Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  He should have listened to his mom. She’d said to do it by the cherry trees on shore, dressed up for the occasion. But he hadn’t wanted to blow his cover; Dana’s profile showed greater joy from surprise. And now it had all gone to hell.

  Then, as if responding to his curses, the breeze shifted directions. Saved.

  “I’m doing great,” he said, as they began to edge away from the other boats. He slowed his pedaling to catch his breath. The beating of his heart, though, wouldn’t slow down.

  “That’s good,” Dana said. “You looked like you were going to be sick there. I was worried about you for a moment.”

  His hand went to the pocket of his jacket, feeling for the small box’s rounded edges. This was it. This was the moment. He blinked twice rapidly to start the vizglasses recording that would go out live to all the friends and family he’d marked for notice.

  “When I’m with you, nothing can go wrong,” he said. It wasn’t the exact opening line to the speech he’d rehearsed again and again in the bathroom. It was even better, he thought to himself. He took a big breath and slowly withdrew the ring box from his pocket. Dana’s eyes widened and she blinked twice as well. She knew.

  He opened the velvet box without a word. Inside was a ring of azure blue sapphire, mounted atop a ring of synthetic diamond in the shape of a crystalline vine, grown exactly to the size of Dana’s finger.2 He’d gotten the size for that the old way, wrapping a string around her ring finger while she slept.

  Dana’s face instantly changed and she gasped. “Oh, God . . . No, no, no,” she whispered.

  The ring box clattered to the bottom of the boat as Tim’s heart sank and his entire body went numb.

  Everyone had been watching, and she had said “no.”

  Then, some kind of instinct took over and he reached down to grab the ring as it bounced between their feet on the boat’s plastic floor. Maybe he could get his money back. Maybe the manufacturer would understand that the algorithms just had it wrong.

  Dana pulled at his shoulders, trying to yank him back up. “Oh my God, Tim. Look.”

  Dana pointed behind him, her finger trembling. Tim looked up quickly, his vizglasses slightly askew, broadcasting a scene for which he never could have planned.

  Coursing across the green softball fields of the West Potomac Park that divided the pond of the Tidal Basin from the Potomac River was a tsunami of white and red foam mixed. Trees, bushes, and even a bright yellow water-taxi boat, all pitched together by the water’s force. To the other side of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, a second wall of water rushed down 17th Street itself. Funneled by the slight hills on each side of the street, the wave pushed ahead of it a double-decker tourist bus and one of the wheeled red, white, and blue Park Service robots that stalked the National Mall.

  Then came the sound. Screams of people in the swan boats realizing what was happening mixed with the low rumble of the twin walls of water coursing through the cherry trees and then into the Basin.

  With a shaking hand, Tim picked up the ring that he had ordered for Dana. Focusing on nothing else, he slid it onto her finger, trying desperately to remember the lines of his proposal before it was too late.

  Ballston Neighborhood

  Arlington, Virginia

  Even on the short drive home, she could sense the change. The confusion. The fear. She could see it in the set jaw of the middle-aged man they passed on the street. Jogging in dress shoes and a suit, he was clearly a government worker, who, like her, had gotten an early notice and therefore a head start on the rush home. Even the sharecars seemed punchy, jumping in and out of traffic with something like alacrity, as if they could not wait to wrap up whatever trip the algorithms had just ordered.

  Keegan parked the SUV in front of the building, taking advantage of law enforcement privileges. Plus, she doubted that any cops would be out writing parking tickets today. Next to it was a yellow and blue sharecar, perched sloppily, half on the curb like it was just waiting for the right moment to move to higher ground.

  Holding Haley close, Keegan swept into the lobby of the building.

  “Stairs,” Keegan said, and TAMS pivoted, then swept around her like a determined dance partner. It had registered the situation as machine-first mode, an environment of danger. Keegan noted it with appreciation, until she realized something else.

  “TAMS, when we get to the apartment, I’m going in first, OK? Remember last time? We don’t need that scene again today.”

  “OK,” said TAMS.

  In the flickering light of the stairwell, Keegan looked at the bot, wondering what exactly it made of her command. How did it process the human need for respecting feelings even in a time of crisis?

  They took the stairs at an easy pace, counting each step, turning it into a game so as not to frighten Haley. When they reached their floor, the hallway was empty. She went right inside, not bothering to scan first to see how Jared was doing or whether he was working or not.

  “Hey! It’s me,” Keegan shouted as her eyes swept the living room. There was no sign of him, just an empty couch, except for the rig and a pile of loosely bunched blankets. She touched the rig—cold.

  “Jared! We’re home!” she called again. She sat Haley on the couch and, smiling reassuringly, snuggled the blankets around her into a kind of nest.

  No response. The air smelled stale. She moved to open a window, but stopped herself and went straight to the bathroom, past the closed bedroom door.

  She closed the drain of the bath and turned the tap on full, then did the same with the sink. She gripped the sink, knuckles white, and nudged the door shut with her foot. Eyes closed, she fought the urge to punch the mirror in anger. Not at Jared. Just at everything in that moment she was powerless to control. She turned the sink faucet off and focused on deepening her breath while she came up with a plan. As she did, her Watchlet vibrated repeatedly with notices, but she ignored it. She opened her eyes and looked in the mirror. You got this.

  She cracked the door of the master bedroom slowly. Jared lay on the bed, sprawled like a starfish, his head facing away from her. Shit, not again. Not now.

  Sitting on the bed, she shook his shoulders. “Hey! Hey! Jared!”

  Jared sighed as she did so and reached up to squeeze her hand. “Hey,” he said, very far from her and the room right then.

  “You need to wake up now! It’s an emergency, Jared. You understand? Haley’s here. I need you to keep her safe because I need to go back out,” she said. “Like now.” She released his shoulders and stood up.

  At that, he stiffened and sat up, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “OK,” he said. “I’m on it.”

  In the pantry was the box of cans they’d put away for emergencies a few years back. But when was the last time she’d checked the expiration dates? Plus, Haley wouldn’t eat tomato soup and refried beans. So she rifled through the cupboards, taking an inventory of the food they had. A box of Cheerios and another of ranch-flavored rice crackers, a jar of chunky peanut butter, and a box of Haley’s processed fruit squeeze tubes. The refrigerator and freezer offered little, aside from milk and almond creamer, butter, and a bag of spinach. They had gotten so used to automated food deliveries that there was no need to keep more than a few meal’s worth of ingredients on hand. Even air-delivered fresh bread, a luxury that neither had been able to give up, was a daily staple.

  She quickly opened the order screen on the refrigerator door and tried to buy a full inventory, essentially two weeks’ worth of past orders all at once. But just as she was about to push the “buy” button, the app froze. She kept trying, so intently focused on the small screen that she did not see Jared walk into the room from the bedroom.

  “What’s going on?” he asked in a gravelly voice, clearing the sleep from his throat. His eyes warily tracked to where TAMS stood watching over Haley, now playing on the couch with her self-assembling Legos. “And why is it back?”

  Keegan motioned him over with a commanding look of her eyes tha
t indicated they had to talk without Haley hearing.

  “We don’t have time for this shit right now. I need you locked on, OK? You need to stay in the apartment, with Haley, for a while,” she whispered. “I don’t know how long. There’s a flood downtown. Catastrophic. We’re safe up here, but that’s not it. I think there’s more coming.”

  “More coming? So you’re saying this wasn’t accidental. Cyber attack on infrastructure?” he asked.

  She smiled at his flash of comprehension. It was a glimpse of the old Jared, the one who had graduated at the top of his law school class. “Exactly. I’m trying to order more food, but it’s flaking out, the signal likely overwhelmed by everyone calling at once. Can you keep trying? Everybody’s being called into work, TAMS and I . . . Hold it.”

  She went over to TAMS, who had now become some kind of racetrack for Haley, the girl no longer at the couch, now running a Lego race car up and down its legs. She examined its antennae array on the back of its head closer. “Haley, can you stop for a minute? I gotta ask TAMS something important.” Haley stopped, and Keegan continued, “TAMS, can you take the network signal from this”—she pulled the Watchlet off her wrist—“and convert it to a satellite-band data feed?”

  “Yes,” said the bot, taking the bracelet computer. After a second, it reported. “Uplink established.”

  “Thank God!” said Keegan, feeling dopamine wash away the adrenaline flooding her veins, achievement knocking out fear. She snatched the Watchlet back from the bot and tabbed open her grocery app. In less than a half minute, she showed the screen to Jared. “Order completed, delivery on the way,” she said triumphantly.

  He held out his hand in a congratulatory high five, his cheeks now showing a healthy red flush.

  Take your wins where and when you can get them, she thought, and gave him a five back.

  “Go,” said Jared. “Haley and I’ll go up to the roof pad and bring the food down.”

  “You sure?”

  “We’ll be fine,” he said.

  He took a half step to hug her, but stopped short.

  And you have to accept your losses, she thought.

  “Don’t forget to turn off the bathtub faucet,” Keegan said. No need to have a flood in the middle of a flood. She turned to lift her daughter up into a hug.

  “Oh, Mommy,” she said, pointing down at the Lego car now missing its front hood. “You messed up my construction.”

  “Sorry, butterfly,” she said.

  She kissed the top of the girl’s head and then looked over to TAMS and gave it a nod, a signal that it was time to go. It was only when she and TAMS were headed down the hallway that she stopped. For a few seconds, she stood, tapping her feet, weighing what to do. Then, keeping one eye on TAMS, she pulled up the delivery order screen on her Watchlet and added an extra supply of Jared’s aerosol Dilaudid.

  Farragut Square

  Washington, DC

  Keegan kept her hands on the SUV’s wheel, ready to snatch control as she travelled with TAMS against a steady stream of autonomous vehicles fleeing the flooding along the Potomac. Above its historic high water mark, the river spread over the entire basin and had even overwhelmed the barrier walls at Reagan National Airport.1

  “Send our location to Noritz and the TOC,” said Keegan.

  TAMS pushed a thumbs-up emoji to Keegan’s vizglasses.

  Their destination was the old FBI Washington Field Office building at 4th and G. A notice had gone out that a temporary command post had been set up there after the Hoover Building’s basement flooded and the entire block lost power.

  On the SUV’s screen, Keegan projected live satellite imagery of the city overlaid onto a street map. It showed how the flood wave had paid no mind to the orderly gridlike arrangement of Washington’s streets. The initial wave had surged well up to M Street, but then the waters had quickly receded, leaving muddy red sidewalks and sucking cars right out of their parking spaces.

  Most of all the view showed how just a few feet in elevation made all the difference between devastation and normalcy.2 Most parts of the city were untouched, but now a massive moat cut through Washington, DC,’s federal district, turning the southern chunk of the city into an island. The Potomac River’s newest tributary entered the city at the Tidal Basin on the edge of the National Mall before its waters returned back into the main river near the lower elevation of the District Wharf shopping complex. Or rather what had been the District Wharf shopping complex.

  The borders of the flood zone reflected the subtle topographic contours of a city constructed out of swampland, unnoticed by most residents, but which had originally set its design over three centuries back.3 The flood’s edge ran along Pennsylvania Avenue, roughly mirroring the now-paved-over Tiber Creek that had once reached right up to the President’s Palace, before it was renamed the White House.4 It then ran from 15th Street beside the Treasury Department building, down over to the I-395 highway tunnels that opened at the base of Capitol Hill.5 Its southern side ran along Madison Avenue, the lower edge of the National Mall, which had previously been the open canal where Washington’s residents had dumped their trash in the early days of the republic’s capital city. The slight incline of the National Mall protected its green spaces, but the Museum of Natural History and the Justice Department, as well as the other buildings between Madison and Pennsylvania Avenues, now appeared as squares of cement rising out of the brown-red water, like tiny islands.

  Keegan zoomed in, seeing tiny dots swarming each of the island-buildings. Some were brightly colored city and federal emergency response drones, but there were also parcel drones dropping packages on the rooftops, an automated rush of requested deliveries and flash-funding charity drops. Panning over to the veterans’ encampment, Keegan saw that the rest of Capitol Hill remained dry.

  “Route the vehicle around any areas less than 20 meters in elevation,” Keegan said, realizing the vehicle’s navigation probably didn’t have a scenario for city streets literally disappearing underwater.

  They got as close as Farragut Square before the crowds got too thick. Keegan sent the SUV off to autopark up on high ground near H street and they set out on foot. Overhead, a bright yellow FEMA drone loitered in a lazy circle, while a micro-cam drone from one of the newsfeeds landed on the statue of Admiral Farragut to get a better shot. Thousands of people were out in the streets, some with a specific destination in mind, some aimless, and many just to film and comment.

  As they wove through the crowd, they passed the Farragut West Metro entrance. Keegan hated that spot more than anywhere in DC. She’d first been there nine years ago, while on leave from the Saudi stability op. It had been in early December, so on her way home, she’d killed time during a seven-hour layover at Dulles Airport to come in and check out the White House Christmas tree and all that stuff that you were supposed to be fighting for. Riding the subway escalator up, though, she had recoiled at the stench, not because it was that bad, but because it was all too familiar. The station had been turned into an encampment for desperate people, crushed together to escape the cold. She was a stone’s throw from the White House, witnessing the abject abandonment of fellow humans that she’d only before experienced in refugee camps. And she knew that her commander in chief would never walk the two city blocks to confront that dark fact.

  Today, a stream of men and women, some with children, emerged out of the station, wet and sobbing.

  “TAMS, gimme a status check on the Metro,” Keegan said as she headed down to see if anyone below needed aid. The rule beaten into her since boot camp was Marines headed toward the sounds of chaos.6

  “The lower-elevation sections of the Orange Line and Blue Line are flooded,” said TAMS. The bot pushed a Metro map with the affected segments to Keegan’s vizglasses. It also marked malfunctions that had apparently locked the valves for the Metro system’s air vents and the DC stormwater overflow pipes that connected to the Potomac River.7 To save money, the designs had piggybacked off each other, but n
ow their malfunction prevented the system from clearing itself.

  Peering down the escalator, Keegan could see the effect. Muddy water lapped halfway down the steps, meaning the entire ticketing mezzanine was flooded. Worse, the next lower level where the trains boarded also had to be completely underwater.

  “Is everyone out?”

  “No. My acoustic sensors indicate there is a female adult trapped below.”

  Keegan couldn’t hear anything over the rush of the water and the voices of the crowd above. Her stomach knotted. “Where exactly?”

  “I cannot ascertain.”

  There was an agent’s booth in the middle of the second level. That might be high enough for somebody to climb up on and get above the flood. She eyed the swirl of muddy water. It was too deep to stand in, and the current would send her down into the Metro tunnels if she tried swimming it.

  “Can you reach her?” Keegan said.

  “Yes. I am rated to ISO standards for underwater operations for a duration of thirty minutes at 10 meters depth.”

  The water reeked of ozone and sewage. If TAMS went in and never came out, that would certainly solve the problem that the deputy director had put in her lap. But it would present another: she would have to find a way to finish the rescue herself.

  “Then do it. I need you to reach whoever is down there and lead them out.”

  “OK,” it said.

  TAMS stepped carefully toward the water’s edge, narrowly avoiding stepping on a tiny frog that hopped up the steps. All sorts of shit down there is going to be forced up, thought Keegan.

  “Hey! You need to get out of there! What the hell are you doing?” a man shouted down.

  “Good question,” Keegan called back, then she thought better of it. It wasn’t the time for snark.

  “We’re FBI. There’s someone trapped down there!”

  A barrel-chested African American soldier in Army fatigues smeared with mud came running down the escalator. He pulled up in shock at the sight of TAMS descending into the water, one hand gripping the railing. “That thing yours?”