by Guy Garcia
In the seconds before Duggan could find the signal deflector and activate it, he felt an electric tingle along with the startling sensation that he knew exactly what everyone around him was thinking and feeling—or could have if he completed the biochemical circuit by inviting their minds into his. His heart was beating so loud and fast … or was it the music?
He texted Eric: Bring Lucy to the VIP entrance next to the stage and I’ll meet you there.
Duggan pressed ahead through the stew of sweating bodies, trying not to acknowledge the unavoidable contact of warm limbs and skin, the welcoming smiles and gently exploring hands, the alarming allure of liquid light and laughter and animal heat that was happening all around him and threatening to kindle the same flame inside.
28
The dancers moved as one, their attention focused only on each other and on the sublimely synchronized pulse. Tom could feel the texture of their radiance as he surfed the sloping trough of a giant signal wave, his entire body flexing and bending with it, until the frequencies were joined and enhanced by a galvanizing presence that had reached out across the Internet and rallied the faithful to this pivotal time and place.
Brothers and sisters,
the time has come,
this time,
our time.
Enemies surround us;
fear follows us;
evolution awaits us.
Open your eyes.
Can you see it?
Move your bodies.
Can you feel it?
Seize the moment.
Be the moment
The ravers faced the X and hoisted their phones in universal acceptance. Duggan realized that they weren’t just hearing Swarm; they were also seeing him through the app streaming from their wristbands into any bluetoothed device. Swarm was revealing himself through the augmented 3-D mosaic of their handheld screens, like a spectral apparition conjured from a parallel dimension. As Duggan continued threading his way toward the stage, he had the unnerving awareness of being watched. He paused to look around, and his blood froze. Every person in his vicinity was staring at him with the same detached watchfulness, the way a video feed relays images without filtering or evaluation. Their eyes followed him as he moved, but the dancers made no effort to stop him.
The music lurched into a staccato military march, and woven into the cresting waves of synth, Duggan thought he could discern strings of words, incomplete sentences, uttered at different volumes and speeds, looping and overlapping as the crowd responded with increasing vigor to Swarm’s avid exhortations.
Wake up.
Own your mind.
Be the future.
Save the nation.
Do it now.
Duggan could see Eric and Lucy standing on the lower platform about forty yards away. A young man emerged from the tower and approached Lucy, who turned and stepped toward him. They hesitated and embraced.
“Attention, all agents!” Duggan blurted into his radio. “Suspect sighted on lower tower platform! Approach with extreme caution!”
A man is talking to Lucy, Eric texted. What should I do?
Nothing. Just don’t let them out of your sight.
Duggan’s radio crackled. “Agent Duggan, we’ve got a situation at the gates!”
His worst-case scenario was materializing. Mobilized by Swarm’s incantations and the optimized zeph.r signal, the thousands who had been stranded outside were overrunning the police lines and pouring through the turnstiles, pushed forward by those behind them, pressurizing the crowd. If this kept up, they would exceed Eric’s density threshold in minutes. Duggan texted Eric, who was hanging back near Lucy and her soft-spoken suitor.
The people we kept outside broke through the police barricade. I don’t think we can stop them
I know. I can see it from here. I’ve got more bad news. The zeph.r code has been modified. It’s different, more potent than I expected. The bracelets are automatically binding the new arrivals to the group
What happens if the crowd reaches critical mass?
They’ll begin to move to avoid being trampled by those rushing in behind them. If the morphogenesis is allowed to continue, the hive will begin to act as a single entity, one that will do anything it can to feed and survive
How will Swarm control it?
Distributed systems have no brain or central command. Once the hive mind takes over, Swarm can’t control it. Nobody can
As soon as Tom saw Lucy, he knew that this would be the first and last time they would ever meet. There was a man hovering nearby, unarmed and obviously harmless. Tom approached Lucy and gingerly caressed her hands and arms, inhaling the scent of her hair, kissing her neck.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “I’ve been a lousy boyfriend.”
She turned to look at him, already smiling. “Don’t apologize,” Lucy said, pulling him closer. “I know you love me. I felt your presence all day. They thought I was crazy, but I’m not.”
“You’re not crazy, but it’s not safe here.”
Lucy looked over Tom’s shoulder at Eric. “Darling, I’ve got to tell you something. There’s a man named Duggan from Homeland Security. He’s using me to get to you.”
“I know.” Tom brushed back her hair and kissed her. “Don’t worry. He can’t hurt me.”
“I only went along with his plan because I had to see you, even if it was just once. Forgive me, my love.”
“It’s not your fault.” Tom disengaged. “I’m so sorry, sweet Lucy, but I can’t stay.”
“No, it’s not fair,” she protested. “You can’t leave me again! I don’t even know your fucking name.”
“It’s Tom.”
He touched her hand and felt something far beyond regret, a glimpse of something that was never meant to be, an alternate reality of home-cooked dinners and children laughing in the backyard, perfectly imagined and forever out of reach.
“I know, I know,” she said between sobs. “Tom, don’t go.”
“Tom’s already gone, baby. He left a long time ago.”
Duggan watched Swarm disappear into the base of the X and cursed. “Suspect has reentered the tower!” he hollered into his handset. “I’m going after him.” But before he could take another step, he was surrounded by a group of about twenty men, their vacant expressions replaced with a malevolent glare. Duggan remembered reading about the riots on Governor’s Island. He wondered if he was about to find out firsthand what had happened to the intruders who made the mistake of taking on the hive. The first group of agents never had a chance. Before they could reach for their guns, Swarm’s disciples overwhelmed them, breaking their bones and necks with unblinking efficiency, yanking out their tongues and gouging their eyes with their fingers and thumbs. Duggan drew his gun and shot the two attackers closest to him as a second squad of agents joined the fray. In the broadening tussle, Duggan managed to claw his way to the platform, glad for once that the music was loud enough to drown out all but the most piercing screams.
Xander was waiting for Tom in the Faraday cage. “Is this what you meant by ‘hairy’?”
“More or less.”
“Who‘s manning the decks?”
“Nobody. The program’s on automatic.”
Xander chuckled wearily. “I know it’s you, Tom. It was you all along, wasn’t it? You’re Swarm.”
Tom sat down across from his friend, who was squatting with his back against the wire mesh.
“What makes you think that?”
Xander took a swig of the champagne bottle he was holding. “I don’t know—the way you’ve been talking lately, your crowd-sourcing trick. But it really wasn’t until I saw you working the crowd tonight, the way you mirrored everyone’s movements. I saw the mind meld.” Xander pointed the bottle accusingly. “You lied to me, Tommy. All this time you’ve been making
me your fool. I thought we were bros.”
Tom dipped his head in penitence, relieved that the charade was over. “I’m sorry, Xan. I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t because I didn’t understand it myself.”
Xander passed the bottle to Tom, who accepted it and took a gulp.
“Cheers,” Xander said.
“It started with the flash mobs, just for fun,” Tom continued. “Then I used the Internet to help you get gigs, to make you an EDM star.”
“You made me a star?” Xander leaned back and rolled his eyes. “That’s rich, you bastard.”
“Really? I thought maybe you’d thank me.”
“Yeah, sure.” Xander grabbed back the bottle. “Thank you for manipulating my career behind my back. Thank you for turning my biggest concert into a battleground. Thank you for turning my fans into a bunch of dancing dunces!”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
“Tom, do you realize you’re a goddamn sociopath? You’re wanted by the FBI, for Christ’s sake. Cybercriminal Numero Uno!” Xander took another swallow. “That fucking brain wave machine. I saw the way you were drooling at the Rife. Did you write the code yourself? Or was it Swarm? Is he controlling your brain too?”
“Swarm isn’t doing anything, Xan. Zeph.r is just a conduit for a transmutation that was already happening, that was always there.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Xander sneered. “I’ve read your blog. What you’re doing is wrong. If I had any sense, I’d lock you in this cage and call the cops.”
“You don’t need to—the feds are already here. They’ll be up on a roof any minute.”
“So when you’re him, or it, whatever the fuck—when you’re Swarm, can you read people’s minds?”
“It’s not like that,” Tom said. “You dissolve and something bigger absorbs you.”
“Row, row, row your boat,” Xander slurred. “Life is but a dream.”
“Yeah, and then you wake up dead—end of story,” Tom said. “But what if you could be part of something beyond mortality? Something that never dies, something that’s barely being born?”
“You make it sound plausible, Tommy, but it’s not.”
“You can’t even see what I’m talking about unless you get inside of it. You can’t see it from the outside, only the residue of where it’s been.”
Xander was silent for a moment. “Like the Higgs frigging boson.”
Tom looked up at the St. Elmo’s fire, its blue bolts spitting at the stars. “Yeah, a five-sigma event, protons colliding at the speed of light, a fusing of particles, a release of energy.”
“Until there’s nothing,” Xander said. “Less than nothing.”
“Until there’s nothing we know and everything we don’t know.”
“And what happens after that? We all fall into a black hole? A bubble of dark matter swallows the fucking universe? What have you done, Tommy?”
“I did what I had to do.”
“You selfish motherfucker.”
“When gravity bends the light, when Swarm pulls us all to the next level, I won’t matter anymore. I won’t even exist.”
“Ha,” Xander said, but his eyes were glistening. “I can’t go with you, Tommy. Not this time. I won’t follow you into the black hole.”
“I know,” Tom said. After all that had happened and all that they had done, they had finally arrived at the fork in the road. “Kinda funny how things turn out. Who would have guessed? Not even us.”
“Tommy, people could get hurt.”
“People are already getting hurt, Xan. They’re dying in their heads, and they don’t even know it. When the change comes, you’ll feel it and you’ll see it. The future is inside us.”
Xander averted his gaze. “I’ve heard the song, Tom,” he said almost mournfully. “But you’ve been chugging too much of your own kool-aid, my friend.”
“It’s not about me or Swarm, Xan. It’s about evolution, peeling away the layers, exposing the core.”
“Yeah, until you get to iron. Then ka-boom!”
As Eric had warned and Duggan had feared, the zeph.r-fueled fusion of densely packed individuals had ignited a biomorphic ecosystem that followed its own rules. The dancers had begun to swirl and churn, their bodies merging into a pattern for seconds before disengaging and recombining in solidarity, wristbands blinking on flailing limbs, still moving to the music as they mobilized to eliminate the threat. Gunshots and screams of pain mixed with grunts and howls of pleasure as Swarm’s legions became the twitching skin of something still groping for its true shape and purpose.
His clothes bloody and ripped, Duggan reached the stage along with a few agents who also managed to survive the mayhem. The music shifted gears again, and Duggan turned and blanched as the emergent organism raised its blazing blue bracelets and chanted the words projected on the enormous screens.
Own your mind.
March to Washington.
Tell the president.
Do it together.
Do it now.
Do it.
Do it.
Do it.
Now.
A hush fell across the valley, followed by a rising chorus of guttural yelps. Something new was happening. A concussive groan like a glacier cracking, cleaving, and sliding away. Then, like lava slowly flowing down a mountain, or a fledgling species taking its first steps, the swarm began to move. The police who hadn’t been injured or killed in the turnstile stampede stood by helplessly as the cacophonous mass surged around the tower and began to stream south.
“He went inside,” Eric told Duggan.
“I know. Two of you stay here to guard the door. The rest come with me.” Duggan entered the tower and led the push against the torrent of terrified VIPs trying to escape down the narrow stairwell. Finding the DJ module empty, they paused to reload their guns and continued climbing.
Tom and Xander listened to the commotion coming from below. “You hear that, Tom? It sounds like the kids are getting a little, um, agitated. I guess the Blue Star Kachina took off his mask. Looks like we are the brothers in the elders’ dream.”
Tom nodded and stood up. “I need you to do me one last favor, Xan. I need you to lower me down over the side with the trapeze crane.”
Xander tilted his head and rubbed the stubble on his chin. Yeah, well, you know what? You can just go fuck yourself, brother.”
“I thought you might feel that way,” Tom said, pulling the Walther PPK from his pocket and pointing it at his friend.
“Ha,” Xander said. “I figured it might be you who took it, but I didn’t think I’d be the target.”
“You’ve got about ten seconds before I pull the trigger,” Tom warned.
“I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?”
“Let’s go—there isn’t much time.”
Xander got up, and Tom followed. “You’ll always be my brother, Tommy.”
“I know.”
They reached the tip of the X, and the vertigo was almost overwhelming. Tom grabbed the harness as Xander took the controls. “Keep making music, Xan,” Tom said. “I didn’t invent your talent. The music was all you.”
The door to the roof flew open. Duggan, with Eric and Lucy right behind him, was the first one to step out and see them. “Stop!” he shouted, raising his gun. “Homeland Security—stay where you are!”
“Don’t shoot!” Xander yelled as he stepped forward, blocking Duggan’s line of fire.
“Get out of the way!” Duggan warned. But Xander stood his ground. The bullet entered his right shoulder and exited just inches from Tom’s head. Xander slumped against the base of the crane, his hand over his wound as he gazed up at St. Elmo’s angry aura. “Hurts like a motherfucker,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Xan,” Tom said. He dropped the gun, raised his hands, and s
tarted backing away from his pursuers. “By the way, you’re not the brother who dies. It’s me.”
“He’s going to jump!” Lucy screamed.
“Good-bye, sweet mermaid,” Tom said to Lucy as he teetered on the ledge. “‘Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’”
Time slowed to a crawl as the scrambling actors in the rooftop drama simultaneously played out different outcomes in their heads. In a bizarre span of seconds in which everyone present saw Tom walking backwards, entropy’s arrow seemed to hesitate, as if resetting the cosmic clock of what had already transpired, re-spooling what the double helix of chance and biological imperative had put into motion long before anyone involved knew their part in the unfolding events, or even if they had ever really had a choice except to follow through on an instinctual and molecular level that briefly but eternally tied them to the marauding mass of minds doing the same thing below.
Before Duggan could aim and fire again, Tom extended his arms, closed his eyes, and let himself fall backward into eighty-five feet of empty space. Duggan and Eric reached the edge of the roof just in time to see a hundred wrist-banded arms rise up to catch their precious cargo. They watched in disbelief as Swarm was carried away by the human tsunami surging toward the capital.
Duggan checked Xander’s pulse and called to the other agents, “Somebody get EMS!” He put his hand on Eric’s shoulder. “Listen to me. You’ve got to warn the president.”
“But, Jake, I don’t know the president.”
“Call Agent Nutley. Tell him Swarm is headed to Washington and I’m in pursuit. I’ll stay in contact as long as my battery holds up.”
Duggan climbed into the harness and handed Eric the controls. “Lower me down,” he ordered.
“What if it doesn’t reach all the way?”
“Then I’ll jump.”
Eric looked down at the boisterous torrent of bodies marching south into the night. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“No, but do it anyway.”
29
No arms reached up to soften Duggan’s landing as Eric released him into the murmuring procession of biomorphic crusaders. Instead, at the last moment, the stampeding sea parted to make a space just large enough for him to reach the ground and get his footing before closing around him and continuing its forward rush. It took Duggan a few minutes to adjust to the unflagging pace and the familiar sensation that even without direct eye contact from his marauding companions, he was being observed. Duggan looked at his phone to confirm that they were heading south, straight to where Lieutenant General Mansfield would be waiting with part of the US Fifth Army. But before he could dial, fingers clenched his phone and snatched it away. Clearly, instant communication was out of bounds for the colony’s newest addition. Now there would be no way to know if Mansfield had received orders to confront the marchers—or what might happen if he did.