by Marc Cameron
Frankly, Calliope was exactly what people like Elon Musk and others warned about.
Using this technology as a non-player character in a pedestrian video game seemed to Chang to be unconscionable. Neural networks could now beat human beings at most any game—Breakout, chess, even the sophisticated and seemingly random game of Go. Calliope could do all of that but so much more, harnessing the Cloud or the host computer she happened to occupy.
Calliope was small, portable, and powerful. But she had another trait that made her particularly useful for any number of Chang’s purposes. Neural networks could beat a human player ninety-nine times out of a hundred, but they did not want to play. Calliope was fairly bursting at the seams as she sought new challenges. She pilfered through subdirectories, files, and applications in the operating system into which Chang had injected her, like a bored child, looking for something to do.
She’d been developed to play the game on her own alongside the primary player, like a second human. She could, for instance, “go and fetch”—fight her way through the enemy to bring back more ammunition, weapons, or fuel for her partner. She commandeered the computer’s entire hard drive, the Net, the Cloud, the Dark Web, anything to which she had access, to complete her task. That morning, he’d loaded her into a self-driving car and told her to guard the three parking spots in the lot next to his building, leaving the details of how to do it to her own devices. He thought she might park lengthwise in all three spaces, but instead she drove back and forth on the lot, actively challenging any vehicle that came near, like an aggressive mother bird protecting her nest.
She needed a mission—and since she knew how to go and fetch things, Major Chang had just the right mission in mind.
7
Tony Lombardi kept a second cell phone at his apartment in South Oxnard, suspended from two feet of kite string in the wall behind the light switch in his bedroom. He was careful with the screw heads every time he retrieved the phone—so as not to draw attention to the switch plate if someone came in with a search warrant. It was a hassle, but so was getting caught spying on a U.S. Naval base.
Lombardi knew in his bones that some government official was going to walk up at any moment and randomly demand to look at his mobile phone. They had no right, but that didn’t stop authoritarian regimes. That’s what governments did. They screwed the people. He knew he had to be hypervigilant, especially at work. When he went to his job on Naval Base Ventura County, the phone stayed at home, hanging from the string in his wall.
The sun was not yet up when he nursed his rattletrap Ford Ranger up to the security gate a little before five-thirty. The odor of diesel fuel and low tide hung heavy across the blacktop road. He liked to arrive at the construction site early enough to impress his foreman, but not so early as to make security forces any twitchier than they already were.
Comprising three Naval facilities—Point Mugu, Port Hueneme, and San Nicolas Island—NBVC was home to no less than four airborne early-warning squadrons. Three of these E-2 Hawkeye squadrons were assigned to the carriers USS John C. Stennis, Theodore Roosevelt, and Carl Vinson. A deepwater port and myriad other Naval tenants including Defense Logistics, Naval Satellite Operations Center, and an Air Test and Evaluation Squadron provided security forces with plenty of reason to be twitchy—and significant opportunity for Lombardi. The government would have called him a domestic terrorist. But he preferred saboteur. It sounded cooler. And besides, he was in this for the good of the country. Terrorists killed people. He just passed on information. His contact with Earth Ally was a pretty Asian chick from USC named Kirsten. She cared about the state of the country, of the world, and made him want to do better, to be better. She told him what she needed, and he got it for her. So far, she hadn’t made him blow any shit up, but he would have if she’d asked.
Security investigations for hammer-swingers and ditch-diggers looked for things that were on the record, not things that weren’t. Sure, they wanted to know where he’d gone to high school, but they weren’t likely to spend the time to send agents out to interview his high school counselor, or anyone who might have known how much he despised the establishment. Lombardi’s California driver’s license said he was twenty-four, far too young to have much of a credit history. Judging from the security forms he’d had to complete, the contracting officer was more interested in bad credit than good, and paid more attention to criminal history than chronological. No history was apparently fine.
He’d been upset at first that his clearance didn’t give him access to any weapons-storage magazines or sensitive areas. Those remained locked up tight, behind impenetrable layers of security. But Kirsten reminded him that he wasn’t here for that.
His job was to observe things that occurred in the open. She was particularly interested in the dimensions of the magazine his construction team was building. Were there special loading doors? Overhead cranes? A track system? Enhanced environmental controls? Additional layers of security?
Kirsten never told him specifically what she was looking for, but he could figure it out easily enough after he found out what she wanted him to watch.
Five minutes online—on his secret phone, so the government couldn’t track him—revealed tests off Point Mugu of America’s hot new weapon—the Lockheed Martin AGM-158C a long-range anti-ship missile, or LRASM. At first glance the technology seemed like a step backward. China already had the Yingji-18. Yingji was literally “Eagle Strike,” and the YJ-18 cruise missile had a range of more than three hundred miles, with a final sprint nearing three times the speed of sound. Russia’s joint venture with India, the BrahMos PJ-10, was the fastest supersonic cruise missile in the world at Mach 3, executing a sophisticated S-turn to avoid interception during the terminal phase. A hypersonic variant, BrahMos II, was under development, supposed to reach speeds over Mach 7.
According to the specs, the LRASM was a lumbering thing compared to Chinese and Russian anti-ship missiles. But no one cared much about the LRASM’s speed. The weapon’s lethality lay in its stealth technology, and its ability to home in on an enemy’s targeting radar—the same radar used to seek incoming threats. Recent tests had shown it could hunt and find targets with extreme precision using an artificial intelligence system designed to recognize the profile of enemy ships. And that was just the stuff they talked about online. Lombardi was sure there was a shitload more they didn’t mention.
He finally asked Kirsten about it. She’d looked surprised that he’d figured it out, but then admitted that she was interested in the missile, though she had no idea what the Earth Ally plan was to do with it. Maybe they were planning on bombing it, though neither she nor Lombardi could figure out what good that would do. The military-industrial complex would just build more and the arms race with the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians would just carry on ad nauseam. It was probably going to be a symbolic gesture—to draw some attention to the idiocy. Lombardi didn’t care.
There was a lot of movement around the magazines where they kept the missiles, wooden crates, forklifts, like they were getting ready to make a move. He’d call for a meeting that evening, turn over his intel, and they could maybe have dinner. He enjoyed being a saboteur for a good cause almost as much as he enjoyed hanging out with Kirsten.
As long as he could keep doing that, Tony Lombardi would keep swinging his hammer, keep his eyes open, and point Kirsten in the right direction. He thought of her now as he looked across the water in the morning twilight.
She was so incredibly pure.
8
The Chinese heart is well versed in quiet, seething hate—and General Song Biming was more accomplished than most. The ill-informed might believe that General Song hated Bai for personal reasons. While it was true that Bai had stolen Song’s girl all those years ago, there was much more to it than that. In Song’s mind, it was as simple as up and down or black and white. Bai was evil and Song was good. Was not good supposed to h
ate evil? If a child drew a picture of an evil man, fat and frowning Bai Min would have provided a likely model. Where Song was tall and fit, with salt-and-pepper hair and a ramrod-straight military bearing, Bai was a head shorter and as round as a steamed meat bun. Song had once read that the ex-lover of a heavyset British MP had described sex with the man as like having a very large wardrobe with a small key fall on top of her. Certainly an apt assessment of anything to do with Bai Min. Song took perverse pleasure in the fact that the onetime object of his affection had chosen someone so foul with whom to spend her life.
Among his more disgusting qualities was the fact that he steadfastly refused to trim his wild eyebrows. This only added to the troll-like visage of his prune of a face. Of course, he had not always been so. Somehow he’d been handsome and gallant enough to win Ling’s hand. He was already a powerful general by the time the weight of his backstabbing had stooped his shoulders and twisted his face. By then it did not matter. In fact, Song had heard that President Zhao preferred his generals to be less handsome than he was. Bai’s status had seen to it that Ling was able to shop at good stores and live in nice apartments. Still, her once beautiful face held a perpetual look of astonishment at how ugly her husband had turned out, as if someone had just blown a puff of air into her eyes. She surely knew, as did Song, that General Bai was up to his neck in something rotten.
Song leaned back in his creaking leatherette chair and took a sip of tea.
He and Bai were both general officers, but as a lieutenant general, Bai had line-item authority over the furnishings and maintenance budget at the shared war-simulation facility run by the Science and Technology Commission of the People’s Liberation Army. Apart from elite party members and a few department heads, furniture used by Chinese government officials tended toward the utilitarian, but the tightfisted bastard Bai went out of his way to see that all the desks on the south side of the complex were secondhand, surely stained with the tears of the minions who had occupied them before. Song’s assistant, a short major with a broad smile and an even broader wife, had a desk that looked as if it had been used as part of a barricade to fend off some guerilla army. Where the south wing was tattered and sprung, every chair and sofa in the north wing was shiny and plush. Normally, such trivialities would have mattered little to Song, but events were not going his way. He sipped his tea and looked grimly at the floor-to-ceiling world map projected on the far wall. Flashing icons showed the location of both Chinese and enemy aircraft, ships, mechanized units, and ground troops in various locations from Japan to the Philippines. Three Chinese Type 094 Jin-class submarines prowled the waters of Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.
Song took another drink of tea and watched the light representing the submarine nearest San Diego, California, flash, then disappear from the screen.
The outcome of this scenario was not his fault, but he would be blamed for it nonetheless. The rank of general was lonely at best, but Song did little to engender good feelings from his comrades—the men who would normally have watched his back during these perilous times. He drank in moderation—surely a reason not to be trusted—and despised parties. He steered clear of side “investments.” There was no private villa for him with a live-in mistress in the mountains outside Beijing. Men with bent or broken morals felt judged whether one judged them or not, and Song Biming found himself a pariah at staff meetings, where discussions always seemed to turn to growing bank accounts and manly prowess with nubile young women. Song had no stories—or at least none of interest to the other generals. None of those men wanted to hear about how Song’s buxom but slightly chubby wife of thirty-one years made the best pork buns in all of China. He listened politely to their whore stories, noting that though most of the exploits had to be highly embellished, sex with his wife sounded vastly superior to any of their imagined escapades. His wife was a good woman, enough of a natural expert in that realm to keep him more than satisfied. She was inquisitive about his work, interested but not nosy, and ambitious enough to push him when he needed to be pushed. She’d resigned herself early on to the fact that she was not his first choice for a wife—and was fine with that, as long as she was his last. So far, he’d kept his end of that bargain. She’d given him more than three decades of unquestionable support, and a fine daughter, who had, in turn, given them a beautiful granddaughter, Niu, who was the light of his life—and the only thing that could take his mind off the tragedy of his work.
Song was a proud man. One did not get to be a general in the People’s Liberation Army without having a certain measure of gravitas and ego. But this downward spiral of fortune made him feel sorry for his family. His wife had been nothing but faithful, pinning all her hopes and dreams on his career. She certainly didn’t deserve this. Any semblance of status he’d ever had was rapidly slipping away—in no small measure because of General Bai Min. Something had to be done—and soon.
Song’s hand began to tremble with rage and he set the cup down on his desk in a puddle of spilled tea. Bai, that deceitful old dog, would find much pleasure in the results playing out on the screen. China was losing this simulation—as she always did eventually, when correct data was used in the program. Unlike war games involving actual troops, the enemy in this simulation did not lay down arms at the appropriate moment to make China look good. Computers did not lie—unless they were told to, and even then they spat out the only truth they knew. Song was ever exacting in his requirements that his programs be realistic and accurate to the nth degree, running thousands of permutations for each battle. He was privy to the latest intelligence data—which he insisted be raw, not preanalyzed or, as the Americans said, spun to suit PLA purposes. He’d stupidly thought that his mandate from Chairman Zhao for a true representation of fighting outcomes would be used to improve China’s capabilities. Instead, the computer-generated losses had been used to beat him over the head—principally by General Bai, his old foe since their days at the National University of Defense Technology, China’s premier military academy, when Bai had stolen his woman.
Religion took the blame for a great many wars; God was merely an excuse. The root of most conflict boiled down to two things: territory or women. President Zhao craved territory, not enough to start a war, not yet. No, the next conflict would only appear to be fought over territory. If a war with the West happened in the near future, it would be Song and Bai’s feud that started it.
Song breathed deeply, regaining enough control to pick up his tea. He needed to return to the matter at hand—watching his computer program demonstrate how the West would soundly beat China. Light after light blinked out, one after another on the screen, signifying the loss of Chinese assets. Computer simulations unfolded much faster than they did in real time, adding to Song’s misery. What was that quaint American saying? That was it. The Americans were handing them their asses.
The motherland did well at the beginning of each scenario—but she always lost in the end. And Song always had to watch.
Formerly a PLA training hall, the moldering bunker sloped downward from the entry toward the wall with the map where the instructor’s lectern would have been. Twenty-two uniformed subordinates sat in near darkness at two rows of desks in the amphitheater-like room, facing the map as they pecked on computers or mumbled into their radio headpieces. Most of them were conscripts, forced into doing their bit.
The light signifying the last submarine off the California coast went dark. Song set the teacup on the desk again, forcefully enough to cause the young woman a row in front of him to look up at the clatter. She looked away as if she’d seen something frightening. A phlegmy cough rattled over Song’s shoulder.
“Rubbing Chinese noses in the dirt again, I see,” General Bai observed, hands resting pompously on the top of his round belly. His aide-de-camp and toady, Chang, stood beside him. Pale and scaly, Chang sifted flakes of dandruff wherever he walked. It was off-putting, to say the least, but it also had the effect
of making people think Chang far more benign than Song knew him to be.
Song stood. As a lieutenant general, Bai outranked him.
“The scenarios offer no benefit if they do not unfold without intervention.”
“Perhaps,” Bai mused, eyes squinting over fat cheeks at the screen. “Or perhaps battle cannot be reduced to ones and zeros. Your children’s games fail to take into account the heart and spirit of our Chinese countrymen.”
Song closed his eyes, steadying himself. “And your war games offer more reality?”
“Exercises,” Bai corrected. “Exercises carried out with flesh-and-blood players, not to mention actual weapons and technology. Surely you would agree that that is a much better predictor of outcomes than lines of computer code.” He nodded toward the flashing map and chuckled. “Your pretend games are doing so well, perhaps one day you will receive a pretend promotion.”
Song clenched his jaw, fighting the urge to smash Bai in the face with his teacup. Bai had won the girl—all those years ago. There was no reason for him to gloat. But he did. A lot.
“So, Comrade General,” Song sighed, dripping with sarcasm. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
“An invitation,” Bai said.
“In that case I will save you the trouble and decline in advance.”
“This is not the kind of invitation one can decline,” Bai said. “We are summoned to meet with President Zhao and explain our programs. I am to give him a full brief on the victories and lessons learned from our latest exercise off the Korean coast. You will tell him how the same PLA Navy that won handily is always beaten by the end of your computer games.”
* * *
—
What do you think?” Bai asked his bagman, Chang, five minutes after they’d left Song’s game room and were safely back on their own side of the building. Bai wouldn’t have put it past the old dog to bug the walls outside his office. Bai had done just that, which was why there wasn’t much chatter in the halls of the north wing.
