by Guy Garcia
So fine, then let democracy run its course. Let the people decide for themselves.
No, that’s my point—the choice was made by our government when it declared war on the free will of its own soldiers, when it failed to recognize and respect the sovereignty of the human mind. The only remedy, the perfect justice for this crime, is to unleash the hive on its would-be masters.
Swarm, it’s me, your Lucy in the Sky. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got to see you before you leave.
Cara wasn’t sure how long the pretty princess avatar had been watching them. She had luxuriant blond curls cascading around her shoulders and was regally attired in a white dress and a crown of floating diamonds. Mr. Aws turned and faced her, but there were no thunderbolts.
Lucy, what are you doing here? This isn’t a good time. Go home. I can’t talk now.
Can’t you feel how connected we are? Ever since that night, I see you in my dreams, even when I’m awake.
Please don’t make me hurt you.
“Sir, I think we have an audiovisual.” Two agents zeroed in on a player in the middle of the tenth row. The man seemed agitated, as if fending off something—or someone.
“Get ready,” Duggan said. “I want you to keep your distance, but cut off his exits. I want a takedown plan with double backups. What the hell is that princess doing there? Who the fuck is Lucy?”
What about your own freedom, Mr. Aws? You know they’ll try to stop you. What good can you do in prison? Is it worth it?
Yes, you have a point, Dr. Park. In fact, I should probably take my leave before those agents lurking in the aisles make their move. It’s been a pleasure.
Mr. Aws, don’t go yet. I can help you.
Swarm, I’m sorry about what I said last time. I’m not mad anymore. I understand what you’re doing. You are a prophet, and I see that now. I just want to talk. I’ll wait for you in the lobby. I’m wearing white, just like my avatar. I love you.
But the monk was already raising his arms, summoning a breeze that became a howling wind that swept across all the player’s screens and battered the battlefields and forests and alien habitats of Luminescence. The hurricane became deafening as it grew in size and ferocity, lifting up trees and buildings, knights and dragons, trolls and unicorns, draining the lakes and sucking the blue sky itself into a voracious funnel that wrenched the entire kingdom loose from its circuits and wiped it off the LCD screens, erasing every trace of Luminescence, leaving nothing but a gaping void of dead black frames.
Pulling the plug on a virtual world in the middle of a half a million dollar competition at a packed expo had a number of instantaneous effects, not the least of which was hundreds of apoplectic gamers jumping to their feet and screaming at the organizers and producers, who were scrambling around with flashlights, desperately trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The outcries of shock and dismay attracted another crush of gawkers who rushed over to see what the ruckus was about, fueling the mayhem.
“Don’t let him get away!” Duggan ordered into his mike, but it was already too late. Did Swarm also set off the fire alarm that triggered a stampede for the exits? Duggan didn’t have time to speculate. “Outside! Tell the Austin PD to grab him on the plaza! Do you still have a visual?”
“Yes, sir. We’re in pursuit. Except—”
“Keep on his tail. I’ll be out in a minute.”
Duggan fought his way across the clogged rows of game consoles to reach Cara, who was shaken but otherwise unscathed. “I’m fine,” she said. “Go on. You have to catch him!”
Outside on the jammed sidewalks, the exiting crowd had been joined by more than a hundred amateur clowns. Big ones, small ones, scary ones, and funny ones, all of them juggling, tumbling, and mugging for the pedestrians, who stopped to laugh and gape. It was as if Luminescence itself had spilled from the servers and emptied onto the streets, spreading its madcap spell over people and things, a fun zone of players being played by the game. On every intersection surrounding the Palmer Center, convoys of mutant vehicle bicyclers and teenage student drivers inexplicably converged and collided helter-skelter into each other, snarling traffic, oblivious to angry shouts and honks from stalled commuters. Before the agents and police could apprehend him, Swarm melted into the mayhem, just another geek in the teeming techie mash-up.
“Which way?” Duggan demanded. The agents pointed to a hooded man who had broken from the pack a couple of blocks away, hurrying up the avenue, his head down as he typed into his phone. The agents’ vehicles were trapped in the student driver gridlock, so Duggan and his men continued their pursuit on foot, dodging clowns and cars, gradually gaining ground. They were closing in when a flurry of pedicabs materialized around their target, moving in formation with uncanny precision. Duggan watched helplessly as their quarry jumped into the lead cab and disappeared with the foot-powered fleet down a side street.
“Goddamn it!” Duggan shouted, winded and seething.
Cara was waiting for him back at the Palmer Center. The look on his face told her what had happened. “I’m so sorry, Jake,” she said. “But maybe it’s not over yet.” Cara turned to the young woman standing beside her. “Agent Duggan, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. This is Susan Oliver. She says she’s Swarm’s girlfriend.”
Part III
EVOLUTION
21
The dust devil did a manic mambo on the blacktop and moved across the road to molest a gaggle of camera-toting tourists before unspooling. Watching from the car, Tom considered the cruel genesis of the wrinkled arroyos and stratified spires protruding from the desert floor like exclamation marks. He knew the scenic overlooks along Arizona’s Route 179 did a good business catering to visitors intent on capturing digital recollections of the red rock vistas. But out beyond Sedona’s commercial encampment of psychics and shops full of vortex maps and Jackalope postcards, he also glimpsed the sculpted remains of a geological last stand against entropy, a graveyard of mineral-rich mountains stripped to their bones and left in the sun to bake in their own pretty ashes.
Xander insisted on sending a driver to pick Tom up in Phoenix and bring him to the hideaway he was leasing from an A-list actor shooting a movie in Asia about Genghis Khan. “You’ll never find it on your own,” Xander boasted, “not even with a GPS.”
Arizona was quite a departure from their month-long hiatus in Berlin, where they had immersed themselves in the local EDM demimonde, staying with DJ friends in the louche former East Berlin area of Friedrichschain. Their lair was stumbling distance from refitted power stations and factories where insomniacs roamed murky chambers outfitted with heavy shades to blot out the dawn and keep them undulating to the beat, alone and together, grinding their hips inside the rhythm machine, taking refuge from their worries and obligations, napping for short intervals in the crannies and nooks around and between the monolithic speaker banks, oblivious to everything except the steady thrum of electrons spinning and sparking in the artificial night.
During their fourth week in Germany, Xander announced that he was looping back to Barcelona for a few days and then flying home to rekindle his muse and work on some new music. Tom stayed behind in Berlin, content to continue sampling the post-Soviet charms of Bitte, developing a taste for Bavarian beer and bratwurst and monitoring the EDM scene through industry colleagues and the 4chan b-tards, who were busy helping Anonymous take down a gang of Russian ransomware pirates. Since absconding to Germany, Tom had continued his campaign of electronic samizdat, and Swarm had begun to surface in the cultural mainstream, sometimes in reference to a shadowy cyber insurgent who had amassed an underground army of followers, sometimes as a catchphrase to describe a dawning realization that the true danger posed to society did not come from any single person or group but from the metastasizing grip of the Internet itself, reigniting the debate over the nature and limits of personal responsibility and social freedom, except that this time the a
rgument was being monitored and measured in an echo chamber of blogs, texts, and tweets.
Was Swarm a person or a movement or something much more elemental, something hidden in plain view, like air, and just as ubiquitous? That day at the expo in Austin, conjuring flash mobs to flummox the feds, Tom had never felt more liberated and empowered. It was almost as if he had stepped out of Luminescence and into the physical world with a corresponding power to summon an unstoppable wind. By commanding the minds and actions of others in real time, his synapses had begun to fire in concert with a larger nerve center, a brain that was no longer his alone or limited by the physical and neurological limitations of his own body. How else to explain Lucy’s uncannily timed appearance at SXSW than the possibility that, under certain circumstances at least, zeph.r’s effects were not completely temporary. The intensity of their fusion had opened a door that could never be completely closed, no matter how much he tried to shake off his emotions or forget her desperate pleas as he pulled the plug, not just on their relationship but the entire virtual world that had once contained it.
Sitting in a café built of bricks recycled from the Berlin Wall, Tom pondered his predicament. He had created Swarm to protect himself, but the twined tango with his shadow self had become symbiotic. He was no longer merely speaking through Swarm; he was relying on Swarm to give him a voice that was echoing through the cyber-verse to a degree that even Tom found astonishing. But how could he lead the insurrection as a furtive fugitive in European exile? The cutting-edge video installations of WTV33, Room Division, and other Berlin innovators were tempting platforms for a widespread zeph.r transmission. But the anti-rave backlash trying to shut down EDM culture in America, or the new Kulturekampf, as the Berliners called it, had also started to surface in Europe. Tom couldn’t risk attracting attention to himself, certainly not at a time when the search for Swarm was becoming an international cause célèbre. By hopscotching across dark nets in cyberspace, Tom could communicate with anyone anywhere without leaving a digital footprint or deliver the mesmerizing graphics from “Stardust” along with his blogs and the zeph.r code in a downloadable app. He had even updated Swarm’s avatar so that a single pixel was added to his image with the arrival of each new viewer, rendering his visual appearance as a pulsating aggregation of microdots, the hive mind in a faceless humanoid form. Newspapers and websites around the world started publishing screenshots and video clips of Swarm’s stochastic silhouette, and one night, on his way home from the clubs, Tom passed a young German sporting a Swarm T-shirt. Tom wondered what the journalists and fans would say if they knew that every version of Swarm’s protean portrait, by virtue of becoming minutely modified by the very act of being seen, was intrinsically unique.
Despite his close call with the authorities in Austin, Tom was undeterred from his quest to use zeph.r as a bridge between the ineffable energy of collective thought and the quantum holy grail of particle physics, a tool that could pierce the membrane between omnipresent but unseen forces and reveal a unified supersymmetry of pure, transformational awareness. He knew that the laws of evolution were on his side and that it was only a matter of time before he found a way to gather the cranial critical mass that Dr. Park had warned against. But where and how? Maybe there was a clue to his next move in the way Swarm’s call to action was ricocheting around the planet, across borders and languages, gaining traction by the nanosecond. Tom had been scouring the Web for the latest manifestations of his alter ego, tracing the semiotic Braille of hyperlinked meme pathways, when he got the text from Xander inviting him to Sedona.
“We’re almost there,” the driver announced as they approached the end of a box canyon. Just when Tom was sure they could go no farther, the car took a sharp right and started climbing an escarpment on a dirt road that eventually dead-ended at a speaker box welded to a rusty red gate. The driver pushed the call button, and Tom heard Xander say, “Open sesame!” The motorized gates swung aside. They drove another ten minutes before Tom saw the house, a protruding blade of glass and steel stabbed into the mesa overlooking the north exposure of Cathedral Rock.
The front door was ajar, and Tom entered the sleek, cool interior, following a muffled thrum through the bamboo-floored rooms until he found Xander ensconced in the center of a makeshift studio, bobbing to the beat with a pair of headphones covering his ears, surrounded by a panoply of glowing consoles, LED screens, and keyboards, all connected to a tangle of wires strewn across the floor like linguini. Tom spotted an analog Moog Sub Phatty synthesizer and a vintage theremin in its original wooden console with what looked like a stubby car radio antenna poking up.
Seeing Tom, Xander removed the headphones and opened his arms wide. “Ditat Deus!”
“Amen, brother.”
Xander dropped his arms. “Dude, it’s the Arizona state motto. It’s Latin for ‘God enriches.’”
“Music to my ears.” Their hands clenched in greeting.
“You have no idea.” He pointed to the theremin. “Ever seen one of those?”
“Yeah, in books anyway,” Tom replied. “It’s the first instrument designed to be played without being touched. You could use it in our next gig.”
“Whatever,” Xander said. “I missed you, man. I have to say, I wasn’t sure you’d actually come. Still too much heat in Austin to go home?”
“It’s why you’re here in middle of nowhere, isn’t it?”
“Maybe I just needed a change of scenery.”
Tom pointed to a silver metal box about the size of a toaster oven stashed in the corner. The front-panel display had old-fashioned knobs and dials and a gleaming cathode-ray tube. “What’s that little gizmo?”
“Oh, that’s a Rife square wave generator,” Xander said. “It was built in the nineteen thirties by a scientist named Royal Rife. He believed that by exposing the brain to specific microwave frequencies, you could change people’s moods, improve their health, and even cure cancer. Our host—whose name I’m forbidden to utter by a legally binding NDA Agreement…” Xander leaned forward and silently mouthed the actor’s name. “He said I could use it, so I thought it might be interesting to see if the Rife beam box could be synched with the Omnisphere, you know, to intensify the audiovisual effects.”
“That would be sick,” Tom said,
Xander flipped the switch, and the Rife sprang to life. The dials flexed behind the indicator panels, and the cathode throbbed with a purplish glow. Even from across the room, Tom could detect a faint oscillating whine, a sound that was unexpectedly, excitingly familiar.
“Wow, that’s pretty intense,” Tom said, covering his ears with his hands. “Are you sure it’s safe?”
“Well, my landlord uses it all the time, and he looks pretty healthy.” Xander clicked off the Rife. “I thought this would be a good place for us to get some work done. No interruptions, just like the old days, you know?” He got up and gripped Tom’s shoulder. “C’mon, let’s have a drink. In the freezer is some ice wine I brought back from Berlin. There’s some killer sativa too.”
Xander retrieved a pair of tumblers and a tall, thin bottle filled with a clear liquid from the mesquite and granite bar and led the way out to the terrace. “This stuff will blow your mind, and if it doesn’t, the spice in the pipe definitely will,” Xander said as he uncorked the bottle and filled their glasses. “It’s made from late harvest grapes that freeze in the first frost. The pulp separates from the skin, releasing concentrated flavors and, some say, the grape’s true spirit.”
Tom lifted his glass. “To icy spirits and warm climates!”
“To hot women and cool mixes!”
The ice wine was dense, sweet, and bracing. Tom gazed into the gaping canyon and marveled anew at the g-force of their social acceleration. In less than two years, Xander had progressed from drug-dealing DJ wannabe to discerning oenophile and friend of unnamable movie stars who kept vintage microwave-beam generators in their bathroom. “Th
is kind of reminds me of Vegas,” Tom said, “only better.”
Xander’s smile melted. “Nope, it’s nothing like Vegas or New York.” He lit the pipe, took a hit, and passed it to Tom. “This house is built on a vortex, you know, a geo-dimensional power spot. Do you feel it?”
“I do,” Tom said, holding his breath. “I most certainly do.” He exhaled and took another exquisite sip. “So, Xan, the ice wine and this cool-ass crib definitely don’t suck. But what are you really doing here, besides ignoring the headlines and playing with Rife beam in the bathroom?”
Xander’s gaze hardened. “I told you, I came here to work. I’m writing stuff for the next record and working on music for a film. Fabian thinks it’s a good move for my artistic cred. He says sound tracks are the next big thing.”
“No kidding. What movie?
“Hang on.” Xander dashed into the house and came back with a Velo-bound typed manuscript.
Tom read the title aloud: “Ocean’s 9/11.” He flipped through the pages. “It’s a joke, right?”
“Yeah, definitely,” Xander agreed. “It’s a rom-com about a terrorist attack on Vegas.”
“Didn’t that kinda already happen, during ARK?”
“But actually!” Xander took another drag and put it on the table. “I’m glad you brought it up. You know, I’ve been reading J. Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher. He says we all want to be famous because we think it will give us freedom, except that the moment we aspire to be famous, we are no longer free.”
“Is that why you stopped touring, because you felt trapped by your fame?”