Olympus Device 1: The Olympus Device (28 page)

He was bleeding. “Dusty, you’re hurt,” she said,
pulling back and meeting his gaze.

“It’s nothing, Grace. O
ne of the tree limbs scratched me a little.”

She released her grip and pushed away, determined to see how badly he was
injured. It wasn’t pretty. The skin on his shoulder had been torn open for several inches, the blood pouring out of the wound. “I need to get you to the emergency clinic – right now!”

He
didn’t want to go. The spark between them had ignited a desire that wasn’t going away over some minor injury. Despite the blood, he moved to hold her again, but she resisted, her voice growing stern. “You’re not going to bleed to death in my yard. I’m going to get you a towel for that cut and then run you into town, and that’s that.”

She had stood and fretted as she watched the young doctor apply the staples to his shoulder. Again and again the painful device
had snapped and clicked, Dusty never complaining once. His only protest came with the order to wear a sling for at least a week until the injury healed.

Self-doubt and insecurity weren’t hallmarks of Grace Kennedy’s existence. She had been on her own for too long – survived in the cutthroat world of business to
o many years for such weaknesses to have any room within her. Now, watching someone pay a heavy price for her stupidity, now those emotions began to take hold.

They had driven home in silence, Grace embarrassed and feeling terrible over the entire affair, Durham stoic
, offering no commentary. She had helped him into his home, made sure he was comfortable as the pain medications began to make him drowsy.

Every day she went to visit him
, often twice daily until the sling came off and the staples were removed. Every single morning she checked in, helped around the house and made sure he wanted for nothing. But they never talked about what happened – the events of that day left to fade away and grow cold.

Now, today, in her tiny cell, Grace was feeling those same emotions of self-doubt and insecurity. Had her actions resulted in a good man being
threatened? Had her ego added to Dusty’s troubles? She could have played nice with the DOJ and FBI. She could have negotiated in private with the cocky, young lawyer, let him save face in front of the judge. Had her calls to various elected officials pushed the Feds over the edge as Monroe had insinuated?

Now, a huge reward was going to endanger the man she cared about, and she couldn’t help but feel part of it was her fault.
The cell grew cold, the chill generated by her helplessness. 

Dr. Witherspoon’s cell sounded, the caller ID showing “restricted,” a sure sign of someone important on the other end.

“This is Henry Witherspoon,” he answered in a neutral tone.

“Please stand by for the President of the United States,” a female voice responded.

Finally
, the ex-professor thought.
I was beginning to think our conversation had been forgotten.

Time seemed to drag on as he waited, anticipation building during the pause. After what seemed like an hour, he recognized the commander-in-chief’s voice. The boss wasn’t in a good mood.

“Henry, I assume you’ve heard about the incidents in Houston?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve got the governor, both senators, and a handful of representatives from Texas crawling up my ass. Everyone knows there is a madman down there randomly blowing things to hell. I want you to cease and desist all activities associated with the blue ribbon panel we discussed. This has become a law enforcement matter and is too politically charged for my administration to be involved.”

The man’s tone shocked the Secretary of Energy, the boss’s statement seeming to blame him personally for the activities in Houston. “Sir, I tried to warn you of the device’s potential. I must beg you to reconsider, Mr. President. We need to develop a strategy to limit the technology
, or this will end badly.”

“Oh, it’s going to end, Henry. It’s going to be over soon. I don’t care about the device or the inventor. I only want that crazed individual off our streets and either in a grave or behind bars.”

Rubbing his temple, the SecEng sighed, “I understand, sir.”

Having received agreement, the president’s voice softened. “Look… Henry… we can’t be seen as weak here. My oath demands I enforce the law of the land and protect the citizens of this nation. If word got out that we were
even considering negotiating with this Weathers fellow, all the folks with an axe to grind would be licking their chops. We would have every radical zealot in the world trying to extort us. Put your project on hold until things settle down. We’ll restart after the drama has played out.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

The call disconnected. Dr. Witherspoon stared at the silent phone, his eyes deep with concern. “You’re making a big mistake,” he mumbled to himself. “I hope we survive it.”    

The six large delivery vans were painted with the logos and color schemes of a nationally recognized parcel delivery company. Piggybacked
on trailers and pulled by over the road semis, the fleet was rushed to Houston after the Department of Justice was granted a FISA court warrant.

The truck’s exteriors were identical in every detail to the thousands of such vehicles that delivered packages all over America
. It was the perfect camouflage to hide in plain sight. The only noteworthy features on the outside of the units were an extra array of antennas mounted along the top, and the heavy-duty locking systems installed on both the rear and side doors. Even the drivers’ uniforms were a perfect counterfeit of their civilian counterparts.

The interior of the cargo area was a different story. Rows of sophisticated equipment lined one side of the space, the electronics mounted in shiny aluminum racks complete with shock absorbing rubber feet and extra cooling fans. Flat panel computer monitors, fixed keyboards, tracker balls
, and a host of switches, LED indicators, and meters adorned the consoles. The mobile mounting system had been copied from a Trident nuclear submarine.

Along the center aisle, two comfortable-looking executive chairs were affixed to the floor via stout-looking pedestals. The plush seating, designed for controllers to spend long shifts at the consoles, wouldn’t have been out of place in any well-appointed corporate office.

The opposite wall contained a large battery bank used to supply power to the array of microprocessor-controlled systems, as well as climate control for the operators and equipment.

Next to the batteries was a purpose
built storage rack that contained over 500 glass tubes. Similar in diameter to common laboratory test tubes, each container was almost two feet long and sealed with special rubber caps on the ends. Inside of these clear rods were the drones.

Slightly larger than a healthy Texas mosquito, each glass tube held a stack of the miniature surveillance drones, the insect-like devices stacked one atop the other like bullets in a belt of ammunition. Each container held 20 units, allowing the six trucks to launch a swarm of over 60,000 of the plastic
winged camera platforms.

The torso of each tiny robot consisted primarily of a power cell, a battery slightly smaller than the lithium-ion units used
in wristwatches. Small plastic wings, slightly larger than those that propelled nature’s blood-sucking pests, extruded from each side of the body. These aerodynamic wonders served both to obtain flight and as to recharge the unit’s battery with the miniscule solar panels embedded in them.

Instead of a skin-piercing, blood-extracting beak, a camera was mounted to the “head.” A marvel of miniature optical electronics, each drone could snap
low-resolution photographs in both normal and infrared spectrums of light.

The
robo-insect’s head was the control center. A small amount of computer memory, basic processor, GPS system, and transmitter were all contained within an area one quarter the size of a pencil eraser.

Each of the six legs was an antenna, two of the carbon fiber appendages used to communicate with the nest, or home van. The remaining four were
utilized as a GPS receiver, proximity and inter-hive communicator, radio frequency identification (RFI), and parabolic microphone.

Each micro-drone could be controlled individua
lly or programed to cooperate with a group. The standard operating procedure involved one of the vans slowly traveling the city streets, circling an area where observation was desired. At preprogrammed stops, normally intersections or traffic lights, a small sunroof slid open, and a tube of 20 “bugs” was released to fly away and begin their coordinated search patterns.

The range of the tiny flyers was restrictive, especially if the wind
were anything but calm. Limited to 400 meters of travel distance without stopping and recharging their batteries, the delivery van had to be relatively close to the target. Deployment in rain or winds higher than 10 mph was forbidden.

The latest iteration of the micro-drone software allowed for multiple vans to work together in order to provide coverage for larger, more complex environments. The six units heading for the Medical Center area were an unprecedented test of this new scalability.

The electronic brain inside of each van was designed purely to control the swarm. Facial recognition, photographic reconnaissance, and sound interpretation were performed hundreds of miles away in Bluffdale, Utah, home of the National Security Agency’s ultra-modern data center.

Any intelligence gathered by the swarm was transmitted back to the hive-van where it was bundled into long streams of binary data.
Microburst satellite transmissions carried terabytes of compressed images, readings and sound, bouncing the signals off a low-earth orbit, military communications bird. Those signals were received by the NSA’s supercomputers.

The NSA had once been the most secretive of any
US intelligence-gathering entities. Unlike the CIA, or other field-active government organizations, the NSA was created purely to perform electronic eavesdropping on telephone, radio, and later, internet activity.

Plagued by scandals, whistleblowers
, and congressional inquiries during 2013, many average Americans were shocked to learn that the all-powerful spying technologies possessed by the agency were being used to monitor domestic activity within their country’s borders.

Email accounts, cell phone records
, and internet sessions were being stored, sorted and analyzed on a scale that seemed like science fiction to most people. Politicians scrambled to publicly decry the agency’s domestic spying as a violation of privacy, while at the same time, in private, supporting the expansion of the NSA’s capabilities with secretive funding and lackluster congressional hearings.

On
e such investment was the construction of the world’s largest data center in Utah. While specific capabilities were kept ultra-secret, some information did leak out for public scrutiny. Despite the warnings of independent experts, the size, scale, and scope of the new installation received very little press coverage in the mainstream media.

People who built large networks of computer systems were astounded by the size of the NSA’s new facility. One Silicon Valley expert was quoted as saying that the agency could now store every detail, phone conversation, internet browsing session
, and email for the entire population of the planet – times 10. In reality, his prediction was short by several multiples.

As the giant, skyward pointing dishes received the hive’s streams of data, massive banks of super-computers began processing the drone’s output
at the Utah location.

RFI signals embedded in credit
cards, driver’s licenses, toll road passes, and security system key cards could be crosschecked and verified against numerous databases. Newer model automobiles with satellite radios and location tracking systems could be scanned, identified, and tracked.

Every conversation and phone call could be monitored, the NSA’s supercomputers correlating the signals provided by the cell phone carriers with the microphone built into the drone’s tiny leg. Voice imprints could be stored, analyzed
, and compared with existing records collected over dozens of years. As one intelligence analyst had said, “It is practically impossible to hide anything but thought from the drones, and we’re working on that.”

Monroe and Shultz watched the six hive-vans exit the staging area, each driver’s route
plotted in advance with logistical precision to provide as much area coverage as possible. The Medical Center was a downtown in its own right, complete with high-rise buildings, parking garages, and of course, apartment and condo buildings. It would require the enormous swarm to cover the entire area.

“If he’s in the search area, we’ll find him,” commented Monroe.

Shultz shook his head, “That’s what worries me the most.”

The charlatan parcel van designated Hive
One rolled to a stop at an intersection. After a check of the rear view mirrors, the driver pushed a hidden button on the steering column that signaled the controllers in the back that they were free from prying eyes and could deploy.

A small trapdoor in the roof of the cargo area was unhinged, a small peephole showing the yellow glow of the Houston
night sky visible through the opening. One of the glass tubes was inserted into the small portal, immediately followed by a few keystrokes on one of the keyboards.

Without any sound or fanfare, the topmost mosquito drone disappeared into the atmosphere. One by one
, the small machines exited the tube, each patiently waiting its turn. The container was empty in less than 20 seconds.

A small blue light flashed once on the dashboard, a signal that the driver could proceed to the next launch point. Similar launches were occurring all over the Medical Center area.

Less than one percent of the tiny robots failed – normally the fault of a manufacture’s defect or improperly assembled component. Another insignificant number fell victim to natural predators, such as spider webs and birds.

Of those deployed from the van this evening, t
wo were wiped out by a lawn sprinkler, another struck by a delivery truck speeding the opposite way. All in all, over 99% of the 10,000 drones survived the deployment and proceeded to dissect the grid that had been preprogrammed into their microprocessor brains.

Unit 2131 was launched three blocks from Dusty’s condo. Staged at the 13
th
position in the tube, it powered up its wings and rose vertically 12 feet above the parcel van’s roof, hovering there until it verified its position via GPS.

Using its camera and internal programming, it began
its predetermined course toward the southwest, avoiding trees, lampposts, and other non-structural obstacles. Once every ten seconds, #2131 verified its position, altitude, and course, its electronic brain intent on finding the flat surface of a structure.

The first building it encountered was actually a small warehouse of pharmaceutical supplies. Sending a signal back to the van’s controllers, the tiny drone was soon ordered to bypass the building as it was already being searched by 20 or so of its cousins.

The next image to be detected by #2131 was Dusty’s condo building. Again, permission was sought from the van’s computers, and this time the drone was ordered to begin scanning the third floor windows.

The
northernmost balcony was the closest opportunity, so the drone corrected its flight path and made for the destination. Slowing as it approached the sliding glass door, the mechanical bug made for the upper right hand corner of what its primitive brain recognized as a window and gently landed on the glass surface. Its camera-nose began searching for the brightest point of light, movement of shape differential equations surging through its internal processor.

Just like its living cousins, the drone’s legs were tipped with tiny suction cups that allowed it to defy gravity and remain flush against the glass. Light spectrum analysis quickly informed the #2131’s brain that it was looking at a curtain, blind or other window covering. Infrared temperature analysis informed the logic circuits that the window was closed and that no air was flowing nearby.

The parabolic microphone couldn’t detect any sound vibrations through the glass, so the mechanical bug started crawling from one corner to the next, its sensors seeking some differential in light, temperature, or sound.

Similar activities were occurring all over the search area. Some of the drones found open windows and entered offices, stores and residences without a second thought. Others detected doors being opened and invaded restaurants, bars
, and even the abundant hospitals in the area.

A flood of data started arriving in the vans. Some of the information was voice recordings o
f everyday conversations, while other drones found valid video targets and started snapping pictures.

The vans compressed and transmitted the massive amount of sound and video to Utah, where the world’s largest collection of
supercomputers began analyzing the input, filtering through every conceivable human activity while looking for any sign of one Mr. Durham Weathers.