THE GUN-FOR-HIRE

There are countless dogs running around his property, and when I arrive for our interview, he's crouched in his yard, tussling with a few of them.

"All rescues," he explains, after dusting himself off and leading me inside his home. "I just can't stand the idea that there's a lot of dogs out there without good owners. So I try to take in as many mutts as I can, and treat 'em well."

I ask him where he finds them. "The pound?"

"Oh, all over," he says. "There's a lot of bad dog owners out there. And very few people who're willing to pick up their slack."

I'm not new to this game. I've been a military contractor for the better part of three decades. And I thought I'd seen it all, but the stuff they had us doing in those early days was ugly, even by the standards I was used to.

At first, it was just your usual private security work. Restoring order in the wake of Bastille Day II, guaranteeing peoples' safety in public spaces, that sort of thing. My guys never even had to fire their weapons, in those first few weeks. Just the sight of us rolling in was enough to scare the shit out of would-be rioters.

The rise of the private, separatist militia groups changed the equation, though. The military realized that these groups, armed to the teeth, as they were, with infinite guns and ammo, might actually be able to take advantage of the economic chaos and establish sovereign territories within the United States.

Unless, of course, somebody came in and cracked down on them.

Word had filtered down from the top that the administration's leadership didn't want to be associated with the bloodshed that would have to ensue. They were already pretty skittish about the stuff they'd had to do to secure the borders, you see. So they asked if the military could find a way to crack down on the separatist militias in a way that salvaged the military's reputation. The obvious model to follow, then, was the Russian one: work alongside private groups that are technically not associated with the military. Groups like mine.

We were told explicitly that—even though we'd be getting supplies, training, and orders from the military—we were never to associate ourselves with the military. We ordered to identify ourselves as members of a "pro-union patriotic group." Basically, a militia specifically for the purpose of taking out other militias. If anybody, especially reporters, asked us why we were motivated to go after separatist groups with lethal force, we were to always give the same answer: "We intend to preserve the republic." In those days, shit was so crazy, and so many people were out for bloodshed, that a lot of people accepted our explanation at face value. They wanted it to be true. And so they believed that it was.

I was assigned leadership of the California-Nevada branch of the "pro-union patriots" militia. The military brass figured they could trust me in that role, because I'd always been a good partner for them, even in my younger days, when I was working for contracting groups that were on the more extreme end of the spectrum. THE GENERAL himself gave me my orders. That was a pleasant surprise for me—it was the first time I'd seen him since the early 2000s, when he had personally shut down my outfit's bid to replace American troops in Afghanistan with private contractors.

We got the call about Pablo Gnosh's big event a couple of days before it was due to show. Their publishing person had hinted heavily that Mr. Gnosh had succeeded in building a "super-sized" replicator. They had some stupid fancy brand name for it, but immediately the term "industrial rep" stuck.

The military got word through their sources in the press, and they put my group on alert.

If, indeed, there were super-sized reps, the military would obviously want to get their hands on one. Our orders were to hang around just a mile or so from where the big reveal event was supposed to happen. After the press left, we'd simply escort in some of our government buddies and peacefully commandeer control of the facility. The government had a vested interest in making sure that industrial reps didn't fall into the wrong hands, so they'd also have us work with Mr. Gnosh to make sure that these things spread in a more controlled manner than the smaller units had.

You've heard the story about how it all went to shit. Before Mr. Gnosh was even done with his big reveal, one of those damn separatist militias rolled in and took control of the facility. Killed a ton of people, including the mayor of Los Angeles. Really wild shit. We were watching all of it from above. We had a live video feed from a drone. But it wasn't immediately clear to us what our move should be.

I called my contacts in the military and they were basically freaking out, unable to make a call. Then a call straight from THE GENERAL came in. He just said, "Wipe 'em out. Just try to take one or two alive. Keep the big reps safe." At that, he hung up.

My guys were counting something like two dozen bogies. So I figured we'd just come in with double the number of men and four times the firepower. Shock and awe.

We had a couple of full-blown tanks and three attack helicopters. With all that plus 10 or so drones with guns and a few guys in Jeeps, I was pretty sure we'd get the job done.

We led with the helis, blasting up everything outside of the hangar. That took out about half of their men, leaving only a dozen or so alive inside.

We got the drones hovering above the hangar and blasted a bigass hole through the front door, then flew in with the drones. That's when things went sideways, because it turned out that the guys inside were already using the big reps to make their own drones—lots of them.

It was total chaos in there. Bullets flying everywhere. I directed my guys flying the drones to focus on any humans in the hangar and ignore the drones. Their drones seemed to be programmed to ignore their own guys and specifically take out any other drones coming near. We took out all but a couple of the humans, which pretty well shut down the production of new drones, but then it was a real mess taking out the few drones that remained. The last of our drones got wiped out, leaving a ton of the enemy bots still active.

I thought about sending in men on foot to clean up the last of them, but my better judgment told me to just wait for backup. No sense spilling blood to shoot up a bunch of goddamn robots.

Within about 15 minutes or so, our military friends showed up with a whole new wave of drones. God damn, they had a lot of those things.

Anyway, they went in and made a huge mess of things. By the end of it, two out of the four industrial reps inside were unusable, and there weren't any militiamen left alive for interrogation.

Our military friends didn't seem to mind. Right away they stripped down one of the working reps for parts and scanned its pieces into the last remaining industrial rep.

Then, like clockwork, they started printing out new pieces and assembling them around the hangar. By the end of that night, they had a dozen industrial reps working away, printing parts which they loaded onto trucks.

It got really wild when they realized that they could just take an entire truck loaded with giant rep parts and scan it and replicate it whole. They loved the idea of printing out new jeeps and tanks in only 30 seconds.

For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me how much of a massive difference this was from the "old" world of regular-sized reps. Full-size vehicles, loaded with rep parts, were coming out of the hangar like it was the world's quickest assembly line. It was like something even Henry Ford himself couldn't have imagined.

Later that evening, a new wave of military guys rolled in and announced that they'd be using half of the available industrial reps. They had these massive crates, full of I don't know what. And they just kept pumping them out. Trucks with crates, unlabeled. I asked one of them what was inside, and he just shrugged. I don't think even they knew.

But I have an idea of what it was.

What?

You know, it was only a few days after this that people first started reporting strange stuff all along the coastlines, and the national borders. You remember. People saying stuff about a "screeching darkness."

Some of my guys went down to the Rio Grande and came back with reports. They said it wasn't like a wall. It was more like… a curtain. Hanging straight down from heaven.

They said it looked like darkness itself. Totally black, and making an indescribably awful noise. One guy said to me, "It looked like the end of the Earth, and it sounded like people screaming in the fire pits of hell."

The things in those crates I saw... I believe it was drones. But not the big drones you and I remember from the before times.

It was little tiny ones. Millions of them.

The very first batches, of what we now call The Swarm.