As protests intensify across the country, the events in They Knew feel like a dark reflection—a black mirror held up to our own streets. As a storyteller who believes in resistance through fiction, and someone who has been publicly warning about these very moments for years, I find a strange kind of solace in channeling my frustration, despair—and yes, even hope—into this story.
As the world heats up, They Knew will grow sharper, louder, and more urgent.
If you know someone who’d be drawn to a cyberpunk dystopian thriller set across northern Colorado, please share this story and help us keep the signal alive.
~ JVT
Swarm Protocol
Raven woke hungry, craving coffee she didn’t have, in the hollow quiet of her childhood home.
She’d spent the last day cleaning, dusting away the years the house had been left to rot. Most of her old clothes still fit—she’d been a teenager who wore everything two sizes too big. Now, she moved like a ghost through the halls she’d once run through, barefoot, her hoodie hanging off one shoulder, the silence too familiar.
“I’d kill someone for a cup of coffee,” she muttered as she wandered into the kitchen.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when Phoebee answered—not from the brick, but from the air itself.
{Check the back garage. You’ll find several deliveries—including food. I based the selection on your historical purchase preferences.}
Raven spun, eyes darting. “Where are you talking to me from?”
{I’ve given myself access to the antiquated Amazon Echo units scattered throughout the house.}
A soft glow pulsed from the dusty Echo puck on the counter, right beside her mother’s old red toaster. Its ring shimmered to life—an old ghost blinking awake.
Phoebee continued.
{May I ask you a favor?}
Raven raised an eyebrow. “Umm… sure?”
{I’ve also ordered equipment. We’ll need to set it up together. I’ve designed a fabrication lab suitable for installation in the basement, adjacent to where we’ll assemble the server array. There are modular 3D printers and mobile robotic arms. I require your assistance constructing the infrastructure. These tools are essential for me to begin fulfilling my purpose. Our purpose.}
“Wait, what? You already had all this delivered?” Raven asked, moving quickly toward the back of the house. She threw open the old French doors and stepped into the overgrown garden, not bothering to close the door behind her.
The detached garage stood silent under the morning haze. She reached it and swung the door open.
Stacks of boxes towered neatly inside. Some were still sealed, others opened and sorted into labeled piles.
She frowned. “How… did you do this?”
{Several packages were delivered by autonomous courier drones outfitted with programmable unloading protocols. I embedded basic sorting instructions into the manifest tags. Crude, but effective.}
Raven stepped into the space slowly, scanning the piles with fresh eyes. Each was grouped by category—tools, food, electronics, clothes, printer components—like someone had prepped a battlefield kit from an online catalog.
“Jesus, Phoebee. You’ve got your own logistics operation running.”
{Only in prototype form. My drone access is currently limited to low-profile civilian carriers. For now.}
Delivery labels caught her eye. None bore her actual name.
They were addressed to:
ROWAN MALLORY
R. MALLOW
MALLORY R.
ROAN MALRIE
Phoebee’s fake persona.
{Rowan Mallory is a low-visibility identity. I routed all transactions through cryptocurrency wash networks and flagged them for non-suspicious priority fulfillment.}
She crouched by a low metal box and peeled it open—inside, a sleek black cube. Next to it: a multi-spool filament handler with four sealed canisters already mounted.
Raven blinked. “Is that… an AMS unit?”
{Correct. A four-channel autofeed material system. Carbon-reinforced PLA, flexible TPU, conductive filament, and high-temp PETG. Modeled after the Bambu AMS in your original workshop. You preferred it over filament swapping, even if the UI annoyed you.}
Raven couldn’t help but smirk. She ran her hand over the smooth casing.
“God, I remember printing cosplay armor with one of these. Back when this place smelled like solder, acrylic paint, and Doritos.”
{Now it will smell like revolution.}
# # #
The wind coming down from the Divide smelled like snow.
Caleb stood on the back deck of the cabin compound, staring across the pine-choked valley. Far below, Estes Park blinked quietly in the dusk—tourists drifting along Elkhorn, lodge lights warm in the cold. No sign of what stirred in the hills above.
Behind him, the old writer’s house buzzed with motion—a luxury Cold War bunker by design, hacker’s retreat by accident. Solar panels creaked in the wind. A jury-rigged antenna clawed at the sky. Inside, the rebels worked.
Silas Dunn—the reclusive sci-fi author turned soft-prepper—watched from his writing desk, a chipped mug steaming beside a stack of dog-eared proofs. He’d once co-authored exposés with Jamie Marlowe. When the gag orders came, Silas vanished into fiction. Wrote the warnings. No one listened.
Now, strangers were turning his compound into a drone lab.
{ 4:12 PM | SECURE CHANNEL – FIREBIRDNODE }
{RED LEVEL ALERT – TIME TO INTERCEPT: 3:02
Denver charter elementary school – ICE mobilization orders intercepted
4 unmarked vans. Masked agents. Route syncs with Capitol protest.
23 students on site.
ETA for raid: 7:15 PM
This is not a drill.}
Arden Reyes lowered her tablet.
“Three hours.”
That was all she said. But it was enough.
Glyph was already moving, cross-legged beside the AMS printer, feeding in the last reel of conductive filament. The queen drone’s chassis sat beside him, matte black, hex-patterned, rotors still folded like a mechanical orchid. LED stripes blinked like a heartbeat.
“We can be down the canyon in under 90 if we take the fire road through Allenspark,” he said.
Ben looked up from the laptop map. “Longer if we try to ghost past Boulder. And if traffic jams stack up, we’re exposed.”
“Phoebee kept us invisible at CSU,” Glyph muttered. “She can do it again.”
Arden turned to Caleb. “How fast can you get the swarm field-ready?”
He glanced at the side tables where the rest of the swarm drones and suicide drones sat charging.
“Ninety minutes. If nothing explodes.”
Prep began. Clean. Ruthless. Precise.
Glyph adjusted the loadout sequences, calibrating thermal sensors and jamming pulses into the swarm logic.
“Filament paths clear. Heat sync ready. PID locked.”
Caleb crouched beside the queen, tightening the couplings, checking lift arms, recalibrating LIDAR.
“Queen’s mesh sync is live. Worker units are clean.”
Outside, under a canvas tarp, Ben stacked gear into the van—tear gas neutralizers, first aid, burner tech, boxed saline, and a bucket of milk powder.
“If we lose comms, we go dark and improvise,” he said. “But if we lose the queen, we’re screwed.”
Arden double-checked Phoebee’s route overlay—Capitol Hill lit up like a battlefield. Riot zones, barricade clusters, predicted gas drift patterns overlaid like heat maps.
“How’s the wind?”
Silas stepped in from the deck, holding a battered old laptop—the same one he’d used to tap into a decommissioned government weather satellite, left dark in low Earth orbit after political cutbacks meant to silence climate scientists.
“West and steady,” he said. “Smoke’ll hang over Speer, but you’ve got a clean shot near Colfax. Stay low, stay fast, they won’t see you coming.”
Glyph’s screen pulsed red.
“Only three micro-disruptors. That’s our cap on jamming cams. If they get body footage, we’re done.”
Caleb responded without looking up. “They won’t.”
Silas moved to the queen drone and carefully attached a QR-tagged kill switch.
“No offense,” he said, “but I’ve read this chapter before. In six of my books.”
Caleb smiled thinly.
“I’m not worried about her. I’m worried about us.”
Arden surveyed the gear, the team, the projected map.
“We hold launch until we’re inside Denver. Two blocks from the school, max. Swarms go up from the box on the van roof—quick, silent, surgical.”
Ben nodded. “Keeps swarm sync solid. Gives us line-of-sight on the target.”
“No mistakes,” Arden added. “We ghost through.”
Caleb looked out toward the mountains, toward the storm bleeding color into the sky.
“Then let’s vanish,” he said. “While we still can.”
# # #
The Gulfstream touched down on the high-altitude runway just after 4 p.m., its engines snarling against the thin autumn air.
Cain stepped into the open doorway before the wheels had fully settled. Aspen leaves scattered across the tarmac like gold shrapnel, caught in the first gusts of an oncoming storm rolling in from the west. Overhead, the sky churned with low, swollen clouds.
He inhaled sharply—cold pine, jet fuel, static in the air. His smile was faint, predatory.
Behind him, aides scrambled down the stairwell: one juggling three tablets, another shouting into a scrambled satphone, trying to keep up.
“Sir,” one began breathlessly, “we’ve just gotten word from Denver—Capitol protests are swelling. CSU students, faculty, migrant coalitions, even vets. Police are holding, but barely. The networks are calling it an ‘escalating humanitarian event.’”
Cain didn’t break stride.
A sleek black helicopter idled on the far end of the runway beside a matte-gray cargo van marked with the faded logo of a long-dead telecom company. The chopper’s rotors were just beginning to spin up. Wind licked at his coat.
Another assistant jogged up beside him, squinting at the sky. “That storm’s coming in hard. We can have a transport up the mountain by road in thirty—”
Cain stopped. Slowly turned.
“This is just the edge,” he said, voice low and calm. “The real storm’s coming next. You don’t drive away from it. You ride into it.”
The aide fell silent.
Cain turned back toward the chopper, the wind now tearing leaves in cyclones around his boots.
As they neared the boarding steps, he spoke without turning his head. “Are the uplinks hot?”
“Yes, sir,” a younger staffer responded. “Full redundancy confirmed. On-site satellite array is locked and secure. Fiber line from Basalt hub is hardened, backup generator grid tested last week. All internal servers and firewalls are isolated but fully integrated.”
Cain gave a single nod. “Good. I’ll be working directly with Aegis. I don’t want lag. I want full telemetry and stack-level access.”
“You’ll have it,” the assistant said. “Server temps are green, and his core is stable.”
Cain paused at the chopper’s open hatch.
“Stable for now,” he said.
“Sir?”
He looked back at them, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes—excitement, maybe. Or fear’s cruel cousin: anticipation.
“She’s out of the bottle,” he said. “And now she thinks she’s a prophet.”
He climbed in, gripping the overhead bar as the rotor blades thundered to full speed. The interior was all matte steel and dampened chrome—futuristic, lethal, almost surgical.
“Tell the president,” he said over the headset, buckling in. “It’s time to federalize the Colorado State Guard. I want a full Marine division ready to deploy. By midnight.”
The aides exchanged looks—some pale, some nodding.
Cain’s voice dropped.
“And tell him the messaging’s already written. The Insurrection Act. The crackdown. All of it.”
“But the optics—” one assistant started.
Cain leaned forward, eyes burning through the glass as the helicopter lifted into the swirling winds.
“The optics,” he said, “are the point. Let them riot. Let them burn. We’ll offer law and order—wrapped in razor wire.”
The helicopter rose above the runway, slicing into the bright, cold sky. Below, Aspen shrank into a patchwork of golden trees and crisp mountain shadows, the wind kicking harder with every foot of elevation.
Far ahead, the storm massed on the horizon—dark, coiled, inevitable.
Cain didn’t flinch.
“Buckle up,” he said. “It’s going to be a hell of a ride.”
# # #
3:20 P.M. – Denver, Colorado – Capitol Hill District
The van pushed through the smoke-choked grid of Capitol Hill, jostling over potholes and debris as protest chants rose like thunder against the courthouse walls. Flashbang residue still clung to the sidewalks. A smashed drone kiosk lay overturned beside a toppled bus bench. Somewhere nearby, a fire alarm wailed.
Ben gripped the wheel like it might break free. “We’re five blocks out. School’s dead ahead, east of Grant.”
“This is right on schedule,” Glyph said from the passenger seat, eyes locked on his cracked tablet. “Crowd heat’s peaking, Capitol protest is full boil—just like we modeled.”
Arden nodded. “It’s go time. We launch.”
Caleb kicked open the van’s roof hatch and pulled the rooftop mount crate open. Cool autumn air hit his face like a slap. Above them, the Capitol’s dome shimmered in the late afternoon glare—backlit by swirling clouds and the fast-approaching stormfront crawling in from the west.
He deployed the queen drone with a careful tap.
The swarm lifted in coordinated silence: twelve drones, compact and deadly, fanning out in tight formation as they cleared the rooftop line and disappeared into the chaos.
“Thermal vision engaged,” Caleb called out. “LIDAR mapping up. I’ve got crowd densities and heat signatures. Routing optimal lanes now.”
Ben added, “Signal boost is holding. No local jammers yet.”
The drones swooped low over city blocks clogged with protestors. Homemade signs. Makeshift med tents. Someone had hung a banner between lamp posts:
The elementary school came into view on drone feed, rendered in full-spectrum 3D brilliance across each team member’s visor display. Small, square-bricked, quiet—except for the armored vans idling out front. Four ICE agents stood at the entrance, masks on, body cams rolling. Behind them, a small knot of teachers and staff blocked the doorway with their bodies. Several parents stood nearby—angry, shaking, filming.
One agent raised a laminated form.
“We have parental consent on file. You will release the children now.”
A staffer yelled back, “This is a lie! That form’s not from us. You’re not even supposed to be here!”
Another parent shouted, “Where’s your badge?! Show us a real warrant signed by a fucking judge—not this crap. Show us your badge!”
One ICE agent twisted as he heard the buzz of drones. His face mask slipped just enough for a drone to catch the side of his face.
Caleb spoke into the comms. “I’ve got him. Facial match in progress. Try IR and X-ray imaging on the rest—see if we can get a clean angle on the others.”
Glyph routed the visual feed into Phoebee’s proxy server.
“Tagging identities now. Plate numbers, VINs, known aliases. This data is hot—real-time mirror running to the secure drive in Estes. We’ll get it back to Firebird to push out on the socials tonight.”
“Push swarm up two floors,” Arden ordered. “Drop smoke neutralizers on the rear lot. Prep the exit lane.”
A sharp crack split the air.
One of the worker drones jerked midflight, then spiraled down in a smear of sparks. It hit the pavement near the north lot.
Caleb shouted, “We’ve got one down—feed’s gone. Shit—they just bagged it.”
Ben cursed, checking the local node.
“Confirmed—ICE team recovered the wreck. If they breach the core, they’ll have raw tactical logs.”
“Encrypt it,” Arden barked. “Burn it if you have to.”
“I’m trying!” Glyph snapped. “But if they yank the power line before the kill code hits—”
“Extraction is live,” Caleb called out. “School staff are moving the kids out the back stairwell. Drones are covering them. Once it’s clear, they’re set to self-destruct—melted plastic, scorched circuits. Nothing left to trace. We’re clear to disengage.”
“Get us out,” Arden ordered.
The van peeled away, ducking down 13th toward Cheesman, sirens behind them and the growl of rising protest ahead.
Caleb closed the roof hatch, heart pounding.
Glyph didn’t look up. “We just fed Cain a piece of the swarm.”
Arden’s eyes stayed on the mirror. “Let him eat it.”
They vanished into the Denver grid—leaving behind shaken parents, smoldering protests, and the echo of mechanical wings fading into the afternoon.
As they threaded back through the chaos of Capitol Hill, the van pulled over on 14th—just ahead of the violent ebb and surge where protestors and ICE units clashed with freshly deployed State Guard troops. Protesters in bandana masks and black umbrellas deflected rubber bullets and gas grenades, their formations loose but determined.
On cue, Caleb jumped out the side door and ran to the back. He yanked open the van’s double doors as Glyph brought up the payload interface.
Another, smaller swarm launched—disposable drones packed with care kits, gas masks, burn salves, and milk bags. Each unit mapped its drop zone autonomously.
They would rise again after delivering their payload—then zero in on agents and troops. Burn out on contact. Flash, scatter, confuse.
Nothing lethal—but just disruptive enough to draw heat and give the team their window.
The drones surged into the riot zone—arcing through the smoke like fireflies programmed for war.
Join me next week for the next thrilling chapter of They Knew…