Swarm Read online

  Part 1

  Unmanned

  Chapter 1

  Into the belly of the beast, I thought.

  The airplane looming above us in the red light of the setting sun had a bulbous body like a whale, with high and oddly twisted wings. A truck could have driven up its rear ramp and into its cavernous hold. It occurred to me that twenty-five years ago, when I was a kid who wanted to be an astronaut, I had watched the space shuttle land on the very runway that stretched into the formless desert beyond the plane.

  Edwards Air Force Base around us was the size of a small town, but the empty wasteland that surrounded it made it seem fragile and impermanent, as if a divine wind might at any moment rise and sweep everything manmade into the endless annihilation of the desert. I had never been on any military base before and everything seemed strange and surreal. I felt both exhausted and wired, like I was being kept awake by amphetamines. It was hard to believe that this was actually happening, that I was really in this bustling martial hive, waiting to board the airplane that would take me to fearsome Colombia.

  I looked over to Sophie. She was the real reason we were here; I was, as usual, an afterthought, her plus-one. She grinned at me excitedly. A week earlier, I would have returned that grin with interest. Instead I forced a fake smile and looked away, a dull knife twisting in my guts.

  The interior of the cargo plane was an enormous tubular cave, its metal walls bristling with racks and tools, its ceiling covered by lights, ducts, wires, crawl spaces and access platforms. Its hold was full of boats. Their inverted hulls looked like thirty-foot long pistachio shells, held in place by a complex web of straps like giant seat belts.

  “Coast and river interdiction,” Reyes explained, noting my perplexed look. “We give the Colombians a lot of hardware. For all the good it does.”

  It was Lisa Reyes who had brought us here. She was a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, and looked the part: lean and wiry with muscle, wearing a dark suit, with high cheekbones, a sharp chin, unnaturally red hair, and a nose that had been broken at least once. She stood and moved like an athlete, perfectly balanced, coiled for action. Between her physical presence and her profession I felt uncomfortably like I was standing beside a feral animal.

  When Reyes had appeared in our lab earlier that morning and introduced herself, I had briefly been terrified that she had come to arrest us. Sophie and I occasionally partook of party drugs. But it was something else that had brought her, something far more serious and mysterious: a triple homicide. The murder of DEA agent Michael Kostopolous and two Colombian government officials, in Bogota, in broad daylight, while driving at high speed. A death from above.

  Michael Kostopoulos. When I had first heard Reyes pronounce his name, I had thought for a moment that I was dreaming.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked. There seemed no reason not to proceed up the ramp, but the uniformed men ahead of us had made no move. I was dressed for Pasadena, not the high desert, and as the sun set the night air was growing teeth.

  Reyes shrugged resignedly and pitched her voice to carry. “Hurry up and wait. That’s the Air Force way. If any of these flyboys ever actually did anything in an expeditious manner, they’d get in trouble for making all the rest of them look bad.”

  “I heard that,” said one of the men ahead of us, turning to give her a look. He was tall, with charcoal-coloured skin and the name OKOCHA emblazoned opposite AIR FORCE on his jungle-camouflaged chest. I didn’t know exactly what his shoulder badges signified, but they looked impressive.

  She smiled at him sweetly. “Oh dear, was that my outside voice?”

  “Reyes,” the other Air Force officer said - Harrison, stout and grey-haired - “you’re lucky there are civilians on this flight, or we’d have you field-test our new FYAUYF emergency deplaning system.”

  “FYAUYF?”

  “Flap your arms until you fly.”

  “Probably be a softer landing than the last one you gave me.”

  Okocha grunted. “Don’t get fussy. Any landing you walk away from, that’s a good landing.”

  Another Air Force man appeared atop the ramp and waved us up. We ascended, and he took our boarding passes. They looked just like the ones for commercial flights. I supposed the military had to keep track of passengers too.

  His eyes narrowed when he saw Sophie’s pass and mine. “James Kowalski,” he read aloud. “Sophie Warren. What outfit are you with?”

  I shrugged uncertainly and looked at Reyes, who explained, “Civilians.”

  “You’re taking civilians to Colombia?”

  “It’s all right,” she said, “they’re with me.”

  He looked at her skeptically, then to Harrison and Okocha for confirmation, before shrugging, acquiescing, and motioning us onwards.

  “Don’t worry,” Reyes assured us for the third time, “you’ll be perfectly safe.”

  We proceeded towards the nose of the plane, to where a row of seats folded down from the walls. I sat beneath an axe mounted beside a sign that said For Emergency Exit Cut Here, and fastened my seat belt. The orange earplugs Harrison gave me seemed to make the whole world grow more distant, intensified the feeling that I was dreaming or hallucinating. Only twelve hours ago I had expected to spend tonight watching a movie.

  I started when the airplane began to move. So did Sophie, sitting beside me. The few tiny portholes were mounted too high to see anything but sky. The noise when the engines throttled up was overwhelming even through the earplugs, and the sideways acceleration as we hurtled across the desert felt odd and uncomfortable. Sophie took my hand and gripped it tightly. She didn’t like flying at the best of times. She didn’t like not being in control.

  Then we lifted off, and were skyborne; en route, incredibly, to Colombia.

  With her eyes closed against fear Sophie looked even younger than she was. Reyes had been visibly skeptical when Sophie was introduced to her as Dr. Warren. Twenty-five years old, with her hair ponytailed and a spray of freckles around her upturned nose, wearing old jeans and an XKCD T-shirt, she looked more like an intern than an associate professor of engineering with her own Caltech research laboratory.

  We were in the belly of a military jet headed for Bogota because the DEA had requested Sophie’s expert technical knowledge and advice regarding the extraordinary means by which Michael Kostopoulous and his Colombian counterparts had been murdered. Or at least that’s what everyone other than Sophie and I thought. And if Lisa Reyes had come to us a week earlier, I would have figured the same.

  Now, though, I thought differently.

  Chapter 2

  I was glad that the engine noise precluded speech at anything below a scream. Just then talking to Sophie was the last thing I wanted to do. Instead I let my exhaustion rise within me and consume me like an all-enveloping cloud of smoke.

  When we finally landed I was asleep on a pile of life jackets, wrapped in a blanket Okocha had found somewhere. I stumbled dazed and bleary to my feet. According to my iPhone it was 4AM, Colombia time. We lined up inside the rear gate, only to discover that it had jammed shut.

  “Remember,” Reyes said drily as the crew chief fiddled with the controls, “we’re the superpower.”

  After about ten minutes the gate finally descended, revealing another runway and another airbase. The only indications that we had entered a new country were that all the signs were in Spanish and everything was shabbier. Some of the buildings and vehicles hadn’t been painted in months, and the roads were marred with cracks and stubborn patches of grass. But the soldiers who greeted us looked tough and well-equipped.

  The air outside was damp and the breeze much colder than I had expected. Reyes spoke to the Colombians in effortless Spanish. Someone gave me a small plastic cup full of sweet black coffee, which I drank g
ratefully, before we were escorted into a long, low hangar-like building, to a whitewashed room dominated by a large steel table. It reminded me uncomfortably of morgue scenes in movies.

  Laid out on the table were the shattered metal and plastic remains of some machine, charred and warped by heat and force. Few shards were bigger than a finger.

  The man standing beside the table was plump and middle-aged, wearing a military uniform, with sharp eyes above a graying moustache. “Martinez, Colombian Air Force,” he introduced himself, in near-fluent English. He looked at me, the only man there not in uniform. “You are the engineering expert?”

  I indicated Sophie. “More her than me.”

  He looked at her skeptically. She was already too engrossed by the wreckage to notice. “This is what’s left of the UAV that hit Kostopoulos?” she asked.

  I twitched; it was the first time I had heard her say that name.

  Martinez nodded slowly. “A flying bomb. There were several witnesses, nearby cars, unhurt except for broken glass. They said it struck the target vehicle directly and exploded on contact. Narco-terrorists, obviously, but which faction, the FARC or the paramilitaries or the international cartels, that we do not know. Our hope is for you to find a clue that will lead us to who sent it.”

  “Then you’re wasting your time,” Sophie said briskly. “I might be able to work out who built it, but you’ll never be able to prove who actually dispatched it unless they’re supremely stupid, and if they were stupid they wouldn’t have used a drone. I don’t like your analogy. Not a flying bomb. Bombs are dumb. More like a small cruise missile. You know who committed your homicide? Someone who typed a command into a computer. They could have been time zones away.”

  “They must have targeted them somehow. We think it was most likely laser-guided.”

  She shook her head. “I imagine it homed in on a radio signal.”

  “No. If they had planted a transmitter in the vehicle we would have found its remains.”

  “Why plant anything? They had cell phones, didn’t they?”

  Martinez looked blank for a moment. Then his face went slack with sudden understanding.

  “Mobile phones broadcast their unique IDs frequently,” Sophie said, enjoying his reaction. Talking down to important authorities was one of her favourite pastimes. “That’s how they find new cell towers. With a drone capable of targeting that signal after them, they might as well have been shouting ‘come get me.’”

  “Their phones. Their phones.” Martinez shook his head wonderingly as he considered the ramifications. “If you’re right, someone with a weapon like that, a drone, they could take out anyone with a cell phone. Generals, presidents, anyone.”

  “Sure. Pick your target, harvest their phone’s ID, send up a drone, get it into signal range, and let it do its thing. Circle, triangulate, spiral in. Boom. The perfect assassination. Death from above, undetectable, unstoppable, untraceable.” She sounded vaguely pleased by the notion of such murderous elegance. “I could be wrong. But that’s how I would have done it.”

  Martinez looked appalled. I sympathized. If Sophie was right, no one was safe.

  Chapter 3

  “How hard would it be to build that kind of drone?” Reyes asked.

  “You wouldn’t,” Sophie said. “You’d buy it. Research UAVs go for about fifty thousand dollars nowadays. Range of several hundred miles, used for all kinds of purposes. Swap out the camera for some radio gear and control circuitry, you’d still have a ten-pound payload if you sacrificed some distance. I’m no explosives expert, but that sounds like more than enough. The hardware is trivial.” She paused. “But the software, that’s another story. Real-time, real-world aerial maneuvering, triangulating on a signal, those are hard problems. Where were they hit? In an urban environment?”

  “On the highway,” Martinez said.

  “Not surprising. Too many complexities in a city. But even in the open it wouldn’t be easy, especially if he was in motion. You can buy a UAV off the shelf, more or less, but they don’t exactly sell real-time targeting software at Best Buy.”

  “Then where would you get it?” Reyes asked.

  “Well… it’s one of the things we do at our lab,” Sophie admitted. “Not homing in on cell phones specifically, but our nets support multiple targeting heuristics. About half a dozen other university labs around the world might have a similar capability. I can give you all the names, it’s a small field, everyone knows everyone. Maybe the same number of private facilities, aerospace companies. And I’m sure military, too, but you’d know more about that than us.”

  “So maybe twenty different organizations could have created this thing?” Harrison said incredulously.

  Sophie nodded cheerfully. “At least. Two years ago it was more like zero. The inexorable march of technology. I may not find any clues, but I can guarantee you one thing, Michael Kostopoulos will not be the last victim of a drone assassination.”

  An unpleasant hush fell.

  “This isn’t off-the-shelf hardware,” I said. That was my remit; my job at the lab was to build and test the UAVs that hosted Sophie’s software. I donned latex gloves and picked up the largest surviving piece, a wingtip. It was remarkably light, and non-metallic. “Carbon fibre?”

  Martinez looked at me warily. “How can you tell? Our forensics team needed microscopes.”

  “Just a guess. Same thing they use to make airliners nowadays. Very strong, very light, very expensive.”

  “Speaking of microscopes,” Sophie said, balancing what looked like a tiny golden flake on her latex-clad fingertip, “I need one for this.”

  Martinez made a call. Soon a uniformed Colombian girl who looked about eighteen brought a microscope. Sophie studied the fragment of microchip with great interest for some time.

  Finally she lifted her head and looked straight at me. “Hard to tell for sure, but it looks like it used to be an FPGA connected to some custom analog circuitry.”

  I grunted with recognition.

  “Which means what exactly?” Reyes asked impatiently.

  Sophie returned to the microscope. I tried to find an answer that might make sense to a non-techie. “An FPGA is basically a reprogrammable computer chip. Slower than the kind in your computer, but you can reconfigure it completely on the fly.”

  “Or it can reconfigure itself,” Sophie added without looking up.

  Reyes visibly decided she didn’t care about the technical details. “So who uses these kinds of chips? Are they common?”

  I shook my head. “No. FPGA plus custom analog for control chips, there are maybe three labs in the world doing that kind of research. Redekopp at MIT, Almasry in Cambridge… ” I hesitated, looked over at Sophie.

  “And us,” she said mildly, still absorbed in the microscope. “And we’re the only ones using them to control UAVs.”

  “Just a minute.” Okocha sounded startled. “Are you saying this came from your lab?”

  “No. This isn’t one of ours. Different substrate. But it looks a lot like my work. I’m almost sure it used to be a neural network.”

  Sophie stood and stretched. Her powerful brain was trapped in a fragile body: she suffered back spasms sometimes, and doubling over for an extended period like she had at the microscope wasn’t good for her. She had bad lungs, too, and the air here was damp and dusty. I gave her a concerned look and was relieved by the quick head-shake that indicated she was fine.

  “What’s a neural network?” Harrison asked.

  “A computer built like a brain,” I oversimplified. “Better than traditional software at pattern recognition and other kinds of artificial intelligence. But you can’t program them like other computers. You have to teach them and let them evolve.”

  Reyes looked at me like I should wash my mouth out with soap for telling such baldfaced lies. Okocha looked very grave. Harrison seemed to feel this was all a waste of time. I felt a little guilty at being the bearer of complicated news, and decided not to brag that So
phie was arguably the world’s foremost expert on the subject of neural networks. Instead I looked back at the charred debris on the metal table.

  Something familiar caught my eye. I picked up a small and ragged rectangle of white plastic, about a half inch by a quarter inch. A smeared and shining blob of what might once have been copper circuitry was faintly visible. The perimeter had maintained enough of its shape to show that a clean diagonal notch had once been cut across one of its corners.

  “This looks like a SIM card,” I said. “From a cell phone.”

  “Not from the victims,” Martinez looked interested. “Their phones were mostly intact. You think maybe they planted another one? For targeting?”

  I shook my head. “I bet they built a phone into the drone. Then they could control it remotely anywhere there’s a cell network.”

  “Control it how?”

  “Maybe some homegrown text-message protocol,” I guessed. “That might be something you could track. But I imagine they covered their trail. It isn’t hard to get anonymous prepaid SIM cards.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Reyes sounded like she thought I was making this all up. “Kostopoulous was murdered by a flying bomb, triggered by a built-in cell phone, and if I understand you correctly, controlled by an artificial intelligence? Did I just walk into a bad sci-fi movie?”

  “A very stupid artificial intelligence,” I said defensively. “Like an insect brain. Not really that much smarter than a Roomba. It can fly and navigate, but that’s about it. It’s actually all old hardware. Smaller and faster than it used to be, but neural nets are decades old, and the military’s been using UAVs for more than ten years now. What’s new is the software.”

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century.” Sophie sounded amused. “May you live in interesting times.”

  “Thanks so much,” Reyes said sardonically. “Just for future reference, us law enforcement types like our times as boring as possible.”