by Julian Gough
‘Yes,’ says Ryan. ‘Working with drones would be part of it.’
‘I don’t like my routines changed. I like my routines, Dad.’
‘Like I say, you could have new routines here. You could help design them. Routines you enjoyed, every day. Let me show you.’ Ryan waves at the wall to his right, and it lights up. They both turn in their chairs to look at it. ‘Nemesis, uh, seven,’ says Ryan. The screen fills with hillside.
‘Simulator?’ says Colt, turning back to his dad.
‘Mmmmm,’ said his father. ‘Af–Pak border. Swat valley.’
‘So you do frontline stuff. Like, real war training.’
Ryan hesitates. ‘We do a lot of this, at the base, sure . . . I’m actually in charge of the domestic programme. But I can’t show you any domestic feeds. Constitution, blah blah.’
Colt nods. ‘Do you have any cupcakes with coconut?’
‘Only pomegranate today.’ Ryan grins. ‘Must have been on sale.’
Wow. His dad is NDSA. His dad is the enemy. Colt stares at his father’s face. His father. The enemy. Trying to protect him. Loving him. The cognitive dissonance hurts. He shakes his head, to stop thinking about it.
Colt clears his throat. ‘Could I fly a drone?’
Ryan waves a hand dismissively. ‘Oh, they’re a piece of piss to fly. Joystick job. Mostly they fly themselves. Basically robots. Lock on; follow; film. Flying them is trivial. Getting the coding right is the problem. The pattern recognition. The targeting.’
Either side of the table, Colt and Ryan turn back to the screen. A dry valley.
The drone is climbing above the treeline now.
Ryan glances across at Colt.
‘This image is from one of the newer, smaller observation drones,’ Ryan says. ‘We’ve found it’s better to specialize. The old days, we filmed from fifteen thousand feet, and fired from fifteen thousand feet, same drone.’
‘I thought the optics were pretty good on the old drones,’ says Colt. ‘Smaller drones have to carry smaller cameras. You won’t get a huge improvement in picture quality . . .’
‘Yeah, but it’s not about the image quality, it’s about the angle. From fifteen thousand feet, you’re looking straight down on top of people’s heads.’ He frowns. ‘Worse. Straight down on vehicles. No matter how good your zoom, if you can’t see through the windscreen, you can’t do facial recognition of the driver. But specialist observation drones like this one – small, fast – can get in close and low, identify the target, and call in the strike. A bigger killer drone, much higher altitude, fires the actual missile.’
‘Mmmmm.’ Colt reaches out for another cupcake without looking away from the screen.
‘So yeah, flying them is easy.’ Ryan sits back in his chair. ‘Firing them is easy. Killing people is easy. But selecting the right target, from limited information; hitting the right target; that’s hard.’
Colt is studying the screen like he’s hypnotized. ‘So if your targeting data is flawed . . . where’s the flaw? Dirty data, or bad analysis?’
Ryan sighs. ‘Most of the mistakes are human error. Killing the wrong people, because we’re too eager; not killing the right people, because we’re too cautious . . .’
‘Heuristic biases,’ says Colt.
‘Yeah. And we can’t overcome them, they’re hardwired in. We’re optimistic; we see what we expect to see. We overcompensate for past mistakes. We can’t judge risk, can’t judge probability. It’s a mess. And it’s not like the old days; if you take out a much-loved local schoolteacher now, instead of the local al-Qaeda chief, there’s a diplomatic shitstorm. So we’ve tried to let the drones make their own decisions, in Pakistan. They make far fewer mistakes when we leave them alone. Let them learn from experience.’
‘Uh huh.’ Colt studies the screen.
A mountainside, very high up now. No soil, no vegetation. A road comes into view. Rough, potholed, no asphalt. The drone zooms in a little. Changes direction, follows the road.
Ryan is still brooding. ‘And Pakistan isn’t even the real problem. Get it wrong domestically . . . Jesus. Nightmare. Remember that kid in Albuquerque?’ Colt nods without looking away from the screen, and Ryan puffs out some air at the memory. ‘Those fucking interviews with his mom. Riots. Inquiries. A lot of careers over . . .’
Colt points at the screen. The drone is still following the road. ‘What’s it looking for?’
‘Oh, you’ll see. Busy day,’ says Ryan. ‘We’ve just modified the code for the Af–Pak self-targeting program, and it’s calling in a lot more strikes.’
‘What did you change?’
‘The conditions for a strike were too tight. A lot of bad guys were getting away.’ Ryan shifts forward in his chair, staring at the ribbon of road unreeling on the screen. ‘Incredibly frustrating, when you know you’ve got the guy you want, and the system won’t agree to a strike, because there might be civilians two houses away. We got them to alter the rules of engagement. Adjust the parameters a little. But Jesus, the paperwork. The committees.’
Colt grabs the edge of the table; pulls himself and the swivel chair sideways, closer to the screen. The wheels squeak. Dust. ‘I don’t need a screen, Dad. You could just run the raw image to my helmet. I could pull more data out of it.’
‘Nope. Screens only. Got to stay airgapped. But if you come on board, sure, you’ll have direct access to the raw feeds.’
A white Nissan pickup truck shudders into shot, weaving around potholes on the dirt road. Big drop to one side. The camera locks on, zooms in further, as the drone moves in fast, until it’s almost directly above the truck, and a little behind.
The drone matches speed, and follows, in the truck’s blind spot.
His father swipes at the air and the pickup vanishes. Columns of data fill the screen.
GPS positions.
Then a map of the Swat valley, with the GPS positions glowing red.
Then phone logs. Time of call, duration, position.
Who to, who from, what kind of device.
‘Can I?’ Colt asks.
‘Sure. Gimme a second to authorize you.’
Colt studies his dad, as Ryan grants the permissions. It’s slow; a lot of identity confirmations. Double retinal scan. Fingerprints seem to be taking a while to register. Some kind of DNA lick, on the fingerprint sensor? Nice. Serious access.
Ryan’s done. He nods at Colt.
Colt swipes. Swipes. It’s a shambles. A hot mess of data, without proper linkages.
‘This could be part of your new routine,’ says his father. ‘Every morning, you look at these datasets, and you find the connections. Build us new algorithms, to connect the dots better.’
‘These are like the arrays in . . . you played World of Warcraft, right?’
‘Yeah,’ says Ryan. ‘Long time ago now.’
‘These are like the arrays used to build character attributes in World of Warcraft,’ says Colt.
‘I guess they are,’ says Ryan.
Colt is reading off the data as fast as he can refresh the screen. ‘You’ve got a clan system,’ says Colt. ‘But the datasets overlap . . . This could be better arranged.’
‘Yes, it could. What do you suggest?’
‘You could do this,’ says Colt. He swipes open a mindmapping tool on his father’s wallscreen, and sketches out a reorganized set of relationships.
Ryan studies it. ‘That’s good. Do it.’
Colt reworks the relationship between the datasets. It’s not a complicated job. In fact, it makes the relationships far sharper, clearer. It’s just not obvious, at first sight, that you can do that . . .
Ryan keeps talking, as Colt codes. ‘We’re looking for a guy, short guy, Juma Gul Ahmadzi, about five feet, usually drives a white pickup, but they all do.’
‘Reflects the heat,’ says Colt, absently.
Ryan nods. ‘In fact, that one we’re following, it’s his brother’s pickup, so it could be him, could be anyone.’ Ryan pulls up another sc
reen, a map, and Colt glances across at it. ‘This is his home village,’ says Ryan, ‘but he isn’t there any more. This is where he was last seen.’ Points. ‘This is his where his oldest sister lives.’ Swipes, points. ‘She married into this clan.’
‘Has he many sisters?’
‘He has five sisters. And two brothers.’
‘But the data says he has three . . .’
‘Had three. We killed one.’
‘See, this over here is out of date, then.’ Colt points. ‘It should update automatically.’ Colt builds a tool to cross-link and update the two datasets as Ryan watches him across the table.
81
Driving away from the airport, taking the turn for Highway 375, heading out into the desert, Naomi feels foolish, naked, self-conscious. A base that runs surveillance drones across Asia, the Middle East, Africa; she is hardly likely to sneak up on it unobserved.
But what else can she do? If she gets close enough, if she just tries to walk in; well, they will apprehend her, but maybe they will take her inside the base. She has to get inside the base. ‘Apprehend.’ From the Latin root apprehendere. To take. To seize.
Apprehension.
She remembers a jingle from an old book she read once. Tenser, said the tensor. Tenser, said the tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.
It begins to run on a loop in her head.
The solar road begins its great curve out into the desert, around the restricted area.
This road leads nowhere. There is no one on it. It isn’t the shortest distance between any two points.
If you wanted to go from Vegas to Reno, you’d drive straight up, along the western side of the restricted zone; not east, out into the desert and around the other three sides.
The only reason this road is so good is that it was upgraded at the end of the 1970s, as part of the MX missile programme. Mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple nuclear warheads were supposed to move restlessly from launchpad to launchpad, on this road, through this desert; with dummy ICBMs moving likewise on other trucks, all over the west, the Midwest, untrackable by the Soviets.
Yes. For a moment, she feels like a missile, launching herself at the hidden base.
An impossibly small, doomed missile.
A firework.
A firecracker.
A match.
No. She feels like Wile E. Coyote, on Acme roller skates. With an Acme rocket strapped to his back. Helplessly accelerating down a desert highway, in a straight line. No way to stop, no turning back.
As the road uncoils hypnotically from the horizon, drifts slowly towards her, then rushes beneath her wheels, she remembers the first time Colt saw Road Runner.
Colt was in the other room. He was six. He had been anxious for days, after one of Ryan’s visits, after hearing an argument.
She needed to work, but he needed her. Kept coming in.
Finally, very close to screaming at him, her jaw trembling, she had found some Road Runner cartoons and sat him in front of them. He liked desert landscapes. Maybe they would hold his attention. She turned the volume down to almost nothing – cartoon soundtracks were way too busy for him – and started the cartoons.
He stared at the mesas, the cacti. Followed with his finger the long, thin road. It somehow vanished at the horizon, but in a landscape drawn without a vanishing point. A puzzle that could not be solved. He moaned. She placed her hand on top of his head, firmly – making sure he could see the hand coming so he didn’t startle – and she ran her palm and fingers down over his face to calm him. He grabbed her wrist, and brought her hand up to his face to do it again. Again. Again.
He let go, and stared at the cartoon desert. A tiny dot in the distance got bigger and bigger, and suddenly Road Runner filled the screen, stared out at them, a cloud of dust rising behind him. Her. It.
Very, very quietly, Road Runner said something that sounded like, ‘Beep beep.’
Colt murmured very quietly back, ‘Hmeep, hmeep.’
Naomi walked silently away.
She sat at the kitchen table, and tapped her screen awake again. Stretched it full size. All the data from her big experiment was in but she couldn’t make sense of the columns of data.
Too weary, too sad.
Mesas of data. Deserts of data.
‘Beep beep,’ she said softly.
No, Colt was right. She’d never really listened properly before.
‘Meep, meep,’ she said. Tried it again, more through her nose this time. ‘Hmeep, hmeep . . .’
A strange noise came from the other room. A noise from deep in Colt’s throat, a noise she had never heard before.
She stood so abruptly that she knocked her chair over backwards, and ran.
He was kneeling on the floor, very close to the picture. The noises in his throat got louder.
Wile E. Coyote is on roller skates with a rocket strapped to his back, chasing Road Runner along a railroad track. Into a tunnel. Around bends that get steeper and steeper. And now there’s a right-angled bend coming up. A right-angled bend in a railway track!
Road Runner and then Wile E. Coyote whizz around the bend.
He laughs, as the law of conservation of momentum is completely obliterated.
He laughs . . . She falls onto the floor beside him and starts laughing too.
Back in the now, without even meaning to, she puts her foot harder on the accelerator. The car goes faster, and, for a moment, she does not; the seat pushes gently against her back. Transmits its energy to her, brings her up to speed, so that as she eases off the accelerator, she and the car are one again, flesh and metal moving in a straight line at the same speed. This new speed. It feels nice.
She does it again.
She is going very fast.
She has never driven this fast before.
She is less scared the faster she goes.
Mmmm, that’s unexpected. She likes it.
She does it again.
82
Colt reaches for a cupcake, but the cupcakes are all gone. Oh well. He’s full anyway.
He’s never felt this relaxed with his father. Maybe this is what growing up is like. Less fear. Maybe it’s not so bad.
‘You know I went to the Afghan–Pakistan border, for real?’ says Ryan.
‘No,’ says Colt politely.
‘Your mother didn’t tell you anything?’
‘No.’
‘Huh. OK . . . Well, it’s only a border in our heads. It’s not a border in their heads. They just walk across it like it’s not even there. But we had to stop, like we’d hit a glass wall.’ Ryan slaps the air between them.
Colt jumps, as the palm of his father’s hand stops dead in mid-air with a loud smack.
Colt’s hand goes involuntarily to his left cheek.
Yes. His father played that trick once, on a visit. He pretended to slap Colt’s face; as his right hand swished past Colt’s cheek, Ryan slapped his own thigh, hard, with his other, hidden hand.
The illusion that Colt had been struck had been so real. As real as the knowledge that he had not. Colt had cried until Ryan explained the trick.
‘If we killed people on this side of the glass, we were heroes,’ says Ryan, indicating with his hand. ‘If we killed people on that side of the glass, we had invaded a sovereign nation, caused an international incident, committed a crime . . . But the drones could follow them.’
Colt feels it, something is missing. ‘Did you stop at the glass wall?’ he asks.
Ryan moves some pieces of paper on his desk. Makes them neater. ‘No.’
There’s a pause.
Weird; I can tell that Dad is feeling a big emotion. I just can. Like Mama can with me. The new neurons. New connections . . .
Colt realizes with a jolt that he doesn’t have a problem with metaphors any more.
Glass wall.
He can see it, and he can’t see it. Glass wall . . . The image hangs there, suspended, neither true not false, a di
fferent thing. He doesn’t have to resolve it into a zero or a one. It’s just one node in a series of connections. He savours it. Glass wall . . .
No, move forward. Keep going. ‘So what happened?’
‘Stuff happened.’ His father shifts in his chair. Like he’s uncomfortable, thinks Colt. He’s physically uncomfortable because he’s mentally uncomfortable. Like the way Mama can tell when I lie. Thoughts move your body . . . what did he just think?
‘They sent me back home,’ says Ryan. ‘With my background . . . well, I ended up here.’
‘Biology?’ Colt tilts his head to one side. ‘I guess it kind of applies to this. Surveillance. Artificial intelligence. Pattern-recognition systems . . .’
‘Yes. The language we use is . . . revealing, isn’t it? The language of cancer. Terrorist cells . . .’ Ryan sighs. ‘So yeah, we took out the biggest tumours, but by then it had already metastasized. And we fought them, but we fought them with our brain. But that’s not the best way to prevent cancer. America has a brain that is already too clever for its own damn good. We think way too much. What we need is . . .’ Ryan takes a deep breath. ‘You’re supposed to sign a lot of bullshit before I show you this, but we don’t really have time for that now. Just don’t fucking tell anybody.’
He unfolds an old, battered personal screen. Swipes open a document, hands it to Colt.
It’s an organization chart.
It’s static, it doesn’t move with Colt’s eye movement. It’s locked to Ryan, not open access. Colt moves to physically swipe through the document, and the screen speaks. ‘I’m sorry, but you are not authorized to read this document at this time.’ The document goes out of focus.
‘Go ahead,’ Ryan says, and grants the permissions; retina, fingerprint.
Colt reads on. ‘Oh wow,’ he says. ‘Oh wow.’
83
She calls up maps, and glances at them, but there isn’t really any point. There is only one road, this road. She must drive straight down it for another hundred miles.
And the territory she must then enter is not really on the map.
A straight road, with no other traffic, and perfect visibility to the horizon. She sets cruise control, and relaxes. Shrugs, sets it to full self-drive, even though she normally hates the loss of control. Looks out the side windows. The desert, the desert, the desert.