“Nope.”
“At least you’re aware of the AI programs that write books and music and VR xperes, I’m sure.”
“Yeah. Go figure. As soon as I get a book contract the entire profession is about to be rendered obsolete.”
They gave me a wizened little smile. “Stay strong, bud. Authorbots will need to use our bodies as batteries if we nuke the planet to deny them sunlight.”
Despite myself, I hissed a laugh.
They continued, “The FBI uses similar tech—everyone does now. Real Philip K. Dick stuff, and the profiles are insanely vivid.”
“What does that mean?”
They removed a blue folder curled into an inside pocket of their jacket. It was stuffed with old-fashioned tree paper and secured with a thick rubber band. They held it in their lap.
“When we found the 6Degrees suspects, we ran their identities through these programs. These AIs gather background by processing vast reams of data. Basically, the moment a person is born we start producing digital trails in a billion different ways. It’s all there, it just has to be collated and sifted through.”
I felt my stomach grow queasy as Coral went on to describe how these AIs could mine every online interaction, keystroke, every piece of biometric data a person’s phone or watch or glasses ever recorded, and of course every conversation they’d ever had in the proximity of a device that could listen. Dating back to the 2000s, most networked devices, TVs, stereo systems, earbuds, digital assistants, remote controls—it had all been spying and collecting ambient conversations. Analyze a person’s words, heart rate, blood pressure, and every email they’ve ever written with advanced machine learning and one can gain a frighteningly realistic insight into their inner psychology. Of course, all this data would take a literal lifetime to sift through and assemble into any kind of coherent narrative that could prove useful to law enforcement (or advertisers). For every moment spent plotting one of the most impressive criminal conspiracies in American history there would be two hundred thousand of the individual just going to the bathroom or being frustratingly unable to locate milk in an unfamiliar grocery store.
“The algorithms know more about you than you could possibly know about yourself. They know what you’re going to do before you do. We’ve largely turned our lives over to them,” they said. According to Coral, the first-generation of MNR was a bit sloppy, producing asides and explanations that generally cropped up in distracting fashion, as if the program was constantly finding new information and couldn’t decide if it was extraneous or vital.
“These next generations, though—they’re getting to be unbelievable,” they said. “The ability to basically reproduce a human life, down to an individual’s thinking. ‘Psychological reconstitution’ is what we call it, and it’s probably more accurate than if the individual wrote their story themselves. Currently we need a warrant to get a reconstruction, but trust me, it’s too useful. Pretty soon we won’t.”
I laughed. Coral was such a geek—that was true, at least. “You’re freaking me out.”
“It should.” They nodded to the refrigerator, a stainless-steel behemoth with every standard feature, including a camera inside to check the contents and a screen to FaceTime people while we cooked. “We are nothing but data. We basically sold our inner selves to the new colonizers for a handful of pretty beads. For instance, we did an MNR of the guy who killed Mackowski. The bomber was actually profiled by identity prediction analysis when he was in the criminal system. That makes a reconstruction easy because his behavioral data was always being collated.”
“So why couldn’t you stop him? Ash Hasan’s sister was killed in that attack.”
They shrugged. “The guy was never deemed a threat. That’s why they used him. The decisions we make aren’t always up to us. That’s why MNR is only useful after the fact right now, but even then… So there’s a woman from 6Degrees leadership we’re still looking for. She had a couple different aliases. We know this because when we captured Ismael, McCurdy, Worthington, and the others, we used a new technique.”
Coral went on to explain a method called “echolocation.” This used data from various sources to re-create the identity, attitudes, and thought processes of people with whom those sources interacted. The Weathermen were smart. Part of their protocol was to pollute their data, and this successfully hid them for a long time. But once the FBI found people in leadership, the echolocation AI could work backward. Colonel Kellan Murdock put a bullet in his head, but because the Pentagon had a treasure trove on the man from his service in Iraq, the AI was able to reconstruct an early meeting between the colonel and this woman from 6Degrees. It used his thought process and the processes of nearby diners to reassemble their conversation and how she might have reacted.
“It’s a jankier read,” said Coral. “The more it uncovers, the more it can deduce. It builds out the life of a suspect as far as it can. But we still haven’t caught her. We think she may have somehow falsified certain elements of her identity, biographical details like her mother’s country of origin. Possibly even her own ethnicity. Things like that. Honestly, it’s almost beyond belief that she’s managed to beat the AIs so far, not to mention facial recognition, fingerprints, not a trace of DNA—we’ve got nothing. It’s as close as I’ve ever seen anyone come in this day and age to being an honest-to-Christ ghost. No one understands how she’s done it.”
“Coral.” I was growing impatient. “What’s this have to do with me?”
They smiled weakly. “We found this one MNR that’s not ours…” They hesitated and laughed uneasily. “It’s a reconstitution, but no one knows where it came from. The cyber folks thought it was espionage at first. It knew things it should not have access to. It’s a recounting of the siege of D.C.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘it’?”
“Well. Originally, the intel was so detailed, the CIA thought it was a Chinese intelligence operation. But their state security is investigating their own versions in Mandarin and Cantonese.”
I was caught between wanting to laugh and be amazed and hate them still and hug them and ask if we could start hanging out again. My nostalgia surged for the ratty offices in Adams Morgan and all our hours of banter on every topic, from Martian terraforming to William Faulkner novels.
“Okay, so what’s the prevailing conspiracy theory? I’ve heard a few in my time.”
“We know AIs have surpassed human intelligence but that doesn’t mean they’ve achieved consciousness. I tend to think consciousness is just going to turn out to be pointless mental pollution organic life coughed up while it multiplied. But what if one of these AIs decided it liked spinning yarns? And it has access to basically any data it wants, from conversations we’ve had near any kind of microphone to seismic images of the Indian Ocean. It’s not exactly documenting current events per se, it’s more like it takes an interest in people. It explores. And it tells stories fabricated from complex systems modeling. It’s leaving these little digital keepsakes. Burying them in the global network infrastructure as a kind of, I don’t know, time capsule. Or maybe for reasons of its own that we couldn’t even understand.”
I stared at them for a moment and then released an uneasy laugh. “Okay, man, that is kind of spooky.”
“Just saying.” They slid the folder across the countertop to me. “Obviously, you can’t tell Moniza where you got this, but I’ll leave it in your hands. You can decide if you want to give it to her.”
I didn’t touch the file or even begin to reach for it.
“What is it again?”
“It’s the story of the siege. That’s what it wanted to describe for some reason.” They put a hand on the folder and inched it closer to me. “Just read it all the way through, Matt. You’ll understand why.” They stood and gave me a weak smile. “It was good seeing you, man. I’m damn sorry for how things went down. Sorry for everything.”