Jon Evans - Swarm

“Gotcha.” Jesse grinned. “Now we look through the eyes of Argus, and we see all there is to see.”

Anya and I shoulder-surfed while Jesse drove. Argus’s actively user-hostile interface was a complex mix of command lines and windows whose layouts and information density would have given graphic designers gibbering nightmares, but he navigated expertly, rattling out cryptic commands from memory.

When he first logged in I instinctively glanced down at his fingers on the keyboard, and noticed he was still using a password that dated back to high school: ancalag0n , a Tolkien reference. Surprisingly slack security, but then, nobody was supposed to know that this account existed at all.

“Their facial recognition software is pretty awesome,” Jesse said, “they have a whole server farm somewhere doing nothing else. I’m having them go through all the archive data from the cameras near that Internet cafe.”

He flipped to a Google Map stippled with so many green location markers that London looked covered by a thick moss.

“Holy crap,” I said. “Are those all the cameras?”

“No. If we showed all the cameras the whole screen would be green. These are just the densest clusters.”

A minimized window began to flicker, calling for our attention, and he swapped it to the foreground: a YouTube-like video browser. As we watched, tabs accumulated rapidly along its top edge, dozens of them rippling rightwards and then offscreen. He began to flip through them. All were brief fragments of video from black-and-white street-view security cameras, with three-week-old timestamps superimposed in the lower right. A single figure was common to them all, a slender woman with dark hair in a hooded coat. Thanks to her teddy-bear backpack I knew her even before we caught a frontal view of her face: Dana.

“Got you,” Anya whispered.

I nodded. Argus was probably built for exactly this kind of problem: isolate a person in a fragment of video, tag their location at the beginning and end of that shot, access the nearest cameras, and repeat. In the same way that a video was a collection of many still photos, you could construct a narrative out of many short video snippets. In theory you could reconstruct your target’s entire life, so long as they didn’t leave your camera network.

“Look, she went shopping.” Anya sounded amused.

We watched Dana walk into Harrods three weeks ago from the perspective of seven different cameras, some in the department store, some on the streets.

“Fast forward?” I suggested.

Jesse shook his head. “The software can only reconstruct her trail so fast. We’re already near the leading edge. But it’s bidirectional, we can rewind her backwards, too.”

He pushed a button, and time reversed. Dana moonwalked through the Victoria and Albert Museum for a little while, looking like any tourist. She seemed alone. This did not jibe at all with Dmitri’s claim that Ortega kept her in tight custody. I didn’t understand why he had bothered lying to me.

Jesse switched the arrow of time again. Dana bought a box of chocolates for cash in Harrod’s food court, left the store, paid cash for a ticket at the Knightsbridge Underground station, and disappeared into a dense cloud of commuters.

“Shit,” I said.

“No, this is perfect. It’s way easier to track people on the Tube. There are cameras all over the underground, even on the trains, and once they enter a station they can’t disappear into a blind spot, they can only pass through one of a small number of exits or transfer corridors.”

Another minimized window began to flicker. Jesse switched to the map, which now sported a flashing red location marker amid the sea of green. “There, see? She transferred at Piccadilly Circus to the Bakerloo.” The location marker submarined, and reappeared south of the river. “Exited at Lambeth North.”

I shook my head, awed.

“Yes, it’s astonishing, isn’t it?” Anya said. “A technical marvel, a social monster. Imagine when they have camera drones flying all over the city like pigeons. Watching us carefully. Erasing dissent before it even begins.”

“Come on,” I said. “In China, sure, but here? Or the US, or Canada? I can’t see it.”

“Knowledge is power, James, especially secret knowledge, and power corrupts.”

“Shit,” Jesse said. “We lost her. South of the river there are fewer cameras. She vanished on Hercules Road.”

He called up another map of London, this one mottled by a pattern that looked like an ink spill. Pretty much everything inside the Circle Line was a faint pink, but outside, patches of light blue developed, some isolated, some forming sizeable contiguous areas. I understood: a map of panopticon visibility. New islands and coastlines of coverage appeared as we zoomed in. Lambeth North was surrounded by roughly equal amounts of pink and blue. Once on Hercules Road, across from the station, Dana could in theory have walked a full mile without encountering another camera, if she had chosen her course very carefully.

“If we go through all the cameras around there for the last month,” I speculated, “have them look for Dmitri and Dana -“

“Yes,” Anya acknowledged. “But I think we will learn little more. Did you see, she paid cash for everything? They know they might be watched. No coincidence, I think, that she came from and went to a place outside of Argus’s remit.”

“So what do we do now?”

Jesse shrugged. “What else? We do it ourselves.”

“Ourselves?”

He grinned. “Fetch me my deerskin cap, Watson. The game’s afoot!”

“Not you,” Anya said to me. “The police will be looking for you, and they have Argus too.”

I nodded slowly. “Live by the panopticon, die by the panopticon.”

“Yes,” Jesse said, “exactly.”

I felt a bit bereft, a little like Miss Moneypenny wishing Bond luck, as I watched Jesse and Anya depart to investigate the situation on Hercules Road. But I wasn’t that worried about their safety, as they were bringing some of her uncle’s security men; and I didn’t really wish I was going with them. I felt like I had already used up my lifetime quota of adventure, and then some. Sitting in a luxury mansion waiting for my friends to return and tell me about their adventures seemed like a perfectly reasonable and defensible way to spend the rest of my life.

While waiting I used Tor to log into my private Gmail account, known only to Jesse and a few old friends. Several had sent me emails, probably wondering what the hell had happened to me and/or encouraging me to turn myself in. I decided that on second thought I didn’t want to read them and be reminded of my former life. That life was over.

I was about two seconds away from logging out when a chat window opened unexpectedly on my screen.

The person at the other end was Dr. Sophie Warren.

I stared at the blank emptiness of the GChat window, not knowing what to think, until words crawled across it:

SW:james is that really you?

I swallowed, wondering the same thing in reverse. It was her style, at least; for whatever reason, she and I never used uppercase characters when IMing each other. My fingers found their way to the keyboard and I responded:

JK:yes.

SW:proof, please. sorry but don’t know what to believe.

I took a deep breath, thought of a nonsensical pillow-talk in-joke -

JK:pumpkin potato, but never potato pumpkin

SW:oh thank god

SW:james i thought you were dead. i thought you were dead it and it was my fault. sory for typos i’m crying can’t really see. what happened? where are you?