Kyra had seen the video only once, and once was enough. Someone in the market had taken it with a cellphone, so it was shaky and blurry. No doubt the actual footage from the Guardians would be much clearer, but she wasn’t going to get to see that. It would be classified at a level beyond her clearance.
The market was busy, the bustling crowd trying to take advantage of the cool air in the morning. It looked, if you squinted a bit, like the farmer’s market that Kyra sometimes went to, to get her groceries. A young American man, dressed in the distinctive protective vest that expat reconstruction advisors and technicians wore over there, was arguing with a merchant about something, maybe the price of the fruits he wanted to buy.
Reporters had interviewed him afterwards, and his words echoed in Kyra’s mind: “All of a sudden, I heard the sounds made by the Guardians patrolling the market change. They stopped to hover over me, and I knew something was wrong.”
In the video, the crowd was dispersing around him, pushing, jostling with each other to get out of the way. The person who took the video ran, too, and the screen was a chaotic blur.
When the video stabilized, the vantage point was much further. Two black robots about the size of small trucks hovered in the air above the kiosk. They looked like predatory raptors. Metal monsters.
Even in the cellphone video, it was possible to make out the recorded warning in the local language the robots projected via loudspeakers. Kyra didn’t know what the warnings said.
A young boy, seemingly oblivious to the hovering machines above him, was running at the American man, laughing and screaming, his arms opened wide as if he wanted to embrace the man.
“I just froze. I thought, oh God, I’m going to die. I’m going to die because this kid has a bomb on him.”
The militants had tried to adapt to the algorithms governing the robots by exploiting certain weaknesses. Because they realized that children were assigned a relatively high value for collateral damage purposes and a relatively low value for targeting purposes, they began to use more children for their missions. Kyra had had to tweak the algorithm and the table of values to account for these new tactics.
“All of your changes were done at the request of the Army and approved by them,” said Dr. Stober. “Your programming followed the updated rules of engagement and field practices governing actual soldiers. Nothing you’ve done was wrong. The Senate investigation will be just be a formality.”
In the video, the boy kept on running towards the American. The warnings from the hovering Guardians changed, got louder. The boy did not stop.
A few more boys and girls, some younger, some older, came into the area cleared by the crowd. They ran after the first boy, shouting.
The militants had developed an anti–drone tactic that was sometimes effective. They’d send the first bomber out, alone, to draw the fire of the drones. And while the drone operators were focused on him and distracted, a swarm of backup bombers would rush out to get to the target while the drones shot up the first man.
Robots could not be distracted. And Kyra had programmed them to react correctly to such tactics.
The boy was now only a few steps away from the lone American. The Guardian hovering on the right took a single shot. Kyra flinched at the sound from the screen.
“It was so loud,” said the young man in his interview. “I had heard the Guardians shoot before, but only from far away. Up close was a completely different experience. I heard the shot with my bones, not my ears.”
The child collapsed to the ground immediately. Where his head had been, there was now only empty space. The Guardians had to be efficient when working in a crowd. Clean.
A few more loud shots came from the video, making Kyra jump involuntarily. The cellphone owner panned his camera over, and there were a few more bundles of rags and blood on the ground. The other children.
The crowd stayed away, but a few of the men were coming back into the clearing, moving closer, raising their voices. But they didn’t dare to move too close to the stunned young American, because the two Guardians were still hovering overhead. It took a few minutes before actual American soldiers and the local police showed up at the scene and made everyone go home. The video ended there.
“When I saw that dead child lying in the dust, all I could feel was relief, an overwhelming joy. He had tried to kill me, and I had been saved. Saved by our robots.”
Later, when the bodies were searched by the bomb–removal robots, no explosives were found.
The child’s parents came forward. They explained that their son wasn’t right in the head. They usually locked him in the house, but that day, somehow he had gotten out. No one knew why he ran at that American. Maybe he thought the man looked different and he was curious.
All the neighbors insisted to the authorities that the boy wasn’t dangerous. Never hurt anyone. His siblings and friends had been chasing after him, trying to stop him before he got into any trouble.
His parents never stopped crying during the interview. Some of the commenters below the interview video said that they were probably sobbing for the camera, hoping to get more compensation out of the American government. Other commenters were outraged. They constructed elaborate arguments and fought each other in a war of words in the comment threads, trying to score points.
Kyra thought about the day she’d made the changes in the programming. She had been sipping a frappé because the day was hot. She remembered deleting the old value of a child’s life and putting in a new one. It had seemed routine, just another change like hundreds of other tweaks she had already made. She remembered deleting one IF and adding another, changing the control flow to defeat the enemy. She remembered feeling thrilled at coming up with a neat solution to the nested logic. It was what the Army had requested, and she had decided to do her best to give it to them faithfully.
“Mistakes happen,” said Dr. Stober. “The media circus will eventually end, and all the hand–wringing will stop. News cycles are finite, and something new will replace all this. We just have to wait it out. We’ll figure out a way to make the system work better next time. This is better. This is the future of warfare.”
Kyra thought about the sobbing parents, about the dead child, about the dead children. She thought about the eighty–percent figure Dr. Stober had quoted. She thought about the number on her father’s scorecard, and the parents and children and siblings behind those numbers. She thought about her father coming home.
She got up to leave.
“You must remember,” said Dr. Stober from behind her, “You’re not responsible.”
She said nothing.
It was rush hour when Kyra got off the bus to walk home. The streets were filled with cars and the sidewalks with people. Restaurants were filling up quickly; waitresses flirted with customers; men and women stood in front of display windows to gawk at the wares.
She was certain that most of them were bored with coverage of the war. No one was coming home in body bags any more. The war was clean. This was the point of living in a civilized country, wasn’t it? So that one did not have to think about wars. So that somebody else, something else, would.
She strode past the waitress who smiled at her, past the diners who did not know her name, into the throng of pedestrians on the sidewalk, laughing, listening to music, arguing and shouting, oblivious to the monster who was walking in their midst, ignorant of the machines thousands of miles away deciding who to kill next.