Jon Evans - Swarm

“Like what?”

“Simple things first. Tunnel navigation. Coordinated simultaneous actions.” He paused. “Then, iterated target tests. We have lights that become darker when a drone comes near. We will set one up, and we want the swarm to send individual members towards it sequentially, until it is dark.”

I nodded, understanding his real intent. They wanted their killer swarms to send kamikazes at their targets one at a time, until thorough destruction had been achieved.

“Followed by penetration tests. A swarm will send one or more of members to switch off a light at the door of a tunnel, and then the entire remaining swarm should proceed through.”

They wanted to blow open a door or a wall, then send the rest of the swarm through the hole to destroy whatever the barrier had protected.

“Also,” he said, “cluster tests. The swarms must dispatch their drones to the densest populations of targets.”

I felt cold. It was all too obvious what that represented: killing the maximum possible number of people. “I don’t know how to do that,” I protested. “I can’t retrain them.”

“Yes, I know,” Dmitri said impatiently. “That will be done elsewhere.”

“Where? By who?” Could Sophie secretly be retraining her own neural nets for Ortega’s use? But no, that was crazy, it had to be someone else. Someone who had reverse-engineered her work well enough to use it for new purposes. A monumental task.

“Not your business. Your business is not to program them. It is to prepare and orchestrate such tests. You can do this? You will do this?” There was a dangerous edge to his voice.

I reluctantly agreed.

“I warn you we will be running equivalent tests in simulation. Any discontinuities between simulated and real results will be watchfully investigated.”

In other words, he would quickly discover any sabotage or slowdown on my part. I nodded my surrender.

“Good,” Dmitri said. “Begin.”

The days that followed were surreal. There were moments when I took a mental step back, looked at myself, and marvelled: there I stood on the roof of a Mexican military academy turned drug lord’s R &D lab, watching a half-dozen UAVs swooping through the two sets of soccer goalposts which served as our test ‘tunnel’, or diving at fluorescent hockey-stick shaped lights erected by chain-smoking tattooed thugs. The Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime kept echoing through my head: “And you may ask yourself, how did I get here? And you may say to yourself, my God, what have I done?”

But you can get used to almost anything. I soon fell into something like a routine. I would program a test in the homegrown language Sophie and I had cobbled together over the years. Her test-harness software compiled that code into patterns her Axon neural nets understood, which we uploaded into the drones’ control chips, golden lozenges nestled in the fist-sized cradle connected to my laptop. They were no more intelligent than insects, but when I looked at them it was hard not to think of brains in jars, and Frankenstein, and Skynet from The Terminator .

That cradle had been hand-soldered by Dmitri himself; it looked crude and clumsy, but it worked. Like me, he was better with hardware than software. Once the electronic brains were reprogrammed, we put the drones through their new paces.

I had hoped I might get online, but after two days I still didn’t even know where the computers with Internet access were. They had to be somewhere: every morning Dmitri reprogrammed our drones with new software. He was nowhere near smart enough to reprogram Sophie’s neural nets himself. Someone else, some dark genius almost as smart as her, was teaching them new tricks, and every day they came closer to passing the tests.

Their purpose was obvious. These drones were being trained for military action. The initial target was presumably either a rival drug cartel or the Colombian government, but I feared Ortega intended to sell his technology to anyone with the money to buy it. Tyrants could use the cluster attacks on anti-government demonstrations. Terrorists could use the penetration attack to breach nuclear power plants. As for assassinations, we didn’t even need to run any new tests: Sophie’s existing heuristics were quite sufficient, as Michael Kostopoulos and the head of the DEA had already proved.

I wondered who had ordered that latter assassination. Don Mario? That didn’t make sense; why whack at the hornets’ nest of the US government unnecessarily, when you’re raking in money smuggling drugs with drones? Ortega seemed a more likely candidate. Not because he was threatened by the DEA. Quite the opposite. To show how much of a threat he was himself. If I was right, that attack had been his Big Brother ad, demonstrating that his drones could kill anyone, showing the criminal world he was open for business.

I had somehow become an integral part of a truly terrifying future. Who knew what monsters were already window-shopping Ortega’s wares, and what they intended to do with their drones, how many they intended to kill. I couldn’t just let that happen. I had to try to do something.

So on the third day I decided it was time to play a trick or two myself.

Dmitri and I stood outside the control hut and watched the flock of UAVs circle overhead, like a cross between migrating pterodactyls and something from the far-future scenes in The Terminator. Their six engines buzzed like an insect hive. Beyond the complex’s walls, the hockey-stick light stood just outside one of the soccer goals. We were combining the bomb test and the penetration test.

A single drone detached itself from the circling swarm, plunged downwards, and zoomed past the light. As it flashed past, the light dimmed. A second drone followed, and it switched off. That was the signal the rest of the swarm was waiting for: they dove past the extinguished lamp, and through both sets of goalposts.

It was all too easy to imagine what would happen if these drones were armed and their targets were real. An aircraft carrier, for instance: the first drone blowing a hole in its side, the second enlarging it, and the remainder darting through that newly created aperture towards the vessel’s nuclear engine. Programming them for real-world battle would be easy. Pattern recognition was what neural networks were best at; switching their target patterns from “switched-off light” to “sufficiently large hole” was a matter of minutes.

“Perfect,” Dmitri said. “Now bring them back.”

I issued a come-home command. Nothing happened. The drones kept circling upwards and outwards, in larger and larger spirals.

“Bring them back,” Dmitri repeated.

I donned a puzzled expression. “I sent the command. They’re not responding.”

“What?”

I shrugged, retyped the command. There was no response. The UAVs’ orbits kept climbing and widening, ever higher and ever further away.

“Bring them back!” Dmitri ordered.

“Oh, shit.” I pretended to have just thought of something.

“What?”

“This happened once before,” I lied. “When they completed a test sequence they lapsed into survey mode and stopped responding to commands on their primary input.”

He stared at me. “You mean they’re out of control?”

“Looks like it.”

“What did you do last time?”

I shrugged. “Last time it was just one drone. Eventually it crash-landed about forty miles away. It wasn’t too bad, we just had to fix up one wing. But your drones have a bigger range, my guess is they’ll get about sixty miles away.”

Dmitri’s expression as he stared at me was a combination of rage, horror and suspicion. That last caused my bowels to loosen uneasily. If he discovered I had set this all up by surreptitiously adding a few new wrinkles to the end of the test sequence…