Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  “What is it then?” asked Noritz.

  “I think it’s a capacitor,” she said.

  “A what?” asked Noritz.

  “It’s like a battery, but instead of producing electricity with chemicals, it just stores it. Kinda like a water tower for electrons, storing them until you need them.6 That yellow is graphene, superefficient, probably lined with ceramic or something else nonconductive. I’ve never seen plates that big before, though. You’d have to buy that special from a fab.”

  “What’s he doing with it then, powering his house? Maybe for some kind of secret lab?”

  “No, it’s doing the opposite. See how he’s got it hooked up over there? He’s got to be charging it off the power grid with cables that big. Plus, you wouldn’t want to store any electrical lab equipment near a charged capacitor like that in case you ever shorted it out . . .” Her voice trailed off, as she considered the cramped space of the van, packed with electronics mere inches from her face.

  She tossed her vizglasses aside and covered her eyes, and shouted “Cover!”

  Scott’s Run Nature Preserve

  McLean, Virginia

  Face down in the mud, Todd pushed himself up and took a deep breath, trying to stop hyperventilating. Just another 20 feet and he would be back at the river’s edge. But he kept slipping down the slick, steepening slope, unable to find either his footing or his breath. This had all started years ago, but somehow it felt as if a line had just been crossed. That it had taken place in his home made it personal, but also meant that he could never go back. It was done. That part of his life was now truly over—just as it was for society.

  The lightning-like electric crack of the capacitor discharging in his house had been followed by eight more in the distance. The FBI team must have set off the proximity sensor in the basement, which sent out the last digital signal in the area for some time. None of his jury-rigged devices had the world-spanning range of the nuclear-weapon-powered EMPs that the doomsayers fantasized about.7 But it wasn’t needed. At the proximity sensor’s signal, a daisy chain of electromagnetic pulses had shot out from the capacitors that he’d geographically set to cover the network of power grid substations in Washington; one had even been assembled in an apartment that he’d rented across from the Capitol Power Plant.8 Just that single device would take out the power source that every office in Congress and the Supreme Court relied on, as well as brick every single computer in the headquarters buildings of the Departments of Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Federal Aviation Administration and US Postal Service, turning them into mere paperweights. Perhaps most damaging, though, would be at the General Services Administration’s DC region headquarters, the little-known agency that managed the basic functions and office management for every single other federal organization. Even if the politicians and bureaucrats tried to fight it, there was now literally no choice other than to remake vast swaths of American government.

  Then came a sweet silence that no one inside the Beltway had heard for literally a generation. None of the cicada-like buzzing of drones overhead or whirring of electric vehicles that had become part of the everyday background noise of modern life. Nothing.

  He wanted to howl with exaltation at the triumph of his moment. But respecting the silence was an even greater celebration of a journey that had begun with such loss. He alone had given society this moment to rethink and reset. He alone had steered it to the last possible off-ramp from the information superhighway, before it all careened out of human control.

  The silence passed through him. Calmed, he started to move with deliberate steps down to the river’s edge. There was still more work to be done. As he reached the water, he washed his hand of the blood from the broken bottle. When he stood back up to survey the shore, only then did he realize he had a far bigger problem that he hadn’t factored in. The small black kayak he had hidden was gone. Or, to put it more accurately, the old river’s edge he had hidden it on was gone, its geography changed by the force of the flood.

  Todd looked around, feeling his heart race now. Breathe, he told himself. Every problem has a solution. He found the kayak floating about 30 yards away. The tree that it had been tied to had broken off at the stump, but fortunately gotten wedged into a tangle of other trees and debris piled up against a boulder.

  He untied the kayak and checked to make sure the backpack was still secured inside. There was always the risk that someone might have taken it, but the kayak had been set well off any hiking trail and covered with netting and leaves.

  Todd dragged the boat deeper into the fast-moving water and, using the paddle planted in the mud to try to steady himself, put one foot up in the kayak. As he tried to pull in the other leg, however, he began to tip over and his arm holding the paddle swayed out.

  The kayak rolled, dumping Todd into the river, and he scrambled to hold on to the paddle while the kayak started to float downstream. Luckily, he’d attached its rope to his wrist, and after a drawn-out thrashing about in the fast-moving water, he got his feet underneath him and stood. He checked for the backpack again and stowed the paddle back inside the boat, then dragged it ashore, half out of the water and half on the mud.

  He’d been kayaking before, but it had always been off a dock, the teenager who worked at the rental stand at Georgetown’s waterfront holding it steady while he and his wife climbed in. Only now had he considered that was another of those little things for which you needed human help. At that thought, he laughed at the simultaneous appropriateness and ludicrousness of it all. He deserved to be cold and wet and at a loss for what to do next, he thought. It was a very human feeling.

  Trying again, this time he wedged himself into the kayak while it was still ashore, the bow of the boat squishing down low in the mud from his weight, but the stern floating free. The cut on his hand throbbed as he dug the paddle’s edge into the muck and inched the boat backward into the water push by push. It probably wasn’t the right way, but it worked. And that made it the right way.

  As the kayak finally broke free of the sludge, the river’s current spun the bow downstream. With a wobbly first few strokes, Todd felt the boat pick up speed. In the faster open water, he found it easier to steer. With little effort, he soon closed in on the American Legion Memorial Bridge that crossed the Potomac. Its high, thick, reinforced concrete piers had kept it safe above the flood, but now it appeared as it never had before. Backlit only by the stars, its spans were completely dark, not a single car headlight on its ten lanes of highway. As the kayak passed under the bridge and he entered pure darkness, the boat’s swaying movement was the only sensation fed into his body. When the boat exited back into the starlight on the other side, he began a slow and deliberate paddle toward his next destination. Not everything had gone to plan, but enough had that he could continue his work.

  Potomac Overlook Neighborhood

  McLean, Virginia

  It all had the look of a funeral pyre, a central column of smoke pouring out of Todd’s house, framed by the four smoldering drones where they had crashed in the corners of the yard. Yet as she emerged from the FBI van, Keegan couldn’t see anyone in the immediate vicinity who was either hurt or dead. Mostly, agents stood about confused, pulling off their AR glasses to see what was wrong with them and flicking switches on tactical radios that had gone dead.

  “Is everyone OK on your team?” Keegan yelled over to Keg.

  “I think so,” he yelled back. “We were far enough back. But a few of the rigs jolted when the comms went down. What the hell happened? We’ve got no feed from the network.”

  “He had some kind of electronic defeat device in the house. A big jury-rigged capacitor set off to go when we got near it. It likely fried anything close with unprotected electronic circuitry.” She looked down at her Watchlet. It had a blank screen. She couldn’t even mark the time of the attack. It was that moment when she noticed the silence in the air. “Keg, get your team to set a perimeter, facing out,�
� she yelled.

  He gave her a confused look.

  “We don’t have any drones watching our back anymore,” she explained.

  One second they had been a connected force in a position of strength. Now they were on the defensive and disconnected, mentally as much as technologically.

  “Keegan, you OK?” Noritz asked, exiting the vehicle in a daze. Inside the van, the detonation had made sparks fly out from the servers and the PackBot’s control screen sizzle, but nothing major had exploded.

  Keegan didn’t respond. She kept scanning the area to make sure there were not any threats emerging from the forest or the street, ready to take advantage of this sudden shift.

  “Keegan?” said Noritz. “Hey! You OK?”

  Even in this cul-de-sac, she could feel that something else had shifted. There was a different energy in the air. Or, rather, a lack of it. “Yeah. All good.”

  Noritz pointed into the night sky. “Look at the stars . . . I’ve never seen them that bright.”

  “There’s no ambient light. Power must be out all over.”

  The two of them stood still, now able to see as many stars as they’d previously needed their night-vision goggles to view. The darkness offered clarity.

  “Just how many of those devices did he have?” Noritz asked.

  “Enough to make plagues eight”—she walked over to the edge of the road and picked up a dragonfly-like microdrone about the size of her trigger finger—“and nine happen.” She tossed the inert little drone to the side, seeing scores of them on the ground in piles, their translucent wings glittering from the starlight

  “What are you talking about?” said Noritz.

  “Locusts and darkness,” said Keegan. “The eighth and ninth plagues—which means there’s one more to go if Todd is doing what we think.”

  The growl of a diesel engine interrupted them; a matte black MRAP with “FBI” stenciled on the side pulled up. It was from the quick reaction force, set at the end of the cul-de-sac, which might as well have been on the other side of the city with the comms gear out.

  “Thank God for military surplus,” Keegan said. The hardened electronics of the armored truck had protected its systems from Todd’s pulse blast, but the universe of people its radios could call would be limited.

  Noritz went over to confer with the team lead of the rapid reaction team, Keegan holding back. There was no rapid reaction to make, no clear next move to take. After a few minutes, Noritz returned, seemingly reenergized. “I’m going to make that my ride. I’ll drop you off close as we can get, then I need to circle back to the office,” he said.

  “What do you mean, drop me off?” she asked.

  “Take the time to check in on your family. They’ve been through a lot. This mess will all be here tomorrow to deal with.”

  He said it as if he was giving friendly advice, but unstated was what would happen in the interim. The mess would still be there tomorrow, but tonight would be when they’d figure out who to pin it on. They’d be looking for a scapegoat, and Noritz was making sure she wasn’t going to be there when they did. The absent person who had steered them right into this trap would take the fall.

  She wanted to argue, but she didn’t have the energy to deal with it all. He was right. She needed to be somewhere else tonight, with someone else.

  But all she could do was think about what was to come. The final plague was the one that had finally persuaded the Egyptians when the other catastrophes hadn’t: Death of the Firstborn. It took her imagination to darker places than she wanted to go, and she forced herself awake by digging her fingernails into her palms. The horror of what she kept imagining made her nauseous. And TAMS, maybe the best weapon they had to do something about it, was hanging on a rack in the back of a converted shopping mall.

  Ballston Neighborhood

  Arlington, Virginia

  Hundreds of lights glowed from high-rises’ windows. It was beautiful in a way, thought Keegan, the glimmers silhouetting backlit bodies staring out into the darkened city.1 Usually that came from a wall screen or tablet. Instead, it was hundreds of tiny candle flames. Flames had always meant fear for some, hope for others. There would be more of the former than the latter right now. But there was something human about the flames, something that forged a shared connection against the darkness.

  The lobby of her building, though, was completely dark. The electric doors didn’t automatically open, but they hadn’t autolocked either, which was a good thing because she had no idea how she would have gotten in otherwise. They opened just an inch, something on the inside blocking them. Keegan pushed harder, this time with the full force of her shoulder leaning in, and the door slid back a few more inches so she could slide her body through. As she squeezed inside, the sound of something moving through the air made her duck. Metal pinged into the hard glass of the door about where her head had just been. She rolled to a low crouch and drew her pistol. Seeing more movement and the outline of a person, she took aim.

  “Federal agent! Do not move!”

  “What?” said an older woman’s voice.

  As Keegan’s eyes started to adjust to the dark, she lowered her weapon. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Oh! You’re the cop!” said a gray-haired woman in her sixties, who wielded a bat.

  “Not a cop, FBI,” Keegan said, exasperated.

  “That’s right, Siena. She’s little Haley’s mom,” said a second figure that emerged from the dark. He was a man, also in his sixties. Instead of a bat, he had a claw hammer in his hand.

  “Yeah, that’s me. Haley’s mom, FBI agent.”

  She couldn’t remember their names either, so it was only fair that was how they knew her. She’d made small talk about the weather with Siena and what’s-his-name with the hammer whenever they crossed paths in the lobby and up on the drone delivery pad. But in buildings like this, no one was borrowing cups of sugar, or whatever people did with neighbors “back in the day.”

  “Seriously,” Keegan said. “What are you doing down here? I almost killed you both.”

  “We’re protecting the building from looters.”

  “Right . . .” Keegan said. She didn’t have the patience for this. “Can I give you some advice, though? Find out who’s coming in before you try to brain them.”

  “What’s happening out there?” said Siena, sounding eager, almost like she wished it were Armageddon beyond the building.

  “It’s what it looks like,” said Keegan, getting annoyed at the delay. “It’s dark, most everyone huddled up like us.”

  “When’s the power coming back on?” they asked, as if being in the FBI meant she had all the answers. It was a far cry from the usual “Deep State” crap that their generation had become consumed by.

  “Power’s going to be out for a while. I don’t know any more than you do. If I do hear more, I’ll be sure to let you know. Police will be by at some point to check on everybody, so just hang in there and we’ll be fine. If you really want to do something, maybe go door to door to see if anybody needs medical help or candles or whatnot?”

  “What about protecting the lobby?” said Siena.

  “Checking on neighbors is more important,” said Keegan. “I need to go check on my family, too. We’re all going to be fine.” She didn’t believe it. They were a long way from fine. But they wouldn’t detect her lie in the dark.

  Upstairs, Keegan paused outside her front door and instinctively swiped at the Watchlet to check on what the tiny bot cams inside would reveal. She half expected to see an image of her daughter and husband huddled around a trio of candles, faces lit from beneath. Instead, the screen remained blank.

  A deep breath and she knocked gently on the door.

  “It’s me,” she said. “Lara.”

  Then came a rush of shame that she even had to say that.

  She could hear fast-paced footsteps as Haley sprinted toward the door. After Jared opened it, Haley leapt into her arms. “Mommy!” she said.

>   Keegan squeezed her tight. It used to be that every time she saw her, it seemed like her little girl had grown inches in between. If anything, tonight Haley felt smaller, more vulnerable as the world around her had become more dangerous.

  The room was lit with long white candles, flickering shadows dancing along the wall.

  Jared held back, for a moment, then moved in to hug them both. It was a hard squeeze, and a longer one than she had had from him in a very long time.

  “Mommy, you changed your clothes,” Haley said, pointing out her tactical gear.

  “Yeah, I had to,” she said.

  “Did you go to the store for them?” she said.

  “I got them at work,” she said.

  “How come? Are the stores dark too?” Haley asked.

  “You doing OK?” Jared asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. Tired as hell, but good otherwise, considering . . .” She carried Haley inside, not giving a damn about what it would do to her back later on, and all three of them crashed down onto the couch. Its springs creaked; Jared being on it so long for his job had worn them out.

  Nobody spoke. They just watched the candle flames flicker in the dark living room.

  “You guys have enough to eat?” Keegan asked.

  “We’re OK,” Jared replied. “After the flood scare, I stocked up on freeze-dried meals and cans, twice the recommended FEMA amount.”2

  The way he was so calm about it made her think that her order of extra medication had come through too.

  That wasn’t fair, she chided herself. For all their troubles, she knew Jared wanted to protect their family.

  “That’s when I got the extra candles too. I didn’t know how many you’re supposed to have, so I just ordered a couple of boxes of the long fancy ones we use in the dining room.”

  “Well, at least it classes up the joint,” she said with a slight smile.

  “Haley, do you wanna go get Mommy one of her energy bars?” he said—the kind of question parents asked to plant an idea that was really an order.