Kill Decision(43)
Lieutenant Gartner heard his cue and started making link-analysis webs visible on screen—dense strands that depicted the social network of the city’s populace.
The general was pacing, gesturing to the screen as he engaged in a rehearsed soliloquy. “A detailed social encyclopedia. Autodetection of suspicious activity . . .”
Gartner made certain the big screen did exactly that—showing a knot of young Congolese men pouring gasoline onto tires stuffed around another man’s torso, then setting it alight to horrific effect.
“Now we know not only the cell phones of this group but also their faces”—the image zoomed in to a leader in sunglasses and a beret—“their leaders. Their vehicles, their confederates—in short, everything.”
While the general talked, Odin wondered how much money they’d spent on this. In Vietnam it had taken an average of fifty thousand bullets to eliminate one Vietcong soldier. Had we upped the ante here? And what was the false positive rate? How many noninsurgents—people who simply matched a misguided pattern—were flagged by the system and handed over to security services or contractor hit squads for imagined or predicted crimes? Certainly, it was not in the interests of the folks running the system to admit it made mistakes.
Of course, Odin knew a system like EITS was not intended to resolve conflicts. It was intended merely to manage them. To keep violence disorganized, channeled, and isolated long enough to permit uninterrupted resource extraction. Once that was finished, the locals would be left to their own devices again. Rinse and repeat, and you pretty much understood the conflict map of the globe. This system let them know more about the locals than the locals knew about themselves. And it was just the beginning. There was no reason this couldn’t be done everywhere—including America, as Odin well knew. The only question was whether it had already been implemented there, in full or in part.
Odin interrupted the general, midpitch. “I was told there’s an autonomous strike capability to this system, General. Is that not the case?”
The general halted, took another sip of coffee, and nodded. “We both know lethal autonomy is inevitable, Sergeant. However, at the moment, we’re not using armed systems over this AO. This is a surveillance platform only.”
“Autonomous drones are part of the design specification, correct?”
“For surveillance, yes. Unmanned systems are how we coordinate complete coverage of the target area.”
“But weapons could be integrated.”
The general put his coffee mug down and studied Odin. “Kill-decision drones are a thorny issue, Master Sergeant. For the foreseeable future we’re keeping a human in the loop.”
“Is this the only implementation of the EITS system currently in use, General?”
“What are you looking for, Sergeant?”
Odin drummed his fingers on the railing while staring up at the screens. Then he focused his gaze on the general. “We both know the days of manned combat aircraft are numbered. Autonomous drones will be cheaper, more maneuverable, and expendable. And remotely piloted drones will be useless against a sophisticated adversary like China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea—they’ll just jam our link signal. That means we need to integrate autonomous drones into our military units. For patrolling and reacting to incursions.”
The general nodded and grabbed his coffee mug again. “We’re in agreement, then. It’s just a question of how long it will take Washington to realize it.”
They studied each other for a few moments in silence as the clattering of computer keyboards and soft radio chatter sounded around the control room.
The general gestured to the screens. “Impressive, isn’t it?”
Odin pondered the imagery. “I just have one concern, General.”
“And what’s that?”
“America pays for the difficult R and D to design these systems, and once they’re designed, they might get away from us. And then there’s the second- and third-order effects of technology like this. Surveillance drift nets create opposition—opposition from a public that doesn’t want technological domination. They’ll innovate ways to evade it, and it’s quite possible we could wind up causing more conflict than if we’d never built it.”
The general just stared at him.
“Just a thought. . . .”
CHAPTER 12
Underground Drive
Linda McKinney disembarked from a white, unmarked private jet, descending the steps into a cold winter night. Though idling, the plane’s engines were still deafening, its navigation and strobe lights flashing.
A freezing wind gusted across the desolate tarmac of a municipal airport. A private terminal building stood off to the left, beyond which she could see a drab concrete elevated highway. Closer was a parking lot beyond a length of chain-link fence and a sealed white metal hangar. Other than that all she could see was a series of yellow-tinged parking lot lights extending into the distance.