Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  “The bad stuff started. The headaches, the nightmares. He started messing up on the job, overshooting targets. He said he wasn’t getting enough sleep, but I knew that wasn’t the problem. I warned him, goddamn it. I told him not to do it.”

  “Not to do what?”

  Fisk was slumped down in his chair hugging himself, a crumpled, diminished version of the strapping, confident fellow Duggan had encountered in the woods.

  “Like I said, he wouldn’t tell me. All he said was that he got an offer to join a special program, something that would earn him time off his tour, but he couldn’t talk about it. Not even to me.”

  “And during this time, when things got worse, he was still listening to heavy metal.”

  “All the fucking time.” Fisk sat upright, but his arms were still wrapped around his torso. “It didn’t make any sense. He was obsessed with it—hard-core head-banger crap. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who’s favorite band was Dave Matthews, for Christ’s sake. We all teased the shit out of him, but it freaked us out.”

  “You and Wasson and the rest of the soccer crew?”

  Fisk nodded. Then, more to himself than to Duggan, he said, “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Those lying motherfuckers! They made Donny their bitch, and then, when the shit hit the fan, I was the one who had to clean up their mess.” Fisk was holding his head in his hands and breathing hard, and Duggan started wondering if his questions and the whiskey had nudged him too far.

  Fisk looked up at Duggan. “Do you know what it feels like to shoot your best friend in the head?”

  “No,” Duggan said. ”I don’t.”

  “Well, Agent Duggan, let me tell you something. I don’t know either.”

  Fisk saw Duggan’s confusion and let it stew a few seconds before adding, “I pulled the trigger and splattered the shooter’s brains halfway across the base, but that wasn’t my best friend. Do you follow me, Mr. Cyber Cop?”

  “Sorry, I don’t.”

  “The man I killed wasn’t him—it wasn’t Donny. I saw his eyes when he left the barracks. And after he went ballistic, when I got close, I could hear that fucking metal music drilling through his brain. He knew I was standing behind him. I knew he could hear me yelling. I put the barrel of my gun against the back of his head, and he still wouldn’t stop. So my conscience is clean. If anything, I was doing him a favor.”

  “How’s that?”

  Fisk’s eyes were red but his gaze was defiant. “I’m saying that what I did wasn’t murder.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the guy I loved like a brother was long gone. The Donny I knew was already dead.”

  The bees buzzed furiously, fanning out from the hive, circling and attacking the intruder. It was impressive how quickly the insects had mobilized to repel the threat, each individual instinctively assuming its role in the frantically humming organism. Cara knew that even as the warriors pelted her bee suit in protest, a battalion of soldiers was heading deep into the hive, some to secure the precious stores of honey, others creating a last-ditch line of defense for their queen. The fact that this particular bee colony was situated on the roof of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco didn’t faze Cara or the bees.

  “Shhhh,” Cara hushed soothingly. “I’m not here to hurt you. I brought you here, remember?”

  The hotel’s managers had approached her years ago to advise them on a project to cultivate bees on the roof, partly to make sure that its elevated micro farm of herbs and vegetables would get properly pollinated and partly to help reverse the colony collapse disorder in the global bee population, which had plunged more than 90 percent since the 1980s. The hotel’s beehive colony, up to two hundred thousand bees that produced eight hundred pounds of honey annually, had since been successfully replicated at hotels in other parts of California, Washington D.C., Toronto, and even China. Tending to the bee colony always lifted Cara’s spirits, and for a few moments, she forgot all about the evolutionary biologists conference going on in the ballroom downstairs. She lifted out a honeycomb with gloved fingers, inspecting the concentrated nectar for color and viscosity.

  “Dr. Park?” Eric, who had joined her on the roof, was standing back at a safe distance. “Sorry to interrupt, but you’ve got to get ready for the awards ceremony.”

  Cara looked at her watch. “Oh, damn. Thanks, Eric.”

  She followed him to the elevators and went to her room to change. A few minutes later, she was sitting with Eric and several hundred colleagues, all of them happily picking at goat cheese and arugula salad and sipping Napa wines. After some introductory comments, Cara’s name was called and she obligingly rose to accept her Beagle citation for innovative research. As Eric had predicted, the PHAROH experiment in Africa yielded data that advanced the understanding of hive-mind intelligence and stirred wide interest in the global community of evolutionary biologists. The applause reached her ears, but she took no pleasure in the acclaim and kept her remarks to a more or less perfunctory thank you.

  What her applauding colleagues didn’t know, and never would, was that what she encountered in the Serengeti the morning after the PHAROH test had left her horrified and disgusted. The unspeakable trauma of what she saw that day in Africa followed her back to the US, where she spent weeks in a demoralized funk. Cara had initially resisted Eric’s entreaties to write a paper about PHAROH and their field experiment in Tanzania. Eventually, though, Eric convinced her that it was unscientific to dismiss an entire area of inquiry over a single inconclusive experiment. Plus, the United Nations was expecting something for its money, even if the result of their research would probably never bear humanitarian fruit. Cara had rushed to make the deadline for the conference, the theme of which happened to be emergent patterns in biological organisms. If a locust swarm could learn to defend itself even in midair, Cara posited in her paper, then maybe it could also be trained to do things other than ravage crops and grasslands. If the biochemical and environmental triggers that caused emergent behavior in locusts, bees, termites, and other animals could be harnessed and channeled, Cara concluded, then why couldn’t swarms be domesticated and trained like any other animal to deliver medicines or do other jobs that required large groups of small highly mobile messengers?

  Writing the paper, along with doubling down on yoga on the weekends, fended off her nagging sense of failure, at least until she received a call from a man who identified himself as Barry Rodman at DARPA. He told Cara that he was a big fan of her work and that it was an honor just to be speaking to a scientist of her caliber. Then he asked if she would be interested in a grant to explore how bees and other swarming animals could be used to deliver lethal viruses, biological weapons, and even miniature explosives to enemy targets. She listened in disbelief to Rodman’s pitch before clearing her throat to interrupt him. How, Cara wanted to know, did the military know about the contents of a scientific paper that hadn’t even been published yet? Rodman declined to say, but he made it clear that a contract of this kind would be lucrative and generously funded. In fact, Cara was aware that bees and stinging insects had a history of being employed as weapons of war going back to the Romans, who had catapulted beehives directly into the ranks of advancing enemy troops. But what the military’s messenger was proposing was unlike any bio-weapon that had ever existed before. Rodman hinted that DARPA scientists were close to perfecting a way to train insects to follow instructions by interfering with their natural navigation systems. He added that PHAROH showed some very promising applications along the same lines. “What you’re doing and what we’re doing look like a natural fit,” Rodman excitedly told her. “We think the combination could double the speed of development and deployment. We already have a small testing facility in the Bay Area, so there’d be no need for you to travel.”

  For Cara, the mere possibility that her research could be used to kill people instead of help them was so distressing that she had to force
herself not to hang up. Instead, she apologetically explained that her teaching schedule and research workload had forced her to put PHAROH on indefinite hold. Besides, she added sincerely, “The damn thing doesn’t even work.”

  “Before you say no,” Rodman persisted, “think of all the things you could do with a budget and a lab twice as big as the one you have now.” Cara politely but firmly told him she wasn’t interested, well aware that her negative response would probably have a deleterious effect on her career in ways that she would never discover. As disturbing as the whole episode had been, it was something else that was bothering her, something she feared might somehow be related to the DARPA offer she had rejected.

  When she got back to her table, Eric, who had already imbibed more than his fair share of small-batch organic brews, was waiting with a fastidiously dressed woman who looked familiar. “There she is!” Eric announced, holding out a chair for Cara. “This is Rosalyn Cooper from the CDC. Ms. Cooper wants to talk to us about a possible collaboration.”

  Cara shook the woman’s hand. “Nice to meet you. I recognize you from the beehive tour I gave earlier today, before the luncheon.”

  “Yes,” Cooper confirmed. “That was lovely and very interesting. I think it’s wonderful that they serve the honey to the guests in the hotel.”

  Eric held up the bottle in his hand. “Case in point: Honey Saison Beer, brewed with sweetness from Fairmont’s own rooftop buzzers!”

  Cooper smiled at Eric. “Yes, dear, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about.” She turned her attention back to Cara. “I was fascinated by your suggestion that insect swarms could be cultivated and taught to perform specific tasks. As I’m sure you know, the bee population is suffering from a viral infection, one that moves very quickly from one infected hive to another. Well, I was thinking that what if the bees’ ability to transfer viruses was adapted for something good? I mean, could bees be used to inoculate vulnerable populations in remote areas where it’s physically or economically difficult to reach the target population?”

  “Are you talking about training bees to use their stingers to inoculate humans?” Cara asked.

  “No, of course not—I mean, eventually perhaps,” Cooper answered. “But initially at least, the bee-delivered vaccines would be introduced to crops that they fertilize and maybe even injected by their stingers into livestock, which also become food for people. There are some tests going on in Africa using specially treated mosquitoes to inoculate people against malaria, for example. But mosquitoes don’t swarm intelligently, and they certainly can’t be trained to zero in on a specific population or geographical area.”

  “But maybe bees can!” Eric interjected. “And who knows, with any luck maybe we can pay back the little buzzers by curing the bee virus while we’re at it.”

  “I have a budget for research along these lines,” Cooper continued, “and I can’t think of anybody who is doing more exciting work in this area than the two of you. Would you consider such a project with the CDC?”

  Eric was already beaming. Maybe this is how it starts, Cara thought, meeting the right person at the right time with money to push the envelope, willing to try something daring and new, something that might actually move the needle. Maybe the science behind PHAROH could redeem itself by paving the way for bees to help people avoid diseases. Maybe the bees had brought her good luck; maybe this was karma payback for giving them a safe haven on the roof of one of San Francisco’s most luxurious hotels.

  “We are very interested, Ms. Cooper,” Cara said. “I’ve also been thinking about what you said about bees transmitting viruses. Eric and I have been talking about developing a computer model that uses beehive migration patterns to make a predictive map of pathogenic viruses.”

  “What if viruses are also following emergent models?” Eric exclaimed. “What if they have a form of collective intelligence that hasn’t even been identified yet?”

  Cooper’s eyes were twinkling with enthusiasm. “I can give you access to our virus-tracking databases, assuming you decide to work with us.”

  “Consider it done,” Cara said. “Eric will set up a conference call to discuss details and next steps.” The women shook hands again.

  “A toast,” Eric intoned, hoisting his beer. “To the future of viral medicine, and God bless our winged friends on the roof. May they flirt with flowers forever!”

  Cara felt a surge of gratitude for her young assistant’s dogged optimism. It was Eric’s refusal to abandon PHAROH and his persistence in getting her to write the paper, which, after a dark detour with the DOD, turned out to be the doorway to what she was seeking: an unexpected and much-needed chance to redeem herself with positive, purposeful work.

  “Yes, long live the bees!” Cara chimed in as she tipped her glass. But there was a tinge of sadness in her voice because, based on her inspection, she knew the Fairmont’s hive colony was already dying.

  11

  In all his countless hours of stringing ones and zeros together, of weaving batches of electrical impulses into actionable commands, Tom had never encountered anything like zeph.r. The person or persons he met in the secret 4chan chat room might or might not actually exist, but the code itself was indisputably real. Mm629 said Tom would know what to do with zeph.r, but he wasn’t even sure how it worked, let alone what it was supposed to do. Zeph.r wasn’t just a piece of software; it was a whole suite of different algorithms bundled together and delivered into his hands.

  Mm629 had implied that zeph.r could be fused into a multimedia signal, but for what purpose? In some ways it looked like a diagnostic tool from a medical lab, yet it was also designed to deliver an audio output. What did the acoustic manifestation of an electromagnetic wave generator sound like? Tom sat in his chair and bounced a rubber handball against the ceiling as he deliberated the pros and cons of finding out, but he had already made up his mind. It didn’t take him long to transfer part of the code into an audio equalizer he was developing for Xander’s upcoming gig in Vegas. Tom put on his headphones and looked at the clock: 3:04 p.m. He clicked PLAY and raised the input until he detected a faint hiss of static. Gradually, gingerly, he increased the volume. What at first seemed to be white noise, he realized, was actually a dense cluster of different sounds, like instruments in an orchestra tuning up. Then the sonic curtain pulled back to reveal the main event, two strands of oscillations moving in tandem. As they wobbled and throbbed, Tom felt their binaural vibrations penetrating his entire body, two frequencies creating a third entity. There was a rising, writhing tower of tessellating textures, each one separate yet fused to the others and seething, like a flame igniting, and above it, behind it and around it, a bigger wave cresting into a sound that he had never heard before.

  Tom opened his eyes and saw his mother’s tear-streaked face staring down at him.

  “Oh my God, Tom,” Sonia said. “You scared me so much.”

  Tom sat up and looked around. The room was in a shambles, his collection of books, DVDs, and games strewn across the floor, framed posters and pictures tilted or off their hooks, chairs pushed over. There were scratches on his arms, and his T-shirt was ripped halfway down his chest.

  “What happened?”

  “I heard noises,” Sonia told him. “I didn’t want to bother you. I thought somebody was with you, and then I started to worry because I heard you talking, but it wasn’t English. When I came in, you were like this. I thought you had an attack. I’m taking you to the doctor.”

  “No, I’m fine,” Tom said, getting to his feet.

  “Mira me,” Sonia commanded. “Are you doing drugs?”

  “No,” Tom told her. Normally he would have laughed, but he was still getting his bearings. “Mom, really, don’t worry. I’m okay.”

  Sonia peered at her son skeptically. “Just promise me you’ll be careful, M’ijo.”

  “I promise, Mom,” Tom said. “Just leave me alon
e and close the door.”

  As he was cleaning up the mess, he noticed a sticky dampness in his crotch. He put his hand down his pants and was horrified to feel a slick residue of semen.

  “Jesus,” Tom muttered. “What the fuck?”

  After he showered and changed, Tom checked out his workstation. The headphones had been yanked out of the plug, but otherwise everything seemed fine. Tom righted his chair and sat down, trying to piece together what had just happened. The timer on his audio player had stopped at 3:13:52. The episode had lasted nearly ten minutes, but most of Tom’s memory of it was a vague jumble of images and sensations. He remembered listening to the zeph.r signal and being drawn in by its fractal effect—the closer he listened, the more he heard. It was almost as if his own consciousness was being drawn into the signal, becoming part of it. He didn’t recall removing the headphones, but at a certain point, he no longer needed them because zeph.r’s augmented presence had spread to everything around him. Every object in the room had become incredibly visceral, as if the molecules in his metal desk, the plastic mouse in his hand, even the air he was breathing had suddenly taken on more heft—each material, texture, and shape contributing its own song to a magnificent chorus that he had joined just by hearing it.

  Eventually, the sensations that had filled Tom’s head and body evaporated, dissipating back into the program like a genie returning to its lamp. But he had seen something that was still seared in his memory. He took out a sheet of white paper and started to draw. Tom made six circles that represented a sequence of overlapping images. In the center of the first circle, he drew a cluster of dots, like a distant galaxy hundreds of light years away. In the second circle, the dots were larger, taking on spherical shapes. In the third circle, the dots had grown even larger, with the dots now appearing in their own cores, almost filling the first circle. By the fifth circle, the largest dot had nearly eclipsed the original, and the dots inside it were spawning the next generation of advancing spheres. When the diameters of the fifth and sixth circles aligned, a green aurora signaled their fusion and the beginning of the repetition of the cycle.