Jon Evans - Swarm

“You can’t just say they’re ‘enemy combatants’ and disappear them like in the good old days?” I asked.

Nobody seemed to find my joke at all funny.

“Mr. Kowalski. You need to understand the situation here.” Clark’s demeanour changed from charmer to street fighter. “Bad enough when the cartels were assassinating DEA agents and Colombian and Mexican officials on their soil. Now they have murdered a presidential appointee in his home. This is already a Category Three shitstorm. His wife and four-year-old daughter are in critical condition with shrapnel wounds. The press are already all over it, and they still think it was a bomb someone planted. When they find out it had wings they’ll go berserk. These cartels can go after anyone they want with these things, anyone, and there’s not a damn thing we can do except turn off our phones and pray. We need to nip this thing in the bud before it turns into the Katrina of all shitstorms. Our military supremacy is built on technical supremacy, and we have just been blindsided and leapfrogged. I’ve spent two days hearing people tell me that our UAVs are years behind these drones. Our forces don’t believe in autonomous weapons. They’re worried they could go rogue and kill innocents. A reasonable concern, but not one that terrorists share. We can’t let that give them the edge. We need to go after them with everything we’ve got. Off the record, we don’t want to go extra-legal here, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t conceivable.”

I went cold as I realized what he meant. My joke had flopped because it was no joke at all: the US government was seriously considering having Jesse and Anya snatched up without arrest or trial.

“Extra-legal?” Sophie sounded incredulous too. “As in kidnapping and torture?”

Clark’s eyes went steely. “Miss Warren -“

“Dr. Warren, if you please.”

“Dr. Warren. This administration does not torture.”

“But it might be willing to kidnap foreign citizens without even charging them with anything. Or maybe just get the Haitians to pick them up for you. I’m sure they’d be very careful to ask questions very nicely. That way you wouldn’t even have to worry about any pesky judges. Good thing, too, because last I checked, kidnapping people on the high seas was called piracy. So state-sponsored piracy is OK, but torture is not. Kind of a fine line, don’t you think?” The volume of Sophie’s voice remained unchanged, but its tone was growing ever colder and more furious. “And what exactly do you mean when you say anything is ‘off the record’? Did I miss the memo where you suspended the First Amendment? If we tell people what you just said, do we get disappeared too? I’m just curious. I’d just like to know what the new ground rules are now that the Constitution apparently no longer applies.”

This didn’t really seem like the time and place to erupt into an irate lecture on civil liberties, but I was proud of her for being so entirely unintimidated. There was something to be said for holding the entire rest of the planet in intellectual contempt.

“Dr. Warren,” Clark said, “really, there’s no need for any histrionics.” Sophie gave him a flat look which I knew meant If I could kill you with my brain, your heart would no longer be beating . “Convoy is an investigative target, not an immediate threat. Their technology is in the wrong hands now whether we like it or not. No point burning down the barn when the horse is already gone. What we’re hoping they might provide is information about where exactly it went. It’s precisely in the hope of not having to make any decisions regarding extra-legality that we’re asking you to go down there.”

Sophie and I said, in stereo, “What?”

“We need to find out who is behind these attacks and where they are, fast.”

“Don Mario,” Lisa said. “Almost certainly.”

I blinked, turned to her. “Don Mario?” It sounded like a name out of pulp fiction.

“Colombia’s biggest drug lord. Real name Daniel Barrera. Has a personal army of an estimated six thousand sicarios . Hit men. Owns who knows how many Colombian judges and senators and cops. It’s got to be either him or whoever replaced Rendon, his big rival.”

“We’re not ready to make assumptions about who,” Clark corrected her. Lisa looked chastened, like a priest rebuked by the Pope. “The truth is we don’t know anything yet. Convoy is one of our few leads, and you’re our only existing connection to them. We’d like you to think of a reason to visit them, immediately.”

“And do what?” I asked.

“Nothing cloak and dagger. Just keep your eyes open and report back on anything you discover. Don’t get me wrong. The fate of the nation does not rest on your success. We have dozens of other investigatory fronts open already. But anything you unearth could save who knows how many lives, and prevent a national panic. In the past we’ve called the cartels narco-terrorists mostly because that made it easier to get funding from Congress. But now we mean it. If they start murdering law enforcement officials around the country with apparent impunity, just imagine the chaos.”

“Sounds bad,” Sophie said coldly. “Why, it’s enough to give me the itch to throw out the Constitution and start getting serious about things.”

“Look, Dr. Warren,” Clark said, “if you have a problem with me, I apologize. I shouldn’t have expressed my personal views, which aren’t relevant, as obviously I’m not the one who makes those decisions. If you’d rather, then I will take you down to the Oval Office right now, and the man who does make those decisions will personally make this very same request. That’s how important this is to us.”

He didn’t sound like he was bluffing. He sounded like he was one word away from taking us to see the most powerful man in the world.

I suspected from Sophie’s speculative expression that she was actually quite willing to go spy on Convoy for the government, but first she wanted to go visit the White House, just for fun. That didn’t sound like a good idea to me. Meeting the President and making him ask nicely for our help purely for our own entertainment felt like trespassing on Mount Olympus during a thunderstorm.

“We could say we’re going to calibrate the drones,” I suggested, before she could say anything. “For the new design. Just for a few days.”

Sophie frowned, looked at me, sighed, acquiesced: “OK, fine.”

“Good.” Clark looked relieved, and hurried to change the topic before she changed her mind. “Now tell me about this kill switch. My staff tell me you might be able to turn their drones off remotely.”

Sophie paused, visibly trying to figure out how best to communicate with this tech-illiterate barbarian. “Maybe. There is a kill switch built into every Axon in case we need to shut them down, but don’t get the wrong idea, I can’t just shout ‘Klaatu barada nikto!’ and watch all their drones fall out of the sky.”

I smiled at the reference. Clark looked puzzled.

“Think of a drone as a cell phone with wings,” Sophie said. “Imagine that if you send it a particular text message, it will switch off and stay off. That’s the kill switch. But you have to be able to connect to send that message, like a cell tower connects to your phone. So I’d need to know the details of its communications protocol, and the appropriate keys if its control channel is encrypted, which it probably is. Given that, yes, we could shut down all their drones. But that’s a lot to ask.”

“Interesting.” Clark considered. “But you said they’ve modified your designs, right?” Sophie nodded. “So they might have removed the kill switch?”

“No,” she said flatly. “It isn’t a piece of code you can cut out, it’s an intrinsic part of the network. This isn’t procedural software. All the knowledge and intelligence in a neural net is dispersed across millions of connections, in the same way memory and thought are dispersed across the neurons and synapses of our own brains.” She saw Clark’s blank expression, switched to an analogy. “Consider your own brain. At its core, the medulla and thalamus control your most basic functions. Eating, drinking, sleeping, waking, sex. Call that the reptile mind. The cerebral cortex, where language and music and mathematics live, evolved on top of that. You can retrain and evolve my nets, and that’s what the cartels appear to have done -” this was the first I’d heard of it, and it amazed me – “but their higher capabilities are still wrapped around their reptile minds, where the kill switch lives. Even if you know it’s there, going after it would be like performing brain surgery with a hatchet. The operation might succeed, but the patient would never survive.”