FALLOUT by Lars Emmerich

Author:Lars Emmerich [Emmerich, Lars]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lars Emmerich

25

David Swaringen went to work with a new sense of purpose following his discussion with Clark Barter. Gone was his vague sense of ethical disquiet, and in its place was a kind of moral equity, a quid pro quo, something more like the code Hammurabi espoused. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

He quieted any qualms he might have felt about watching other people die on screen at the hands of men with guns and helicopters. He had to, because the men with guns and helicopters were often following his commands. He wrapped it all in a rational cloak of prevention and service of the greater good, a doctrine of saving hundreds or thousands of lives, sometimes by taking a handful of them.

Conventional wisdom in the intelligence community was that some people just needed to die. Swaringen didn’t know for sure, but he felt the sentiment was probably right. Some people were undoubtedly incorrigible. No amount of negotiation, education, or incarceration was going to change their minds. They were going to kill Americans at the earliest opportunity and in as grand and spectacular a fashion as possible, no matter what else happened.

In his more sanguine moments, Swaringen understood that the United States had provided plenty of hate fodder for the opposition. You didn’t have to mow down too many neighborhoods for the remainder of the city to turn against you. Showing up in foreign lands with tanks, mortars, and Kevlar was a great way to influence people. But rarely was the influence entirely in the desired direction. People had a way of rising up against that kind of intervention. Hate and anger galvanized around ideology, and soon you had an insurrection on your hands. Like the insurrections the United States was currently bungling.

Hence the need for Penumbra, Swaringen figured.

Swaringen also paid greater attention to the litany of ID criteria that the technicians went through by rote during every situation response in the command center. This felt extremely important to Swaringen. He wanted to make sure they were using lethal force only against the right people, and never against the wrong people. Ensuring the IDs were correct obliged his innate sense of justice, of fair play. The gloves were off, but only against a certain crowd. Everyone else should be able to live in peace and tranquility, he reasoned.

It became evident as Swaringen paid closer attention to the ID criteria that there was some sort of a computerized system in use to help recognize people’s faces at a distance. Swaringen wasn’t quite certain what this technology entailed, but it was pretty impressive. The after-action reports that he had seen, where the individual’s real face was compared to the database’s parameterized representation, showed a remarkable degree of accuracy. “Advanced Adaptive Learning Algorithm,” one of the technicians explained. “It runs in the background continuously. There are millions of video cameras all over the United States, and I think by now we’re tapped into all of them. So there’s plenty of video for the computer to chew on.

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