Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  The people around them began to turn, realizing that the arrow and the woman on the screen were literally right beside them.

  Over the loudspeakers, Jacobs’s speech slurred as he raged. “Don’t let them do it! Don’t let the machines win! I promise whatever you do, you will be remembered as the righteous ones. As you protect me, I will protect you!”12

  So that was it. Jacobs wasn’t going to leave it to the bureaucracy to silence her.

  “My threat assessment is—” TAMS reported.

  “We need to go, now!” said Keegan.

  As the words came out of her mouth, someone snatched the “Damn the Machines!” sign out of Keegan’s hand and she was shoved to the ground. As she landed on her side, the fall knocked her into Jared and the two of them tumbled. Haley fell off her father’s shoulders. Keegan tried to push herself off the ground, fingers grasping at the slick grass for grip. As she pulled herself up on her hands and knees, a kick struck her on the right of her rib cage, just below the shoulder. The shock of it radiated across her whole side. She could hear Jared screaming for Haley, but the voice moved farther away as the rush of the crowd swept him up.

  Another kick landed on her left. This one packing the power of a football punter, the laces of a shoe connecting in the soft of her stomach and lifting her up. The impact blasted the air out of her lungs and she fell over gasping.

  Fighting for breath, she thought only of Haley. Where was she? All she saw was muddy feet and legs. Somehow, over it all, she could still hear Jacobs yelling. “By taking back what is ours, we’ll show them who has the true power!”

  Keegan struck out with a kick, feeling her boot’s heel impact someone’s knee. She didn’t know if it was the person who had kicked her; she just needed to create space. From her right another kick came in, this one trying to stomp on her head. She managed to block it with her right forearm.

  Still on the ground, she drew her pistol, the bio-lock thrumming in her hand as it identified its owner. Keegan’s right arm lashed out with the gun, smashing the metal edge of its grip hard into a hand that was trying to grab her. She rolled over and, with her left hand, pushed herself up from the ground that had already been churned into mud from the fight. Three points of her body touched earth, while her right arm swung the pistol in an arc. The crowd pulled back as she panned the weapon in their direction.

  Keegan spat blood and wet grass as she stood. Two hands on the pistol now in a close-combat shooting posture, the stance natural from years of training, but her mind forgetting everything else but her daughter.

  “Haley! Haley!” she shouted, blinking away tears and mud, her mind registering that she had lost her vizglasses during the skirmish.

  She continued to sweep her gun in an arc until she caught sight of an elderly woman, wearing a gray GEORGETOWN LAW sweatshirt, who had Haley wrapped in her arms. The scared look on her face and the way she stroked the girl’s hair showed she was trying to protect the little girl.

  Haley wailed in fear, but she was safe. Keegan wanted to run to her daughter more than anything else, but she could sense movement behind her. She spun, swinging the gun barrel back and forth at the crowd that had edged closer again.

  “Back!” Keegan roared. “GET THE FUCK BACK!”

  When the crowd stepped back just a few feet, she saw TAMS sprawled on the ground, two men bashing away at it with poster poles. One was in a blue denim shirt and cowboy hat with an American flag stuck in its leather band, the other wearing a bright yellow school crossing-guard’s vest.13 They hadn’t even bothered to pull the poster off. The paper anti-automation signs flapped about, torn and crumpled, as the poles crashed down on the robot. As Crossing Guard hammered away, Cowboy froze, seeing Keegan and her gun. He grabbed his partner, trying to stop him.

  Over the loudspeaker, Jacobs was still yelling something, but the only voice Keegan could hear was Haley: “Mommy, they hurt him!” The little girl broke free of the elderly woman and ran to the machine, the muck sucking at her purple boots. Haley reached out a hand to TAMS to try to help the machine get to its feet.

  Keegan tipped the gun’s muzzle slightly, to signal to the two men what would happen if they moved even the slightest bit toward her daughter. But she knew if she fired, it would be all over in this crowd. They would tear her and her family apart and nobody would stop them.

  The two men with poles didn’t move, but in the crowd behind them, Keegan could see an approaching line of posters bobbing up and down in tight formation. Reinforcements.

  TAMS stood up, mud dripping from the sensor ridges that ran down the back of its head. The two of them looked ridiculous, the 5-foot-tall robot, its chest plate now gashed and dented, and the little girl in purple rain galoshes, holding its hand. Keegan could see the robot beginning to boot back up, a bent antenna extending to begin a data download.

  TAMS reported in. “Agent Keegan, I am back online. Your vizglasses are nonoperational.”

  “Haley,” she said calmly, ignoring the machine. “Come back to Mommy.”

  “But they’ll hurt TAMS,” the little girl pleaded.

  The crowd hung back, but Keegan could see that the two men now understood who the girl was. The man she’d mentally dubbed Crossing Guard stalked toward Haley like he thought she was easy prey.

  “Move another inch and you die!” Keegan shouted.

  She pointed the gun at the narrow space between the man’s eyes. It wasn’t the proper aim point she’d been trained for, but Keegan wanted him to literally look down the barrel. There would be no misunderstanding about where the first bullet would go if anyone touched Haley. The realization that she might have to shoot a man in front of her daughter made her simultaneously want to throw the gun away, and to shoot him even more.

  The two men remained still, but behind them, two more protestors carrying makeshift weapons approached through the crowd. One wore digital camouflage fatigues and a matching chest rig, clearly a militia member playing soldier. The other was built like a body builder, but wearing a white polo shirt.14 One of the alt-righter cliques. They pulled up when they saw Keegan’s gun. But Keegan knew more were on the way.

  “Butterfly,” she said, deliberately ignoring them, speaking in her softer, mommy voice, “let go of TAMS’s hand.”

  Jared’s voice weighed in from behind her, the standoff allowing him to force his way back through the crowd. “Haley, come back to Daddy and Mommy, now.”

  The girl gripped the robot’s hand tighter.

  “Agent Keegan, there is an important update from the FAA,” reported the machine in its normal tone. TAMS was either oblivious to the fact that it was about to be abandoned, or was aware but didn’t care. “The autonomous air traffic above the National Mall is not responding to FAA airspace-management protocols. Attempted overrides have not been successful.”15

  Keegan looked up and saw the barely controlled chaos of the earlier autonomous flight patterns had formed into a single orderly swarm of dozens of drones circling in a tornado-like swirl.16

  Then, the whine of a jet turbine pierced through the air.

  An Ehang passenger-shuttle drone broke free of the swarm and swooped low over the crowd.17 Too low—just 20 feet overhead. It was close enough that Keegan could see the passenger banging on the clear-glass canopy from inside the drone with her fists, her mouth gaping in a silent scream. A second later, the drone pulled up slightly and then slammed into the side of the Washington Monument. A fiery blast erupted, but the solid stone held fast. The drone’s crumpled wreck then slid down the side of the monument, onto the crowd standing below.

  Small news drones then began to peel off from the larger swarm, one by one, diving down and then exploding into the crowd. People stampeded when they realized what was happening, the standoff between the FBI agent and the protestors eclipsed by the automated death raining down.

  Over the din, Keegan screamed, “TAMS! Get Haley to safety! Authorize: Riot Control Mode!”

  TAM’s head tilted for a microsecond
as it accessed the new operating profile. At the same time, the first man in the denim shirt broke toward the machine, swinging his pole in front of him like a scythe. It wasn’t clear whether Cowboy was attacking the machine and girl or just trying to clear his way through the crowd. It didn’t matter.

  As the pole swung toward Haley, TAMS’s left arm snapped out, swatting the crude weapon aside. The machine then gently moved the girl behind it, bending at the knees to protect her with its body, while still holding her hand with its right hand. At the same moment, TAMS’s left limb went from rigid to flexible at the elbow and its forearm telescoped out another 6 inches. As it did, the fingers in its hand balled into a macelike sphere studded with knuckle joints. The robot smashed its fist into the man’s forearm, just above where he held the weapon he had been swinging in Haley’s direction.

  The man dropped the pole with a scream, his ulna and radius bones shattered. As he fell to his knees, the robot’s arm began to swing in a figure-eight motion in front of it, the flexible arm moving like a nunchaku from its elbow, almost too fast to see. The big man wearing the polo shirt then tried to tackle TAMS from the right, where the robot had been shielding Haley. But before he could get close, the machine’s torso pivoted on its frame. The figure-eight arc of its rapidly spinning left arm rotated with the turn, colliding with the man’s collarbone in a spray of blood. It next spun toward the pretend soldier, who dropped his pole and edged back.

  “TAMS, get us out of here,” Keegan yelled. “Get Haley to a secure location.”

  “OK,” the machine said calmly. Just beyond them, a drone flew into the Reflecting Pool in a watery eruption of spray and sparks.

  “Please follow me,” it said. Keegan pulled the elderly woman behind Haley, the robot still holding her hand behind it. She motioned Jared to stand behind the elderly woman. They formed a tight line, stacked together behind their robot shield.

  “Go, Go, Go!” Keegan screamed, slapping the robot’s shoulder just like she would in a room-clearing tactical formation.

  But they didn’t run off. TAMS advanced at a walking pace, its arm swinging before them in a figure eight, arcing to the right and then left, clearing their path with a resonant hum like an airplane propeller. Most people in the chaotic stampede of the crowd flowed around the tight mass of five bodies, like river water around a stone. Every so often, though, someone got too close, and the machine’s spinning arm struck down.

  Packed in tight and without her vizglasses, though, Keegan couldn’t see the robot’s route. But she soon got situated. After about 150 yards, they’d made their way through the dense heart of the crowd around the Reflecting Pool, to where the terrain opened up in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Rather than going toward the FBI command truck, TAMS kept going straight. Was the machine trying to find Jacobs? Had some algorithm reranked its priorities back to the investigation?

  “TAMS, I said get to safety,” Keegan yelled. “Not Jacobs. Priority is safety!”

  “OK,” TAMS replied and kept moving in the very same direction toward the metal fence at the base of the Lincoln Memorial steps.

  Most of the police had fled, but a Park Police officer still crouched beneath the arched entry gate, sheltering from the crashing drones. He saw TAMS’s macelike arm swinging and pointed his shotgun right at them.

  “Halt!” he yelled, but the shotgun’s muzzle wavered.

  TAMS froze, not at the gun, but at the sight of the fellow law enforcement officer giving orders. Its arm stopped spinning and it stood still.

  Keegan stepped out from behind the stack of bodies, holstering her weapon and putting her hands out, palms open, to show no threat. “FBI! Let us through!” she said, pulling out her badge.

  “Get back!” said the policeman, gaining more confidence at the sight of a bureaucratic rival. “I don’t care if you’re FBI, lady. You can’t go through, especially not with your kid.”

  As Keegan opened her mouth to reply, the roar of another drone’s engine drowned her out. The police officer looked up to the sky for a moment, and Keegan noticed his weapon’s strap wasn’t wrapped around his hand. Rookie move.

  Keegan snatched the shotgun barrel with her left hand, yanking it toward her. Then with her right, she reached over to grab the barrel, pulling it with both arms so that the muzzle now safely faced out under her arm. The policeman tried to wrestle it back, but with the gun now tucked under her arm, Keegan gave it a hard tug, feeling the snap as the man’s trigger finger broke against the guard. Swinging the shotgun by its barrel back over her head in an exaggerated version of a baseball batter’s windup, she slammed the gun’s wooden stock into the policeman’s helmet. The man fell to the ground unconscious.

  “Let’s move,” said Keegan.

  TAMS reanimated and stepped over the unconscious policeman, still leading Haley by the hand. As they dashed up the memorial’s wide steps, Keegan turned to see if anyone pursued them. Seeing no one, she tossed the shotgun aside.

  The podium, where just minutes ago Senator Jacobs had summoned the wrath of the crowd upon them, stood empty. He’d apparently fled at the first drone crash. Had that been his plan all along, to launch his campaign for president on a wave of victimhood and sympathy? Whatever it was, thought Keegan, it could wait. She needed to get Haley out of here now.

  As they entered the darkness of the interior hall of the memorial, they stopped at the base of the massive statue. A few other people and cops huddled inside, peering out around the columns at the pandemonium below. The mass of the drone swarm was visually smaller, but it still ejected drones in steep arcs into the crowd.

  “Agent Keegan, we are not yet secure,” TAMS said. Keegan noticed that too. For all the bulk of the memorial, the fact that Lincoln’s statue could gaze out on the National Mall grounds meant they were all still exposed to danger.

  TAMS pointed to a set of descending stairs. A red velvet rope stand that had been blocking them lay on its side. The robot started toward the stairs, while Jared rushed to grab Haley’s other hand and hurry her down to safety.

  Keegan looked back through the open side of the Lincoln Memorial as another passenger drone sped past, parallel to building’s face. As it flew by, the marble columns broke up the image of its flight and then it disappeared from view. But the drone doubled back, flying away from the memorial, then abruptly changed direction again. When Keegan saw the aircraft in profile she grasped it was circling back to line up an attack run at the Lincoln Memorial itself. As the aircraft flew straight toward them directly over the Reflecting Pool, its sole passenger could be seen covering their eyes.

  “Run!” Keegan screamed.

  TAMS and Haley were already at the bottom of the curving stairs that led to the undercroft crypt below the Lincoln Memorial’s floor.18 The robot pushed the door open and pulled the girl through, Jared following a moment after. At the base of the steps, the elderly woman stumbled. Keegan lifted her under her armpits and dragged her through the door.

  The woman’s feet were not yet inside the crypt when the drone crashed into Lincoln’s statue. The explosion shook the chamber below hard enough that Keegan wondered if the roof might collapse and bury them here forever. A tongue of flame then licked down and around the curve of the stairs, but the perpendicular angle of the door kept it from entering the crypt. It did force through a scalding gust of smoke and dust, knocking Keegan and the woman to the ground. Screams filled the air and then the crypt grew startlingly quiet.

  Keegan lifted herself from the floor, her ears ringing as it took her a beat to find her focus again. Coughing, she pulled the older woman, whose name she still didn’t know, over to where she could sit with her back against the wall and yelled for her to stay there. She nodded silently in shock, Keegan just barely able to see the features of her face as the dust in the room started to settle.

  Keegan searched for Haley and Jared and found them sitting against the wall on the other side of the door, safe. Jared had their daughter hugged tight in his arms, Haley’s face
buried in his shoulder. Beside them was TAMS, still holding the little girl’s hand.

  Keegan knelt next to them, reaching out to smooth her daughter’s hair. She turned to look the robot in its eyes, the visual sensors glowing yellow in the dim light. “Thank you.”

  It felt strange to say that to a machine. But it was something that, as a parent, she had to do.

  Lincoln Memorial

  Washington, DC

  Keegan peered through the fine dust to see who else was in the crypt. The pressed-together bodies muffled the sounds of sobbing and coughing in the confined space. Unasked, the robot turned on its running lights, bathing the room in a blue light.

  “Hey, butterfly, stay here with Daddy and TAMS,” Keegan told Haley. “I need to check on the other people in here.” She began to move around the room to see who needed medical attention. That’s when she saw Senator Jacobs, huddled on the floor with his knees drawn in close and his face in his hands. His chief of staff sat next to him, furiously trying to clean her vizglasses with a pulled out shirttail, again and again, not noticing that the lens screen was completely cracked.

  Jacobs looked up at Keegan, his face showing the kind of blankness brought on by shock. Then it began to change as there was a glimmer of recognition, and he took back on the bearing of a politician; it was something known for him to cling to, as his mind and body tried to process it all.

  “I . . . nearly died up there. These machines . . . are going to kill us all. It’s just like I warned. They’re failing us, and now the whole country knows it.”

  She put her hands on the lawmaker’s shoulders, and leaned in close like she was going to help him to his feet. “Fuck you,” she hissed. “My daughter was out there. So was my husband. They nearly died. A lot of other people did.”