Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  The man turned from his fellow passenger, still oblivious to the fact that she was being watched, and stared back out the window. Behind his reflection in the glass—his face framed by wispy, long white hair pulled back into a ponytail—the speed of the train turned the landscape into a green and gray streak. Then it slowly came back into focus, a visual clue that the Freedom Rail had begun to slow.

  He used his cane to tap the polished steel toe of her black Dr. Martens boots, another statement of rebellion repurposed into fashion. He wondered if she knew the shoe’s journey, rebranded from originally being worn by police to becoming the emblem of skinheads and soccer hooligans and finally as part of the marketized revolution.

  “Can I help you?” she said angrily, taking off her glasses. She took in the sight of the old man in the seat beside her. He wore old-fashioned eyeglasses, no electric hookup, just black with an overlay of an almost imperceptible pattern of dot matrices.23

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I saw your ticket was for Princeton Junction,” he said, pointing up at the sign at the end of the car flashing their arrival at the station. “I didn’t want you to miss your stop.”

  “Oh my God. Thank you so much! I’ve got an exam this afternoon and—”

  “You got lost in studying?” he said, motioning at her lenses.

  “Yep. VR cramming app blocks everything out, even my stop,” she said. “But I don’t know what I would do without it.”

  “I can’t even imagine,” he said. “I’d give you the line about how we studied ‘back in my day,’ but you don’t have time to hear about how dinosaurs roamed the campus and used notepads and laptops.”

  The train pulled into the station silently, and the two exited together.

  As she walked beside him, just a half step back, both out of respect and to catch him if he fell, the man scanned the crowd. Waiting on the platform were a few students and business commuters, but not who he was looking for.

  The girl noticed his pause, that minute shift in body stance from not finding what he was looking for. “Do you need any help finding where you need to go?” she asked in that tone that patronizing youth use with the feeble and helpless.

  “No,” he replied. “Someone was to be here to meet me, but they must be running late.”

  “Would you like me to wait with you?” It was unclear if she really meant it, or if it was just one of those things you said and hoped the other person wouldn’t actually take you up on it. But in either case, it was a kindness that made him think better of her.

  “That’s very nice of you,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to be the one to blame for you bombing your exam. I’ll be fine. Thank you . . . and good luck!”

  As she walked away, he noticed that she’d pulled her jacket hood up, even though it was a sunny day. Her face was totally enveloped by the thick black light-absorbing fabric and its Defeat-All coating.24 Was she dressing that way for a reason or just to screw with other students data gathering on their classmates for feed chum?

  Either way, he thought, it had to stop. There was more to be done than just coating yourself to slide through the system.

  He sat down on one of the benches, pulled out his tablet, and plugged a slightly grimy pair of white headphones into a special adapter on the device. He didn’t actually read the text moving across the screen, but it gave him an excuse to wait there and occasionally look up, seeming to check the trains’ progress on the arrivals sign, but really to rescan the crowd for his contact.

  After fifteen minutes of waiting, the old man gave up. If he stayed much longer, it would be conspicuous, maybe causing someone to come over and check on him. Very well. It would have to be just him.

  He boarded the next “Dinky” train that headed directly into Princeton University campus, paying for the fare with paper dollars on one of the old automated machines.

  The walk through campus was done at a deliberate pace, step by measured step, using the cane to steady his walk. He took in the Gothic buildings and their unapologetic suggestion that those who studied in them would never allow the progress of the world to erode their import.

  If I were a building, that might be me.

  He reveled in the feeling as he crossed another quadrangle of green space, where a half dozen youth lazed on the grass on top of orange-and-black-plaid blankets. While many of the students he’d passed earlier had been wearing glasses similar to the girl on the train’s, the entry to this quad was marked as an “IQ” area—a tech-free space for students to enjoy their “inherent qualities,” to be in only human company without machine interference or monitoring. Who knew what kind of bad decisions might emerge from afternoons spent here? Discourse? Dissent? Disobedience? It was partly why parents were the ones who were the most against IQ zones; they thought it better to track their children’s activities, to pen them in with algorithmic boundaries, rather than give them the freedom to become something other than what they had imagined for their creations.

  The old man eyed them, but not with envy. Those smiles were fleeting. They’d soon be back in the cloud, chasing that unfillable longing for more—more information, more stimulation, more of everything that would never be enough. Freedom? No. It was really a corral. And they did not even know it.

  He made his away across campus to the northwestern corner, to a quad surrounded by a perimeter of three-story Gothic-style buildings. Green vines crossed the limestone archways and flying buttresses, while castlelike turrets decorated the roofs, keeping the rest of the world at bay—this was the image that people thought of when they imagined the ivory tower.

  Except here, the wooden doors to a lecture hall were held open by a new kind of footmen—a pair of 24-inch-tall wheeled utility bots used for everything from escorting solitary students home from the library late at night to playing “Old Nassau” when alumni flooded the campus for reunions. This pair, though, were painted dark blue and red, a prank by Penn students he guessed, ahead of an upcoming game. He crossed inside and took a seat toward the back.

  FBI Domestic Special Detention Facility

  Reston, Virginia

  The windowless interrogation room was in what had once been a laser tag franchise. Its only light came from a faint LED dome situated directly over a bearded man. The only other points of illumination were the glint of the LED on the gold wedding ring on the man’s left hand and, just a few inches higher, a flash of silver where the table’s connection bolt had worn off the PVD coating of his black handcuffs. Otherwise, the room was in almost complete darkness as Keegan entered it.

  The bearded man looked up at Keegan with what seemed like relief, but he caught himself and instantly hardened his face, dropping his gaze to stare into the darkness. It was curious, though, Keegan noted. Rather than a thousand-mile stare, the prisoner’s eyes were focused. As Keegan’s eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, she understood why: there was a silhouette at the far end of the table.

  So, the head office had already sent someone else into the interrogation room before her. It wasn’t the idea of being babysat that rankled her so much as it was the fact that they’d missed identifying the threat, just like Noritz; it seemed they didn’t trust the FBI’s new “hero” agent not to commit a civil rights violation.

  Well, if the prisoner wasn’t going to speak to their roommate, neither was she. Keegan turned so her back was to the mute opponent in the staring contest, not acknowledging their presence.

  “Assalamu alaikum, Peace be upon you. My name is Lara Keegan. I would shake your hand in greeting,” Keegan said, gesturing at the handcuffs, “but I have to ask your forgiveness in these circumstances.”

  Shifting nervously, the suspect tugged at his restraints but kept his eyes locked on the person sitting at the far end of the table. That was fine. Anything that burned up his energy would weaken his resolve.

  “You already know me from the station. Let’s talk about you.”

  Silence.

  “Nothing? Well, I’ll help get you starte
d. Besides your having interesting taste in luggage, we know that you are garbed in the clothes of a cleric. And beyond that, you are wearing black.”

  Silence.

  “This lets us know something truly important. Wearing black is a sign you are a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon his name.”

  The bearded man readjusted his hands in the cuffs but stayed quiet.

  “It is an honor to be in the presence of someone with this heritage,” she continued. “But it does pose a problem that perhaps we can solve together.”

  The prisoner still said nothing, but for the first time, his eyes shifted from the figure at the end of the table, as he quickly glanced at Keegan.

  Keegan leaned over the table and held the man’s cuffed left hand up to examine it in the faint light. She turned it carefully, rotating it to examine the wedding ring in the dimness. “You see, Sura 43 of the Koran says no ornaments of gold should be worn on the person.”25

  She eyed the man’s face. Hard to tell. Maybe melanin injections for the skin coloration and some kind of reconstructive surgery to shift the jawline and cheekbones. It would likely leave small scars under the beard area. Could they get a warrant to shave him?

  “And that means no imam, especially one in black, would ever wear a gold ring.”

  Leaning forward, Keegan then put her full weight on the man’s elbow and forearm. Pinning the hand down, she yanked the ring off the man’s finger. A muted grunt of pain came out of the suspect’s mouth as the flesh above the knuckle tore off with the ring. Was he that tough? Or was he just snowed on meds?

  “There now, that’s better,” Keegan said. “Your costume is fixed.” She wiped the blood from the ring on her pant leg and then held it up to the light. Turning the ring slowly, she read the inscription out loud. “TR-MP, June 23, Love Forever.”

  The legs on the prisoner’s chair ground into the floor as he shifted his position, trying to worm his way out of the mounting pain in his hand. The trickle of blood from his finger started to pool under his shackled hands. Now three things reflected the LED light.

  “ ‘Love Forever.’” Keegan laughed. “We’ll see about that. A life sentence in prison has a way of testing relationships. So now it’s the time in our conversation to answer questions. Who is the mysterious man in the black robe really?”

  Instead, it was the silent observer who spoke.

  “Mr. Thomas Reppley of 114 Northwood Avenue, Sanford, Alabama.” The voice was dispassionate, the tone of an analyst simply responding with data, unaware that he was screwing up the whole flow of the interrogation.

  Keegan ground her teeth in anger but kept her expression passive. Without warning, her opening line of questions made no sense, all because this intervening asshole had held back useful information.

  Even if the asshole didn’t, she knew not to reveal any discord in front of the prisoner. So Keegan plowed ahead, as if the exchange had been planned.

  “So, Mr. Thomas Reppley of 114 Northwood Avenue, Sanford, Alabama, as you can see, the who is not a problem for us—despite your costume.”

  She tilted her head at the figure in the dark. “We know far more about you than you think. So, let’s talk about the why. We know it wasn’t your deep and abiding faith that brought you all the way from Alabama for your little charade on the Freedom Rail. So we need a different answer. Tell me, what else could motivate Mr. Thomas Reppley?”

  The observer spoke up again with the same inexpressive tone. “Potential financial gain. Six days ago a deposit was made of 15,909 Monero into an account at Winner’s Luck online gambling site.26 The account was registered to Mr. Reppley’s cousin-in-law, Michael Harris Simpkins. This is anomalous, as Mr. Simpkins previously had only used US dollars to make his deposits, not blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Further investigation is recommended.”

  Reppley’s eyes went wide and he sputtered a wet gasp. “Wait. I don’t know what—”

  This was too much. It was her interrogation to run and she didn’t like being played the fool, especially in front of a prisoner. Better to put the brakes on now and pick things back up once this asshole was locked back into whatever closet he worked in.

  “You see, Reppley,” said Keegan, moving over to the door and the light switch, “there is nothing you can hide from us.” She then flicked the switch that turned on the room lights.

  What Reppley saw before him made him howl. It was an animalistic scream of rage and fear. The prisoner kicked the chair over and tried to wrench himself free of the table, every instinct fighting to get as far away as possible from the once-shrouded figure. But the handcuffs kept him shackled to the table. As his body convulsed back and forth, he strained against the metal and blood started to drip from the cuffs as they cut into his wrists.

  “Goddammit,” said Keegan, looking from the observer, to Reppley, and then back again. She threw the ring in disgust. It made a ping as it bounced off the figure at the other end of the table.

  Princeton University

  Princeton, New Jersey

  As lecture halls went, there was no more hallowed place than McCosh 50.1 Besides hosting countless future senators and CEOs for their takes on everything from economics to ethics—or lack thereof—it was where Albert Einstein had delivered a series of four speeches to an audience of scientists gathered from around the nation. Soon after, the lectures on “The Meaning of Relativity” would be turned into a book and Einstein would win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

  The room was little changed well over a century later. Some four hundred wooden desks were laid out in auditorium style, open on the left and closed on the right to place your elbow on when taking notes. It must have been torture to left-handed students in the past and today’s students used to memory foam and the paper-free learning environment (PFLE) movement. Yet the old man appreciated that the desks remained as a reminder of the physicality of knowledge. Learning ought to be experienced as a corporal process of improvement.

  The old man took a seat in the back, toward the right, with an unobstructed view of the class. He gingerly twisted his body to fit in the wooden desk and pulled out a black leather-bound notebook and began to take notes as the lecture began. To his left, a buzz-cut young man in a flowing button-up long-sleeved burlap jumpsuit and orange flip-flops juggled four yellow balls. There was always someone like that—a jester, desperate to be noticed.

  Yet nobody paid him any mind, which was, the old man thought, a credit not just to his fellow students but also to the speaker who so held their attention. He truly was a proper heir to this room’s renowned history.

  Across the wooden stage, Professor J. P. Preston moved fluidly, bounding from foot to foot when he punctuated a point. He wore a dark blue stretch suit, a salmon-colored collarless dress shirt, and a pair of slightly scuffed fabbed mesh brown loafers. Every so often his lecture was diverted by anecdotes about what the president had said to him at their summer “get-together” on Martha’s Vineyard. It could have come across as arrogant, but every person in the audience knew that Preston had walked away from literally hundreds of billions of dollars, if not more, by turning his automation kernel into an open-source platform.2 He had written the software at the core of nearly every automated machinery’s operating system, and simply let anyone and everyone have it for free.

  Preston explained his reasoning, his fervent belief that technology could be in the public interest. If lawyers could go work for a law clinic or doctors at an aid clinic, why not technologists? In a fragile world of convulsive poverty, conflict, and environmental catastrophe, there was only one way for humanity to survive: to create, to build, to surpass. It was as much a sermon as it was a lecture. And if the old man had still been a student, it would have worked. He would have walked out of the lecture hall and immediately signed up to join this great man in the same great cause.

  But he was not a student anymore. When the lecture ended, the old man stood with an aching lower back. He watched as a scrum of students gathe
red around the professor, each hoping to be noticed, whether to be able to say that they once talked to him or even maybe get up the courage to request a recommendation later. Soon the room was empty. The old man walked to the front of the room and took the wooden stage. He wanted to see what it would feel like, looking out at all the desks, the adoring eyes watching. But all the desks were empty. Him, they would never know. He closed his eyes, feeling the weight of all that stone above him.

  The old man made his way to Preston’s office. There was no need to ask the two vandalized bots for directions; he could navigate the rabbit warren of corridors that linked all the buildings at the basement level by reading the small plaques on the wall. It took more time, but wouldn’t move any electrons across any network.

  Using the cane’s brass handle, he rapped on the door. There was no answer, and so he rapped again—four times, in an evenly spaced tempo.

  The door cracked open, and there stood Preston. He wore a pair of cheap vizglasses, the kind people wore to big outdoor festivals like Burning Man or industrial work sites. Over Preston’s shoulder, the old man saw an old-fashioned frame that held a cover of theNew York Times Magazine. He was about to speak but stopped, just for a moment. Then he smiled, realizing Preston had slightly enlarged the image from the front page to ensure visitors could more easily read his accolades.

  “I am sorry to barge in like this, but I just caught your lecture. Nathaniel Ludd—a big fan of your work, Professor,” the old man said.3 “Life-changing stuff.”

  The professor took off the glasses for a moment, assessing. Was this an eccentric billionaire with a research-enabling donation? Fortune knocking? Or just another of the idle, would-be intellectuals who haunted the campus, wasting time?

  “OK, hi there,” Preston finally said. “Very nice to meet you, but I’m in the middle of something—running a model that I need to babysit into adolescence. Can you come back during office hours? It’s the same rules for adult auditors as students.”