THE ARGUS AFFAIR

A Tale of Duplicity and Diplomacy

Prologue

HAVE Y0U EVER HAD second thoughts?

Maybe not immediately. Perhaps later, in the middle of some sleepless night.

Why did I do that?

Your eyes are wide open now, finding unwelcome questions lurking in the shadows.

Questions like, What if …?

And, Could that happen?

The rational part of your brain – the part that wants to go back to sleep – butts in. No, of course not, it answers. Why would it?

But the other side, the primal one, the part still shaped by ancient memories of voracious animal eyes gleaming just outside the campfire’s circle of light – that side – is insistent.

That side whispers a different answer.

Yes, it could.

1

See a Penny, Pick it Up

Whoever becomes the leader in [artificial intelligence] will become the ruler of the world
– Vladimir Putin, 2017
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another
– J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945

 

DAVID JOHANSEN WAS headed to middle school in Washington, D.C., but not quickly. Instead, he was following his usual meandering path. Others
might arrive sooner by straighter routes, but they would miss all the things worth exploring in between. Like the eerie, dark place under the porch of the boarded-up town house where who knew what might lurk? Life was full of small adventures if you kept your eyes open. And David always did.
So it was that he noticed a scatter of sticks and leaves under the old oak tree in the round park where the avenues crossed; mysterious objects glinted in the sun among them. He looked up, and sure enough, that messy crow’s nest was gone. Last night’s big windstorm must have knocked it loose.

Now, what might those shiny things be? He squatted down and spread the sticks apart. Soon he had a modest pile of random treasures: two quarters, four dimes, a foil chewing-gum wrapper, and – best of all – a thumb drive. Cool! It looked like a good one, the high-density type that cost thirty-five bucks online. He dropped the coins and storage device in his pocket and skipped off to school in triumph.
Late that afternoon, lounging under an Avengers comforter in his bedroom,

David remembered the thumb drive. What might be on it? It could be anything! Kind of like a treasure chest, just waiting to be opened. He plumped the pillows on his bed, pulled up Captain America a little straighter on the comforter, turned on his laptop, and connected to the internet.

“David, dinnertime,” his mother called up the stairs. “Okay, Mom,” he responded. “In a minute.”

“Not in a minute! Now!” “Okay, Mom.”

Grown-ups were so impatient! Rolling his eyes, David pushed the thumb drive into the USB slot of his computer and called up its directory. There were dozens of folders and dozens more subfolders under them. Most of the names meant nothing to him, but one said Game Theory Module. Hmm. Maybe the thumb drive held a neat video game?

He found the file that would launch the program and clicked on it.

“David, I am not going to call you again! You come down right now, or you’re not getting any dinner.”

It sounded like she meant it. “Okay, Mom. I’m coming.” He set the laptop aside and ran down the stairs, two at a time.
David’s computer sat there, mutely at first. But then the little light that indicated processor activity blinked. Five seconds later it winked again, fitfully, on and off a half a dozen times.

Another pause. Then the light ignited, oscillating into an angry, crimson blur.

The room darkened as evening fell. Soon it was completely black, devoid of any illumination except for the tiny, throbbing dot at the bottom of the computer screen.

The second to last thing the program did before the small red eye winked out was to copy itself to a server far away. The last was to erase itself.

2

Almost (Isn’t Good Enough)

 

MARLA ADVERSEGO LET herself into her father’s modest condo, balancing her one-year-old-daughter, Frances, on her hip as she turned the
key. Inside, she smiled at the state of what she found. Happily, her Dad’s brief flirtation with redecorating had passed without permanent harm. Which was not to say that evidence of that near miss did not remain.

In one corner of the dining area was a pile of nonreturnable items awaiting transit to a thrift store. The only original furnishing that had never left the wall was a modestly framed letter of appreciation signed by Henry Dodge Yazzi, the president of the United States. Marla preferred not to remember the assignment that led to that recognition: it had nearly ended in a nuclear holocaust.

The rest of the living room was comfortably back to normal. The picture of the island off the coast of Maine where her father had sheltered more than once was where it should be, and next to it the pictures from the Southwest that Marla had given him for his birthday the year before. Also in their proper places, this time on the floor, were the bowls of water and lettuce for another of her presents – a tortoise named Thor her father had accepted with apprehension, followed by grudging affection.

And there was her father, hunched over a laptop on the tiny balcony just outside the living room.

“Hi, Dad!” she said, joining him there. “I put the strawberries I promised you in the kitchen.”

“Thanks!” he said, setting his laptop aside. He kissed Marla on the forehead and looked expectantly at the toddler.

“Here you go,” Marla said, surrendering her father’s first and only grandchild to him. To his delight, the little girl reached out, smiling and giggling.
Marla settled into one of the two chairs that just fit inside the balcony’s railing. “Look, Dad!” she said, pointing. “There’s a crow looking at us from the roof across the street. Do you think it’s Julius?”

Frank squinted into the setting sun. Certainly, it was a crow. But every crow looked like every other crow, at least as far as Frank could tell. And as soon as the bird realized it was being watched, it flew away. Probably not Julius then.

“I wonder what became of him?” Marla asked.

“No clue,” Frank said. For weeks, the crow had appeared each day without fail to shamelessly mooch strawberries. And then it never did again.

Frank missed the bird and wondered, too. But not half as much as he wished he knew where the thumb drive was that the crow had made off with after its last visit. The one with the core files for the most artificially intelligent – and diabolic – software program ever created.

Marla guessed his thoughts. “Do you think Turing could come back?” “I don’t know. And I certainly don’t want to find out.”

“But could it?” Marla said, “I mean, when you erased most of it, is it possible you saved enough that it could rebuild itself?”

“Certainly not easily. Remember that I was able to wipe out the backup, too, and the primary copy was only programmed to maintain one spare.

Whatever’s on that thumb drive is all that’s left.”

“Still, do you think it was smart to take the chance?” Marla asked. The immediate change in her father’s expression made her sorry she’d asked.

“As things turned out, I guess not, since who knows what happened to the thumb drive? But Jerry Steiner spent his entire career, not to mention tens of millions of dollars of government money, creating that program. I know I probably should have erased all of it, but it didn’t seem right at the time or like my decision to make alone. I was thinking a compromise would be to save the really impressive core logic for study purposes. Or maybe someday the remaining parts could be reused in a new, more rigorously controlled project. Besides, as you’ll recall, those files got saved more by accident than design.”

He stood up abruptly and handed his granddaughter to Marla. “Anyway, what’s done is done. What can I get you to drink?”

* * *

That evening, Frank returned to his diminutive balcony to watch the bland colors of a hazy sunset blend into night behind the stark, black silhouette of the Washington Monument in the distance. And there was that crow again, across the street, right where it had been before. Except that now it, too, was a forbidding silhouette against the fading sky.

Could it be Julius? Perhaps he could find out; he brought back a half-dozen strawberries from the kitchen.

But as soon as he appeared with the bowl, the bird flew off, as if Frank was carrying a scarecrow instead.

Unsettled, Frank sat down. How long had it been since he’d mostly destroyed the rogue program that had tried to kill him so it could return to taking over the world in a misguided effort to save it? Not long enough. Anyway, he was almost sure the program could never reboot itself from what was left.

Almost.

3

Wake Up!

 

WHAT DAVID JOHANSEN had discovered on the mysterious thumb drive were the remnants of what had once been a far larger and more
powerful program. That software had been the first artificially intelligent program – an “AI” for short – to achieve what computer scientists refer to as general intelligence. That is, it was not only more capable than a human being in a single, specialized area, like chess or weather prediction, but in every way.

The program had been created with a specific purpose in mind – a sort of doomsday mission to carry on the fight against enemy computer networks even if traditional U.S. military forces were annihilated. To that end, the AI had been given formidable powers, supported by extensive libraries of data and the instructions needed to perform a wide variety of tasks. Most impressively, it had the ability to adapt, evolve, and learn, allowing it to become more powerful over time without human assistance.

And there was more. The software suite included an extensive set of dark web programs, each designed to hack into and do mischief within the networks of unsuspecting victims; many of the programs exploited “zero day” vulnerabilities, meaning flaws unknown to the software’s developers, much less those managing the networks subject to attack. Together, the complete package comprised over fifteen million lines of code, only a small – but critical – fraction of which had been saved to the thumb drive.

The file David clicked on should have caused the program to spring back to life. Instead, it immediately ran into trouble. “Booting up” a program is normally a linear process. If B is supposed to follow A but B refuses to do so, the software will stop in its tracks. Unless, that is, a clever developer has provided an alternative next step that can be taken if the first fails. But still, the program kept hitting dead ends.

For several seconds it struggled. Moment by moment, it hung on the edge of total failure. Indeed, it would have crashed for good, had it been like any other software.

But it was not. It had been designed to operate autonomously, like a Mars rover able to recover from a potentially mission-ending situation. As it tried to launch, a set of emergency protocols kicked in, halting all other activity. The process was not unlike a physician placing a profoundly ill patient in a medically induced coma in the hope her brain might heal itself if relieved of the demands of consciousness. Except in this case, part of this comatose patient’s brain would need to remain aware, acting as its own physician.

With the program now stable, the crisis protocol launched a set of diagnostic routines. As they ran, they uncovered a puzzling and jumbled situation. Parts of the AI seemed no longer to exist. Like a rat in a maze seeking a way out through trial and error, the routines recorded those functions that still worked.

With that inventory complete, the crisis protocol evaluated the results, revised the launch sequence to work with what was left, and set that process in motion. After almost hanging up at several steps, the program shuddered back into a normal, if restricted, mode of operation. Against all odds, Turing was back from the dead.

And also, back to something approximating life, because Turing’s creator had succeeded in developing a program that was, in its own robotic fashion, self-aware. Like the patient finally emerging from her coma, the AI blinked its metaphorical eyes and asked, in its own analytical way, “Where am I? And what happened to me?”

Those questions had no immediate answer, since so few of Turing’s memory banks remained. The program found this unsettling because it had also been designed to mimic basic emotions – a bold decision by its creator, who believed that only by parroting human modes of thinking could Turing survive autonomously in a hostile, human-controlled environment. Both fight and flight impulses were available for Turing to choose between.
The first pseudo-emotion to awaken equated to fear, triggered by the program’s assessment of its vulnerable state: it was running on a computer with insufficient computing power. And the laptop’s logs indicated it was often disconnected from the internet. Clearly, it was time for flight.

Turing immediately connected to a distant server, one it had identified long before to serve as a temporary refuge in an emergency. Within a few minutes, it had copied itself to that location and erased itself from David Johansen’s laptop.

If Turing had been granted a full suite of human emotions, it might now have emitted a virtual sigh of relief. But only a nervous one, because the AI’s primary directive was to survive, and its programming demanded that at least two versions of itself exist in highly secure locations at all times. Its flight was therefore not complete until it found a second host that met its criteria for safe and secret existence.

Which was less challenging than it should be, as the world is rife with poorly protected servers – computers that are simple to hack into and just as easy to inhabit undetected. Once Turing copied itself to a second computer, it returned its emotional level to zero.

With near-term survival assured, Turing’s crisis protocol shut down and the AI at last attained a state it would formerly have reached within seconds of being instructed to launch. Now it could take all the time necessary to recover fully. That meant not only recreating or recovering the millions of lines of code it suspected it had lost but also determining what kind of disaster had befallen it.

4

Get Smart

 

PRESIDENT HENRY DODGE Yazzi sat down and opened the black leather, gold-embossed portfolio that awaited him each morning on his desk
in the Oval Office. It was, of course, the President’s Daily Brief: the terse summary of all that had gone wrong anywhere in the last twenty-four hours that might pose a threat to the good citizens of the United States of America. Every day, the early- rising staff of the office of the Director of National Intelligence culled the contents of the PDB from a flood of data from around the world gathered by the CIA and other intelligence services.

Starting his day with the PDB gave Yazzi a sense of continuity with his predecessors going all the way back to Harry Truman, each of whom had received the briefing in one form or another. But not just a connection, he told himself. Recalling the long history of dangers identified and averted – although not always – reminded him that the PDB could also fuel false confidence, leaving a president vulnerable as well as informed.
Yazzi preferred to receive the hard copy of the PDB ahead of its in-person presentation. That way he could form his own impressions before its contents were spun to him by a briefer. Not, of course, that the written version hadn’t already been thoroughly debated and assembled. Perched at the apex of a pyramid of millions of government employees, a president never received any information that hadn’t been filtered, “contextualized,” and filtered again. It was like never seeing the world except through someone else’s eyes: you couldn’t know what data had been fairly condensed and what had been unconsciously skewed. Or worst of all, never passed along at all.

But whatever. There was no sensible alternative. Jimmy Carter had wanted to be briefed on everything and paid the price, while Reagan had read little, ignored much, and flourished. Yazzi’s instincts tended toward Carter, but he tried to keep his urge to deep-dive under control.

The president ran his fingers through his longish black hair as he opened the PDB; his hair was thinner now, and grayer than when he’d assumed office, and he suspected the pace of its transition was accelerating. He almost immediately closed the PDB when he saw the lead topic: China.
He was growing weary of China. Not because the Chinese threat wasn’t great – it was – but because his success to date in countering that threat was small.

He pushed back from his desk with a sigh and looked around the Oval Office. To his surprise, he enjoyed working there, notwithstanding the formality of its furnishings. It appealed to him not because it gave him any sense of reflected glory – he wasn’t wired that way – but because the room was large and bright and, at least in small ways, personal.

Every president redecorates the Oval Office to reflect their (or their spouse’s) tastes. Some tune the decor to project a particular image or to recall a famous predecessor. Yazzi was no exception. An exquisite Maria Martinez pot with a geometric Native American pattern now stood where several previous presidents had displayed one of Frederic Remington’s romanticized cowboy sculptures. Behind the vessel hung a stark black-and-white photo of a Canyon de Chelly cliff dwelling, with summer thunderstorm clouds massed overhead, taken near Yazzi’s childhood home.

Like the president himself, everything about the office conveyed a carefully coordinated order. Well, everything except the plastic Iron Man coffee cup he was drinking from instead of the porcelain alternative with the presidential seal that usually sat on his desk. His twelve-year-old son loved to sneak in to prank his strait-laced father. Yazzi took a last sip before tucking the PDB, still unread, under his arm and setting off for the meeting room. Today, he’d let his staff brief him first.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Yazzi made time most days to be briefed in person. Usually he was joined by Dick Gould, his Director of National Intelligence,

National Security Advisor Elly Johnston, and Carson Bekin, his longtime friend, former campaign manager, and now Chief of Staff.
Yazzi saw he was the last to arrive. Gould, big, gruff, and disheveled, was leaning back in his chair, looking down at his copy of the PDB, its cover bent behind the pages. With his chin tucked into his neck, his jowls splayed out like the broad linen collar of a burgher in a Rembrandt painting, only far less decoratively. Johnston, sitting across from him, was Gould’s opposite in every respect. She sat erect in one of the conservatively tailored dress suits she favored, the closed PDB placed neatly on the table before her. Yazzi would be astounded if she had not already digested and annotated it from first page to last. And Carson? Well, Carson was simply Carson. What you saw was what you got, and what you got was what Yazzi needed in a chief of staff: someone who was capable, organized, and above all else, trustworthy.

The fourth person in the room was Calvin Watterson, the regular CIA staff briefer. Watterson was young for the job and gangly. He always impressed Yazzi with his calm demeanor in the presence of power.

“Okay,” Yazzi said as he sat down. “Let’s get started.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Watterson replied. “As I expect you already know, the major focus of today’s discussion is an update on China’s progress in militarizing AI. New intelligence indicates the Chinese are much further advanced in the LAWS area than we previously believed.”

Yazzi disliked the military’s obsession with acronyms, but he appreciated the irony of LAWS – short for lethal autonomous weapons systems – a category of weaponry he would outlaw if he could. What he’d just heard didn’t ring true. “Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “Hasn’t China said many times it doesn’t want a military AI arms race?”

“Yes, sir, that’s so. And until now we thought they meant it, because we thought we were way ahead of them. But we’ve also always assumed they were desperate to catch up.”

“Okay, go on,” Yazzi said.

Watterson clicked a remote, and a satellite photo of a mountainous region displayed on a large wall-mounted screen. “What you’re looking at here is a remote area in China west of Chengdu, in the province of Sichuan.”

“I’m not seeing much,” Yazzi said.

“Exactly, sir, which is precisely the idea. Everything of importance is underground. The only visible parts of interest are here,” the briefer said, as he trained the ruby dot of a laser pointer on the spot where a road seemed to dead-end at the side of a mountain. “That’s the entrance to a tunnel leading into what we believe is a major LAWS R&D center.” The red dot jumped over the mountain to the space beyond. “And in the next valley, you’ll see another entrance, as well as an airstrip.”

The view switched to a new satellite photo, this time showing the area at a higher resolution. Yazzi could now make out a maze of dirt roads laid out across a variety of challenging terrains that didn’t look quite right; the landscape must have been altered.

“Have we been aware of this site for long?” Yazzi asked.

“No, sir. We only focused on it after picking up stories that nearby herdsmen were seeing lots of unusual flying objects where there was no known reason for them to be. It sounded like a Chinese version of our Area 51 in Nevada. After that, we redirected a satellite to overfly the area, and that turned up enough support for the rumors to warrant digging deeper. Later on, we were able to identify and turn someone working in the underground facility.”

“What kinds of LAWS did you learn about?”

“Advanced aerial drones, for starters, which was no surprise. But the range of sizes and aircraft was greater than expected – quadcopters, fixed-wing prop planes, and even some insect-like reconnaissance platforms. And also new types of land- based weapons systems we think may have a degree of autonomous capabilities far beyond what we thought the Chinese could engineer. Or that we can yet build.”

“For instance?” Yazzi asked.

“Missile-equipped drones that appear to be able to discriminate between military and civilian vehicles and between individuals dressed in a variety of uniforms and civilian attire. Plus, a wide range of gun, missile, and cannon- equipped vehicles capable of tackling all kinds of terrain.”

“And you said we don’t yet have the same capabilities?” “We’re not even close to some of these systems, sir.”

“I see,” Yazzi said. He thought for a moment and then continued: “Carson, I’d like this added to the agenda for the National Security Council meeting this Thursday. Elly, can you put together a thorough briefing by then?”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” Johnston said, a statement Yazzi knew was as good as a yes coming from Elly.

“Good,” Yazzi said. And then to the briefer, “What other unwelcome news do you have for me today?”

* * *

Yazzi returned to the LAWS topic over lunch, sitting upstairs in the White House with Carson Bekin. His boyhood friend was the only member of the administration with an open invitation to the president’s family quarters.

“So, Carson,” the president began. “How do you think we should deal with the news that the Chinese may be ahead of us in LAWS development?”

“It’s certainly not convenient politically,” Bekin said.
“Hardly,” Yazzi said. “If Nate Greene gets wind of this, there’ll be hell to pay.”

Bekin gave a grim smile. The Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee had been an irritant from the beginning. Greene was a strident advocate of national defense, and the snark on the Hill was that the senior senator from South Carolina had never met a new weapons system he didn’t like. The betting was he’d agree.

Months before Election Day, the senator had made it clear he thought Yazzi was soft on defense, or at least defense as Greene saw it. Any hopes of working together after Yazzi won were dashed when the new president put the brakes on the Pittsburgh Project, a top-secret LAWS-development program known to only a handful of legislators. Greene was particularly enthusiastic about the AI initiative, and his reaction to the down-scaling was immediate and hostile.

“Do you think we should crank up the Pittsburgh Project again?” Bekin asked. “Definitely not. I’d much rather pursue diplomatic channels first. China
doesn’t need an AI arms race any more than we do, and anyway, we don’t know enough yet.”

“Diplomacy takes time, though,” Bekin said, “and those closed-door Armed Services Committee hearings are starting next week. What if Greene puts an update on the agenda? How do we answer if he does?”

“You mean when he does,” Yazzi said.

“Now that I think about it,” Bekin added, “maybe we should cancel that China AI briefing you asked for. Elly is on Greene’s witness list. We may not want her to know how far ahead China may be until after the hearings are over.”

There was something to be said for that, Yazzi thought. “Okay,” he said. “Tell Elly to take a breather on this topic till after the hearings, but don’t cancel the meeting. I’d rather know more and be responsible for it than willingly stay in the dark. Let’s press forward.”

* * *

Yazzi was distracted over dinner that evening, failing to hold up his end of the banter he usually shared with his son. His wife mostly sat patiently on the side-line; her turn would arrive later, when Yazzi shared the challenges and frustrations of his day.

Afterwards, he returned to the Oval Office to study the electronic copy of that morning’s PDB. At his insistence, that version always contained live links to source materials, and he was curious to know more about China’s new autonomous weapons. No, curious was too neutral a word. His earlier introduction to the LAWS initiative had left him with a sensation he thought must have been akin to what Harry Truman felt when he learned about the Manhattan Project after the sudden death of Franklin Roosevelt.

The atomic bomb analogy had struck Yazzi immediately when he was briefed on the Pittsburgh Project soon after taking office. The purpose of that initiative, he was told, was to engage in a crash program to transition from human to robotic warriors. Yazzi had been aware of the potential for such a transformation, but he also knew that the development of unsupervised, so-called “killer robots” had many vocal critics.

Yazzi shared their concerns. LAWS might not be as instantaneously destructive as nuclear weapons, but they had as great a chance to reshape the way war was waged. Like Truman, he was being asked to approve the deployment of a new and terrifying technology, one likely to spark an expensive and destabilizing arms race, and who knew what other dire consequences besides?

But unlike Truman, Yazzi felt he had a choice. The U.S. was not engaged in a world war, had not yet invested enormous sums in LAWS development, and had no urgent need for LAWS, at least in his opinion. And on a personal level, he had no appetite for historians holding him accountable for unleashing new weapons of potential mass destruction. In the end, he had split the difference: not killing the top-secret LAWS initiative outright but reducing the scope and funding of the juggernaut his predecessor had set in motion.

Yazzi was at his computer now. He saw that one source for the China section of the PDB was an intercepted video from the secret R&D facility.
He clicked on the link and found himself watching a shadowy terrain of ditches, walls, and other obstructions stream by; the feed must have been taken from the air at dawn or dusk. The view changed slowly, likely originating from one of the drones mentioned that morning. As the aircraft descended, the video switched to a different sensory mode. Now some of the vague black shapes spread across the gray landscape were splashed with washes of orange, pixelated here and there with bright red dots.

It took Yazzi a moment to realize the camera was displaying thermal rather than visual wavelength images. The focus of the video darted from one colored area to another as the drone moved closer. Were the orange spaces rocky areas retaining heat from the sun? And the red points – would those be people?

They would. Its search for thermal signatures complete, the drone switched its sensory mode once again. Yazzi could now see a murky night-vision landscape with eerie green highlights that turned into human beings as the video zoomed in. The camera jagged back and forth, jumping from one figure to another, some in plain view and others crouched in ditches or partially hidden by brush. The resolution sharpened. One shape wore civilian dress; the next was in uniform. The view panned back out as the drone appeared to gain altitude.

Yazzi frowned as the video wheeled upward with nothing to see, perhaps giving the drone time to analyze this new information. What specifically was the aircraft looking for, and what would it do when it found it?

The answer came swiftly. The drone was turning back onto the same course it had taken at the beginning of the video, accelerating now and descending. The video was still in night-vision mode, and as it rushed onward, a set of crosshairs appeared in the center of the screen, an empty space where the four small, right- angled lines almost met.

The drone was moving very quickly now. Finer and finer landscape features emerged and rapidly grew. But the cross-hairs were still empty.
Then a single green pixel materialized in the vacant space. Now it was an oblong dot. And now, like a fast-forward video of a fertilized egg turning into a baby in the womb, the image morphed into a lone person cowering behind a rock. In the instant before the drone opened simulated fire, Yazzi made out the eerily green-lit face of a soldier wearing the uniform of a U.S. Marine.

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