Kill Decision

CHAPTER 13

Linda McKinney exited her room to the sound of arguing. As she rounded the corner, she came upon Foxy and Singleton squared off again, while two large ravens squabbled over the wreckage of Singleton’s hunter vehicle on the floor in the middle of the hallway. The birds were using their thick black beaks to tear wires out of the autonomous vehicle’s central circuit board. Pieces of plastic littered the floor.

“When is Odin going to get these flying rats under control?”

“You know they like to wreck things. I can’t keep windshield wipers on the trucks when they get bored. Besides, I thought your ‘hunter-killer’ could look after itself.”

“It’s idiocy having these birds flying around down here. They steal chips and components.”

Foxy and Singleton both turned to see McKinney. Foxy nodded. “Morning.”

“Morning.” McKinney looked down to see the ravens flapping their wings, caw ing loudly as Singleton tried to move in to salvage his machine.

Foxy thumbed down the hall. “Team room’s that way. You’ll find breakfast there.”

“Thanks.” McKinney nodded and stepped past, trying to stifle a shared grin with Foxy as the birds snapped at Singleton’s fingers. He tried to shoo them away.

Like the rest of the underground offices the brightly lit team room was new enough that it still smelled of fresh paint. However, it didn’t have a drop ceiling; instead exposed limestone stood three times McKinney’s height above. The scoured and striated rock was painted white and crisscrossed by fire sprinkler pipes and bright fluorescent work lights. The work area was huge. A dozen people in jeans and variously colored Ancile Services polo shirts sat around a series of large tables that had been pushed together to create a broad and long work surface littered with thousands of documents, photographs, and blueprints, as well as machine-milled foam models of what appeared to be unmanned aircraft and machine parts. There were also diagrams of corporate and residential buildings detailing explosive damage, dotted with callouts and captions unreadable at this distance. A dozen identical laptops were open and running with people clicking away at keyboards. Half a dozen more people sat or stood at tables running along the room’s perimeter. The walls were hung with large plotter-printed diagrams, maps, and blueprints depicting the United States, maps of commercial flight paths, radar and military installations, and printouts of surveillance imagery. There were also silhouettes of hundreds of drone aircraft pinned to the walls-way more, in fact, than McKinney had known existed. The silhouettes were categorized by country: Argentina, Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK, the U.S.-and on, and on. There were hundreds of drones on the walls.

Clearly thousands of man-hours had already been expended on this project, and everyone seemed to be busy working their portion of it.

Odin stood at the head of the table with his arms crossed. He nodded silently to her as she examined the team room.

Among the other team members it was impossible to tell who was military and who was civilian. Long hair and beards certainly didn’t indicate a civilian background, since Odin and Foxy had both.

There was a plump forty-something Asian man-Korean, she guessed-conversing with a lanky blond guy who, although boyish, was probably in his thirties. She exchanged nods with him as she laid her assigned laptop on the table and took an open seat. There was lots of room.

Glancing along the table she saw a pear-shaped African-American man in his thirties gesturing to a laptop screen, while another Asian man listened in, slighter in build and more fair-complexioned-most likely Japanese. The Japanese man gave McKinney a knowing, sympathetic nod. Two other individuals at the edge of the room-a Caucasian man and a Latina in their early twenties-were arguing about something involving radio signals. A collection of computers and signal processing equipment lined their workstation.

The last team member at the table, a sophisticated-looking African-American woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with short hair, smiled in greeting. Her eyeglasses went way beyond functional into stylish-expensive territory. “Have you had breakfast yet? There’s food just beyond the pillar.”

McKinney shook her head. “No, I’m fine, thanks. Not much of an appetite.”

A series of clocks on one wall showed the time in a dozen cities of the world. It was nearly seven A.M. local time.

“So, what is this, mission control?”

The woman nodded. “Joint operations center-the JOC. People from different disciplines and commands under Odin’s op-con.” On McKinney’s squint she added, “Sorry. Military speak. It means ‘operational control.’ He’s in charge here.”

“He made that pretty clear.”

She smiled sympathetically. “They pick assertive types to head these missions.” She reached across to extend her hand. “I’m Snowcap, team psychologist.”

McKinney shook the woman’s hand. “Surprised to see a psychologist here.”

Snowcap nodded. “These operations usually include a psyops component-managing public response to frightening news. I’ve been briefed on your situation. These things can be stressful even for trained military personnel. Let me know if you need help. Foxy mentioned you’re having trouble sleeping. I can prescribe something, if you like.”

“No. I’m good, thanks.” As McKinney settled in, she noticed a sign in large red letters painted on the wall across from her: No Mundungus This Area.

Before she could ask Snowcap about it, Odin stood and dropped a pad of paper onto the table. His voice boomed out. “All right, let’s get started.”

Everyone stopped what they were doing and focused on him. The two radio folks at the edge grabbed a seat at the main table. Behind Odin, Singleton emerged from behind a large whiteboard hung on a massive pillar of stone. He was stirring cream into his coffee as he calmly took his seat next to Odin, near the head of the table.

Odin gestured to McKinney. “As you can see, we have a new team member. Expert Six is the myrmecologist who developed the swarming algorithms we found on the Shenyang server-algorithms based on the African weaver ant, her particular field of study. Which means her work is of specific interest to the enemy. Which is no doubt why they tried to kill her thirty-six hours ago.”

Most of the team nodded at her with respect.

Singleton cleared his throat. “You realize they might simply be using her algorithms because they were readily obtainable.”

The others groaned, tossing pieces of paper in his direction.

Singleton held up his hands calmly. “I’m just saying that if they’d been able to get their hands on a more sophisticated model, they would have.”

The Korean scientist scowled. “I suppose you think they should have used your code instead.”

“I’ve looked at Six’s swarming model, and I don’t see how it would be useful in a hardware context without major modifications.”

McKinney looked across the table at him. “I didn’t write it with hardware in mind. I had no idea that it would be used in any context other than pure research.”

“Clearly. Not to mention the fact that we haven’t seen swarming behavior in these attacks. So far what we’ve seen is precision bombing of carefully selected targets. That doesn’t approximate the indiscriminate foraging of Hymenoptera.”

Odin stared at him. “Everyone on this team has expertise relevant to the mission.” He looked to McKinney but pointed at Singleton. “One is an expert on robotics and visual intelligence. More complex autonomous systems.” Then he pointed past McKinney to the Japanese man. “Expert Five, artificial intelligence.”

McKinney brightened. “I saw your flying fish swarm when I came in last night. Pretty cool.”

The man smiled. “Thanks. More of an experiment, really.”

Odin pointed to the African-American man. “Expert Four, drone design.” He crossed the table to the thin blond man. “Expert Two, aerospace and electrical engineering.” Next to him, the Korean man. “Expert Three, computer engineering.” He pointed to the woman across from McKinney. “Snowcap, our MI and psyops liaison.” Then to the two signals people. “Gumball and Leggo, signals intelligence. And of course, you know Foxy.”

Singleton immediately waded into the silence that followed, gazing across the table at McKinney. “It’s not my intention to offend you, Six, but your software isn’t exactly munitions-grade AI. I don’t want us wasting time on theoretical swarming applications.”

McKinney made a point of meeting his gaze. “I’m not offended by rational discussion. I gather we’re all here to solve this problem.”

Odin spoke to the room. “Swarming strategies have historically won sixty-one percent of all battles-and an even greater percentage in urban terrain. Think Grozny, Stalingrad, etc.”

Singleton was undeterred. “But we’re facing more sophisticated, singular weapon systems.”

“Which to me aren’t as worrisome as what might be coming.”

Singleton scoffed. “You’re not seriously suggesting we let these assassinations continue unopposed?”

“Don’t try my patience. The enemy is interested in autonomous swarming-which has the potential to transform the conduct of warfare. We will listen to what Six knows.”

Odin gestured to McKinney. “As a matter of fact, Professor, would you please come up and give the team a primer on your software model and maybe weaver ants in general?”

McKinney sighed, realizing how tired she was. But then, she’d taught many a class exhausted when she was a TA and then an associate professor. She nodded and stood, heading to the nearby whiteboard bolted to the wall-like stone pillar. It was covered with green dry-erase ink, diagrams of circuits, and logic work-flows.

She turned to the team. “Mind if I erase this?”

Singleton pursed his lips. “Hmm. I’m still working through some things there.”

McKinney put the eraser back on the tray. “Fine. I guess I can-”

Foxy was already wheeling a portable whiteboard in from the edge of the room. He slid it in front of the first one.

“Thanks.” She grabbed a marker and faced out to the assembled experts sitting around the room. One of the stranger speaking engagements she’d had. She looked to the Japanese scientist, the AI specialist. “Five, quite a bit of this will be elementary for you. I apologize in advance.”

“Not at all. I’m interested to hear it.”

“Well…” She took a moment to gather her thoughts. “Ant colony optimization-or ACO-models have been around since the early nineties. Mathematical representations of ant behavior are widely used in private enterprise to optimize complex logistics problems, like delivery truck routing, computer network routing, and market analysis. Antlike swarming intelligence is best illustrated by a classic combinatorial optimization challenge known as the Traveling Salesman Problem…”

McKinney drew a series of dots on the board. “Given a list of cities”-she started connecting the dots with a single traveling line-“how do you find the shortest possible route that visits each city only once?” Her on-board solution quickly failed to do so, and she looked up. “Sounds simple, but it’s not; it’s what’s known as a nondeterministic polynomial-time hard problem-meaning it’s very difficult for humans to achieve. Ants solve this problem routinely. They will always find the shortest possible route to a food source, and as experiments using the Towers of Hanoi Problem set show, if that path is obstructed, they can adapt and find the next shortest route. And so on. They do all this without centralized control and without conscious intent.

“In many ways, individual ants are similar to individual neurons in the human brain. The fact that individual ants-let’s call them agents — follow fairly predictable behaviors, means that metaheuristics can simulate their actions with considerable accuracy.”

Snowcap held up her hand. “A metaheuristic is…?”

“It’s an iterative computation method designed to improve a candidate solution. It’s a form of genetic or evolutionary programming. For example, here’s a basic ant algorithm for detecting the edges of pheromone trails. It was developed way back in 1992 by Marco Dorigo…” She started scrawling on the board.

McKinney pointed at the formula. “An ant is a simple computational agent that iteratively constructs a solution for the problem at hand. At each iteration, each individual ant moves from a state x to state y, which represents a more complete intermediate solution. Thus, for each ant”-she pointed at the formula-“ k, the probability of moving from state x to state y depends on the combination of two values-namely the attractiveness?xy of the move, as computed by some heuristic indicating a priori desirability of that move, and the trail level? xy of the move, indicating how beneficial it has been in the past to make that particular move.”

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 cafe 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…”