Burn-In

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Burn-In Page 39

by P. W. Singer


  “Makes sense,” she said. “They’re all part of the same conspiracy. That really doesn’t answer the question of where they got the money, though.”

  The Encounter braked hard. Keegan tapped the screen to find out why; the bumper-level night-vision cameras revealed a makeshift barricade blocking the road. It looked like lawn equipment lashed together, obviously built by somebody who had never built a roadblock. Their first venture into a new kind of politics. They’d soon get the hang of it if Todd wasn’t stopped. Maybe it was too late.

  “What is notable,” said TAMS continuing on, “is that Militas Mining was set up by VDO Associates.” Further lines connected to new dots. “It is an algorithmic law firm that has worked on seventeen merger and acquisition transactions for companies owned by Willow Shaw.”

  Her face was easy for the robot to read.

  “Your biometric profile indicates an adverse reaction to this information,” TAMS said.

  “A strong one,” said Keegan.

  She wanted to pull over to the side of the road and think for a minute. Instead, she took control of the vehicle’s steering wheel and drove it directly toward the barrier. The Encounter’s underbody skid plate ground on metal as it rose slightly and then crashed back down, smashing an edge trimmer under its tires.

  She set the vehicle back on autodrive to continue to the hospital.

  Link analysis led analysts astray all the time, she thought. It was also how so many wing-nut conspiracies had been fueled, cloud crawler algorithms building connections between countless events that had no real ties. Elvis and a lunar helium farm that somehow connected to Hitler and the Deep State. The same could be the case for the law firm and the hidden transactions, just connections made literally out of digital noise. But it didn’t feel like that.

  “Damn,” she muttered to herself. Why would Shaw, as much a pro-technology and societal transformation zealot as anybody she had ever met, be behind a campaign to derail the very advances he’d worked his whole life to spread?

  It didn’t make sense. Unless it did and she just wasn’t getting it yet.

  “Do you have anything else?” she asked. “Anything else at all you’ve learned from accessing Shaw’s network that identifies other persons of interest in our investigation?”

  “Yes,” said TAMS.

  “And?”

  From the car’s speakers, Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” began softly playing. “With expanded cloud access, I now understand your reaction to this song when it played during one of our training cycles,” said TAMS. “I also now understand the context of this subsequent statement.”

  Jared’s voice then spoke from the car speakers. “That machine is going to find out more than you want it to.” As it played, Keegan’s viz displayed a historic chart of her biometric data, showing a previously unexplained spike at that moment.

  Keegan took off the glasses, as her vision narrowed and pulse began to pound in her ears. She looked away from the robot and caught her reflection in the driver-side window. Shadow veiled her forehead and brow, but the whites of her eyes glared back. She had dreaded this moment for over a decade, but had to decide in an instant what to do next.

  “And what do you now understand?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

  “There are critical anomalies in your personnel records,” said TAMS.

  “How so?” she asked, limiting her words to avoid giving TAMS any more data to churn.

  “Expanded cloud access revealed anomalous correspondence between yourself and Mr. Shelby Brown, as well as the contents of his cloud. Your combined data and timeline activity indicate that you are both persons of interest in an open case in Washington State, an unsolved homicide at the University of Washington Tacoma on the date of—”

  “Stop.” She shifted in her seat to look squarely at the robot. “You pulled this from Shaw’s proprietary database?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not an FBI algo or data set?”

  “Correct,” said TAMS. “I presently only have access to the KloudSky network.”

  And that set the timer of the ticking bomb that would destroy her life. The microsecond that TAMS linked back into the FBI’s network, it would automatically download its findings.

  She leaned back in her seat, feeling the metal of the multi-tool press into her hip. The sound of Noah’s voice playing in the car’s speaker brought back the memory of the advice that he’d given back at the shooting range.

  Never go into battle with a bot you can’t trust and never trust a bot you don’t know how to snuff out.

  Perhaps TAMS would not even realize what was happening before it began to overheat and cook its own chips. Or, maybe it would, but wouldn’t care.

  “Your biometric profile indicates acute stress,” said TAMS. “Is there anything that you need assistance with?”

  Georgetown University Hospital

  Washington, DC

  The Georgetown University internal medicine intern chewed harder, trying to get one last boost out of the cherry-flavored stim gum. The whole day had been chaos for the junior physician, the Emergency Department flooded by every type of case possible. Some were directly caused by the power outages that had hit the city, while others were from its ripple effects, like the rash of broken bones from people tripping down dark stairs.

  That was probably the case with the patient on the gurney. The old guy in mud-streaked green corduroy pants was a walk-in, so they didn’t have a run sheet from the ambulance. But it looked like he had somehow managed to fall face-first through a plate glass window. A band of ravaged skin slashed across his face, with a laceration dividing his left eyebrow, while his right check was swollen with an even dozen short rough gashes. His left hand had another slash on it, maybe from breaking his fall on the glass. At least most of the cuts weren’t too deep, as if made by the kind of knife her dad used to fillet the fish he caught on Lake Anna. She couldn’t remember what it was exactly called, she was that tired.

  “Sir, I need to fill out a form for you. What is your name?”

  The patient looked back blankly at her and shook his head. Then he started to speak slowly. Each word was in some kind of Eastern European accent, distorted by the grimace of agony that he made to get it out. He moaned, “Pain. Help.”

  “What? Is? Your? Name?” she said louder. Then she shook her head at what she’d just done, realizing she was being the Ugly American.

  The man only shook his head in confusion, then gripped the metal bars of the gurney as if trying to control the hurt.

  One of the nurses came over, the one that she knew hated interns, thinking they lacked enough experience to be useful and just got in the way. The nurse wiped her hands on her pink scrubs, as if wanting to be rid of the intern and her inefficiency. She was maybe only a year or two older, but while the aspiring doctor had been traveling to Cancun, writing med school applications, and studying in classrooms, the nurse had been working in this very hospital.

  With an audible sigh, the nurse reached up and tightened her ponytail, separating it into two pieces and pulling, as if preparing herself for the long night ahead. Only then did she speak to the intern.

  “What the hell are you screaming at a patient for?”

  “I need to know his name for the system, but I don’t think he speaks English. He was a walk-in and the facial ID admissions scanner’s not working, because, you know,” she said tilting her head at the man. He likely wouldn’t understand, but it still didn’t seem right to say out loud that all the cuts had changed the geographic markers of his face.

  “Cómo te llamas?” the nurse asked the man. As if the doctor didn’t know Spanish herself.

  He looked blankly from the nurse to the intern and back and then shook his head. “Pain. Help,” he said again.

  “That doesn’t sound like a Spanish accent,” the nurse said.

  The intern took a breath, remembering not to come off as uppity to the nurse. The last thing she wanted t
o do was get that reputation. It’d come back to bite her in the ass later on, not just with this nurse, but every one of her colleagues. “It sounds East European, maybe,” she said, trying to say it with a helpful tone. “I can run through all the languages with the translation app and see which one?”

  “Skip it,” the nurse said. “Enter him as a John Doe for now and the records software will figure it out later. You need to keep things moving along. But make sure he gets a CT stat.”

  “Thanks. Good advice; don’t get bogged down.”

  “You need an attending to help?” the nurse asked.

  “No, I got it,” she replied, and then added “Thank you,” one more time just to be safe.

  As the nurse moved down the hallway, the intern turned back to the man. “Don’t worry, Mr. Doe, we’ll get you patched up soon enough,” she said in what she hoped was a calming, confident tone. She wiped away the blood and then showed him the needle of lidocaine. “First I’m going to help you out a bit with the pain . . . For pain. Help.”

  He nodded.

  She inserted the needle into the main laceration, pressing slightly to inject the painkiller. He was a head trauma, so she didn’t want to sedate him, just numb the points of most intense pain. She made several more injections at each of the largest cuts and then started to treat them, some with stitches, some with glue, and the smaller ones just using butterfly strips to close them. He was a tough old dude, who probably could have put up with old-school stitches. The second that she had started to work, a calm had come over him; his eyes tracked each of her moves, but he never flinched.

  After she was done, John Doe’s face was a patchwork of bandages. Before she left, she rechecked his pulse, even as the automatic diagnostic features of the gurney evaluated the patient. With all the ways the tech had gone screwy the past few days, she felt like she had to be sure herself. His heart rate was 47 beats per minute, which stopped her. A resting rate that low wasn’t necessarily dangerous, but more apt for a yoga instructor or professional athlete than an old guy who’d just gone through a trauma. It showed 48 the next time. Just to be safe, she shined a light in his eyes, seeing how they reacted. She checked his eyes with a flashlight and had him visually track her finger but did not seem to find any telltale signs of a concussion. If anything, it was abnormal the way his eyes held steady the whole time.

  Seeing the nurse start to come back down the hallway, she recognized she’d lingered too long. “All done, Mr. Doe. They’ll come for you soon and get everything sorted out.” She gave him a gentle pat on the hand, hoping he got what she meant.

  The patient nodded and lay back on the gurney, closing his eyes. It was probably a good thing he couldn’t understand everything that was going on in the city; at least one person had found peace in all the chaos.

  Jackson Todd waited thirty seconds until after the young doctor left to sit back up, counting the seconds in his head. Then he opened his eyes.

  She’d done a good job, far better than he’d hoped. The bandages pulled at his skin, but he did not register the feeling as pain, certainly not after the agony of making that first cut into his own face. The intensity of that moment—the feel of the knife in his hand, the sight of his blood drops splashing onto the side of the kayak—was receding into the background, the way a nightmare is only hazily recalled but the primal feeling of fear during the dream is never forgotten.

  He looked around the hallway, checking that the intern and nurse were nowhere to be seen, and got down off the gurney. He pulled out the backpack he’d stored beneath, still streaked with mud. Slinging it over his shoulder, he moved slowly at first, the shuffle of someone uncertain where they should go. He exited the Emergency Department through the double doors and turned down one hallway and then the next, moving as if he was looking for a destination that he didn’t know, before finally entering a restroom.

  Five minutes later, he emerged wearing a white doctor’s coat, clean pants, and an ID badge. With a confident step, he took the stairs up to the third floor, exiting into the waiting room for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The paint and furniture of the NICU were all muted colors—light tans, yellows, and greens. It was an earthy palette designed to soothe. On the other side of a thick glass viewing window, curtained partitions framed rows of bubble-like incubators.

  Todd walked through quickly, lest any of the parents there, lingering over their infants with looks of satisfaction and uncertainty, stop him to ask a question. At the far end, the glass security doors into the facility opened, automatically sweeping inward in welcome. In another era, all he would have needed was the coat to pass through the entire building. Yet even the security badge’s electronic permission, sent via an RFID signal that he’d coded himself, would not be enough to get any farther without passing another test.

  Stationed at the desk just beyond the door was a young nurse with pink fingernails decorated with unicorns. “Can I help you? All visiting staff still need to register.”

  He watched her eyes dart back and forth from his face to the badge on his white coat. Then, instinctively, she inhaled quickly, her hand going to her mouth, as she imagined the painful injuries the doctor must have suffered. Working in the NICU, she only dealt with the emotional trauma of parents, not the physical kind before her.

  “It’s that bad, isn’t it?” Todd asked.

  At that she looked slightly embarrassed, focusing away from his bandages and back on the name and photo, which would further reinforce their validity in her mind. She would want to avoid causing further offense to “Erik Reed,” a visiting pediatrics fellow from Johns Hopkins.

  “No, not at all, Dr. Reed.”

  “There’s no need to sugarcoat it,” Todd replied. “I count myself lucky. Baltimore is . . . a heartbreak.”

  “Are those from the . . . chemical burns?” the nurse asked, then instantly regretted her curiosity.

  He shook his head. “No, fortunately not that. It happened in the chaos that came after. When the gas cloud hit Baltimore, I was on my way down here for a study review meeting with Dr. Tomkins”—he name-dropped a senior doctor in the hospital—“who is coordinating on how environmental factors impact critical-care outcomes in the NICU.” He patted his messenger bag. “So it was this project I have to thank for saving my life.”

  “That’s amazing,” she said, eager to draw some tiny bit of good from the bad that felt so overwhelming. “You need anything?”

  “No, I tried to remotely upload the study’s data, but it’s not working. I just need to quickly access the local data files; I already have the code.”

  As she swiped his badge and buzzed him through, Todd waited for her to sneak one more glance at his face and looked directly back at her, forcing her to maintain the gaze.

  “It may look bad,” he said. “But I know I’ve been blessed with this opportunity. It came at a cost, which is why it is so important to finish the task.”

  Georgetown University Hospital

  Washington, DC

  Stepping through the entrance to the Emergency Department brought back a rush of memories. The last time Keegan had been there was when a Sunday afternoon trip to the mall for new baby clothes had instantly transformed with her first early labor pain, followed by an hour-by-hour fight to keep her newborn daughter alive.

  Tonight, she tried to bury that feeling of panic. She could deal with the shitstorm that TAMS was going to unleash on her life after this all was over. She had to trust right now that it too could prioritize Todd’s capture as their most important objective. Todd was no longer just their prime suspect in the attacks; he was now the potential key to unlocking something much bigger.

  The waiting area inside the ED was barely controlled chaos. Wall screens blinked on and off, flashing images of the flood and blackout while nurses triaged patients, recording vitals and chief complaints in the race to see who needed to be seen first. Family members of unseen patients pleaded with blood- and mud-covered doctors hurrying in and out of the waiting
area.

  Keegan scanned the area for Todd’s face, but nothing popped. At the far end of the waiting room, she spied a security guard blocking the doorway to the patient-care area. She strode toward him with intent, TAMS following at the normal distance she’d instructed it. That was good, she thought; a visual confirmation of Modi’s claim the new body still had all the old memories.

  “I’m Agent Lara Keegan, FBI. I need access to your facility.” She showed him her ID and badge. “We believe there’s a threat to the hospital.”

  The guard wore a black nylon jacket with “SECURITY” in large yellow letters, an outfit he’d attempted to up-armor himself with knee and elbow guards and a black ballistic vest missing its protective plates. Squinting back at her through smudged black-framed AR glasses, he reacted as if she’d come to lodge a noise complaint about a too-loud dorm-room party. “There’s a threat to everything today, Agent Kagan,” he said.

  “It’s Keegan,” she said. “And this is different. We have a high-threat individual who we believe may be inside your facility.”

  He hooked his thumbs into his belt, leather creaking. “And they just sent you? And this, uh, thing?”

  “We’re stretched thin, just like you guys,” she said.

  “You got a picture of your person of interest? Let’s start with that.”

  She looked at TAMS and nodded.

  The guard’s eyes lost focus on hers as he looked at Todd’s driver’s license photo projected onto his lens. “Haven’t seen him. If he’s here, he didn’t come by me.”

  “That’s good news,” she said, not wanting to pop the campus cop’s bubble at how out of his league he was against Todd. “But we’ll still need to access the entire hospital’s facial recognition systems. Our guy could have come through any of the entrances.”

 

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