Kill Decision

by Daniel Suarez

  “A covert military operation with a wiki.”

  Foxy headed to the door. “It’s only going to get stranger from here on, Professor. So I suggest you get some sleep. Your bathroom’s over there. Toiletries too. Clothes and shoes in the bureau and closet. The alarm clock will sound at oh six hundred hours. Everyone gathers in the team room at seven. You can grab breakfast before then—I’ll send someone around. If you need sleeping aids or anything else, ring this button by the door.” He regarded her tired eyes. “Any questions?”

  She shook her head wearily.

  “Super . . .” He gave her a two-finger salute. “See you in about five hours, then.” And closed the door behind him.

  She stared at the dead bolt, and then walked over to turn it with a satisfying clack. Just the sight of the slug of steel entering the frame, sealing her off, brought her stress level down by half.

  McKinney then sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands to her face. This was insanity.

  She noticed the remote control for the television on the nightstand. She grabbed it and clicked the power button. The television blinked to life on the Weather Channel. A meteorologist was waving her hands above the northeast, showing a high-pressure system moving in from the Great Lakes. It was a window of normalcy viewed from inside a loony bin.

  She clicked the channel button and cable news came up. Video of a burning office building, windows blackened and blasted out. The chyron scrolling on the bottom read, “. . . attack in D.C. Six dead. Twelve injured . . .”

  McKinney felt it almost personally.

  The anchorwoman spoke over the video: “. . . time in the heart of America’s defense sector close by the Pentagon. The bomb claimed the lives of Alerion Aerospace CEO Brad Oliphant Jr. along with several board members and executives. As a parts supplier for several Pentagon drone aircraft programs, security analysts speculate that Alerion was targeted by extremists intent on exacting revenge for the recent Karbala shrine attack, despite new evidence supporting an American denial of responsibility. Although al-Qaeda and other terror organizations have voiced support for today’s attack, authorities confirm that no credible group has yet to claim responsibility for—”

  Click.

  Another cable news station. An inset photo of the same burning office building next to the anchorman, who was in midstory. “. . . explosion could be heard throughout the capital city and, for some, brought back awful memories of 9/11. It is a city under siege this hour, as residents cope with the realization that they now live in a combat zone.”

  Click.

  Another news channel. Images of the injured being rolled on gurneys to waiting ambulances. Fire trucks. The anchorman’s voice authoritative: “Parts of D.C. are in lockdown as investigators comb through the scene, reviewing surveillance videos for some clue as to how the bombers were able to bypass security.”

  McKinney nodded to herself. A smart bomb doesn’t go through security. She wondered if this was a planted story or whether most government officials really didn’t know the truth either.

  Click.

  More news. Same story.

  Click.

  News again. Was that the only thing on this damned system? Weather and news?

  Click.

  News commentary. Several pundits sitting across from each other at a desk that would look at home on the Starship Enterprise, weighing in on recent events. A bald man with a crooked tie was talking fast. “. . . ourselves is why, after over a decade in the War on Terror, literally trillions of dollars and thousands of American dead and tens of thousands of injured—after all that blood and treasure—and literally hundreds of thousands of civilian dead overseas, why are we now as helpless against these terrorists as we were on 9/11?”

  Another pundit: “That’s not the big issue here, Howard. I mean, given all the privacy and civil liberties that we’ve given up, we now effectively live in a surveillance state—cameras on every street corner, in every place of business and office building, mass wiretapping—and yet the government is no closer to finding these terrorists. You look at the Spanish train bombings, the London Underground bombings—they had surveillance video in a matter of hours that led to the perpetrators. Yet here it’s been months and nearly two dozen attacks—”

  The host interjected, “Well, there have been arrests.”

  “But the bombings continue, and we’ve had no convictions. We’ve had several suspects released, in fact.”

  The host changed direction. “Instead, word on Capitol Hill is that House and Senate intelligence committees are examining an emergency defense appropriation reported to be in the tens of billions of dollars to create a drone air defense system, which makes me wonder how much more we could possibly spend on security that isn’t—”

  Click.

  The Weather Channel again. McKinney tossed the remote onto the nightstand and collapsed onto the bed, listening to the soothing voice of the weatherwoman. . . .

  “. . . scattered showers across much of southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago. While a high-pressure system eases down over the Kamchatka Peninsula . . .”

  CHAPTER 13

  Close Hold

  Linda McKinney exited her room to the sound of arguing. As she rounded the corner, she came upon Foxy and Singleton squared off again, while two large ravens squabbled over the wreckage of Singleton’s hunter vehicle on the floor in the middle of the hallway. The birds were using their thick black beaks to tear wires out of the autonomous vehicle’s central circuit board. Pieces of plastic littered the floor.

  “When is Odin going to get these flying rats under control?”

  “You know they like to wreck things. I can’t keep windshield wipers on the trucks when they get bored. Besides, I thought your ‘hunter-killer’ could look after itself.”

  “It’s idiocy having these birds flying around down here. They steal chips and components.”

  Foxy and Singleton both turned to see McKinney. Foxy nodded. “Morning.”

  “Morning.” McKinney looked down to see the ravens flapping their wings, cawing loudly as Singleton tried to move in to salvage his machine.

  Foxy thumbed down the hall. “Team room’s that way. You’ll find breakfast there.”

  “Thanks.” McKinney nodded and stepped past, trying to stifle a shared grin with Foxy as the birds snapped at Singleton’s fingers. He tried to shoo them away.

  Like the rest of the underground offices the brightly lit team room was new enough that it still smelled of fresh paint. However, it didn’t have a drop ceiling; instead exposed limestone stood three times McKinney’s height above. The scoured and striated rock was painted white and crisscrossed by fire sprinkler pipes and bright fluorescent work lights. The work area was huge. A dozen people in jeans and variously colored Ancile Services polo shirts sat around a series of large tables that had been pushed together to create a broad and long work surface littered with thousands of documents, photographs, and blueprints, as well as machine-milled foam models of what appeared to be unmanned aircraft and machine parts. There were also diagrams of corporate and residential buildings detailing explosive damage, dotted with callouts and captions unreadable at this distance. A dozen identical laptops were open and running with people clicking away at keyboards. Half a dozen more people sat or stood at tables running along the room’s perimeter. The walls were hung with large plotter-printed diagrams, maps, and blueprints depicting the United States, maps of commercial flight paths, radar and military installations, and printouts of surveillance imagery. There were also silhouettes of hundreds of drone aircraft pinned to the walls—way more, in fact, than McKinney had known existed. The silhouettes were categorized by country: Argentina, Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK, the U.S.—and on, and on. There were hundreds of drones on the walls.

  Clearly thousands of man-hour
s had already been expended on this project, and everyone seemed to be busy working their portion of it.

  Odin stood at the head of the table with his arms crossed. He nodded silently to her as she examined the team room.

  Among the other team members it was impossible to tell who was military and who was civilian. Long hair and beards certainly didn’t indicate a civilian background, since Odin and Foxy had both.

  There was a plump forty-something Asian man—Korean, she guessed—conversing with a lanky blond guy who, although boyish, was probably in his thirties. She exchanged nods with him as she laid her assigned laptop on the table and took an open seat. There was lots of room.

  Glancing along the table she saw a pear-shaped African-American man in his thirties gesturing to a laptop screen, while another Asian man listened in, slighter in build and more fair-complexioned—most likely Japanese. The Japanese man gave McKinney a knowing, sympathetic nod. Two other individuals at the edge of the room—a Caucasian man and a Latina in their early twenties—were arguing about something involving radio signals. A collection of computers and signal processing equipment lined their workstation.

  The last team member at the table, a sophisticated-looking African-American woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with short hair, smiled in greeting. Her eyeglasses went way beyond functional into stylish-expensive territory. “Have you had breakfast yet? There’s food just beyond the pillar.”

  McKinney shook her head. “No, I’m fine, thanks. Not much of an appetite.”

  A series of clocks on one wall showed the time in a dozen cities of the world. It was nearly seven A.M. local time.

  “So, what is this, mission control?”

  The woman nodded. “Joint operations center—the JOC. People from different disciplines and commands under Odin’s op-con.” On McKinney’s squint she added, “Sorry. Military speak. It means ‘operational control.’ He’s in charge here.”

  “He made that pretty clear.”

  She smiled sympathetically. “They pick assertive types to head these missions.” She reached across to extend her hand. “I’m Snowcap, team psychologist.”

  McKinney shook the woman’s hand. “Surprised to see a psychologist here.”

  Snowcap nodded. “These operations usually include a psyops component—managing public response to frightening news. I’ve been briefed on your situation. These things can be stressful even for trained military personnel. Let me know if you need help. Foxy mentioned you’re having trouble sleeping. I can prescribe something, if you like.”

  “No. I’m good, thanks.” As McKinney settled in, she noticed a sign in large red letters painted on the wall across from her: No Mundungus This Area.

  Before she could ask Snowcap about it, Odin stood and dropped a pad of paper onto the table. His voice boomed out. “All right, let’s get started.”

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and focused on him. The two radio folks at the edge grabbed a seat at the main table. Behind Odin, Singleton emerged from behind a large whiteboard hung on a massive pillar of stone. He was stirring cream into his coffee as he calmly took his seat next to Odin, near the head of the table.

  Odin gestured to McKinney. “As you can see, we have a new team member. Expert Six is the myrmecologist who developed the swarming algorithms we found on the Shenyang server—algorithms based on the African weaver ant, her particular field of study. Which means her work is of specific interest to the enemy. Which is no doubt why they tried to kill her thirty-six hours ago.”

  Most of the team nodded at her with respect.

  Singleton cleared his throat. “You realize they might simply be using her algorithms because they were readily obtainable.”

  The others groaned, tossing pieces of paper in his direction.

  Singleton held up his hands calmly. “I’m just saying that if they’d been able to get their hands on a more sophisticated model, they would have.”

  The Korean scientist scowled. “I suppose you think they should have used your code instead.”

  “I’ve looked at Six’s swarming model, and I don’t see how it would be useful in a hardware context without major modifications.”

  McKinney looked across the table at him. “I didn’t write it with hardware in mind. I had no idea that it would be used in any context other than pure research.”

  “Clearly. Not to mention the fact that we haven’t seen swarming behavior in these attacks. So far what we’ve seen is precision bombing of carefully selected targets. That doesn’t approximate the indiscriminate foraging of Hymenoptera.”

  Odin stared at him. “Everyone on this team has expertise relevant to the mission.” He looked to McKinney but pointed at Singleton. “One is an expert on robotics and visual intelligence. More complex autonomous systems.” Then he pointed past McKinney to the Japanese man. “Expert Five, artificial intelligence.”

  McKinney brightened. “I saw your flying fish swarm when I came in last night. Pretty cool.”

  The man smiled. “Thanks. More of an experiment, really.”

  Odin pointed to the African-American man. “Expert Four, drone design.” He crossed the table to the thin blond man. “Expert Two, aerospace and electrical engineering.” Next to him, the Korean man. “Expert Three, computer engineering.” He pointed to the woman across from McKinney. “Snowcap, our MI and psyops liaison.” Then to the two signals people. “Gumball and Leggo, signals intelligence. And of course, you know Foxy.”

  Singleton immediately waded into the silence that followed, gazing across the table at McKinney. “It’s not my intention to offend you, Six, but your software isn’t exactly munitions-grade AI. I don’t want us wasting time on theoretical swarming applications.”

  McKinney made a point of meeting his gaze. “I’m not offended by rational discussion. I gather we’re all here to solve this problem.”

  Odin spoke to the room. “Swarming strategies have historically won sixty-one percent of all battles—and an even greater percentage in urban terrain. Think Grozny, Stalingrad, etc.”

  Singleton was undeterred. “But we’re facing more sophisticated, singular weapon systems.”

  “Which to me aren’t as worrisome as what might be coming.”

  Singleton scoffed. “You’re not seriously suggesting we let these assassinations continue unopposed?”

  “Don’t try my patience. The enemy is interested in autonomous swarming—which has the potential to transform the conduct of warfare. We will listen to what Six knows.”

  Odin gestured to McKinney. “As a matter of fact, Professor, would you please come up and give the team a primer on your software model and maybe weaver ants in general?”

  McKinney sighed, realizing how tired she was. But then, she’d taught many a class exhausted when she was a TA and then an associate professor. She nodded and stood, heading to the nearby whiteboard bolted to the wall-like stone pillar. It was covered with green dry-erase ink, diagrams of circuits, and logic work-flows.

  She turned to the team. “Mind if I erase this?”

  Singleton pursed his lips. “Hmm. I’m still working through some things there.”

  McKinney put the eraser back on the tray. “Fine. I guess I can—”

  Foxy was already wheeling a portable whiteboard in from the edge of the room. He slid it in front of the first one.

  “Thanks.” She grabbed a marker and faced out to the assembled experts sitting around the room. One of the stranger speaking engagements she’d had. She looked to the Japanese scientist, the AI specialist. “Five, quite a bit of this will be elementary for you. I apologize in advance.”

  “Not at all. I’m interested to hear it.”

  “Well . . .” She took a moment to gather her thoughts. “Ant colony optimization—or ACO—models have been around since the early nineties. Mathematical representations of ant behavior are widely used in private enterprise to optimize complex logistics problems, like delivery truck routing, computer network routing, and market
analysis. Antlike swarming intelligence is best illustrated by a classic combinatorial optimization challenge known as the Traveling Salesman Problem. . . .”

  McKinney drew a series of dots on the board. “Given a list of cities”—she started connecting the dots with a single traveling line—“how do you find the shortest possible route that visits each city only once?” Her on-board solution quickly failed to do so, and she looked up. “Sounds simple, but it’s not; it’s what’s known as a nondeterministic polynomial-time hard problem—meaning it’s very difficult for humans to achieve. Ants solve this problem routinely. They will always find the shortest possible route to a food source, and as experiments using the Towers of Hanoi Problem set show, if that path is obstructed, they can adapt and find the next shortest route. And so on. They do all this without centralized control and without conscious intent.

  “In many ways, individual ants are similar to individual neurons in the human brain. The fact that individual ants—let’s call them agents—follow fairly predictable behaviors, means that metaheuristics can simulate their actions with considerable accuracy.”

  Snowcap held up her hand. “A metaheuristic is . . . ?”

  “It’s an iterative computation method designed to improve a candidate solution. It’s a form of genetic or evolutionary programming. For example, here’s a basic ant algorithm for detecting the edges of pheromone trails. It was developed way back in 1992 by Marco Dorigo. . . .” She started scrawling on the board.

  McKinney pointed at the formula. “An ant is a simple computational agent that iteratively constructs a solution for the problem at hand. At each iteration, each individual ant moves from a state x to state y, which represents a more complete intermediate solution. Thus, for each ant”—she pointed at the formula—“k, the probability of moving from state x to state y depends on the combination of two values—namely the attractiveness ηxy of the move, as computed by some heuristic indicating a priori desirability of that move, and the trail level τxy of the move, indicating how beneficial it has been in the past to make that particular move.”