Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  “It sounds like you’ve started developing some theories about it.”

  “No, actually, we’ve hit a dead end, or a cul-de-sac,” Park said. “I’m just a research scientist advising the CDC. I’m not a neurologist or a virologist, and I shouldn’t even be speculating because it’s outside my area of expertise.”

  “But you are a doctor, aren’t you, Ms. Park?”

  “I have a PhD, if that’s what you mean.”

  “In evolutionary biology,” Duggan said.

  “Well, yes, that’s right,” Cara said, succumbing to flattery in spite of herself. “So in any case, I’m very sorry I couldn’t be of more help, but I need to get back to my work.”

  In some part of him that was still latent and unformulated, Duggan began to like this woman. He liked the way she put sentences together and the timbre of her voice. He liked how she was smart and to the point and made sense and was confident but stopped short of arrogance. He even liked the way she was trying, politely yet firmly, to get rid of him.

  “Dr. Park,” Duggan said, “I’m calling because I have reason to suspect that these flash mobs we’re talking about, and the illness or virus that’s causing the symptoms, could be a threat to national security. There are potentially many lives at stake. It seems to me that especially because you’re not a medical doctor, you might be able to help me understand what’s going on here, who’s behind it, and how we might be able to stop it.”

  “No offense, Mr. Duggan,” Cara responded stiffly, “but these young people you’re talking about aren’t criminals, and while I certainly appreciate that you have a job to do, I really can’t be a part of some government crackdown or any investigation that infringes on a person’s privacy or civil rights.”

  Duggan paused, deciding to try a different tack.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Park, but I think we got off on the wrong foot here. First, I have absolutely no intention of cracking down on people who like techno music or infringing on anybody’s rights. I called you because I’m trying to find a particular person, a scientist who is in possession of government property that could be dangerous, very dangerous, to the public. These ravers—it’s the techno fans themselves who are possibly in danger. My impression is that your work with the CDC has the same goal—to protect innocent people from harm. Am I right about that?”

  Cara hadn’t expected this—an undercover government agent talking about the welfare of ordinary citizens. He seemed nice enough, but she feared that if she cooperated with this man, sooner or later, one way or another, she would end up regretting it.

  “Mr. Duggan, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, and I’m happy to assist the government whenever it’s using its resources for the common good. But for you to understand what my work is about and how it may or may not be useful for your investigation, you would have to come to San Francisco and see the lab and get an educated grasp of my research, and then maybe we could have a coherent discussion about the flash mob syndrome, and any possible connection between it and this person or persons you’re looking for.”

  “I agree,” Duggan said. “You tell me when you’re free, and I’ll be there.”

  Cara looked at her phone in disbelief. “That’s very accommodating of you,” she answered, “but I don’t think that’s going to be possible.” Her tone was apologetic, but what she was actually thinking was, Back off, you pushy bastard. “You see, I’m leaving in a couple of days for a conference in Asia, and unfortunately I won’t be back in the Bay Area for quite some time …”

  “In that case,” Duggan interrupted, “I look forward to seeing you at your office at two in the afternoon tomorrow.”

  “Excuse me? Mr. Duggan, I don’t think you …”

  But Duggan had already hung up.

  17

  The taxi took Duggan north from downtown San Francisco through the Embarcadero and across the Bay Bridge to the Telegraph Avenue entrance of the UC Berkeley campus. Though it was his first visit to the city, he barely noticed the quaint cable cars clinging to surreally sloped streets, the paint by numbers Victorian facades, the way the fog barreled across the bay and collided in slow motion against the Oakland hills. His thoughts were continually reverting to the Meta Militia’s potential to hatch thousands of Donald Westlakes, all of them running amok and pointing their guns in the wrong direction.

  Duggan paid the fare and wended his way past squads of backpack-toting students, across a small grove of redwoods, until he reached the biological sciences building. The door to Cara Park’s office was open, but instead of seeing the intriguing woman he had spoken with on the phone, Duggan found himself facing a young man who introduced himself as Eric. Duggan noticed Eric regarding him with a bemused head-cocked expression.

  “Something the matter?”

  “You don’t look like Big Brother.”

  “You don’t look like Cara Park.”

  Eric made a noise indicating amusement. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’m Dr. Park’s research assistant. She’s waiting for you up at the lab. We figured it would save time if I drove you up the hill. It can get a little tricky, especially when there’s fog.”

  “It doesn’t seem very foggy now.”

  Eric craned his neck at the sky. “That’s something only a first-time visitor would say. The Bay Area is a giant collection of microclimates. The weather can sneak up on you.”

  “Is that why everybody here wears fleece hoodies and Gortex?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Eric said. “But mostly people tend to lie around on the grass with their shirts off.”

  “Because it gets so warm?”

  “Because it’s standard behavior.”

  Duggan followed Eric to a faculty parking lot, where he unlocked a blue Prius. As he navigated the windy road toward the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Eric said, “Dr. Park told me you’re with cyber intelligence.”

  “Yeah, Homeland Security,” Duggan confirmed. “Cyber Security Division.”

  “Gee, that sounds pretty serious. Do you arrest guys who share music files without paying … or people who hack PlayStations?”

  Duggan decided to let the gibe slide. “I’m here to talk to Dr. Park about some software that was stolen from the Department of Defense.”

  “You got hacked?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “What’s that got to do with EDM?”

  “You mean electronic dance music?”

  Eric glanced at Duggan and nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Cara said you were chasing some kind of techno terrorist.”

  Duggan crossed his arms and looked out the window. The panorama of bronze hills and eucalyptus trees overlooking schools of sailboats skittering against San Francisco’s mist-shrouded skyline was breathtaking. Farther west, the crimson tiara of the Golden Gate framed the Pacific and announced the edge of the continent.

  “So, Eric, what kind of work do you do at the lab?”

  “Different things, but mostly software development and statistical bio-modeling. I run the numbers on the colonies, population counts, hive migration patterns—bees, ants, termites, grasshoppers, slime molds, all kinds of adorable critters.”

  “What’s that got to do with the Center for Disease Control?”

  “We’re helping the CDC look for correlations between hive migration patterns and epidemics, like, for instance, signs of distributed intelligence in human pathogens, applying predictive models from one thing to the other.”

  “You mean correlations between bees and viruses?”

  “Sure, and basically the different ways that certain populations organize and interact as single entities, or anything else with a distributed brain that can teach itself new tricks.”

  “The hive mind,” Duggan said.

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  A gauzy mist had begun to creep across the road, smudging out the vi
sta. Eric eased the car into a parking space on the edge of a group of bunker-like structures. “I warned you about the crazy weather up here,” he said. “Wait till you meet the people.”

  In the thickening fog, the buildings looked as if they could withstand a nuclear blast, which was probably the case. Eric led the way inside and down a long corridor with concrete walls and fluorescent lighting, halting in front of a pair of steel doors. He entered an access code and rested his hand on the scanner. The red LED light turned green, and the doors swung open.

  “Welcome to the Berkeley bug motel.” Eric grandly waved his arm over several dozen crate-size Plexiglas-fronted containers stacked in the middle of the room and against the walls, each one home to a particular species. “Just please don’t feed the residents.” He halted in front of the first box. When Duggan realized what he was looking at, he reflexively took a step backward. “Don’t worry; they don’t get out,” Eric said, adding, “very often.”

  Duggan watched as thousands of ants, oblivious to their human spectators, clambered over each other, marching through winding tunnels with tireless determination, an endless stream of insects hauling morsels of food and mulch dozens of times their body weight, soldiers and civilians all going about their business. He noticed that some of the ants were carting lifeless bodies through the tunnels.

  “I didn’t know ants were cannibals.”

  “They’re not” Eric said. “But they carry their own dead. That tunnel leads to the graveyard.”

  “The colony has a graveyard?” Duggan asked.

  “Yup,” said Eric. “It’s in a chamber farthest away from where they store their food.”

  “Really? How many ants are in a colony?”

  “In this one about one hundred thousand,” Eric said. “But a super colony discovered in Hokkaido, Japan, had more than three hundred million. Each ant brain has about two hundred and fifty thousand brain cells. A human brain has about a hundred billion cells. So collectively a super colony could have …”

  “More brain cells than a human being,” Duggan concluded. “So then why isn’t an ant colony as smart as a man?”

  “That depends.” The voice belonged to a stunningly attractive woman in a lab coat.

  “On the colony or the man?” Duggan asked.

  “On how you define smart.”

  She was tall and slender, with flawless caramel skin and long black hair pulled up in a businesslike bun. “Hello, I’m Cara Park,” she said, extending her hand. Duggan gladly took it.

  “Your associate has been showing me your little zoo.”

  “So I see,” Cara said coolly. “They might look small to us, Mr. Duggan, even inconsequential. But as a species, ants have been doing pretty well, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Only a man with half a colony in his head would disagree,” Duggan replied. Cara’s almond eyes rested on him for a few seconds. “I’ll take over from here, Eric. Thanks.”

  Eric bowed slightly. “I’ll be in my office if you guys need me.”

  “Let me show you the lab.” Cara led Duggan through the spotless high-tech facility, where half a dozen or so researchers were huddled around high-resolution LCDs. “Observing our insect friends is the key to what we do, of course, but biology is increasingly about analytics too.”

  “You’re doing some fascinating work here,” Duggan said. “I can see why you said I couldn’t understand without coming to see the lab for myself.”

  She scanned his face for sarcasm. “I hope the trip doesn’t turn out to be a waste of your time, Agent Duggan.”

  “Not much chance of that.” Cara didn’t ask him what he meant.

  “Are all these people your students?”

  “No, only Eric and two others. We share the facilities and divide the costs between various department budgets.” Cara circled back and walked him down the avenue of insects. More ants, bees, grasshoppers, and he was loathe to guess what else, with less than a quarter-inch of plastic keeping them in their own separate worlds. “We have more than five million insects in the lab,” Cara told him, “but there are many millions more in those computers over there.”

  “A synthetic model of insect colonies and hive behaviors,” he guessed.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said.

  Duggan could feel the perspiration gathering in his armpits. He couldn’t remember the last time an admiring look from a woman had had such a physical effect on him, but it was time to get to the point. “When you said that the ravers and flash mobbers in New York both showed signs of mind control, did you mean that it seemed as if someone was telling them what to do, or did you mean that they were under the influence of something that made them more susceptible to suggestions?”

  “I honestly can’t say,” she answered. “Possibly both. At this point, we still don’t have enough data to make even an educated guess.”

  “What about the reports of people losing control of their sexual impulses? I mean, I know young people are normally kind of promiscuous, but the news articles and blogs I read made it sound like some of these events turned into full-blown orgies.”

  He could sense her reevaluating him, trying to read his intentions. It occurred to Duggan that ideation was an aphrodisiac, and this tentative probing of each other’s mental acuity, the back-and-forth volley of hypothesis and validation, was a form of cerebral foreplay. There was something about the way Cara tilted her head ever so slightly that told him she felt it too. Some of the student researchers, two females in particular, were discreetly glancing at Duggan and whispering to each other. Was their subtextual flirting that obvious?

  Cara motioned to him. “Let’s go talk in my office.”

  She shut the door and took her seat behind her desk. The only non-office-type furnishing, aside from a couple of colorful designer lamps, was a painting of the open sea, a blue-green haze of waves and sky with no discernable horizon. There was a comfortable-looking sofa on the other side of the room, but Duggan chose a steel straight-backed chair closer to the desk. He did his best to ignore the way her maroon skirt peeked out from under the white lab coat when she shifted to face him.

  “My point is that I can’t I can’t isolate a single cause from all the variables,” Cara was saying. “I flew to New York because of the reports that the ravers were acting as a collective entity, and the CDC wanted to know if a virus could somehow be passed from insects to people. But what got my attention was that the symptom profiles of the people at the rave and the flash mobs were almost exactly the same. How could any pathogen spread so fast? My contact at the CDC promised me a summary of the lab analyses from the New York hospitals. Any correlations, or lack of them, will tell us a lot about whether we’re on the right track or following a dead end.”

  “Please make sure you let me know when you get the data,” Duggan said. “It could be important.” He pointed to some large sheets of paper lying on a worktable against the wall. “Is that a map of Rave Plague outbreaks?”

  “Actually, they’re image maps of beehive migration patterns,” Cara said, moving them over to her desk. Duggan rose and leaned over her shoulder to look. He could smell her perfume—refined, slightly citrus. Cara pointed to the lines radiating from the main hubs, which followed their own trajectory like storm bands around the eye of a moving hurricane. “These lines show the trajectories of the scouts from various hives getting ready to move. The hives are also in motion but still manage to stay at an optimal distance from each other.”

  “It’s funny,” Duggan mused, “because the maps we made of social media networks around traveling rave festivals look just like that.”

  Cara’s eyes grew wide. She picked up her phone. “Eric, do you have the CDC’s map of known Raver’s Disease incidents? Yes, the national map. And while you’re at it, bring that list of EDM festivals. Yes. Thanks.” She turned her attention back to Duggan. “What made you think about that?” />
  “Well, your assistant told me that you were looking into parallels between insect migrations and viral pandemics, so I just assumed …”

  “We compared the known outbreaks to viral infection patterns,” Cara explained. “But there didn’t seem to be a match, which is why I don’t think we’re looking at a contagious viral event. But it never occured to me to cross-check the outbreaks against beehive scout trajectories. Look, they show a different kind of navigational intelligence. It’s not biochemical; it’s more …”

  “Electromagnetic?”

  “Yes.”

  They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Cara let Eric in and asked him to put red dots on cities where there had been a major EDM event and superimpose those dots onto the map of Rave Plague outbreaks. She took a ruler and started connecting the outlying virus dots to the red EDM festival dots, starting with the closest ones and moving outward. The pattern revealed itself quickly—a hub-and-spoke configuration that moved on a linear axis. She placed the EDM-virus map on her desk next to the schematic of the beehive-scout patterns.

  “Look at that,” Eric said.” The EDM raves are the hubs that connect the viral spokes.…”

  “Which is why the infections didn’t match a classic viral-contagion pattern,” Cara interjected.

  “I’ll bet the remaining dots form secondary hubs,” Duggan said, “and that they follow the same pattern as the main signal.”

  Eric looked up from the maps, for the first time reading the body language between Duggan and Cara. “What signal?” he asked.

  “Have you ever heard of something called the Swarm?”

  “Not something,” Eric corrected. “Someone.” He told Duggan about Swarm’s unrivaled reputation as a maestro of flash mobs and the militant blogs that had started appearing on the Internet. “He used to be a prankster,” Eric said. “His flash mobs used to be mainly about having fun. But about a year ago, something changed. He’s been getting more dogmatic lately. I mean, who knows, it might not even be the same person anymore.”