by P. W. Singer
“Micro-expressions indicate not just mistruth, but also emotional distress.” It then added, “Your biofeedback indicates the same state.”
“Well, the Potomac’s the color of blood and I’m stress-eating a sausage bomb with a robot who thinks it can read minds,” Keegan replied. Quietly, she added, “Scan the room, but silent push any information of law enforcement interest.”
She looked down to see the red light of an emergency message popping on her vizglasses, now lying faceup on the table. Setting down the half-smoke and picking the glasses up, she smeared chili across the lens. The text box read that facial recognition software had identified the beefy man standing behind the counter, watching the waitress a bit too closely, as having two outstanding warrants for armed robbery. A query from TAMS then typed out if it should notify the local police.
“Information noted. Yes, agreed,” Keegan replied, deliberately using a calm tone, as if having a normal conversation.
She looked down at the half-smoke, the chili starting to cool and congeal. She crammed as much as she could of the spicy half-smoke into her mouth, getting a good half of it in. Chewing furiously, Keegan wondered if TAMS knew the Heimlich, just in case. She then wiped her mouth with a napkin and placed the dirty paper back in her lap, using the motion to reach under the table for her gun.
Ben’s Chili Bowl
Washington, DC
“I have been instructed to provide you payment,” said TAMS. The robot held the two $40 bills between its thumb and trigger finger. The man behind the counter glared back at the robot standing before him, TAMS’s head barely topping the counter.
“What?” the man said. He was wearing the yellow “Ben’s” T-shirt worn by the restaurant staff, but it was a tight fit.
Its legs telescoping, TAMS boosted its height by over a foot to look the man nearly in the eyes. “I have been instructed to provide you payment,” the machine said.
“I know that. Don’t you have a credit number to just bill to or something?” he asked.
“It is legal tender for the goods and services you have provided,” the machine said, ignoring his query. The robot stood silent as the man scowled in exasperation.
“Give it here, then.”
The robot dropped the bills. As the bills fluttered down, they missed the countertop and fell to the floor in front of TAMS—just as Keegan had instructed.
The man looked at the robot in anger. “Stupid machine, pick them up.”
TAMS stood still.
“Pick them up.”
No movement.
The man grunted in frustration and leaned over the counter, his fingers stretching out to reach the bills on the floor, one leg extended up.
Seeing her opening, Keegan leapt up from the corner table. By the time the man looked up, she was already on him. She was smaller, so she used physics to her advantage. She grabbed the man by the collar and yanked him toward her, his body sliding over the slick countertop. When his center of mass shifted over the edge, he tumbled to the ground. Before the man could get up, Keegan placed her shin over his throat, using her focused body weight to pin him.
“Auditory sensors indicate four additional people in the food storage areas,” TAMS said as patrons sprinted for the door.
The bot began pushing additional information onto her vizglasses. Unlike in the Kill House, the walls were too thick to determine the exact outline of whoever was back there. The glasses also noted the DC Metro Police’s ETA, a clock ticking down the arrival of a patrol car projected to be assigned the call to investigate.
“TAMS, hold this guy until police arrive,” said Keegan. Pulling the dazed man up, she reached over to grab TAMS’s hands and placed them over the man’s wrists. “And read him his rights.”
“OK.”
As the suspect looked confusedly on, the robot held him in place with its locked fingers as makeshift handcuffs. Then, with a vocal tone taken from an amalgam of the recordings of Supreme Court hearings, it began its lecture. “Mr. Andrew Kerinsky, as you are presently detained by a representative of law enforcement, as determined by the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona Supreme Court decision, you have a right to . . .”1
Keegan stopped listening to the robot as she moved back over the counter and snuck a quick glance around the corner, into the kitchen area. No one. She moved on to the doorway to the storage area and peeked around the edge. The waitress and a cook were kneeling on the floor, eyes fearful. An elderly man in a suit was laid out beside them, a trickle of blood coming from a gash above his eyebrow. Keegan had been to Ben’s enough times to recognize Sage Ali, the son of the legendary founder. And behind them, crouched behind a stack of hot dog buns, was a young man with a shaved head wreathed in a barbed wire crown tattoo. In his hand, he held a blue eight-shot revolver, the kind fabbed by 3-D printers in garage gun shops.2
At the snap of a round hitting the wall inches in front of her, Keegan jerked back behind the doorway. A second bullet went through the doorway and hit the wall at the other end of the diner behind her, glass spraying from an actor’s photograph. Keegan looked back over at TAMS. As the robber now writhed to try to get down to cover, the robot ignored the gunfire, prioritizing Keegan’s last order to it. It was now reading out loud a clip from the Wikipedia summary of the 2010 Berghuis v. Thompkins Supreme Court case, which amended the suspect’s right to silence only if they explicitly verbalized their right to silence.3
Changing her position lower to spoil the shaved-head shooter’s last aim point, Keegan peeked around the corner again, but he was already gone.
She knew she could hang back and wait for DC police . . . But you don’t shoot at a federal agent and just get to run away.
The waitress pointed down the hallway, to the exit door. Stepping into the alley off U Street, Keegan squinted to see if the man had gone left or right. The clang of banging iron caused her to look up. Shaved Head’s escape had taken him to the roof of the six-floor luxury condominium behind the restaurant, as she could tell from his red running shoes disappearing over the edge. Keegan ran toward the exterior stairway, when the man reappeared, pointing his pistol down at her.
Shit. Keegan unconsciously shifted her weight to the balls of her feet and felt her stomach knot, her body waiting for the shot to hit.
The explosion from above echoed through the alley. Then came a howl of pain from the rooftop, where a cloud of blue-tinged smoke hung where the man had just been. That was the problem with untraceable black-market 3-D printed guns, she thought in relief. They don’t show up in registries, but the black-market printers never vouch for their reliability.
Seeing a service door, Keegan sprinted toward it and pulled a breaching tool from her pocket. She jammed the flashlight-sized tube against the door’s radio-frequency identification access plate, the kind used by all the automated cleaning services. An instant later, as the autosearch warrant authorized, the locks popped to allow her inside.
Half a minute later, Keegan was standing on the roof, weapon ready. Breathing hard, chest rising and falling from taking the steps two at a time, she searched the rooftop for any sign of the potentially injured robber. She knelt to peer under an HVAC unit, exhaling in frustration when she heard footsteps. Sweeping her pistol across the roof, she saw nothing. Then she heard them again.
There. Above her. A glimpse of movement as the man bounded from one of the rooftop’s drone delivery pads to another, using the raised octagonal “lily-pad” landing platforms like a playground jungle gym.
“Stop!” shouted Keegan. “FBI!”
Shaved Head kept going, leaping across to another of the lily pads.
Keegan grabbed one of the landing platform’s support struts and pulled herself up, as if back on the obstacle course in Quantico. By this point, the man had leapt across to a neighboring pad, a larger one designed to accept bulk deliveries.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Keegan said.
Shaved Head shook his head with a smile and made a running leap toward the next
platform, which bordered the side of the roof. He didn’t stop but kept running as he landed, leaping off the building. His body disappeared over the edge as he fell into the void.
Holy shit. Had he just committed suicide just to get out of an armed robbery collar?
Keegan made the leap to the lily pad and pulled up. Peering over the edge, she girded her stomach for the sight of what falling six floors did to a body. Instead she saw the robber on a balcony on the building across the street, one floor down. Bastard.
Keegan took aim. “Stop!”
Shaved Head looked back at her and then started to jimmy the balcony’s sliding glass door. Her heart pounded and the blood rushed in her ears as she centered her sights on the robber. The balcony was decent sized, the kind of premium space that a good lobbyist’s salary could buy, with a broad mirrored glass wall running along the back of it. But who was on the other side of that wall? Maybe a kid like Haley. Or a Jared on the couch. She held her fire and holstered her gun. She would have to make the leap herself.
She doubled back two more lily pads, not out of any strategy other than the assumption that there must have been a reason they did the triple jump in the Olympics. Taking a deep breath, she began to run, leaping from one lily pad to another, then the final one, ignoring the nerve pain now starting in her leg and the chili in her stomach, and launched herself across the gap between the buildings.
As Keegan fell short of the balcony on the other side, her brain unconsciously signaled that she should have factored in how much taller the robber was. It gave her body just enough warning to grab at the balcony railing with both hands, the right catching the railing fully, the left with two fingers. It was enough, and she hung there for a second, trying to get a better grip on the slippery metal rail. So she swung her legs out and then back in a kind of Kipping pull-up and let herself fall. The momentum took her down and she just made it past the railing of the balcony one floor below.
Stuck the landing was all Keegan could think.
She laughed out loud, the adrenaline from her near fall welling up. She realized she had lost her vizglasses in the leap. Typical. All that care not to scratch them in her pocket and they’d just fallen five stories.
She heard the robber in the balcony above ripping up the screen door, and she rapped her knuckles on the mirrored glass of the one she was standing on with her gun hand, pulling out her FBI identification card with the other. “FBI! I need you to open up.”
No response, so she knocked again. The door slid open, pulled back by an automatic track. But there was nobody there. Puzzled, she peered into the room and called out, “FBI! On the floor!”
She felt a vibration at her ankle—a domo bot in the form of a large cat was rubbing its body against her, purring.4 The mahogany-shelled quadruped bot turned its head up to her and said, “Welcome to my home. How may I help you?”
Whether that was the owner piped in or the sim-pet acting on its own, it didn’t matter. Legally, they’d just given authorization to enter. Keegan kicked the purring cat out of the way and stormed through the apartment, out the front door, and into the hallway of the apartment building. Running to the stairwell, she raced up the steps two at a time. Her guess was that the robber had gone up as well, rightly assuming the streets below were going to start filling with cops.
At the door at the top of the stairs, Keegan paused, both to catch her breath, fighting back the taste of chili that was starting to work its way back into her mouth, and to check her Watchlet. Scrolling the wristband screen to the CityCam app, she pulled up the city government’s security camera feeds nearby—nothing useful. One was digital snow, evidently jammed, and the other two cams that covered this block just showed a dark screen, likely sabotaged old-school style with spray paint.5
Going in blind then.
She carefully cracked the door, edging her pistol out first.
She caught a flash of movement on the adjacent building—this one was the same height as the one she was on, and the robber was again leaping across the alleyway-sized gap between the two structures.
Second time’s the charm.
Keegan ran as fast as she could to the roof’s edge. Not needing to leap from one pad to another, she easily made it to the other side, landing with a spray of cheap asphalt shingles. She hit hard, though, the impact a wave of nerves firing all the way up her back. The brief shock made her lose her balance before she rolled back to her feet with her pistol at the ready.
Stepping deliberately around a messily stacked pile of broken TVs sprinkled with green and brown glass, Keegan hunted for the man. Then she saw him—the bastard was starting another run to leap to the next building.
“FBI!” Keegan shouted. “Stop. Running. Now.” She tracked the man’s lower body with her gun’s sights, leading him just a bit and fighting the instinct to place the shot center mass, just as she was taught. She wanted to wound him, not kill him, but this had to end. She exhaled and started to pull the trigger.
That was when Shaved Head’s feet skidded as he desperately tried to slow down. Keegan’s tunnel vision down her gun sights widened as she saw TAMS’s head emerge at the edge of the roof. The robot pulled itself up to block the robber’s predicted running path.
Shaved Head made a slight step to his left and TAMS matched him, moving over onto the ledge of the building, ignoring the abyss behind it. As the robber tried to fake right, Keegan ran forward, a slight hitch in her step now, her leg almost completely numb from the inflamed nerve. The man heard her and turned, his eyes wide as Keegan took him with a low rugby tackle. The momentum carried them both into an HVAC vent, knocking it free from its mounts.
“Do not move,” said Keegan, using her weight to pin the writhing man. She looked up and saw TAMS freeze in place.
“No, TAMS, you’re doing what I want,” said Keegan. “Come over here and help out.”
The robot reached down with one hand to cuff the man at his wrist, using the other to pull Keegan up.
Potomac Overlook Neighborhood
McLean, Virginia
There was a slight ping as Todd’s shovel hit another rock. His forearms ached, but it was exhilarating in a way. For him, the feeling of exhaustion had always been associated with productivity, a job worth doing being done. His efforts hadn’t been so physical in the past, but it still gave the same sense of achievement.
The sound of whistling and footsteps approaching interrupted that pleasurable feeling, replacing it with the need to put on a different face. It was crucial to control the flow of the conversation from the start. Todd climbed out of the hole in his backyard and leaned on the shovel as if it were a walking stick. Looking as nonchalant as he could, he called out, “Hey Alden, what’s going on with you?”
The head of his next-door neighbor, Alden Chait, appeared over the fence dividing their backyards, perfectly framed like a target, between the evenly spaced wooden posts. “Not much. I forgot to take the compost to the curb,” Chait said. “Pickup tomorrow. Then I heard the digging and thought I’d check in on you.”
Unstated was the idea that Todd, the older neighbor, who lived alone, ought to be checked in on. It grated on him to think he was only a target of pity and concern.
Chait leaned in farther, as Todd considered the distance that the shovel’s blade would need to swing in order to take Chait’s head in the temple.
“So you putting up a privacy hedge because of the new camp back there?” Chait asked. He nodded over at the woods just beyond the tangle of scrub and grass that marked the open border of Todd’s backyard to Scott’s Run Nature Preserve. “I mean I feel sorry for those people, having no jobs and all that, but I wish they’d camp somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” Todd said, leaving it unclear as to whether he was answering the question or agreeing with the sentiment.
There was a pause, the only noise a slight buzz in the distance of a passenger drone making a run out to Dulles.
“You want any help?” Chait asked, filling the emptin
ess. “We got one of those new Werx yard bots. The digger attachment can knock that out for you in no time.”
“No, I’m good,” Todd said. He scratched at his chin with one finger. “You ever have the urge to plant something and watch it grow and become remarkable? From the very beginning, all through your own efforts? That’s what I’m after here.”
“Well, let me know if you change your mind,” Chait said. “I’ll plug it into the charger just in case. And just promise me you’ll be careful. There’s like 200 volts running through the line buried under there.”
“Two hundred thousand,” Todd said. Chait was dead already. He might as well go knowing the correct number.
“Huh?”
“The power lines that go into your house run up to 240 volts; that’s what you’re thinking of. But the park is city land, so the line back there is the high-capacity distribution for this whole area. The old overhead power lines for that when you were a kid were 13,000 volts, but the new Japanese multicore cable they put in the ground has a capacity of 200,000 volts.”6
“I forgot you used to work on all that tech stuff,” Chait said. “Well, whatever the number is, I think it saved us a couple hundred thousand dollars. They’d already put that line in when we bought our house. Everybody freaking out about the cancer risk of having a big power line running right behind their home knocked down the price. Didn’t bother me. My attitude was like that song in the old movie about the lions, ‘Hakuna Matata.’ Whatever will be, will be.”
He had that wrong as well.
“We were here before all that,” Todd said quietly. “Isabella and Adam died right before they put it in.”
That was how he knew exactly where the power line was. While mourning his family, he’d sat on the back deck alone, day after day, doing nothing but watching the Dominion Power bots dig the trench and lay the cable. It was then that he’d thought through what he would do next with a life that was over, what could be done to make their sacrifice have any meaning at all.