Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author's Note

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Acknowledgments

  References

  Notes

  About the Authors

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2020 by P. W. Singer and Redoubt, LLC

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Singer, P. W. (Peter Warren) author. | Cole, August, author.

  Title: Burn-in : a novel of the real robotic revolution / P.W. Singer and August Cole.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019045766 (print) | LCCN 2019045767 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328637239 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328637895 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.I572455 B87 2020 (print) | LCC PS3619.I572455 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045766

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045767

  Cover images: © Titima Ongkantong / Shutterstock (eye); © Jason Winter / Shutterstock (circuitry); iStock / Getty (Washington, DC)

  Author photograph © Sam Cole

  v1.0520

  To Sue, who gave us edits to this book as she literally waited in the hospital room for her breast cancer surgery.

  There is no more true dedication.

  burn-in: “the continuous operation of a device (such as a computer) as a test for defects or failure prior to putting it to use.”

  —Merriam-Webster Dictionary

  The following is a work of fiction.

  However, all the places, trends, technologies, and incidents in it are drawn from the real world.

  Capitol Hill

  Washington, DC

  The man’s greasy red beard and braided Viking-style Mohawk had likely not been washed in a couple weeks, but the way that he cradled his AR-15 assault rifle made it clear he took care of what most mattered to him. And Special Agent Lara Keegan of the FBI’s Washington Field Office would have bet a month’s salary the Viking cleaned that weapon each and every day.

  Side-eyeing him through the passenger-side window of a dated black Chevy Tahoe SUV, Keegan delicately folded the wax-paper-thin orange-tinted nanoplastic that she had laid out on the vehicle’s dashboard. It gave her something to do while they waited in traffic, plus it kept her hands visible for the Viking to see.

  Everything from Louisiana Avenue on up to Union Station was at a standstill. A few drivers honked in frustration, but the rest of the vehicles idled without complaint. That was the easiest way to tell which had a human at the wheel; machines knew not to waste their energy on emotional inefficiency.

  Keegan made sure the nanoplastic’s gold unidirectional filament was aligned with the crease, and then gently pulled on the next fold of the sheet. As she did, a blue minivan crept into the lane next to them, blocking her view of the Viking. The parents in the front seats were ignoring their two kids in the back trading punches over a suitcase wedged between them. She hoped for their sake it was the end, rather than the start, of a family vacation.

  The minivan moved a foot forward and she got a better view of the Viking. The AR-15 was airbrushed a mottled gray and black. So he’d kitted it out for urban combat operations. And, yep, there it was. Peeking out from under the man’s red beard was a tactical throat microphone. It was the same kind once only used by special operations teams, designed to allow subvocal, hands-free communication during a firefight. Now anyone could buy one.

  The next step in the build required Keegan to look down for just a microsecond. She carefully slid a needle-like spine inside the crease of the folded sheets.

  “Hello, World,” she said quietly to herself, reciting the mantra of expectant computer programmers dating back before her grandparents’ day.1

  As she quickly looked back to the side, to ensure the Viking hadn’t moved, the folds in the orange structure opened up into an origami form of a robotic praying mantis, six tiny hairlike legs unfurling.2 It gave Keegan a tiny moment of satisfaction to know that she’d created the only thing that seemed to be moving this morning.

  The SUV moved an entire foot, then braked hard enough to tip the mantis over. A freshly washed black four-door sharecar wedged itself into their lane mere inches ahead of a dirty red hatchback with cracked roof solar panels. It was just one tiny skirmish in the all-encompassing war between billions of lines of software code, each fighting to make society function smoothly, while simultaneously screwing over their market competitors.

  “Bot fight coming,” said Keegan. “Two cars up.”

  Another gleaming black car braked to let other vehicles pass. It was all part of the game. A vehicle might perch on the edge of the traffic line, not close enough to block the neighboring lane, but enough to set off the automated detection protocols, tricking its counterpart into stopping to creep around the perceived obstacle. Or it might be what the fleet of black cars were up to evidently. If two vehicles detected a rival company’s car behind them, they would set up a moving screen, driving in parallel at the lowest legal speed.

  And Keegan was stuck behind it all, playing with a robot in the passenger seat, trying to ignore a newbie agent nervously tapping a steering wheel that required nothing of him.

  “You should call their complaint number,” said Special Agent Aiden Griffin. “Or should I override and clear a path?” He’d been out of the FBI Academy a little over a year and still had that too-eager voice; that was why he had the backup-chauffeur job.

  That was the only sacrifice the systems would make to the algorithmic gods of efficiency—the law enforcement vehicle protocol had been required for legalization of autonomous vehicles. At the simultaneous signals of a short-range radio wave and siren blast, the battles for speed and position would cease and all vehicles were required to pull to the side of the road.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Keegan commanded. “You do that and ‘FBI seen on way to Union Station’ will be in the newsfeeds before we even make it a block,” she explained.

  The drive out to the downtown train station and subway hub hadn’t been a planned operation, just a quick response to a flash alert that necessitated an FBI presence. It was likely a wild goose chase, but they had to assume whoever was behind it would be monitoring any activity of interest in the area.

  Griff started picking at the sole of his shoe as the tension built, flicking out a small rock that had gotten lodged in one of the ridges. The nervous fixation annoyed Keegan because he wasn’t keeping his eye on their environment.

  “I get the rest, but what’s the hat for?” she asked.

  Each day Griff came to work as if dressed for a raid: sleek gray tactical pants and a too-tight black long-sleeved sensor-defeat shirt. He also wore a cumbersome tactical vest, which he was always trying to find a reason to wear.

  “Keeps the sun off,” he said of the knit black watch cap he had pulled low, almost touching his eyebrows
.

  “Seriously? It’s a winter hat.”

  “Sweat gets in my eyes otherwise.”

  “Because you’re wearing the hat.” She reached back, grabbed a ballcap with “FBI” on the front, and offered it to him. “Here, this is actually what you need.”

  “Nah, I’m good,” he said.

  She tossed the hat back behind them. “Suit yourself,” she said, point made.

  She picked up the origami robot off the dashboard and began to move it back and forth through the air, the way kids played with toy planes. Sweeping it slowly across the horizon, her eyes tracked what was happening in the distance behind it.

  “Yep, right there. Just about your two o’clock. One coming down from the distro facility in the Post’s old printing plant in College Park.”3 Zooming the mantis back out, she aimed the triangular point of its head at the eight-rotor delivery drone flying above, an imaginary line running from her tiny robot to the larger one in the sky.4

  “As that thing flies over to deliver its beet juice or spare charger or whatever, it’s just soaking up data to mine and sell. That’s where the real money is. You set off the siren and it’ll flag us to anybody who’s buying that drone’s feed right now.” Keegan tipped the tiny robot in the direction of the Viking. “Plus, there’s no telling how our friend with the AR-15 will react to the excitement.”

  “We’re taking too long, though,” Griff said.

  On that, the newbie was right. She used the robotic mantis’s beak like a stylus, tapping it on the “Time to Destination” option on the vehicle’s map display. In the rush out, they hadn’t been able to reserve one of the newer vehicles in the FBI’s fleet, so the display was the old-school, hard-screen kind, rather than a heads-up display that projected up onto the window.

  She didn’t need to say anything. It had read seven minutes when they left the office and they’d already been in the SUV for twelve minutes, with another six blocks to go. No plan survived first contact with the enemy or DC traffic. So it was time to change it. Keegan pressed the FBI pin in her jacket lapel that doubled as the send button for her radio.

  “Control, this is Keegan. We’re stuck here. Permission to get out and leg it?”

  She could hear Griff’s quiet groan at the idea of leaving the car on the sweltering spring day.

  “We can cut across Lower Senate Park and get there in the time it’ll take us to move another half block in this car,” she said. Keegan intentionally used the formal title of the green space that divided the Senate office buildings from Union Station, knowing that’s what the wall map back in the FBI Operations Center displayed, rather than what the Viking and everybody else would have called it: Patriots Camp.

  In the earbud in her right ear, Keegan could hear the voice of her boss, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Harrison Noritz, having a muffled conversation with the others back in the Operations Center.

  “I think that makes sense,” Noritz replied directly to Keegan. “You aren’t moving at anything over walking speed anyway. But use discretion, given the . . . sensitivities there.”

  “You heard the man,” Keegan told Griff, crumpling the origami robot in her hand and slipping the balled-up nanoplastic into her pocket. “Set it on RUR. No sense in FBI property getting blown up at the station’s parking garage along with us.”

  With the required permission from the human bureaucracy, Griff gave the machine its authorization, setting the vehicle on “Roam Until Recall,” to drive about until called back to their location for pickup. The vehicle quickly lurched forward a few inches. “Now you start moving,” Griff huffed. But it was only the autodrive resetting to the more precisely programmed follow distance in its traffic protocol.

  As Keegan slammed the passenger-side door shut, she gave an open-handed slap onto the SUV’s window, as if giving the machine a high five. The titanium of her wedding ring made a reassuring ping as it rapped against the glass. Griff looked over and gave Keegan a thumbs-up that wasn’t needed. The slap was just an old ritual of Keegan’s from when she’d had to exit armored vehicles in far more dangerous places.

  As she moved around the blue minivan, Keegan saw the dad escalating the argument, jabbing the air with his fingers while he yelled at the kids. Asshole. She could also see that the Viking had moved, and not in a good way. His lips were opening and shutting in the staccato style of a professional sharing a rapid update with someone on the other end of a command network. More important, his finger had flicked off the safety and moved down into the rifle’s trigger guard.

  Keegan walked slowly toward the Viking, with her hands held palms out. “Hands where he can see them,” she hissed at Griff.

  As they closed, Keegan caught a whiff of that old familiar smell of goat crossed with Break-Free cleaning solvent. She’d been right about both the hair and the gun.

  “That’s far enough,” growled the Viking.

  Keegan paused and scanned the area ahead of her. She stood near the start of a central lane that ran through the camp that had sprung up on the seven blocks of park bordering the Capitol building. A row of tents ran along each side of the path, covering ground that members of Congress had been using as a landing area for autonomous personal aircraft. None of the tents were uniform, ranging in size from Improved Combat Shelters—the Army version of a one-person pup tent—to massive AirBeam inflatable barrack buildings. Here and there, a few brightly colored civilian camping tents livened up the sand and jungle green of military surplus. But that’s where any disorganization ended. All of it was squared off and as clean as could be. Even the gravel in the pathway had been recently raked into the wavelike patterns of a Zen garden; whoever had that duty had evidently served in INDOPACOM.

  “You know the agreement,” the Viking said as he tipped the gun toward the edge of the cement, which also aimed it just before their feet. “No cops inside. Only those that paid their dues. Step on the green and y’all will get your asses handed to you . . . again.”

  Keegan still got angry every time video of that confrontation flashed through her feed. The DC police had gone in dumb, thinking they could roust out the camp with the same tactics that worked on angry students or farmers. But batons and pepper spray were nothing to a couple thousand veterans who’d been through far worse. No one was ready yet to copy what General Douglas MacArthur had done to the Bonus Marchers over a century earlier and bring in tanks.5 So instead, a rough truce had been made. Traffic was allowed on the streets that ran through the parks, but everything in between—now known as Patriots Camp—was the veterans’ turf, to run as they saw fit. At least until Congress paid up.

  “Not a cop, but a federal agent,” Keegan said. “More importantly, I’m one of you. I have just as much right to be here as you do.”

  Behind the Viking, a woman emerged from a tent set up at the park’s edge. It was pixelated desert tan, evidently military surplus, with a sign directing journalists to register there. Keegan knew enough about electronics, though, to recognize that the array of antennae peeking from the top was not merely for linking up to the news networks. When the DC police had tried to storm the camp, the veterans had thrown up a digital blockade, not just jamming radios, but tossing up so much electronic noise that the cops’ surveillance drones had literally fallen from the skies.

  The woman was in her late twenties, diminutive, with a matte black eyebrow stud and dreadlocks. While the Viking was in green digital camo, cut off just above the knees into a pair of ragged shorts, Dreadlocks was in blue Navy coveralls. As she came closer, Keegan spied the name “Richter” stitched on the right, as well as the blue, gold, and red stripes of a Presidential Unit Citation on her sleeve. That and the fact that she carried no weapons indicated she was higher up in the camp’s ranks.

  “Everything OK, Red?” she asked, looking only at the Viking, as if the two FBI agents didn’t exist. Keegan tried not to smile at the typically creative service nickname.

  “This lady cop says that she can come in, that she’s one of us.�
�

  “You don’t say,” Richter replied, leaning forward as she stared directly at Keegan. Her breath smelled of mint stim gum, which took Keegan back to her own deployments and the cravings that followed. “Prove it.”

  Keegan slowly pushed up her left sleeve to just beneath the elbow. There, 1 inch below the elbow and 2 inches above the wrist, was a tattoo of an eagle above a globe crossed by an anchor. Three names were below it, each in a different font: Ferry, Rodriguez, Anton. Keegan covered the tattoo with her hand, just to show that it was sized according to Marine regulations, just like she’d had to do for her NCO the morning after she’d come back to the barracks with it.6

  Richter nodded her approval, not having to ask what the three names meant. “How about you?” she asked Griff.

  Before he could answer, Keegan said, “He’s with me. We just need to cut through to the station.” Griff nervously cracked his knuckles while Richter briefly looked him over.

  “Sorry, no can do.” Now, she only looked at Keegan, ignoring Griff again. “Only those that served.”

  There wasn’t time to argue.

  Keegan turned to Griff. “Head back to the vehicle. Link back up with me when you get there.”

  Griff looked like he was going to argue with her—the Academy certainly didn’t teach you to leave your partner behind in a camp full of armed protesters—but Keegan cut him off.

  “I’ll be fine. Any of them could have shot me back in the Corps, so why do it now? Move,” she said more emphatically, signaling an order. “We don’t have time to waste.”

  At that Griff turned and headed back to the SUV, which had only driven itself another 7 feet.

  At Keegan’s impatience, Richter looked at her quizzically. “I got this, Red,” she said to the Viking. “I’ll escort her through.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, the chain of command clear.

  Richter motioned for Keegan to follow.

  Keegan had mixed emotions about it all. She’d been asked to march more than once, but declined every time. She’d varied her excuses—sometimes it was an FBI training course she claimed she couldn’t get out of, other times a family commitment. But it was really because she just didn’t like where it all had ended up.