THE END OF WAR (Watty Award Winner)

1

Amara Green

CIA Black Site

Somewhere in Thailand

9:54 a.m., local time

May 10 in the near future

They're not supposed to do this.

Amara Green sits at one of the only tables free of the clerical debris that accompanies an extensive intelligence operation. That the table sits in a small, sterile room with two doors can only mean one thing: it's used for debriefing after an "enhanced interrogation" of one of the detainees. That it's air-conditioned speaks to how long those detainees are typically confined in their "rooms."

Now let's figure out why.

"I'm going to put the link in now," Amara says, still feeling the effects of an 11-hour jetlag from her flight out of D.C. She plugs a cord into her laptop and tries to mask the stress stewing in her voice. There's little use hiding. She knows the ACM, an autonomous combat machine, sitting across from her with folded hands will pick up on it. After all, she's the one who programmed it to "read" human voices.

What she didn't program it to do, however, is stop in the middle of an "enhanced interrogation," turn around, walk out of the room, and sit at a debriefing table for two days.

This particular ACM participated in hundreds of "enhanced interrogations" before without error. Its algorithms were smooth as the debriefing table. In fact, Roja, the nickname for this ACM, became so good at squeezing information—sometimes literally—out of detainees that it put half of the Black Site's human interrogators out of work. It never ate. It never slept. It never stopped.

Until two days ago.

"Here," Amara says. She passes the cord from her laptop to the ACM.

Roja reaches a hand up to its ear and gives the appendage a twist. If one were to forget what Roja really is, this would, for a moment, appear comical. However, only humans are allowed such amusing morsels, and Roja, despite appearances, is not a human being. The ear opens like a door, revealing a port into the digital biology inside.

The screen on Amara's laptop lights up with a stream of data. Despite the info dump, it's simpler for her to talk to the ACM while running the diagnostics checks. Of the 10 ACM models in existence—each named after a color in a nod to Amara's contributions—Roja's communication skillset is by far the most advanced.

Strange. The diagnostics check is showing no errors.

"Why did you leave that interrogation two days ago?" Amara says. She doesn't need to look Roja in the eyes when she says it, but she does anyway. Glitches in the ACMs' code sometimes express themselves in the eyes.

"That's correct. I did leave that interrogation," Roja says in a British accent, despite its Spanish name. The irony is lost on the ACM. Amara would chuckle were she not so tired. These quirks are as close as humor gets to her job.

So you're going to pretend to be James Bond today, huh?

A British accent usually means I need to check the speech-learning code. But that's never had anything to do with the decision-making program, which must be where the error occurred.

Amara's fingers tap at the keys as nimbly as someone with the weight of the world on her can. The promise of the End of War Project is just that.

"I asked you a question," Amara says. "Should I repeat it?"