by P. W. Singer
She parked the car and they headed on foot to the location of the dot, a small floating pier hidden from view by the crook of the river at the end of the uninhabited Kingman Island.
The pier looked unaffected by the recent disaster; the opposing flow of the Anacostia River had pushed back any of the floodtide coming up from the Potomac. At the pier’s end was a building with no windows. In front of it was a weatherproof canopy that blurred when Keegan’s vizglasses looked at it. So they had put up sensor-defeat materials to ensure no one image-captured who was coming or going.
On the building’s roof was an elevated steel platform, larger than standard drone landing pads, more like the helicopter landing pads attached to an offshore oil rig.
Keegan tapped her Watchlet against a black half-sphere in front of the building, and after it confirmed her bank account could afford the potential charges, a door wide enough for three people hissed open. Inside, the room was bathed in a hazy blue light, black leather couches set against each of the walls. There was no way that she was going to sit on those. A small set of lockers stood in the middle, each with a digital thumbprint-lock. It was unstated you left your vizglasses here. Reluctantly, Keegan also put in her pistol, knowing she’d not get in with it anyway.
At the back wall a stairwell headed up to the roof landing pad. Above the steps, a dozen long black hooded cloaks hung on pegs. Opaque gray face masks, whose distorted features appeared to move depending on the angle you looked at them, hung atop the cloaks.
“Look, this is about to get weird,” she said to TAMS. “So I don’t want any activity here to be incorporated into your human-interface protocols.” She shuddered to think of the updates it would push out to all the other units in the system.
“OK,” TAMS said.
A turbine’s whine announced their ride’s approach. Keegan climbed halfway up the steps, stopped, and pulled down a cloak and mask and put them on TAMS.
“There. You almost look like you belong.”
As they exited to the landing pad, what looked like a plane crossed with a boat glided across the river toward them, flying maybe 10 feet above the water.12 The craft stopped to hover 6 inches off the pad and they boarded into an empty seating area. It re-elevated and they headed down the Anacostia River. Keegan looked out the window at the recovery work going on in the distance of downtown Washington. It was all coordinated by the US military’s AI disaster assistance protocol, originally designed to guide troops on humanitarian climate-change disaster-response missions in the Pacific, never envisioned for use just across from the Pentagon itself.13 Emergency vehicles flashed blue and red beneath a Christmas-colored constellation of drones forming and reforming like a school of fish. Nearby, airborne floodlights illuminated house-sized orange automated snowplows that pushed walls of mud aside to make way for a wave of street cleaners. The scene possessed a certain beauty that she thought Modi would appreciate, the purposeful fusion of people and machines.
The shuttle turned as the Anacostia emptied into the Potomac and picked up even more speed. They flew past Alexandria, the Old Town district still a bloody red from the floodwaters, and then past Mount Vernon, perched up on a hill high enough the waters didn’t reach. George Washington had always thought ahead when it came to real estate.
Where the Potomac widened toward the entrance of Chesapeake Bay, the reddish blood of its waters began to take on a more brownish-blue hue, brightened here and there by the green bursts of algae blooms. The next few months would be like chemical warfare in the Bay, thought Keegan, with the new urban detritus battling the older rural runoff.
As the shuttle slowed, Keegan focused on a speck floating just past Point Lookout. As it grew larger, it appeared to be more building than boat, an octagon three stories high and the size of a warehouse. Its light-absorbing paint made it look like a hazy void. Yet it still had navigation lights, making the camouflage seem a bit bizarre. Then again, Keegan thought, the whole premise of the place was an indulgence in contradictions.
The ferry pulsed its engines to climb upward and gently landed on the roof. She turned to give TAMS one last instruction. “The rule here is ‘Don’t touch.’ That means anything. Or anyone. They really hate that.”
“OK.”
She couldn’t tell if it was aware or unaware of what she meant. As she stepped down onto the landing platform, her feet tingled with the pulse of music coming from below. Her ears felt slightly clogged, like the weather was about to do something wild. She flexed her jaw as she walked toward a covered walkway, at the end of which was a burly man in a zippered red leather trench coat and oversized black tactical viz goggles. The coat bulged noticeably, but without her vizglasses TAMS could not discreetly alert her to what kind of weapon he had.
“Reservation?” the bouncer asked, running a wand up and down her to check for weapons.
“Spur of the moment thing, you know how it is,” said Keegan. “With all this shit going down in the city, who knows what tomorrow brings. You get hit out here?”
The bouncer nodded and laughed. “Yeah, we were rocking back and forth for a few minutes . . . shoulda charged extra.” He started to scan TAMS and the metal detector immediately lit up. “What’s going on?” There was no menace in his voice. Just curiosity.
“Three’s the magic number,” Keegan said. She looked at TAMS and drew the cloak’s hood back to show the robot’s face. It stared back, its blank visage taking on whatever meaning the bouncer took from it.
“Whatever floats your boat is the motto here,” the bouncer said to Keegan. He nodded, and whoever was reading his gesture from behind the door, human or machine, released the lock and the door opened with a burst of thumping music from the darkness beyond. “Welcome to Control Room.”
As human and machine went through the door, the music became clearer. She didn’t need to ask TAMS what it was. It was old, the kind that Keegan’s mom sometimes listened to on road trips. They’d leave just before bedtime, so the kids could sleep in the car, while she drove through the night, listening to the soundtrack of her youth to stay awake. Nine Inch Nails was the band that scared Keegan the most, more than once making her reach out to hold her sleeping brother’s hand in the back seat. The lyrics spoke of beauty but were set to a jarring mix of piano, electronic beats, and wailing.
She shines in a world full of ugliness.
She matters when everything is meaningless. 14
Descending a metal circular stairwell, Keegan felt the same need. She grasped the railings, both to keep from stumbling in the dark and to mentally hold on to something real.
The stairs emptied into a wide-open room, lit with pink strobes. In the corner by the stairs, a metal cage hung suspended from what looked like a frayed rope. Inside, a young woman was trying to dance to the beat of the music. She wore nothing but bright blue rubber Wellington boots, the kind that people wore around muddy farms—or now the streets of DC. Maybe it was some kind of joke, or trying to turn the recent devastation into sex. She looked little more than eighteen. Maybe she was, or maybe she had just had the work done to look that age; Keegan wasn’t sure about any of it. But she was confident that whatever identification the club had for her would attest to that age, whether it was true or not.
Yet, for all her gyrations, the attention of the crowd was on a large circular stage in the middle of the room, where two dancers, human and machine, held their focus. The human dancer was loose-limbed and tall, maybe 6 feet, but she moved with a gymnast’s precision. She wore a translucent skinsuit that sparkled with dots of electric light that blinked and brightened with her movements. It gave the feel of watching sexualized energy itself. It was almost lessened when invisible seams in the suit began to give way with each gyration, first discarding a sleeve, then a panel covering her lower back. Underneath the lights was a tattoo that rippled with colors, orange and red flames and some kind of text that Keegan couldn’t make out from a distance.
For all the woman’s grace, the crowd was more transfixed
on the other dancer. A humanoid design robot descended the stage’s central pole upside down, hand over hand, with its legs perpendicular to her body. Its body, Keegan reminded herself. It was one of the most realistic she’d ever seen, designed to replicate the human form with the kind of expensive fidelity that came from the gray-market fabricators in the Emirates. But its movements were entirely inhuman. The machine pivoted entirely around its shoulders to land on its feet, an unnatural articulation that drew a collective intake of breath from the crowd.
The two dancers entwined, an embrace that made Keegan cringe slightly, a mix of disgust at what that poor woman had to do in front of this crowd and fear about what might happen if the robot malfunctioned just slightly. The two began to caress each other, as if the audience were not even there, knowing that their indifference made it all the more entrancing to the crowd.
Keegan had had enough and turned away to scan the room. Like a cliché, it was almost all men. Even without vizglasses, she recognized a few faces. Dressed like he’d just come from a neighborhood barbecue was a senator from Kentucky, while a few tables over were three Washington Capital hockey players, but in suits and ties, as if they’d just come from a charity banquet. Just behind them stood a clean-shaven man in a black turtleneck. Keegan recognized him from her military days, but she couldn’t remember which unit the three-star general now commanded.
For some customers the performance was not enough. In a roped-off corner veiled by a fine chain-mail curtain that billowed like fog, three robotic dancers gyrated astride customers squirming in deep, red leather couches. As the curtain parted to allow a man to stagger out, Keegan caught a better glimpse of one of the dancers. Clad in glossy black carbon-fiber skin, it had a lifelike face mask that recreated a Grammy-winning country music star with long blonde hair. The other machine was all flesh and wreathed in tattoos all the way up to its neck.15 It looked like one of the most popular viz feed influencers. But as it spun slowly for its customer, Keegan saw the machine had two faces beneath the spiky brown hair, frosted pink at the tips. Even at a distance Keegan could see the twisted expression of pain on one side, while the other smiled deeply, it eyes rolled back. Agony or Ecstasy.
Nausea welled up in Keegan’s gut, and she gently nudged TAMS in the other direction. This was not what she had come to see.
“Anything catch your eye?” a female voice said from behind.
Keegan turned, unsure if it would be human or robot. It was a girl, early twenties, perfect skin, pale as moonlight with enormous eyes, set deep like a cat’s. Keegan tried to keep her focus on those eyes, glowing greenish blue with bioluminescent contacts, rather than tracking down to the red leather knee-high platform boots. The girl was likely ogled all day; that was the last thing she needed. Then Keegan realized, at a place like this, maybe she wasn’t noticed much at all.
“You just want to enjoy the show tonight? Or maybe you two are looking for some company?”
“How much?”
“Depends. I’m Rose, by the way. You and me can have some fun, twenty minutes, for four hundred dollars. An hour is eight hundred. But looking at your friend here, maybe you want it in on the action? That’s double.”
Keegan nodded but bit the inside of her lower lip, as if thinking it over, running the numbers in her head. She then looked around the room, appearing to weigh the options. Another of the robot dancers in the VIP area stood up and began to walk through the crowd, evidently programmed to drum up business. This one was done up in the sexualized business suit of a news anchorwoman whose viewers’ Cambridge scores registered as reacting most to traditional values.16 Its realism somehow made it seem more artificial, like a robot version of a human fembot.
“What are my other options?” Keegan asked.
“Machine-on-machine is an hour minimum. A thousand dollars. That’s the rules, I don’t make them.”
The human girl, Rose, then noticed the fembots starting to finish their dance, and the rhythm of her voice changed, picking up the pace as she tried to close the deal. “Maybe we start out easy, just you and I, and your friend can watch if you want. Then if you like it, we go up a level.”
She’s worried about losing work to a machine. Even here.
“Maybe we just talk for a minute. All I want to do is ask you some questions.”
“You’re not one of the Holy Rollers are you? Jailbreak me to find Jesus? You can go fuck yourself. Better yet, go fuck your tin can.”
Keegan put her hands up. “No, nothing like that. I’m just looking for someone.”
An upturned palm was Rose’s response. “It’ll cost you . . . Even if you’re a cop.”
Smart girl. Keegan pulled one of Jared’s $200 bills from her pocket and placed it in the girl’s hand. It felt like robbing the girl in a way, but there was no way in hell Noritz would reimburse her for a payoff here.
“Much better,” Rose said, tucking it into a pocket lining the inside of her bustier. “Ask me anything you want.”
“Anything?” Keegan asked.
“Look around. You think I’m going to be offended?” Rose laughed.
“Why’s it cost more for the bots than the humans?”
“Look at ’em. Tech like that don’t come cheap. Plus they break. A lot. Maybe you can figure out why. By comparison, the humans? Well, we come cheap,” she said with a dark laugh that clearly masked something more, “because we show up here already broken.”
“Sorry,” said Keegan.
“No need to feel sorry. It is what it is. Even at less than the bots, it pays better than being a store greeter, just getting by until the government decides to kick in some of that basic income money they keep talking about.” Her tone consciously changed, trying to get back to the transaction. “Sure you’re a cop? You know . . .” she said, squeezing the back of Keegan’s neck. Her nails dug into the skin and chills shot through her body. Keegan hoped TAMS was too consumed by everything else that was going on around it to notice. “. . . you can book the Smash Room with me. It’s not cheap. A hundred dollars for two minutes,” she said.
Keegan recoiled, and Rose smiled.
“That’s not what the Smash Room is for, honey. It’s for it . . . your bot.”
Keegan’s eyes darted to TAMS to see whether it was reacting.
“We can tie it up; I’ve got titanium cuffs, surplus Chinese special forces. Holds any machine down, even if you program it to try. Then do what you want. Diamond saws, concrete hammers. You name it. Whatever gets you off. Or it can play too. We got everything from old Roombas to ones more for human tastes.” She nodded over at the fembot, now stroking the hair of the senator, who had been interviewed by the human version of the woman just the weekend before. “Even one of those.”
“Something for everybody here,” Keegan said.
“Come on, like you haven’t thought about it?”
Keegan looked away.
“Oh shit, you have,” Rose said.
“It’s not like that,” Keegan said.
“That’s what everybody says at first.” And then Rose leaned in. “Go on, tell me.”
“Maybe some other time. I really am looking for someone. Need to find a regular by the name of Simpkins.”
Another upturned palm. “You wasted your question then. Five hundred dollars more.”
“Guys in here are getting a lot more than a name for that tonight,” said Keegan.
“Don’t be an asshole,” Rose said. “You can have whatever you want; told you that already.”
Keegan pulled out a wad of bills from her pocket. “Then I want something more than a question answered. You help me find Simpkins, and this is all yours.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed as she tried to count the stack of bills in Keegan’s hand. “Simpkins in trouble?”
“Just gotta find him.” Keegan jerked her thumb at TAMS. “Delivery for him. Has he been around here recently?”
Rose reached across and snatched away the wad of bills.
“If you count downstai
rs as ‘around here,’” the girl said with a triumphant smile. She leaned in close again and whispered in Keegan’s ear. “Oh, and I know this cash is supposed to be shit. But we got a Russian here who can get us sixty cents on the dollar. Over there, cash is still king. So screw you, and what you tried to pull.” She then straightened herself and patted the rectangular lump poking out of the side of her bra. “In either case, a deal is a deal. I’ll take you down to him.”
But before they headed down the stairs, the girl took TAMS by the hand, looking into its eyes with what seemed like real concern. “Welcome to the business, bot. Just remember this one rule and you’ll be fine: we all get fucked.”
Control Room Club
Chesapeake Bay
“You sure you haven’t been here before?” Rose asked Keegan as they descended into the club’s lowest level. “You got that look on your face.”
The damp air reeked of hot plastic, stale sweat, and burning ozone. It was an all-too-familiar smell from the weeks they had spent waiting offshore on the USS Arlington, just before it all went to hell.
“No. Just a long day,” said Keegan, taking in another deep breath.
The corridor was bathed in red light, and none of the club’s music filtered through. The ceiling had to be soundproof, and this bottom level was below the waterline, adding a claustrophobic feel. Then came the sound of a rubber-coated mallet whacking steel. Wheezing gasps for air followed. Keegan looked over at TAMS to see if it was reacting. Nothing. Good. She didn’t need it running into one of the chambers unordered, like it had done to check on Haley.