Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  Park’s message had both intrigued and disturbed Tom. He obviously had a weakness for beautiful women who spoke directly to him through a camera lens. But what, if anything, did she actually know about zeph.r? Was it a fishing expedition or a trap? He was going to find out, but he would take proper precautions. It didn’t ultimately make any difference, because the Tom Ayana who lived in Austin was part of a life that he was leaving behind, like a snake sloughing off its old skin in order to keep growing. He would miss his mother, but in most ways that mattered, he’d checked out a long time ago.

  Tom took it as a positive sign that Austin’s annual South by Southwest Interactive conference happened to be in full swing. The city was packed with techies and social media mavens who had come to mingle and swap business cards during the nonstop barrage of meetings, product demos, and sponsored parties overflowing with free food, drink, and branded industry swag. The hordes of hackers, software engineers, and mid-level media managers were his kind of people, the kind that checked their mobile devices every ten seconds to get details about the next presentation or event they absolutely couldn’t miss, the kind who knew that the only thing cooler than being in the know about a paradigm-shifting innovation was having co-written the business plan.

  It wasn’t hard to find Cara Park’s e-mail and send her an encrypted message to meet him at a place where he controlled the environment and everything that happened in it. The zeph.r code was safe in the cloud, but now that Park knew Swarm was in Austin, the feds wouldn’t be far behind. Tom decided that Xander had picked an opportune moment to take a vacation and that Berlin was a perfect place to get high and lie low, moving by night through the underground club circuit, an internationalist hyper-creative community that would embrace them, absorb them, and conceal them for as long as they needed or wanted. He didn’t even have to learn German.

  Cara called Duggan the minute she received Swarm’s text.

  “Read it to me exactly as he wrote it,” he told her.

  “All it says is this: ‘Dear Professor Park, I saw you on television talking about Swarm. You seem unusually informed and intelligent for an academic. I’d be happy to hear your theories about human evolution. Meet me Thursday for the SXSW Gaming Expo at the Palmer Center. Find the Luminescence multi-player contest and log in under your own name. Wait for me in the grove of aspens behind the castle at exactly three in the afternoon. I’ll join you there as Mr. Aws.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes,” Cara confirmed. “What’s Luminescence?”

  “It’s a virtual reality game.”

  “He wants me to meet him in a game?”

  “It’s a fantasy world where people appear as avatars who can communicate with each other by typing or talking into voice-recognition software.”

  “Like a chat room.”

  “Yeah, but more visually elaborate,” Duggan explained. “You know, as in speech bubbles. You need to answer him.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Just say you’ll be there.”

  “Anything else?”

  “After you answer, don’t touch your computer,” he instructed. “I’m sending some men over now to do a trace on the text. I’m sure he’s covered his tracks, but just in case he made a mistake. My associates are heading to you now with a copy of the game and headgear. They give you a crash course on Luminescence today so you can navigate the game and find the virtual meeting place tomorrow. They’ll bring your credentials for the conference too.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “I’ve got to make sure we’ve got a proper reception waiting for Mr. Aws. I’ll be there to meet you at the Austin airport at noon.”

  “Jake, how can you be sure that Mr. Aws is Swarm?”

  “Typical hacker humor,” Duggan noted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Aws is Swarm spelled backward.”

  20

  Tom had cleared his room of incriminating material and was ready to go by the time he sat down at the kitchen table for a farewell lunch with his mother. She was humming a Mexican folk tune as she served him his favorite home-cooked meal—huevos rancheros with beans and rice and plenty of chile verde sauce. She put the plate in front of him, with a cold glass of limeade to wash it down. It gave her pleasure to watch her son eat. It was the only time she had his full attention. “Why are you going to Shanghai?” she asked him. “You don’t even speak Chinese.”

  Tom laughed and wiped his mouth with a hand-embroidered napkin. “It’s for business, Mom,” he lied. “Besides, everybody in the world speaks English, even the Chinese. I’ve got to do something downtown, and then I’m heading straight to the airport to catch my plane.”

  Sonia frowned. “How can you go so far away without taking any luggage?”

  “My bags are already at the airport.” He got up from the table and wrapped his arms around her. “Don’t worry. I’ll call you from Shanghai in a week so you’ll know I’m okay.” He put a wad of thousand-dollar bills in her apron pocket. “Here’s some money, Mom. All the bills are paid for the next six months, and your bank account will be refilled automatically.”

  Sonia pulled out the cash and tried to give it back. “It’s too much, M’ijo. What am I supposed to do with all this?”

  “Buy yourself something nice,” Tom said, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “Or give it to the church.”

  “I’ll ask the Virgin to watch over you and keep you safe,” Sonia said. “I told Chevo the same thing when he left.”

  Tom felt a familiar pang, but all he said was, “I love you, Mom. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You’re just like your father,” Sonia said matter-of-factly, “always moving between the light and the darkness, living in two worlds.” She took his hands in hers and squeezed them. “He says he’s proud of you for helping your tía. He says not to be afraid of this thing you’re doing in the electric world, that place the computers take you. He says to trust the meaning of your name.”

  Tom was absolutely dumbfounded. For all these years, ever since he was a child, Sonia had never spoken so frankly about his father. He was a shadow, a cipher that only festered in his imagination, a yawning abyss banished and buried by anger and grief. And now here she was, suddenly chatting about Chevo like it was no big deal.

  “Mom,” Tom said. “How do you know Dad wants me to trust my name?”

  “Because he told me,” Sonia said. “He talks to me all the time.”

  Tom walked out the front door and down the steps to the car waiting to take him to the Palmer Center. Better to let the authorities think that Swarm was still in Austin, or if they somehow managed to track him back to Tom and his mother, she would point them to Shanghai. Besides, the megabucks grand slam version of Luminescence to which he’d invited Dr. Park was restricted to players who registered for the Austin expo. Millions would be watching online and betting on the outcome, but you had to be present to compete. SXSW Interactive was Tom’s home turf in his hometown, and he couldn’t imagine a more fitting setting to take a final bow before disappearing in a puff of pixelated smoke.

  Tom took a last glance at the house where he’d grown up and saw his mother standing on the front porch. The potted prickly pears clustered around her feet reminded him of the painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe that she kept in her bedroom. Had Sonia stood amid the cactus thorns to watch his father on the day he left to catch the plane to Alaska? Tom knew she didn’t wave good-bye to his dad, because she had never accepted his departure. She never lost hope that he somehow avoided or survived the crash, or if he did fall from the sky, that the Virgin would find his spirit wandering the icy slopes and guide him home. For all of Tom’s life, even with the years piling up and grinding her down, Sonia never stopped taking care of herself, keeping the house ready, cooking Chevayo’s favorite foods, cleaning up, and sitting by the window until long a
fter dusk.

  She didn’t wave to Tom either.

  It was hard to imagine anything trickier than apprehending a nameless and faceless suspect in a crowded, cavernous space that was equal parts trade show, amusement park, and video game arcade. In the hour that he’d been at the expo to prep for the takedown, Duggan had been engulfed by fake fumes from ersatz volcanoes, accosted by a loquacious robot, and nearly run over by a pack of remote-controlled racing cars. Applause and laughter mixed with Wagnerian music, floor-shaking thuds, and amplified explosions as roving gangs of conference attendees clogged the aisles and collided with queues of fans waiting to take their picture with costumed actors from the latest superhero hit.

  “How are South by Southwest techies like beauty queen contestants?” Duggan overheard someone say. “One, they want to make the world a better place. Two, they want to be Googled but won’t let you touch. Three, they get free drinks everywhere they go.”

  Duggan had taken every conceivable precaution to ensure that Swarm was captured and removed as a threat to the nation’s peace and cyber security. Fifteen plainclothes NCSD agents, two of them posing as gamers, were strategically placed around the interior of the expo. At least as many Austin police officers were stationed outside the exits on the unlikely chance that Swarm somehow managed to get that far.

  Cara had taken her homework seriously, adjusting the virtual reality headgear and playing Luminescence with her federal tutors until the wee hours before packing to catch her flight from San Francisco to Austin, practicing diligently to make sure she didn’t get lost, captured, or killed on her way to her tête-à-tête with Mr.Aws at the castle. To her own surprise, once she acclimated to projecting herself into a digitized doppelganger in a dreamlike 3-D environment, she found the fantasy kingdom and its strange denizens oddly captivating. She liked the way the players’ thoughts appeared in speech bubbles above their heads and how shape-shifting between avatar personas was an accepted form of self-expression. The scientist in her wanted to know, for instance, why the trolls clustered together and shared a cranky, pugilistic disposition. Were irascible people drawn to trolls because they reflected their actual temperament or did being a troll mold one’s personality the way Halloween costumes tailored the dispositions of those who wore them? Not to mention the unicorns. But as the minutes until her meeting with Mr. Aws ticked away, she found her thoughts shifting to the even stranger reality of agreeing to meet with a suspected real-life cyber terrorist in a make-believe world to discuss an untested theory that might or might not prove to be Swarm’s undoing. And the whole thing was happening in the congested sensorium of a technology conference crawling with undercover federal agents, one of whom was her secret lover. My God, Cara told herself. You have fallen into the rabbit hole and are about to have an audience with the Mad Hatter. How will you ever find your way out?

  The meeting with Swarm was still forty minutes away, and Duggan’s stomach was churning. He took an antacid and adjusted his wireless mike for the fourth time. Cara had already taken her place with the other early arrivals at one of the video game consoles clustered under an array of oversize HD LCD screens that would soon come alive with the sights and sounds of 250 fanatical contestants engaged in an accelerated cash prize round of Luminescence. He decided to take a stroll around the expo’s perimeter and check on his agents.

  As he walked past a row of demo laptops, he noticed the LED camera lights blink on as he passed. Duggan stopped and so did the cameras. He stared back at the unblinking apertures, refusing to accept the possibility that he was being tracked and watched. Relax, it’s just a computer display gag. He pushed the more disturbing possibility out of his mind and circled back to the Luminescence arena, where many of the player consoles were already occupied, mostly by men in buzz cuts, baseball hats, and hoodies, all of them waiting to don their headgear and storm the virtual kingdom and collect their share of the half a million dollars’ worth of enchanted gold coins strategically sprinkled across the realm.

  Duggan alerted the agents on his closed communication network. “Keep your eyes out for the man in the picture,” he instructed. “To join the game, he has to be sitting at one of the player consoles.” He had circulated the DOD staff photo of Ulrich to his agents, but most of the men in the room were wearing VR goggles and sporting varying degrees of facial hair. “Stay frosty and keep in mind that he might have shaved or changed his appearance.”

  There was a trumpet fanfare and an ebullient roar as the LCD screens lit up to announce the official start of Luminescence. The players activated their virtual devices, and within seconds creatures of every description were storming through the gates, fanning out in every direction. The clang of crossed swords mixed with howls of pain as the players in the vanguard were cut down by a squad of black knight bots on horseback. A growing clot of SXSW spectators gathered to watch the crusading contestants on the giant monitors and cheer them on, but Duggan kept his eyes on the screen that projected Cara’s activities. He knew Swarm was somewhere in the room, but they wouldn’t know for sure until he revealed himself by making contact. Cara had picked a yellow-and-black bumblebee as her avatar, and he spotted it soaring above the mayhem in a steady course toward the castle. It circled and drifted down into the grass and pretended to browse some flowers as NCSD agents incarnated as white knights loitered nearby. Within moments, a hooded figure in a long monk’s robe glided into view.

  “Let the monk pass,” Duggan instructed the agents. “Duel with each other so he doesn’t get suspicious.” The knights did as instructed, and the monk advanced. The bee turned to face the intruder, and the monk bowed in courtly greeting. The speech bubble created by the word translation software in the player’s headset microphone appeared, and Duggan knew the game was on.

  Dr. Park, I presume.

  Mr. Aws. Nice to meet you.

  The pleasure is mine. I like your bee. I hope it doesn’t sting.

  The bee danced in a circle and fluttered its wings.

  No, of course not. I came to warn you. The signal you are using raises the serotonin levels in the brains of your subjects. I’ve seen this before in locust swarms. The serotonin induces morphosis.

  The monk came closer and bowed.

  Interesting. Tell me more.

  The bee transformed into a green grasshopper.

  All locusts begin as grasshoppers. Starvation and crowding triggers the serotonin secretion, and they begin to change, both neurologically and physically. They become stronger and more aggressive, sexually and otherwise. They also begin to exhibit emergent behavior, a unified consciousness that’s driven by primal urges and appetites.

  The mild-mannered grasshopper began to change. It got darker and bigger and started to buzz angrily. Then it reverted back into a harmless bumblebee.

  Very impressive, but your demonstration just proves my whole point: as Stuart Kauffman argued, self-organization and complexity are already built into our DNA, and now we have our finger on the biological trigger.

  I’m sorry. I’m not sure I follow. What trigger?

  Darwin was only half-right; he couldn’t have anticipated the impact of technology on our capacity to initiate change in our own environment. You see, all we need to do is create the correct conditions for an accelerated form of human emergence.

  My God, Duggan thought, it’s him. He recognized the syntax from the Swarm blog, the same intelligence and chilling confidence, the erudite rant of a terrorist with bio-global ambitions. Duggan was proud of Cara. She had quickly earned Swarm’s respect and had gotten him to open up to her. He wanted her to understand what he was doing and why, one scientist to another, they were sparring on neutral terrain before retreating to their respective corners.

  It’s too dangerous, Mr. Aws. We’ve seen the brain damage and violence that comes with uncontrolled emergence. The locusts become ravenous, marauding predators, cannibals. We don’t know the immediate implications or
longer-term consequences for our own species, especially if the mutated humans are allowed to reach critical mass. What if you can’t control what you’ve started? Are you ready to take that risk?

  The monk chortled dismissively.

  Human beings routinely slaughter each other by the millions. They assassinate, torture, and mutilate, often in the name of their supposedly benevolent gods. They create systems and hierarchies that crush the weak and the poor. They stuff their faces while others starve. They build weapons of mass destruction to protect arbitrary borders and obliterate their rivals. Children are given guns or are sold into prostitution. Innocent people are jailed and tortured for their skin color or social class or religious beliefs. Others blow themselves up for the same reasons. And you’re worried that I might encourage bad behavior?

  The white knights stopped fighting and were beginning to creep closer.

  Tell your knights to back off, Dr. Park, or I’ll make them go away.

  What knights?

  The monk raised his hand, and twin bolts of lightning struck at the hapless swordsmen. They changed color and flickered, and then they were gone.

  “What the hell happened?” Duggan demanded into his mike. Nobody knew. “He’s right under our noses at one of those consoles. I need a visual ID—now!”

  “Sir,” an agent responded, “everybody looks the same with those headsets on.”

  “Then get closer to the players and see if you can hear him talking to Dr. Park through his microphone.”

  Mr. Aws, maybe what you say is true, but shouldn’t people be allowed to choose? Who gave you the power to decide how and when they evolve?

  That’s rich, Doctor! Who gave me the power? Why, it was you—the white-coated sorcerers of the governing class! It was scientists like yourself who devised the means to supercharge human minds the better to fight your wars without errors or moral reservations. And how long would it be before someone decided the same technology could be used to shape the thoughts of ordinary people, turning them into unquestioning slaves, for their own good, of course. Just look at history and ask yourself if I’m wrong.