Swarm

Of course that could never happen. My old life was as dead as Ancient Rome. I understood too late that one of the defining features of a truly extraordinary life is its irreversibility. Once you have hurdled half a dozen standard deviations it is not easy to push your life back up to the peak of Gauss’s mountain.

I dozed dejected for some time, until a knock on the door roused me. Jesse.

“C’mon,” he said, “I’ll introduce you to the titan.”

Chapter 56

I followed Jesse through Anya’s uncle’s sumptuous labyrinth, past servants like faceless shadows, into a corner room lit by two huge windows that revealed wide swathes of very expensive urban real estate. A disused easel sat in a corner; its place of honour had been usurped by an ebony table laden with MacBook Pros. Anya sat before one of them. Jesse and I sat beside her in leather swivel chairs so soft and comfortable I never wanted to get up again.

“So. Argus,” Jesse said. “You know the word panopticon?”

I shook my head.

Anya explained: “It once meant a prison where all privacy is extinguished. Today it means London. This is the world’s surveillance capital. More than one million closed-circuit cameras in this city, millions more in the rest of the country. The UK government has recently connected all those they control into a single network called Argus, after Argus Panoptes, the titan with a hundred eyes. With it you can survey almost all of London, if you are a senior police officer or politician.”

“Big Brother’s wet dream,” Jesse said. “But we prefer two-way windows to one-way glass. So with the help of some friends, we hacked into their panopticon.”

LoTek, I thought, taking the news almost casually. My capacity for surprise appeared to have been numbed by overuse.

Anya indicated the nearest MacBook. “Without leaving this room we can look through any camera in London, or go through six weeks of archives. We’ve been amassing dossiers on politicians opposed to civil liberties. Some live very interesting lives indeed. We intend to teach them exactly how the loss of privacy can lead to the loss of liberty.”

“And you think we can use Argus to find Ortega’s drones.”

“I’m sure of it. And when we do, we will need Sophie’s override sequence from you.”

“Find them how exactly? I’m guessing his people aren’t exactly in the habit of turning to the nearest camera and shouting ‘Hi, Mom! After I kill the G8, I’m going to Disneyland!’”

“There are ways, James. Don’t underestimate us. But we need to know that the override will work. Is it just a command sent over the drones’ control channel? Is there a chance they might filter it out?”

I smiled thinly, remembering the sense of giddy triumph I had felt when my swarm hack had succeeded. “They tried that in Mexico. I found a workaround. But you need physical access to at least one of their drones.” Only identically programmed neural nets could form a swarm; we couldn’t take over their drones with one of our own.

“Why? How does it work?”

“The intra-swarm net. The one they use to communicate with each other.”

I explained the details, then used the computer nearest me to log on to Hushmail and forward the override code to Anya and Jesse.

“Excellent,” Anya said, with relief and something like triumph in her normally cool voice. I supposed she had been stressing out at the thought of Ortega’s unstoppable drone army. Jesse gave her a curious look, apparently as surprised as I by the sudden crack in her ice-queen armour. “Now,” she continued quickly, “all we must do is find them.”

“How?” I asked.

Jesse said, “Argus. Give me one thread and I’ll unravel their whole veil.”

“Great. What thread?”

“Your BFF Dmitri. We figure he’s been here in London sometime in the last month.”

“Maybe not. They’ve got a whole team of people. He wasn’t the one who actually trained the neural nets. But OK, maybe. So what?”

“First we need his face. We’ve assembled a series of photos, Russian hackers from his era.” Jesse indicated a minimized slideshow icon on my computer. “See if he’s in there.”

The slideshow was a motley assortment of group shots from hacker conventions, webcam screenshots, stills from surveillance cameras, and many of inexplicable provenance. One sequence appeared to be from a bear hunt. Another featured two dozen geeky-looking individuals, all dressed as Santa Claus, roaming the streets of Tokyo. I was nearing the end, and losing hope, when I finally recognized a familiar face.

“Dana,” I said sharply, and pointed at a cell-phone group shot taken in a bar called PROPAGANDA. Its neon sign was in English but all other written material was Cyrillic. “That’s her. Dmitri’s girlfriend.”

“You’re sure?” Jesse asked.

I hesitated. “Almost.” I clicked to the next shot. The same group, with some kind of canal behind them. Dmitri and Dana stood in the middle, his arm around her. “And that’s him,” I said excitedly. “What is that, Venice?”

“St. Petersburg,” Anya said.

According to its metadata photo was two years old. But hadn’t Dmitri said they had met only last year? And in Moscow, not St. Petersburg? I supposed it didn’t matter. “Great. Now what?”

“Now we find them.”

“Right. How?”

“We outsource the first stage,” she said. “Finding their real names and their data shadows. Online handles, profiles, email addresses, everything. Grassfire has people at Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. LiveJournal, that’s very popular in Russia. Major backbone providers, mobile phone networks, databases everywhere. We should know in an hour whether Dmitri or Dana have logged on to any such accounts recently. If so, we can isolate the individual computers they used. If even one of those computers was in London, they are ours.”

“Huh.” I was something like awed.

“Are you frightened that we can do this? Trace them from an old picture to their current location?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said. “You should be. It frightens me too. That’s why we must act while we can. This is only the beginning of the panopticon dystopia.”

“But it’s OK in your hands,” I said. “Because you guys are the good kind of omniscient eyes and ears operating completely outside the law with no checks or balances. Right?”

Jesse grinned. “Yes, exactly. We’re benevolent dictators. How could anyone possible think otherwise?”

“How indeed. That’s so comforting.”

“Ain’t it? But the mushroom cloud of ubiquitous surveillance is not about to go back into its uranium casing. All we can do is ensure that the transparency is two-way, so that you can spy on me spying on you.”

I shrugged. “Who has the time these days?”

At that Anya laughed aloud. It hadn’t seemed that funny to me, but I guessed it tickled the Russian sense of humour.

“Come,” she said, standing, “let’s have lunch in the attic.”

She used the intercom to issue commands in Russian, then led us down a hallway and up marble stairs, to a steel door with rubber seals. The sudden light and colour and fragrance beyond made me gasp. The entire top floor of Kharlamov’s mansion was a floral greenhouse, full of whole fields of flowers arrayed in swirling patterns.

Pathways of raked gravel led between the vividly coloured beds and ziggurats. There were delicate orchids, each in its own glass cage, and rosebushes clipped into the shapes of little girls. A green cylinder seven feet tall stood in a place of honour, droopingly erect and strangely skeletal, like a carnivorous alien from another world.

“The corpse flower,” Anya said. “It blooms only once a year.”

I said inadequately, “This is amazing.”

The air was warm and damp. Except for a web of thin steel girders the roof and walls were solid glass. She led