Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  Part II

  EMERGENCE

  12

  October 22nd, 20014

  Duggan, Jake

  National Cyber Security Division

  Department of Homeland Security

  FIELD REPORT #917-406

  SUBJECT: Airman Donald Westlake, U.S. Air Force, Kandahar, Afghanistan

  TO: SIMON GUPTA, DIRECTOR OF H.S. CYBER-OPS

  FROM: J. DUGGAN

  Three weeks ago, I was entrusted with a mission coordinated with the CIA and DOD to investigate the possibility of a security breach at Kandahar Air Force Base in relation to the shooting of allied Afghan soldiers and the subsequent death of Airman Donald Westlake, a member of a secret drone aircraft pilot training program directed by the AF in conjunction with the Afghan authorities. An inspection of the physical evidence at Kandahar base barracks showed no signs of network manipulation or intrusion by unauthorized personnel, but there is reason to believe that such evidence, if it exists, was removed prior to my arrival at the base. The suppression of evidence by agents of the CIA and the DOD has led me to believe that the real goal of the DOD was to downplay or otherwise obscure facts or circumstances or activities, involving CIA and/or DOD agencies and/or external forces, that either caused or increased the likelihood of the death of Airman Westlake.

  I have also come across anecdotal testimony related by Westlake’s drone teammate, Martin Fisk, since discharged and being treated for PTSD outside Fairchild AF Base in Spokane, WA, to the effect that Westlake did not suffer a combat-related psychotic episode, as described in internal govt documents, but was in fact acting under the influence of Internet-delivered messages, signals, or instructions that may have origins overseas, in the U.S., or both. Interviews and background checks suggest that the source of the signals could be undisclosed experiments by the DOD related to mind control, either defensive or offensive in design and nature, and other viral or Internet-bourne inducements. While I have found no direct evidence linking the CIA or DOD to specific experiments or covert programs that could have produced Pvt. Westlake’s actions in Kandahar, research and backchannel interviews suggest that the possibility is real and cannot be responsibly ignored.

  Given the unknown origin, capabilities and distribution methods of these signals, and the magnitude of the potential threat that they represent to American citizens, I strongly recommend the following course of action:

  1.A formal request to the CIA and DOD for all documents and evidence related to the Westlake incident, including interviews with military personnel in Kandahar and in the U.S. who had direct or indirect contact with Westlake and members of his platoon.

  2.A full accounting of all special ops, covert training and mind contro

  experiments, involving microwave transmission or any other cyber-techniques applied via computer software components, or that could be transmitted via the Internet, private online networks, or other mobile devices.

  3.A request to the NSA for any and all related data and materials that pertain to this case, including the known defection and/or disappearnce of DOD researchers working on program like the ones described above.

  4.An immediate elevation of this case to the Director of the Department of Homeland Security to flag what seems to be a case of intentional and coordinated inter-jurisdictional abuse and mis-intelligence between the DHS and the CIA and DOD.

  5.If any of the assumptions and conclusions of this memo are true and accurate, it’s possible that the internal and external networks of the CIA, DOD and NSA have been comprised by enemy agents working inside and/or outside the US, which would require the immediate notification of the Director of the FBI and the Director of the National Cyber Security Division.

  6.Permission for this agent to continue the investigation of the Westlake case and all related concerns and potential security and agency protocol breaches with the sole intention of containing and neutralizing any possible threat to citizens of the United States, either now or in the foreseeable future, and to ensure that such a situation is steadfastly avoided henceforth by identifying those responsible and taking immediate and appropriate organizational action.

  13

  Throngs of half-naked young people sporting mouse ears, Burger King crowns, DayGlo body paint, and oversized sunglasses waved at the limo as it approached the ARK festival. Xander and Tom waved back, marveling at the fantasyland of streaming banners, faux medieval towers, carnival rides, and waterslides ringed by a trio of giant stages that loomed like Mayan temples over the postpubescent playground. Platoons of festival workers were attending to the first wave of what would grow into a bronze carpet of fifty thousand bodies. Even with the sun sinking in the west, it was still scorching hot, and in the middle of the carnival several hundred revelers in surfer shorts and bikinis were doing a rain dance around a giant dripping mushroom made of hydraulic misting tubes brought in to blunt the heat.

  “Jesus,” Tom said. “Are you ready for this?”

  “I’ve been ready forever,” Xander answered.

  In a couple of hours, Xander and Tom would join the sultans of spin as they whipped the faithful into fits of aerobic abandon. But for now all they could do was gape in awe at the sheer scale of the spectacle gearing up around them. ARK was the latest and biggest in the new breed of mega-EDM events. For years, the electronic dance movement had been building on the outlaw foundations of Detroit techno and Chicago house, amplifying and consolidating the countless permutations of trip-hop, dubstep, techno, and trance, elevating the DJ from a booth at the back of the room to the front stages of sold-out arenas and stadiums. With Tom’s surreptitious help, Xander had caught the mega-rave wave just as it was cresting into a multibillion-dollar enterprise and EDM festivals were metastasizing into massive multidimensional attractions.

  The opening acts were warming up the crowd as the limo pulled up to the backstage entrance, where staffers politely asked to see their passes before waving them into a compound of deluxe Bedouin-style tents. Balloons swayed lazily overhead, and a propeller plane used smoke to etch an invitation to a casino after-party, the puffy white letters slowly smudging to nonsense in its wake.

  Tom and Xander were escorted to the VIP enclosure behind the main stage, where the other DJs and their entourages sipped cold tequila cocktails and acknowledged new arrivals with a glance and courtly nod. An elaborate buffet and open bar awaited, as did a bottle of vintage Dom Perignon with regrets from Fabian, whose note begged forgiveness for having to shepherd another client at the Sacred Music Festival in Fez, Morocco. When Xander popped the cork, several heads turned and Tom felt curious eyes on them. Then a fawning actress and her manager/boyfriend approached their table and asked if they could please have a pucker of bubbly. Xander made a graceful bow as he filled their glasses and the invisible membrane was breached effortlessly, seamlessly, as if they had always been on the inside track, as if their ascendance to the royalty of EDM had been preordained and blessed from the very beginning. Where Tom and Xander came from and how they had arrived at the technorati apex made no difference, not with the thrumming vibrations of half a million watts of audio equipment massaging them through the evening air and thousands of fans eagerly waiting for DJX, as Xander was now officially known, to assume his place on the illuminated platform and rattle the heavens with his sand-shuddering beats.

  Xander’s animated gestures and lopsided grin said it all—this was where he belonged, these were his kin, this gleaming chain of social silver was his element. Tom knew that someday, probably very soon, he would remember this moment as the precious pinnacle of something that was about to be overwhelmed by events even more irresistible than music or money or fame. Xander was absolutely right about their fates being tied, but Tom now saw that rising to the upper echelons of the EDM elite was just the beginning of a much steeper trajectory.

  Even though he was young and fresh on the scene, or most likely because
of it, DJX had been awarded a plum slot to spin, just when the sky behind the stage became an orange-violet aurora laced with iridescent chem-trails. A female show runner materialized and whispered into Xander’s ear, signaling that it was nearly time for him to go on. Tom and Xander followed her onto a tarp-covered riser behind the stage, which overlooked a vast ocean of people already applauding and calling for their groove-wielding hero. Tom and Xander were shaking their heads and laughing even before the crowd let out a guttural roar of anticipation. “Let’s make them remember this,” Tom said, heading to his perch a hundred yards opposite the main DJ stage at the elevated A/V console that controlled a curved wall of fifty-foot-tall LED screens.

  A thudding cadence announced the beginning of the set, and Xander stepped onto the turntable deck under a halo of bluish light.

  “Hello, everybody! Are you ready to touch the sky?”

  He raised his arms in greeting to the cheering throng, at once blessing and bowing to the sea of smiling faces. Then he donned his headphones and started turning dials and pushing buttons, adding layers of percussion until he had a samba-like foundation riding the insidious bass line. Thick waves of synthesizer slowly wobbled and then sped up to a rollicking strut that got the crowd kicking and bouncing. In the video control booth, Tom was echoing the aural textures with whirling shapes that dissolved and merged into each other like spin art. It occurred to him that neither he nor Xander played an actual instrument, yet here they were manipulating sounds and images in concert before a vast and appreciative audience, a foot-pounding pageant performed by an emphatic cast of thousands.

  Xander looked at Tom from across the crowd and raised two fingers, meaning that there would be only two more songs before the world premiere of “Stardust.” Tom reached into his pocket and retrieved the flash drive that he hoped would demonstrate the potential of the Meta Militia’s contraband code on a live audience. In addition to recalibrating the zeph.r signal and synching it with microwave-enabled audio and visual suggestions, Tom had taken the extra precaution of separating his and Xander’s earphone channels from the main feed to shield them from zeph.r’s mind-warping effects.

  Xander launched into a patch of fast-paced electro with a counter-pattern of peeling saxophone—or was it guitar? In response to the song, Tom brought the circular shapes on the LED screens into sharper focus, making them synch with the beats like single-cell creatures pulsing to the rhythms. Out in the audience, glow sticks drifted over the thicket of hands and arms like mitochondria.

  Xander looked over and held up a single finger.

  Tom pulled out the key drive and uploaded zeph.r, checking to make sure that his visual loop was queued up and ready to go. Xander was building tension with scratchy guitar riffs over tumbling synthetic drums and a corroded lower register. He took the tempo down to a lumbering crawl, and Tom followed suit, initiating the fractal egg animation and aiming a battery of industrial-strength lasers upward to intersect like the interior arches of a celestial cathedral. Xander raised his hand, and the symphonic overture of “Stardust” rose along with the lights, a single searing note that coalesced with the lasers overhead to create a portal to the Milky Way.

  Tom turned a dial to stream zeph.r into the mix and scanned the crowd just as the light and music swooped back to Earth in a cascade of pulverizing thumps and the dancers reeled with mouths open, heads bobbing, bodies bending like rubber under the sonic pummeling. Xander was nodding and staring into a faraway place, pacing himself. Through the lens of the Orion software, zeph.r was a neon red rectangle with pulsing control nodes, blinking in time with the music, guiding him as he adjusted the blend and raised the amplification another notch.

  The crowd was heaving in tandem to Xander’s motions like minnows swimming in some unseen current, their heads bowing in perfect agreement. Almost too perfect. Just to be sure, Tom boosted zeph.r another notch, and that’s when he saw it: an enormous murmuration shuddering through the audience, like the ripples emanating from a stone dropped into a pond, except that this pond was a mass of several thousand people suddenly lurching in unison, an impossible concurrence of limbs perfectly synchronized to the beat as the song’s lyrics shuffled and blinked on the giant screens:

  Move.

  Be

  the

  beat.

  Now be

  Stardust

  Again.

  Tom looked over at Xander, who seemed perplexed by what he was seeing in the crowd. Their eyes met, and Tom shrugged, pretending not to know what was happening, pretending not to be thrilled by what he was seeing. Tom gazed out at ARK city—twenty thousand eyes glued to the screens, feet stamping, arms pumping, all of them responding to the same internal metronome, not separate anymore, not from the images inside or outside, not from the world around them or each other. The throng simultaneously heaved and screamed in approval, the conscious attention of a single beast consuming its audiovisual feast.

  Be

  Stars.

  Move

  with

  Each other.

  Xander arched his back and rotated on his heels, the same action that had momentarily mesmerized the police in Austin. He pounded the air with his fists, absorbing the approval of countless roaring mouths, basking in their feral screech. He turned his palms in a gesture of benediction to his tribe, and leaned forward over the controls, constructing a swirling melody around an amplified Middle Eastern tattoo. Xander had returned the crowd to solid ground, and now Tom took them deeper, immersing the dancers in a sulfurous haze of smoke and blood red light. The giant words flickered and flashed, a kaleidoscopic scrabble of letters and shapes coalescing into a call for action.

  Move

  Live

  Love

  Each other

  Live

  Love

  Now

  A thousand yards away, on the other side of the ARK festival grounds, Eric Wightman heard a thunderous racket from the main stage and cursed his friends. He had come to ARK at the last minute, convinced by his chums that seeing DJX would be the highlight of the summer. They had all agreed to arrive early for his set, but that was before his pals, most of them drunk or rolling on ecstasy by now, had insisted on waiting in line for the fucking Ferris wheel, like little kids distracted by the candy-colored ring of pretty lights. Don’t worry—we’ve got plenty of time, they’d assured him. And then the wheel had lurched to a halt because someone had thrown up and had to be carried away to the medical tent, and now Eric was trapped in limbo, literally up in the air. Even from this distance at the top of the mechanical loop, he could tell that whatever was happening on the main stage was epic. The light show on the screen and the cluster of lasers rising over the crowd like a castle of white light were hypnotic, incredible. And the new song—so stirring and soulful, was triggering memories, things he hadn’t thought about in years. The feeling he got from the music erased his anger but not his frustration. He wanted to be there with those people. He wanted to dance with them, all of them. “Shit!” was all Eric could say. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  Tom felt the energy in the audience morphing again, moving inward from the edges. Then he peered into the teeming crowd and saw something inexplicable—people going at it like animals in heat, not just making out but having actual intercourse. Already stripped down to swimsuits and flip-flops, it didn’t take long for the boys and girls to get naked and nasty with their neighbors, total strangers instantly available and irresistible. Meanwhile, in the middle of the humping horde, dozens of delirious dancers were passing out, their limp silhouettes carried on a cushion of hands to the edge of the crowd, where they were gently lowered to the ground. ARK security, alarmed by the licentious groping and growing pile of bodies, pushed into the heart of the crush to disperse the mob, but instead of making them docile, zeph.r accentuated their natural aggression. Anyone who resisted became the object of their wrath, until the lovers and
the fighters were all trading blows in the expanding brawl.

  This wasn’t the plan, people going crazy, getting hurt. Tom disengaged the zeph.r signal, but it was too late. As the tangle of humanity churned into a violent mash-up, Tom’s elation evaporated and Xander gave him the signal to pull the plug. The show was over. Tom cut off the sound, uncoupled his hard drive, and erased all traces of zeph.r before joining Xander in a mad scramble to get away from the chaos and back to the enclosed VIP area. They fought their way through the stampede, miraculously managing to locate their driver.

  “Get us the hell out of here!” Xander ordered. As the limo pulled away from the exit, a caravan of Nevada State police cruisers barreled through the gates, followed by ambulances and fire trucks, all with lights flashing and sirens screeching.

  “What the fuck happened back there?” Xander wanted to know. “Everybody went berserk.”

  Tom was busy making whiskey drinks at the other end of the limo. “It was fun at first, and then it got kinda weird.”

  “Ya think!?”

  Twenty minutes later, Xander and Tom were back in their high-roller suite with wraparound views of the Las Vegas Strip. The ARK after-party and the nightlife lords and ladies of Las Vegas awaited them, but right now it was just the two of them, still trying to digest the magnitude and meaning of what had just transpired.

  “Did you freaking see that!” Xander was pacing and typing into his phone. “I mean, the crowd went absolutely apeshit!”

  “Yeah, I saw it,” Tom replied. “Totally insane.”

  Down below, gamblers and gawkers streamed through gleaming mazes of carefully calculated temptation, most of them hoping in vain that they’d get a chance to do something that was supposed to stay in Vegas. During the ride from the airport to the hotel and during a short exploratory sprint on the jammed sidewalks, Tom was astonished by the sheer range of humanity pouring through the streets, an endless parade of pedestrians who had converged on this shameless Shangri-la to forget their woes and escape the inertia of the familiar, the comfortably safe and sound, where the chances of winning big were even lower than a streak on roulette.