Burn-In

by P. W. Singer

  Haley ran to the kitchen.

  “Just what is happening out there?” Jared asked when she’d moved out of earshot. “Everything’s off, not just the power, but all our devices. I can’t even pull down the news to find out why, let alone work. Haley’s toys are on the fritz too.”

  “The same people behind the flood and drone crashes fried the power grid and knocked out anything digital with what were essentially daisy-chained electric IEDs.”

  “Feels like this is never going to end,” he said, “like we’re never going to go back to normal.”

  “I don’t know about that. We’ll catch them and then get things back on track,” she said, maybe not so certain herself. But she had to be the confident one.

  “No. You know how our parents talked about the September 11 attacks, like the whole world changed forever after that?” he asked. “Not because of the attacks themselves, but by what came after. Afghanistan. Iraq. Saudi Arabia. This is going to be like that. Except we’re going to be attacking one another.”

  She stared back at him. Maybe he’d been living online for too long. Or, maybe he was right.

  “No need to go there just yet. Some things you have to take one day at a time. An hour at a time. Otherwise it’s too much,” she said, as much to convince herself as him.

  “Where’s TAMS?” said Haley, running back into the room, no bar in hand, having forgotten the mission.

  “Still at work,” Keegan said.

  “I miss it,” said Haley, as she climbed into her mom’s lap. “Did it get turned off too?”

  For a second Keegan wondered how Haley had guessed that, then realized she meant like her toys. “Haley, TAMS is resting at my office.”

  “You can turn it on, right?” said Haley.

  “It’s not quite like that,” said Keegan. How would the little girl understand a robot “dying”?3 Would it be like losing a toy, a pet, or even a human friend? “TAMS had a job to do, and did it. It did a really good job, in fact. But now it’s all done.”

  “But I want TAMS here, with me!” Haley started balling her fists like she was about to have a tantrum.

  A loud knock on the door interrupted them. Keegan set Haley aside and went to the entry hallway, taking in how the door was cheap wood, the kind that any looter’s axe could go through in a second.

  Get a grip. Those two dingbats in the lobby are in your head.

  The second knock was even louder, shaking the door on its frame.

  She drew her pistol from her holster, in that moment realizing that in the rush to get inside, she hadn’t even put it away in the gun safe above the refrigerator.

  “Bathroom,” she hissed at Jared and Haley.

  Haley started to cry, a wail that was between mumbling and moaning. Jared just nodded solemnly and scooped the girl up.

  Keegan refocused on the front door.

  “Keegan, it’s Modi,” a voice called from outside. “Open up. I know you’re in there.”

  What was he doing here?

  She unlocked the door, then stepped back, hiding the pistol behind her.

  Modi was not first through the door, however. TAMS was. In the silhouette of the doorway, the outline of the robot looked fragile and childlike, almost like Haley herself—delicate.

  “What the . . . ?” said Keegan.

  “Hello,” the machine said, and then a microsecond pause of recognition, “Agent Keegan.”

  “You can put away the gun, OK?” said Modi stepping in behind the robot. She nodded and holstered her Sig, impressed he had noticed that tactical detail so quickly. But any thought of that changed as he came closer. The candlelight didn’t shimmer off his hair. Instead of the rippling metallic colors, it was all now a muted brown. He was also wearing a fitted business suit, the fabric tight around defined muscles.

  The bathroom door swung open and Haley ran out. “TAMS!”

  “It is nice to see you again, Haley,” TAMS said, as the girl collided with the bot, rocking it backward with the force of a hug every bit as intense as the one that she had given her mother. Jared walked out into the room behind her but hung back, eyeing both the robot and Modi with suspicion.

  Haley was oblivious to it, though, squeezing what would have been the life out of the machine. Keegan marveled at the connection Haley seemed to have with the robot. Yet, as she looked at the child’s hands clasped around the robot’s waist, she picked up that something was wrong. The bot’s ceramic skin was unmarked. No dings and scratches from battle damage.

  “Wait,” Keegan said to herself. There was no way they could have fixed it in the interim, not with all the attacks and system collapses. She stepped closer to the bot, then dropped down on one knee to examine the plating.

  “Haley, why don’t you take TAMS to your room to show it your toys?” said Keegan. “TAMS . . .” she said haltingly, feeling almost guilty for using the same name for this other system. “TAMS, go with Haley until I tell you to return.”

  “OK,” Haley and the robot said, almost in unison, which made Haley giggle. She tugged the bot by the hand to her room. “Can you help Baz fly again?” Haley asked.

  Keegan waited for the door to close, then turned on Modi. “That isn’t TAMS.”

  “Yes and no,” Modi said. “It is a TAMS unit, just not yours. It has the same experiences synched up, but we had to pull another one for you . . . from other sources.”

  “How did you get a new one in the middle of all this?” she asked. “That kind of tech isn’t just lying around in a warehouse, waiting to be booted up.”

  “For some organizations, it is,” he said.

  “Seriously, I need to know. How’d you get the hardware here, backed up, and I am guessing charged up, in the middle of an EMP blackout? Is this Shaw pulling strings for you too now?”

  He shook his head. “No, there are limits to even where someone like Mr. Shaw can reach.”

  “Who then? DoD used to run the program. This one of theirs?”

  “Indirectly. It was provided to other government agencies that have an interest in this matter,” he said.

  “The other kind with three letters?” asked Keegan.

  Modi nodded.

  At that, Jared abruptly stood up.

  “OK, this has been fun, but one of us has to stay out of prison. I know I shouldn’t be in the room for this,” he said, heading toward the bedroom.

  “A very good idea,” Modi said under his breath.

  After the door closed, Modi pulled out a small black rectangle the size of an auxiliary phone battery and flicked it on with his thumb. He quickly circled the room, exuding confidence that had been lacking before—gone was the gawky uncertainty of an academic uncomfortable in his own skin and now he had quick, predatory movements. It was the practiced efficiency of a well-trained soldier, Keegan realized.

  “We’re good now,” he said. “Just stay away from the windows.”

  They sat down at the kitchen counter, moving aside two half-eaten bowls of cereal. Looking past Modi, she noticed that her folded bots were all set along the windowsill, looking out toward the city.

  “Second one of those I’ve had pulled out on me in two days,” she said. “This another conversation that never happened?”

  Modi took a breath. But rather than hunch and sink into himself, as had been his habit before, he sat with military posture, his shoulders back and spine ramrod straight. “Agent Keegan, I have close-hold information that I have been authorized to share with you and you alone at this stage of what is a highly compartmented national security investigation. Not Noritz. Not Bosch. Not Shaw. Understood?”

  “Yes,” she replied, wondering why this clearance wasn’t being done in written form and a little afraid of the answer.

  “I don’t work for the Justice Department or the FBI. At least, not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “I’m a counterintelligence officer at CIA assigned to a special internal task force that has a domestic focus. In my case, it has me inside
the FBI to monitor the Bureau for penetration by enemies of the Constitution, foreign or domestic.” He emphasized the latter, then paused to let Keegan process the full meaning of what he had said. “The program started after the, shall we say, interesting behavior within the FBI’s New York office that hampered the nation’s ability to respond to the very first case of foreign interference into a domestic US election.”4

  “Who watches the watchers?” whispered Keegan, still taking it in.5

  “A question asked by everyone from the ancient Romans to Star Trek.”

  “A spook and a geek?”

  “Guilty as charged . . . but they had it right. It’s the question that comes back every generation or so, the last time being when America’s elections were rocked by the very same problem, prodded on by our Russian and then Gulf friends. The counterprogram took a couple years to fine-tune the legalities, but it’s been running for quite a while now.”

  Keegan said nothing. The questions crashed together in her mind, and she tried to focus on which to ask first. What exactly did they know about her, and was she under investigation? Was there a threat inside the Bureau? What did CIA know about where the next attack would be? What came out was the question that could unlock many of these others: “Did TAMS know all along?”

  “Of course not,” Modi said. “We had nothing to do with the creation of that program or its activities, though I will admit it gave us a wealth of internal surveillance data far beyond the original expectations of our own collection plan.”

  Keegan thought about what that exactly meant in translation. Modi and the Agency had been monitoring everything that TAMS had seen and experienced. Including of her.

  “What about you? Are you even a profiler?”

  “Not exactly. I actually am a psychologist. Started out in SOCOM working computational understanding of humans, essentially using AI to understand how people are best influenced.6 Moved over to the Agency after that. You can see why our sessions were so personally interesting to me.”

  “Glad to know I kept you entertained,” she asked, making it clear she didn’t appreciate being viewed as simply a unit of study for him. “I guess that explains the placement in Unit 5 then.”

  “In more ways than one. Being in the Behavioral Analysis group allowed us to monitor activity within the Bureau, but not directly be involved in a law enforcement operation, such as having to make arrests or testify. Keeps us on the right side of the law . . . supposedly.” He smiled but had a resigned look. “Someone has to follow the law, even if it’s the spies.”

  Keegan looked at the way he calmly rested his hands on the counter; he wasn’t worried what she thought. “Well, at least now I know why you threw out the bot I gave you.”

  “Yes, your ‘gift’ is right out of our playbook. It got swept up in a routine bug check. Caused quite the stir in Langley, people thinking the whole operation had been compromised. Fortunately, TAMS’s feed showed you’d been placing them in your own home as well,” he said, nodding over to the ones on the windowsill.

  They’d been watching . . . everything. What else had they spied on?

  Haley squealed in her bedroom, and Keegan smiled involuntarily at the thought of an analyst in a dark room at CIA headquarters having to watch Haley put on a stuffed-animal play for TAMS. Then she turned serious again. “How did you know about the rune tattoo? You figured that out before TAMS did.”

  “A prior assignment I’d worked for the Agency. After the assassinations and mass killings that happened everywhere from London to New Zealand to Pittsburgh, the directors of the allied Five Eyes nations intelligence services realized we had to treat the white nationalist phenomenon as a global extremist network, much as we did ISIS and then the Sons of Aleppo.7 Same threat profile, same actions, same shitty ideology of hate and violence.”8

  “So what else didn’t you tell us then? If you were tracking neo-Nazis . . . The ambush in Greene County—did you know that it was coming?”

  Modi shook his head. “No, and if I had, I’d have found a way to warn HRT either through CIA or some other way. I know it may not feel like it, but we’re on the same team. Heath, Jacobs, Todd, and their like are a cancer inside this country and they need to be cut out.”

  “OK then. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Exactly what I just did,” Modi said. “It has been decided to return TAMS to you. Or, at least a version of TAMS that will aid you in halting a domestic threat my agency is limited in our legal ability to intervene against any further.” At that, he stood up from the counter and put the jammer in his pocket. He then reached across, took her hand, and placed a folded-up Watchlet in it.

  “Like TAMS, it’s in perfect working order, with all your data up to the last network backup.” Another reminder they knew more about her than anyone else. “You can use the satellite uplink on the bot to work around the crashed local networks.”

  He left his hand on top of hers, though, a little bit longer than needed. Then he gave it a light squeeze, maybe out of affection, she thought, maybe just another attempt at manipulation.

  “Lara, I know you have less reason to trust me now than ever before, but it has been a true pleasure working with you.” He let go of her hand. “I really do mean that.”

  “And that’s all you can say?”

  “I guess so.”

  Modi let himself out of the apartment, leaving Keegan sitting alone at the counter. A moment later, her husband came into the living room.

  “How much did you hear?” Keegan asked.

  “Enough,” he said, a slight hint of hurt in the tone. “What are you going to do now?”

  “There’s more attacks coming. I know it. I also think I know what I need to do, but I’m going to be on my own.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’ll have TAMS, or I guess a TAMS. But if I hook it back into the Bureau network, we’ll probably be called in. Maybe worse.”

  He put his hands up. “Wait. Could this get you fired?”

  “I don’t know. I may already be.”

  “What do you mean?” said Jared. “Shouldn’t that decide it for you?”

  “It’s not that simple,” said Keegan, now thinking about how she faced a problem much like TAMS did every single moment it traveled through a human world. The right thing to do isn’t always binary.

  “Well, what do you do now that Modi is part of this?” He said it with a tone that betrayed a bit of suspicion, maybe even jealousy. “Do you trust him?”

  “I’m not sure. Given the stakes, I think I have to.”

  “Maybe he’s just setting you up. Did you think of that? Maybe this is to make you some kind of scapegoat.”

  “You mean, is the CIA behind it all?”

  “Who the hell knows? This is your world,” he said, offering a smile of acceptance.

  “Alright then,” said Keegan. “I hear you. Focus on Haley, that’s the most important thing in the world you can do for me. I’ll be back quick as I can, but no promises.”

  “Whatever you do, please make it quick. I don’t know how long the two of us will be able to hold out without the feeds and stay sane. Plus, I want you to be the one who has to have the existential talk with Haley about Baz dying.” That was the old Jared, using humor to deflect from the angst he must be feeling.

  “Hopefully it doesn’t come to that,” she said. “Why don’t you go up to the roof for a bit? Stars are out. It really is quite beautiful.”

  He smiled and gave her an appreciative look. “You should join us,” he said quietly, maybe one last try.

  “I need to finish this.”

  “I know,” he said, and leaned in to give her a hug. He smelled faintly of the bay leaf cologne that she’d bought him as a Father’s Day gift from Haley last year. He smelled of their life a long time ago, none of the fear of the world outside, or the buried anger inside.

  He called Haley and the two of them headed up to the roof, the little girl leading the way with
a long white candle in hand, as if leading a Christmas Eve procession.

  Keegan went to the couch, leaving the Watchlet on the kitchen counter, as if to get it physically away from her. She could feel her back starting to lock up, so she moved to the floor and laid her head back, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, trying to release the tension. Her mind swirled as she tried take it all in. Her back started to loosen up, but with it came a feeling of fatigue that was mentally and physically overwhelming. Knowing if she gave in to the feeling for any longer that she’d never get back up, Keegan stood and went over to the coffeemaker in the kitchen. There was no tiny red light on, though, reminding her of the power outage and all that remained to be set back in order.

  She still needed to fortify herself for what was to come, so she poured herself a cup of the leftovers and took a sip of the bitter, room-temperature coffee.

  Keegan asked herself one more time if she was really going to do this.

  “OK, TAMS,” she called out. “Time to stop playing with Haley’s stuffed animals and get back to work. Come back in.”

  Leaning against the counter, she watched the machine walk in. It looked exactly the same as the system that she’d met that first day in the interrogation room. “You ready for this?” she asked, working to convince her brain to treat this new TAMS the same as the old one. It was a different kind of uncanny valley to cross that she’d never thought about before.

  “Yes, I am fully operational,” it replied.

  “Good enough. Open up a connection from the Watchlet onto your sat comms network. Time to call in a favor.” She slipped the device around her wrist and swiped through her personal contacts list. Of course the Agency had downloaded that too, she ruefully noted.

  She pulled up Willow Shaw’s information and opened an encrypted text chat.

  What was she going to say? Keep it simple, she thought. It was all complex enough dealing with Shaw.

  Need to speak.

  After only five seconds, the bracelet vibrated and a video chat screen opened up. It showed rolling green hills bathed in the fading pinks of an ocean sunset. The timing meant it was somewhere on the West Coast. Maybe his estate. Or rather, she corrected herself, one of his estates.