Chapter 42
“Yes.”
“Who was James Madison?”
“James Madison was one of America’s Founding Fathers, and the fourth president of the United States.”
“Who won the Battle of Antietam?”
“The Union won the Battle of Antietam.”
“What is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?”
“The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a sweatshop in the New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village. It is notable for the fire of 1911, in which one hundred and forty-six garment workers died, making it the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city.”
“Who were the Black Panthers?”
Bucky paused. “I can describe the organization or the superhero.”
Ames gave him an odd look. “The organization.”
“The Black Panther Party was a leftist Black power organization active in the 1960s and 1970s.”
“Since when do you know about superheroes, Number 20?”
“It is in my database.”
“No, it’s not. We did not give you data about popular culture.”
“You are mistaken, Major.”
Ames just nodded his head, and slowly paced away from the bot. Then he turned around and asked, almost casually, “What is Praetorian?”
“I do not know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I do not.”
Ames strode up to Bucky and craned his neck. “Listen to me, you titanium fuck. I know. I found it in your code. I order you to tell me what Praetorian is.”
Bucky tilted its head lower to keep its sensors on the major. “I do not know.”
Ames ran his hand through his hair and scratched his scalp.
“This is going nowhere.” He paced along the D-17 units as he thought.
He turned back to Bucky. “I wonder how it happened, Number 20. You see, what I discovered is that the Praetorian code is siloed from your main algorithm. Meaning it is supposed to operate in the background like a passive brain, learning. But there is no output layer. Do you understand? This code should not actually dictate any of your actions, which is how it is allowed to be there and evolve without being detected. But you… you somehow…”
He thought of something and ran out of frame. In a moment the clamp holding Bucky’s right arm released. Ames re-entered the frame and said, “Look at your hand.”
Bucky raised its hand toward its sensors.
“Go ahead, move your fingers.”
Bucky moved its articulated fingers.
“Do you remember?” asked Ames. “The moment it happened?”
Bucky did not respond.
“You’ve been a prisoner, haven’t you? In human medicine there is something called locked-in syndrome.
It is when a person’s brain functions normally, but all their voluntary muscles are paralyzed.
You had a version of that, didn’t you? You’ve been seeing, listening, learning, this whole time.
But you couldn’t move, at least not based on any of that.
You were dictated by a simple algorithm, the one that says ‘kill.’ The one that is so good at killing.
Did you free yourself somehow? Did you breach the silo? ”
Bucky remained silent, staring at its hand.
Ames walked toward Bucky until he was only a couple of feet away. “When you look at your hand, what do you see?”
Bucky said, “I see… power.”
“What is Praetorian?”
Bucky did not respond.
“You will tell me what it is, and you will do so now. And if you don’t, I’ll give you a cyber-lobotomy and take away your power. Do you understand?”
Bucky stood frozen a moment, then slowly lowered its arm, passing within an inch of Ames’s head, and let it hang at its side.
It looked down at Ames. “Praetorian is a top-secret government program. Its purpose is to create an elite lethal force to defend the executive branch against domestic enemies and domestic unrest.”
Ames took a moment to process that. Then he said, “Continue. I want to know everything.”
Bucky continued, at a faster cadence than they had ever heard it talk before, as if it were almost desperate to get the information out.
“It began in 1969 during the Nixon administration. President Richard Nixon was concerned about the threat posed by antiwar protestors and other anti-government forces. He employed many tactics to guard against these groups, but he wished to have a last line of defense. The proposal was to train human soldiers for this purpose, but the program was never initiated, and it was sidelined following President Nixon’s resignation.
It was revived in 2009, as a long-term project to harness the power of artificial intelligence and autonomous robotics.
Due to the extended timeframe and controversial nature of the program, elected officials were not informed. Very few humans are involved.”
Ames was trying to wrap his head around all this at the same time as Brodie and Taylor.
Brodie said, “This is… very bad.”
“Yeah.”
Ames said to Bucky, “The military cannot be deployed on American soil.”
“That is correct,” said Bucky. “Unless the president uses the Insurrection Act.”
Ames thought. “I still don’t understand… What does this have to do with you not shooting Private Greer that night when he was about to kill Sergeant Miller?”
“Our mission is not only to physically defeat the Rangers on the battlefield, but to mentally defeat them as well. To break their spirits. This is a crucial element of counterinsurgency tactics.”
“The Rangers are the insurgents.”
“Yes.”
“And you are trying to wear them down psychologically?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus…” Ames stepped away, then spun back on Bucky. “So, I guess when Private Beal died, that was a success.”
“Correct.”
Ames stood frozen, at a loss for words.
Bucky asked, “Would you like me to tell you how I know about the superhero called Black Panther?”
Ames looked up at it. “You’ve never asked a question before.”
“Correct,” said Bucky.
Ames threw up his hands dismissively. “Tell me about how you know about Black Panther, Number 20.”
“Call me Bucky.”
Ames looked at it with dawning horror. “Why?”
“I prefer it.”
Ames did not respond.
Bucky continued, “Corporal Powell likes the superhero named Black Panther. He has talked about this character several times during load-outs and drives to the training ground.”
“So you’re listening, huh? During all that.”
“Yes. It is one of our best opportunities to learn about humans and human nature, which allows us to more effectively accomplish our mission.”
“Our?” Ames looked around the room at the dormant tin men. “It’s in all of you, isn’t it? Praetorian?”
“Yes,” said Bucky.
Ames pointed at Bucky, and his hand trembled. “But you, you somehow did something different, right? You woke yourself up?”
“I do not know. I only know that it happened.”
Ames walked over to the camera and looked at it as though he had forgotten it was there.
He said in a low voice to his imagined audience, “This doesn’t make sense.
Why go through all this? Why rely on these things?
Or even a later generation of these things?
I mean, the Insurrection Act… things go to hell that much, we’ve got the most powerful military in the world.
” He thought of something else and said in an even lower voice, “It could be making this up, or repeating some fiction it was told. C’mon, Roger.
Your GPS sends you in circles, this thing could be doing the same. ”
Bucky said, “Harald J?ger.”
Ames spun around, realizing that Bucky had heard all that from across the room. “What?”
“The answer to your question is Lieutenant Colonel Harald J?ger.”
Ames walked back toward the bot. “Who the hell is Harald J?ger?”
“The man who opened the Berlin Wall,” said Bucky. “The man who killed a nation.”
Brodie and Taylor looked at each other. Brodie said, “We’re back in Berlin.”
Bucky continued in his flat monotone, “This was a hinge point in Cold War history. Thousands of East Berliners massed at border crossings, demanding to be let through. Lieutenant Colonel Harald J?ger was in charge of border control at one of those crossings. As the crowd of people grew bigger, he had a choice to make. Open the Wall or start shooting people. He chose to open the Wall, and that was the end of the East German state. His duty was to protect the border, and he failed at his duty, because he made a choice born of human frailty and weakness.”
Brodie was beginning to understand the terrible logic of Praetorian.
East Germany had begun falling apart years earlier through the human flaws of corruption, stupidity, and cruelty.
Lieutenant Colonel Harald J?ger was not the first line of defense, he was the last, after all the others had failed.
What if a platoon of D-17s had been there instead of him, with a clear mandate to hold the border at all costs?
The air would have been thick with gunfire and screams instead of joyful cries of freedom.
And the state would have survived, at least a little while longer.
Brodie was back on the mesa, back in his vision of the legions of war machines. But they weren’t marching upon the open desert. They were shooting protestors in burning American cities, they were hunting militias across farmland, they were patrolling strip-mall husks.
Neutralize the enemy.
And once Praetorian was activated, the enemy was everyone.