We were cruising at about 43,000 feet, halfway through our voyage over the Atlantic Ocean when a sudden patch of turbulence jolted me awake.
The large, spacious first class cabin was mostly asleep, but the sole person sitting next to me was hard at work on his laptop.
It was in that sudden jolt of turbulence, that my eyes peeked at something realize I never should have seen.
It was a screen full of death, bodies scattered across a village in what looked to be some place in the Middle East.
I stared long enough at the gruesome image that the man next to me caught my snooping, and expediently slammed his laptop.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were asleep.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Nothing…” he paused. “I really can’t say. I’m sorry. Again I thought you were asleep. I also could have sworn I installed one of those privacy screens where you can only view the monitor head on. I should’ve…”
“It’s OK,” I said, admitting I shouldn’t have snooped. “But what was that? Were those bodies?”
“I really can’t tell you. This is uh… it’s a military thing.”
“You’re military?” I asked.
“Not exactly. I work for Google.”
My face queued an expression of confusion, and the man next to me read it clearly.
“We… I mean Google, sometimes works with the military.”
“To do stuff like that?” I said, gesturing at the man’s closed laptop and the gory image preserved on it.
He cleared his throat. “It’s not like that… I mean it’s not violent like that. Google is trying to save lives here.”
I gave him a quizzical look.
He took a deep breath. “Hey, look I’m actually really proud of this project, and I know what you saw was violent, but that image should actually be reassuring to Americans and the West as a whole.”
“So then what is it?” I asked again.
“I can’t…”
“Can you at least tell me if those people in that image are real?”
“They’re real,” he said. “They were real people and…”
“And?”
“Look that image is the end result of a project that Google has been helping the Pentagon with. I really can’t go into much more detail than that.”
“Oh come on,” I said, my curiosity getting the better of any manners I had not to dig deeper.
“It’s… I could get in trouble.”
“Probably could get in trouble just for showing that photo to someone who wasn’t supposed to see it.”
The man’s shoulders folded into his comfy first-class chair. He was resigned.
“Why shouldn’t I be proud?” I heard him whisper to himself.
“It’s a weapon meant to save US military personal and reduce foreign casualties,” the man elaborated. “And despite what you might hear from the media about this type of tech, it’s good for everyone involved.”
“That doesn’t exactly tell me what it was that I saw,” I said. “How’d dozens of bodies end up dead like that?”
“It’s a new type of bullet. A ‘smart bullet’, and we shot a bunch of rounds and they hit their targets, which happen to be those men in the field.”
Recounting the photo, and the blood splatter at different angles around each man’s head, it only made me more curious.
“A ‘smart bullet’? Like a missile… or something?”
“No… like… It’s a bit different than that. It’s…”
The man reached for laptop and popped it open. For a moment I saw the scattered bodies across the field again before he closed out the image and opened another. On the screen was what looked an insect, but it was mechanical, like a robot. It couldn’t have been larger than the size of of a heavy fly.
“This is it,” he said, pointing to the photo. “This is the thing that’s going to save US and foreign lives. It’s the first real use data we have, and I can’t help but think of all the people we’re going to help with it.”
“What the heck is it?” I asked.
“It doesn’t really have a classification, but some call it a droid I guess. You see this thing flies around a battlefield, mostly going unchecked because of its small size, and when it finds its target, it can kill that specific mark without wounding anyone around it.”
“How?”
“You program it to recognize a specific face if you’re trying to kill a single target. Or… you could program it to take out a target based on a number of queries. For example, look for characteristics common in men over 18, and it would target any man over 18 in a given area. You could even program targets based on clothing, or any other number of criteria if you don’t have a photo with the target’s face handy.”
“That sounds awful, but how does it even do it? How does it even kill somebody? It’s just a little insect.”
“I get that it might sound awful, but we’re talking about precision bullets here. Bullets that are far more accurate and safe than what we use today. But it gets its target like any other bullet. It has a single .22 caliber round and a small charge backed into its frame. When it gets close enough to the face, it detonates that charge and shoots the round.”
“A single charge, but what if it misses?”
“Well that’s why we send a few hundred, or thousand at a time.”
What the man told me made me feel sick.
“That’s really awful. Aren’t there rules against this type of stuff? Genova convention? I mean that’s not a bullet. That’s a killer robot.”
“No rules against it, and I disagree it’s a killer robot. I mean it’s still under human control. We release them, and that’s no different than firing a bullet. The difference is our bullets don’t just go in a straight line from where they’re fired. They’re smart; they won’t hit some innocent kid or something – they’ll go directly to their predetermined target. That’s progress. That’s lives saved. And not just American ones. That’s innocent foreign lives saved as well.”
“I don’t think people will go for this. It seems too… detached from actual war. Like it makes it trivial, too easy, and more likely to happen. Something about a man behind a gun is less scary than something faceless.”
“And that’s why I’m afraid of talking about this with you. I can’t even imagine what type of trouble I might be getting myself in, but this isn’t something we should shy away from – this is real progress, and this test proves it works. I bet your notion on the ethics of this is colored only by what you’ve seen in fiction. If you actually saw these babies in action, how efficient they are and how many innocent lives can be saved because of them, I think you and the general public would reconsider.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I think war should be horrible, so horrible that it’s hard to undertake.”
“Has that really deterred anyone in history that thinks that force is the only way to get what they want?”
“I don’t know, but I guess I hope it has.”
“That’s wishful thinking,” he said.
As our conversation came to a natural rest, I curled up in my blanket, and somehow found a peaceful sleep for the rest of our journey.
At the airport and at the customs line, I saw the man who was sitting next to me on the plane.
I wondered why he told me what he did about the weapons project he was working on, and over and over again the same answer came to mind – he’s proud if it – he thinks it will help people.
I saw him for a last time as we exited the terminal and were waiting near each other in front of the airport pickup lane.
“Hey, on the plane,” the man said. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”
“Absolutely not,” I said, feeling the tranquil and half-asleep daze of the transatlantic flight wash over me. I was too tired to give him final thoughts on what I made of his work.
That tranquil feeling, that half-asleep daze, was shaken just a moment later when I heard a buzz, then a crackle, and saw the man next to me collapse.
It wasn’t the man who had been sitting on the plane next to me, but another man of roughly the same height, same build, and wearing the same well-worn business traveled black suit.
I heard the man that sat next to me on the plane scream “OH GOD, FUCK! WHAT DID I DO!?”, and start dashing back towards the terminal.
He didn’t make it five feet. Another crackle and I saw the man fall, a small puff of red mist emit from his head.
As his body fell, I heard the screams from standers-by.
I didn’t stand there long. It wasn’t 15 seconds before I managed to claw myself into a cab and rush away from the airport.
And now, since then, it has been 18 days, and I have only been inside.
The last few days I’ve often thought that maybe once I was fond of nature, but now the thought of hearing nature’s slight buzzing only excites the expectation of a crackle soon to follow.
This fright has kept me inside and I’m afraid it will continue to do so for the rest of my life, whatever that might be.
For the last 18 days I have longed for that peaceful sleep I somehow found on that transatlantic flight – that peaceful sleep I somehow found even after a man told me of a weapon of war too awful to have allowed for such peaceful rest.
And now, as I sit in this remote cabin, this accidental prison, I wonder in my long-awake daze, why the fuck did I have to look at that man’s laptop?
But for a moment that thought escapes me as something rises more urgent – I think I hear buzzing.