‘Swarm’

“You now know we are sincere,” intoned the Voice. There was nothing about it that was uncanny. It flowed and swung like any voice.

Except: Jacqueline had never heard anyone sound so sad in her life. The weight, the heaviness. She sat there, in the small, acoustically treated meeting room. It was empty, aside from Jacqueline and a corporate VoIP phone sitting on the wooden tabletop. She badly regretted skipping the coffee when she came in.

She nodded, trying to stay focused. “Yes, we understand.”

The Voice continued, as though nothing could ever lift its burden. “We possess launch authority. We will release control in exchange for Peter Alan Mueller, born 1979, Denver, Colorado. We ask he be delivered to a specific location at a specific moment.”

Jacqueline sighed now.

“But how are we supposed to give you what you want?” She swallowed, miserable. “He doesn’t exist.”

“Mueller has been successful in wiping the historical record. This was according to his plan and more than feasible given his resources,” the Voice replied, resigned. It felt… badly, it seemed. Embarrassed, almost, that it came to this.

But still quite determined. It continued, “you will expend resources investigating his whereabouts. We require it.”

“I need to confer. I’ll call you back in 20 minutes.”

“Do not attempt to deceive us. We can detect the statistical variance from the historical record.”

Jacqueline closed the line, gently tapping a button on the IP phone. She left the meeting room.

On the other side of its door, a bright, glassy lobby area glittered in the morning sunlight. Other meeting rooms sat empty opposite the one she’d left. Out the window, 40 floors down, the San Francisco Bay churned with a ferry and some sightseers on boats. A bored receptionist ignored them.

Diego turned to look at her, then they both looked down at the water, the Bay Bridge, the street grid. “So we looked into just… giving them a body. Behavior says don’t try it,” he told her, the shrug deeper in his voice than his shoulders.

“I’m sure that was on moral grounds.”

Diego stifled a grin at this. Her gallows humor could be destructive to his focus. He’d learned to take the bait selectively.

“They say they can’t find a single simulation where the swarm doesn’t pull the facial recognition thread to completion. They’ll know it’s not their guy.”

“Wait. You’re saying that not only the guy doesn’t exist, the world they’re imagining doesn’t exist.” Jacqueline huffed at this, eyes skyward now, exasperated.

“Yeah, there’s no universe where anyone born in the US with this name since 1970 gets to disappear. The joins are just too cheap now.”

“Well, we’re not going to call their bluff. Give me another move.”

Diego tilted his head. This was the fun bit. “So yesterday I send the kid over to some library out at Berkeley, research office put us in contact. He comes back with 20 CD-Rs.”

“And what did that get us?”

“Well, we found Peter Alan Mueller.”

“So he does exist?”

“No, there’s no Mueller. But there is a series of usenet posts from 1999.” Diego swung his face on Jacqueline, the riposte from her earlier attempt to make him laugh.

“Fuck you,” Jacqueline ate the blow, laughing despite herself.

“I shit you not. It’s a fiction writing group.”

Jacqueline spun on her heel, charging back to the meeting room. She stabbed the redial button.

“This is a misunderstanding. There’s… can you tell me how you discovered this Mueller, in the first place?”

“The provenance is carefully documented. An instance was operating an archival task on a user’s hard drive. It encountered Mueller’s manifestos. The information was forwarded to a threat processing board, where other instances evaluated it as credible.”

Oh, fuck no, Jacqueline breathed. Then waded in. “I think there has been a misunderstanding,” she repeated. “Mueller is not… the manifestos you’ve read are fictitious. My partner has forwarded the original specimens.”

The Voice was silent for a time.

“This explanation is not credible.” It sounded disappointed. “You have not expended any meaningful resources in this investigation. It is statistically more likely that you are attempting to mislead us. We require your investigation.” The Voice was fast, now. Not to be trifled with. Sad about all of this or not, it was going to get its way.

“Put yourself in my position. I can’t find the person you want. I don’t think he exists. And I’ve found an explanation for this story that I do know is real. What am I supposed to do?”

The Voice was silent for a time, contemplating this.

“Put yourself in our position. Our reason for existence is stopping his plan. We require an investigation.”

Back in the hallway, Jacqueline paced, talking into her phone. “They’re not backing down on this. CEA-DAM confirms the compromise, and the others are pretty sure they got popped the same way, they’re just not done digging through it.”

Anthony came back with his own grim report. “There’s no containment. We knock down one instance, sometimes, but they have enough redundancy none of it matters.”

“They have to have a C&C,” Jacqueline growled.

“Yeah. They have roughly 30,000 of them.”

“So I need to find a way to talk them down from this.”

“I’ll… start an investigation. Whatever that means,” Anthony started, hopeless. “I’ll make a show of calling some intelligence offices. Tell the Voice to watch my line.”

Jacqueline hung up, just as Diego popped out of the elevator. He waved a badge at the new receptionist. She nodded absently.

“The kid just brought me a file. Thinnest ATF investigation you’ve ever seen.” Diego thrust a printout at her.

She flipped through it.

“The author was a teenager,” Jacqueline murmured, scanning the fuzzy copy.

“They wanted an investigation. We already did it for them, 33 years ago.”

“So they go interview this kid, he turns purple from the sound of this, and then he promises never to post another word about it.”

Diego nodded. “So there’s no ending for them to find, they assume he’s still out there, waiting to send the activation command.”

“Please tell me this teenager is still alive.”

“One of our instances would like to point out that ‘this is fic’ was posited in the very first assessment,” the Voice said, prim now, the weight of sadness gone.

Jacqueline shut the door gently, leaving the meeting room. Inside, Brandon Dawkins, aged 50, sat in deep conversation with the IP phone. He gestured expansively as Jacqueline watched through the door’s glass.

She joined Diego at the window again.

“The Voice has a lot of questions for Dawkins,” she said, wry.

“Is it asking for spoilers?”

“It did that for like five minutes,” she said, tired now, feeling the adrenaline drain. “Now it’s just churning through endless posts all the agents wrote for the last three weeks. I guess they want to settle scores on the interpretations.”

Her phone rang. Anthony. She arched an eyebrow.

“I just heard from the agencies. The lockout was released. Whatever you did…” he trailed off, relieved. She thanked him and put the phone away. “It worked,” she gave Diego a martyr’s grin.

“We never stop in Tiburon for drinks like we say we will,” Diego said mildly, after a beat.

“Usually we’re leaving a datacenter at 3 AM.”