by P. W. Singer
As they walked farther down the wide corridor, the red light faded. TAMS turned on a navigation light, but Keegan hissed to turn it off and the space was left in near darkness. The only light came from the porthole-like observation windows that were the only view into each of the chambers.
Unable to fight her curiosity, Keegan snatched a glance as they passed by. Inside was a spare white room, a bed in the middle. A man in his fifties, bald, with thick black glasses, lay back naked on a purple crescent-shaped pillow. In the corner sat a robot about half his size, matte blue with rainbow-colored bands and a white lace bra, holding an old hardback book. Its frayed blue cover had a picture of a bespectacled boy with a tiny scar on his forehead.
The robot read out loud in the voice of a young woman with a British accent, “I mean, it’s sort of exciting, isn’t it, breaking the rules?”17
“What the . . . ?” Keegan said. “They pay for that?”
“You have no idea,” said Rose. “Simpkins is at the back.” She pointed to the end of the hallway. “You’re on your own from here. He’s been on a mean streak this week.”
And with that she was gone. Keegan turned to watch her walk purposefully away, back into the red light of the corridor’s far end.
They walked to the end and Keegan forced herself to look though the porthole. It was not as bad as she’d feared. A naked man and two women were writhing in a tangle of limbs, atop a silvery set of sheets.
“Let’s just get this over with quickly and quietly,” Keegan told TAMS. “You go in first. Just tap him on the shoulder, gently like.” She didn’t need some guy getting off on her bot.
“OK,” the robot said, and Keegan pressed the entry button.
The door opened silently, sliding on a track that disappeared into the wall. TAMS stepped through and, with exaggeratedly slow movement, walked up to Simpkins. The man remained oblivious to the door opening and the robot. TAMS reached out toward his left shoulder, just above where a tattoo began, a series of repeating diamond-shaped arrowheads that ran down his arm, stopping at his wrist. TAMS’s metal finger tapped the point of one diamond three rows down. Keegan wondered what mathematical equation had led it to choose that one point versus any other?
When Keegan pulled her attention to the entirety of the scene, she regretted sending the bot in first. What had looked through the porthole like a ménage à trois was actually something that made her grip the doorframe in anger.
“Fuck off. I didn’t order you,” the man said, looking back at TAMS, while still intently thrusting into one of the two identical light-skinned sex bots. “Come back later.” One hand propped him up on the bed, while his other clutched a robot’s unattached arm. The second robot lay face down, curled over its knees but with its arms reversed. Its head was lolling to the side, only wires connecting to the torso, and a ragged, torn edge to the rubber skin where its neck had been. Yet the robot’s hands still gently caressed the breasts of the supine bot that had Simpkins’s attention.
“TAMS, non-lethal weapons authorization,” Keegan ordered. “Tase him. Now.”
“OK.”
Keegan turned away, so that she did not have to see what a burst of electrical charge was going to do to all this. At the sound of the sizzling flesh, she turned back around.
Simpkins lay crumpled forward, sprawling atop the two bots. At his cessation of movement, they had also stopped moving.
The stillness was unsettling. It was like a switch had flipped. The room felt tight and the air thin. Keegan entered the room and coughed, trying not to breathe in the funk of sex. Not wanting to touch anything, she used her foot to push Simpkins to the floor, not minding the thump as his head hit. She pulled the sheet off the bed and covered the two bots.
“We need to dress him. Can you do that?” Keegan asked TAMS.
TAMS did not move, looking neither at Keegan nor Simpkins. Then it spoke. “I am unable to perform that operation without assistance.”
It was too complex a task for one person or machine, at least without hurting the man further.
“Fine,” Keegan said. “We’ll do it together.”
Damn machine can predict crime all by itself, but this is what it needs me for.
As TAMS held the limp body up, she tugged the man’s clothes back on. The machine could touch this creep’s flesh; it didn’t mind. They were almost done when the clothes were suddenly flung into the air.
Keegan leapt backward, letting go of Simpkins.
On the bed, the two robots had begun to disentangle themselves from each other. They lay separated by no more than an arm’s length, their torsos facing as one lifted up the missing leg of the other and reinstalled it, followed by reattaching the head, the tear line fitting back together snugly by design. The process of reassembly and reset continued as a gentle ritual, like it was part of an ancient ceremony performed for thousands of years.
“Working as an FBI bot doesn’t seem that bad now, I bet,” said Keegan to TAMS.
Five minutes later, Keegan stalked down the hallway with TAMS behind her. The bot had Simpkins in a fireman’s carry, the unconscious man’s limbs occasionally dragging on the floor. At the bottom of the stairs, Keegan stopped and faced TAMS. “If he wakes, tase him again.”
“OK.”
At the top of the stairs, Rose waited for them. She leaned against the wall, one leg straight and the other bent at the knee, leather-booted foot pressed against the wall. “Your friend like his surprise?”
“A bit too much,” Keegan said. “Time to go home.”
“You sure about that?”
FBI Satellite Facility
Reston, Virginia
It was a different interrogation room from before. The harsh smell of lemon from a recent cleaning blended with lingering scents of cinnamon from when the space had been a candle store years back.
The lights were on. Bright. Keegan had to squint, but thought it suited the situation perfectly. No skulking in the dark for this one anymore.
Simpkins, his wrists shackled to the table, looked from TAMS to her, and then back at the robot.
“Not a chance, asshole,” Keegan said.
Simpkins frowned. Then he dipped his head to wipe his brow on the dark blue sleeves of his shirt. At that, he smiled at the realization of how he’d gotten back into his clothes. “Too bad I missed dress-up time,” Simpkins said. “But I’m still not talking.”
“Sure,” said Keegan. “TAMS, come over to where I can see you. You’re freaking me out over there.”
The robot sat down smoothly and laid its hands on the table across from Simpkins’s shackled wrists.
“Easy there,” said Keegan, as if warning the robot. “It doesn’t seem to like what it saw today, Simpkins.”
She suspected that, at just the mere suggestion of it, Simpkins would read TAMS’s blank face as if filled with menace.
“Agent Keegan,” said Dr. Modi’s voice in her earpiece, “I’m recording this interrogation.”
He was watching from his office, viewing the room through TAMS’s cameras.
“You want out of here?” Keegan asked Simpkins. “There’s one way and it’s the easy way. We just talk. All the other ways don’t end well.” She tilted her head at TAMS and its blank face somehow looked even more threatening.
Simpkins shook his manacled hands forward, trying to strike out at TAMS, straining so hard that the metal of the cuffs peeled back the sleeves of his shirt and caught on the meat of his tattooed forearms.
TAMS stared back without expression or action.
“This one isn’t programmed for that stuff,” Keegan said.
“Agent Keegan, can you hold his wrists out for me to see?” Modi said in her ear again.
More joysticking from afar. Next time she did an interrogation, she’d have to bring her own jammer in to get anything done.
Keegan stood, walked over to Simpkins, and slammed his wrists down on the table. She then looked into TAMS’s face. “See, he’s fine.”
“Th
at’s what I thought,” Modi said in her ear. “Can you show me both sides?”
“He’s fine. See,” she said, twisting Simpkins’s wrists with a slight tug to show TAMS both sides. “Not a single scratch.”
“I see that,” Modi said. “The design is what matters. See how the checkerboard is made up of diamond shapes? Those are Othala runes, the marker for the National Freedom Front.”18
The red, white, and blue Nazis. And, just like they always did, hiding their brand in plain sight.
Keegan let go of Simpkins’s wrists and walked back to her seat. “Those are pretty extensive tats,” she said. She then uncuffed her shirt sleeve to reveal her tattoo. “How long did it take? Mine took an hour.”
Simpkins smiled. “Nine hours.”
“Damnnnnn. Must have hurt like a bitch. My arm didn’t stop throbbing for a week.”
“It’s supposed to hurt,” he said with a tone of pride. “There’s pain in progress.”
Wonderful, she thought, another hatemonger from the dark web, who imagined himself some kind of intellectual.19
“So what’s with the design? This was a pretty obvious choice,” she said, pointing out each of the parts. “Eagle, globe, anchor . . . Only a United States Marine can wear it.”
“You’ll learn it soon enough. Ours is for those who have seen the truth. Patriots around the world wear it,” said Simpkins. “Our legions are everywhere.”
“I’m betting on that.” She turned to TAMS. “TAMS, see how many other tattoos like that you can find in the cloud.” She stood to leave the room.
The machine may not have not been able to pull out the underlying meaning of the artistic design, but once given an image to hunt for, it could do search and pattern matching of a kind beyond Simpkins’s understanding. Before Keegan had even made her way through the hallway, hundreds of open-source images were flashing across her vizglasses. Photos of a family beach vacation, father, mother, and two daughters, all having matching ankle-band tattoos of the design; the dating profile of an overweight, elderly man, wearing a shirt pin with a neo-Nazi logo on it, as he posed in front of a cherry red sports car; the department newsletter sharing images from the police department’s charity softball tournament, an off-duty SWAT team smiling for the camera as they flexed biceps marked with the tattoo.
An accompanying map began to geolocate the images off the photos’ metadata. One by one, dots appeared all over the country, but the highest concentration by far was just outside Washington, DC, a short enough drive from Simpkins’s favorite club.
Ballston Neighborhood
Arlington, Virginia
It was two hours before sunrise when she got back to the condo, so she took her shoes off at the door. It was not just her trying to avoid waking Jared, but also because she had no idea what substances were now on their soles. Slipping in quietly, she found Jared sleeping on the couch, Haley lying beside him under a tangle of blankets, propped up on a pair of pillows with giraffes on them. Given that Keegan had just been to a robot sex club, she couldn’t complain about his parenting tactics.
The fridge displayed eggs and bread inside, but she stopped short of opening the door. As hungry as she was, it was too early to start banging pans. She knew there were protein bars in the cupboard, so she grabbed one, cringing at the slight sound of the wrapper crinkling as she tore it open. As she took a bite, the chocolate and peanut-butter flavor melted in her mouth, leaving just the slight chalky aftertaste that insect protein supplements always had.
“You’re here,” Jared murmured from the couch.
“For a little while,” Keegan said.
“OK,” he said. “Haley’s sleeping. Don’t wake her.”
“I can see. Water, power been good? Cloud OK?”
He murmured yes. “How about you?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” she said. She was far from it, but she didn’t have it in her this morning to have another battle.
“You’re being safe?” he asked. It was real worry. He could read her better than anyone and knew something was off, the legacy from what she’d seen the night before. For all the distance, the love they had shared was still there—indeed, it was sleeping right beside him on the couch. Neither of them wanted to contemplate what it would be like to live somewhere without her, even just for a week at a time. Jared also knew too much about her own past to contemplate a life without him.
“I just need a shower and a change of clothes, then I’ll head out.”
Jared nodded his head in agreement, no attempt to stop her, and then curled back into a ball. He probably thought it was best she didn’t cross paths with Haley. Maybe he was right.
In the guest bathroom, she waited for the water to heat up while finishing the protein bar. As she sat on the fake white marble vanity top, she looked over at the wicker and glass storage basket where she kept her personal hygiene products. Even that basket had some emotional baggage. Keegan wasn’t opposed to it. If anything, it was pretty nice. But, like everything, picking it out with Jared had turned into an exhausting series of decisions, him picking out eight different options and then wanting to talk through which of the online reviews they should trust more. That was a before problem, when such petty squabbles were a luxury of the fully employed.
She stood and went over to the basket, pulling out the foldable screen tablet.20 She kept it wedged behind one of the boxes she knew Jared would never look in. Men were strange, but predictable that way. The tablet was a disposable model she had bought three months back. Buying it had felt like an act of betrayal, but separating your accounts and devices was one of the things that all the guides recommended when you crossed over to this stage in a relationship.
The shower ran, steaming up the small bathroom. She inhaled the damp air and scrolled through messages. Notices from her bank account, advertisements from online dating sites that had somehow figured out her looming change of status, and various messages from friends and family she’d have to answer at some point. She set the tablet down on the sink’s edge and got undressed. Wiping the condensation away from the middle of the mirror with her hand, she looked at herself, a bit fearful of what she’d see. A failure as a wife? As a mother?
The woman who looked back had bloodshot eyes, the skin around them slightly swollen, so it looked like she was squinting. Running her hands through her hair, Keegan exhaled to try and shake off the slightly queasy feeling from that toxic mix of emotions and the hangover of adrenaline.
She moved to get in the shower, eager for the reset that the hot water would provide, but stopped short as the tablet flashed the next wave of downloaded messages. One caught her attention, the picture of its sender sending a shiver up her spine. Of all the times for him to reach out.
So there I was sitting in traffic, minding my own business, and the viz feed pops a clip of you as an FBI superhero with a robot sidekick. Of all the jobs for you to end up in! But you always were smart as hell. I guess that also means it’s all good now for me too . . . I can’t tell you what a relief that is. Hit me back at this account and we can set a time to catch up. Lots to talk about, S
Note: I saw you busted those guys at a chili dog restaurant. Some things never change ☺
Just like that, after over fifteen years? With the warrant out for them after the riot at the student center, a quick decision had been made in the basement laundry room of her dorm. There should be no further contact among the group, so there would be no way for the police to connect the dots. There hadn’t even been time for that clichéd one last kiss with him. She hadn’t even gone to graduation, getting the degree in her first mail call at Parris Island.
And yet there his message was as if all that had been set aside. Didn’t he get that her being a federal agent wasn’t a sign that they were in the clear, but the very opposite? At the same time, she was curious where he had ended up, what he had become. In her mind, he was still that curly-haired kid with a dimple on his left cheek from the dorm next door, who she had first talked to in a pol
itical science study group. Snippets of dances, student marches, and dorm-room hookups played in her memory. Did he have a wife? Kids? With a single reply, she could find all that out, maybe even answer the once seemingly unanswerable question of the road not taken.
Keegan looked back at the woman in the mirror, to see if she could help in some way. The face that looked back warned her that answering him would risk much more than her marriage.
She cleaned the condensation from the screen and deleted the message. It didn’t seem enough, so she wiped the tablet’s memory. Once that was done, she filled the sink with water and dropped the tablet in, it making a slight sizzle as the water seeped into the battery. Then she wrapped the dripping tablet in a towel and stepped on it repeatedly, until the screen broke and the motherboard cracked.
Inside, though, she knew none of it would be enough to undo the damage.
FBI Hostage Rescue Team Operations Center
Quantico, Virginia
“Here you’ll see landing zone Broadway. FBI V-290 Valor, call sign TALON 22, will put an eight-person HRT element here,” said Noah.
Watching Noah stand inside the cavernous hangar at Quantico, Keegan felt the familiar pre-mission anticipation build. She tried to dial the excitement back with a deep breath, but it didn’t work.
Noah wove his hands through the air in front of him, using force-sensor gesture gloves to conjure up the paths the agents would follow toward their target.1
“We’ll be staging here.” He pointed, and geographic markers appeared on the large 3-D projection in the air in front of the force. The display showed gently rolling land that gained elevation as it ran up to the edge of Shenandoah National Park. The briefing continued for a few more minutes, covering the particulars of the target, an “American Solidarity Enclave” located in the western part of Greene County, Virginia.