Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  “No, I already told you. I stopped doing live gigs because the vibe went sour and people were getting hurt. In Spain, some people were saying that EDM DJs are techno terrorists.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Agreed, but still. In the Spanish press, they called me a murderer, Tom. A matador.” There was an ache in Xander’s voice that Tom had never heard before.

  “Look, I hear what you’re saying. I feel it too, a change in the barometer, a shift of gravity. But I can’t back away or hide from it. We can’t stop being who we are.”

  “Who are we, Tom?” It was more of an accusation than a question. “I’ve been thinking that maybe things happen for a reason. Maybe there’s a lesson, a message of some kind, in all the strange shit going down.”

  “Who’s message?”

  “I don’t know. But I thought if I turned down the volume for a while, I might be able to hear it.” Xander deferred to the yawning silence before continuing. “I went on a little excursion the other day, up to the Hopi reservation. It was pretty interesting. Maybe we can take a ride tomorrow and I’ll show you around.”

  “What’s at the Hopi reservation?”

  “Injuns!” Xander made a savage face emitting tribal hoots and Tom had to laugh. “There’s a guy who’s friends with my actor pal,” he continued, “He took me to a ceremony, you know, with a shaman, near a place called Prophecy Rock. It’s kind of a big deal to get invited, but this guy’s pretty plugged in with the locals. Anyway, it made an impression. I see things differently now.”

  Tom considered the impassive walls of sandstone across the valley, tiny fissures burrowing into the rock for thousands of years, then one day the whole cliff collapses. “I feel the same way, buddy.”

  “So then you’ll come to the reservation with me?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Tom said. “But, yeah, sure. Why not?”

  “Awesome!” Xander jumped to his feet in celebration. “Wait, I wanna show you something.” He went into the house again and came out with a book-sized tablet. He tapped the screen, and sheets of water began to spill along the patio roof, glistening panels of liquid enclosing them on three sides. The temperature dropped immediately, and the acoustics shifted. Cathedral Rock was still visible, deconstructed and blurred into a flickering watercolor.

  “You’re kidding me,” Tom said. Even in his enlightened state, Tom noted, Xander hadn’t tired of cool toys.

  “It’s called hydro-architecture, walls made of moving water.” Xander stood up and pushed his finger through the translucent plane. “Tom, let’s try something. If you go out and get on the other side, I’ll get my camera and take your picture through the water.” Tom went outside on the terrace and slowly pushed his hands and face through the liquid curtain.

  “Wow,” Xander said, snapping away. “The colors are fucking incredible. You look like you’re passing through the portal to another dimension. It’s kinda scary.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “It is.”

  Fluorescent lighting was cruel to most people, but Susan Oliver looked poised and lovely as she patiently waited in the interrogation room at Austin police headquarters. Her blonde curls and long white dress clashed with the drab surroundings, making her seem like a creature from another world, which, Duggan considered, was more or less true given the circumstances. There was nothing remotely exotic about the man in the blue suit sitting next to her, who reflexively glowered at Duggan as he entered the room and took his seat.

  “Hello, Susan. It’s nice to see you again. I want to you thank you for taking the time to come in today.”

  “Hi,” she said sweetly. “Nice to see you, too, Agent Duggan. I think you’ve already met my lawyer, Mr. Reyman.”

  “Yes, I have,” Duggan affirmed. “I’m sure he’s informed you that you are not a suspect and that I just want to ask you a few questions.”

  “On the condition that I can ask you some questions too,” she replied.

  “I can’t promise that I’ll answer them, Susan, but you’re certainly welcome to ask.”

  “You can call me Lucy. I mean, it actually makes more sense, you know?”

  “Whatever you prefer, Lucy. Is that why you’re wearing the same dress you had on at the gaming expo?”

  “I guess.”

  “And maybe you could help me understand why you changed your mind about coming to talk with me?”

  “Agent Duggan,” Reyman interrupted, “may I remind you that my client is here of her own volition and doesn’t have to answer any of your questions if she doesn’t wish to.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Reyman,” Lucy said with a rebuking tone. “Agent Duggan, I’m here against my attorney’s advice. But it’s only fair that you know I didn’t come here to help you. I came to help Swarm, you know, Mr. Aws. It took me a while to figure that out, so here I am.”

  “What do you mean by help Swarm?”

  Lucy shifted in her seat and tugged on a lock of buttery gold hair. “Well, like I told Professor Park, the main thing is I don’t want him to get hurt. I was there at the expo, and I know he’s in a lot of trouble …” Lucy put her hand up to her mouth, her eyes glistening with concern for her phantom lover, a person she knew only as a faceless body and an avatar called Swarm. “If I help you catch him, will you promise me he won’t get hurt?”

  “You know I can’t do that, Lucy.”

  “Then can you at least promise me that I can have a couple of minutes alone with him before you take him away?”

  “A couple of minutes, yes,” Duggan said. “Alone, no.”

  Lucy wiped her eyes and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “I figured that was the best I’d get.”

  “You really care about him, don’t you?”

  “Do you know what it feels like to love somebody, to touch each other’s souls across space and time, and yet you can’t ever be with that person? Physically, I mean.”

  Duggan tried to look empathetic.

  “So tell me, Lucy, what did you touch in Swarm’s soul?”

  “Agent Duggan,” Reyman objected, “we had an agreement that you would respect certain boundaries about Ms. Oliver’s relationship with Mr., ah, Swarm. This man played with my client’s heart, and he owes her an apology and an explanation.”

  Hearing a lawyer refer to a suspected cyber terrorist as if he were some kind of deadbeat boyfriend was almost too much for Duggan. He looked at the ceiling and took a breath before resuming.

  “Lucy, in your online dates, did Swarm ever talk about his plans, about where he was going next, what he was planning to do, anything like that?”

  She nodded and sat up straight in her chair. “Right before he left for China, before that last time I saw him in Luminescence, he said that he was close to reaching the critical mass for bio-emergence. I mean, he didn’t actually say it. I just knew. He was looking for a big event, lots of people, a party or a concert. And he was working on a device to make the mutation process go faster and mobile.”

  “What did he mean by making mutation mobile?”

  Lucy shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I really have no idea. But if you take me to where he is and let me talk to him, I’ll do my best to find out.”

  “But you’ve never seen his face, so how can you even be sure it’s him?”

  “I know what he looks like inside. I’d see it in his eyes. Trust me, I would know.”

  “And you’re willing to travel if necessary?”

  “Sure, whatever it takes.”

  Reyman held up his hands. “That’s absolutely out of the question, Agent Duggan. How could you possibly …”

  Lucy gave her lawyer a fierce look of reproach that froze him midsentence.

  “I’ll go wherever you want, Mr. Duggan,” Lucy said. “I can feel him changing. Don’t ask me how, but I can. I know he misses me, and he feels ba
d about hurting me. He’s afraid of me because I’m the only thing that could hold him back from the next level.”

  “The next level?”

  “Morphosis, the next evolutionary step in our species.”

  “But how could you hold him back?”

  “Because I’m the only one who knows his other self. You know, the part that’s still human.”

  22

  The looping threads of oscillating notes and beats were still echoing in Tom’s ears as the murmur of men’s voices reached him from the other end of the house. Tom and Xander had spent the remainder of the previous night in the studio, listening to DJX’s latest tracks and experimenting with ways to integrate various electrical patterns and riffs with the Theremin and Ominsphere, blasting weird ululations at decibels that literally raised the hair on their arms. After Xander had turned in for the night, Tom carefully unlatched the Rife generator and used headphones to secretly sample its mesmerizing modulations. The device itself was quaintly primitive, but the four-hundred-page instruction manual stored in the machine’s carrying case, with its meticulously indexed menu of mind-altering frequencies and recipes on how to manage and mix them, was a gold mine. Tom now had all the components he needed for a full-scale deployment of zeph.r. He could hardly wait for a chance to fine-tune zeph.r’s turbo-charged capability to fuse words and music into electromagnetic commands.

  Tom pulled on shorts and a shirt, poured himself some coffee, and padded barefoot out to the terrace. Xander was basking in the late morning light in a white caftan, having toast and coconut water with a man in faded jeans and expensive-looking cowboy boots. The visitor’s plaid Western-style shirt was partially unbuttoned, a navy bandana knotted around his neck. His longish hair was streaked with silver and his aviator Ray-Bans reflected the mesas and buttes of the Verde Valley with polarized precision.

  “Ah, good, you’re up,” Xander said as Tom emerged from the house blinking. “Tom, meet Travis B. Marlow. Travis, this is my best friend and creative partner, Tom Ayana.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Marlow said with the slightest tinge of a Western drawl. He raised his lip at Tom but didn’t offer his hand. “Tom Ayana,” Marlow intoned. “Interesting.”

  “What’s interesting?”

  “It’s just that in Sanskrit, ayana means …”

  “I know what it means,” Tom said.

  “Travis is going to be our guide to the Hopi nation,” Xander offered. “He says we’re very lucky to be allowed to join the ceremony tonight. It’s a gathering of the tribal elders, Indian shamans. Outsiders usually aren’t allowed.”

  “It’s only because I told them you were friends of Ryan’s,” Marlow said. “They love his movies.”

  “The Hopis watch movies?” Tom asked.

  “Yes, they do,” Marlow said, staring at Tom with a look that said, Dear Lord, spare me from these clueless city slickers. “The Hopi are old souls, but they’re not Luddites,” he said sternly. “They have DVD-R and satellite Wi-Fi and MacBook Pros. Some of them even went to college.”

  Tom shrugged. “I’m not from around here.”

  “No kidding. So where are you from, son?”

  “Austin.”

  “Well, that explains a lot,” Marlow said with a chuckle. “You guys killed all your Indians a long time ago. I’m surprised you even know what they look like, except for what you’ve seen in the movies, of course.”

  A gust of wind blew Xander’s napkin off the terrace, and they watched it flutter into the canyon like a startled dove. “I’ve gotta say, I expected more from someone whose name means ‘voyager, the one who follows the path.’”

  “The path to what?” Xander asked.

  Marlow tilted his head toward Tom. “Only your buddy can answer that question.”

  Xander was nonplussed. “Tommy, you never told me.”

  “It’s just a name,” Tom said.

  “The ceremony tonight is in the Hopi village of Old Oraibi, not far from a petroglyph called Prophecy Rock,” Marlow continued. “I thought we’d swing by there first, get you guys oriented.”

  “What’s a petroglyph?” Xander asked.

  “It’s a series of drawings etched into the rock,” Marlow answered. “Think you guys could be ready to go in an hour? A jacket, sunglasses, and hiking shoes are all you’ll need. The Hopi and the desert will provide the rest.”

  During the ride to Prophecy Rock, Marlow became more relaxed, pointing out various landmarks and talking about his upbringing as the son of a fighter jet test pilot at Warren Air Force base, near Laramie, Wyoming. The technicians on the base had taken young Travis under their wing, teaching him basic computer programming and introducing him to a network of linked computers that was being developed by the military to provide fail-safe communication in case of a nuclear attack. It was called ARPANET, short for advanced research project agency network, and it was designed to avoid sabotage or destruction by allowing messages to seek their own path from point A to point B across the global computer grid. Long before the Defense Department decided to open up ARPANET for commercial use by the public, Marlow was smitten by the notion of a digitized Internet that increased in power exponentially with each computer that joined it. To Marlow, the untracked borders of the World Wide Web were the final frontier, an untamed territory with limitless vistas to be mapped and explored.

  “It didn’t take me long to figure out that computers, once they were linked together in sufficient numbers, behaved more like organisms than machines,” Marlow explained. “This turned out to be an idea that people would pay me to talk about. Before I got out, I worked as a consultant for Gates and Jobs and just about every technology company you ever heard of—and quite a few you never did … or will.”

  “So why did you stop?” Xander asked.

  Marlow chuckled grimly. “Well, in the beginning, cyberspace was the most interesting place in human history. The World Wide Web was untamed territory, and everybody in it had unlimited freedom. You could be anybody, do anything, and the only speed limit was your imagination—terra incognita, the final frontier. For a while, it operated as a kind of boundless, victimless Manifest Destiny. But then the settlers moved in and staked out their little plots of html, and their little plots of mind, and they furnished their cyber suburbs with all the familiar baggage. And soon enough, the cyber bordellos opened up, followed by the neon storefronts and banner ads for five cents a click, and everybody was back to the same old tricks. Like Joni said, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

  “What about AI?” Xander asked, “You know, uploading our brains into the cloud, the singularity?”

  For a few seconds, the only sound was the engine and the thrum of wheels on packed earth. “Maybe,” Marlow allowed, “but computers won’t be as smart as people until they’re capable of building humans who are smarter and faster than they are.”

  “Wouldn’t that make them God?” Xander asked.

  “Or the opposite.”

  They drove for a while through forests of wind-carved hoodoos and flat-topped mesas lording over flat playas of silicon. The stark landscape was interrupted now and again by fleeting views of unadorned ranches and adobe huts. This was a vision of the West minus steam engines, strutting cowboys, or whiskey-soaked saloons. No Lone Rangers and Tontos, no Pale Riders, Tom mused. There was nothing Hollywood-esque about this reservation, and Tom wondered if the Hopi watched Westerns when they logged on to Netflix on long, lonely nights.

  “What if you could find another place like the early Web,” Tom asked, “a place that was still full of open space and possibility? What if the Internet wasn’t the final frontier? What if there was another human dimension still waiting to be explored?”

  Marlow peered at Tom though the rearview mirror as if to get a better look at him. “Why in the hell,” he said with a sly grin, “do you think I’m here? You see, this is the origin
al sharing economy. And when city people are renting out their toasters and washing machines because they lost their job to a new algorithm, the eternal lessons learned in places like this will come in real handy.”

  The SUV arrived at the foot of a craggy butte. They got out of the car, and Marlow led the way beyond a jumble of boulders toward a series of red-walled bluffs. They passed a cypress pine so tortured by the wind that it had coiled completely around its neighbor. “An arboreal love story or fratricide?” Marlow muttered. “Take your pick.”

  He halted in front of a large stone slab inscribed with a series of interlocking drawings. At the lower left corner, a stick figure held a vertical line that forked into two secondary vectors flowing to the right. The top path was adorned by three human figures before turning into a jagged staircase that seemed to lead nowhere. The lower path was decorated with cornstalks. Three circles intersected with the lower path, and a second vertical line connected the two horizontal paths on the right.

  “The Hopi believe that the world of men has been destroyed three times,” Marlow began. “We are currently in the Fourth World, which the Hopi believe is about to end.”

  Marlow pointed to the human figure on the bottom line. “The great spirit presides over a thousand-year timeline and the two choices facing mankind. The top line is the path of materialism and technology. The zigzags at the end show that this path becomes unstable and ends in destruction. The other path is the path of life, which is the path of spirituality and coexistence. The Hopi believe that we still have a choice. We can take the path of greed and materialism, which will trigger the great purification and the end of our existence. Or we can reconnect with nature and pursue the path of the Great Awakening and emerge into the Fifth World.”

  “How will we know when the Fifth World arrives?” Xander asked.

  “According to the prophecy, the end of the Fourth World will be signaled when the Blue Star Kachina removes his mask during the ceremonial dance and reveals himself to the children. The unmasking of the Blue Star Kachina and the appearance of a blue star will signal the beginning of a time of great turmoil and transformation. The survivors will enter a new era of spiritual rebirth and global consciousness.”