Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  After making sure that the augmented reality signposts for the flash mobbers were all in place, Tom went back to the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon working on Swarm’s missive to the masses. He didn’t need to imagine what Swarm would say, for the thoughts and actions of his virtual alter ego were increasingly his own. Since his mind-melding Skype session with Lucy, Tom had started reading books about history and science and philosophy to help him understand and better articulate the unfamiliar dimension of his feelings. His electromagnetic union with Lucy had convinced him that humanity was squandering its evolutionary potential. If people could come together the way he had with Lucy, there would be no suffering, no famine, and no war because the destructive division between oneself and other human beings would no longer be possible. The manifesto that Tom was scribing was just another variable, another tool in the service of Swarm’s mission, which was itself a work in progress, revealing itself incrementally with each modification of zeph.r software, each public transmission of the signal, each word that was uttered by and in the name of Swarm. It was time for the emergent rebellion to be heard and seen and felt. Once unleashed, could the genie be put back in the bottle? Or was zeph.r strong enough to replicate endlessly and trigger the next step in human evolution?

  A private launch was waiting for Tom at the South Street Seaport pickup point, and even over the noise of outboard engines, he could hear an elephantine electro thump as the boat approached the private dock behind the main stage. Xander greeted Tom with a thumb and forearm clinch that he’d learned from his new friends and led him to the greenroom tent. Tom was even more eager than usual to check the A/V deck since this was his first attempt to use ARK as a springboard for a multi-pronged event in a major city. He had embedded a custom set of visual commands directing the ravers to rush the ferries to Manhattan at the end of the set and join their flash mob brethren at Grand Central Station.

  Xander tapped Tom’s shoulder and nodded toward the stage. When Xander reached the top of the stairs, the crowd went ballistic and a corona of photons seemed to emanate from his dark silhouette, like a solar eclipse in the shape of a man. There was a second, lesser roar as Tom took his place at the A/V station, and he made a mental note to stay completely out of sight during their gigs from now on. Fame was the last thing Tom wanted or needed, not with feds sniffing around and their impending realization that the apparently harmless pranks going on right under their noses were in fact field rehearsals by a posse of neo-insurgents.

  Maybe it was the salt air, or the proximity to one of the world’s most sybaritic cities, and most probably, at least in part, because it was the final stop in the ARK tour, but there was an extra jolt of energy in the air. The other DJs, the crew and the producers, everyone could feel it, and the grin plastered on everybody’s face reflected the mood of relief and mutual congratulation. Even with the Vegas mishap and the growing ranks of anti-EDM picketers at every stop, the ARK festival tour had been a huge critical and financial success and a clear victory for anyone who liked music loud and unmuzzled. But what Tom and the rest of the ARK team did not know, what they wouldn’t discover until it was far too late, was that at that very moment an armed flotilla from Long Island was landing on Governor’s Island, preparing an ambush designed to teach the plague-infested techno geeks a lesson they would never forget. The intruders, their features obscured by face paint and ski masks and carrying wooden clubs and chains, vaulted the fence easily, overwhelming the few security guards in their path and breaking into a trot as they zeroed in on their target.

  As the finale of their set approached, Xander started the countdown to “Stardust,” and Tom was ready with a specially tailored message:

  Do what you want.

  Think what you want.

  Be what you want.

  Go to the city.

  Keep on dancing.

  Take the boats.

  Take the city.

  The dancers responded slowly at first, like a huge ship changing course but then turning and spilling toward the exists with gathering momentum, still moving in tandem to the beat but with a freshly charted destination. Some held their phones up, using the Swarm AR app to navigate their path to the boats and their destinations on Manhattan island.

  Go to the city.

  Take the boats.

  Take them now

  to the city,

  together,

  now.

  The dark wedge sliced into the exiting crowd like a V-shaped raft of ducks swimming against the current, forcing their way toward the stage, pummeling anyone and everyone who got in their way. At first Tom mistook it for a fight, but the blob of black was grinding through the crowd with a clear objective. In another minute or two, they would reach the DJs, and then what? Tom hastily typed a new message into his A/V program and uploaded it. Most of the people had already surged out to the docks to board ferries and water taxis back to the city, but several hundred dancers were still in the music’s grip, their eyes on the screens as they heeded Tom’s new call to action.

  Stop the men in masks

  Turn them back.

  Stop them

  Now.

  What happened next was inexplicable and unforgettable to anyone who witnessed it, a random collection of individuals suddenly acting with a single objective, a hundred fists raised like a hammer against those who would do them harm. The wall of hands and arms created a barrier in front of the advancing attackers and then encircled them. The intruders froze in their tracks, lashing out blindly, trying in vain to find the leaders of the countercharge. The pulverizing beat grew louder as the thugs lowered their weapons in disbelief, predators turned into prey. Then the rearing surge of humanity closed in and took them apart.

  Dear brothers and sisters:

  We are living proof of the transformative energy of human consciousness and the distributed genius of the crowd. As our numbers and power have grown, so has our understanding of what is possible, of why instant collective action matters. In the course of evading the authorities and helping those in need, by being ruthless provocateurs of fun and whimsy, by exploring the boundaries and possibilities of technology and common cause, we have bonded and evolved together.

  Now it is time for us to change and grow again.

  Listen: Do you hear that sound in the clubs and on the streets? Have you noticed that the mindless dance has lost its frivolity and taken a quantum leap? The same bold rhythms that make us smile and pump our fists are the marching drums of a militia on the move. Strength in numbers is an invisible wind, a zeph.r blowing across the land from the west, the bringer of spring and rebirth after a long, cold winter.

  But before we can grasp our destiny, we must understand our history—not last year, or last century, not even to the earliest traces of man. I mean the memory buried inside, embedded in our DNA, like the gills that briefly appear on the human fetus in the womb, submerged, dormant, waiting. Look around you, my brothers and sisters—the old order is dying. But something else is being born. The networks and technology we need are already here, the hive mind is wired and globally aware. Who will control and deploy the means of our morphogenetic rebirth? Who will own the future? Better us than them. Better now than never.

  We are approaching the end of the third Gilded Age.

  The power of money, what money means and what it can do, all of this will be washed away by the surge of the collective, which moves at the speed of thought yet does not actually move at all, like a tsunami. We think of a tidal wave as something that travels between continents with the speed of a jet plane, crossing the ocean until it smashes against the coastline. But in fact, for most of its journey, a tsunami is simply energy being transferred from one water molecule to the next. The water itself doesn’t actually move. Only at the very end of the tsunami’s journey, when the shallows compress its hydraulic fury against the shore, does the wave reveal itself, rearing up
in a cold-blooded curl, crushing and carrying away everything that stands before it. The new community will not be compromised by the cloud; it will not be collected and sifted by servers. It will be viral in the truest, deepest sense—person-to-person, peer to peer, phone to phone, mind to mind.

  Swarm + crypto currency = Nuero$

  At this moment, we are more than a million strong and multiplying every minute. Now imagine if each of us contributes one hundred dollars anonymously to the cause. That would instantly become one hundred million dollars. But if that money is collected and reissued to millions more as Nuero$, what we will have actually accomplished is the monetization of the hive mind, crowd-funding as a global financial event, immediately spawning a new crypto currency worth billions.

  The enemies of distributed democracy will say that we are demented radicals, that our goals are beyond the fringe. But what threatens them most is the mobilization of the mainstream, the awakening of the masses—not just immigrants who came here looking for a better life or native-born Americans no longer welcome in their own country, but all of us together. Do you feel the cameras watching? Can you trace the moment when your phone became a leash and turned you into a moving target? We have become refugees in our own cities, the walking dead in the war against the everyman. What the pundits call politics is the pathetic clamor of mongrels fighting over scraps. Even our masters have lost their bite.

  Come, my brothers and sisters, join me in the crystal waters. The wave is approaching. Some will float, and some will sink. It’s high time we took them all for a swim.

  Duggan looked up from his computer screen at JT, who was waiting for his reaction.

  “Where did this come from? And what the hell is the Swarm?”

  JT shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Well, actually, Jake, the answer is not that simple. As you requested, we ran a relational term search across all platforms, the entire NSA database, and this blog post had the highest keyword correlations from the list you gave us: militia, EDM, zeph.r, sometimes with a slightly different spelling but still statistically valid. We did a search for the Swarm’s IP number, and it turned up over two hundred thousand individual addresses, none of them viable. Or I should say all of them viable since the message from the Swarm went viral.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “We think they’re using some new kind of cloaking software to disseminate their propaganda,” JT explained, his tone straddling alarm and admiration. “The message is erased from the hard drive as soon as it’s opened, but not before spitting it out to the next round of recipients from the receiver’s own e-mail address book.”

  “Like a spam bot?” Duggan asked.

  “Yes, but much smarter. It looks like Swarm has tapped into a phone-to-phone network that uses Bluetooth to transmit messages completely off the telecom grid. The only reason we have a copy of the transmission is because we got lucky when someone on our side took a screenshot with his camera before it self-erased.”

  Duggan could barely contain himself. “This Swarm manifesto—you’re saying more than a quarter million people have already read it and passed it on God knows how many times, and that despite having the resources of the entire government at our disposal, we can’t track it or identify the source of the damn thing?”

  JT bit his lip. “All we know so far is that the message was initialized through a distributed worm-bot designed to self-publish and replicate at a particular time.”

  “When was that?”

  “It went live the same day as the ARK festival incidents in New York.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah, it’s probably not a coincidence. And there’s something else you should see.”

  JT handed Duggan a sheet of paper with words inside overlapping circles of varying sizes. “It’s a word cloud. The bigger the circle, the more times the word came up in e-mails, blogs, text messages, social media posts, telephone calls, whatever. As you can see, Swarm, zeph.r and Meta Militia have a high degree of coincidence with EDM, rave plague, ARK and DJX.”

  “DJX?”

  “That’s the stage name of an electronic music star who toured with the ARK festival.”

  “Which was ground zero for the shit show in New York. And this revolutionary postcard hit the Net the same day.”

  “Correct.”

  “So you think this DJX is associated with the Swarm?”

  “Possibly. His real name is Xander Smith. He’s a self-taught musician born and raised in Austin. An FBI field agent interviewed him in Chicago a couple weeks ago. But the agent says there’s no way this kid is the author of the Swarm manifesto.”

  “So that leaves us with Kenneth Ulrich.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Is he the brains behind the Swarm?”

  “Swarm is a metaphor,” JT corrected, “an amorphous crowd-sourced symbol to rally the faithful. But the Meta Militia, as far as we can tell, is an actual organization. We’ve been able to intercept some of the group’s internal communications, but they’re encrypted, naturally.”

  “Can’t we break the code?”

  “Most likely, but it takes time. Meanwhile, if we sift through Ulrich’s e-mails and monitor the grid, we might be able to correlate if and when he first made contact with the militia and whether or not he’s with them now.”

  “So what are we waiting for?”

  “Right,” JT said, rising to leave. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  Duggan rested his elbows on his desk and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Nothing about this case made sense: a deadly clash between pro- and anti-EDM groups on Governor’s Island that may or may not have been orchestrated by a rogue DOD scientist, who may or may not have joined forces with a hacktivist group that called itself the Meta Militia. To top it off, the ARK incident corresponded with a series of flash mobs that were described by some observers as having been carried out with almost military precision, coinciding with a call for a cyber uprising by a dark-net movement called the Swarm.

  Duggan reopened the file of media reports that JT had given him. The flash mobs began the same night as the rave and had continued into the following day, each one larger than the previous one and following its predecessor by close to exactly six hours. In the first, two hundred people in business suits converged on Grand Central Station and froze mid-stride like mannequins for more than five minutes before dispersing. In the second, four hundred musicians dressed in marching band uniforms showed up at Lincoln Center and replayed “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” At the third, six hundred people in clown costumes gathered on the streets around the New York Stock Exchange and performed zany circus routines for several minutes, before leaving trails of banana peels in all directions. All told, the rave and flash mobs resulted in nine deaths—six had been beaten to death by angry dancers on Governor’s Island, the other three drowned during the ferry crossing back to New York, and dozens more had been injured at the concert or during one of the flash mobs.

  Duggan browsed on to a story that explained why there were so few arrests, considering the scale of the disruptions. According to a spokesperson for the NYPD, the flash mobbers had been so organized that police didn’t have time to react or even to realize that what they were witnessing wasn’t some sort of promotional event for a movie, Broadway show, or the circus. “It looked to me like they rehearsed their routine a hundred times at least—I’d pay to see it again,” one officer had quipped. “The strange thing was that afterward most of them said they couldn’t remember why or how they got there. But you know—that’s kids nowadays.”

  Another clip quoted an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley named Cara Park who had been in New York as part of a CDC task force on the Rave Plague. Park had examined ravers and flash mobbers admitted to New York hospitals and suspected a connection between the two. “What got my attention about the flash mobs,” Park told the reporter, “is
not just that they happened the same day as the EDM festival but that some people admitted to being present at both. They all showed some of the same symptoms of a kind of group psychosis that we’ve been seeing at some EDM events, namely synchronized action, post-activity depression, memory loss, and unaccountability for their actions. It was almost as if something or somebody, at least temporarily, had taken over their minds.”

  Duggan opened his browser and found the phone number of the UC Berkeley biology department and asked for Dr. Cara Park. When she answered, he introduced himself as an agent of the cybersecurity division of the Department of Homeland Security.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. …”

  “Duggan.”

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Duggan, but I already told your associate that I wasn’t interested in military funding for my research.”

  “You didn’t tell me, Dr. Park. I’m not with the DOD.”

  “Well, maybe not you specifically. But it was somebody else from the government. Don’t you all work together?”

  “Ideally, yes,” Duggan said. “But that’s not why I’m calling. I read your interview about the flash mobs and ravers sharing certain symptoms of mind control, as if they’d been brainwashed.”

  “No, not brainwashed,” Cara said. “What I meant was that they seemed to share a kind of collective amnesia that may or may not be related to a virus or to some other unknown pathogen. Until we can isolate and identify the cause of the syndrome, we have no chance of finding a cure. Honestly, certain alarmists to the contrary, we’re not even sure what we’re dealing with here. Forgive me for getting a bit technical, but MRIs of some of the injured demonstrators showed brain alteration but no damage per se, at least not in any overtly or permanently disabling way. It’s the most extraordinary thing.”