Atomic Swarm Read online

  For a moment, Jackson froze. The picture of the men holding their stomachs and the description of their reaction to the ‘gas’ were very familiar to him. The MeX1 dot.robots which Jackson and the other recruits had flown on missions for Lear had carried something called a Bass Bomb. The device – more like a very sophisticated speaker than a bomb – had caused exactly the same reaction in its victims. Its short blast of low-frequency sound didn’t permanently damage a target, but caused them to lose control of their bowels in incredible pain.

  But Lear was dead – MeX had been disgraced and closed down.

  Jackson shook his head. The notion that the robbery could have been carried out by MeX robots was preposterous. He needed to get over this sense of paranoia. For a good few months after Lear’s disappearance, Jackson had seen connections to the maniacal billionaire and his rogue robots everywhere he looked. In his mind, every blacked-out 4x4 he spotted held MeX mercenaries waiting to fling the doors open and drag him inside. If ever someone he didn’t know walked behind him on his way from school for more than a few minutes, he had them down for a kidnapper. And he’d pored over the newspaper and Internet accounts of Lear’s disappearance, finding it hard to obtain the kind of irrefutable evidence of the man’s death that he craved. For several weeks, he had become so paranoid he didn’t leave the flat at all.

  The MIT scholarship had been the chance for a clean start. Since moving to America, and getting wrapped up in the heavy load of college and lab work, Jackson had slowly got his head back together.

  You’re way too busy to be worrying about ghosts, he told himself, scrunching the newspaper page into a tight ball and throwing it in the bin. Lear is dead.

  CHAPTER 7

  Jackson’s dad had one holiday outfit, regardless of where he was going – pressed white short-sleeved shirt, white nylon football shorts, black socks and trainers. His legs were so pale they were almost luminous.

  Jackson waved vigorously as his father made his way through the crowd at airport arrivals, and greeted him with a big hug. He hadn’t realized quite how much he’d missed him.

  Mr Farley reciprocated with an awkward one-armed hug. ‘You been waiting long, son?’ he asked formally.

  ‘Long enough.’ Jackson had actually arrived an hour and a half early in his excitement to see his dad. ‘You got any other bags?’

  ‘Nope. This is me,’ said Mr Farley, holding up a small cracked faux-leather kit bag. It was so old, Jackson was sure he remembered seeing it in photographs of his dad when he was a boy.

  It wasn’t a warm day, but Mr Farley insisted that the windows in the cab be left rolled down as they made their way to Cambridge, Massachusetts. ‘Eight hours breathing other people’s air,’ he announced, before apologizing for his post-flight grumpiness. ‘So this is Boston?’ he said, staring out of the window as the taxi tracked alongside the Charles River. ‘I still can’t believe you’re studying here.’ He looked across at Jackson. ‘Your mother would have been proud of you.’

  After that, the job of keeping the conversation going was left to Jackson. He was used to this; his dad had always been a better listener than he was a talker. Jackson filled the brief journey time by recounting everything he knew about the approaching Boston skyline and the buildings of the university.

  ‘Ever wondered what the front door of a nuclear reactor looks like?’ asked Jackson as they cruised past the Fire Proof building. He pointed to what he knew looked like any old warehouse door.

  ‘Your university has its own nuclear reactor?’ his dad asked, slightly horrified.

  ‘Sure. MIT is one of a handful of colleges in the world that trains the nuclear physicists of the future!’ said Jackson. He imagined himself introducing his dad to the wonders of Cambridge and MIT and enjoying the look of amazement on his face.

  The cab crossed an intersection and pulled up at a modern-looking hotel. Jackson waited while his dad checked in and then the two of them walked the short distance back to the Fire Proof building. Jackson led his father down to the basement level and they entered the vast laboratory. His dad stopped in his tracks, clearly amazed.

  ‘Cool, huh?’ said Jackson nonchalantly, but secretly pleased with his dad’s reaction to the huge laboratory.

  Mr Farley gazed around the room, his eyes tracing the long line of scientific apparatus that stretched along the back wall and then stopping at the elevator cage containing Tin Lizzie.

  ‘That’s a Hummer, right? Like the American army use?’ Jackson’s dad asked, pointing at Brooke’s car.

  ‘Yes and no. It’s a Hummer H3R, the civilian version of what the military use. It belongs to Brooke. It’s self-driving, Dad.’

  ‘It drives itself? Really? Isn’t that dangerous?’

  Jackson laughed. His father had in fact, unknowingly, once seen Tin Lizzie in action. It was via a remote link on Jackson’s bedroom computer monitor – Jackson had linked to the car and driven it remotely in an attempt to rescue Brooke from a hideaway in the mountains of Arizona. He recalled how his dad had made him switch off what he took for a ‘driving game’. It was an act that almost led to the two-tonne off-roader flying off a cliff with Brooke still in it.

  There was a lot that Jackson had never been able to tell his father. It was the thing he hated most about his double life – having to hide his involvement with MeX and then make up excuses for the fact he’d become a virtual recluse after the information that he and Brooke gave had led to the downfall of the organization. It was hard to lead a normal existence when you feared for your life. He’d told his dad he was feeling a little down, which was their code for the times when they missed Jackson’s mum. But even that didn’t wash after a couple of months. His dad had tried to talk to him, which Jackson knew had been difficult for someone so uncomfortable with expressing feelings, but even then Jackson could never have told him the real truth.

  Jackson looked at his dad. He was gingerly fingering a large piece of wispy transparent film, slung between a desk and the wall.

  ‘It’s just a hammock. Feel free to climb in,’ said Jackson.

  ‘But it’s made of cling film, isn’t it? Won’t it just rip?’

  ‘It’s a super-strong cling wrap, made of a nano-engineered compound which emulates the organic thread of a spider. You’ll be fine; that section alone is strong enough to support the weight of a car.’

  Farley Senior shook his head in disbelief. ‘Astonishing. But I’ll give it a miss if it’s all the same.’

  ‘You might like to see these,’ said Jackson, indicating the section of the laboratory reserved for the robots. If there was one part of his and Brooke’s work at MIT that Jackson most wanted his dad to see, it was the robots. Both Jackson and Brooke had a passion for designing, building and programming all manner of robotic machines – Brooke for the potential of how they could help people, and Jackson for the love and utter fascination of the science involved. Jackson knew his move to America had been hard on his dad. He hoped the line-up of robots might help his dad to realize it was all worthwhile.

  Jackson walked along the robot line-up. ‘Say hello to Punk, Verne, Fist, Tug and Tread.’

  Each machine was in its designated pen, the aluminium structures built to support them so they could be charged and worked on from several angles.

  ‘I like the look of the yellow one. Fist, was it? What’s he do?’

  ‘A bit of everything really. The clue’s in his name: Fire, Industry, Security, Tactical. He’s based around a combination of memory metal and hydrogen fuel-cell technology.’

  ‘Memory metal?’

  ‘Strands of steel filament, which tighten when an electrical current is passed through them and then relax when it’s turned off. Fist is made up of four separate robotic hands that when combined, are as powerful as a car crusher.’

  ‘But its hands can only be three times bigger than mine. How can they produce that amount of pressure?’

  ‘You want the technical answer?’ asked Jackson, relishing the opportunity
to impress his dad with his knowledge.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Quantum mechanical and electrostatic effects present on the nanoscale,’ said Jackson.

  Mr Farley’s eyes widened. Good, thought Jackson, he’s impressed.

  ‘And what are they… remote control?’ asked Mr Farley.

  ‘We call them dot.robots – because they’re remotely controlled via the Internet. And this is what we use to control them!’ Jackson pulled his mobile phone from his pocket.

  ‘If the robot I’m controlling can see – like Punk, Tread or Verne – I can feed the video stream from their cameras to the handset or any other connected device.’

  Jackson held the phone up so his father could see it. Lacking any buttons or even a hint of a screen, it looked, to all intents and purposes, like a thin, shiny, white plastic slab.

  Jackson handed the phone to his dad who flipped it over in his hands a few times before looking up and shrugging his shoulders in bewilderment.

  ‘Touch where you think the screen should be,’ suggested Jackson.

  His dad did as instructed and the whole surface of the phone transformed into a full-colour screen, showing a virtual desktop and various icons.

  ‘The plastic contains microscopic phosphorescent particles – front and back, the whole phone is one big display.

  Jackson’s dad shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘And you’ll love this…’ Jackson walked over to Brooke’s desk and grabbed another identical-looking handset. He held them both up in front of his dad and they clipped together, magnetically, end to end. Immediately the colour screen extended across the second phone, forming one long widescreen display on the surface of both devices.

  Jackson pulled the phones apart again, placing one of the handsets on the desk and keeping the other in his hand.

  ‘One phone is all I need to operate any of the dot.robots in this lab. I can control them by touching virtual controls on the phone’s surface or by simply drawing gestures in the air!’

  ‘And you worked on all these things?’ asked Mr Farley.

  ‘Yes, Dad. I worked up the numbers. I do the maths for all of Brooke’s projects. Here’s something she’s working on right now.’

  Jackson motioned to a pile of carbon fibre and titanium components on a desk. ‘Brooke calls it her portable robot Chauffeur. It’s a miniaturized version of the robotics that automate Tin Lizzie. They are small enough to be stored in a holdall. The kit of parts can be retro-fitted to just about any four-wheeled vehicle to make it self-driving.’

  ‘Jackson, this is incredible work you’re doing. Really. But I hope you’re also doing your schoolwork. To leave this place with a degree, at your age… you could pick any job you wanted. And name your price!’

  Jackson didn’t mind the gentle rebuke. It was really important to him that his dad understood and appreciated the work he and Brooke did – even though his praise, as was his dad’s way, came with a piece of practical advice attached.

  ‘It’s college work, not schoolwork, Dad, and everything I do here counts towards it. I only have to attend a couple of lectures a week to cover my degree. The mathematical theory I can do with my eyes shut. Generally, it’s stuff I’ve already read up on – infinite-dimensional algebra, probability theory… one of my lecturers even turned up dressed as Darth Vader! He did the whole hour on quantum cosmology without taking his mask off!’

  Jackson could see from the change in his dad’s expression that he wasn’t too keen on much more detail – he’d just wanted to know his son was meeting his academic obligations. Jackson changed tack. ‘What d’you say we get something to eat? You must be bushed after the flight.’

  They ate at the hotel, which Jackson was impressed to find had some of MIT’s most famous mathematical equations for wallpaper and patent applications for pictures. Jackson couldn’t be sure, but as they sat in the hotel restaurant, he thought his father seemed more distant than usual, and he had to work doubly hard to keep the one-sided conversation going. Jackson put it down to jet lag and his dad’s need to catch up on sleep.

  But the next morning when Jackson met his dad at the hotel to do a tour of Cambridge, it didn’t seem like much had changed. His dad was so quiet that Jackson couldn’t remember a time when he’d had to talk so much. His self-styled urban safari took in his favourite book-shops, some of MIT’s kookier buildings like Simmons Hall, the dorm building opposite his own which he thought looked like a giant space invader, and the higgledy-piggledy Stata Center, a collection of crooked, metal-clad towers that looked like they should buckle and fall at any minute. They walked through endless corridors and giant lecture theatres and laboratories, and roamed the labyrinthine service tunnels that snaked underneath the campus and dated back to before the Second World War.

  But none of Jackson’s campus tour elicited any more than nods and token questions. Jackson’s jet-lag theory began to look shaky and he wondered if his dad had something on his mind he wasn’t telling him.

  Finally, they arrived at the top of some wide stone steps leading to Gillian Court, the name given to the wide lawn below the university’s Great Dome. ‘And when I want space to think,’ said Jackson pointedly, looking at his dad, ‘I come here.’

  Mr Farley looked at the beautiful lawn as shards of golden sunlight cut through a thick canopy of garish purple clouds and formed perfect geometric shapes on it. Rain was a certainty.

  The two of them sat at the top of the steps, as Jackson often did, gazing out over the lawn before the inevitable downpour came. Jackson and his dad always did silence well; it was part of what it took for them to live together. All the same, Jackson was now convinced there was something about this particular lack of conversation that wasn’t right. Even after nine months apart, he was aware of a tension between himself and his father, not unlike the pressure of the gathering storm.

  ‘Is everything OK, Dad?’ he asked.

  It was as if the question was an injection of something Mr Farley needed to wake him up. He got to his feet, took a couple of thoughtful paces, and then turned back to Jackson.

  ‘I have something important to talk to you about,’ he said. ‘Your mother and I have kept something from you, Jackson. We agreed to tell you on your twelfth birthday, but it’s been such an extraordinary year and what with you getting ready to come here and everything… I couldn’t find the right time.’

  ‘Just tell me,’ Jackson said, trying to help his dad who, for some reason, was obviously struggling.

  ‘Jackson,’ he said, his body now still, but his voice unsteady. ‘I am not your biological father.’

  Jackson couldn’t speak.

  His dad looked unsure what to do next and so carried on, his voice wavering as he spoke. ‘When your mum and I first met, she already had you. You were just over a year old. We discussed telling you so many times, Jackson, but we were afraid it might change things between us. But it shouldn’t change things.’ He bent down towards Jackson. ‘That is… I’m still your dad!’

  But Jackson could only sit frozen on the stone step, stunned. ‘You’re not, though, are you?’ he said. ‘And if you’re not my real father, then who is?’

  His dad visibly flinched. ‘That’s just it, Jackson, I don’t know. Your mother refused to tell me. She insisted it was between you and her.’

  ‘But she’s dead!’ Jackson was surprised how angrily he’d fired the words out. ‘You can’t tell me something like that and just leave me hanging!’

  ‘I’m sorry. She wouldn’t tell me. What could I do, son?’

  Son. The word seemed to hang in the air.

  Jackson couldn’t help it; his emotions suddenly became a combustible mix. ‘You could have insisted she told you!’ he yelled. ‘You could have made her tell you.’

  ‘You know Mum.’ Mr Farley tried a gentle smile. ‘What chance did I have of changing her mind, son?’

  ‘Stop calling me that!’ Jackson intended the comment as a slap.

  The noxious mixture
of anger and hurt continued to bubble away, making Jackson feel hot. Even the rain, which was now sweeping in across the lawn and dancing up the steps, couldn’t cool him down.

  ‘I wish you’d hadn’t come here. I’ve been fine without you!’ he said, turning and storming towards the Great Dome.

  ‘Jackson, wait! We need to talk about this!’

  But Jackson had already disappeared inside the building.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jackson saw his dad once more before he left for London. It was at the airport departure gate. Brooke had frog-marched him there. His dad hugged him, but Jackson didn’t hug him back. His dad also gave him his birthday present. Jackson put the small parcel in his coat pocket, where it had stayed ever since.

  That was five days ago. Jackson had hardly left his dorm since, surfacing to buy pizza and chocolate then returning to his room. He’d managed to avoid everyone’s attempts to contact him, including Brooke’s, which came in the form of hourly text messages. She’d even sat outside his dorm room just talking, before he told her he was fine and to leave him alone. Jackson just couldn’t seem to clear his head. All he could do was read. Books were good for numbing the pain. He wasn’t particularly bothered what he read, but facts were good – advanced number theory, statistics, a thick textbook he’d borrowed from J.P. called Artificial Intelligence – they were good antidotes, some reality.

  It was J.P.’s book that indirectly led to Jackson eventually leaving his pit of a room. The author, a retired robotics expert called Professor Singer, was giving a lecture on campus. Since he was reading the book, Jackson thought he might as well see what the professor had to say.

  ‘Singer is an oddball,’ J.P. had said when he handed Jackson the book. ‘But he’s also a genius! He’s been designing computerized brains since before I was in diapers.’

  The lecture hall was like the auditorium of a theatre. Rows of seating formed a crescent in front of a large stage where a small man in a white lab coat sat behind a desk, reading. Beside him stood something, roughly a metre and a half high, mysteriously draped in a black cloth.