Jon Evans - Swarm

In most respects we were opposites. I was shy, introverted, and awkward, skinny and bespectacled, a classic geek who invariably blushed and turned incoherent on the rare occasions I tried to talk to a girl. Jesse had won the genetic lottery outright: in addition to his razor-sharp mind he was tall, handsome and outgoing, a swimmer and soccer player who could charm anyone and never lacked for a girlfriend. But I was the only one in town who truly spoke his language. So he dragged me to parties and soccer matches, until the edge came off my social anxiety and I learned how to talk to strangers and even girls, as long as they weren’t too pretty; and I introduced him to Stanislaw Lem, the Descartes mathematics contest, programming languages, multiplayer video games, and the more interesting nooks of the then-burgeoning Internet.

After I got my driver’s license – I was six months older – he would often stay over at my place, and late at night we would smuggle my parents’ car out of the garage, pushing it halfway down the street in neutral before we dared start to the engine, and drift aimlessly past the deserted strip malls that defined the disaffected geography of our lives, or drive through dark country roads and corn fields to neighbouring towns, steal street signs that matched the names of girls we wanted to impress, or even venture all the way to Toronto and its 24-hour diners populated by scary big-city drifters. Despite our nocturnal anomie we graduated with near-perfect marks, because we were always competing with each other. Jesse’s senior-year computer-science project, a primitive but functional first-person shooter he wrote from scratch, got the attention of the outside world and earned him a full scholarship at MIT. I had to settle for Canada’s University of Waterloo.

There I missed him. There were plenty of other geeks around, but nobody near as fun as Jesse, and I had grown used to having a friend who could open non-geek social doors for me. When we went home for the holidays we were inseparable. I drove down to Boston at least once a term in my rusting Chevy Acadian. In May after our junior year we continued down to New York, and on our first night in the Big Apple dug my old tent out of the trunk and camped in Central Park because hotels were too expensive. The next day he made friends with two waitresses who turned out to be avant-garde theatre actresses, and that night we went to a warehouse party with them. It wasn’t until the police turned up that we realized the party-throwers had broken into the warehouse illegally. Jesse somehow escaped with the actresses in the confusion that followed; I spent the night in jail, shuddering with terror. If convicted I could have been barred from the USA forever, but the charges were stayed and all records expunged. These were the years of the dot-com boom, and no judge wanted to ruin the life of a mild-mannered white geek with a bright future who had apparently just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We talked about starting a company after college, but instead Jesse decided to go to Columbia for his doctorate, which upset me more than I was willing to admit. It was then that we finally began to drift apart some, but we were still family. I wound up working for a dot-com startup in Silicon Valley. Once I answered a 3AM knock on the door of my Oakland apartment to find him there. He had given me no warning, but I just nodded, muttered “Hey,” waved towards my fold-out couch, and staggered back to bed, as if his unexpected materialization from across the country was nothing unusual. During that visit he slept with a girl named Linda Lee who I had been crushing on for months. Eventually I forgave him.

Our encounters grew increasingly sporadic. After his folks moved to Vancouver I no longer saw him over the holidays. He soon lost interest in academia and fell into the hacker scene, that loose-knit global subculture of shady young computer experts. Ultimately he dropped out of Columbia without even getting his master’s degree.

While I toiled in the Valley, Jesse worked contract software jobs in New York, Dubai and Hong Kong, backpacked through Burma, attended Burning Man, and gave talks at hacker conferences in Russia. Once he spent a week in prison in Laos and got out just in time to fly across the Pacific and attend a clothing-optional party in Malibu. After Christmas one year I went to visit him in New York, and there, at a hacker party held in and atop a Brooklyn warehouse, he introduced me to a cute blonde girl named Sophie.

In the years since she and I had grown used to Jesse disappearing for long stretches with no explanation, only to reappear with a grin, a few colourful anecdotes that said little or nothing of substance about his life, and maybe a new tattoo. Then one day he showed up with a gorgeous Russian girl in tow, a fat cheque in his hand, and a plan to use unmanned vehicles and Sophie’s neural networks to find and recover billions of dollars’ worth of ancient treasure long sunk beneath the turquoise Caribbean.

It turned out that while aboard the Ark Royale , Anya Azaryeva did not wear the spike heels and microskirts that had caused so much comment after her visits to our lab. Instead she wore a bikini made of tiny fragments of fabric that were the same shade of glacier blue as her eyes. She looked like she had just stepped out of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Wilfrid’s teenage copilot seemed unable to tear his eyes away, while I had the opposite reaction: Anya made me so uncomfortable that I avoided looking directly at her. Not because of Sophie, who had never been the jealous type. The problem was that Anya was so beautiful it was actually difficult to think straight in her presence.

“Hey, darlin’,” Jesse said, kissing her perfunctorily. “Look what followed me home. I tried to say no, but they just looked so woeful.”

Sophie and I climbed onto the Ark Royale . Jesse had named it after history’s first aircraft carrier, although he had also been known to refer to it as the Royale with Cheese. I didn’t like the way its deck rolled beneath my feet. Anya said hello, gave me a surprised look that I took a moment to connect to my beat-up face, and air-kissed our cheeks as if she were French.

When I first met Anya I had thought she was shy. It had taken me some time to realize that the silent distance she kept between herself and the world stemmed instead from contempt, as if contact with ordinary people might stain her own perfection. She treated me with halting courtesy only because I was her boyfriend’s best friend. I supposed when you were that gorgeous you didn’t need to be nice. You probably didn’t need to be smart and skilled, either, but Anya, like Jesse, was living disproof of the theory that beauty times brains equals a constant.

We unloaded the nameless boat that had brought us, then waved goodbye as Wilfrid accelerated back to Port-au-Prince. I wondered if the real reason Jesse didn’t take his ship into port was that he didn’t want it to be subject to any government’s legal jurisdiction.

“Let’s head back to the happy hunting grounds,” Jesse said to Anya, who nodded and ascended to the bridge, moving with a dancer’s instinctive grace. He turned to us. “Come on. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”

The Ark Royale ‘s fibreglass hull was about sixty feet long. Its back half – aft, I supposed, in nautical terminology – was roofed but open to the stern, with passageways to the external walkways on both sides, and a pool ten feet square open to the ocean beneath.

“She used to be a dive boat,” Jesse said, indicating the pool, “that’s where they’d go in when the weather was bad. Handy for us too. Those are some of your creations down below.” I squinted into the water, and in the warped light I could make out yellow cigar-shaped things about six feet long attached to steel scaffolding beneath the pool. USVs: unmanned submarine vehicles, controlled by Sophie’s Axon neural nets.