Prodigal Son

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “That’s Soo-jin Kim,” Molleken said. “She’s here to help me interpret social situations.”

  Soo-jin didn’t look up. Her sleek black hair draped past the bend of her elbow. She swept it over a swanlike neck and continued flipping pages.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” Molleken asked.

  “I’m a tech journalist for Medium,” Evan said. “My name’s Marc Specter.”

  Joey had ginned up a profile and thwacked it onto the website, putting Evan’s image and fake name on the byline of a scattering of existing articles.

  Something emerged from the loose curl of Molleken’s fist. It crept around his pinkie and then scuttled across his knuckles.

  A giant flower beetle.

  “And what do you want?” Molleken asked, admiring his pet.

  “I’m writing a story on your technology.”

  The beetle hopped off Molleken’s hand onto the desktop. His finger moved pointedly on the sensor pad, and the beetle skittered around the desk, adhering to the very edge. As it passed before Evan, he caught a reflective flash from its thorax, a metallic circle no bigger than a dime.

  A remote-controlled insect.

  When he looked up, Molleken was watching him. “It’s real,” he said. “A living machine. You might think of it as a cyborg. I equipped it with a microprocessor and implanted six tiny electrodes.”

  The beetle reached the corner of the desk, made a cadet-tight pivot, and scampered back toward its master. Molleken’s finger lifted from the sensor pad, then tapped it once, the beetle freezing at attention, its antennae bristling.

  He pressed his fingertip again to the pad, and the beetle’s wings slid out, beat themselves into a blur. Another movement of Molleken’s hand and it took off so abruptly Evan had to duck to avoid catching it with his face. It hummed around the room, Evan marveling at it. Over on the regal sofa, Soo-jin looked unimpressed.

  Molleken said, “With tiny jolts of electricity to its brain and wing muscles, I can control—”

  He frowned and stared at the pad, making adjustments. The flower beetle sped up, looping around the room, out of control. It buzzed past Evan’s ear, zipped past the desk, and struck the window with a thud. It dropped lifelessly from sight, leaving a Rorschach blot of its innards on the pane.

  “Oh,” Molleken said. “Well. Still working out the kinks. The biological ones aren’t very smart either.” He knuckled his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “So,” he said, the beetle forgotten. “A story. On my technology.”

  “The military applications in particular.”

  In her same casual tone, Soo-jin said, “You want me to get Legal in here?”

  “No, no,” Molleken said. Back to Evan, that same focused nonfocus, as if those extra pupils were attuning themselves to invisible signals Evan was giving off rather than to Evan himself. “Do you understand what I do, Mr. Specter?”

  Evan stared at the splotch on the windowpane above Molleken’s head. “You’re a software engineer and a founder.”

  “He’s a biomimeticist,” Soo-jin called out from the shadows behind Evan. “He takes biological inspiration from nature and incorporates it into technological design.”

  “Like, say, a dragonfly drone,” Evan said.

  “Like precisely that.” Molleken brightened. “Us humans, we love to revel in our technological superiority. Deep data-mining and artificial intelligence. But nature’s been playing this game a lot longer than we have.”

  “What game is that?”

  “Design.” Molleken smiled, his face lighting with a childlike wonder.

  Evan thought about Molleken’s defender downstairs in the bar: Don’t take advantage of Brendan’s good nature. There was something immensely appealing about him, an unshielded youthfulness that elicited an almost protective instinct. Wide-eyed, uncensored, pathologically direct.

  “Dragonfly wings beat in a basic Lissajous pattern with exceedingly high efficiency. They have separate muscles for their front and back wings. That design element eliminates the need for discrete tilt and attitude controls. They can hover.”

  “Don’t you think you should mingle a bit downstairs?” Soo-jin said. “It is your party.”

  Molleken waved her off, his eyes never leaving Evan’s. “Abalone,” he continued. “Their shells are made out of calcium carbonate. Know what else is made of that?”

  Behind Evan, Soo-jin flicked another page of her magazine. “Chalk,” she said, in a been-there voice.

  “But by subtly adjusting proteins, they build it into staggered walls of nanoscale brick to create an armoring harder than Kevlar.” Molleken grinned. “A blowfly can make a near-instantaneous right-angle turn in less than fifty milliseconds. A maneuver like that would rip a Stealth fighter to pieces. A gecko can walk straight up a wall. We can model high-tech camera optics off the eyes of praying mantises. When I was figuring out how to efficiently move maritime drones through water, I looked to eels. Want to know how they swim?”

  “I think I get it,” Evan said. “You use animal design to build better weapons.”

  Molleken rubbed his face, exasperated, his eyeglasses bobbing up above his fingertips. “No. That stuff’s boring. It’s just for funding. That’s not where it’s at for me.”

  “No? Where’s it at?”

  “Imagine a hummingbird drone, nineteen grams, wingspan less than seven inches, highly efficient electronic motor. Now imagine it lives on a single 1.2v Li-Ion coin-cell battery that can keep it airborne forever through regenerative wireless charging. You could direct it through radio telemetry, fly it into the Fukushima reactor to assess the radiological threat level. Hell, it could recharge itself off the radiation in the air.” He leaned forward, his eyes shining. “Now imagine we equip it with thermal cameras and FPV capabilities—”

  “First-person view,” Soo-jin said lazily from the perimeter.

  “—and fly it into inaccessible earthquake disaster zones to locate trapped survivors. Or to track endangered wildlife populations. Or to catch poachers in Africa or South Asia. It could read wind patterns inside wildfires, guide water hoses to the source of a conflagration. Imagine crawling a centipede through the wreckage of 9/11—”

  Soo-jin sat forward. “Brendan, perhaps just a quick hi to your other guests—”

  “They’re here drinking my alcohol, eating my food, making use of my house. That’s sufficient social reciprocity to help our people leverage relationships moving forward.” Without so much as a change in his cadence, Molleken kept on his previous track with Evan. “—or a solar-powered octocopter that could provide wireless Internet in remote poverty-stricken regions in Haiti or Lesotho. What if a fleet of them delivered food? Vaccinations? Brought blood samples to medical labs to help thwart disease outbreaks? Tested for harmful gases and chemicals in the air? Imagine being liberated from size, from range, from power sources.”

  “It that achievable?”

  Molleken brushed back his lank bangs, which had fallen to touch the top of his eyeglasses. Then he reached in a drawer and pulled out a bigger touch pad.

  “Brendan,” Soo-jin said. “Don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s creepy.”

  “Mr. Specter won’t find it creepy,” Molleken said. “He’s a curious man. Unlike the drunkards downstairs.”

  He placed four of his fingers on the pad. Evan heard a faint hum from the corner over by Soo-jin. He turned, and she rolled her eyes and pulled her feet up onto the chesterfield. A metal trunk in the shadows juddered slightly, its latch rattling.

  Then the lid popped open a sliver. Something seemed to pour out of the interior, but Evan couldn’t make out what it was.

  It spread across the floor, a wave dispersing into individual drops that scuttled toward him. He felt his stomach turn in revulsion, a precursor to fear. The edge of the flood swept beneath Soo-jin’s stockinged feet.

  A faint ticking of tiny legs against floorboards, multiplied by a thousand. The surge swep
t to Evan’s chair, enclosing it. He resisted the urge to leap up. He looked down.

  Robotic ants.

  Thousands of them.

  He looked back at Molleken, who was still grinning, his fingers manipulating the pad, spread as if gripping a bowling ball.

  Evan’s chair shuddered. And then lifted unevenly. His arms flared as he kept his balance.

  The army of ants conveyed him in his chair around the huge desk. He stared at Molleken, who seemed to approach lurchingly. Evan’s chair was deposited next to Molleken’s. He looked down as the ants peeled themselves off the wooden legs, lowering him to the floor.

  That awful skittering noise resumed as the robotic ants retreated back into the shadows. Soo-jin watched him from across the room, the pale skin of her face the only part of her visible in the shadows, her expression unreadable.

  Evan heard the latch rattle once more, the lid of the metal trunk click upward. A pouring sound, like ball bearings dumping into a bin. The waterfall sound went on for much longer than seemed plausible. Then the lid clanked down once more and silence reasserted itself in the study.

  Evan realized he’d been holding his breath.

  He and Molleken sat facing each other, their knees almost touching, not more than a few feet between their faces. Molleken seemed unbothered by the lack of personal space. Those duplicate pupils gazed into Evan, and again Evan had the unsettling feeling that Molleken was seeing more of him than he wanted to reveal. He resisted the urge to adjust the chewing gum beneath his upper lip.

  “No wonder the military wants in on this,” Evan said. “The applications are spectacular.”

  “The military is small-minded,” Molleken said. “But they do spend an awful lot of money.”

  “I’d like to make clear,” Soo-jin called out, “that this discussion is strictly off the record. Do you understand, Mr. Specter?”

  “I understand.”

  Evan kept his focus on Molleken as Molleken did on him when addressing Soo-jin. She was an external embodiment of her boss’s concerns more than an actual person in the room with them. She seemed like a figment of Molleken’s imagination. The fact that she was East Asian and submissive, lurking in the shadows, gave Evan the same discomfort he’d felt downstairs at the young women on passive display before the male partygoers.

  “The potential is spectacular,” Evan said. “But the military applications present some moral challenges.”

  “Of course they do.” Molleken’s gaze was steady, penetrating. “But you can’t stop progress.”

  “That’s what Oppenheimer thought.”

  “And he was right.”

  “A swarm of your microdrones could overwhelm enemy air defenses.”

  Molleken smiled. Up close his skin looked impossibly smooth, devoid of wrinkles. “They could do more than that. Sensor systems like AWACS, they’re oriented toward larger airborne assets. If they were sensitive enough to detect one of my microdrones, they’d also alert at every mosquito or dandelion puffball caught on a breeze. My dragonflies benefit from inherent cloaking by dint of their size. And they have a negligible heat signature, which renders thermal imaging useless. So they are essentially invisible. They are everywhere and nowhere. They are divisible and additive. They are collaborative and think for themselves.”

  Molleken leaned forward, his nose no more than a few inches from Evan’s, seemingly unaware that he was crowding him. “Imagine waging war without home-team casualties,” Molleken said. “No more Americans coming back in caskets. And imagine outsourcing the negative emotion associated with killing so our soldiers don’t have to feel it.”

  Evan recalled Rafael rubbing his shaved scalp with agitation. You make the choices, you hear me? We at least bear that. What happens when you don’t anymore? What happens then?

  Evan leaned back, gathered his thoughts. “In the past decade or so, the number of skiers who wear helmets has tripled,” he said. “Do you know the effect that’s had on the number of head injuries?”

  Molleken’s features broadened with pleasure, a smile without the smile, this style of banter seemingly to his liking. “I do not.”

  “They’ve stayed exactly the same. Do you know why that is?”

  “The added protection gives skiers incentive to take more risks.”

  Again Evan pictured Rafael, trapped inside his own conscience and the four walls of his room. I’ll tell you something that’s not programmable. Jake Hargreave’s soul. You try rendering that outta ones and zeros.

  “There’s a moral hazard to avoiding cost,” Evan said. “Making war less painful for one side makes it a lot easier to sell. Which means we’ll see more of it.”

  “There’s no halting progress,” Molleken said. “There’s no halting this technology. It’s being developed around the world. The safest thing we can do is make sure everyone has it.”

  “Mutually assured destruction.”

  “How many thermonuclear bombs have been used in war?”

  “None,” Evan said. “Yet.”

  Soo-jin’s voice floated across to them. “Go to your party, Brendan. Circulate.”

  “Fuck you, Soo-jin.” There it was, a peek at the child-tyrant behind the curtain. Molleken rose abruptly, staring down at Evan. “Enough talk. Want to go play?”

  45

  The Waiting Darkness

  Evan exited the study with Molleken. Soo-jin didn’t even look up from her magazine as they passed by. They moved through the bodyguards and headed up a private hall. The electronic dance music rumbled through the bones of the house, vibrating the royal-blue Anatolian silk runner beneath Evan’s feet. They reached the elevator and stepped inside. The house was only three stories, but Molleken thumbed a fourth button at the bottom.

  The elevator car’s mirrored interior threw endless fun-house reflections of Molleken and Evan as they rode down, down, down. When the elevator peeled itself open, they were in an underground garage that smelled of gasoline and cleaning products. A dozen or so cars slumbered beneath covers, enough to require a staff for maintenance. But there was no one here now.

  Molleken led the way to a thick steel door, where he placed his palm on a sensor that hummed, reading his vein patterns. The door clicked open.

  Beyond was a passage bored through the earth like a subway tunnel. Evan barely had time to register his surprise before Molleken ushered him across the threshold. A single open-topped shuttle car rested on a monorail. The space was claustrophobic, tight enough that Evan had to stoop to get aboard after Molleken.

  Molleken threw the lever, and they whipped off, shot up the horizontal shaft. A few lights flew by overhead at wide intervals, intensifying the coal-mine effect. Evan pressed a palm atop his Giants hat to avoid losing it. He had kept his bearings, noting their northwest heading, which was launching them into a commercial zone of Redwood City. Molleken looked over at Evan, hair riffling, and said, “I traded for one of Elon’s tunneling machines.”

  “What did you give him?”

  Molleken smiled and did not answer.

  Almost as soon as the ride started, it began to slow, halting at an abbreviated platform facing a similar door. The jaunt had been maybe three-quarters of a mile.

  Another palm-reading sensor, and then they entered a pitch-black space.

  “Welcome to my battle lab,” Molleken said.

  He stepped forward, and motion-activated lights clicked on, illuminating the cavernlike space in segments. The lights kept going, the lab stretching out and out as it unfolded into view, an awe-inspiring reveal.

  There seemed to be no rear or side walls, just perimeters where the lights ceased illuminating.

  Evan followed Molleken through various industrial workbenches, server racks, and enclosed spaces. The cold design and fascinating gear gave it a utilitarian cool-nerd aesthetic; Evan half expected to find a Tesla coil lurking behind a pony wall. The overheads began to shut off in their wake until they were entrapped in a solitary rectangle of light that moved with them, the rest
of the battle lab hidden all around.

  They moved past a variety of missile prototypes, and then a disassembled Predator drone came into sight. Evan felt a prickle at the back of his neck where the Hellfire missile had scorched his skin.

  “Is that a Predator drone?” he asked. “Here in your private lab?”

  “I’m engineering a superior carbon-and-quartz-fiber composite for the fuselage,” Molleken said. “To reduce vibration and further decrease the sound signature.”

  “You must have crazy security clearances,” Evan ventured.

  But Molleken just kept walking, the lights clicking off behind them, shrouding the Predator in darkness.

  They arrived at a bowling-alley stretch of polished tile leading to a bizarrely staged tableau: a variety of mannequins posed among furniture as if at a cocktail party. A masculine one in the middle had a bright red target painted on its smooth plastic skull. Molleken halted at the far end of the gallery before a lab bench. Atop the immaculate surface rested a plastic torso and head wearing a skin-tight skullcap of sorts, the apparatus on display like a wig.

  As Molleken peeled it up gingerly, Evan saw that it was studded with electrodes—hundreds of them. Molleken placed it on his head, making several minute adjustments as if smoothing a swim cap into place.

  He looked ridiculous, his round face beaming beneath the apparatus. Sliding open a drawer in the bench, he removed a tiny robotic bee and set it down on the lab bench. A shiny little square of a backpack rose from its thorax. Next he took out a laptop and placed it open beside the torso. Code began to scroll across the screen.

  Evan blinked pointedly, initiating the live-feed feature of his contact lenses. A graphic appeared, projected by the left contact and visible only to him. It indicated that there was no signal here; the recording would be saved and dispatched once he returned aboveground.

  “I started developing neurofeedback to interface with robotic prosthetic limbs,” Molleken said. “Turns out we can be trained to vary our neuro-wavelengths and use the brain-control interface to manipulate objects external to us.”

  He closed his eyes, settled his shoulders, took a breath. The bee hummed to life and rose, flying in circles around his head. Evan focused on the laptop, capturing as much of the code as he could without seeming obvious.