The pilot let out a string of curses. His radar missiles had missed and he felt like a dope, beaten by robots.
“You all right?” Turk asked over the radio.
He replied with a curse.
“It’s all right,” said Turk. “They wanted to see how you would react. They’ll use that for the next encounter.”
“Bastards.”
“We’re tracking them. You did good,” Turk added. “You did real good.”
“Then why do I feel like an idiot?”
12
Even as the encounter ended, the staff of experts in the Cube were analyzing the performance of the UAVs. The evidence was now overwhelming that Rubeo was right — they were using technology developed for the Flighthawks.
They had a traitor on their hands.
“Theft is not the only explanation,” said Jonathon Reid, standing with Breanna and Rubeo at a console in the front of the situation room. “They may have salvaged the C3 automated pilot units from one of the Flighthawk aircraft lost in Africa last year.”
“All of the computer units are accounted for,” said Rubeo, who had watched the raw video of the encounter with a deeply distressed face. “More to the point — the only transmissions the elint Global Hawk recorded were brief bursts between them. They’re using something similar to the system the Gen 4 Flighthawks use. We just don’t know what it is yet.”
“But it’s a good bet it’s exactly the same,” suggested Breanna.
Rubeo scowled. “It may be better.”
“That’s quite an indictment of your organization,” said Jonathon.
Rubeo looked as if he’d been shot.
“We need to find out who these people are,” said Jonathon. “And what else they have.”
“Why they’re doing it would be good to know as well,” said Breanna.
“I believe I know the who, at least,” said Rubeo. “Lloyd Braxton. And it may be related to a movement he calls Kallipolis.”
“Kalli-what?” asked Reid.
“Kallipolis. It has to do with Plato and a movement of elites toward a perfect world beyond government.”
“That’s crazy,” said Reid.
“That’s Braxton,” said Breanna.
Rubeo’s people had prepared a short PowerPoint summarizing Braxton. A poor white kid from the hardscrabble area of Oakland, he’d won a scholarship to Stanford at the tender age of fifteen, graduated at eighteen, and gone across the country to MIT to work in their famous robotics lab. Two years later after winning numerous awards for work combining AI with robotics, he was recruited for a Dreamland project that adapted the physical design of the original Flighthawk to make it more suitable to combat conditions. He stayed to work on projects ranging from the unmanned bomber to nanotechnology. The ability to work across such a broad spectrum of areas was the rule rather than the exception at Dreamland, but Braxton was a standout intellect even there.
What was unusual were his politics, or more precisely his antipolitics. They were as unconventional as his mind. And he wasn’t shy about sharing them.
Braxton had flown in the back of several Megafortress test beds Breanna piloted, and she had interacted with him in any number of debriefings and planning sessions. They’d chatted numerous times at parties and other social occasions. He constantly intermingled thoughts about Plato and philosopher kings with g forces and artificial intelligence.
But that wasn’t why Breanna remembered Lloyd Braxton.
He’d had a huge crush on Jennifer Gleason, who at the time was not only the number two scientist at Dreamland, but was engaged to Breanna’s father, Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, the commander of Dreamland.
Crush didn’t begin to describe it. Even obsession didn’t quite capture his behavior. Braxton did everything from asking to be assigned to her projects to slyly following her around the base. Things reached a peak when Jennifer came home to her on-base apartment one night and found him inside.
Colonel Bastian — he hadn’t been promoted to general yet — had him escorted off the base the next day.
But even though the incident was reported in his employee file, Braxton retained his top level security clearance. Not only that, but he was hired almost immediately by DARPA, the Defense Department’s equivalent of Dreamland, and later by the CIA. It wasn’t clear what he’d done — most of the CIA projects were so highly classified that even Reid wasn’t familiar with what lay behind the nondescript names they were given — but it was obvious that they had to do with artificial intelligence and its application.
Since then, Braxton had left government service five years ago to start a firm in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what his background might have predicted, the company made toys — high-tech racing cars for boys that tied into games on iPads, and a miniature balloon-based UAV that kids could fly in their backyards. The toys didn’t sell particularly well — he was underfinanced, having found it impossible get backers — but the technology the toys exploited was considered so valuable that four different global companies bid to buy the entire company. Braxton cashed out with over ten billion dollars — not the biggest payout in Silicon Valley history, but up there. And it didn’t hurt that Braxton not only got all the money, as he lacked partners, but paid no taxes on the money, thanks to an extremely clever set of maneuvers that included his renouncing American citizenship and moving his company’s headquarters overseas.
In many ways Lloyd Braxton had lived the American Dream. Starting from conditions that could be best described as horrible — his mother was a crack addict — he had become a billionaire. But along the way he’d developed a massive contempt for others who weren’t quite as smart as he was. It was an extreme arrogance not just toward other scientists, but toward the human race in general.
After selling his company, he founded a think tank called Kallipolis, a reference to a mythical utopian island ruled by “philosopher kings” in the ancient Greek philosophy espoused by Plato. Ostensibly designed to advance Plato’s teaching that the world should be run by the best and brightest, in practice it preached Darwinist anarchy, where the “rabble” were to be left to fend for themselves while the “best” were equally free to do whatever they wanted. Seminars were held on the best way to leave behind the ties of government authority, which amounted to everything from taxes and speeding laws to banking regulations designed to prevent terrorism.
Kallipolis wasn’t simply against intrusive government, something most people could agree with. The think tank and the circle that developed around it found no legitimacy for any form of government. Governments were anachronisms left over from the days before high-speed communication, lightning-fast transportation, and high-tech computing. Borders were archaic, and meaningless to the wealthy and intelligent elite. Which of course Braxton and the people associated with Kallipolis were.
The group claimed governments had no right to arrest anyone or defend their borders. According to Kallipolis — or at least the speakers and organizations it gave money to — the best people should divorce themselves entirely from government and the rest of the human race. Only when they did that would humankind evolve to the next level.
What exactly this next level was remained to be seen. Braxton never said explicitly. But he had hired a ghost writer to write a science fiction novel, privately published as an enhanced e-book, that depicted a unified world ruled by a small, brilliantly intelligent elite.
“Proles” — about ninety-nine percent of the population — lived in peaceful harmony, tending to robots and computers designed by the elite and manufactured by other robots and computers. The peaceful harmony was enhanced by ecstasylike drugs that heightened the pleasure centers of the brain.