J. T. Nutley was standing in the doorframe of Duggan’s office, arms crossed, lips pursed to convey urgency without commentary. His designer suit was custom fitted, and his shoes gleamed in the fluorescent light.
Duggan put aside the file he was reading. “What?”
Nutley cocked his head down the hallway, indicating that Duggan should follow. They’d been friends since meeting at cybersecurity training camp, where JT had teamed up with Duggan on several assignments. Beside also being from Illinois and sharing a rabid devotion to the Cubs, JT had impressed Duggan with his incisive logic and knack for ferreting out the political motives behind even the most mundane organizational directives.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Duggan asked, even though he had a pretty good idea.
Like most government agencies devoted to conducting covert operations on a large scale, the NCSD frowned on unnecessary communication of any kind. Only the most trivial or most important information was ever rendered onto paper or transferred verbally. Everything else was implied, inferred, committed to memory, and/or immediately destroyed. Doodling in a notebook during a meeting, for instance, was grounds for a reprimand, or so JT had once told him. Nutley was an encryption expert, which he liked to describe as “making sure that nobody knows what nobody knows.” Like everybody else at the Department of Homeland Security, it was hard to tell when he was joking or serious because even the most lighthearted quip could contain a coded insinuation or warning, which was probably why the summons by Duggan’s boss, Section Chief Simon Gupta, was delivered by his colleague and friend without a single word being uttered.
Two minutes later, Duggan was standing in front of Gupta’s desk, waiting for him to finish typing on his computer. Nutley stared into his phone for a moment before leaving them alone. Duggan liked Gupta, who shared his background in software engineering and his distaste for supercilious superiors.
“Jake, sit.”
Duggan did.
“How was your trip to Afghanistan?”
“I filed my report yesterday, sir.”
“I don’t want to read your report,” Gupta said. “I want to know what you think.”
Duggan told him that the whole assignment was a wild goose chase and a waste of time and that the last thing the Defense Department wanted was for anyone to know what had actually happened to Donald Westlake in Kandahar. “They left a laptop that had already been sanitized and showed me the base bowling alley,” Duggan said.
Gupta made a sympathetic face. “Well, so the case is closed.”
“I guess that’s one interpretation of the facts.”
“Exactly.” Gupta leaned back in his chair, indicating that they were moving on to a new topic. “I need you to think about something else, Jake. We’re conducting another round of sim games, this time with the Russians.”
Gupta was referring to a series of cyber-warfare simulations that the United States conducted jointly with foreign powers to preempt the real thing. Cyber war games were intended to provide a common framework for both countries to deal with large-scale cyber-attacks before they escalated into full-blown confrontations. The last one had been with China, but it didn’t take long for the Americans to suspect that the Chinese were using the event to understand how to repel or disable US cyber weapons. In response, the United States had begun a parallel program overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to build a national cyber test range at which American programmers could fight mock cyber wars in a more controlled environment. The joke around the NCSD was that the games were a thinly disguised rehearsal for a digital skirmish that both sides knew had already begun, or, as JT liked to say, “a game within a game within a game.”
“I want you to go to NetOps in Colorado,” Gupta continued, “and brief the participants on backdoor worms.”
“To keep them from planting any?”
“In a perfect world, yes.”
“Always more than happy to take another bullet for the Pentagon Cyber Command,” Duggan said cheerfully.
“Objection noted,” Gupta replied. “JT will assist with logistics as usual. I’d like you to leave today.”
When Duggan got back to his office, JT was there to greet him with an I-told-you-so shrug.
“You knew I was going to get drafted for NetOps.”
“Yep.”
“And you’re smiling because you’re going too.”
JT shook his head gravely. “I’m smiling because I’m not. But how about you let me buy you a welcome back and bon voyage lunch at Outback.”
“As wonderful as that sounds,” Duggan said, “Outback will have to wait until after Colorado.”
“Is Gupta up your ass?”
“That’s not it,” Duggan said. “It’s the trip I just took to Kandahar.”
“The Westlake shit show.”
“Yeah, Donald Westlake. A soldier goes berserk for no apparent reason and the Pentagon responds by using the NCSD for a fresh coat of whitewash. Doesn’t make sense. They were hiding something, but I can’t figure out why. Especially since …”
“Since what?”
“There was definitely a breach, but I think it came from inside.”
“Whoa. You mean a worm inside Cyber Command?”
“I don’t know, but the CO at the base couldn’t get rid of me fast enough.”
JT was pensively studying the carpet. Duggan could almost see the dots connecting.
“Maybe I can cheer you up,” JT said finally. “There’s a guy I know at the NSA, Jordan Sharpe. I’m pretty sure he’ll be at NetOps. He’s a sniffer, with a particular interest in Cyber Command shenanigans. I bet he’d love to hear your story. Off the clock, naturally.”
“What’s to stop him from ratting me out to his bosses?”
“He’s a player who keeps his cards pretty close, especially when the stakes are high.” JT made a church steeple with his fingers. “How lucky are you feeling?”
“Not very,” Duggan said.
“In that case,” JT said jovially, “you’ve got nothing to lose by shuffling the deck with Agent Sharpe.”
Tom could usually hear Xander before he saw him. It started with boisterous dings from the bell on his pedicab, followed by squealing brakes and, in the case of this particular night, a ceremonial howl of animal exuberance. Once he actually arrived, Xander was in perpetual motion, flipping a random piece of paper between his fingers, making electric drum noises with his mouth. Evoking sound from inanimate objects and his own body was how Xander perceived and internalized his environment. Chairs, cars, walls, books, empty cereal boxes, dining utensils, pencils and pens, pots and pans, chest, hands, elbows, and feet—all were potential instruments to express a mood or texture or to simply confirm an object’s thingness. In Xander’s universe, until something made a noise, until it was coaxed to release an audible presence, it didn’t completely exist.
An almost preternatural obsession with the timbre of a drum or the buzzing chatter of electronic instruments was only the most obvious manifestation of Xander’s aural compulsion. He was instinctively attuned to the cadence in a person’s breathing, speech, and stride; the swaying of trees; the asymmetric arias of traffic, the swooning waltz of the moon and sun; the way shadows of passing streetlights kept time inside a moving vehicle. He was even sensitive to the way a sentence could be orchestrated and scored with staccato starts and stops, sub clauses, hyphens, and commas, pausing abruptly to make a point or unspooling into rolling legato ribbons of words that pooled and cascaded on their leisurely journey to illustrate an idea or make a larger statement about human sensitivity to the metronomic intervals between letters, spaces, events, and ideas before finally punctuating its finale with a single conclusive period.
“What,” Xander shouted, his fists battering the sill of Tom’s window, “is happening!”
“Where,” Tom shot back, “is happening?”
“Why is happening!”
“Who is happening!”
Xander vaulted over the threshold and planted himself directly in front of Tom’s chair. He beamed and pointed both thumbs at this chest. “This guy!” he boasted. “Because I just signed a deal with Mash Machine Records. And we, my friend, are going to Vegas!”
“You’re spinning on the Strip?”
“Yeah, man. I just got a paying gig at the freaking ARK Festival!”
Tom tried to look surprised. During the months since Operation Uncle Sam had reinforced Swarm’s standing as a social media sensation, Tom had surreptitiously dedicated himself to boosting Xander’s career. By anonymously hacking into every electronic music webzine, chat room, and message board, in addition to posting ersatz reviews along with Xander’s photo and a sample of one of his best mixes, Tom managed to nudge his buddy from a total unknown into a budding phenomenon. The master stroke that pushed Xander over the edge came during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, where many of the top musicians in the world, and most of the top music executives in the country, gathered for a three-day marathon of parties and showcases by hundreds of performers of every stripe. As Tom guessed, it wasn’t very hard, given Xander’s genetic gifts and musical proclivities, to tilt the media machine in Xander’s direction by inciting a flash mob of more than a thousand instant fans to gather for his ACL gig, vaulting him into one of the festival’s fast-track discoveries and getting him a “New DJs to watch” clip on Turntable.com. Tom stood on the sidelines and observed proudly as Xander mesmerized the crowd with a thudding tattoo, building an interlocking matrix of bass lines anchored to layers of gritty synth; turning the knobs of the mixing board with kinetic flair; looking up from the decks and raising his palms toward the writhing crowd like a high priest giving his benediction; and blessing the jumping, pumping throngs that came to worship the beat and give themselves up, if only for a few hours, to a higher audible power.
Tom had clinched the Vegas gig for Xander by secretly instigating a grassroots campaign among the trendsetters who drew their power from sniffing out the next cool thing and serving it up to the ARK bookers on a digital platter. Xander’s sound system and lighting were still relatively rudimentary, but that would change now that he had Mash Machine Records to back him. Mash Machine’s marketing whiz, Fabian Beres, who already represented several of the world’s biggest DJs, was taking Xander to the next level as his new pet project. Tom could help with that too since Xander had asked Tom to join his crew to “deal with the technical stuff.” Tom agreed, on a conditional, part-time basis, to contribute code for the audiocontrol system and supervise some of the visual effects.
“Tom, I’m going to be spinning on the same stage as fucking Tiesto and Deadmou5?” Xander’s statement was uttered as a question, as if saying it aloud to Tom would somehow make it more tangible.
“That’s great, Xan. You’ve worked hard for this. You deserve it.”
Xander’s blooming confidence filled the room like a rise in barometric pressure. He was on the brink of breaking into the big leagues, and Vegas would be the flashpoint. There was no way Tom could miss his buddy’s coronation at one of the biggest EDM events in the world. Besides, Tom had never been to Las Vegas, and he couldn’t imagine a better reason to get his own chips.
“It’s gonna be like the Rat Pack on ecstasy,” Xander quipped.
“Yeah, and you’ll be chairman of the mixing board.”
Xander took a breath, suddenly serious. “You know, I never doubted that this would happen, but now I can feel all that space between the molecules, invisible forces, electrons, and billboards flashing. Everything connecting across platforms in multiple dimensions.” He looked at Tom as if for the first time. “Nothing will ever be the same again, will it?”
“Probably not.”
Xander put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. “But you and me, Tommy, I mean it—we will stay brothers no matter what, right?”
“Absolutely.”
They exchanged a heartfelt hug. “I want you to know I consider you a part of what’s happened to me,” Xander said. “You listened to my tracks and told me they were good, you told me to keep going when nobody else gave a shit, you loaned me money when I was broke and let me crash on your floor till I was back on my feet. You’ve been with me all the way, mano a mano, brother to brother. We did this together.”
“Yeah, Xan, we did.”
“C’mon, then. Let us go forth and inebriate!”
“Sorry, man. We shall go forth, but not tonight. I’ve got a date.”
“Really? Where?”
“Luminescence.”
“Wait, let me get this straight: you’re taking a girl on a date in a fantasy world video game.” Xander shrugged. “I guess it beats stuffing bitcoins into a virtual stripper’s thong.”
“You would know.”
“Yep,” Xander affirmed before exiting through the window.
A moment later, he telegraphed his adieu with the pedicab bell—a single exuberant ding.
Tom checked the time. He had a few minutes before his date with Lucy, just long enough to scan the posts on 4chan/b/. Helping Xander become an EDM star wasn’t the only thing Tom had been up to during the past few months. After a series of sporadic, occasionally disturbing chats, macktheknife and his friends invited Swarm into their inner circle, tutoring him on the ins and outs of the 4chan underworld. The site’s structure was deceptively straightforward—forty-nine different multimedia message boards, each with its own subject and abbreviation bracketed by slashes, ranging from 4chan.org/an/ (for animals and nature) to /x/ (for paranormal). Tom’s new chums were denizens of /b/ (for “random”), an image board that served as a playground and online hangout for an unruly aggregation of self-proclaimed “b-tards”—hackers, anarchists, and social malcontents, some of them harmless, some not, all of them resourceful, opinionated, and stridently anonymous, which Tom soon learned was not at all the same thing as unknown. Macktheknife, quasar539, toke, bbreath, and the rest of the gang were alt-J celebrities in their own right, online lords of mayhem who patrolled the posts and lashed out at those deemed unduly dense or unworthy.
At first, Tom found himself intimidated and rattled by the scabrous stew of midget porn, cartoons, snuff-joke video clips, and non sequiturs, but gradually certain personalities had emerged, distinct themes and voices bubbling up out of the piquant cyber soup. The underlying assumption was that society was broken and corrupted, which demanded a radical intervention and reboot of the American experiment. The Internet, with its unmarked boundaries and dark crannies, was a safe haven for the neo-patriots who would save democracy by keeping it honest, by taking carefully aimed potshots at the corporate gentry and the military-industrial plutocracy. It eventually dawned on Tom that “random” was anything but. The constant barrage of queries, invectives, miscellaneous facts, and outrageous accusations was all part of a vetting process guided by contrarian stipulations and unreasonable expectations. Those found lacking in skill, wit, zeal or bravado were quickly hounded out, marginalized, or ignored. To be called a fag, for instance, had nothing to do with sexual preference. While hetero lewdness generally ruled, nobody cared what anyone did with his or her own body or anyone else’s, for that matter. Alacrity, audacity, and programming pluck were the valued commodities of this geek-ruled realm. Before long, Tom was giving as good as he got, solidifying the respect and trust of the b-tards, who were intrigued by his uncanny ability to fire up flash mobs at a moment’s notice. Except that it wasn’t really Tom that the mobbers were following anymore—it was Swarm. Swarm was the one who communicated an authority that transcended ego, his confidence emanating from a deepening awareness of allied forces, not just his 4chan cronies but also the minions who acted out his wildest fantasies with fanatical verve, storming shopping malls in rabbit suits, converging at busy intersections for instantaneous pillow fights, assembling for candlelit Edwardian dinner parties in a parking lot at dusk. It was Swarm, not Tom, who was beginning to regard the flash mobsters as a physical extension of his will, a congregation of connected brains and limbs reaching out across the city, materializing out of nowhere and then melting away, leaving no trace. It was Swarm as much as Tom who was drafting a message, a manifesto that would speak to the masses, which would make them understand that they were part of something that had never existed before, something that could fulfill and even transcend the lofty ideals sketched out by the b-tard bros and every soul who felt a sea change coming but didn’t know what to call it or how to help make it happen. Tom had created Swarm as a protective alias, a disembodied alter ego invented to crystallize and lead social media disruptions without revealing who was behind them. Gradually, though, Swarm had begun to embody something beyond flash mobs and mere weapons of mass distraction, a possibility that demanded a new language and a new definition of the here and now, where it was going, and what was coming next.
But tonight Tom was focused on more mundane concerns. After Sonia came to Tom for help with his aunt’s predicament with the Munificent Life Insurance Company, he had spent weeks corresponding with the adjuster, patiently explaining that the forms should have been sent to Tom’s aunt in Spanish, to no avail. An appeal directly to the CEO, Wallace F. Brown, went unanswered, phone calls deflected. At that point, Tom decided to take a different tack. Thanks to tips from his 4chan pals on how to launder the cash from the magazine subscription scam, Tom had more than enough money to cover his aunt’s medical bills. The b-tards also agreed to help Tom teach the company, particularly its callous CEO, a lesson in community relations.
Tom’s war on Munificent Life was waged on multiple fronts. The first volley was in the form of a DOS attack on Muni-life.com, followed by a corresponding flurry of negative instant messaging that triggered a hail of bad publicity and shut down the company’s website. Meanwhile, macktheknife and a few other b-tards focused their ire on Brown. It didn’t take long for them to unearth and publish an e-mail string between the CEO and his underage mistress, a University of Texas junior, which did not sit well with Brown’s wife—or the conservative church congregation of which he was a prominent, and soon to be former, member. In an effort to stem the damage, the company reimbursed Sonia for her sister’s denied coverage, but not before Munificent’s stock plummeted by 15 percent.
The coup de grâce had come just a week ago, when one of Swarm’s hacktivist confidants passed him a tip that Munificent Life had engaged former NSA data analysts to help them sift through social media sites to preemptively identify and freeze out customers with higher than average health risks. Details of Munificent’s malfeasance were leaked to strategically chosen industry bloggers, eventually flowing upstream to major media and progressive pundits, who in turn demanded a federal investigation. The final touch was an AR image that appeared from nowhere and instantly went viral. It showed Brown as the Grim Reaper, smiling as he entered the Munificent headquarters building made to resemble a tombstone. The caption: “Business is good.” Within days, Brown announced his resignation, taking most of the company’s board of directors down with him.
Tom logged on to 4chan/b/ and checked a forum he had authored under the heading “Cancers in the Munificent C-Suite.” All the comments on Tom’s C-suite message string were verbal high fives; one had even attached an animated gif of a triumphantly fluttering pirate flag. “This one goes out to Jeremy Hammond!” announced Toke, referring to a hacker who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for breaking into databases of corporate and security firms. “The geek shall inherit the Earth,” crowed macktheknife. “And meanwhile, they will beat the shit out of mendacious Munificent fucks who try to withhold medical coverage from helpless widows! Bravo, b-tards. It’s been a good day in the good fight. The cloud has spoken! Long live Swarm!”