by Mendy Sobol
“Did you read that in my personnel file?”
“I put that in your personnel file.”
Speeding down the Massachusetts Turnpike, I was trying to take in what I was hearing, trying to figure out what to say next. But Captain Rusk wasn’t finished.
“There’s one other thing—the only important thing really. There’s another war coming. Probably not this year, maybe not next. But as sure as sunrise, we’ll be at war inside of three years. For that war, the first real cyber war, IPI needs you, and your country needs you. I need you. So I guess what I’m asking is, are you willing to finish out your last year at Pensacola, then come work with me at IPI?”
I didn’t say a thing until we crossed the bridge to Cape Cod, until I could see the Atlantic shimmering as far away as forever.
“I’ll do it on one condition.”
Captain Rusk’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
“Remember my friend David Cooperman from John Paul Jones...?”
Me and Coop started working together at IPI the following summer.
PART FOUR
WAR
Chapter Twenty: Toby
Mmmm. So IPI’s hooked a couple of new fish. And that one’s good. Real good. Their programmers worked on that autopilot glitch for two years. She (she?) waltzes in and fixes it her first day. They’re gonna cyberjack her in no time.
Yup, this one’s different all right—she’s got imagination. And that makes her dangerous.
Well sweetheart, like the song says—I’ll be watchin’ you....
Chapter Twenty-One: Melora
Working at IPI was sweet. My first day on the job I corrected an autopilot program glitch that had stumped the other programmers for weeks. I made cybergrammer in sixty-three days—a record that still stands—then spent a month at the IPI labs in Palo Alto having my implants and fiber optics installed and calibrated, and another month in Natick programming my own subvocalization recognitions. The hardest part was adjusting to the immunosuppressants they prescribed me so my body wouldn’t reject the implants, but after a few days riding the porcelain bus, I was good to go. Coop had to make up for a lack of experience and a lot of lost time, but with me coaching him, he made cybergrammer in six months.
Our work was fucking incredible, always new, never boring. Okay, this one time we got bored and played a little prank on the security geeks. Me and Coop had them passing kidney stones, breaking into their “secure” Net, setting off intruder alerts for a different IPI entrance every three minutes. Of course Captain Rusk knew it was us right away, showing up at our workstation with the klaxons blaring and the two of us laughing our asses off.
“Promise me you’ll never, ever, do that again,” he said.
We knew it was a big deal for a man who spent his life giving orders to ask us to stop acting like a couple of pendejos. So we promised.
Maggie Rusk became the mother me and Coop never had, confiding in us, letting us confide in her, taking us in the Geo on road trips to Tanglewood and the Cape, taking us shopping at Quincy Market and Filene’s, feeding us ridiculous amounts of food.
Professor Sherman and his wife Ellen filled the role of grandparents, throwing birthday parties for us, buying us everything from London Fog raincoats to goldfish, and having me join them at Disneyworld during one of my trips home to Florida.
I couldn’t say the captain was like our father because he was, y’know, the Captain. And now he was a senior vice president and, at least in title, our boss. He was the one who assigned us projects, the one responsible if we screwed up. But me and Coop made sure we never screwed up, and once he assigned a project, Rusk left us alone.
A couple of months after making cybergrammer, I was sitting in the lunchroom eating a microwaved burrito, reading The Boston Phoenix. Captain Rusk was in the far corner near the parking-lot-view picture window eating some great smelling dish Maggie packed for him, reading Barrons. Usually Coop joined me, but he was out on some secret mission, probably a quickie with his latest girlfriend, a big phony from Wellesley, way too young, way too tall, and way too smart for him anyway. Then in walked this guy Kenneth. Coop called him “Hahvahd,” because the first thing he always told everyone was that he went there. Hahvahd joined IPI in the same training group as me and Coop, so Rusk was his boss too, but he hadn’t made cybergrammer. He asked me out a couple of times like he was doing me a favor, and I said no. When he asked why, I told him “I only date guys who went to Brown.”
Kenneth spotted me right away, coming up to my table, pulling a chair around backward, sitting with his legs splayed like he was riding a horse. Captain Rusk was at his back, hidden in the corner, head bent over his reading.
“Hey, Kennedy, howya doin’?”
“Better a minute ago.”
“That’s pretty funny. I think you get that sense of humor of yours from the Kennedy side of your family. But y’know what I can’t figure out?”
“Everything?”
“No, what I can’t figure out is this. Sure, JFK did a lot of screwing. But I can’t imagine a Harvard man like him fucking some spic. I mean, getting his cock sucked, maybe, but….”
Before I could move, before I could speak, before I could breathe, Captain Rusk was out of his chair, crossing the room, lifting Kenneth off the floor by his Brooks Brothers lapels, throwing him against the lunchroom refrigerator.
“Apologize.”
“Whaaa?”
Rusk grabbed him a little tighter, hoisted him a little higher.
“I said, apologize.”
“I... I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything, I just....”
“That’s good enough.” Holding him pinned against the Kelvinator, feet six inches off the floor, Captain Rusk took one hand from Kenneth’s lapel and snapped off the IPI I.D. tag clipped to his pocket. “Don’t bother clearing out your work station. We’ll mail your personal effects.”
“I... I don’t understand, sir.”
“You’re fired, mister. Go home.”
One great thing about being a Captain—even civilians can tell when it’s time to say, “Yes sir,” and follow orders. Sliding to ground level, Kenneth scrambled out the door while Rusk smoothed his own tailored suit.
“You okay, slugger?” he said.
Slugger? Where did that come from?
“Yes, sir. I’m fine. That was great! Thanks! But I don’t think HR’s going to be happy about your termination procedures.”
“When it comes to harassment, they’ll have to get used to me dealing with it the old fashioned way.”
Even though I knew I could have handled Hahvahd myself, could have told Rusk not to interfere, I realized how good it felt having him act like a father should. So instead, I said, “Thanks, dad.” And the captain stopped smoothing his clothes and smiled.
Remember all those Access Law exemptions? You know, like the one Congress gave to credit bureaus? I remembered them, too. So I went to my workstation, jacked in, and added a broken lease, unpaid student loans, and three bankcard defaults to that hijo de puta Kenneth’s credit history.
Have a nice life, Hahvahd.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Melora
RITA. That’s my girl. More like my baby.
Evil bitch.
Real-time Integrated Tactical Analytics. Mainframe computers and programs powerful enough to run a war. Remove the human element with all its biases, neuroses, and hidden agendas. Great idea, right? But what’s that saying—the road to hell is paved with good intentions?
The war was already fucked before we brought RITA online. We weren’t losing, but we weren’t winning. Which meant we were losing.
Every month a different admiral or general showed up at IPI, looked over our shoulders, asked a few dumbass questions. None of them knew shit about computers, and all of them looked scared. They had no fucking clue what RITA could and couldn’t do, but they all wanted to believe she could win their war for them. So after every visit they flew to DC and told the politicians RITA was The Answer. And after eve
ry visit, the politicians wrote more checks made out to IPI. Believe me, IPI kicked back plenty of that taxpayer money to the politicians.
Toby wasn’t the only one who taught me history. The Navy did too—at least their version—long before Toby hacked his way into my life. But Chief Kavaney, veteran of two hot underwater wars and one cold one, told me the military history he thought counted. And the old chief told me straight.
“For my arthritis,” he’d say, downing his fifth shot of Wild Turkey in the dark back booth at Spanky’s, a Pensacola dive bar popular with us bluejackets. Then he’d go off on his favorite subject. Officers.
“Y’see, Mel, they ain’t like us. We just wanna keep our frickin’ noses clean and do our frickin’ jobs. Officers? They’re all on the make. Little politicians hooked on movin’ up the ladder, all of them with their noses shoved up the butts of the guy on the rung above them ‘cuz that’s the only way up, and all doin’ it so the guy on the rung below ‘em will stick his nose up their butts.”
“C’mon, Chief,” I’d say, “They’re not all like that.”
“Not all, Mel, but the good ones hardly ever make it to the top. They can’t, because makin’ it to the top means stickin’ your nose so far up the real politicians’ butts that you forget what daylight looks like. It means lyin’ about everything to keep the politicians happy, lyin’ so much you forget what the truth is. Lyin’ about things like what it will take to win a war. Or how many boys and girls are gonna wind up dead. Lyin’ about how we’re winnin’ the war—lyin’ to yourself about how we’re winnin’ it—so the politicians can lie to the voters. ‘Cuz if you don’t go along to get along, you ain’t never gonna get another little star pinned on your lapel.”
“I met a good senior officer once. Guy who got me into the Navy. And he was a pilot and wing commander in Vietnam.”
“Well sure, Mel. Sounds like a real warrior. I’ve known some great ones in my day. But honestly, those guys ain’t shit in the big picture. They ain’t shit because they don’t have the president’s ear. And the only ones who’ve got the president’s ear are the ones who tell him what he wants to hear. The further they go up the chain of command—the higher they climb on that ladder—the less they want to take responsibility. They don’t have to win wars, they only have to avoid the big mistakes that’ll get ‘em fired. So they live their lives terrified they’re gonna make a big mistake. At first it makes ‘em cautious. That ain’t a bad thing, because in the short run, it means less of us get killed. But after awhile, it makes ‘em timid. Then scared. Then positively chickenshit. And in the long run, that means a whole lot more of us get killed.”
I thought about that while Chief Kavaney ordered another round. This time he sipped at his whiskey, swirling it between swallows so the ice cubes tinkled against the side of the glass, eyes focused on something in the distance, or maybe something in the past. I drank my bottle of Bud, sitting quietly because I felt like saying something now would mean butting in on the chief’s private conversation with himself. After a long few minutes, he downed the rest of his drink and shifted his gray eyes back to me.
“Winston Churchill said that if you take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put ‘em at a table together—what do you get? The sum of their fears. I never thought he was talking about sailors, airmen, and soldiers in the field. I thought he meant the ones who climbed that brown-nosing officer ladder so high they got a seat at that table. And I always thought it was those sons of bitches who lost us that fucked up war in Vietnam. Them and the lyin’ bastards in the White House they answered to.”
When IPI put Captain Rusk in charge of the cybergrammer group hand-picked to fix the shit-show RITA had become and make the billions Congress had poured into her start paying off, the captain called us together for a meeting. “If you could program RITA to be one thing,” he said, “what would it be?”
“Fast,” Coop said. “Oh, and sexy!” Everyone laughed at that, the way Coop always got us laughing.
More seriously, Caprice, a girl who’d been hired fresh out of some Ivy League school and made cybergrammer almost as quick as me, said, “Smart.”
Ron, the former All American quarterback from Utah, raised his hand to speak, as usual, even though everyone else had, as usual, jumped right into the conversation.
“Down the hall and to the left, Ron,” Coop said.
Even Ron laughed at that one, but this time Captain Rusk didn’t join in.
“Go ahead, Ron—what’s the one thing you’d program RITA to be?”
“Adaptable.”
“And you, Ted?”
Ted, the ex-Marine with the bulldog neck and bulldog tattoo didn’t hesitate. “Deadly,” he said.
Captain Rusk nodded. “What about you, Melora? What one thing would you want RITA to be?”
Coop and Caprice wanted RITA to do what computers were best at—process billions of bits of data at speeds millions of times faster than any human commander and spit out the results so others could act on them. But doing more of what wasn’t working and doing it faster wasn’t the answer. Ron and Ted wanted something better. So did I.
That’s when I remembered what Chief Kavaney said back in Pensacola, remembered his Churchill quote about “the sum of all fears.”
“Fearless,” I said. “I want RITA to be fearless.”
Okay, so given my fucked up childhood, maybe I was projecting. But that’s when I decided that RITA might make mistakes, but she’d never be afraid.
So we went to work. And we did it. We made RITA fast. We made her smart. We made her adaptable. We made her deadly. And I made her a cold-hearted-bitch. And I never worried about that, because RITA didn’t make decisions, only suggestions. It was up to humans to decide whether to act on them. Flesh-and-blood commanders could always make the compassionate choice if the silicon maiden went too far.
You see, I understood RITA. My problem was, I didn’t understand people.
If I’d thought more about what Chief Kavaney said, I wouldn’t have been surprised when commanders rubber-stamped RITA’s suggestions. Wouldn’t have gone along when her suggestions were treated like orders. Wouldn’t have been so fucking proud when the generals, admirals, and politicians took the safeties off and let RITA, without any human interference, run everything from recruitment to logistics to ops. In other words, the whole goddamn war.
Of course they trust RITA, I thought. She’s better at this than they are. And she’s better because we made her that way!
But that wasn’t it at all.
Commanders didn’t turn the show over to RITA because they trusted her. They did it because they were scared. If they let RITA do her thing and it worked, they got the credit. If it didn’t work, RITA got the blame. But if they overruled her and things turned out badly, it was all on them.
RITA had become the sum of their fears.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Melora
I’d never lie and say it wasn’t fun working on military systems. It was. For most of our lives, me and Coop never had much money, power, or freedom. Now we had all three. We were making great money. So much money in salary, bonuses, and IPI stock options that I had to jack in to figure out what I was worth.
In some ways it was more fun when the war started. After years of simulations and practice, RITA, our creation, was getting a chance to do her thing in a real war. Every day we got shitloads of real-time feedback from her, and every day there were new programming challenges for us. We kept making RITA smarter, faster, deadlier, and more fearless, and as she proved herself, her role in running the war got bigger.
We never ran Operations—“independent contractors” did that out of Building B next door. At least that was the official word. Everyone knew they were CIA. Half the cars in the Building B parking lot had D.C. or Virginia plates; some had license plate frames from Langley car dealerships. And while IPI’s dress code meant everyone wore business clothes, most of us in programming found ways to let our frea
k flags fly—shoulder-length dreads, ink peeking out from beneath cuffs and above collars, half-shaved mullets, heavy-metal galaxies of pierced ears, lips, noses, necks, eyebrows, and tongues. Not so much over at Ops. Those boys and girls all looked Government Issue.
While they handled what most of us at IPI called “The Show,” we knew RITA was the real boss, and RITA was our creation. Ted, Coop, me, and the rest of the cybergrammers programmed scenarios and simulations for every operation, and RITA, weighing every option, every bit of intelligence, every lesson of military history, made every tactical decision based on strategic considerations. RITA learned more from each engagement and did something no human commander ever dreamed of—she remembered all of it. We knew RITA would lose some battles, maybe even on purpose. But RITA would never lose a war. And for me, and the rest of us, it was a blast. At least until real bodies started coming home.
Once a month they shuttled Ops Team Leaders over to our building so they could tell us first-hand about improvements they wanted us to make in our programs. We were all on the same side, but we were also competitive. And arrogant. We didn’t like them; they didn’t like us. We looked down on them because they were too lame to write their own programs. They thought we were a bunch of freaks and draft dodgers. Mostly, the glitches they bitched about were their own fault, operator errors caused by poor training, laziness, or stupidity. At least that was our opinion.
One time some IPI exec got the brilliant idea she could promote teamwork and increase efficiency by inviting Captain Rusk, Coop, me, and a couple of the other senior cybergrammers over to Building B to watch The Show. I could tell the Captain wasn’t happy about it, but he put on his game face and said, “Let’s go check it out and see what we can learn.” Looking at me and Coop, he added, “And let’s all be on our best behavior.”
We filed downstairs and onto a waiting shuttle bus. Building B was no more than four hundred yards away, and we could have easily walked, but right from the beginning this operation was going by the book. Our “host,” a brown-shoed Company pendejo named Mr. Smith—seriously, Mr. Smith—greeted us on the bus. He looked like he would have preferred latrine duty.