Xander sat in his car and watched the house until Sonia emerged to make her monthly pilgrimage to her cousin’s for the weekend. He approached the far side of the property, as he’d done so many times before, and let himself in through the window of Tom’s room. It looked exactly the same, like an exhibit in a History of Human Evolution Museum. Except nobody would ever buy tickets to tour the house where Swarm was born, because Tom and his avatar alter ego had both vanished after the battle of Washington. Xander had followed the spectacle from a hospital bed in Philadelphia, wishing that he had the strength to catch a train and witness the spontaneous rebooting of the American experiment firsthand. It was a watershed event by any measure: eight hundred dead, two thousand wounded, millions of live video streams and no arrests. And a crowd-sourced Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, protecting freedom of mind, added to all the other inalienable rights enshrined at the nation’s founding and entrusted to succeeding generations charged with protecting and embellishing that vision.
Thanks to a global audience watching the president’s speech, governments around the world were immediately besieged with demands for similar measures. But laws banning brain control experiments became redundant once the source code for PHAROH was released into the cloud, guaranteeing that no person, entity, or government would ever again be able to weaponize microwave brain research with impunity.
After an initial celebration and acknowledgment that the human race had taken a step forward, the inevitable cadre of doubters and detractors waded in to muddy the waters of history. Did the crowds in Washington really communicate in multiple languages and act as one, or were they reading the words from their phones? Was the X-ist rave Kickstarted, or secretly funded by Islamic extremists? Were the photos and video of Donald Westlake authentic or phony reenactments made with paid actors? For those who believed that the answer to all those questions was yes, for those who stoked uncertainty to keep consensus at bay, there would never be enough answers, only more questions.
The speculation on the fate of Swarm himself, at least among those who believed he actually existed, variously held that he was killed from the fall at X-ist, or that he was married and living in a small town in Nebraska, or that the government had secretly taken him prisoner and was trying to coerce him to help create a newer, better version of zeph.r. But savvier minds discounted the last possibility, mainly because those who sought covert control over others had already moved on to new methods that tapped the quintillions of bytes of public data to create predictive models of what people were going to do before they even knew it themselves. Instead of forcing anyone to behave one way or the other, it was much cheaper, and for the time being legal, to use prognosticative algorithms to pursue hidden agendas that appeared to be part of the random flow of day-to-day life. The inherent pattern in nature, machines, and human beings, if understood and parsed correctly, could turn seemingly random events into decisive factors in the fates of individuals, organizations, and entire nations. If the travel plans of a CEO ready to blow the whistle on his board and the explosion of a gas-processing plant near his office in New Jersey just happened to coincide, or if a typhoon leveled a guerrilla base in Malaysia days just before it launched a civil war, well, these things just happen, don’t they? Already the mountains of personal data being compiled from the digitization of every possible action and device was being sifted to assemble a synthetic electorate, a prognostic primary where candidates could be vetted, pitted against each other, and projected to win or lose an election before they even decided to run.
For that matter, what were the odds that the window to Tom’s room would be open when Xander arrived, a laptop plugged in and running, with a bottle of Patron and a single shot glass on the desk beside it? And how to explain the unpublished manuscript on the first screen, and the salient epigrams by Nietzsche, Darwin, and Radiohead to set the stage for the unlikely tale to follow?
Xander spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the night sipping tequila and reading the improbable tale of two guys from Austin who hitched a ride to the far end of possibility and never looked back. A postscript at the bottom of the last page explained why the file was prepackaged as an attachment addressed to hundreds of people he’d never heard of and didn’t care to know.
Hey Xan,
I know that if anyone is reading this, it’s you, my brother and unsuspecting partner in crime, if you can call unleashing the people from their chains and helping them reclaim their own minds a crime, as many, obviously, have already done. My actions and everything that has transpired because of them speak for themselves, but I’m not so naive as not to realize that the iterations and intentions of those who would rewrite history for their own purposes will eventually take their toll on the truth. So I decided it might be useful to record our own version from a third-person POV and relay the facts in a form that doesn’t require verification, that can’t be argued away or dismissed, because it isn’t being presented as anything but a story, a fable, the unattributed product of an overactive imagination. Maybe sometimes the only way to communicate the veracity of certain events is through a fanciful meme, a swirl in the universal ether, as Tesla would say, that bypasses disclaimer or validation by using a more innocuous medium to deliver the message. If the truth is often stranger than fiction, then can’t a novel be truer than the officially sanctioned reality?
I leave the decision in your hands, literally. If this book has only one reader, at least it will be you. If you decide it deserves a wider distribution, pick SEND and this string will automatically upload to a global e-mail list. There will be no way to trace its origins or stop its widespread dissemination. If you choose to DELETE, it will be gone forever, The End. I’ve changed most of the names and some of the details, of course, to avoid unnecessary objections or embarrassment. Just remember: there is no right or wrong, no felt or unfelt, no said or unsaid, no written or unwritten, no lived or unlived, no done or undone.
I trust you to act from a place that is sincere and pure, as always. You’ll know where I am and what to do, even if you don’t always know when or why.
Intrinsically yours,
Tom
Xander stared at the buttons marked SEND and DELETE, two possible actions with unpredictable outcomes, two paths with equally obscure destinations. Should he deliver the final message from his friend to those who would gladly receive it? Or erase his words to protect the shapeless entity that lives on in the chambers of the undiscovered mind?
His fingers trembled as they hovered over the keyboard.