Milo paused to take a drink, giving George time to say something. He didn’t. He didn’t know what to say about what he was hearing, in part because it meant Buzz might have more than words in its toolbox when it came to making its judgments manifest in the real world—information that would have been nice to know beforehand.
“Which brings us to that parlor trick in Cuba,” Milo continued.
“What about Cuba?” George asked, having found his voice again. At this point, he’d not heard anything about the mysterious attacks resulting in concussion-like injuries with no clear cause. He’d been busy trying to create an artificial consciousness and had willfully lost touch with current affairs so he could concentrate.
Milo proceeded to run through the bits that had become public, which George would later tell Roger—in part to see if his therapist had known about this side of the company they both worked for. Roger hadn’t, which meant he knew nothing, either, about the side of Quire Milo was about to divulge.
“That was a dry run,” Milo said before seeming to change subjects. “Did you know that federal employees on international travel get government-issued smartphones? It’s so unfriendlies can’t listen in while our people are abroad, talking secret smack about their hosts.”
“Okay,” George said. “Makes sense. Security, et cetera. But what’s that—”
“Those phones have remotely accessible code in the firmware. Code that was written here,” Milo said, “and it was being tested on some staff over there.”
“On Americans?” George said. “Isn’t that treason?”
“Consider it involuntary patriotism,” his tablemate said. “We couldn’t test it on the Cubans. If we—they—got caught, we’re talking international incident, potential act of war, the whole shebang. Do it on our own people and hint it was some other government? Total deniability.”
“So let me get this straight,” George said. “Our—I mean, my—company developed an ultrasonic weapon exploiting specially bugged-out smartphones so they can give people headaches long distance?”
“Something like that,” Milo said. “Except it’s more than ultrasonics and smartphones. It’s microwaves and cell towers and power lines. They took a real belt-and-suspenders approach to weaponize every controllable bit of infrastructure, from the frequency at which AC alternates to the flicker rate of TV broadcasts to turning the water pressure up and down so that the plumbing in a building’s walls becomes an ultrasonic oscillator, humming below the level of human hearing but nevertheless burrowing in through the ears and bones, pinpointing the seat of consciousness inside the human skull and setting it vibrating like a wineglass next to a tuning fork.”
Milo went on to explain that there were two phases to what was being called Project Dropped Call: an offensive and defensive side. “Think of it like that scorched-earth weed killer Roundup. It kills everything—weeds, crops, grass, whatever. How are you going to use that around a farm if the stuff kills your crops? So Monsanto develops—wait for it—Roundup-resistant crops! That’s the defensive side of Project Dropped Call—the way it targets who doesn’t get killed when the humming infrastructure starts killing people.
“And that’s where those special phones come in,” Milo said. “Because the phones don’t launch the attack. The phones are what protect you from the attack—provided you’re on the right list, the one with the numbers that get called during the attack and start the phone vibrating using an inverted signal compared to what the killer infrastructure is sending out.”
George began shaking his head and looking ill.
“You know how many people work in a US embassy?” Milo asked.
George shrugged.
“A lot more than came down with ‘concussion-like symptoms,’” Milo said. “Cuba was less about testing the weaponization of the local infrastructure; they knew that worked, which is why they only set it to one—concussions—as opposed to eleven: dead. What they were testing was whether they could prevent the majority of embassy staff from experiencing symptoms by using the haptic feedback on their phones, combined with bone conduction, to basically turn their skeletons into noise-canceling headphones.
“So the dream scenario,” Milo said, bringing his lecture in for a landing, “two people are sharing coffee, someone a thousand miles away pushes a button, and one member of our café society drops dead while the other keeps sipping his espresso.”
“Who else knows this?” George asked in a whispered hiss. “We have to tell someone about this.”
Milo folded his arms and looked at George with pity for his naïveté. “What part of ‘They can pick and choose who to kill or save from a distance’ don’t you understand?”
“Who thinks like this?” George asked no one—himself, he guessed—though Milo gave answering a shot.
“They got the idea from that Pokémon episode that caused seizures in kids in Japan a bunch of years ago. The one with the red flashing eyes blinking at the right hertz to trigger attacks in the seizure prone. Not all those kids had been identified as ‘seizure prone’ previously. So somebody in DARPA starts thinking and what-iffing. Does everyone have a seizure frequency? And if so, how could they weaponize human sensitivity to those frequencies? Sound seemed like a good one to start with because it’s invisible, conducts well through various materials, including bone, and can be tuned too high or too low for humans to hear, while still scrambling their nerves and making their skeletons vibrate.”
“You make it sound so logical,” George said dryly, which was easy enough to do, seeing as his mouth suddenly felt full of cotton.
“Logical, smogical,” Milo said. “It’s a pretty awesome weapon, though, when you think about it.”
“You think about it,” George said. “I’d rather not.”
“No, seriously,” he said. “What’s wrong with no more collateral damage? Flip a switch, bulldoze the bodies, get yourself a free country, infrastructure still functional, biologic resources—minus the people—all good to go. Like the neutron bomb, but way smarter and more targeted.”
“Who gets to decide what’s collateral and what’s not?”
“C’mon,” Milo said. “It’s not like they built Skynet or anything.”
No, George thought, Skynet was put in orbit. The thing Milo was describing was only as high off the ground as a local cell tower or power lines. Birds could perch on it; people in cherry pickers could work on it. The solid parts of it at least. Not the hum, though. Not the ultrasonic hum set to strum the uniquely human strings of the uniquely human nervous system, setting them vibrating so fast they’d sproing before anyone knew what hit them.
Lovely, George thought.
“You ever wonder if ‘I just code’ is going to become the next ‘I was just following orders’?” George asked.
“You’re funny,” Milo said, not laughing, but then, neither was George.
Before this discussion, George had given Buzz a test run. He’d populated a training database including everything that had ever been digitized in the Library of Congress under class B (philosophy, psychology, religion) subclass BF (psychology). For good measure and the personal touch, George hacked into and uploaded his own therapist’s case files. And then he topped it off with the entire Psychology Today digital archive, just in case the dump from the LOC didn’t include periodicals.