by P. W. Singer
Jacobs stiffened and Keegan felt him try to pull away. “Are they OK?”
“My daughter’s over there . . . with the robot that saved her life. No thanks to you and your network. You own this. All of it.”
Jacobs coughed and then spit. He tried to find his confidence, speaking louder now, as if to the crowd inside the crypt. “This was brought upon ourselves. We tried to make the world a better place for machines rather than God’s chosen. But I had nothing to do with it. And if I had been martyred up there . . . just as Lincoln was . . . then our nation would . . .”
“Be a better place?” said Keegan. “Oh no, that doesn’t work today. Not with me.”
TAMS interrupted. “Agent Keegan, I have received updates from emergency management systems. FAA reports all unmanned aerial systems in the area have either been destroyed in crashes or cleared from the airspace.”
Keegan used her command voice to yell to the crowd, “Everybody, I’ve got news from above.” The sobs and whispers quieted.
“The authorities say it’s all clear upstairs. You need to exit immediately. Clear the area.”
Then she whispered to Jacobs, “Except you.” She placed her hand back on her pistol, showing it was not a choice. “I’m going to secure the senator and ensure he’s safe,” she yelled to the crowd. The aide started to protest, but Keegan’s face made clear she was not going to tolerate a debate.
Keegan turned to the robot. “TAMS, you remain with me. Jared and Haley, stay here too.”
Slowly, the survivors shuffled out. The woman from the entrance touched the robot on its head and muttered thanks.
Jacobs watched them go and then slumped back against the wall. Haley started to play with the bot, using her hands to cover one of the blue lights and switching to the other, making a strobe effect in the room.
Keegan knelt in front of Jacobs, her hand still resting on the pistol.
“Don’t waste my time with any more denials. The neo-Nazis gave you up and then the robot matched it all together,” she said. “Of all people, you should have known that nothing stays hidden from the machines . . . not even what you and all the groups do playing your little game under the waterfall.”
Jacobs’s eyes went wide, the look of someone who unexpectedly found themselves trapped, as much by Keegan’s revelation as his physical surroundings. It was a powerful feeling, Keegan knew, even more so to experience the first time, and she wanted to leverage it.
She nodded at TAMS. “It got it all. We know about the network of groups, the meetups in the virtual world . . . even your Lincoln avatar. All of it.” She paused a beat to let this sink in. “The only question is, what happens next? Not whether you get elected or not, or even whether you go to jail or not. What you need to think on right now is whether Moses”—emphasizing the name to try to convince Jacobs their chat encryption had been broken—“gets you the next time.”
Jacobs’s eyes went even wider and his body shook with a tremor at the mention of the name. “Just turn that thing off, and then we can talk,” he said in a raspy voice.
“Sure. We can do that,” she said. “Haley, set TAMS on sleep mode. TAMS, turn lights off.”
Haley giggled as the lights turned off and then settled down.
Jacobs looked at Keegan for a long moment, his face barely visible in the dark. “This wasn’t the plan,” he whispered. “You have to believe me. The idea was to scare people, to show how the system was breaking down, to create the needed moment for true change. But he’s taken it beyond that. And, I guess, now he’s going after . . . anyone.”
“Do you know Moses’s real name?” said Keegan. “We can’t protect you without knowing that.”
“Moses is the avatar of Jackson Todd.”
“And who’s that?” She could run it down later but wanted Jacobs to keep flowing.
“A PhD geek in electrical engineering.”
“That doesn’t sound like your usual crowd. How do you know him?”
“Todd was a program manager at DARPA, working on robotic applications of machine learning, neural nets, ‘intelligent decision support systems,’ all that next gen stuff.”19 “We first crossed paths back when I was in the House and they sent him in to change my mind by talking up the scientific value of it all,” he said.
“You mean all the ways we were planning to deploy autonomous robots onto the battlefield, even while saying we were just doing research?”20
“Look, I don’t understand the tech. Never did. But when his work came through the Appropriations Committee, I knew enough to know I didn’t like what I saw. Felt it in my bones that it was just wrong. Just like with the Internet, they were trying to jump-start social change with AI, using the military budget as a backdoor to change the world.21 I tried to zero out the funding, including for his program. You can go back and see, that’s God’s honest truth. They sent him in to brief me. Smart guy, but I wasn’t persuaded. But there were people more important than me who wanted it to proceed. And so it did. I went to fight bigger battles and lost track of him.”
“And?” Keegan asked.
“And then, years later, he reached out to me right out of the blue. Just showed up in the stairwell outside my office. I had moved up to the Senate by this point. I didn’t recognize him at first; he was thinner, older, just looked like shit. Then he said everything he’d briefed me on back then had been the cause of his family’s death. And so I listened.”
“What did he mean was the ‘cause of his family’s death’?”
“You remember the Metro accident in Arlington seven years ago?”
Keegan nodded. It wasn’t too far from their condo; Haley would sometimes play in the memorial fountain.
“His family died in that crash. Wife and son. It wasn’t just that his whole life’s work was on automation; they’d literally been on the way to meet up with him. Back then he’d been all for technological advancement, no matter the cost. Now it was all about stopping that future. And who can blame him?”
“How long ago did he come to you?” she asked.
“Maybe three years ago. He’d resigned from DARPA and was working as a contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers. He said he’d come to me because I was the only one who had tried to stop it back then. That at least we could do something now for others, to jump-start the kind of movement that you saw today, bringing together people who wouldn’t otherwise connect, to work together to create a new America, a new future.”
Keegan cut him off. “Yeah, I saw how that worked out today. Kumbaya, and then the riot and the drone strikes. It seems Todd decided you didn’t have a role in his future, after all. What else can you can tell me about him?”
“I don’t know. I guess just that he’s not like the others. This goes beyond politics for him. He’s a true believer.”
“This some kind of religious extremism thing?”
“Yes and no. It’s about what it means to be human, but also about defending our very way of life itself.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Keegan muttered.
She quickly stood, wincing at the throbbing in her leg. In the Corps, they’d told her pain is just weakness leaving the body. It still took her breath away, though.
“TAMS, lights back on,” she ordered.
Jacobs’s confusion was evident even in the dim blue glow. “How . . . how did it hear you?”
“Machines don’t really fall sleep, everybody knows that!” Haley squealed from the corner.
So she’d been listening too. Keegan could only hope most of what she and Jacobs had said had gone over her daughter’s head. As for Jared, well, it was good for him to find out firsthand what a fraud Jacobs was. Maybe it would finally drain—or at least redirect—some of his anger.
“TAMS, pull up any relationship between the recent terror attacks and religious constructs. Todd didn’t just choose Moses by coincidence.”
TAMS gave an immediate reply. Finding relationships between words, entities, and concepts—symbolic reasoni
ng—was one of the earliest areas that AI had specialized in.22 “There is a high-frequency symbolic connection between the online description of seven recent incidents in the news, Dr. Todd’s choice of representational avatar, and the Old Testament section of the Bible.”
“Which part?” Keegan said, already having a sense, but wanting to hear it to be sure.
“Exodus 7:14 to 9:35,” TAMS replied.23
“Is that the story of the biblical plagues and Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt?” she asked.
“Yes,” TAMS answered.
“You said that there were seven incidents. But weren’t there ten plagues?”
“That is correct,” TAMS replied.
FBI Domestic Special Detention Facility
Reston, Virginia
As Keegan stood at the podium, she was conscious that she smelled of smoke, burned plastic, and sweat. She was reminded of a former boss saying how these in-person meetings were just new ways to inhale the odors of your colleagues.
With everyone in the conference room using immersive VR rigs to watch the presentation, Keegan could well have been 1,000 miles away. But this was one of those moments when being in the room really mattered. The investigation that had been code-named “NEOLUDDITE” wasn’t just what people called a “Super Bowl” case, the kind everyone aspired their whole career to work. It was also the sense that being there was being part of something bigger than all of them. Each of them had experienced the trials of the flood and shutdowns in their own individual way, but now they could work side by side to solve them.
That sense of togetherness, though, was undermined by the sight of Deputy Director Bosch sitting at the far end of the table, his face as blank as that of TAMS, which stood across the room from him.
Keegan’s briefing ran through the attacks, projecting for the audience an overlay of the biblical text of each plague and visuals of its recent parallel. Some were fairly obvious, like the Plague of Blood (םָדּ), which was set against a video of the contaminated rivers, and the Plague of Poisoned Livestock, whose images of contaminated meat made Keegan’s stomach knot. Others were more symbolic, like the Plague of Lice (םינּכּ) and the crashed banks, assumed to be a commentary on parasitic financial networks. It culminated with the most recent catastrophes of Boils (ןיחשׁ) and Fire and Hail (דבּ) in the chemical attack and hacked drone swarms on the Mall. The underlying message was the sweeping scale of what might come next, in a world where technology had been so democratized that one man had the power once wielded by gods.1
The crowd reacted as it all began to fit together, each event seemingly a technological breakdown that now made sense as part of a broader effort to shake society’s confidence as a whole—an attack on human will as much as on digital networks. It wasn’t just how their postures visibly shifted, but that the usually staid chat room that was running alongside the presentation soon filled with brightly colored clouds of graphics and text.
Why isn’t he taking credit, pushing it out to the public? Terrorists usually do that, read one.
Are we buying this as a lone wolf? posted another. Or is this still a networked conspiracy . . . Jacobs trying to misdirect us, pushing it all off on a single actor.
If conspiracy, internal or external??? reacted another.
One meeting attendee, the assistant director for counterintelligence, even posted a series of emoji faces, charting his shock and then displeasure. It was soon followed by a reminder from the conference moderator staff to not post unessential information.2
As her formal briefing came to its conclusion, Keegan used the opportunity to move around slightly, feeling her back tighten up from standing in one place too long. She picked through all the questions and comments that had popped up during the live feed. Grabbing at the question of Jacobs’s misdirect first, she highlighted it in the projection and then answered out loud.
“All data point to the evolution of a network to a single actor going rogue. TAMS registered Jacobs as telling the truth, for once, in our conversation. I know that can be spoofed, but he didn’t seem to have that in him at the moment. Plus, it fits with what else we know, from the prior apprehensions of the NFF and the political goals Jacobs had for himself.”
She then moved on to the question of whether terrorists always wanted credit. On that one, Modi threw her a helping hand, posting into the chat a series of studies on terrorist psychology, whose findings he summarized.3 The BLUF: Terrorism comes in all sorts of forms and motivations. What leads someone down that psychological staircase to terrorism is complex, but at the end of the day the unifying factor for all is not about getting credit but creating fear, Modi wrote.
After ticking through each comment, she reviewed a series of pictures they had pulled of Todd, the collection showing the story of his life. High school and university graduation ceremonies. Cutting the cake at his wedding. Family vacations. A newsclip about the accident that killed his family. His old Defense Department identification badge. Keegan next layered a live satellite photo of his house in Northern Virginia over all the images. The crowd went silent, wondering if he was there right now. They also noted the blackened roof of one of the neighbor’s houses. McLean Fire Department had marked it as an accident, but that could certainly be questioned given what they knew now.
“Whatever the scenario, based on the information we have at hand, Todd is our primary person of interest. Bring him in and we figure out whether Jacobs is lying about what happened to his network, or we stop the next attack—maybe both.”
This was the signal for the meeting to shift from Keegan’s briefing to the planning of a raid on Todd’s residence. The HRT agents had the lead for that. Keg came in, looking slightly uncomfortable among all the suits. This was his first briefing since taking over for Noah, and it just happened to be among the most senior group possible. As he walked toward the podium, Keegan gave him a slight nod of confidence. It was at that moment that Bosch finally spoke up.
“Before you step away, Agent Keegan, there is something to clarify.” He smiled, but she perceived that it took real effort. “We all owe you our thanks,” he said, “for your dedication to mission and to the Bureau.” He clapped and the audience promptly followed suit, with the VR feed also filling with thumbs-up icons.
After the meeting, Noritz motioned her to follow him to his office. Modi stepped in behind them too, unasked.
TAMS moved to follow, but Noritz abruptly said, “Just humans.”
“TAMS, head down to the gear room and charge up,” said Keegan.
The three of them entered Noritz’s office, and he sat down in the leather chair behind his desk. It was supposed to be the commanding position in the room, but after Bosch’s earlier show, it had the opposite effect. As much as if Bosch had pissed down the chair legs, he had marked the chair—and anyone else who sat in it—as his.
“I have some news that’s going to disappoint you, so hear me out before you react,” Noritz said. He paused, licking his lips. She waited for him to pull out his ChapStick, but he plunged forward as if resolving to rip the Band-Aid off as quickly as possible. “The TAMS program is being shut down.”
“What?” whispered Keegan.
Modi just nodded, as if bored by the news. It was like he’d always known this moment was coming.
“Whose orders?” said Keegan, though she knew whose. “And why?”
Noritz held up his hands and smiled, but it was a sad one. “You know that,” he said. “And you know why. Deputy Director Bosch feels, and I agree . . .” he said, as if ensuring to have that on the record if the conversation was being recorded, “that given what we have seen happen with such systems, we can’t trust them in an operational setting. It’s not just what Todd has shown he’s capable of; it’s what the public might think.”
“You know what happened today wasn’t a machine problem. That was a human problem. All these breakdowns are Todd picking at the seams of our society and pulling the threads apart one by one. He’s not done y
et.”
“We know that. Just because TAMS is offline does not mean the NEOLUDDITE investigation is stopping. In fact, Deputy Director Bosch feels that our shift away from a reliance on such technology may prove advantageous in the investigation. You just said Todd was picking away at the tech one by one. Now we’re closing down both a major liability for this investigation and for the Bureau.”
“Don’t twist my words around. TAMS is how we got here. Noritz, my daughter would not be alive if not for it. When those drones started falling out of the sky, it found us the only safe place on the Mall. Which also happened to be where Jacobs was hiding, too.”
“You’ve become . . . close . . . to the machine,” said Noritz, as if forgiving her for something wrong. “I get it, but—”
“But the decision’s already been made,” said Keegan.
“You know how it is,” said Noritz.
“Yeah, sure.” She looked over at Modi. “Anything to say?” said Keegan. “I thought this was your project as much as mine.”
“No, as much as I’d like to,” he replied, in an empathetic voice. “I have to look at the work with you and TAMS as an assignment. Like you, I don’t get to do everything I want to do, say everything I want to say. I have bosses, too.”
Keegan looked back at Noritz, ignoring Modi now, as if he had disappeared from the room.
“If that’s all, sir. I’ll be downstairs,” said Keegan. “I need to go decommission . . . my partner.”
She went downstairs and found TAMS hung along the back wall on a padded black metal rack, its blue running lights offering the only illumination in the room. Keegan flipped on the overhead fluorescents.
She’d waited as long as she could for Shaw to reach out, to tell her that the order was off. But nothing came in.
“TAMS, we need to talk,” Keegan said, knowing that they really didn’t need to. She did.
“OK.”
“You’ve done a lot of solid work,” said Keegan. “Just as well as any human agent would . . . Better than any human, maybe.”