Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

“Will you tell us about Jake?” Joey asked.

Rafael’s head snapped over. “I am telling you about Jake.”

“Okay,” Evan said. “Okay.”

“You need to listen , a’right?”

“I will,” Joey said. “I’m sorry.”

Rafael palmed his skull and rubbed some more. “What I’m telling you is, you’re in a box halfway around the world for twelve hours, and then your girlfriend’s mad you didn’t pick up milk on the way home. You understand what I’m telling you?”

“We do,” Evan said.

“And who bears that responsibility? Jake Hargreave does. I do. It’s all on us. And the fact that it’s not … dunno, dangerous makes it even worse, you understand? Makes it harder . Like I said, you don’t have fear. You have dread . Dread at what you’re doing, what it’s doing to you. The choices. The decisions . You copy?”

The heater clicked on with a low hum, and Rafael’s eyes shot over at the noise. A warm, dusty air breathed through the room, thick and claustrophobic. The window fogged from the bottom up, a patchwork of clouds. He licked his lips, settled his tensed shoulders.

“Know my favorite euphemism for this shit? ‘Loitering munitions.’ ’Cuz that’s what we do. We loiter. Days, sometimes. Even weeks. You’re not looking into their eyes, but you know them. You’re following them. Their habits, chores. See them kiss their wife good-bye. Buy bread at the market.” Rafael breathed wetly a few times. “There’s a delay after you launch. Most people don’t know that.” He closed his eyes, held out one arm like an airplane wing. “The UAV yaws from the thrust of the missile, pixelates the screen for a sec. And then it feels like an eternity, hoping no one wanders into the screen. You know, civilians, nonhostiles.” He paused. “A kid on a tricycle.”

Rafael’s shoulders shook some more, but his eyes stayed dry. It occurred to Evan that whatever meds they had him on interfered with his ability to generate tears. He looked numb and wrecked at the same time.

“Then you have splash, right? Moment of impact. Dust cloud. And when it settles, you can’t always tell if you got just the one or two you was aiming at, right? Could be three, could be four. ’Cuz body parts, you copy? A fucking detached torso.” A strained sound rose from deep in Rafael’s chest, part cry, part gasp. “Little kid’s sneaker. Or they’re flapping around bleeding out, the heat signature fading and fading till they’re the same color as the ground they died on. No one talks about that shit neither. And then you got more decisions, you understand? The squirters, too, at the periphery, piss themselves with fear. And maybe you gotta clean them up, too. Second missile. Third. Who makes that choice? Who steers those in? We do.” He smacked his chest hard with a fist. “ We do.”

He pounded his chest again and again and again and finally stopped, catching his breath. The heater shut off with a dying wheeze. The air felt sharp and arid at the back of Evan’s throat.

“And everyone else, they give us all the shit. ‘Chair Force.’ ‘Stick Monkeys.’ ‘The Chairborne Rangers.’” Rafael gave a dry laugh that lifted the hairs at the back of Evan’s neck. “Doesn’t feel like combat, but it is. You carry it, carry the same burden. You make the choices, you hear me? We at least bear that. What happens when you don’t anymore? What happens then?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Evan said carefully.

“Course you don’t,” Rafael said. “Course you don’t. ’Cuz you’re not paying attention. No one’s paying attention .”

“To what?”

“What’d the Russians just put up at the Abu Dhabi defense exhibition?” Rafael stood, agitated, finger-jabbing at Evan. “A Kalashnikov drone. Size of a coffee table, six pounds of explosives on its back. Motherfucking Kalashnikov, man. You can’t take a piss in the desert without hitting one’a their rifles. And now they want to do that for drones. ‘Democratizing smart bombs,’ they say. It’s their response to our RQ-11 Raven, hand-launched motherfucker the army uses. They answered that shit with an upgrade. Mutually assured ruination. So what’s our answer to their answer?”

“I don’t know,” Joey said.

“We go smaller. And smarter .” Rafael slung his Padres cap on backward once more. “The third revolution.”

“Third revolution?” she said.

Rafael ticked off the points on his fingers. “Gunpowder. Nukes. And now this.”

“What’s ‘this,’ Rafael?” Evan asked, careful to keep the impatience from his voice.

“Autonomous weapons.” Rafael blinked at them. “Suicide drones that think for themselves . Kamikaze UAVs with their own moral code. ‘Ethical adaptors,’ they call them. Ones and zeros arranged to create a sense of compassion.” An ugly laugh like a sneer. “To robo-think through using lethal force. To learn from past missions. From mistakes. Like, say, someone logged the wrong guy’s SIM card in our database. Sorry, 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.”