Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  Tom needed just a few more moments to hack into the soundboard of Lucy’s laptop, allowing him to surreptitiously monitor every word and sound. She was talking to a girlfriend on her cell phone, a loquacious acquaintance apparently, for Lucy hardly spoke at all, but when she did talk, her thoughts were delivered in an impetuous, slightly imperious purr. They were discussing whether depictions of women warriors in video games and movies like Kill Bill, Kickass, and Mad Max:Fury Road were overcompensating for centuries of female subordination. Or were they doing women a disservice by making ordinary females feel inferior if they couldn’t wield a sword, shoot a gun, or physically demolish any man who made the mistake of messing with them? “No, no, no, it’s not about actual violence,” Lucy demurred. “It’s a metaphor for female empowerment—jobs, education, financial independence; those are the real weapons. But what man wants to make a movie about that?”

  Tom was completely and irrevocably smitten. With a few more keystrokes he could have activated her laptop camera, but he resisted. The next time he saw her naked, he wanted it to be her idea.

  Tom’s surreptitious snooping was interrupted by the familiar sound of a pedicab downshifting on the street outside his bedroom. He closed the computer screen, launched iTunes, pulled up the shade on the window and unlatched it. Xander Smith stepped across the sill and plopped down in a battered leather armchair with a duct-taped gash in its side, a hand-me-down from Tom’s maternal grandfather.

  “Un-fucking-believable!” Xander was saying as he pulled off his bike gloves and produced a joint from his breast pocket. He cocked his head and nodded in approval of the Moderat mix oozing from the speakers. The smeared coat of red and white body paint made him look like a slacker soccer fan, which in fact, he was. “Dude, is your TV on? Go to Channel 5. You should have been there. Fifty naked people painted in stars and stripes running around collecting revolutionary war relics on their AR app. We made a frigging flag in the middle of the park in broad daylight! It was epic Swarm!”

  “Swarm,” Tom repeated. “Isn’t that the same guy who put on the porno flash mob at Whole Foods?”

  “Yeah, after some homophobic clerk refused to ring up a couple of gay guys from San Francisco,” Xander said, lighting the joint. “I mean, five hundred people wearing ‘Straight Friendly’ T-shirts and looking at AR porn though their phones in the checkout lines. That was a good one, but today—oh my God—pure genius.” Xander offered Tom the joint. He took a hit and handed it back.

  “How did you find out about it? The flash mob, I mean.”

  “Tommy, like I told you, man, it’s by invitation only. Somebody who’s already done a Swarm has to submit your name and mobile number. And then you get a text with instructions at the last minute. A girl I know hooked me up. I offered to vouch for you.”

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks,” Tom said. “I don’t like the idea of being tracked, my every move dictated and recorded by somebody I don’t even know.”

  Xander took another hit and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Right, and social media sucks out your brain so it can sell it back to you. Man, you’ve gotta stop being so paranoid.” Xander knew his friend had an aversion to being liked, poked, friended, and followed, but it would be some time before he fully grasped why. “I just don’t understand how a techie like you could be such a Luddite when it comes to social media.”

  “Social and media aren’t necessarily compatible,” Tom said.

  “Actually, it’s funny you’d say that.” Xander took another lungful of pot and rose to his feet. “I just gave a ride to this aerospace engineer at UT Austin who told me that he saw that documentary, The Spirit Molecule, and it inspired him to take a vacation in the Amazon and partake in a shamanic ayahausca ceremony. I think this guy probably did DMT in a dorm, or who knows, maybe it was actually ayahuasca. Anyway, I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, given our shared interests. But then he says that during the ceremony he saw his own death and rose through the clouds and into deep space, where he was befriended by an alien.”

  Xander paused for dramatic affect. “Did I mention that this guy was a PhD candidate in aerospace at UT?”

  “Yeah, so what did you tell him?”

  “I said, ‘Listen, pal, you of all people should know that when the universe was born and all there was in the cosmos was helium, which over millions of years gathered into giant clouds of molecules that collapsed into a ball that become so dense it triggered a nuclear reaction and was reborn as a star, basically a giant galactic furnace that cooked and fused the atoms, creating bigger, heavier molecules, forging all the elements in the periodic table down to iron, until the star exploded, a supernova, and this cosmic debris fanned out across the empty universe and cooled and clumped into galaxies and solar systems and planets, and one of those planets was Earth, where volcanoes and coagulating gases created the oceans, and single-celled organisms were born when lightning struck—like Frankenstein’s monster—and fish hung out in the oceans for a few million years before they got up on their fins and grew feathers and hair and came out of the sea—not necessarily in that order …”

  A few months earlier, channel surfing on a THC-infused evening, Xander had come across The Cosmos, a formative encounter that led to his binging on the entire TV series and devouring every movie and book he could find on wormholes and black holes, interstellar travel, and the origins and predicted demise of the universe. Tom watched as Xander paused to reentact the iconic scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, vocalizing simian grunts, and waddling in a circle, arms and knuckles dangling below his knees, pretending to gape in wonder at the black obelisk before gingerly touching it and lurching backward.

  “So for reasons that only Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan can fully appreciate,” Xander continued, “our monkey ancestors climbed into the trees and onto the savannah, and humans were spawned, people, bipedal conscious beings. And we, you and me, my overeducated friend, are basically living dust balls of cosmic debris. We are interstellar immigrants born from the splattered guts of quasars, the orphaned offspring of black holes, the cremated ashes of deflated dead stars. You, my friend, are the fucking alien!’”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He goes, ‘Well, of course. That was my whole point. But if you’re going to get technical about it, then we are actually made of empty space because the distance between the nucleus of an atom and the electrons circling around it is, relatively speaking, like the distance from here to the moon, so if it weren’t for the negative charge of the electrons in our bodies repelling each other, I’d be able to put my finger right through you.’”

  Tom raised his eyebrows. “Cheeky monkey.”

  “Right?!” Xander waved the joint in the air like a stylus on an invisible chalkboard. “I considered pointing out that most of the known universe is made of dark energy, not to mention the parallel dimensions in string theory, and the Boson Higgs, but instead I just said, ‘Hey, that’s great, buddy, but your molecules just arrived at Second and Congress, and you owe me twenty bucks extra for the pot.’”

  Tom frowned in mock disapproval. “You shouldn’t do drugs with your fares.”

  “But, actually …” Xander offered Tom the end of the joint, but he passed. “On the other hand,” Xander continued, “you and I got stoned when we met and it didn’t turn out so bad.”

  This was true. Tom had been outside the Frank Erwin Center that night, trying in vain to score an extra ticket to a Radiohead concert. He was loitering dejectedly near the entrance, anguished over the stirring spectacle he was missing, when he heard someone say, “What if you could see Thom Yorke spin after the show on Sixth Street tonight?”

  Tom had turned to see a lanky fellow in shorts, T-shirt, and a trucker’s cap perched on a dark green pedicab jackknifed at the curb. A deal was cut: Tom would pay the pedicab fare to the club and Xander’s cover charge in exchange for the chance to see Radiohead’s lead
singer perform an after-hours DJ set. Since the band hadn’t finished yet, there was no particular rush, so Xander took his time meandering across downtown Austin, pointing out which of the myriad bars and clubs specialized in illicit commerce of one sort or another. When the Frost Bank Tower wheeled into view, Tom showed off his knowledge, debunking the building’s owl-inspired legend, which seemed to impress his garrulous chauffer.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I spend a lot of time on my computer.”

  Xander lit up a joint and held it out to Tom. “Well, tonight you’re going offline, pal.”

  Tom sat in the back of the pedicab that balmy night as Xander glided through the artsy enclaves of East Austin, mixing outrageous anecdotes with keen observations about the psychology and economics of the hippest town in Texas. Eventually, Xander rolled to a stop outside one of the countless clubs on Sixth Street, secured the pedicab with a chain, and motioned Tom to follow him inside. As Xander had promised, the doorman waved them in without even charging them, and a couple of beers later, Yorke sauntered through the door and took his place at the turntables. The music that throbbed from the speakers for the next few hours was dark and edgy but also thrillingly percussive, and before long Tom and Xander had joined the crowd in an ecstatic convocation of motion and rhythm, dancing themselves into a sweaty state of blissful abandon, exchanging sloppy grins, tequila shots, and back-slapping bouts of solidarity.

  When Tom tried to pay Xander for getting him into the club, Xander wouldn’t take the money. “Many more to come,” he said, pushing away the cash and offering his new friend a free ride home. Tom talked about his job protecting companies from online theft and how most people were absolutely clueless about the cyber battles raging in a parallel universe right under their noses. Xander, for his part, revealed his aspiration to become a professional DJ, conjuring a vision of ecstatic throngs stomping to his beats without a trace of doubt that it would happen.

  That night, Tom and Xander formed a bond that went beyond a shared appreciation for Fight Club, cosmology, and the latest electro beats. It was unsaid but mutually understood that in a world that seemed indifferent to the tribulations of the modern male, it was crucial to have a trusted ally, someone who would make sure that you got home on nights when you got too drunk, who would convince you that your best moment was waiting right around the corner, who would be your wing man on a date, take your side in a street scuffle, and share your estrangement from the traditional duties of manhood with no compelling alternative in sight.

  Xander’s post-Nirvana slacker shtick, Tom eventually learned, was just another anti-designer outfit, insouciant camouflage for the bright, ambitious music wonk who tirelessly pursued his passion. When he wasn’t pedaling rides or complicating his life with girls, Xander befriended visiting DJs, landing an occasional gig behind the turntables or pinch-hitting for talent that got sick, flaked out, or just wanted a few free minutes to chat up a woman at the bar. On those nights, Tom would show up late and watch his buddy rehearse his mega star aspirations, swathed in a shirt that showed off his taut torso, nodding and rocking to the beat with supreme confidence, even when his entire audience consisted of just a few blotto college kids and middle-age tourists who wouldn’t know Radiohead from Motörhead. But even then Tom noticed the way the crowd watched Xander’s every move, thirsting for his slightest glance or acknowledgment. And so the incipient seed of where this could all lead, an untrammeled path of opportunity and possibility that Tom was barely beginning to fathom, was planted.

  Xander’s musical proclivities leaned toward deep house and the throbbing minimalist techno of the Berlin School, but Austin was hardly a mecca for electro dance aesthetes. Mainstream ravers wanted bombast and a steady beat, predictable lulls and swelling crescendos that mimicked the rhythms of rough sex. Every now and then, Xander would stoop to the gravitational wallop of dubstep just to keep everyone awake, but playing it safe bored him. He told Tom that he was working on a new sound, a neo-techno hybrid that fused rock and dance with galactic ululations that he imagined emanating from comets, quasars, and black holes. “When I spin,” Xander told Tom, “I want people to turn off their ears and dance to the electrons spinning inside.”

  A week after the Operation Uncle Sam flash mob, they were having happy hour specials at their favorite dive when Xander had an epiphany. “Warhol was wrong,” he blurted out. “He said that in the future, everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. What he should have said was that in the future, everybody would be famous for fifteen gigabytes.’”

  “Right,” Tom said wearily. “Social media.”

  “No, shut up. Not just social media—I’m talking about virtual reality, augmented reality, everything, everybody.”

  “What about Swarm? Tom asked. “Are his fifteen gigs used up?”

  Xander swirled his drink before answering. “Swarm is different. Nobody knows who he is or even where he lives. Some people say he’s a bot, a program playing people like chess pieces, but that doesn’t explain his social awareness or his sense of humor. He uses AR to mix reality and cyber clues to what’s going to happen next and where. It makes everything like a game where you can meet people and have fun while you’re changing the world. The guys who talk to him online say he seems like a normal dude, except for his voice, which is, you know, disguised.” Xander shrugged. “Then again, maybe Swarm is a fifty-year-old woman who taught herself how to program C++ when the kids left home.”

  “Yup,” Tom agreed. “She could be that old lady sitting at the end of the bar.”

  Xander shrugged. “Entirely possible.”

  Tom felt bad about intentionally misleading his best friend. But his public distance from Swarm had become progressively necessary as his flash mobbing alter ego had become a minor Internet celebrity and Tom had discovered shady ways to supplement his regular income as a security programmer. Fending off the hacker hoards for his clients, feeling unseen minds and fingers prying around the edges of their firewalls, probing for the slightest weakness, had a way of blurring the boundary between what was acceptable and unacceptable, possible and impossible, right and wrong. Data—names, credit cards, bank accounts, passwords—was like chum being chewed and digested by hungry hackers, which in turn became bait for something bigger, which itself was eventually swallowed. Many of the predators were legal businesses, the same ones that paid Tom’s salary. But others were rogue sharks, ready to take a byte for profit or just the sheer sport of it. In the invisible war for proprietary information, it was impossible to know the motives of your adversaries, impossible to tell if you were squaring off with a seventeen-year-old boy in Iowa or a forty-year-old colonel in the Chinese government, let alone anticipate which one was smarter, faster, or more ruthless. All you could know for sure was whether you had survived the hit. Pieces of raw data floated where the attacker had sunk his teeth. Then came the hasty job of cleaning up the mess and patching the gashes of compromised code so there wouldn’t be a next time—although, naturally, sooner or later, there was always a next time, from the same intruder or from a new contender who smelled blood in the water.

  But as scary as the Internet’s porous underbelly could be, Tom had gradually become aware of a bigger, darker menace that dwarfed all the rest. Thanks to a client who had given him his platinum pass to the SXSW Interactive conference, Tom spent the better part of a week gorging on high-minded technology talks and panels, soaking in every possible aspect of the fast-forward future, including a disconcerting scenario where the same giant companies that were supposedly ushering in a gleaming bright tomorrow were putting people out of jobs as algorithms and robots inevitably replaced their human masters. How could all these people be smiling when it was just a matter of time before the machines they worshiped rendered them obsolete? Tom was shocked by the audacity of Silicon Valley unicorns that espoused transparency and social responsibility even as they fleeced their customers by harvesting their intell
ectual property and reselling it to third parties behind their backs. Couldn’t the young techies see that the digital utopia they were so enamored of was just another scam? Worst of all, Tom realized, the rigged gig ecology that he so disdained depended on people like him to keep its mega-servers free of bugs and running smoothly. He was an accessory to the crime, and that shadow passing over his beloved Net was the digital economy itself, a crowd-sourced leviathan siphoning up every scrap of plankton without having to do much more than open its gaping mouth.

  True to his Catholic upbringing, Tom told himself that he would never cross the line, that stealing was bad, simple as that. But what was right about getting two hundred dollars an hour when you had saved your client from losing ten thousand or ten million? Not to mention the billions that Big Tech was slurping up right under his nose. It was like being a money sorter at the Federal Reserve, a trove of unmarked of dollars flowing through your hands, none of it yours. Except that in cyberspace, there were no armed guards glaring at you as you worked; no cameras zoomed in on your fingers as you counted and bundled the frayed fives, tens, and twenties. As it was, your own bosses barely understood what you were doing. The only reliable measure of your competence was the fact that they were still in business. So naturally, inevitably, Tom got tired of keeping his hands to himself, acting like a choirboy in a candy store while looters, lunatics, and robber barons ran rampant all around him.

  Tom obsessively followed the fanfare and brinksmanship of the notorious online hacker forum 4chan.org, keeping track of the dispersal of classified documents by various hack-tivist individuals and groups, and DOS attacks on corporations that triggered their ire. He was fascinated by the specter of an invisible organization commanding thousands of slave computers to overwhelm an adversary’s websites. He also knew that Julian Assange, the combative WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief, had become a persecuted target of international extradition and that half a dozen Anonymous hackers were in jail after one of their own turned into a double agent for the FBI. And he knew that Edward Snowden became a hunted man after releasing classified documents he had obtained while working as an analyst at the NSA. The members of Anonymous claimed to be “everything and nothing.” Their defiant motto: “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us—always.”