Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  The machine stared back, its face blank.

  “The investigation will proceed, but we’re going to . . . do it another way.”

  “How can I assist the investigation’s new priorities?” asked TAMS.

  “That’s not possible. It is a set of orders that I have to follow, just like any protocol that guides you.”

  The machine looked back at her, as if it didn’t understand. Keegan knew it was just her, an all-too-human mind transposing emotions onto it.

  “I know. It doesn’t make much sense to me either. If there is one last thing that I can teach you, it’s that there’s plenty of things that humans do that don’t make much sense. We’re a walking bunch of contradictions. Trust me on that one thing.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m going to power you down now, TAMS,” said Keegan, running her fingers across its now dented and pockmarked chest plate. “Thank you.”

  A moment later, it was done. The system lights went dark and the robot’s limbs and head fell limp.

  Lifeless, like it had always been.

  But somehow, now even more so.

  Scott’s Run Nature Preserve

  McLean, Virginia

  The smoke from the cooking fire kept getting in Todd’s eyes. Every time he moved, it felt like the wind would pick up and push it back in his direction. He would move clockwise around the stone circle, and so did the smoke. He slid over again, which now put him next to a woman in her forties. Despite the heat, she was wrapped in a sleeping bag. Even as the smoke swirled around them, she stared blankly into the fire with glassy eyes. He took her by the hand and walked her out of the smoke.

  “Thank you for that,” said an older woman in a thin gray tracksuit, with duct tape binding a tear on the left sleeve. She walked over to greet Todd.

  “Haven’t seen you here before here. I’m Mayor Renae.” She spoke with the patient cadence of a librarian, like someone used to knowing more than the people she dealt with. Her eyes, wide set and kind, looked him over with a practiced gaze to tamp down the nagging feeling she always got with a newcomer, that they could be a threat to her camp.

  She waited a moment more for the man to introduce himself, and then forged on. “You might be wondering about the title. Well, if you’re going to have a tent city, you gotta have a mayor,” she said pointing around. There were about thirty tents gathered around the firepit and a common kitchen area with two old gas grills and table of plywood set across old stumps. “Mostly, it means I just guilt people into treating others the way they want to be treated themselves.”

  “How’d you end up here?” Todd asked. Dressing the part that he’d thought he’d need to play, he wore a pair of faded green corduroy pants, topped by the thin foil of an emergency thermal blanket turned into a makeshift poncho. Like the woman with her sleeping bag, he didn’t need it with the fire, but he hoped the mayor wouldn’t notice that.

  The park, a county-owned nature preserve, was located just behind his neighborhood. When they’d bought their house, having a 300-acre forest that backed up to your property line had been one of the great appeals. There were hiking trails for the kids, deer that would wander into your backyard while you had your morning coffee, and most of all, no neighbors looking through your back windows. But then the very thing that they’d paid extra for had turned into a drag on property value.

  First came the construction for the power line that ran through the county land and then set off a panic over cancer fears. A few years after that, the next controversy started when people who had lost their jobs and then their homes had set up camp in the park’s woods. It had pitted the neighborhood association members against each other, some worried about safety or property values, others knowing how close they really were to being in the same position. Soon, even those most worked up about the squatters found out there wasn’t much they could do. The homeless camp had been set up in a hollow hidden from the public hiking trail that ran along the top of the ridge. The park rangers knew they were there, but as long as there was no trouble, left them alone. Which was why Todd was there. It was off the grid, but near where he needed to be.

  “I used to work as a hostess over at the restaurant for Washington Golf and Country Club, not far from here,” Renae said. “After my shifts, I’d bring leftover food from the parties and banquets. It seemed the least I could do. After the downturn dragged on, I couldn’t keep up with the bills. You know how it is . . .”

  He nodded as if that were something he’d been dealing with too.

  “They already knew me here, so it just seemed the natural place for me. After that, well, people came and went, and I just stayed.”

  “She been here long too?” Todd asked, tilting his chin over at the woman still staring into the fire.

  “No, from a family that just came down from Baltimore. You see what happened there?”

  Todd felt his legs wobble, just for a moment. He nodded his assent to Renae.

  “There’s four of ’em and they’re really sick,” she said. “There’s a guy on the other side of that tree, I think her husband. He was still puking up blood.”

  “Should we . . . call an ambulance for them?” Todd asked before he could stop himself. He chided himself to be more careful in balancing the character he had to play and the agent of change he had to be.

  “Here? Then what?” said Renae. “First, they’re not going to come. Second, even if they do, it’s just going to create trouble with the cops.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “We’ll do our best for them. And that’s the best we can do,” she said. “How about you? You doing OK?”

  “I know it feels like everything is coming apart,” he said, “but maybe that’s for the best. It means something is finally changing.” He said it as much for himself as for her.

  “I hope you’re right,” she replied. “Anyways, as long as you treat everyone the way you want to be treated, you’re welcome to stay here . . .” She held out her hand, her eyes indicating she was still waiting for his name.

  “Ned,” he supplied, and shook her hand.

  “Good to meet you, Ned. With everything coming apart like you say, it’s good to be around other people.” She walked back to her tent, leaving Todd by the fire, wondering what the woman exactly saw in the flames, and if she could ever understand the justice of his actions.

  All of a sudden, there was movement behind him in the trees, a rustle of leaves followed by a glimpse of brown. It was one of the deer overrunning the park. Normally, they sauntered through the park like they owned it, but this time the animal looked spooked.

  It had happened quicker than he expected.

  Todd took hurried steps away from the camp, moving down the hill to the muddy shore of the Potomac River. He crouched low, walking along the waterline for a few hundred feet, and then headed back up into the woods, following a washout that doubled as a game trail. The thin paper of the thermal blanket rustled slightly, but the sound was close enough to that of leaves crinkling in the breeze to mask it.

  He froze. They were hard to see at first, but silhouetted on the hiking trail that ran along the ridgeline was the outline of a person wearing a combat helmet and carrying a rifle. A soldier. Then another and another after that.

  He lay down quietly in the roots and slithered the last 20 feet to his destination: a metal stand in one of the trees, wreathed in dark green camouflage thermal netting. The freegans would be proud of him, he thought, recycling someone else’s work. The tree stand had been put in by the bow hunters licensed by the county to try to trim back the deer numbers.

  Just a foot away from the tree, the plan went awry. Todd cut his left hand on a piece of broken glass, likely from some discarded beer bottle. He bit back a curse at the pain and slowly ascended the ladder. At the top, he hunkered down behind the netting and shifted the heat-reflective blanket that he wore as a poncho to shield his body.

  Peering through the slit, he watched as more soldiers advanced by in the dar
k. It soon became clear he didn’t need the camouflage that the thermal blanket or the hunting blind offered. The figures seemed intent on navigating the dark trail to his neighborhood as rapidly as possible, not scanning the forest for targets. Then, he saw that they weren’t soldiers at all. Stitched in the middle of their dark green body armor were three yellow letters: FBI.

  Potomac Overlook Neighborhood

  McLean, Virginia

  In the darkness, the noise of her own breathing and the slight murmurs of the wind working its way through the dense trees sounded louder than they actually were.

  The timer on her vizglasses told Keegan the main assault force would race up from the trail to Todd’s backyard in the next thirty seconds. With his residence on a single-road cul-de-sac, the working assumption was he would see any vehicles coming from a distance. So the raid would seize the element of surprise by coming in on foot from the back, using the adjacent park’s forest as cover. The follow-on force would block any vehicular traffic from approaching the cul-de-sac. At the nearby American Legion Memorial Bridge that ran over the Potomac River, Virginia State Police had set up another roadblock, cutting off any escape back into the city.

  The HRT operators, led by Keg, crouched at the head of the trail behind the house. The agents spread out, lying down on the slight slope in Todd’s property line, framed between the privacy fences on either side of the backyard. Keegan and the follow-on force stacked up on the trail, waiting for the signal. It would be an obvious one.

  Keegan zoomed in on the target, using the full-color night vision that amplified the ambient light 85,000 times.1 The split-level ranch-style home showed its age. It needed some paint on the white trim, and one of the gutters hung askew. Had it always looked like this, or had Todd given up on the upkeep when his life’s work shifted from creation to destruction?

  She looked up from the house to the sky above, a swirl of tiny lights extending out as far as her eyes could track. That was the one thing she’d always loved about the goggles, the way they allowed you to see five hundred times more stars in the sky. On night raids, they turned every soldier into an astronomer, and sometimes even a philosopher, pondering the meaning of their smallness in the midst of all that light in the distance.2

  Buzzing replaced the whisper of the wind. Then, like an omnipotent deity, a voice rang out from megaphones mounted on the four quadcopters that dropped down to hover at the corners of Todd’s property. “Jackson Todd! This is the FBI.” At those words, the HRT operators ran from the woods into the backyard.

  One of them then fell, as if yanked backward by the neck. The other HRT members dropped to the ground, weapons searching for the sniper. There was no other fire, no explosions.

  “Anyone have eyes on?” Keg yelled out.

  The agent who had fallen pulled away a thin piece of greenish rope that he’d gotten tangled in, tossing aside what looked like a wooden handle.

  “Stand down the sniper hunt,” Keg said. “It’s a kid’s zip line.”

  The HRT operators regained their footing and carefully worked their way to the back porch. Edging past a gas grill, they placed a wall-penetrating radar next to an exterior brick wall.3 It showed what the overhead drones’ thermal sensors had indicated: there were no humans home. But with somebody as savvy as Todd, there was no way to know for certain.

  Keegan advanced from the trail and walked around the house to locate Noritz. He was huddled inside a navy blue tactical command post van, part of the convoy of law enforcement vehicles that filled the cul-de-sac at the HRT operators’ initial all clear. Sitting beside him were a pair of FBI Special Agent Bomb Techs performing the law enforcement version of Keegan’s old robot-wrangler job in the Marines. Noritz had said he wanted her in there with them for the next phase, when they entered the house. But it was not clear to her if he was trying to signal his continued trust by having her in the command center, or if it was the very opposite: keeping her where he could see her.

  In either case, the two wranglers had their hands full tonight, literally. After all of Todd’s tech takedowns, the operational plan was to limit use of anything that had advanced automation software. Fingers dancing across keyboards in a blur, the two steered everything from the drones that hovered above Todd’s yard to a cloud of insect-sized drones that were pushed out through the neighborhood to establish a perimeter.

  “HRT confirms no sign of Todd,” Keegan announced.

  “Strike one,” said Noritz and then he turned to the wranglers. “Send it in.”

  A small tracked robot about the size of a lawnmower rolled off the van’s ramp and turned jerkily toward Todd’s house. An older model PackBot, the machine did not try to hide its singular purpose behind plastic skin or human form.4 Designed for bomb squad and SWAT team work and then sent out to the second Iraq War, it had a single metal arm with four hinged joints topped by a two-fingered claw. Mounted on the second-to-last joint, the equivalent of the robot’s forearm, was a sensor pod and a shotgun.5 The gun was supposed to be used to detonate improvised explosives, but Keegan knew from experience it could be used to target people.

  The robot rolled up Todd’s front stoop with a stuttering advance. With a critical eye, Keegan could see the wrangler’s moves were unsteady; he wasn’t used to the joystick-style controller, modeled after the video games of their parents’ generation. What had once been a user-friendly design was now as intuitive as changing typewriter ribbon.

  At the door, the robot stopped.

  “Ring the bell, or blast it open?” asked the technician, perhaps a little too eager to try out the shotgun.

  “Try the door,” Noritz said.

  The robot’s claw hand reached out and grasped at the door handle. After a first miss, Keegan suggested, “Try shifting to the pinhole camera mounted inside the hand; it’s easier that way.”

  “Thanks.”

  The viewscreen shifted from looking down on the door handle to a bug’s-eye view looking directly at it. Centering the knob on the screen, the twin metal grippers closed on the hand, darkening the screen. It shifted back to the sensor pod view above the handle and the hand spun slowly, turning the door handle.

  Todd’s house was unlocked.

  “That’s not suspicious at all,” said Keegan.

  “Agreed,” said Noritz. He spoke into the comms channel. “All agents, pull back. Let’s clear the house first with the PackBot.”

  “Roger that,” Keg’s voice came back.

  An update flashed across the viewscreen in the van and onto Keegan’s viz; no traces of explosives or any other nuclear, biological, or chemical threats had been detected by the PackBot’s sniffers. But it also illustrated how much code was still running back and forth, even with their attempt to avoid automation.

  The robot used its arm to push the door open wider.

  “Hold it here to see if there’s any reaction from inside the house,” Keegan instructed. Being silhouetted in an open doorway was often the start of an ambush.

  After five seconds of nothing, the wrangler looked back at Noritz and he nodded his approval. The robot’s spotlight on the sensor pod turned on and it crept forward. On the viewscreen, a new window opened. It showed a graphic layout of the robot’s actual position matched to a rendering they’d built from the house’s plans and photos from an old online real estate listing. This would allow them not only to track its progress, but also to see if there were any false walls hiding potential dangers.

  The robot rolled through a hall entryway with wooden floors, then into a carpeted den connected to an open kitchen. The operator spun the PackBot on its tracks slowly, surveying the room. Keegan wasn’t sure what she expected to see, but the normality of it surprised her. Hell, it was exactly the kind of needing-to-be-updated suburban house that she and Jared had spent hours poring over online before he’d lost his job.

  “Light on over there,” Noritz said, and the robot headed toward a doorway with a band of light peeking out from beneath it. The builder’s plans m
arked it as stairs down to the basement level.

  The robot opened the door—no need for Keegan to tell the wrangler how to do his job twice—then rumbled down a short set of stairs, a second set of tracks flipping downward off the back of the PackBot to keep it steady. At the bottom, the machine paused, as if appreciating that it had the room to itself. It was an empty rec room, the carpet showing the tracks of a vacuum. The emptiness was eerie; it was the kind of room that should have been littered with toys. The bot advanced slowly, then stopped before entering the other room in the lower level, where the light was coming from. The design plans showed a 22- by 18-foot room with no windows, labeling it a “guest room/office.” Yet in builder speak, that could mean anything from a spare bedroom to sex dungeon.

  “Open it?” asked the tech.

  “If he’s set something to blow, all we’ve lost is a bot,” said Noritz. “Do it.”

  Just before the bot pushed opened the door with its arm, it seemed as if every person in the crowded van took a breath in nervous anticipation. The door opened to show a large box, about the size of a refrigerator, standing in the middle of the room.

  “What the hell is that?” said the robot operator.

  Its sides were a yellowish glass, shimmering with the reflection of the robot’s light. Two thick black cables snaked out the top, running down the box to the wall, where they followed the baseboard.

  “Analytics on what we are seeing? Anybody?” asked Noritz.

  All Keegan could think was how useful TAMS would have been at this moment. As the operator started to drive the robot closer, she said, “Don’t touch the cables,” worried about a booby trap.

  “Got it. I’m going to get a better angle on those wire terminals coming out the top,” he said. “It looks like some kind of big generator or battery.”

  It was the last word that did it—the shimmery glass looked like the big brother of what she’d seen inside the guts of the tiny robots she’d so many times assembled herself. “It’s not that,” she said.