Jon Evans - Swarm

It was hard to accept that my life had suddenly and irrevocably turned upside down. For the first few days my new existence felt essentially unreal, a temporary dream from which I would surely soon awaken. Of course I hadn’t really been kidnapped and forced into employment by vicious Mexican drug thugs. Of course I would be returning to Pasadena and Sophie in just a little while. Of course I wouldn’t be trapped in my host Ortega’s poisoned web for the rest of my life.

I supposed Ortega was a drug lord in his own right. Mexico’s drug cartels, the middlemen between Colombia and America, had been engaged in a savage and bloody war for years. But not for much longer. Now that Don Mario had drones to carry his cocaine directly to America, the Mexican cartels, though they might not know it yet, were as obsolete as dodo birds.

The services Ortega provides , Dmitri had said. Don Mario is not a subtle thinker .

I guessed Ortega had seen his own inevitable obsolescence and decided to jump ahead of the curve, to embrace new technology rather than fight it. He had understood just how disruptive Sophie’s drone technology was, and had acquired it in order to resell it, making drones and drone services available to the Colombians… and, presumably, anyone else willing to pay for them.

I hoped I was wrong. Because if I was right, if Ortega was a drug lord reinventing himself as the equivalent of IBM for criminals and insurgents, then he and Dmitri were even more dangerous than I had feared.

In a way it was brilliant. Assassination, drug smuggling, terror attacks: drones were the perfect weapon, decoupling the criminal from the crime. If you took only basic precautions, you never needed to fear arrest, the law would inevitably founder on reasonable doubt. Networked drones acting in concert were eight times more effective than individual UAVs at finding sunken treasure; they would likely be at least that much better at mayhem, violence, and destruction, too.

I could distract myself from my ongoing doom with work, at least, as long as I didn’t think too hard about its eventual consequences. There was plenty to do. Applying the swarm-system bug fix took only a few minutes per chip, but that was only the beginning of what they wanted.

“First we test your fix,” Dmitri explained to me in the server room that served as our office, once I had showered and changed into ill-fitting clothes. “And it better work.”

“It will.” I was confident of that much.

“But that fix will wipe out all of our training, won’t it?”

“Your training?”

“We’ve been teaching your Axons some new tricks.”

I nodded slowly. Sophie had been right: they had expanded on her work. Even I didn’t know how to do that. It was an astounding feat, comparable to figuring out how to fly a helicopter without any training. “We who?”

“Never mind. The point is, it will be necessary to erase that training, correct?”

“Yes.” Dmitri’s existing neural nets were like Neanderthals, an evolutionary dead end. I would have to devolve them back to what they had been before upgrading them to the more advanced Homo sapiens of Sophie’s swarm technology.

“Once you’re finished with the upgrade, they’ll be retrained again. Then we need to test them again, until we are sure our new tricks and your swarm technology play well together.”

“What kind of new training are we talking about?” I asked.

“Never mind.”

“I’ll need to know if I’m going to -“

“No, you won’t. We give you a series of tests. The training and testing will iterate until such tests are successful. That’s all you need to know.”

“Dmitri,” I said, risking humour and using his name for the first time, “I’m beginning to think that you don’t trust me.”

He gave me his toothy predatory grin. “James, I trust you like a brother. A psychopathic idiot savant brother who might turn on me at any time.”

It was almost funny. I almost smiled.

“I know you’re fantasizing about escape.” He waved off my protestations. “Of course you are. I know what you feel, because I felt it myself. I was not born working for Ortega. He drew me in like he did you. He’s a Venus flytrap, a pitcher plant, and you and I, we are little bugs. Take my advice and accept it. There is no escape, so enjoy the honey.”

I looked around the cramped server room, out the window at the razor wire and endless semidesert. “This is honey?”

“It will come. He believes in both the stick and the carrot. You will receive gifts. Liberties, even, eventually, but those only slowly. Ortega trusts no one. But you will have such luxuries to enjoy. Mansions, yachts, Ferraris. Women, not whores but beauty queens, the most beautiful in the world.”

“I don’t want -” I started bitterly, and then fell silent.

“I know. You are not that kind of man. Neither am I. You know why I am here? Not so long ago I was a free man, part of a group of hackers, the Darknet. Ortega hired us for a job. Or so it seemed. Then I met a woman. Her name was Dana. She was in trouble. Her former boyfriend was stalking her, and he was Russian Mafia.” A bad memory hardened his face. “I won’t trouble you with all the story. I could write a book, but no one would believe it. Things became crazy. Crazy. In the end I killed him. I had no choice. But then our lives were forfeit, we had to flee, and only Ortega would take us in. Only then did Dana admit the truth. He had forced her to create that situation. Not her fault any more than mine, or yours. He is like a spider. He catches you in his web, and after you thrash around a little while, amusing him, he devours you. But instead of killing you he makes you part of his web. As you have now become.”

“Like a von Neumann machine,” I mused. “Or grey goo.”

Dmitri blinked. “What are those?”

I looked at him, puzzled. He wasn’t much of a hacker if he didn’t recognize those references.

“Never mind,” he reconsidered before I answered, showing an equally unhackerlike lack of curiosity. “His web, it’s not so bad. We have more money than any university lab. I need equipment, or software, I don’t even ask the cost. In some ways it is paradise, a playground. It is difficult to find good assistants though.”

“So you kidnap them.”

He shrugged as if surely I could understand the necessity.

“Plus,” I said, “there’s that whole getting thrown in jail for the rest of your life worry.”

Dmitri laughed with genuine mirth, as if I had made a very good joke.

After a second I said, “Admittedly you’re putting a brave face on it… “

“James, being arrested is the very last thing we worry about. We own Mexico. Local police, federal police, special drug squads, even the military, they don’t take a shit without us knowing. This land we are on is theoretically owned by the Mexican military.”

I gaped. “You’re shitting me.”

“What frightens me is the other cartels, not the government. Last time a war broke out… ” Dmitri shook his head. “They are crazy here. Mexicans, they kill for fun, for nothing. They torture for pleasure, they leave garbage bags full of body parts on beaches, in the streets, to show off their work. Or they feed the dead to dogs. They worship death. I mean that literally. They have a saint they call Santisima Muerte, a skeleton in a veil. They dedicate black masses to her where they kill children and drink their blood as communion.”

I stared at him.

“It’s true. I have seen it.” His lips curled into his most customary expression, a twisted smile that said the only way to deal with life’s sick joke was to find it amusing. “Quite unhygienic, if you ask me, but then most sicarios don’t expect to live past thirty. Usually they get their wish. Then maybe someone writes a narco-corrido about them. There are hundreds of such songs, some very popular. Smugglers and sicarios are folk heroes here, like cowboys in America. Really, they should have their own reality shows. Narco-Corrido Idol. Mexico’s Next Top Sicario. People call Ortega a hero. Like some called John Glanton a hero.” I didn’t know that name. “But he swam a river of blood and climbed a mountain of corpses to be who he is. Never forget that.”