by P. W. Singer
“Agent Keegan, we really do need you to get down. Everything’s calibrated up there. You could knock us offline,” said the tech voice in her ear.
She opened her eyes and saw the crowd had grown even larger in the minute she’d been going over the scene in her mind.
“TAMS, estimate crowd size,” Keegan asked.6 She’d left the robot below, both to keep a lower profile and to avoid freaking out the techs in the command post with any more weight up top.
“Surveillance footage identifies 368,242 individuals presently standing on the National Mall grounds,” TAMS responded. “Washington Metro reports 96,786 additional riders on incoming trains. DC bus system reports 57,345 on transit buses. Share ridership services report 12,398 customers designating the Mall as their destination—”
“Got it. End request,” Keegan said. “We need to get up there before he starts up. I’m coming down.” When she climbed down, TAMS was already waiting for her.
When she made the small jump off the last rung, she created small splashes, squishing into the grass. Despite the last three days of sun, the soil was still waterlogged from the flood. Everything behind them, from Independence Avenue all the way down to the river, looked like it could have been one big rice paddy. Right now, the Roosevelt, Terrorism War Veterans, and Martin Luther King Jr. Memorials were all still submerged under a foot of water.7
“Follow,” Keegan instructed the machine. It instantly projected a suggested route to the stage onto her vizglasses. She ignored it; she’d already planned her route from her perch atop the FBI trailer. TAMS’s mapping software wasn’t factoring in the trouble that it would likely cause if a robot marched its way through the biggest anti-technology crowd in history. Keegan’s path would take a little bit longer, but they would skirt through the back edge of the crowd, thousands of people spilling over off the south side of the rectangle of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
As they started out, a forty-ish man in khakis and an expensive neon-green running jacket was the first to turn around and notice them. Probably some out-of-work lawyer or lobbyist, judging by the expensive black loafers that he was wearing despite the muck. He eyed Keegan, wearing her blue windbreaker with “FBI” stenciled in bright yellow, and the small robot, wearing a vest marked the same. The man gave the robot the middle finger. Another protester standing beside him, a woman in her twenties wearing a tie-dye skirt, held a neatly inked cardboard sign reading “Humanity First.”8 She laughed and slapped the man’s back in congratulations at his success in insulting a robot oblivious to insults.
The crowd thickened as they moved closer to the memorial. “Pull in tight behind me, half distance of normal-follow mode,” Keegan instructed TAMS. The corner of her glasses showed a green thumbs-up emoji signaling the bot’s compliance. The machine would be nipping at her heels, but it would make it harder for people to see what was coming through.
As they passed through the back of the crowd, most ignored them. Everyone was transfixed by the setup on stage; plus the 5-foot-tall robot was almost too short to see before it had already passed by, its human form blending in. When people did notice Keegan and the machine, though, there were none of the amused smiles they’d received during their first training runs. Mostly, there were frowns and curses. A few protesters recorded videos, seeking to go viral with a post about a machine shouldering its way into their day of outrage. One big guy, wearing tan construction worker’s overalls, spat at the robot. He missed and hit the back of another protester, their eyes still on the stage, oblivious to the drama behind. Keegan kept moving. Arresting some pissed-off, out-of-work day laborer for “contempt of cop” was not why they were here.9
The robot kept pace with her, but Keegan noticed its feed of messages into her vizglasses was a microsecond slow. Overload. Every sensor in the area, from drones and the DC police surveillance towers to the heartbeat reports in elderly protesters’ pacemakers, created a massive fire hose of data that bogged it down.
Keegan felt a tug on her right sleeve. Her arm tensed, ready for a strike, maybe someone not content to spit, but as she turned, she saw a pair of rheumy eyes looking up from beneath a hoodie. A young girl, maybe in her late teens. It was hard to tell. Her checks still had the outlines of the hip harlequin color blocks designed to fool face ID software in surveillance cameras; now the makeup was streaked, looking like a clown who had spent the last night in tears.
“Hey, can you spare anything?” the girl said. “I’m from Baltimore.”
Keegan nodded and gave her a $50 bill from her wallet before moving on without a word. Hopefully, she’d be able to use the tracked bill to get something at one of the street vendors. A few were not yet linked into the tracking system that would take the money out of circulation.
The two approached the stage’s security perimeter, a 4-foot-high temporary metal fence circling the Lincoln Memorial’s base. A line of DC Metro Police officers stood behind it, looking unmovable in their well-worn riot armor. The police officers warily tracked TAMS’s arrival, trying to read the crowd’s response to the machine, worried it would spark the very violence they were here to stop. Once they were through the security checkpoint, Keegan noticed TAMS had already reverted to a normal follow distance, having analyzed and projected that Keegan’s close-in order was just for the crowd environment. Always a learning machine.
In the crowd, a call-and-response chant began. “Who is the future for?” a blue-jeans-wearing hype-man yelled over the loudspeakers. “We’re who the future’s for!” screamed back the crowd, as instructed by the text on the screens and their vizglasses feeds, which would then project an image of someone in the crowd.
Keegan indicated TAMS should hang back as they approached the waiting area for the speakers concealed at the back of the memorial. “There’s Senator Jacobs,” said Keegan. “Wait here.”
TAMS pulsed another green emoji at Keegan and moved to stand by one of the pillars, the bulk of the massive 7-and-a-half-foot-thick fluted white marble columns making the tiny robot look even smaller by comparison.
Keegan was in no mood to draw this out; she needed to get to Jacobs before he was swept up in his own moment.
As she walked up to the circle of staffers surrounding the senator, Keegan recited in her head the opening line she was going to deliver.
Jacobs beat her to it.
“Get that monstrosity out of here!” screamed Jacobs, pointing over the shoulder of one of his staffers at TAMS, standing back by the pillar. “Are you trying to start a riot?”
Jacobs strode out to meet her, face reddening with each step. TAMS sent a query to her vizglasses as to whether she wanted assistance, which Keegan blinked away. She studied the sneering man’s face, taking in the broken blood vessels in his nose, the gray hairs in his eyebrows, the sculpted canopy of thinning hair, and the anger lines around his mouth, imperfections that were automatically glossed over as part of the unspoken algorithmic compact between the media and powerful people. He was a couple inches taller than Keegan, and it seemed like he was willing himself even taller, to tower over her and intimidate.
“Senator, if anybody starts a riot today, it’s going to be from that stage.”
“That’s an insult—as is bringing that robot here. How dare you, after everything that’s happened. Agent, you’re supposed to be stopping terrorists, not inciting violence. Give me your name!”
“Special Agent Lara Keegan, Washington Field Office.”
A pause to enjoy watching Jacobs’s eyes bulge—he’d heard the name before. But in what context?
“K—E—E—G—A—N.” She stepped forward and hissed in his ear. “But before you file a formal report, I have another name to share: Gregory Heath.”
Senator Jacobs snapped, “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Senator Jacobs is lying, read the message from TAMS, monitoring Jacobs’s facial micro-expressions from 10 meters away.
Of course he is, Keegan thought. He’s a politician.<
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Jacobs looked rattled for a second, but then a woman stepped between them. She was in her forties, wearing thick black glasses that contrasted with skin so pale it looked as if it had never been touched by the sun. As she wrinkled her snub nose and glared at Keegan, she tapped her vizglasses to ensure they were on, likely rapidly ascertaining who this impertinent person really was. “Senator, you have to make your way to the staging area. You’ll be on soon.”
All it took was an audience of one, and the senator composed himself.
“I have an important announcement today and this nonsense has to wait,” he said firmly. “Alicia here is my chief of staff. You can make an appointment with her. Alicia, get the agent on my calendar for next week.”
The gambit had failed. Keegan knew there’d be no “next week.” The meeting would be bumped just long enough for the senator to bring holy hell down on the FBI’s leadership and budget. In the weeks that it would take for Bosch to officially dismiss her from the FBI she would likely be assigned a job in the flooded Hoover Building basement, checking driver’s license numbers by hand.
The woman started to ask for Keegan’s contact information, but Keegan interrupted. “No, that’s not going to work. This is urgent. I’ll wait right here to speak with the senator after he gets offstage.”
TAMS sent an urgent update—not just a message icon, but a flash of bright red that washed across her whole view.
“I’m sorry, the senator is not going to be able—”
Keegan held up a hand for her to be silent, reading quickly.
Jared and Haley Keegan are in the operational zone, approximately 73 meters from your position, TAMS messaged.
“What? In the crowd?” Keegan said out loud. “Here?”
She turned to look at the crowd, even larger, pressed in even tighter in the minutes since she’d surveyed it earlier. A faint green arrow appeared in her field of view, marking her family’s location. The crowd roared, a surge of sound that caught her off guard.
She turned to see that Jacobs had stepped onstage, slightly stooping, as if unsure if all this was for him. But with every step closer to the wooden podium, Jacobs stood taller, broader, the crowd’s fury a source of energy. With his chin now cocked, the senator said into the microphone, “Now. Is. Our. Time!”
The crowd only got louder with each line of Jacobs’s speech. The mass of people began to press toward the metal barriers, the line of police in riot gear rippling slightly, the cops taking small steps back, steadying themselves in case the fencing broke under the weight of tens of thousands of people.
Keegan could sense this was going to turn bad—and soon. She tried to open her personal comms app on her Watchlet to message Jared, but it froze because the network was overloaded by the scale of the crowd.
She leapt off the back of the memorial. Between the crowd and the police line, there was no way she could make her way directly to where the green arrow was pulsing. So she worked her way back through the edge of the crowd, reversing how she and TAMS had made their way up. Her stomach knotted tighter with each step, not knowing what she was going to say to Jared or if he would even listen to her. They hadn’t spoken since their last fight.
Ducking under the signs waved by two protestors, Keegan pulled up quickly to reorient herself, somebody bumping into her from behind, hard. “Back off,” she hissed and turned around, only to see TAMS. She’d forgotten to tell the machine to stay behind. It stared back at Keegan, pulsing a thumbs-up emoji of its readiness to her viewscreen.
“That’s all you have to say?” Keegan said. “Stay close, but don’t step on my heels again.”
Another green thumbs-up. It also registered a health monitor alert that Keegan was exhibiting signs of stress and anger. No kidding.
As she looked out at the crowd, she saw the Korean War Memorial, slightly to the right. The statues of the poncho-clad stone soldiers, stretched out in a patrol, broke up the tight mass of the crowd. That was where it made the most sense to wade in.
For the moment, the crowd’s focus had unshakably locked on to Jacobs. The energy in the air was real, unmistakable if not detectable by actual sensors. He was pulling them in, recounting how he had long been the lonely voice, warning against the ever-increasing spread of automation. He was the prophet to whom no one had listened. But now they would listen: “Because we will make them!”
As Keegan and TAMS reached the periphery of the Korean War Memorial, she saw how a few people had perched snake-bodied camera bots atop the statue soldiers’ helmets, arrowlike heads panning from articulated rubber coiled bodies.
Another cheer from the crowd reverberated as Jacobs launched into a diatribe against the president’s permitting all of this “so-called progress to happen” due to inattention and greed, even letting the government’s own plans for the future be developed by the “very same inhuman monsters who are destroying the country, while profiting from it.” He stopped short of naming Willow Shaw, but he didn’t have to; the crowd already knew who he was talking about.
The green arrow in her vizglasses showed Jared and Haley 80 feet into the crowd from the Korean War Memorial. So close, yet Keegan could not figure out how to get to them, especially with the machine on her heels. And she couldn’t very well leave TAMS alone any more than Jared could leave Haley.
Think. Think. Think, she willed herself.
Then she saw a teenager in bright orange leather motocross gear that had hard plastic guards protecting his joints. He looked like some kind of postmodern knight, or the dissident version of the riot police. Instead of a shield and lance, though, he held two signs, dark blue reflective print on a white background, one on each shoulder.
Keegan took off her jacket, turned it inside out, and went over to him after telling TAMS to stay in the shadow of one of the statues. “Hey, my sign got wet and ruined. Could I have one of those?”
The biker looked her over, blinked a few times into his viz, and then smiled. They were all in this together. “Sure. I took two because they were giving them out for free anyway. Which one? ‘Work + Glory + God’ or ‘Damn the Machines!’?”
“Whichever one’s heavier,” said Keegan.
“They’re exactly the same. Here, take ‘Damn the Machines!’”
“Thanks,” Keegan said. The sign’s pole felt off. She looked down and it had a woven grip etched into it, which seemed odd. The weight of the pole was also off. It was plastic, but completely solid. The paper of the poster at the top was held in place by two plastic sleeves, each 4 inches in length. She ran her hand along the thick sleeves . . . thicker than they needed to be.
Take the paper out and you had a damn good melee weapon that, with enough force, could punch its way through skin, maybe even light body armor.10
TAMS sent Keegan a message driven by her newfound interest in the sign: There are 2,445 “Damn the Machines!” signs presently in the protest. Stenciling and format indicate the signs were made at the same facility as the 2,456 “Work + Glory + God” posters, 2,467 “Humans First” posters, 2,473 . . .
So someone had seeded the crowd with thousands of weapons that wouldn’t be picked up by metal detectors. It was a lot like how the alt-righters back in school had weaponized flagpoles, always trying to act like they were patriotic, but really just gearing up for an unfair fight.11
“Cease update,” said Keegan. “Just confirm Jared’s location and join me.”
Same position, messaged TAMS. They are 18 meters away.
Keegan started a chant to match the message on her sign—“Damn the Machines! Damn the Machines!”—lifting it up and down in front of her, working the cadence into her steps. It worked and the crowd began to part, ever so slightly, as TAMS drafted behind her.
It wasn’t until she was three rows of people away from the green arrow projected onto her viz that she could finally see Jared with her own eyes. He had Haley on his shoulders, the little girl tapping on his chest with purple rain galoshes. Keegan pushed her way through and grabbed
Jared’s shoulder. He looked surprised and then mad.
“What you doing here?” he said, instinctively holding Haley’s legs tighter to his chest at the sight of her.
“We need to get out of here. It’s not safe for either of you,” said Keegan, emphasizing the word. “Why would you even bring her here?”
“This is history in the making,” Jared said. “She’ll always be able to say she was here.”
Keegan tried to figure out if this was the drugs speaking, but the earnestness in his face showed it wasn’t. He really did believe it.
At that moment, Haley looked down and saw her. “Mommy! I can’t see the man on the stage. Can I watch through your viz?”
“Sure, honey. Let’s get you and Daddy over to the side where we can have some space,” Keegan replied.
“No, Lara,” Jared said. “We’re staying. You don’t get . . .” That was when he saw TAMS standing behind her. “Did you really bring that thing here?”
Just, then an alert hit her viz: Notice: Senator Jacobs . . .
Before she could finish reading the message from TAMS, she knew what was happening. Her body felt the eyes of tens of thousands of people on her.
“Mommy, Mommy, that’s you!” Haley screamed in delight.
Keegan looked up, and there they were: she and TAMS close-up on the two massive screens, Haley’s waving hand in the corner.
The screens shifted back to Senator Jacobs onstage. “And they even dared to send one of their machines for me today. To stop me! This is what they do to those who speak the truth,” Jacobs roared.
“Lara, what’s going on?” Jared asked, at the same time Haley cried out, “Mommy? Is that man talking about you?”
Simultaneously, TAMS began flooding Keegan’s vizglasses with updates, but all she saw was the wash of red color that now painted over them. Someone had tagged Keegan and TAMS, so anybody using augmented-reality glasses within the area would see them called out, a giant dark red arrow hovering over their heads.