Jon Evans - Swarm

I crouched beside the nearest UAV and examined the three panelled compartments in its body. Avionics, fuel cell – and payload: ten kilograms of devastatingly powerful high explosive. I knew accidental detonation was impossible, only a massive current spike through the blasting cap could set it off; but my hands trembled, and not only from the cold, as I unfastened the panel with a Phillips screwdriver.

Its door yawned open, revealing a compartment full of a waxy substance that looked like Play-Doh, a congealed clump of matter that could destroy everything in a thirty-foot radius. A single bullet-shaped probe had been thrust into the glutinous mass: the blasting cap. Two wires protruded from it. The red one was affixed to one of two connection points on the compartment’s inner wall. The black wire was tied off in a knot.

The solution was almost absurdly obvious; all I had to do to arm the drone was clip the black wire to the free connection point. I supposed simple was sensible. They had to be able to act quickly in case the compound came under attack.

I had written my escape program; I knew how to arm the drones; all I had to do was upload the program to the drones’ neural nets, launch them, and steal a car. But I had no intention of doing so that night. It was far too soon. I hadn’t thought out all the possible risks and ramifications. Everything had to be perfect before I dared to act. I closed the drone’s payload compartment, picked up the toolbox, and stood, ready to return to my bed for hours of what I already knew would be tense sleeplessness.

A harsh voice called out to me in Spanish, and I gasped involuntarily.

The guard approached, one hand on his slung Kalashnikov, his eyes hard and suspicious. I felt my heart convulsing in my chest like a dying fish. It was already too late to try to talk my way out; my body language had revealed my guilt.

I didn’t understand Spanish, but his gesticulations made his words unnecessary: I was to come with him, right now. The name “Dmitri” was audible in the accusatory babble.

I felt physically numb as I led the way back along the roof. The game was up. I was very possibly walking to my own death. Escape was now out of the question; the very best case was that henceforth Dmitri would have me watched like a hawk. This had been my one chance, and I had squandered it.

I was so distracted by fear and dismay that I tripped over an air-conditioning pipe, and the toolbox flew from my hands and fell open, spilling equipment onto the gravel. I knelt automatically, started recovering the fallen tools with fumbling fingers. The guard said something exasperated and began to help. It must have been so obvious from my trembling limbs that I was not in any way a threat.

What I did next was more instinct than intellect. My fingers closed on the shaft of the fallen hammer. I rose to one knee for better leverage. And as the guard turned towards me, sudden surprise etched on his face, I swung with all my strength.

It wasn’t much, my muscles were clenched tight, but my pure animal desperation was enough that the steel hammer struck his temple with a clearly audible thunk, and he collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

I stared down at him for long seconds, still on one knee, hyperventilating from the adrenalin, almost waiting for him to wake up and grab his gun and shoot me. Blood welled slowly from his head onto the gravel. I couldn’t remember the last time I had struck another human being. Junior high, probably.

I put my fingers to his throat like a TV detective, felt a faint fluttering. I knew intellectually that now now the die was irrevocably cast I had to kill him. There was an Xacto knife in the toolbox. But I couldn’t bring myself to use it; instead I dragged him out of sight behind the control hut, bound his wrists and ankles with wire, and gagged him with his shirt, watching my fingers and arms do the work as if they were operating autonomously. It was like my sense of self had retreated into an observation capsule behind my eyes, abandoning all motor control to my reptile brain.

Fortunately my reptile brain had watched a lot of action movies and seemed to know just what to do. There was no choice left, it was escape or die, and dawn was only a few hours away. I hid the gun under some ductwork and hustled back to the drones, hyperaware, every sense on overload. Every creak of a window dangling open in the wind was a battalion of guards come to shoot me dead.

After harvesting the golden Axon chips from the UAVs I fled as quickly and silently as I could. Then while crossing the roof I tripped again and dropped them. For a frantic moment I feared three were lost, before I found them unharmed between my feet.

The building was as quiet as a mausoleum. I descended to the lab, plugged the electronic brains into their cradles, and uploaded my escape program. Half an hour after clubbing the guard with the hammer I was back on the roof. En route I checked on him briefly; still alive, still unconscious. It took only five minutes to plug the neural networks back into the drones they commanded.

When finished I took one step back towards the stairs and found myself staring straight into the startled and suspicious expression of another armed guard. He was ten feet away, he had one hand on his gun already, and he was big and strong. His presence seemed inexplicable, the work of a cruel and capricious god.

I was so wired and adrenalinized that I felt like a wild animal. I didn’t even hesitate. “Come on,” I said before he could initiate the conversation, keeping my voice brisk and casual, “give me a hand here.”

He said something interrogatory in Spanish, but with a faint note of uncertainty in his voice.

“ Aidez-moi ,” I said, hoping that French was more like Spanish. “Test. Examination. Night test. Testo de noche . Come on.” I walked to the nearest drone, grabbed one wing, and nodded to the other. “Take that. Prends-le .”

He hesitated for a very long second.

“Come on,” I said, letting some of my emotion and frustration bubble into my voice. “You want to go wake up Dmitri? Il dorme . He’s tired. Es muy fatigo . But fine, wake him up.” I motioned to the stairwell as if his funeral, not mine, lay in that direction.

After a second the guard grunted, reslung his gun, walked slowly over to the drone, took the other wing, and helped me carry it to the launcher. Without allowing myself to hesitate I started its engine and fired it into the sky. The launcher, like the drones themselves, was sleeker and better-made than the one Jesse and Anya used; thankfully, this meant it was quieter, too.

“Hurry,” I said, rushing back to grab the second drone and launch it before the first one could tell itself to go blow things up. “ Vite! Pronto! ”

My desperation was contagious. The guard and I sprinted back and forth, launching the drones one at a time, until all six had spiralled upwards into the night sky. Then he looked at me quizzically, as if wondering what we did next. I ignored him, walked to the edge of the roof where I had a view of the gate, and waited.

Seconds ticked by. Nothing happened. It hadn’t worked. There was a bug in my program, or I had mistranscribed the override sequence, or there had been some other obstacle I had failed to notice or surmount. I was an idiot. I had had my chance, and I blew it, and I deserved what happened next.

A single sound separated itself from the faint engine whine above us. A drone caterwauling downwards, dopplering towards the earth. I flashed back to the mortar attack in Colombia, and quickly dropped to my knees so that the edge of the roof obscured my view of the gate.

Then a flash like a blinding instant of daylight lit up the world, and a colossal whoooom! blew out every window in the compound and slammed me flat.