Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  “But it won’t kill me, it won’t kill me.” 70

  Todd spoke the old folk song’s lyrics, rather than singing them back to her. It was the words that mattered for their purpose, the sign-countersign for the meetup agreed to in the closed game chat room.

  “Cool beans,” she said, her tone instantly chipper. She drew her gun hand out of the pocket, revealing a pistol-shaped store clerk’s price-gun. She waved it with a smile and then tossed it to the ground, the plastic skittering across the broken glass.

  “It’s ’cause I used to work here,” she said, addressing both how she knew about the hidden door and where she’d gotten the price gun. “Selling silk scarves that cost a week’s pay. Bags and purses worth more than any bank account I ever had. They only let me wear them at work. Assholes.”

  She motioned for him to follow, opening back up the hidden door with a push. “You’d think this was a secret room for security guards or something cool like that,” she continued. “But it really just connects to the storage rooms and parking garage. I guess they didn’t want a handle on the wall to mess up the feng shui. Whatever. It’s where we’d hide out when we wanted to avoid the manager.”

  Not knowing what he was supposed to say, Todd just snorted, feigning amusement. Entering the darkness, he put one hand in his pocket, the other feeling for the wall, to assure himself both of his location and that no one else was lurking along the hall. It had the rough feel of cement blocks, a contrast with the luxurious once-polished wood on the outside. Everything’s a façade, he thought.

  “The day they fired me turned out to be the best day of my life,” she said, her voice ahead in the dark. “If anything will turn you freegan, it’s day after day of watching people fondle Birkin bags that they’re only going to throw away at the end of the season.”71

  For somebody trying to disguise their appearance at a secret meetup, she did a lot of talking. But maybe that was to be expected. Everything the freegans did was built around the twin pillars of recycling and collectivism, what they saw as the way to beat back the twin sins of consumerism and elitism. Todd thought that, in execution, it meant they spent most of their time standing around trash heaps arguing about urban foraging rights.

  “Didn’t this used to be a condo complex too?” he asked, making conversation to keep her at ease.

  “Yeah, bottom floor high-end goods, top floor high-end people. And, just like with the product, a lot of people fronting like they were high-end. Some of the worst people in the entire nation, paying my month’s salary for the condo fees alone, just to be able to say they lived here.72 Now it’s all ours, just there for the taking after it all went bankrupt. I can tell by your clothes,” she motioned at his outfit, “that you’re a buyer, but there’s a lotta good shit here if you want to join in. Might find you like it.”

  “I appreciate that, but for now, all my time is spent working for the common good. Why I appreciate your help,” he added. He needed her aid, not just to find his way through the dark, but to get what he was really here for.

  “It’s not help,” she said. “But sharing. That’s the only way out of this.”73

  That only showed how little she understood. The freegans imagined themselves true believers in change. They were more like parasites, in his view, living off a dying society’s leftovers. But, like parasites, they had their uses.

  They continued down the service hallway, the noise of some kind of early-morning party going on in one of the abandoned condos above reverberating down through the ceiling. After a turn through a door indicating “Parking Garage,” they descended a stairway that was pitch black except for a tiny orange digital dot of light at the bottom.

  A flashlight illuminated a man smoking a pink e-cigarette and waiting at the stairway’s landing. A thick crack in the cigarette’s plastic cut through the picture of a Japanese anime girl band that had been popular a few years back.

  “Hey,” the girl said. “It’s us.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” a male voice said, running out the words with a smoker’s drawl. He had hollow eyes, shoulder-length brown hair, and a thin beard. Dressed in brown canvas overalls topped by a blue blazer with gold buttons, he looked like an out-of-work construction worker going out to a yacht club dinner. The discarded clothes of two men who would never meet.

  The man aimed the flashlight straight into Todd’s eyes. Todd squinted, turning his head slightly at the glare, as the man examined him. He directed the light from Todd’s pockmarked cheeks to his long brown stringy hair.

  “Shit, man. You don’t look like Moses. Just a junkie.” He laughed. “But I guess that’s the point. If you ever throw away that mask, let us know first. It’d be cool to try out.”

  “Agreed,” Todd said quietly. “You run into any problems?”

  “Say again?” the man said. He pulled out the e-cigarette, and then coughed, spitting wetly onto the wall next to him.

  Todd took a step forward and said more loudly, “The pallet. Did you get it?” Closer to the man now, Todd tried not to breathe in any more of his funk, a mix of stale fruit, burned plastic, and unwashed clothes.

  “Yeah, it’s here,” the smoker said, putting the e-cigarette back in his mouth. It now bent slightly at the crack. “Shipment address had it going to Richmond, but we got in there before it went out.”

  That was the key. He’d had the shipment directed to a real address. But if it actually arrived questions would have been asked about the special order of capacitors that showed up out of nowhere.

  “Anybody get hurt?” he asked, breathing in through his mouth. The smell of cigarettes, both real and fake, annoyed him, the scent of a loss of control over base cravings.

  A long drag and a pulse of orange light, then a deep exhale. “Why? From the way you were carrying on in the cloud, that wouldn’t be an issue.”

  “There’s a time for violence,” Todd said.

  “Yeah, well, this wasn’t one of those times. The Baltimore port is all automated now. Not a single damn person there. All you need to do is punch in the access code and it loads it for you. You just gotta get there before the real delivery truck arrives.”74

  “Good,” Todd said. “Where is it?”

  The smoker waved the flashlight over Todd’s shoulder, lighting up a large shipping pallet. Todd walked over and examined three large cubes, each the height of a man, wrapped in protective blue rubber. Running along the side was thick yellow tape with the image of a broken wineglass and the words “Fragile: Handle with Care.” and “Hati-Hati: Mudah Pecah.”75 He’d have to strip that off before they left, a slight clue to its origin point that a street camera might pick up.

  “We got it for you, but we ain’t driving it out,” the man said. “I trust your people are taking care of the pickup?”

  Todd looked down at his watch, trying to make out the dial’s illuminated markers in the dark. “Something like that.” That they thought him a representative of a group was useful. The less they understood the better. All that was coming for him was an automated share delivery van, billed to an account he’d pulled off an open network hack. It would just come up in the network as one of thousands of pickups for the day, lost within the noise of a city of them.

  “Cool. There’s only one more thing then,” the smoker said. The flashlight switched off, leaving the tip of the cigarette the only light in the room. Todd heard a rustle of clothes and then the ratlike squeak of steel sliding against leather.

  In the dark, Todd turned, tightening the grip on the pistol he held in his pocket. It was a Brazilian open-source design, bought at a North Carolina gun show a year back. It fired plastic rounds tipped with metal. They were only lethal when fired at close range, but they warped when they hit the body, leaving little to trace back.

  “Hey, Tim, this isn’t what the group agreed,” the girl protested.

  “They’ll agree when we bring it back,” the smoker named Tim said. “Here, take the light.”

  The flashlight came back on
, pointing first at the man and then back at Todd as the girl steadied it. In the man’s hand was a black wood-handled Santoku knife, with decorative swirling clouds etched onto the 8-inch blade.76 The tip was broken off, meaning it was some counterfeit given as a wedding or Father’s Day present and then tossed away with an equal lack of gratitude. But the edge of the knife shined in the light, showing it could still cut with ease.

  “Show me your wrist,” Tim commanded, coming closer to Todd.

  Todd felt his face flush with anger, but more at himself for failing to calculate for this scenario. A suppressor—why hadn’t he thought to print one? His pistol had seven rounds, meaning these two wouldn’t be a problem, but he didn’t need the sound reaching an army of scavengers in the condos above. “You really want to do this?” he asked the man.

  “Damn right. I’m going to see what you’re hiding on that wrist,” Tim said greedily, “whether it’s attached to the rest of your arm or not.”

  Todd released the pistol and pulled out his hand, holding it out palm upward.

  “I thought so,” said Tim. “Nice watch there.”

  “It’s an old one,” Todd said. “Not even digital.”

  The freegan stepped forward and gently held Todd’s fingers, turning the hand over so he could see the face of the watch. “An Explorer, right?”77 Tim’s dirty fingernails disgusted Todd.

  “A wedding gift from my wife . . . It’s not waste, not unneeded,” said Todd, making his voice plaintive, as if to appeal to their values.

  “Today it is,” said the man, nervously tapping his shoe.

  It made Todd’s stomach ache to think of giving it up. He ran his next moves, visualizing each step. A quick yank back of his hand, then pull out the pistol. First the man, then the talkative girl, then bar the door at the stair, to keep their compatriots from coming down.

  But none of it was in the plan. It would create points of connection where now there were only faint dots. An order of graphene and ceramic sheets, made in a vacuum chamber at an Indonesian fabworks. A missing package from the Baltimore harbor. A group of scavengers posing as revolutionaries, who’d be on to their next abandoned building by the end of the day. And a delivery pickup billed to a corporate account that wouldn’t even register it as a crime. Nothing now linked them together. Nothing worthy of investigation. But bodies would change that.

  The freegan tauntingly shone the light back on the shipping pallets, oblivious to the calculations Todd ran in his head. “You want your boxes or what?” said the man. “I know what I want. Time to share, man.”

  Todd popped the clasp and handed the watch over while the girl watched, mumbling to herself. “Here. And get out, before I change my mind.” He told himself that if it pained him, then it was just another sacrifice that proved the worth of it all.

  “Thanks, man,” the smoker said and retreated quickly. The flashlight flicked off and the pair’s footsteps disappeared into the darkness.

  After a few seconds, Todd rubbed the skin where the watch had been. Pulling out a finger-sized flashlight, he brushed a layer of dust from one of the windows in the blue rubber casing. The dull yellow sheets of material were beautiful and yet horrifying. They had the façade of order, when instead, there was deliberate asymmetry, the kind that was only possible through inhuman precision. After further inspection, he breathed a sigh of relief. If the sheets had turned red, the marker that they had cracked in transit, then it was all for naught.78

  All the other details were too small to see with the naked eye. Each sheet was actually stacks of atom-thin, but incredibly conductive, nanocomposite paper.79 The sheets of graphene film, made of hexagonal crystals of carbon atoms, were layered one after another between equally thin nonconductive ceramic sheets, with a microscopic overlap between the corner of each sheet, like the pages of a book pressed ever so slightly.

  Only those tiny contact points linked it all together.

  Logan Circle

  Washington, DC

  TAMS could not have been any quieter. The bot sat in the front seat of the FBI Suburban, motionless and noiseless, as if it knew that it was partly to blame for what had gone down.

  She didn’t tell TAMS where they were going; she didn’t know herself. She just let the Suburban follow its own patrol pattern. Pretty soon, the algorithm had them across the river and looping around the wide traffic circles that L’Enfant had designed into the city, first at Foggy Bottom, then Dupont, and now at Logan. Something about the shape naturally, or rather algorithmically, was like catnip for the nav system, she thought. Maybe it was the mathematical ability to draw a limitless number of connection points compared with a standard intersection; maybe it was just a design quirk. In either case, it captured her mood perfectly, making forward progress without really going anywhere.

  At some point in the autonomous circle hunting, Keegan felt hunger pangs and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, wishing them away. It didn’t work. Frustration and anger had conspired to make her far hungrier than she should have been. It was the kind of hunger that only cheese fries and a half-smoke could solve.

  “Fuck it,” she said, and set the destination.

  They found parking a half block away and walked under a bright yellow and white awning on a red and white brick neoclassical storefront.

  “More training for you,” she said to TAMS. “You can people watch and I’m going to eat.”

  What Keegan loved about Ben’s Chili Bowl was that it was a vibrant landmark in a city full of cold, stone institutions. Built into the front of an old turn-of-the-century silent movie house, the diner had opened in 1958 on U Street, back then known as the “Black Broadway” of the segregated capital city.80 A favorite of police and protesters alike, it had been the only business to survive the riots after Dr. King died, then the wave of murder and drug crime during the crack epidemic, then the gentrification that turned crime-ridden streets cool, followed by the more recent return of the neighborhood to its dangerous past.

  Keegan had first been there blurry-eyed and drunk, Noah and a group of randoms from the Marine barracks taking her there as part of the celebration of her release from Walter Reed. Since then, she’d gone there for occasions that ranged from her and Jared grabbing a hot dog after a date to moments like this, when you just needed to eat something bad for your body, but good for your soul.

  She stepped in the door, though, and felt pangs of lament, not relief. She was taking a robot to one of her special places before her own daughter. The smell quickly erased that emotion, her body reacting to the scent of French fries and the tang of chili. They walked to the counter, past the photographs of celebrities who’d eaten there, from US presidents to Hollywood actors. People came not just for the food, but also the history, the connection to something human and bigger than them.

  Above the wall of fame was an old-model flat-screen TV, playing footage of a man angrily shouting before a crowd. Closed-captioning text of his rants ran at the bottom of the screen in slightly fuzzed font due to the TV’s age.

  SENATOR HAROLD JACOBS: NO MACHINE CAN BE TRUSTED. THEY’VE TURNED OUR WATER INTO BOTTOMLESS POOLS OF BLOOD . . .

  What a drama queen, Keegan thought. Something breaks, you fix it. Move on.

  A “SOFTWARE GLITCH” IS MORE THAN A DECIMAL POINT IN THE WRONG PLACE. IT’S A TAX ON YOU. IT MEANS YOUR CHILDREN WILL BE BATHING IN WATER THAT LOOKS LIKE BLOOD WHILE YOU SPEND YOUR HARD-EARNED MONEY ON BOTTLED WATER . . .

  After a few seconds, Keegan stopped reading and turned to the menu on the wall, even though she knew what she was going to get—two half-smokes with chili and an order of fries. The half-smoke was a DC thing that she’d not known about until she moved to the city. It looked like a hot dog but tasted like a spicy sausage. She’d be feeling it later, but so what? A price had to be paid.

  After she ordered, she picked a table in the corner. Unlike TAMS, she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head, so she always liked to sit with her back to the wall, able to see who was coming an
d going. She motioned for the robot to sit across from her.

  After what seemed hours, but was only little more than a minute, a waitress brought the food. You used to just pick up the food at the counter, but a few years back they’d added the waitstaff, mostly as a way to give someone a job. It was another unexpected effect of the automation wave, new charity jobs created to replace the old ones lost, just not how everyone had thought.

  The waitress placed the tray down stiffly, not making eye contact with Keegan. Maybe it’s the bot, she thought.

  “Thank you,” said Keegan.

  The woman lingered for a moment.

  “You doing OK?” Keegan asked.

  “Oh, sure,” she whispered. “We’re all fine here.”

  After she turned away, TAMS spoke. “The waitress was not telling the truth,” it said.

  Keegan looked down at the chili covering the sausage before her. Dammit, the bot was right.

  “Yeah, she lied. But what’s she going to say, that the pay’s terrible and her feet hurt and she wants to go home? Humans lie all the time. The key is to distinguish between the little lies, the ones that make just getting on with life possible when it’s really hard, and the big lies.” Keegan picked up a half-smoke and pointed it at Jacobs on the screen, a small drop of chili falling onto the Formica table. She paused. “Tell me more about the waitress’s state.”