Jon Evans - Swarm

The cockpit door opened and Jesse stepped back into the cabin, holding a newspaper and grinning cheerfully. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

“Thanks.” Behind him I glimpsed a small blond man at the controls. I remembered the ride to the airstrip, and the sight of Jesse leaning casually against Viktor Kharlamov’s Gulfstream, but I didn’t remember actually getting on the plane. I had never been so exhausted.

“I figured you’d appreciate Svetlana’s gentle touch more than mine.”

“Yeah.”

“Champagne, sir?” Svetlana asked. Her uniform consisted of high heels, a short skirt, and a blouse a size too small.

“Uh,” I managed again, a little dizzy, and looked to Jesse.

“Two beers,” he said. “And two for him too.”

The beer was Russian and ice-cold. I took a long swig from my first and looked around in some considerable disbelief. I had so many questions I didn’t know where to begin.

“We’re avoiding American airspace, just in case,” Jesse said. “Stopping in the Bahamas to refuel.”

“Going where?”

“London. Anya’s uncle. He’ll keep you safe ‘til this all resolves. Not too many other places you can go. You seem to have developed something of a reputation.” Jesse slapped the newspaper onto my lap.

It was an English-language Mexico City paper called the Daily News. I sat bolt upright, all lassitude forgotten, jarred into full alertness by the sheer wrongness of my own face, my Caltech ID photo, on the front of a newspaper:

Terror Mastermind In Mexico City

James Kowalski, the alleged “evil genius” behind the wave of terror attacks that killed 114 in New York earlier this week, has fled to Mexico City, according to multiple high-placed sources in the Mexican military and police forces. [Continued on page 4]

I put it down without turning to page 4. It was already too surreal, too scary. And brilliant. How ironic that they called me the evil genius. Ortega had outsourced the job of finding me to Mexico City’s twenty million residents. If not for the aid and shelter provided there by Alejandro-the-biohacker, one of Jesse’s Grassfire friends, I would probably already have died in police custody. Although I supposed my battered face served as something of a disguise. A thin silver lining.

“The Times is a bit less histrionic, but you’ll find yourself in there, too.” Jesse shook his head with mock disapproval. “I swear. I turn my back for one lousy week and you get yourself onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”

“So glad you find this amusing.” My voice was sarcastic, but it was true. The awed amusement in Jesse’s voice lifted my spirits more than sympathy could have.

“You are in fact literally on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. You want to see? We’ve got satellite Internet in this thing.”

I winced. “No thanks. Listen. I’ve decided. I’m going to give myself up.”

Jesse rolled his eyes. “Really. What for? So they can lock you in Guantanamo Bay and melt down the key? You feeling particularly martyrish today?”

“Ortega’s going to attack London,” I said. “The G8 meeting. I have to help them stop him. I can tell them.”

“Tell them what exactly? You know the details of his plan?”

“Well, no,” I admitted.

“It is in fact possible to warn them without giving you up, thanks to today’s amazing communications technology. There’s this nifty thing called the Internet.”

“If you take me in, you’ll get in trouble too.”

“James, last time I saw you, you were wrestling a crowd of Haitians and sacrificing yourself to the tender mercies of a bloodthirsty drug cartel so that me and Anya and Sophie might get away. Call me old-fashioned, but I figure that means I owe you one. And believe it or not, you know what, even before that happened I would have risked trouble to keep you out of jail. For fuck’s sake. You are not giving yourself up.” His voice brooked no argument.

“Huh.” I had almost forgotten about my act of heroism.

“Besides, Jorge Ortega is the least of our problems.”

I blinked. “What?”

“I’ve been doing some poking around since me and Anya got back to London. The feds took Sophie to some airbase in Afghanistan to help them with their drones. At least that’s what they think she’s doing. But I think I’m beginning to get an idea of what’s really going on, and if I’m right, Ortega the killer drug lord and his war on the G8 is only the tip of your girlfriend’s iceberg.”

I stared at him incredulously. “You mean Sophie’s behind him?”

“Hell, no. The way I see it, he’s actually in her way.”

“Then what?”

“Near as I can figure,” Jesse said, “she’s trying to take over the world.”

I leaned forward slowly. “Excuse me?”

“You know Sophie sold her own Axon technology to Ortega.” I nodded. “Well, guess what? She also sold it to the Chinese. And the Russians, and the Indians, the Israelis, the Iranians, the Indonesians, and when she got bored of countries starting with I she went on to the South Africans, the Venezuelans, Pakistan, some Tamil Tiger splinter group, and God knows who else. Then she went and stuck all that money in bank accounts opened in your name. You’re worth about sixty million dollars on paper, ol’ buddy ol’ pal, not that you’ll ever lay a finger on a dime.”

I stared at him wide-eyed.

“Because our Sophie doesn’t care about money, does she? What she cares about is that when everyone inevitably moves to drone-based militaries, and drone-based economies, they use her designs, her neural nets. Right now everybody thinks they’re five years ahead of everybody else, because of their ultra-top-secret new technology that nobody else has, not even the Americans. So they’re all out there desperately developing brand new UAVs and armed quadrupeds and God knows what else, and incidentally committing themselves irrevocably to her Axon architecture while they’re at it.”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Yeah. Your girlfriend is already well on the way to being the Bill Gates of the next world order. Everybody locked into her operating system. And she’s got a back door to make any of her nets do what she wants.”

“The override.”

“Bingo. So never mind Ortega. Maybe he assassinates the G8, big deal. Eight fewer figureheads in the world. A little hue and cry and they’ll be replaced. It’s the system that matters, and that’s what Sophie’s trying to replace. She wants her Axons to be the world’s new units of power. In a way Ortega going batshit is good. Otherwise this wouldn’t have come to light.”

“How did it?” I asked. “How do you know all this?”

“Friends in low places, as Garth Brooks once sang.”

“You have friends in secret Chinese military research facilities? How?”

“Grassfire. And elbow grease. You may have noticed I’ve spent the last five years travelling to troubled shitholes all over the world. Did you think I was just screwing around on beaches? Did you think I got jailed in Burma because I got into a bar brawl? I was building a network. A network of networks, really, like the Internet. Individuals and organizations concerned by increasing government oppression and surveillance around the world.” His voice sharpened. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but everywhere you turn these days there are new cameras, new laws, new regulations, a new form to fill out, another piece of ID to carry, all in the name of security, or maybe just convenience. Individually they’re not big enough to get most people upset. Just a little uncomfortable, and what’s comfort next to safety, right? But what’s really happening is liberty dying the death of a thousand cuts all around the world. If we don’t save the world’s people from its governments soon, it will be too late.”