Flakes

by Stuart Killbourn

“They were so small – like snowflakes, falling from the sky. In spring, they didn’t melt. That’s when we noticed, but it was too late.”

“What were they?” asks Rob.

The old man, Fitzpatrick, looks almost incredulous. He cannot believe our ignorance. He looks at our faces around the campfire in turn, disapproving.

“What were they?” he stammers. “The flakes are like sails, rigid yet resilient.”

We look unconvinced, yet we are willing listeners.

“Have you heard,” continues Fitzpatrick, “of the ladybird that allows a wasp larva to spin a cocoon between its legs? The ladybird stands guard, fending off predators – for weeks! Why?” He questions us with a gruff evocation of, “Tell me.” Fitzpatrick turns away in disgust. When he turns back, his face is imposed close to ours and his voice is low. We huddle closer to hear.

“The wasp – dinocampus coccinellae – stings the ladybird and lays an egg inside its soft underbelly. The ladybird gets turned into a zombie. The wasp controls it. Eventually, the larva eats its way out.”

We shiver in terror and look wide-eyed at each other. Fitzpatrick reaches under his long, black coat and pulls out a small metal hinged box. He holds it in front of us, unopened, in the palm of his left hand. Our mouths hang open. Like a magician, he fondles the lid with his right hand, saying:

“In here … is a flake. You can see it, but you mustn’t touch it.” His warning is stern and uncompromising. We nod slowly giving our consent.

“Millions of these arrived. We don’t know exactly … or where they came from. Look!”

He slides the lid from the box and we peer inside. There is a fleck of silvery ash lying on a bed of cotton wool. It is smaller than a postage stamp. It shimmers rather than shines; it emanates magic rather than technology. It seems to have no thickness, and it flexes and curls as Fitzpatrick’s ragged breath whispers over it.

“What’s it made of?” asks Rob.

“A good question. Look how it glistens in some light but not in others.”

We stretch our necks and try to glimpse these things. Some gape in wonder, but I am too far back to see much at all. Fitzpatrick continues:

“It’s made of graphene.”

“It’s beautiful,” coos Roxane.

“It’s vicious,” counters Fitzpatrick.

“How?”

“This will steal your mind. Like the wasp larva, this will eat into your brain. It will suck up your soul and leave you a dry husk.”

“It’s some sort of parasite?” questions Rob.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Aren’t the CIA doing something?” Rob is quite taken aback.

“If they’re doing something – it ain’t working, is it?”

With that, Fitzpatrick snaps the box shut and whisks it from sight. His laughter is maniacal. He delights in scaring us silly. We have been drawn in by the drama carried in his voice.

“You’re talking absolute rubbish!” shouts Zeph.

Fitzpatrick gives an aggrieved stare.

“We put these under microscopes – proper big ones. This is no simple fleck of dust – this is graphene – seven layers thick! You can see circuits on an atomic scale. It’s a microchip – but not as we could make. This was made by aliens.”

“Away,” spoils Zeph.

This time Fitzpatrick ignores the heckling.

“This is an intelligence we can only begin to guess at. They aren’t just blown on the wind by a chance gust. They open and curl to steer where they want to go – even against the wind. It’s a magnificent piece of machinery.”

“It doesn’t look like machinery,” cuts in Zeph.

“But this is a machine nonetheless – and a dangerous one!”

“Nah,” derides Zeph. “An Abraham tank – now that’s dangerous!”

“Only as dangerous as the man at the helm,” argues Fitzpatrick. “If you control the man,” he waves the metal box in our faces to make his point, “you control the machine.”

The point is well-made, and Zeph is silenced. Rob blurts out:

“If these flakes are machines, can’t we control them? Beat them at their own game?”

Fitzpatrick had shaken his head. It was clear that he hadn’t considered it a viable plan, but he couldn’t say why. It was this failure that planted a seed within us. We held on to that idea – that hope: that we could fight back. Our minds were young and malleable. We were not slaves to Fitzpatrick’s defeatism. The fire of freedom burned within us.

After Fitzpatrick retired to his tent, we sat round the campfire talking long into the night. We made a pact – a solemn pact. We drew blood and smeared it together as we pressed our wrists together. At least me, Rob and Zeph did – Roxane thought that was silly boy stuff, but she was one of us just the same. We vowed to stick together. We would be free. If we could not be free, our lives were worthless and best sacrificed in the struggle. We were young, naïve and fervent. It was a potent cocktail. Immediately, we made up passwords, secret signs and a whole new vocabulary around our self-appointed mission. It was a great adventure!

From that day, I became fearful of dust and of getting something in my eye. What if it was one of those flecks? I didn’t want to become a zombie. However, looking back, it was Zeph that made the first definite change. He passed up his place at Caltech to study mechanical engineering. He switched to computer science and was obsessively writing software routines for micro hardware interfaces within weeks. Likewise, Rob directed his studies towards chemistry. Whatever graphene was, he tasked himself with finding out all there was to know about it.

My own contribution? I sneaked into Fitzpatrick’s tent and stole his metal box. If we were going to hack this alien technology, we were going to need one to experiment on. We would need as many as we could get our hands on. As I have no particular talent for maths or computing or science in general, I took up every other function of our subversive network. My main role was propaganda. We were four. To crack this, we would need others to join and I set about recruiting them. The truth is I have told many lies. I’ve made many promises – all worthless and undoubtedly broken. I took Fitzpatrick’s box and showed it up and down the west coast: sometimes around campfires – as Fitzpatrick had shown us – at other times in frat houses, coffee shops and once at a church prayer meeting. There was no let-up; no situation inappropriate; no opportunity bypassed. Many – most I should say – considered me a crackpot or a fantasist. But with some, who were concerned that our government no longer served the needs of its citizens, the fire took hold, and they were relentless. And, over time, I got better at what I did.

I met with Rob and Zeph almost daily. We would stay up late running our freedom cells. I often crashed on Rob’s sofa instead of going home. The work was unforgiving. We had one flake; we would need more. We knew what to look for and, in time, others were found. We peeled them apart – layer from layer. Before long Zeph was able to construct rudimentary interfaces with the flakes. He could prod them and see reactions. He could make them curl – the mechanism they used to navigate. Zeph had several cells coding input signals and decoding the data we got out. He wanted to reverse engineer its operating system. There were long periods of absolutely no progress, but suddenly we would have one breakthrough followed by another and another. The rush we got from these was immense and pushed us through the barren periods. We were thirsty for more.

My political science classes suffered significantly. I was averaging just four hours sleep and rarely followed the thread of a lecture from start to finish – the ones I went to! But what the hell, I was not learning about what others had achieved: Marx, Engels or Mao. I was doing it myself! On the job training I reckoned.

Roxane, Roxy, assisted me. She kept me on schedule, submitting my course work and briefing me on the main themes. My favourite classes were tutorial groups where I stood up and debated right in the face of Professor Markle. He drew on dry dogma from yesterday’s leaders; I drew on my own experience – and my own experience was empirical, pragmatic and targeted at an audience under twenty-five. His lessons were obsolete; mine were timely. In one class, I called him a dinosaur. He did not appreciate it, but Roxy sniggered and gave me an approving wink. I had the affirmation of my peers.

It would be wrong to portray Roxy as some sort of personal assistant to me. She was, in her own right, brilliant. Her contribution was in the area of psychology – her major. She reasoned that people controlled by an alien chip would exhibit distinct behavioural traits. She developed the test – a series of profiling questions designed to detect the influence of extra-terrestrial control. The implementation that made the difference was a very limited version run across social media platforms. The test in its full scope became part of our initiation rite. Indeed, we identified candidates who were hosts! We had attracted sufficient interest to merit infiltration. This led to an official policy that members should report other members whose behaviour might suggest alien influence. That turned up practically no hosts, but it was very effective at maintaining discipline.

Roxy’s efforts provided what was to prove the singular most important breakthrough in cracking the flake. She compiled a list of high-confidence candidate hosts and we began to assign cells to watch them. When a middle-aged man collapsed and died from a heart attack in a remote location, the cell collected his body and brought in for examination. The post-mortem report described a flake embedded in his olfactory bulb. Scans showed tendrils reaching into the frontal lobe and visual cortex. The report poured petrol on the fire. We were enraged and redoubled our efforts.

It was shortly after this that Zeph made a suggestion. Well, not a suggestion as such, but he raised a possibility. He said we shouldn’t do this, but once out, it was hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Zeph had the idea that we shouldn’t just block the influence of the flakes, but that we could work out how to control them – to control the hosts – to control other people and use that to advance our cause. To do this we needed some test subjects. Rob had, by this time, developed quite a sophisticated interface with the graphene flakes and could piggy-back communication between flakes. By applying stimuli on one flake, another flake could be made to respond. We already had some sort of master command protocol, we just needed to probe how flakes controlled people and influenced their decisions and actions. I’m sorry to say that this is where our activities became questionable. Thus far, we had imagined liberating humanity would solely involve setting people free, but to achieve our goal we needed to imprison hosts in our underground laboratory and subject them to some quite horrific tests. Roxy argued that the psychological bias created by the flake was subtle and hosts were most likely completely unaware of its influence. That would have been bad enough, but we needed to probe the full extent of what we were up against. It is one thing when millions of small choices steer society one way or another – that might sway an election and put hosts into positions of power. But could a flake direct its host to physical violence – even to attack and kill specific targets? There was no evidence of it, but we needed to find out what was possible. And while we learned more and more about the flakes, they would be learning more and more about human physiology and how to control us! What was now a subtle bias might become specific and direct.

At one of our nocturnal meetings, Roxy reported that one of her cells had noticed a curious correlation. Certain right-wing extremist social media posts contained symbols with colour combinations of red and black. Users that Roxy had profiled as suspect hosts were disproportionately more likely to like and repost these messages – spreading a specific, destabilising agenda.

Sure enough, when we examined the responses of our test specimens – we struggled to call them people – there was a clear and coherent signal. Brain imaging revealed the symbols corresponded with patterns of tendrils linking the flake to the visual cortex. We could see how the input signal was generated and it was only a matter of time before we identified the output signal that controlled the host.

Zeph and his network of analysts were fired up to categorise the control signals and causal actions. In less than a week, we could almost drive a host human using inputs to another flake. The host specimens would behave normally, we would take control for minutes at a time and then they would regain cognition with no knowledge whatsoever of what they had done. It was an extreme form of hypnosis. From that point we had no doubt that whoever sent these flakes had no good intention towards us. Their agenda was complete control of humanity.

When Rob was shot in a bungled robbery of a convenience store, we were spooked. The perpetrator was never identified. Roxy, posing as a witness, was interviewed by several of the police detectives handling the case. She reported that each one tested positive to her host profile test. Their attitude was dismissive – if not obstructive. It was a cover up.

Rob lived. The bullet deflected from a rib and missed his heart. He spent weeks in hospital, which really set us back. I told Rob to lie low – to recover. He refused. He was angry, but I insisted.

This period was the most treacherous. Zeph and I – and Roxy too – felt intensely paranoid. We were constantly looking over our shoulder. I held it together by sheer bravado. Roxy applied some psychoanalytical technique. It was Zeph who cracked. Roxy tried to talk to him, but he just could not cope. He was also at the sharp end of our work with the test specimens – and I have to say that was thoroughly unpleasant.

That left just me and Roxy. We are all that is left of those kids gathered round that campfire listening to Fitzpatrick. But we have cracked the codes and hijacked the flakes’ network. We learned that the flakes come to us riding on beams of light that blew them – literally – at near light speed across the interstellar chasm. We traced them back to a solar system a mere twenty light years away. The distance is unimaginable – impossible for us to strike back. All we can do is watch carefully and fend off each attack. Indeed, flakes arrive in sporadic waves – cosmic flurries of alien insurgence. We have detected and co-opted each one – at no small cost.

Can we claim it? No. Who would listen to us? But we have control. We have access to government secrets from any nation we wish. Our hand is on the tiller and we steer. If one day our alien adversaries show up with more than flakes, we will need to be ready. There is me and Roxy and our network of cells. No-one has all the pieces of the puzzle – except me and Roxy. We know everything; we control everything. You may not be as free as you would like to believe, but you feel free, and that’s what counts.

I finished my dissertation and Professor Markle gave it a pass with merit. He doesn’t exactly know why – he can’t quite remember, but he did. If running the world doesn’t deserve that, what does? I used to question why politics was considered by some to be a science – but now I know: the system can be analysed; behaviour can be predicted; outcomes can be controlled. It can be hacked. I know. I’ve done it.

You may ask: did Roxy ever take her own test – or administer it to me? No, she did not.