by Guy Garcia
As they fought their way forward through ornate rooms of shattered Baccarat crystal and ruined national heirlooms, Duggan couldn’t help wondering if this was the nightmare that the Founding Fathers envisioned when they had warned against “the tyranny of the majority.” A disconcerting thought crossed Duggan’s mind: wasn’t technology, in its relentless march toward automation and software-enhanced efficiency, inevitably setting the stage for direct digital democracy? Wasn’t the rusty machinery of representative government ripe for the same disruptive algorithms that had ruthlessly revamped and reformatted countless industries by replacing people with programs that did their jobs better and faster, emancipated from human error and cleansed of emotional congestion? Were the bio-emergent masses standing on the White House lawn, with their ability to think and act instantly and in concert, the last stand of government by and for the people—or the beginning of the end of it?
Swain halted at the intersection of two corridors and pointed to a door about thirty feet to the side. “That’s it,” he said as a machine gun rattled from a conference room in the other direction, pinning them down. As Swain’s men returned fire, the captain waved for Duggan to keep moving. “Go on—we’ll cover you.”
The door to the audio control room was slightly ajar. Duggan discerned a figure leaning over a conglomeration of computer routers and monitors, turning dials and pressing buttons like a demented DJ. Somehow, the man sensed Duggan’s presence and wheeled around. It was Ulrich, a specter in the flesh, fine-tuning his zeph.r playlist for a fresh batch of impressionable minds.
“Homeland Security!” Duggan shouted, raising his pistol. “Hands where I can see them. You’re under arrest!”
The tear gas bomb exploded just outside the control room door, throwing Duggan to the floor. Dazed but still conscious, he spotted Ulrich’s silhouette advancing toward him in the haze and squeezed off two rounds before the fumes blinded him. Duggan braced himself for the blow that never came, using his wadded shirt as a mask and managing to get to his feet and reenter the control room. He closed the door behind him and waited a few seconds for his vision to clear. Then he raised his gun and emptied the rest of his clip into the White House audio control panel. As he blasted away at the blinking components, Duggan knew this was the closest he would ever get to dispensing physical justice to zeph.r and every other amoral algorithm and errant equation that had no qualms or accountability, feeling visceral satisfaction as he took aim at the hard drive habitat of contagious worms and slave-bots, obliterating the outsourced operating systems of self-serving servers and microwave beams that festered in government labs and loud music, but not quite blotting out the knowing chuckle that Ulrich had made as he skittered away, confident he would escape and that their paths would cross again at some undetermined time and place because whatever the outcome of this particular skirmish, the vendetta between them was just getting started.
Duggan felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Are you okay?” Swain was staring at the bullet-riddled debris from Duggan’s shooting spree.
“Yeah,” Duggan said. “I never cared much for heavy metal.”
“Me neither.”
Duggan emerged a few minutes later on the south portico, disoriented and covered in dust. The South Lawn was still teeming with Swarm’s blank-faced battalions—murmuring, yelping, watching, waiting. Duggan was positive that Swarm was out there somewhere in the crowd. He stared back into the mosaic of faces, trying to match one of them with the man he had shot at on the tower at X-ist. Did Swarm know that Ulrich’s plot had been at least temporarily derailed? And if so, how would that affect his next move?
On a platform to Duggan’s left, a team of workers was hastily setting up a holographic projector and loudspeakers. What Duggan didn’t know was that during his pursuit of Ulrich inside the White House, a proposed constitutional amendment and the software plans for PHAROH had been anonymously released into the ether, where anyone and everyone could download them. Was it the work of Swarm or the Meta Militia? Time would tell. But what Duggan wanted more than anything right now was a drink.
A text from Eric told Duggan to look at the attached copy of the doctrine of freedom of mind:
All inhabitants of the United States, regardless of whether they were born in this country or not, regardless of age or economic status, in times of war or peace, are guaranteed the right for their minds to be free of interference, or coercion, or control by natural or artificial means, whether by radio waves, sounds, images, chemicals or any other device created to alter the thoughts of any person, without their knowledge or consent. This right is irrevocable and shall be protected and enforced as long as this nation is governed by the regulations and principles of the Constitution of the United States of America.”
The document reminded Duggan of a college course he took on the drafting of the Constitution. He recalled a quote from the first essay of The Federalist Papers, in which Alexander Hamilton laid out the “important question” that was about to be decided, namely “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” The very definition of democracy, Duggan knew, was based on the assumption of human reason, the God-given ability to think freely that was the essential requirement for civil reflection and choice. It followed that without the emancipation of mind, without the public recognition and protection of unfettered thought, there could be no liberty or democracy, only the tyranny of accident and force.
Moments later, a live apparition of the president materialized before a crowd that had swelled to several hundred thousand, with untold millions more watching on television and the Internet. The president’s ashen face and humble posture showed a man who felt the weight of history in the making.
“My fellow Americans,” he began. “What has happened here today will never be forgotten. I have heard you. And I give you my word that I will begin working at once to prepare a new amendment to the Constitution containing the words spoken here today and ensuring freedom of mind for all in this land. And I vow that before this Congress adjourns, I will submit the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the states for speedy ratification. In the meantime, I am declaring an immediate suspension of further research or deployment of any device or weapon designed to alter, control, or otherwise infringe on brain activity, freedom of thought, or the independence of the human mind. Finally, my fellow Americans, I now ask you to leave here peaceably and go back to your homes so I can begin the important work that lies ahead.”
The president’s image flickered and faded, and the blue bracelets in the crowd also blinked off.
“It’s over,” Duggan said.
“You think the president will keep his promise?” Eric asked.
“I hope so—for everybody’s sake.”
As the crowd began to disperse, a lone figure in white stared up at the elevated platform where Duggan was standing. Eric pointed. “Look, Agent Duggan. Isn’t that Swarm down there?”
Duggan braced himself for some sign or mental signal that the dark-haired young man below was the same person who had dared to hot-wire the genetic roadmap of the human race, fend off the US Army, and bring the federal government to a standstill. The man briefly locked eyes with Duggan and nodded before letting himself be swallowed by the receding human tide.
“Jake,” Cara asked, “do you think it was him?”
Duggan took her hand and turned to go. “Plenty of people look like that,” he said. “He could have been anybody.”
32
Xander sat in his car and watched the house until Sonia emerged to make her monthly pilgrimage to her cousin’s for the weekend. He approached the far side of the property, as he’d done so many times before, and let himself in through the window of Tom’s room. It looked exactly the same, like an exhibit in a History of Human Evolu
tion Museum. Except nobody would ever buy tickets to tour the house where Swarm was born, because Tom and his avatar alter ego had both vanished after the battle of Washington. Xander had followed the spectacle from a hospital bed in Philadelphia, wishing that he had the strength to catch a train and witness the spontaneous rebooting of the American experiment firsthand. It was a watershed event by any measure: eight hundred dead, two thousand wounded, millions of live video streams and no arrests. And a crowd-sourced Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, protecting freedom of mind, added to all the other inalienable rights enshrined at the nation’s founding and entrusted to succeeding generations charged with protecting and embellishing that vision.
Thanks to a global audience watching the president’s speech, governments around the world were immediately besieged with demands for similar measures. But laws banning brain control experiments became redundant once the source code for PHAROH was released into the cloud, guaranteeing that no person, entity, or government would ever again be able to weaponize microwave brain research with impunity.
After an initial celebration and acknowledgment that the human race had taken a step forward, the inevitable cadre of doubters and detractors waded in to muddy the waters of history. Did the crowds in Washington really communicate in multiple languages and act as one, or were they reading the words from their phones? Was the X-ist rave Kickstarted, or secretly funded by Islamic extremists? Were the photos and video of Donald Westlake authentic or phony reenactments made with paid actors? For those who believed that the answer to all those questions was yes, for those who stoked uncertainty to keep consensus at bay, there would never be enough answers, only more questions.
The speculation on the fate of Swarm himself, at least among those who believed he actually existed, variously held that he was killed from the fall at X-ist, or that he was married and living in a small town in Nebraska, or that the government had secretly taken him prisoner and was trying to coerce him to help create a newer, better version of zeph.r. But savvier minds discounted the last possibility, mainly because those who sought covert control over others had already moved on to new methods that tapped the quintillions of bytes of public data to create predictive models of what people were going to do before they even knew it themselves. Instead of forcing anyone to behave one way or the other, it was much cheaper, and for the time being legal, to use prognosticative algorithms to pursue hidden agendas that appeared to be part of the random flow of day-to-day life. The inherent pattern in nature, machines, and human beings, if understood and parsed correctly, could turn seemingly random events into decisive factors in the fates of individuals, organizations, and entire nations. If the travel plans of a CEO ready to blow the whistle on his board and the explosion of a gas-processing plant near his office in New Jersey just happened to coincide, or if a typhoon leveled a guerrilla base in Malaysia days just before it launched a civil war, well, these things just happen, don’t they? Already the mountains of personal data being compiled from the digitization of every possible action and device was being sifted to assemble a synthetic electorate, a prognostic primary where candidates could be vetted, pitted against each other, and projected to win or lose an election before they even decided to run.
For that matter, what were the odds that the window to Tom’s room would be open when Xander arrived, a laptop plugged in and running, with a bottle of Patron and a single shot glass on the desk beside it? And how to explain the unpublished manuscript on the first screen, and the salient epigrams by Nietzsche, Darwin, and Radiohead to set the stage for the unlikely tale to follow?
Xander spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the night sipping tequila and reading the improbable tale of two guys from Austin who hitched a ride to the far end of possibility and never looked back. A postscript at the bottom of the last page explained why the file was prepackaged as an attachment addressed to hundreds of people he’d never heard of and didn’t care to know.
Hey Xan,
I know that if anyone is reading this, it’s you, my brother and unsuspecting partner in crime, if you can call unleashing the people from their chains and helping them reclaim their own minds a crime, as many, obviously, have already done. My actions and everything that has transpired because of them speak for themselves, but I’m not so naive as not to realize that the iterations and intentions of those who would rewrite history for their own purposes will eventually take their toll on the truth. So I decided it might be useful to record our own version from a third-person POV and relay the facts in a form that doesn’t require verification, that can’t be argued away or dismissed, because it isn’t being presented as anything but a story, a fable, the unattributed product of an overactive imagination. Maybe sometimes the only way to communicate the veracity of certain events is through a fanciful meme, a swirl in the universal ether, as Tesla would say, that bypasses disclaimer or validation by using a more innocuous medium to deliver the message. If the truth is often stranger than fiction, then can’t a novel be truer than the officially sanctioned reality?
I leave the decision in your hands, literally. If this book has only one reader, at least it will be you. If you decide it deserves a wider distribution, pick SEND and this string will automatically upload to a global e-mail list. There will be no way to trace its origins or stop its widespread dissemination. If you choose to DELETE, it will be gone forever, The End. I’ve changed most of the names and some of the details, of course, to avoid unnecessary objections or embarrassment. Just remember: there is no right or wrong, no felt or unfelt, no said or unsaid, no written or unwritten, no lived or unlived, no done or undone.
I trust you to act from a place that is sincere and pure, as always. You’ll know where I am and what to do, even if you don’t always know when or why.
Intrinsically yours,
Tom
Xander stared at the buttons marked SEND and DELETE, two possible actions with unpredictable outcomes, two paths with equally obscure destinations. Should he deliver the final message from his friend to those who would gladly receive it? Or erase his words to protect the shapeless entity that lives on in the chambers of the undiscovered mind?
His fingers trembled as they hovered over the keyboard.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MIND CONTROL
Late 1800s–early 1900s
Serbian-born scientist and inventor Nicola Tesla conducts experiments using ELF (extremely low frequency) electromagnetic waves as part of his goal to create a global wireless communications system and a limitless power supply that uses the earth’s atmosphere as a conductor. Tesla is credited as being one of the first scientists to explore how electromagnetic radiation can be used to produce altered states of consciousness in the human brain.
1945
The US Air Technical Command requests access to Tesla’s personal papers, including documentation and drawings of his ELF beam experiments, for defense-related purposes. Government officials subsequently deny ever having had possession of Tesla’s research materials.
1950s–1960s
Interest in the military applications of Tesla’s ELF research spreads to the Soviet Union. Russian scientists, who have already been experimenting with mental telepathy and other nontraditional forms of communication, accelerate their own electromagnetic brain wave tests.
1975
A US congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church publicly reveals that the CIA and the Department of Defense have conducted experiments on American and foreign subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through psychoactive drugs, like LSD, and other chemical, biological, and psychological methods. A year later, President Gerald Ford issues an executive order prohibiting such experiments on unwitting human subjects.
1976
On July 4, the US embassy in Moscow is bombarded by ELF waves being transmitted through the earth and air. The microwave particle beam is dubbed the “Woodpeck
er” signal because of the persistent tapping noise it produces on shortwave radio bands in several countries. Woodpecker is comprised of as many as five different frequencies, including the 8Hz-to-10Hz range, which according to some reports is capable of inducing a hypnotic state in humans.
1980
In an article published in Military Review, “The New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock,” Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander of the US Army openly depicts a brave new arena of brain-targeting “psychotronics,” which he defines as “weapons systems that operate on the power of the mind and whose lethal capacity has already been tested.” Mind-altering techniques, the lieutenant-colonel contends, are “well advanced” and include manipulation of human behavior through use of psychological weapons affecting sight, sound, smell, temperature, electromagnetic energy, or sensory deprivation.
1980–1990s
The US government continues research on electromagnetic devices with both defensive and offensive capabilities, including GWEN, the Ground Wave Emergency Network, a national network of radio towers, each capable of covering a three-hundred-mile radius with very low frequency (VLF) waves that hug the ground rather than flow through the air. Critics contend that VLF waves are harmful to humans and could be used to manipulate or disable brain functions on a national scale.
1998
The Institute of Noetic Sciences launches the Global Consciousness Project, which uses a geographically distributed network of computers and random number generators to detect and measure widespread emotional responses to natural disasters, social or political upheaval, football games, and other mass events. The project’s goal is to measure and validate the possibility that large numbers of people thinking or feeling the same thing at the same time can generate a psychic wave or pulse that disrupts the function of random number generators around the planet.