Jon Evans - Swarm

We all stared at Sophie, hoping for a hint of a shred of hope.

“It’s not your fault,” she told me. “They would have gotten it from you the hard way if they had to. At least this way you’re still in one piece.” It was true but didn’t make me feel any better. “Anyways it doesn’t really matter. The Russians are just the beginning of our problems.”

Those were not exactly the magical words I had wished for. “What do you mean by that? ”

“Let me rest a little,” she said. “When we get there I’ll explain everything.”

The UAE immigration officer stamped my Jason Kasperski passport without even looking at it. Minutes later we were in a taxi on an ultramodern highway, sweeping through raw desert back towards the Too-Much-Is-Not-Enough surreal cyberpunk skyline of Dubai, and then the dedicated causeway and private island of the Burj al-Arab. The building and grounds were so clean and perfect that they looked like part of an animated movie.

“This is your foxhole?” Sophie asked.

Jesse smiled. “If you gotta hide, hide in style.”

It seemed absurdly normal to be back; our raid on a military base in Afghanistan had been so intense and hallucinatory that anything else, including this seven-star hotel decorated mostly with solid gold, seemed positively quotidian.

Danielle met us at the door. “Sophia. Long time no see.” There were complicated undercurrents in her voice.

Sophie swallowed hard, her breath rasped in her lungs, I had never seen her so discomfited by anyone before. “Danielle,” she said faintly. “Hi.”

The two of them shook hands uncomfortably.

“If you’re all quite finished with the formal salutations,” LoTek’s acid voice said, “let me just remind you that the G8 meeting starts tomorrow. So I dearly hope your little shopping trip was worth it.” He stepped into the foyer and demanded of Sophie, “Well? Have you a masterstroke to save the day, or are we all well and truly fucked?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” She took a deep breath. “I was wrong about a lot of it. Let me sit down somewhere and I’ll explain.”

We took seats around the round mahogany table in the living room and waited anxiously while she tried to assemble her thoughts into a narrative.

Finally she said to Jesse, “See, I figured Kostopoulos and Colombia were Ortega on his own, I didn’t think you and Anya were connected. But when they asked us to go visit you I was pretty eager, because I’d found out about Grassfire and wanted to see what you were up to. I heard about Kostopoulos from Shadow and Octal. I never imagined we might get attacked in Colombia. In Haiti we just got lucky. Anya must not have known they were grabbing me, or she would have made sure we didn’t get away.”

“Haiti was Ortega on his own initiative,” I said. “Without telling the Russians.”

“Ah. That explains a lot.”

“Maybe to you,” I said bitterly. “Why? Why did you sell Axon to Ortega and everybody else?”

I left unasked: and why in my name, without telling me?

“Because I had to,” she said simply. “Because autonomous drones are an incredibly disruptive and unbelievably dangerous technology. You think what the Russians are doing today is bad? Think ahead. In ten years it’s going to seem quaint. We have to put a leash on drones before it’s too late. When I realized Axon was five years ahead of anyone else, I saw if I could spread it as widely as possible, to as many dangerous and violent groups as possible, lure them all into committing to it as their weapon system of choice, then I could use my leash to round them all up and keep them under control.”

I nodded slowly. She had sought to infect criminals, terrorists, and militaries – while seemingly empowering them – with a deadly next-generation weapon that was secretly a Trojan horse, in order to singlehandedly save the world from the nightmarish future she had foreseen. A scheme of incredible scale and breathtaking arrogance.

“Control,” LoTek repeated. “Which means what exactly when it’s at home?”

“Oversight and authority over all drones and drone technologies, worldwide. There’s no alternative. Otherwise we’ll have anarchy that makes Somalia look like Utopia. Assassinations, wars, atrocities, unstoppable, anonymous, forever.”

A brief silence fell.

Jesse broke it. “Bullshit.” He sounded coldly furious. “‘Oversight and authority’ means ‘tyranny.’ What you call anarchy is liberty as described by fearmongers who can’t stand the notion. Drones are only the great threat if you’re a tyrant. For everyone else, they’re the great equalizer. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about, keeping ultimate power for yourself.”

“I am not!” Sophie objected, equally irate. “You think I’m doing this for me? I am not going to keep the leash. I am going to very publicly turn it over to a small and trustworthy group who will use it only responsibly if they use it at all.”

“Small and trustworthy group. You actually want to create every conspiracy theory’s worst nightmare. A little group of men and women sitting around a baize table somewhere, secretly controlling the world. Only a matter of time before they or their heirs decide to end all dissent forever.”

“Nothing secret. Public knowledge, public oversight, public everything.”

“It doesn’t matter whether people know who their rulers are.” LoTek rasped, unimpressed. “In most fascist states the fascists are only too happy to remind them. What matters is that the knowledge which gives them that power will still be secret.”

“Secret knowledge doesn’t mean you can’t have checks and balances.”

“Yes, it inevitably fucking does,” Jesse protested. “There’d be some crisis, manufactured or not, and they’d get authoritarian, then draconian, then totalitarian. You’d condemn us all to an Orwellian future for the sake of so-called stability.”

“Jesse, you have to put down your libertarian-coloured glasses. It’s a crazy philosophy. It might be nice in theory, but it doesn’t work. You’d condemn us all to bombings and assassinations everywhere, bloody back-and-forth vendetta massacres, a positive feedback loop death-spiralling into total chaos. That’s not liberty. That’s disaster. That’s the tyranny of the violent over the peaceful.”

“Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither.”

“Don’t be an idiot. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about whether it’s a good idea to give away nuclear weapons in Cracker Jack boxes. Because autonomous swarms of drones are no less dangerous.”

I thought they were crazy to be arguing philosophy when the destruction of America was imminent. I also thought Sophie was right. You only had to look at how much trouble today’s drones had caused. The drones of tomorrow would be smaller, sleeker and cheaper, and the subsequent generation deadlier yet. Making that technology available to anyone and everyone, as Jesse wanted, was a recipe for carnage. Much better to leash it. But how?

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Sophie said. “Once the Russians launch, the rest of world will understand how big the dangers are. In the long run it might even help. The only way to construct a new world order is to prove that it’s necessary.”

“A new world order?” Jesse asked, aghast. “You’re going to just let the USA burn, twelve thousand drone attacks, total infrastructure collapse, who knows how many dead, to construct a new world order? What the fuck?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t intend to let them succeed.”

“How exactly are you planning to stop them?”