THE GENERAL

The bags under his eyes hang like coin purses, and his face is tanned dark from the summer sun. He invites me into his study, which is filled from corner to corner with presidential biographies, books on military history, and—I note with some approval—a number of oral histories. "I've only recently had enough time to read more of these," he says, "now that I've entered my second retirement."

I was called out of my first retirement for the operation.

My reputation among the top brass was that I was an original thinker. At least, by the standards for military generals. (Laughs.)

The truth was, I'm no smarter than anyone else in the service. But when I was brought in and showed what a replicator could do, it didn't take me long to see the implications.

The replicators, if widely spread, make any need for global trade obsolete. Why import something from China, or Europe, when you can just print it out of a rep? There's no longer any need.

That, to me, was deeply disturbing.

I saw the reps not just as a threat to commodities markets, but as a threat to the very foundations of our world. International cooperation depends on trade. Global peace depends on global markets and commerce. This machine would, at the very least, destroy that balance. My superiors and I saw the problem more or less the same way: If the reps were allowed to spread exponentially across the world, the resulting chaos would be catastrophic. In our eyes, the very survival of the human species was at stake.

The mission was clear: Stop the viral spread of replicators, no matter the cost.

That might be hard to understand for readers who see reps as a source of abundance.

You have to think strategically. Imagine what would happen if reps were allowed to spread around the entire world, especially in an uncontrolled way.

Let's say that one country with a longstanding dispute with its neighbors gets its hands on reps before its enemies. That government could act quickly to create untold numbers of weapons. Not just guns and ammo, but IEDs. Dirty bombs. Drones. Missiles. All of which could then be used to overwhelm neighboring countries who hadn't yet gotten their hands on reps.

The potential for highly asymmetric warfare is only one problem. You'd also see governments being destabilized. Civil wars erupting, especially in weak states. I'm not just talking about Africa and the Middle East here. Lots of European and Asian countries would very quickly go down. Latin America in particular wouldn't have a chance. Guaranteed chaos.

My orders were to prevent chaos.

And in those early days, I actually thought we had a chance.

In the week after the burglary at Alphacorp, our intelligence guys were confident that there were probably only a few reps loose in the wild.

We figured that if we scooped those up before they could start spreading exponentially, we'd be able to contain it.

The models we were following here were based on models the CDC used to track diseases like COVID-19, the novel coronavirus variant that swept the world back in 2020. That model told us that if more than 100 reps made it out into the wild, and especially if that 100 was distributed relatively widely across the country, there'd be nothing we could do to stop it.

So we got to work.

I gathered together a bunch of our best agents and convinced my bosses that we needed to let them in on the secret. I knew I could trust them, and frankly I felt that if we didn't trust them, we didn't stand a chance, because they wouldn't know what to look for.

At the same time that we sent out agents, we pulled in the intelligence agencies and gave them explicit approval to censor any mentions of the replicators online. If the knowledge of the machines was spreading, our efforts to contain them physically wouldn't be worth much. We came to the conclusion that we had to go "full China," as some of us started calling it.

What does that mean?

It means giving government agents the ability to delete information posted to private networks.

This is just how it works in a lot of countries around the world now, especially those who've thrown in their lot with the Chinese on things like internet infrastructure. The government has a stakeholder relationship with the social networking companies, the ISPs, and even the companies that lay the pipes. If they don't like something that's posted online, they can simply take it down. Sometimes they can order social networking companies to take stuff down proactively, but if it really comes down to it, the government can also just do it themselves.

That was the sort of power that we realized we needed to have, if we wanted to keep a lid on the reps.

So we basically went and told all the social network CEOs that we'd throw them in jail if they didn't give us the power to delete anything we didn't like. Only a couple of them tried to hold out. Some of the more libertarian-minded west coast firms in particular were a pain. But we found ways to coax them into an agreement.

This is what "going full China" meant. I didn't like it, but I saw the strategic sense of it. And anyone could see that extraordinary measures were called for, given the circumstances.

What was the government's plan, if you had been successful in keeping the reps from spreading? Could you have really kept them secret?

I don't know. That was above my paygrade.

And anyway, who cares, now?

Any planning we might have done beyond the containment operation was blown up once the goddamn Mormons got their hands on the reps.

After we lost control of the situation with them, I got sent back into retirement.

He smiles, shakes his head.

The fuckin' Mormons.