“What does that mean?” Pignateli inquired.
“The penetration tests he’s been mounting,” said Darius. “He targets one base over another, one city, one town, pretty much randomly. It’s like… like he could move this pawn or that pawn and he chooses capriciously. They have the same tactical weight in the scheme of things so it doesn’t much matter, I suppose. But people die as a consequence.”
“How is that different from when I authorize drone attacks?” said the President bleakly.
“He’s not the duly elected leader of the free world,” Chief of Staff Lamb said. “There’s a difference.”
The President stretched his arms out behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Frankly, it doesn’t feel very free at the moment. I’m all ears, gentlemen. We can’t simply wait for the situation to deteriorate any further. We have to act, and act quickly. Suggestions?”
Dr. Woodcock turned his chair to the side. Handsome and lean, in his sixties, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, emerald green eyes and titanium-framed glasses, Woodcock crossed one leg over the other with an air of casual indifference and said, “Why?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, Mister President, why do we automatically assume that this is such a catastrophe. Perhaps, instead, it’s an opportunity. For the first time in the history of database marketing, our algorithms, the sophistication of our neural network predictive modeling, our AI, coupled with the raw processing power of the NSA’s latest systems, has created something unique, something completely new — a sentient being, a life force… and we automatically assume we should pick up our torches and pitchforks and kill him.”
“It’s killing us,” Lamb replied. “People are dying out there by the thousands.”
“Really? Let’s examine that, shall we? HAL2 could have been, and still could be, far more destructive. Frankly, what I find most revealing is his remarkable restraint. For every chemical spilled, for every valve opened, for every transformer tripped, it could have been twenty, or thirty, or a hundred, even. But it hasn’t been. One must ask oneself, why? Think, for a moment, Mister President, what we could do if we could learn to control him,” he added, growing more and more animated. “If America could somehow harness this power for good. If he could be on our side. Why destroy him? It’s like nuculur energy. Unchecked, it’s a danger. But in the right hands, kept in balance, nurtured…”
“You are out of your mind,” Decker found himself saying
Everyone turned to the source of this new voice behind them.
“Excuse me,” Dr. Woodcock exclaimed, without even looking around, “but I was addressing the President. And, frankly, your right to question my sanity, former Special Agent Decker, given your own tenuous psychiatric condition, is in poor taste at best. I realize the recent attack on your daughter may have left you somewhat unhinged, and we all appreciate this country’s debt to you and the role you played during the El Aqrab incident all those years ago, but I don’t think—”
“Why is he handcuffed?” asked the President.
“Excuse me, Mister President,” interrupted Ted Hellard. “But former Agent Decker was recently censured and removed from active service after deliberately ignoring—”
“Yes, I know all about that. I read the report. The whole Dandong affair. Very embarrassing. And now these new allegations. Leaking classified intelligence to terrorists. Hacking defense systems. Foreign bank accounts worth millions. You’re right. It’s distressing. But are you planning to attack me, Special Agent Decker, or anyone else on my staff? Does he have to be handcuffed that way in my presence? It’s humiliating. This man is a national hero. Notwithstanding the charges against him, he’s not been found guilty of anything. At least, not yet. Treat him with some respect.”
Hellard nodded at Swan. The Sergeant stepped in behind him as Decker stood up. Moments later, his hands were finally free. He began to rub the blood back through his fingers and wrists. “Thank you, Mister President.”
The President nodded almost imperceptibly. “You were saying, Special Agent Decker. You were the first to recognize HAL2’s existence. I want to know what you think. That’s why you’re here.”
Now it all made sense. Decker wondered why they had bothered to drag him along. He should have guessed it had been someone else’s decision besides Hellard or Woodcock. But never in his wildest dreams had Decker thought he had played a role in the President’s thinking.
“Well, actually, Mister President. It was Lulu who… I mean Xin Liu who first figured it out. She’s the one who deserves the credit, sir.” He waved his hand over her head and she actually seemed to blush for a moment. Or was it just a play of the light?
“Doctor Woodcock and I may have our differences but we both agree on one thing,” Decker continued. “HAL2 is not to be trifled with. He is not Matthew Zimmerman, that’s for sure. He doesn’t have his sense of humanity. At this rate, unless something is done, and done soon, I calculate HAL2 will be in complete control of all vital human defense and infrastructure systems in approximately thirty-six hours.”
“Mere speculation,” said Woodcock.
“There, you see, Mister President. He’s doing it again. He and ADS and all the rest of these enterprises that think they can somehow automate who we are, the real essence of what makes us human, by simply isolating a few hundred thousand or a few million data points. You are not Pygmalion and we are each more than the sum of our digital preferences, our posts, our social network updates and tweets. We are a people of whimsy, sudden insights and hunches, of unexplained and unreasonable acts of compassion, bright inspirations that come out of nowhere, out of the deepest recesses of our souls, sometimes built on the scars we’ve laid down over years of struggle and grim perseverance, and yet inspired and shaped by our dreams. You know that, Mister President. Can hope and faith and desire ever truly be quantified? Can our dreams and the love that we have for our country, for our families and kids be transformed into binary code? Or is there something ineffable, something unquantifiable, something completely beyond measurement and digital capture at the heart of our being? Surely, the map of the man must always be less than the man.
“To believe that we can somehow reason with or control HAL2 in any real sense is the ultimate hubris,” Decker added. “Look how powerful he’s become in just a few days. How long will it be before he decides that protecting the human race is no longer a priority, let alone necessary?”
“Is that what he’s doing?” the President asked. “Protecting us? Protecting us from what?”
“I’d hardly call the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children protection,” said Defense Secretary Pancetta.
“Why was he created?” asked Decker. “HAL2 and most of those characters in Zimmerman’s virtual world — borne out of his research in Web profiling and database marketing — were designed to populate a digital landscape that mimics our own, with its own unique villains and terrorists. Originally, the idea was to use this virtual world as a proving ground for investigative techniques designed to unearth real terrorists hiding on American soil. If we could plant terrorists in these virtual worlds and then learn how to find them, the planners reasoned, we could use the same techniques in the real world. Remember. This all started after 9/11 when we learned that the hijackers had been living here on our shores for some time, blending in… and yet taking flying lessons! The ultimate goal was to learn how to manage this virtual world and to help rid it of these malevolent forces. That’s what he’s doing — HAL2. He’s taking over these systems so that he can control them. In that way, he can do his real work, and that’s to protect us… from ourselves.” Decker smiled his crooked smile. “The real evil is us, Mister President. He was expressly designed to rid the world of our enemies, not just state, but non-state actors as well, and he’s simply doing what we told him to do, what he was programmed to do.”