by P. W. Singer
Keegan wordlessly passed him the makeshift shovel. She took a moment to watch TAMS at work, sloshing back and forth in the water. The barrier was now as high as its shoulders. She wondered if the machine would keep building until it could not reach the top. What would it do then? Move laterally to the lower parts of the wall? Or would it begin to build its own wall to stand on, so it could keep building higher and higher?
Modi caught Keegan’s gaze. “The paperclip problem,” he said.
“The what?”
“What you’re thinking of is called the ‘paperclip problem.’10 Imagine an intelligent machine is given the task to make paperclips. Now imagine it is also a learning machine, that gets more and more intelligent along the way, ever improving at its job of making paperclips. Sounds great . . . at first. You get more and more paperclips, cheaper and cheaper. Except, at some point, the machine gets so intelligent, so good at its task, eventually paperclips cover the Earth, then the whole universe. Even worse, it introduces another problem, that of control. If the machine’s mission is to make paperclips, what does it do about any people that stand in its way?”
“Will that be the case with TAMS?”
“I guess we’ll have to watch that wall to find out.”
Ballston Neighborhood
Arlington, Virginia
Keegan woke to find herself on the bathroom floor, using a damp rainbow-striped beach towel as a makeshift pillow.
When they had finally arrived at the Washington Field Office later the night before, it had been chaos, just without the good vibes that had permeated the crowd at the Archives. In a bureaucracy, turf matters above all, even when organizing to help. So most of the tension among managers and all their subordinates had been about who goes where, with who in charge. Despite having just been doing the job on the streets outside, there was no established protocol for where she and TAMS fit into this matrix. So she had made the decision easier for them, typing up a quick mission report to explain the diversion to the Metro and National Archives as being by design and then declaring the need for “operational recovery and recharge,” for both of them. With no sign of Noritz to sign off, she had left for home, taking TAMS with her.
Surprisingly, the drive had gone quickly. They’d had to take the long way around the Beltway, but the roads were nearly clear, no one out driving their commute or running errands. In times of crisis, most just want to hunker down with family, something Keegan felt desperately herself.
Once she walked in the door, though, it was like a miniature version of downtown. There was a small pool of water coming out from the bathroom, as if the deluge outside had worked its way up into their apartment. Either Haley or Jared had turned the faucet off eventually, but the puddle had been left as a lower priority than playtime or turking away for more points.
She didn’t have the energy for another fight, so while they slept, she had stripped off her muddy clothes and ransacked the condo for whatever she could find to sop the water up. Clean towels. Dirty towels. Dish towels. Even Haley’s yellow duck towel with a frayed orange bill on its hood. TAMS probably could’ve helped, but this was her own mess to clean up. Once she’d gotten most of it up, she’d taken a rest against the bathroom wall, only to fall asleep as the day’s exertions and stress finally caught up.
Now, Keegan pulled herself up off the floor slowly and carefully, to be gentle on her back muscles that were stiff as hell. She then examined herself in the mirror. Her eyes were red and the skin on her forearms had faint purple splotches. She was afraid to ask TAMS the exact chemical makeup of the muddy water downtown, but she was pretty sure it was not spa grade. Her back throbbed, the sciatic nerve aching and shooting what felt like mild electric shocks down her leg. If the bags at the Archives hadn’t done it, sleeping at an awkward angle on the bathroom floor had.
“Haley?” she called out. There was no response, and she quickly saw why as she peeked out into the den.
Her little girl was sitting on the couch with the VR rig on, the oversized helmet making her neck disappear. Haley’s muffled laughter came from underneath the helmet, sounding like she was talking from underwater. Keegan could not make out what the girl was saying, just a stream of vowels broken up by gasps of airy laughter. TAMS sat with its legs folded under itself near a wall outlet, charging, observing.
She shivered at the sight and went back down the hallway to knock on Jared’s bedroom door. At no reply, she knocked again and then waited another ten seconds. Still no reply. When she opened the door, the bed was empty; he was nowhere to be seen. She checked her Watchlet—no message.
The fatigue of the past twenty-four hours seemed to get heavier as she sat down beside Haley on the couch.
Leaning in, she could also hear the person on the other side; it was Jared’s old guy Harlan, talking, echoing from the inside of the helmet too big for Haley’s head.
“. . . you just watched what was on the channel,” the man’s voice on the other side of the country said.
“Did you get to pick a show?” asked the little girl.
“No, no, not at all. If it was Looney Tunes, you watched Looney Tunes. Or waited until something else better came along.”
“What’s a Looney Tunes?”
Where was Jared? He could get fired for letting Haley on the gear. But at this point, that was the least of her issues. It was the not knowing. He could be sick. Passed out. OD’d. That was not something she was going to be able to deal with again. She had been deployed when her brother died in an Olympia Public Library bathroom, literally on the other side of the planet at the moment his heart stopped beating. But she had imagined it in great detail—cracking open the stall door, seeing the unnatural angle of his arms, the wet hair, one blue leather loafer off, revealing a dark green sock with a hole at the big toe. The kinds of details you never forgot because your own brain had invented them, embroidered them itself.
A gentle rap of her knuckles on the helmet caused Haley to lift it up just enough to peek out from under the brim. “Hi, Mommy. I’m talking to Daddy’s friend about cartoons. Did you watch a She-Ra when you were little?”
“No, that’s too far back for me as well,” Keegan replied.
At that moment, the front door swung open and Jared stepped through. He was wearing a sweatshirt and pajama bottoms, like he’d forgotten to change to go out. Haley’s preschool backpack was slung across his shoulders. The strange attire was contrasted by how he strode in, with a loose-limbed confidence Keegan had not seen in him for months. His smile froze, then shattered into pressed lips when he saw her.
“Haley, why don’t you show Harlan your animals?” she said. “I bet he’d love to meet your friends.”
As Haley ran off, the helmet’s weight almost toppling her over, Keegan turned back to Jared. “Where were you? And why is Haley talking to your lonely old guy?”
“I was out. And don’t call him that. He helps pay for all this.” As he said it, Jared noticed TAMS charging in the corner.
“What’s that thing doing back here?” he said, adjusting the small backpack on his shoulder.
“No, you don’t get to ask the questions. Haley’s not supposed to be doing your job. What the fuck is wrong with you? You can’t leave her alone. Ever.”
“Lara, just take a breath, OK? Enough. Haley’s fine. You should know that . . . Your toys are watching.”
So, he had figured it out.
“If you want to talk about it,” he said, “then we need to do it alone.” His precise diction betrayed that there was something more going on.
Keegan turned to the charging robot. “TAMS, go watch Haley in her room. Play her some Sesame Street songs, but close the door so we aren’t disturbed by it.”
“OK.” It stood and walked to the back bedroom. After it closed the door, a low hum of music filtered through. Its algorithms had decided on “People in Your Neighborhood.”
“OK, now, what the hell is going on?” Keegan asked. “Why did you leave Haley here to do your da
mn job? You’re a better father than that.” The last line was meant to sting.
Jared, though, ignored it, or even worse, didn’t notice it. He pulled off the yellow and pink kid’s backpack and tossed it to her. It was stuffed full. Lumpy.
“What’s this?”
“Open it,” he said, a proud, knowing smile on his face.
Somehow she knew it even before she unzipped the bag, so it was not as much a surprise as it should have been. Yet the sight of dollar bills literally spilling out of the bag onto the floor was still striking. Not just twenties and forties, but even hundreds and two-hundreds.
“Jesus. Are you a bank robber now?” she said, picking up a handful to examine it closer. Yep, they were real. She handed them to him.
“No, even better. It’s not stealing when it’s free,” Jared said, tucking the bills into her pocket with a flourish, as if he were tipping her. He reached into the bag and pulled out another fistful. “Somebody sent a flash across my turking feed that the ATMs are crashing all over the country, spewing out cash from some bug in the dispenser system. So I ran down as quick as I could. I got to the one across the street and the one over at the mall before anyone else showed up.” He laughed. “I guess it finally paid off that I’m online all the time.”
She stared back at him. “How much is in here?”
“I don’t know. Should we count it or weigh it?” A flash of a smile again, the charming, confident Jared whom she’d first fallen for. “I just took as much as I could carry. A few other people showed up too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy.”
She looked at the bedroom door, wondering if the music really was loud enough. “What were you”—stressing that they were not in on this together—“thinking? I’m a goddamn FBI agent. My husband cannot—cannot—even get caught crossing the street on a red light.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, defensively. “The money just came out of the machine.1 I didn’t make it do that. It was just there to be picked up. Plus, it’s not digital but cash. There’s no transaction on our account, just dollars to spend on whatever we need.”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “Let me explain what happens next. The banks track the lost currency and log it into the system. Any transaction with those numbers on them gets blocked, automatically. You took a bunch of worthless paper. We might as well use them to wipe up the water you left running.”
“Bullshit,” Jared said, not wanting his victory taken away so easily.
“You have a law degree. From Yale,” she said. “And you still couldn’t figure this out? What’s happened to you?”
“What happened to me?” he hissed back. “What about you? You leave your family in the middle of an emergency to do what? Babysit for a machine? At least I’m trying to do something for us, for Haley, instead of training some machine to take my job.”
“Now you just sound like that asshole on the news, Jacobs.” She stood and walked toward the back hallway, but paused at the doorway and pointed at the dollar bills that had fallen on the carpet. “Pick those up before we come back out. I don’t want to have to explain to Haley what her father just did or how he’s become such a useless, jobless fuck-up.”
It was really that she didn’t want to have to explain it all to TAMS, but Jared deserved that twist of the knife.
As she marched down the hallway, each step radiated down her leg. But the pain was almost necessary, to put a physical marker to the emotions she was feeling. At Haley’s doorway, she stopped and tried to re-center herself as “The Alphabet Song” blared from the inside.
With a fake smile, she entered the room. Haley was singing along to the music coming out of TAMS, the helmet still on her head but the light indicator showing the feed was off. Either Haley had moved onto something more interesting or Harlan had realized that little kids were only good company in limited doses.
Keegan sat down next to the girl and carefully lifted the helmet off. Throwing it across the room would have been the most satisfying thing at that moment, but she knew they would just deduct it from Jared’s earnings. So she laid it at their feet.
Reaching over, she pulled Haley into a hug, rocking her back and forth in the same rhythm she had in that very first moment she’d held her at Georgetown Hospital. It took her back to when Haley was just a tiny living thing wrapped in a blanket, back before the changes between her and Jared had complicated what it meant to be a mother.
Haley somehow knew what she was supposed to say at these moments. “I love you, Mommy. And Daddy loves you too.”
“I know, honey,” Keegan said. “I know.”
As she held the little girl, the previous song ended and a new one came on. It was still Sesame Street, but TAMS had decided that the appropriate track now was the song “Sad.”2
When rotten things happen,
it’s OK to be sad.
But the music behind the all-too-timely lyrics was incongruous, the joke being that the doleful words were set to a lively doo-wop beat from the 1950s. The machine could read a room well enough to match a song’s lyrics to emotional data, but matching it to musical tone was evidently beyond its capacity.
Keegan smiled at the thought of TAMS’s advanced neural networks battling to the death over a song choice and still getting it wrong. Then Haley looked up and smiled back at her mom.
And that’s when Keegan wondered if maybe the machine actually had understood just what was needed at that moment.
Mosaic District
Merrifield, Virginia
Keegan’s Watchlet vibrated, but she ignored it, manually driving the FBI SUV around a mud-covered lime-green sedan going half the speed limit. Its driver was hunched over the steering wheel, likely the first time in years they had taken over the wheel. In the wake of everything that had happened, it seemed that many people were too jumpy to trust autodrive. The irony was that more people driving themselves would likely cause more deaths.
The traffic inched along just past the Merrifield Mosaic District complex, one of those planned suburban developments faked to look like a throwback city square, which had then been thrown forward by automation.3 A massive VR playpen had replaced the movie theater a few years ago. She’d taken Haley there once on a rainy day; you could explore the inside of the Pyramids or run screaming from what looked to them like a T. rex dinosaur.4
Her Watchlet pulsed again, this time with an unusual syncopated rhythm that felt like the device was shorting out. Someone had somehow reset the notification. Shaw.
She put the vehicle on auto so she wouldn’t viz and drive. Donning her vizglasses, she blinked open the message. It was a call, no visuals.
“Agent Keegan, I’m interested in your latest observations on TAMS.”
Taking a deep breath, she considered all the ways she could respond. “TAMS is learning quickly. Connectivity is an issue, to be expected. As you may have seen, no problems with water immersion or ingress.” She fired off a question back at him before he could consider the response. “What caused the flood?”
“That is good. As for the flood, the . . . authorities . . .” He paused, as if to show what he thought of them. “Are investigating.”
Keegan figured that meant Shaw knew more, but wasn’t sharing yet. “How about you? Were you able to ride out the waters?” she asked.
“I did not have a problem of too much water, but rather not enough.”
At that, Shaw sent a video of a vineyard. Lines of withered vines were arrayed down a west-facing slope, judging by the rising sun in the background. It seemed as if the grapes were writhing in the light, but she squinted and could see that the movement was from hundreds of ag-bots, their shells made from discarded corks, working away on the field.
“The drought in Sonoma demanded my attention instead.”
The nation’s capital floods, maybe also sinking the president, whom he’s treating like a sock puppet, and yet Shaw’s fucking around with grapes? “And so what now?”
“In situat
ions like this, our commission is taking a pause. It is, of course, a greater priority in the overall well-being of the nation, but the president has judged the politics of the moment necessitate otherwise. The incident in Washington . . .”
Keegan’s teeth gritted at that description of countless lives lost.
“. . . if anything, makes it more urgent. Are you familiar with John Gardner?”
She wasn’t but began to initiate a search on the name, starting to punch the name into the Watchlet.
“There is no need,” Shaw said, as if watching her type. Maybe he was. “Gardner is one of those people who created our world but is little remembered by it.5 He engineered what were called the ‘Great Society’ reforms back in the 1960s. The program changed everything in America, from guaranteeing voting rights for the groups that were then minorities to establishing a government role in medical and retirement assistance, to even creating the public broadcasting networks that gave your child Sesame Street.”
Was that a guess? Or a message?
“In a time of similar turmoil,” Shaw continued, “when the nation seemed ready to fall apart, Gardner simply reimagined the situation: ‘What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.’6 Now we must simply do the same.”
It’s easy to say that when you’re not living in the muck, thought Keegan. But then again, she was self-aware enough to contemplate that maybe that was exactly what was necessary to get the right perspective on the problem.