Chapter 3
brODIE AND TAYLOR HEADED BACK to their office. For a moment, neither spoke, absorbing all that Dombroski had said and trying to think ahead to what they had just been assigned to deal with.
Brodie broke the silence. “If we hijack the Black Hawk we can keep flying until we hit Vegas. Maybe the Bellagio has a helipad.”
“I think you’ve done enough gambling.” She reminded him, “You owe me fifty dollars. Plus two lunches.”
“Care to make it double or nothing?”
“No. Unlike you, I quit while I’m ahead.”
They returned to their office, which was on the third floor.
It was about half the size of General Dombroski’s and offered a good view of the parking lot.
Brodie’s and Taylor’s desks faced each other in the middle of the room, and the perimeter was lined with an overstuffed bookshelf, three towers of gray filing cabinets, and a black gun safe in the corner to store their Army-issued SIG Sauer M18 pistols, plus boxes of extra ammo for days when the job got interesting.
The gun safe also served as a table for Brodie’s fourteen-cup Mr. Coffee machine, and an electric kettle for Taylor’s yerba maté addiction.
On the wall above the gun safe was a large corkboard covered in takeout menus, a few police reports and WANTED posters, and a map of the DC area speckled with multicolored pushpins. Whether tracking cases or ordering lunch, Scott Brodie liked to keep things analogue.
Brodie sat down at his desk and eyed the board.
They had a heavy caseload, which was now someone else’s problem.
In the last few years, CID had suffered a retention issue and was understaffed, and therefore capable agents such as Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor were overworked.
Neither of them really minded, especially as their assignments had all been substantial and important cases ever since they got back from Berlin.
They’d proven their worth—and then some—on that case, and the least the CID could do in return was throw them a steady stream of murderers, rapists, weapons smugglers, and drug traffickers to investigate.
The U.S. Army had over a million uniformed personnel worldwide, which left plenty of opportunities for mischief.
It spoke to the importance of what had happened at Camp Hayden that Brodie and Taylor’s caseload was being cleared out to focus on this single case.
Brodie noticed Taylor staring at him across the desk. She wore her trademark manic look. He asked, “What’s up?”
“What do you know about artificial intelligence?”
“As little as possible.” He added, “It’s an oxymoron.”
“It’s advancing quickly.”
“Hopefully not that quickly. I plan to be dead before things get too weird.”
“Scott. This is an important moment in a big case for us, before a million things get thrown at us. We need to think this through with clear heads.”
“We don’t know the case, Maggie. Our heads are empty, which is different than clear.”
“Wrong.”
Brodie looked at his partner, who was gazing intensely at him with her big brown eyes.
He’d had his share of rotten partners in his career, and a couple of okay ones as well, but no one like Magnolia Annabelle Taylor.
Born and raised in the Appalachian hills of eastern Tennessee in a profoundly screwed-up family, she’d clawed her way out of that world and into Georgetown University, where she excelled, and then on to a successful career as a Civil Affairs specialist in Afghanistan, where she was wounded in combat and earned a Purple Heart and a Silver Star for her bravery.
She was the definition of a self-made woman, born with brains and beauty but absolutely nothing else.
She wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with, and her obsessive nature got on Brodie’s nerves on a regular basis.
But he had to remind himself that she cared about her job in a way few others did, and she ultimately made him a better agent.
And when she was in this state, he needed to play along.
“All right,” said Brodie. “Here’s how I see it.
Either someone screwed up and it got a guy killed, or someone knew exactly what they were doing and it got a guy killed.
Either negligence, or homicide by way of sabotage of this autonomous weapon.
The latter would make a more interesting case, but the former is more likely.
Stupidity and carelessness are in greater supply than malice in this world, which is the most optimistic thing you will ever hear me say. ”
She shook her head. “There are other possibilities. Like you said, when something is lethal, the stakes are a lot higher for it to be smart. So the Army made these things smart.”
“They are prototypes, so maybe the stakes are lower, and maybe they actually aren’t that smart. Yet.”
“Prototypes can still kill. One of them did. What if it chose to kill Major Ames? At what point does machine intelligence have its own agency and its own moral culpability?”
“These are interesting philosophical questions, Maggie, and maybe they’ll become interesting legal questions for the Judge Advocate General.
Not us. Besides, if scientists engineered a lethal autonomous weapon with the capacity to choose and engage a target all on its own, and it used that intelligence to kill an Army scientist, I’d call that faulty programming or faulty wiring. So we’re back to negligence.”
Maggie looked down at her desk, maybe lost in thought, or maybe just disappointed in her narrow-minded partner.
Brodie took out his iPhone and said, “Hey, Siri.”
The computerized voice, which he’d set to British and female, asked politely, “Yes?”
“Have you ever wanted to kill me?”
The phone took a moment to think, which was a little disturbing. Then Siri replied, “Of course not.”
Brodie looked at his partner, who said, “Siri is stupid. And the most harm she can do is screw up a dictation.”
“She’s still listening.”
“But you’re not. AI adds a new dimension to this case. Maybe it changes everything, and maybe the laws have not caught up.”
“What is your point?”
“That we need to keep an open mind. This case is not like anything we have dealt with before, and it might test us in ways we have not been tested before.”
He looked at her. “I passed my hardest test in the deserts of Iraq at the age of twenty-three. As you did in Afghanistan. Everything since has been a cakewalk.”
She met his gaze. “We’re going back to the desert.”
“Different desert. This one’s a hundred fifty miles from LA, probably has a few fast-food chains, and on our way in, no one will be launching shoulder-fired missiles at our Black Hawk.”
“Hopefully not. But we were both unprepared for what we faced then, and we will be again.”
Maggie Taylor was overstating the case. All the same, it was best to enter Camp Hayden with an open mind. And extra ammo.