Muhammad Number Twelve. The algorithm’ll get that shit right next time. You feel me?”
Joey said, “Jesus.”
“Jesus can’t help no more. They even got teams of roboticists figuring out how to engineer guilt. But—go figure—it’s a bitch making robots feel guilty. So now say that some shit goes down wrong, someone bombs a … a fucking baby-naming ceremony in Paktia—” Rafael cut off with another series of silent, tearless sobs. “Whose fault is it? Is it Jake’s? Is it mine? Nope. ’Cuz we’re no longer in the mix. We’ve evolved past needing humans to make war, right? So who bears the cost? The weight of it? Does the coder? The pogue who placed the order for the drone? The fucking contractor sales rep?”
“And that’s what Jake got onto?” Evan asked.
“They pulled him up to Creech North.” Despite the Faraday bags sealing their phones, despite the fact that they were alone, when Rafael said the base name, he still spoke in hushed tones from fear or reverence or both. “They needed pilots for testing. Don’t need sensor operators ’cuz that’s what the drones do, right? Make us redundant. Hell, man, it’s just life-and-death decisions, right? The hell you need me for?”
“What do they look like?” Evan asked, though he already knew. “The drones?”
“Insects. We’re talking swarms. One collective brain distributed across a thousand of them. They’re securely data-linked. Anything one knows, they all know. You got—wha’d they call it?—diffusion of responsibility even for motherfucking microdrones. Take one out, the other ninety-nine finish the job. And the shit these things can do. Coordinate their movements, chose optimal formations, navigate to targets. And we ain’t even talked about cluster bombs yet. Shoot a thousand of these fuckers out of an F-16 flare canister, they disperse to dodge radar, head to a congested urban environment, then join up to maximize their payload. Navigate to multiple precision strikes … Hell, you could wipe out an entire presidential cabinet at the same time in their beds.”
Rafael breathed for a time, and Evan and Joey breathed with him.
“They can do all that shit without a single human in the decision loop,” he finally said softly. All the anger had drained from his voice. “They just need the start order. ‘Circle that black pickup truck.’ ‘Land on the roof of that hospital.’ ‘Eliminate these two dudes inside that house.’”
Evan pictured Declan Gentner holding his palm aloft. The spurt of blood from Jake Hargreave’s neck.
Evan looked over at Joey. “Kill everyone at the impound lot.”
Rafael stared at him, wide-eyed. “That’s what they used to get Jake?”
“A KAM,” Evan said. “Yeah.”
Rafael nodded. “Dragonfly?”
“That’s right.”
Evan started toward Rafael, who flinched, hands hovering tense above his thighs, ready to lift into a high guard. A reflex of the traumatized. After a moment he relaxed his arms again and looked away, tongue running inside his bottom lip, his eyes averted, embarrassed. Evan nodded reassuringly and moved past him to the fogged-up windowpane.
He drew the letter M on the glass, his fingertip cutting through the fog. Then he added wings to the sides. “This logo was stamped on the dragonfly,” he said. “Recognize it?”
“Mimeticom.” Rafael’s nod looked like a twitch. “That’s them all right.”
Using his sleeve, Evan wiped the logo from the pane. “Who’s them?”
“The company providing the tech for this shit at Creech North. Serious top-secret, need-to-know shit buried in Area 6.” He blinked rapidly four times, his nose scrunching. “It’s the Area 6 of Area 6. When Jake was up there, they found out there were glitches in the ethical-adaptor software.”
“Glitches,” Joey said.
“They programmed five unarmed dragonflies to surveil an office with ‘maximum efficiency.’ A reality-based tactical scenario. Had a E-1 in there at his desk, you know, playing his role. Just a kid, three steps out of basic. So they set him up in the room and pulled back to the observation bay.” A spasm caught Rafael’s eye, twitching it once. He wet his lips again, staring off into the middle distance. “When the drill went live, the first drone flew itself through his eye into his brain.”
Joey let a breath out through her teeth.
“The other four took perches in the corners of the room,” Rafael said. “‘Maximum efficiency.’ Easier to provide comprehensive surveillance if no one’s moving, right? Problem solved. And hey, no worries. Like I said, the algorithm’ll get it right next time.”
Evan forced a swallow down his dry throat. “And Jake was going to blow the whistle on this?”
“Man, Jake came back from Creech North shaken. Was looking into