Frankly, Calliope was exactly what people like Elon Musk and others warned about.
Using this technology as a non-player character in a pedestrian video game seemed to Chang to be unconscionable. Neural networks could now beat human beings at most any game — Breakout, chess, even the sophisticated and seemingly random game of Go. Calliope could do all of that but so much more, harnessing the Cloud or the host computer she happened to occupy.
Calliope was small, portable, and powerful. But she had another trait that made her particularly useful for any number of Chang’s purposes. Neural networks could beat a human player ninety-nine times out of a hundred, but they did not want to play. Calliope was fairly bursting at the seams as she sought new challenges. She pilfered through subdirectories, files, and applications in the operating system into which Chang had injected her, like a bored child, looking for something to do.
She’d been developed to play the game on her own alongside the primary player, like a second human. She could, for instance, “go and fetch”—fight her way through the enemy to bring back more ammunition, weapons, or fuel for her partner. She commandeered the computer’s entire hard drive, the Net, the Cloud, the Dark Web, anything to which she had access, to complete her task. That morning, he’d loaded her into a self-driving car and told her to guard the three parking spots in the lot next to his building, leaving the details of how to do it to her own devices. He thought she might park lengthwise in all three spaces, but instead she drove back and forth on the lot, actively challenging any vehicle that came near, like an aggressive mother bird protecting her nest.
She needed a mission — and since she knew how to go and fetch things, Major Chang had just the right mission in mind.
7
Tony Lombardi kept a second cell phone at his apartment in South Oxnard, suspended from two feet of kite string in the wall behind the light switch in his bedroom. He was careful with the screw heads every time he retrieved the phone — so as not to draw attention to the switch plate if someone came in with a search warrant. It was a hassle, but so was getting caught spying on a U.S. Naval base.
Lombardi knew in his bones that some government official was going to walk up at any moment and randomly demand to look at his mobile phone. They had no right, but that didn’t stop authoritarian regimes. That’s what governments did. They screwed the people. He knew he had to be hypervigilant, especially at work. When he went to his job on Naval Base Ventura County, the phone stayed at home, hanging from the string in his wall.
The sun was not yet up when he nursed his rattletrap Ford Ranger up to the security gate a little before five-thirty. The odor of diesel fuel and low tide hung heavy across the blacktop road. He liked to arrive at the construction site early enough to impress his foreman, but not so early as to make security forces any twitchier than they already were.
Comprising three Naval facilities — Point Mugu, Port Hueneme, and San Nicolas Island — NBVC was home to no less than four airborne early-warning squadrons. Three of these E-2 Hawkeye squadrons were assigned to the carriers USS John C. Stennis, Theodore Roosevelt, and Carl Vinson. A deepwater port and myriad other Naval tenants including Defense Logistics, Naval Satellite Operations Center, and an Air Test and Evaluation Squadron provided security forces with plenty of reason to be twitchy — and significant opportunity for Lombardi. The government would have called him a domestic terrorist. But he preferred saboteur. It sounded cooler. And besides, he was in this for the good of the country. Terrorists killed people. He just passed on information. His contact with Earth Ally was a pretty Asian chick from USC named Kirsten. She cared about the state of the country, of the world, and made him want to do better, to be better. She told him what she needed, and he got it for her. So far, she hadn’t made him blow any shit up, but he would have if she’d asked.
Security investigations for hammer-swingers and ditch-diggers looked for things that were on the record, not things that weren’t. Sure, they wanted to know where he’d gone to high school, but they weren’t likely to spend the time to send agents out to interview his high school counselor, or anyone who might have known how much he despised the establishment. Lombardi’s California driver’s license said he was twenty-four, far too young to have much of a credit history. Judging from the security forms he’d had to complete, the contracting officer was more interested in bad credit than good, and paid more attention to criminal history than chronological. No history was apparently fine.
He’d been upset at first that his clearance didn’t give him access to any weapons-storage magazines or sensitive areas. Those remained locked up tight, behind impenetrable layers of security. But Kirsten reminded him that he wasn’t here for that.
His job was to observe things that occurred in the open. She was particularly interested in the dimensions of the magazine his construction team was building. Were there special loading doors? Overhead cranes? A track system? Enhanced environmental controls? Additional layers of security?
Kirsten never told him specifically what she was looking for, but he could figure it out easily enough after he found out what she wanted him to watch.
Five minutes online — on his secret phone, so the government couldn’t track him — revealed tests off Point Mugu of America’s hot new weapon — the Lockheed Martin AGM-158C a long-range anti-ship missile, or LRASM. At first glance the technology seemed like a step backward. China already had the Yingji-18. Yingji was literally “Eagle Strike,” and the YJ-18 cruise missile had a range of more than three hundred miles, with a final sprint nearing three times the speed of sound. Russia’s joint venture with India, the BrahMos PJ-10, was the fastest supersonic cruise missile in the world at Mach 3, executing a sophisticated S-turn to avoid interception during the terminal phase. A hypersonic variant, BrahMos II, was under development, supposed to reach speeds over Mach 7.
According to the specs, the LRASM was a lumbering thing compared to Chinese and Russian anti-ship missiles. But no one cared much about the LRASM’s speed. The weapon’s lethality lay in its stealth technology, and its ability to home in on an enemy’s targeting radar — the same radar used to seek incoming threats. Recent tests had shown it could hunt and find targets with extreme precision using an artificial intelligence system designed to recognize the profile of enemy ships. And that was just the stuff they talked about online. Lombardi was sure there was a shitload more they didn’t mention.
He finally asked Kirsten about it. She’d looked surprised that he’d figured it out, but then admitted that she was interested in the missile, though she had no idea what the Earth Ally plan was to do with it. Maybe they were planning on bombing it, though neither she nor Lombardi could figure out what good that would do. The military-industrial complex would just build more and the arms race with the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians would just carry on ad nauseam. It was probably going to be a symbolic gesture — to draw some attention to the idiocy. Lombardi didn’t care.
There was a lot of movement around the magazines where they kept the missiles, wooden crates, forklifts, like they were getting ready to make a move. He’d call for a meeting that evening, turn over his intel, and they could maybe have dinner. He enjoyed being a saboteur for a good cause almost as much as he enjoyed hanging out with Kirsten.
As long as he could keep doing that, Tony Lombardi would keep swinging his hammer, keep his eyes open, and point Kirsten in the right direction. He thought of her now as he looked across the water in the morning twilight.