Kill Decision

by Daniel Suarez

  Odin grimaced. “I think we might be getting too deep in the weeds here, Professor. How does your model function?”

  McKinney nodded and erased the algorithm. “Right. Sorry. Just wanted to lay a foundation.”

  “You can put the gory details up on the wiki.”

  “Now, my work in particular . . .” McKinney thought for a moment, and then wrote two Latin names on the board. “Oecophylla longinoda and Oecophylla smaragdina—two closely related arboreal ant species that dominate the tropical forests of Africa, Asia, and Australia—otherwise known as the weaver ant due to their practice of weaving leaf nests with larval silk. They’re of the order”—she wrote on the board again with her clear, Arialesque print—“Hymenoptera, which includes bees and wasps. Weaver ants are what’s known as a eusocial insect, meaning they exhibit the highest level of social organization in nature.

  “I developed Myrmidon, my weaver computer model, based on years of direct field observations.” McKinney paced before the board. “Unlike most ant species, weaver ants are fiercely territorial. They attack any intruders into their domain—no matter what the odds. Climb into a weaver tree, and you will be attacked. They swarm enemies with suicidal disregard. That strategy is not evolutionarily problematic because, as with many colony insects, weaver workers don’t reproduce—only the queens pass on their genetic material. Thus, workers always fight to the death—the colony is their legacy.

  “A single weaver colony might span dozens of trees and include hundreds of nests built throughout their territory in an integrated network. From here they launch attacks, raise young, and care for livestock, other insects that they raise for nectar.”

  The team members looked surprised at this last part.

  McKinney drew another series of points similar to the Traveling Salesman Problem and started connecting them. “Weavers maintain a flexible network of routes between their population centers. And unlike most ants, they have excellent vision. They also have better memories than regimented species such as army ants. Individual weaver ants can accrue ‘experience’ which informs later actions.”

  Expert Five piped in. “So they’re like a neural network.”

  McKinney nodded. “Precisely. Weavers process experience via mushroom bodies. . . .” She drew the outline of an ant’s head, inside of which she drew several large blobs. The largest, occupying the bottom center, she shaded in. “These are brain structures found in almost all insects, and they manage context-dependent learning and memory processes. Their size correlates with the degree of a species’ level of social organization. The larger the mushroom body in the brain, the more socially organized an insect society is. As we’d expect, weaver ants have an unusually large mushroom body, which endows weaver workers with above average memory.

  “That memory sharpens the iterative component of weaver swarming intelligence. Because swarming intelligence is all about data exchange. What we call”—she wrote a word on the board—“stigmergy. Stigmergy is where individual parts of a system communicate indirectly by modifying the local environment. In the case of weaver ants, they exchange data mostly through pheromones.” She started drawing lines that represented ant paths. “If they encounter a source of food or an enemy, they return to the nearest nest, all the while laying down a specific mix of chemical pheromones in a trail that communicates both what they’ve encountered—food or threat—and the degree to which they encountered it—lots of food or a big threat. Half a million individual agents moving about simultaneously doing this creates a network of these trails, known as the colony’s pheromone matrix, holding dozens of different encoded messages. This matrix fades over time, which means it represents in effect the colony’s current knowledge. As weavers encounter these trails, they’re recruited to address whatever message the trail communicates—for example, to harvest food or fight intruders. As they move along the trail, they reinforce the chemical message—sort of like upvoting something on Reddit or ‘Liking’ someone’s Facebook status. As that pheromone message gets stronger, it recruits still more workers to the cause, and soon, clusters of ants begin to form at the site of the threat or opportunity.”

  Expert Two, the blond man, nodded. “Meaning it goes viral.”

  McKinney nodded. “Basically, yes. In this way, weavers manage everything from nest building, food collection, colony defense, and so on. At each iteration of their activity, each ant builds a solution by applying a constructive procedure that uses the common memory of the colony—that is, the pheromone matrix. So, although individual weaver ants have very little processing power, collectively they perform complex management feats.”

  McKinney dropped the marker in the tray at the base of the whiteboard. “In fact, if I were going to create an autonomous drone—and I had no ethical constraints—swarming intelligence would be a logical choice. Lots of simple computational agents reacting to each other via stigmergic processes. That’s why weaver ants don’t need a large brain to solve complex puzzles. They can solve problems because they can afford to try every solution at random until they discover one that works. A creature with a single body can’t do that. A mistake could mean biological death. But the death of hundreds of workers to a colony numbering in the hundreds of thousands is irrelevant. In fact, the colony is the real organism, not the individual.”

  Expert Five interjected, “Then we would expect swarming drones to be cheap and disposable.”

  McKinney nodded. “And individually, not very smart. The demise of one or dozens or hundreds might not mean the demise of the group—and the survivors would be informed by the experience of swarm mates around them.”

  Singleton scribbled on his notepad. “You sound intrigued by the possibilities.”

  “I find weaver ants fascinating. But I wouldn’t want to meet them scaled up in size and given weapons. It would be an insanely foolish thing to build.”

  Odin stood up again. “Thank you, Professor.”

  Singleton cleared his throat. “All of this would be incredibly useful information if we were facing hundreds of thousands of swarming robots—which we are not. Can we get down to business now?”

  Odin just stared at Singleton for a moment. “Now that we know what risks we might face from swarming intelligence, let’s review recent operations.” Odin turned to the African-American scientist at the far end of the table. “Four, tell me what you learned from the Tanzanian video.”

  The man put on glasses and started examining his laptop screen. “Pretty amazing to finally see one of these things flying, Odin. Your hunch about the target was dead on.” He glanced up at McKinney. “No offense intended, Six.”

  “None taken.”

  He tapped a combination of keys, and what was on his screen moved to a larger flat-screen monitor hanging on the wall where everyone could see it. It was the black-and-white FLIR footage of the drone that had attacked McKinney in Africa.

  “From what we can tell, Odin, this isn’t an extant design.” He pointed at various features with a laser pointer. “Forward canards. Midsection dome. Slightly swept wing. What we’re looking at here is a Frankenstein machine—something put together from all sorts of different drone designs.”

  “What’s the prognosis for recovering wreckage?”

  “In the Amani jungle reserve? Approaching zero. Whole armies have disappeared in there.”

  “What about its radar track? Where did it come from?”

  “Came on radar off the east coast of Africa, near Zanzibar.”

  “HUMINT?”

  “CIA’s got some local stringers asking around, but that’s gonna take time. Could be weeks till we hear anything.”

  “What about ships in the area?”

  “There were dozens of ships and small craft. It’s near a major African port, but there were no satellite assets overhead at the time.”

  The Korean scientist nodded. “The enemy’s probably monitoring orbit schedules.”

  “Okay, so even though we were in the right time and place, we
still have no idea where these things are originating.”

  The African-American scientist nodded sadly. “It’ll be worse here in the States. The drones mix in with domestic air traffic—small private planes. There are thousands of unregistered private airstrips—runways on ranches and commercial and private lands that aren’t attended by flight controllers or anyone else. Radar echoes alone aren’t going to identify these things, and since they are remotely controlled we can’t listen for unique radio signatures.”

  The Korean scientist nodded. “None of them have been picked up by DEA drones or coastal radar, so they might be being built and launched domestically. But with just two dozen attacks over three months, we don’t have much data to work with. There’s too much terrain to cover.”

  The blond scientist added with a slight Germanic accent, “Without an intact specimen—”

  The Korean scientist next to him shook his head vigorously. “The moment we try to grab it, it’ll explode in our faces—making it next to impossible to determine who built it, how it operates, and how to defend against it.”

  Odin glanced down at the notes on his pad of paper and crossed an item off a list. “That’s being handled, Two. Next comes target prediction. Where are we?”

  The Japanese researcher shook his head. “Nowhere, Odin. We’ve run the previous bombing victims through tens of thousands of link analysis filters, searching for any recognizable pattern or connection, but there’s nothing. A human rights activist, a financier, oil company executives . . .” He threw up his hands. “None of them knew each other or had interactions of any type. They didn’t work for the same companies or even in the same industry. They had no common financial interests, enemies, religious or political affiliations, social interests. Exchanged no communications. Not all of them were American, and on paper some of them would have been political adversaries—for example, the human rights activist in Chicago and the private prison lobbyist in Houston. Or the financial journalists killed in the New York café bombing or the retired East German Communist party boss living in Queens.”

  Odin pondered it. “What were the journalists working on when they died?”

  “Corruption at major investment houses. The activist was doing a documentary on sweatshops in Syria.” He shrugged. “If you’re going by a list of people they criticized—well, it’s a long list. It’s in the hundreds. We certainly can’t use it to predict an attack. We sliced and diced the data just about any way we can think of, and the only clear pattern is that these drones don’t attack in high winds, rain, or snow.”

  A murmur swept though the group as several wrote that down.

  “None of you guys noticed that?”

  Odin looked up from his notepad. “Praying for rain isn’t a solution. What else have you got?”

  “Other than that . . . I guess we’re still dead in the water.”

  “Not entirely.” Odin tapped the intercom on a phone sitting on the table nearby.

  A voice came over the speaker. “You ready?”

  “Yeah, get in here.”

  “There in a sec.”

  McKinney couldn’t help but notice that Odin was looking at her. She raised her eyebrows.

  The others looked to her as well.

  Odin paused a moment before speaking to her. “Your value, Professor, lies not only in what you know, but also in what you represent.”

  She looked at him askew. “I’m not following you.”

  The team room door opened, and Hoov, the Eurasian communications specialist from the plane in Africa, entered carrying a laptop case. He pulled up a chair and deposited the case on the table between Odin and McKinney.

  Odin gestured to him. “You remember Hoov. He’s been examining an image we took of your laptop several days ago—before the attack.”

  “You broke into my quarters.”

  Hoov shook his head dismissively. “Not necessary, Professor. I was able to remotely access your system.”

  “Oh, well . . . that’s okay, then.”

  “Tell her what you found, Hoov.”

  Hoov nodded and addressed McKinney. “Three different classes of malware—one a fairly common ZeuS/Zbot Trojan variant, but two of them were a bit more exotic. Not known in the wild, and sophisticated. They both utilized a previously unknown OS vulnerability—what’s known as a zero-day—which means we’re dealing with serious people.”

  “Get to the point, Hoov.”

  “Okay. Professor, your computer is infected with the same rare, stealthy malware that compromised the Stanford servers.”

  McKinney wasn’t surprised. “Okay, so they stole my work the same way they stole the Stanford researchers’ work.”

  “Correct.”

  “How long do you think they’ve been inside my machine?”

  “Hard to say. But . . .” Hoov looked to Odin.

  Odin leaned in. “I’ve got a cyber team ready to trace the espionage pipeline this malware serves whenever I give the word. But I don’t want to do that just yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would risk detection, and I don’t want them to abandon this pipeline like they did the Stanford one. Right now they’re still searching for you. That’s valuable to us.”

  McKinney narrowed her eyes at him.

  “They’re not positive you’re dead. They’ll be looking to see if you pop up again. We can use that.”

  “I don’t like where this is going.”

  “If they suddenly discovered you’re not dead, for example, and are here in the United States working with the U.S. military . . .”

  “Jesus!” McKinney pushed back from the table and stood up. “You didn’t bring me here for my expertise. You brought me here as bait!”

  The other researchers turned to look at Odin with varying degrees of concern.

  He held up his hands. “Wait a second. If we can get them to send a drone after you, that means we can predict where a drone attack will occur in advance. Which is what we’ve already spent months preparing for. It means we have a shot at catching one of these things.”

  “No matter how many times you assure me you’re telling me the truth—”

  “Whether you like it or not, until we find out who’s sending these drones, you’re not safe—and neither is anyone you care about. That means there’s no going home for you until you help us trace these things back to their maker.”

  “I can only imagine what happens to me now if I refuse. Do you strap me to a telephone pole somewhere and chum the Internet with my data until drones come to kill me?”

  Odin stared impassively. “I was sort of hoping we wouldn’t have to use straps. . . .”

  CHAPTER 14

  Insomnia

  It was well past midnight, and Linda McKinney hadn’t slept in three days. Instead she was sitting at the desk in her room in front of the government-issued laptop. Oddly, it had no brand markings on it. She flipped up the lid and was surprised to see it was already powered on. The main page of a wiki was on-screen.

  In the dim screen light McKinney could see her logon and password info on a printed security card next to the laptop, along with a “security best-practices” guide. She minimized the wiki page and noticed an Ubuntu desktop arranged much like the one on her own laptop. Okay, at least they were using open-source software, and they’d spied on her enough to install Code::Blocks on this loaner machine. No doubt her weaver ant simulation project files would be on here as well. She was actually impressed that the government folks were this competent.

  She double-clicked on the Firefox browser icon. Not surprisingly, it didn’t bring her to the Internet. No getting to the outside world. Instead it went to the same intranet project wiki page that was already open. The title “Task Force Ancile” headed the page with the company’s shield logo. Along the left side were links to various categories: intelligence, video, interdiction, and many more.

  A top-secret operation with a logo. She thought that was funny.

  McKinney clicked on
the word Ancile, and a definition popped up describing the Ancile as the legendary shield of the Roman god of war, Mars. The text said Rome would be master of the world as long as the shield was preserved.

  Master of the world, eh?

  Ruling the world wasn’t on her personal list of priorities. She back-clicked and surveyed the categories of information available on the main project page. There were various headings: Robotics, AI algorithms, Forensic analysis, and many more.

  She clicked on a link entitled Attack Scenes. It brought her to a page with dozens of thumbnail images. Brief introductory text described them as videos uploaded to various offshore aggregation websites. They appeared to be video clips of actual attacks as they happened, presumably filmed by spotter drones—like the one that had hovered outside her cabin back in Tanzania.

  McKinney clicked on the first video thumbnail. It expanded to a full-screen high-def digital video of several men playing golf on a lush green course somewhere. There was no sound. Even now the angle was changing subtly, as though being filmed from a moving object. The men stood around the manicured green watching one of their number getting ready to putt.

  Suddenly an instantaneous blast ripped the scene apart. McKinney recoiled in horror as body parts rained down in every direction. Strangely, there was no crater in the grass, which was now smoking, yet slick with blood. It appeared that the bomb detonated above the ground, to devastating effect. She closed the window and just stared at the main page. There were at least a dozen more.

  “Dear God.”

  She didn’t want to see any more of that. How had the videos been discovered? And by whom? The comments section still seemed to be hashing out the answer. Logons with call-sign names she didn’t recognize, but also the occasional one she did—Expert Three, Hoov, Gumball.

  She backtracked to the main wiki page and followed the link to a diagram of all the drone attacks. It showed a map of the United States overlaid by a couple of dozen red dots scattered mostly on the coasts—although some were deep in the Midwest. As she moved her mouse over the dots, basic details of each attack popped up: date, GPS coordinates, number of dead and injured, and a hyperlink for more information. She clicked on a link for a bombing in Urbana, Illinois. She remembered its having been reported as a terrorist bombing in a park months ago. Six dead. A dozen injured. A dedicated page popped up with the names and photos of victims, grisly high-res photos of the scene. She scrolled down to see vast amounts of information, and another bustling comments section.