Kill Decision

by Daniel Suarez

myrmecologist E. O. Wilson proposed that ants were a “superorganism”—an organism that transcended the limitations of a single body to enact a collective will. And that will had an intelligence superior to that of the individual ants themselves. Precisely how this occurred was still unknown, and it was a mystery that McKinney had dedicated her career to unraveling.

Hymenoptera

“Plenoptic camera. Called a ‘computational’ camera in the trade—lets us change the focal length after an image is taken, remove occlusions through synthetic aperture tracking. Lets us clearly view surveillance subjects through light cover—window screens and foliage.”

Hymenoptera

“It’s a read-only memory chip. Stores machine code, logic that controls electronic devices.

“As a biologist, you, of all people, know that conflict is a fact of life. Competition is the mechanism of evolution.”

We can zoom in on any portion of a vast battle space—each airborne asset has one hundred and sixty-five individually controlled high-resolution cameras. Multiple assets can be networked to programmatically tile together contiguous, high-resolution surveillance of broad swaths of terrain in real time. Synthetic aperture radar allows us to see through both clouds and darkness. This is an all-seeing eye, Master Sergeant, permanently recording all activity below from a height of sixty thousand feet—well above the weapon range of these populations.”

“That’s not the big issue here, Howard. I mean, given all the privacy and civil liberties that we’ve given up, we now effectively live in a surveillance state—cameras on every street corner, in every place of business and office building, mass wiretapping—and yet the government is no closer to finding these terrorists. You

“Sounds simple, but it’s not; it’s what’s known as a nondeterministic polynomial-time hard problem—meaning it’s very difficult for humans to achieve. Ants solve this problem routinely. They will always find the shortest possible route to a food source, and as experiments using the Towers of Hanoi Problem set show, if that path is obstructed, they can adapt and find the next shortest route. And so on. They do all this without centralized control and without conscious intent. “In many ways, individual ants are similar to individual neurons in the human brain. The fact that individual ants—let’s call them agents—follow fairly predictable behaviors, means that metaheuristics can simulate their actions with considerable accuracy.”

That’s why weaver ants don’t need a large brain to solve complex puzzles. They can solve problems because they can afford to try every solution at random until they discover one that works. A creature with a single body can’t do that. A mistake could mean biological death. But the death of hundreds of workers to a colony numbering in the hundreds of thousands is irrelevant. In fact, the colony is the real organism, not the individual.”

“What difference does it make whether they’re in the government? They’re larger than government. They’re power. The world is a big system now. I don’t think anyone knows who’s in charge. But you can run afoul of various interests. That’s for damn sure. And you just did.”

She nodded. “Sure. I’m a biologist. It’s the amount of brain mass exceeding what would be expected, given body mass. It directly correlates to intelligence. Humans and dolphins are the most encephalized species, for example.”

cogitating

“The conference presentation was on ‘brain-jacking.’ They insert the transmitter directly into the insect’s brain—adding it at the larval stage so the insect grows around it. They leverage an existing nervous system to make a remote-controlled minidrone out of a living thing. All you do is activate the neurons that handle flying, turning, crawling, whatever, and the bug’s own nervous system handles the rest. We all thought the guy was sick. Apparently he found a receptive audience in the military.”

Apparently there are fifteen chemicals that indicate human presence by the breath we exhale—things like acetone, pentane, hexane, isoprene, benzene, heptane, alpha-Pinene. You get the idea. They appear in a specific ratio wherever people are breathing—the more concentrated it is, the closer people are or the more people there are.”

“If hackers are the militia of cyber war, then hobbyists are their drone war cousins. It’s safer for everyone if we scare them now. Put them on notice. Isolate them. Like we did with the WikiLeaks people.”

“The Web is a lot like the pheromonal matrix of an ant colony; popular messages get reinforced, less popular messages fade away. That creates a data trail that others can follow. That got me thinking about all this data being gathered on everyone—purchase records, calling patterns, social media, and e-mails, everything. What if the systems that these private security firms built to analyze that data—to keep us safe—actually did the opposite? What if whoever’s doing this is using that data to select targets?”

They’re called sock puppets. We create armies of artificial online personas—user accounts that espouse views certain interested parties want espoused. We flood forums, online comment sections, social media. It requires good software to manage it all—to automate the messaging while maintaining uniqueness, and to keep all the fictional personalities and causes straight. I took the logic from my bot-herding software—from the gold-farming operation in China.”

It’s called meaconing.” He pointed. “Wireless phone systems consist of base stations spread around town. When you turn on your phone it searches for the base station with the strongest signal and establishes a control link—down which it sends information about the phone’s identity. The first thing I do is jam the target phone’s existing control link. That forces it to scan for a new base station—which I mimic by providing a stronger signal. Basically I become his cell tower, and that gives me a control link to his phone. I can then listen in and see the identities of any phone he communicates with. The control link is completely separate from the connection that people use to talk on the phone. That means I can remotely program a target phone to turn on even if it’s off. I can activate the microphone when he’s not on a call—use it as a bugging device.

“That’s a use I hadn’t heard of. Although, this is the problem with a surveillance state; once you build it, it always grows. Do you realize how many industries use this data? How many people are busy building the systems to gather and analyze it? How much economic activity that’s generating? Ah,