Jon Evans - Swarm

The ground floor was a living area. Twin MacBook Pros sat on a desk below nautical wall maps. Swinging doors led to the kitchen. Everything was either bolted down or kept on shelves behind netting. “There’s the head and shower,” Jesse said, indicating a door. “Try to keep it to a minimum, we’ve got solar water but not much. If it’s yellow, let it mellow. Living quarters down those stairs, your cabin is second on the left.”

We followed him up another set of metal stairs to the twenty-by-thirty-foot roof above the pool, where four UAVs sat parked, their airframes attached by bungee cables to metal rings set in the walls. They looked like cheap aluminum versions of the ones which had killed Harrison and very nearly me. Their launcher, basically a giant crossbow, stood behind them.

“Meet the Ark Royale Air Force,” Jesse said. “Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. Parked and ready for their brain surgery.”

To our right the superstructure rose another level. Through a window I could see Anya behind a wheel, computer screens, and instrumentation worthy of an airliner. On its roof, at the ship’s highest point, stood a huge whip antenna, a radar mast, and a satellite dish. Combined they looked a bit like a work of conceptual art.

“Hell of a view, ain’t it?” Jesse asked, turning to look at the sea. Westwards the sun was sinking towards the uninterrupted horizon. To the north we could see the pale vee of the ship’s wake. The surging and rocking as we encountered wave after wave was unsettling. I hoped I wouldn’t get seasick. The mainland was visible only as a bank of clouds to the east.

“It’s strange living on a boat,” he went on. “Makes you feel small and free, at the same time. Everything seems simpler. I understand Thoreau a little better now. You find yourself living dawn to dusk, like everyone must have in the days before candles.”

“You wake up at dawn?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Used to be that was just when I was finally getting home. But it’s nice. “

“So why did you need to come down here?” Anya asked us, emerging from the bridge. Her English was only slightly accented. The ship still trembled from the engine’s exertions; she must have left it on autopilot. “Why couldn’t we just download the new software like before?”

“This is a major upgrade,” Sophie said. “Swarm software. I wanted to be on hand in case there were any unexpected issues.”

“I sure hope you didn’t come for a Caribbean vacation,” Jesse said. “We’ll be putting you two to work, you know. We’ve got decks that need swabbing, dishes that need washing, planks that need walking, we have to alpha-test our entire keelhauling system, we’ve got plans for you two.”

I grinned. “Any luck finding treasure yet?”

He grimaced. “Shipwrecks, yes. Treasure, no. Our biggest haul to date was a cargo ship carrying toilets. You should see the video. Toilet bowls scattered all across the seabed. Marcel Duchamp eat your heart out.”

“Are your investors getting impatient?”

Sophie gave me a warning look. Jesse glanced at Anya, who smiled sourly. “Our investors, fortunately for us,” she said, “are long-term thinkers extraordinaire.”

“Up to now your drones worked independently,” Sophie said as she typed at her laptop. A USB cable ran from it into the open guts of the aerial drone’s control system. “Now they’re going to communicate with each other, share their inputs. If one sees something interesting, they’ll all divert from their preprogrammed course to focus on it. In simulation, swarms were eight times more effective at finding sites of interest. I’m not even sure why. Maybe a swarm can see larger-scale inputs than its individual members. There might be patterns we don’t notice in the seabed topology, currents, wind, fish populations, who knows.”

“In simulation,” Anya repeated skeptically.

Sophie unplugged the drone, looked up not at Anya but at Jesse. “That’s why I’m here. I may have to retrain them. But in the end it should still work.”

When she was finished it was too late for a test run. Jesse made dinner while I checked email on my iPhone, via Wi-Fi and the satellite dish. “Enjoy the fresh veggies while they last,” he advised us as he served spaghetti and salad. “Mostly we live out of boxes and bottles and cans.”

We watched the sunset while we dined. I hoped for a green flash, I’d never seen one, but none came. “Happens maybe once every couple of weeks,” Jesse explained. “Atmospheric conditions have to be perfect.”

Sophie and I washed the dishes together in silence. As we worked I wondered what we should be looking for. So far Jesse and Anya didn’t seem to be hiding anything. I also wondered about the traumatic experience on a boat that Sophie had neglected to ever mention before.

I can’t tell you my secrets yet , she had said last night.

I didn’t really know much about her past. There hadn’t seemed to be much to know; an ordinary childhood, four years spent as her upper-class North Carolina high school’s math and computer whiz, and then Caltech. I had never even met her family, because she had none: her mother had died young in a car crash, her father of cancer only days before we had first met, and she had no siblings. That was all I knew. What else hadn’t she told me?

Ours was anything but a joined-at-the-hip relationship. Sophie sometimes went to conferences without me, and I often overnighted at our UAV test range in the desert outside of Pasadena. She could at least theoretically have maintained an entire secret life and hidden its traces. It wouldn’t have been beyond her. She wasn’t like other people.

After dinner we retired to our cabin, which was host to four berths, arranged as two sets of bunk beds set into the walls. A small mirror hung above a tiny counter. Through a porthole we could see a crimson wisp of cloud. There was barely enough room for the two of us to turn around, and I wondered how four people had ever fit.

“You know,” Sophie said thoughtfully, as I looked out at the endless expanse of the steely sea, “we’ve never had sex in a berth before.”

I knew it was intended as a kind of peace offering but it made me furious, as if she thought I was some kind of subhuman beast to be distracted with carnal pleasure.

“Just a thought,” she said quickly, reading my face.

Jesse’s voice calling from above was a welcome intrusion. “Yo, Maverick. You want to grab a beer?”

I said, “Love to.”

He and I liberated Prestiges from the fridge, climbed up to the flight deck, and watched the the gibbous moon and its glittering reflection on the Caribbean.

“So did you discover the subtle allure of scarification, or get into a slapfight with Edward Scissorhands, or what?” he asked.

“Some of it’s shrapnel from a mortar attack,” I said with studied casualness, “some from being chased through the Colombian jungle by narco-terror paramilitaries.”

“Right.”

I didn’t say anything. It felt good to be able to one-up Jesse in tales of international adventure for once. I was suddenly proud, almost glad, of the harrowing days I had barely survived.

“Wait,” he said, “you’re not serious, are you?”

“Serious as a heart attack. As an AK-47.”

He half-smiled, still not sure if I was bullshitting, and we fell into our own arch and stylized private dialect. “Really. But not too serious, I presume. I mean, not as serious as a Cure song.”

“Au contraire. At least that serious. I would venture to say, Mr. Ruby, that I am as serious as Mr. Spock.”

“You don’t say.”

“I just did.”