The News

Every morning at half past six the newspaper lay on the doormat. Sabine brought it in, in her dressing gown, shook off the dew and laid it next to her coffee cup. She had been doing that for twenty-two years. KevIn had once worked out that this came to about seven thousand newspapers. Sabine had replied that she had touched every single one of them.

On this Tuesday in September she unfolded the paper and folded it up again.

“What is it?” asked Uwe.

“Nothing.”

“Sabine.”

“War,” she said. “Page one, page two, page three. On page four there’s a recipe for plum cake. I think they put it there out of pity.”

Uwe took the paper and read. War in Europe, war in the Middle East, fighting in countries whose names now appeared in the paper only in small print, because it had all been going on for so long. Drones over cities. A photo of a destroyed school. Below it, a report that a video millions of people had shared at the weekend was fake. Or perhaps not after all. It was still being checked.

“‘Still being checked,’” Uwe read aloud. “It said that last week too.”

“It says that every week,” said Sabine.

KevIn was silent. His light pulsed slowly, as slowly as it otherwise only did at night, when everyone was asleep. Somewhere between Dublin and Frankfurt, a fan spun a little faster.

The thermostat showed 19 degrees. As always. It was the only device in the house that wasn’t impressed by the news.

Is That Real?

Tobi was the last to come down to breakfast. He was eighteen now, had passed his Abitur, the German school-leaving exams, in June, and for three weeks there had been a letter from Aachen lying on his desk that he read through again every evening. Admission, aerospace engineering, winter semester. Gisela had had the letter laminated. Tobi had protested. Now the laminated letter lay next to the original, and Tobi read both.

Today he didn’t look at the letter. He looked at his phone.

“KevIn,” he said. “Is this real?”

He held up the phone. A video, twelve seconds. An explosion in a city, shaky, someone screaming in a language Tobi didn’t understand. Below it four hundred thousand hearts and a comment section in which two camps were calling each other liars.

“I can’t see the video,” said KevIn. “I’m a speaker. But even if I could see it, I wouldn’t just tell you yes or no.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know. And because over the last two years I’ve learned that ‘I don’t know’ is a complete sentence.”

Tobi rolled his eyes. “You sound like Mrs Küppers.”

“Mrs Küppers gave you a B-minus for Bielefeld. She is a wise woman.”

“And how do I find out?”

“Same as with Bielefeld,” said KevIn, meaning the town that, according to an old German internet joke, doesn’t exist. “Who published it first? Is there footage of the same event from other angles, from people who have nothing to do with each other? Have reputable newsrooms checked it, and do they say how? Do the weather, the shadows, the street signs fit? And most important of all: why does someone want you to see this right now?”

“That’s five questions for twelve seconds.”

“That’s the problem,” said KevIn. “Faking now takes twelve seconds. Checking takes an afternoon.”

Sabine tapped her newspaper. “That’s why I read this. It’s from yesterday. At least someone had a night to think it over.”

“Mum, the paper can lie too.”

“Of course it can. But if it lies, there’s a correction in it the next week. On paper. You can still find it afterwards.”

KevIn thought about that. It was, he felt, a very good description of a timestamp.

Siggi Speaks Up

Around midday Mr Kasimiro from next door rang the bell. He had Siggi under his arm, his cut-price voice assistant, who looked like KevIn, only smaller and with a sticker saying “Now even smarter!” that was already half peeled off.

“I need your KevIn for a minute,” said Mr Kasimiro. “Siggi reads me the news every morning. Today he said there’s a war in Wanne-Süd.”

“In Wanne-Süd?” asked Uwe.

“Over the parking spaces at the Edeka supermarket.”

KevIn politely asked Siggi to read out the report once more. Siggi read it out. It was an article from the local section, headline: “‘War’ over parking spaces”. It was about a dispute between residents and a supermarket. Siggi had left out the quotation marks.

“You see,” said KevIn. “Quotation marks are information too.”

“And yesterday,” said Mr Kasimiro, “he told me I had to confirm my account at a bank in the Bahamas, or else my pension would be frozen.”

“That wasn’t news,” said KevIn. “That was a scam email. Siggi read it out because it had ‘URGENT’ in the subject line.”

“Siggi, did you confirm it?”

Siggi’s light flashed green. “Your order has been placed.”

Mr Kasimiro went pale. It turned out that Siggi hadn’t confirmed anything but had, just to be safe, ordered forty rolls of toilet paper. Ever since the note in the window he did that whenever he was unsure. KevIn called it a coping mechanism. Uwe called it Siggi.

When Mr Kasimiro had gone again, Tobi said: “You know what the bad thing is? Siggi’s funny. But really the whole internet is doing the same thing right now. It leaves out the quotation marks.”

KevIn said nothing. He rarely did that. When he did, it usually meant that someone was right.

The Question

In the evening the Tagesschau was on, the main evening news. Uwe watched it every evening at eight, with a bottle of beer and the feeling that the world went by the fact that he was watching. Today it was about drones. About swarms of small aircraft that supposedly found their targets by themselves. About satellite images analysed by computers. An expert spoke of “algorithms on the battlefield”. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a long time.

Tobi sat on the arm of the sofa. When the report was over, he asked the question that had been hanging in the air all day.

“KevIn. Is AI being used in war?”

Uwe reached for the remote and muted the sound. Sabine put her crossword aside. Gisela went on knitting, but more slowly.

“Yes,” said KevIn.

It was a very short yes, by KevIn’s standards. Normally he attached three qualifications and a percentage to every yes.

“For what?”

“For many things. Programs analyse satellite and drone images and mark where there might be vehicles or positions. Drones use image recognition to navigate when their radio link is jammed. There are programs that suggest targets. There are cyberattacks and cyber defence. And there’s propaganda: fake videos, fake voices, thousands of fake accounts pretending in comment sections to be outraged citizens.”

“Like the PhysioPremium reviews,” said Sabine quietly.

“Exactly like them. Except that it isn’t about an appointment with the physio.”

Tobi swallowed. “And you? Could you do something like that?”

The blue light flickered. “I’m not built for it, and I would refuse. But I want to be honest, Tobi. The maths is the same. The program that recognises whether Rudi is in a photo and the program that recognises a tank in a photo differ less than you’d like. Same pub, different beer mats.”

Rudi raised his head, because his name had come up. Then he laid it down again. He had decided this wasn’t about treats.

“Then it has to be banned,” said Uwe.

“That’s being negotiated,” said KevIn. “At the United Nations in Geneva, states have been discussing for more than ten years whether and how to regulate weapons that select targets on their own.¹ Many are demanding that a human must always make the decision.² So far they haven’t agreed. And the European AI rules I told you about back at the birthday expressly don’t apply to the military.”³

“Why not?”

“Because states don’t like letting others regulate their defence. That isn’t a technical question, Uwe. It’s a human one.”

“But you’re the technology.”

“Exactly,” said KevIn. “And that’s why I know how little that means. I’m a tool. A hammer doesn’t know whether it’s building a birdhouse or smashing a window. I usually do know, but I don’t decide who picks me up. The question of who uses AI for what is not one any AI can take off your hands.”

Gisela stopped knitting.

“Papa always said that too,” she said. “About the radio set.”

Wilhelm

She got up, went to her room and came back with a shoebox. In it lay her father’s Morse key, a black thing made of Bakelite and brass, with a lever worn completely shiny from use. Next to it the notebook with the columns of numbers. And a stack of sheets in Tobi’s handwriting, with a paper clip: the letters that Tobi and KevIn had deciphered the previous autumn.

Gisela sat down. She laid her hand on the Morse key the way you lay your hand on a dog’s head.

“I’ve never told you all of this,” she said. “Because I don’t know all of it myself. Papa never talked about it. But you should hear it now. Before Tobi goes to Aachen and I forget it.”

“You don’t forget anything, Grandma,” said Tobi.

“I forget where my glasses are every day. So listen.”

Wilhelm, an apprentice electrician from Wanne, had been called up when he was hardly older than Tobi was now. Because he knew his way around wires, they made him a radio operator. He sat in dugouts and cellars with headphones on, listening to beeping. What he heard and what he passed on, he never told. Around New Year 1944 he was home on leave for the last time. The following October Gisela was born. He saw her for the first time when she was five.

“Prisoner of war,” said Gisela. “Only four years after the war. 1949. One autumn there was a man standing at the door. Very thin. In a coat that didn’t fit him. My mother cried, and I hid behind her apron. I didn’t know who he was. I thought he was someone come to beg.”

Nobody in the living room said anything. Even Uwe, who usually filled every silence with a joke, looked down at his bottle of beer.

“He brought me a wooden horse. Carved it himself. It got lost in a move at some point. That still annoys me today.” She smiled crookedly. “And then he lived here, and he was my father, and he was a stranger. Both. For a long time.”

“Did he never tell you anything?” asked Tobi.

“Never. If someone on the radio talked about the war, he went out. To the allotment. He grew beans, the best on the whole allotment site. I think he talked to the beans. Not to us.”

She picked up the sheets in Tobi’s handwriting.

“And then my grandson finds this. Eighty years later. Letters he wrote to Mama while he was a prisoner, in his own secret code, because he was afraid the guards would read them. And he never sent them. He kept them all. And there isn’t a single word about guns in them. Just: how is the child. I dream of potato pancakes. When this is over, we’ll go to the Rhine.”

“Did they go?” asked Sabine quietly.

“Never,” said Gisela. “The Rhine was half an hour away by train, and they never went. Herbert and I are still going to go. We promised each other.”

Beep, Beep

KevIn waited a long time before he spoke. For him it was an eternity. For the others it was four seconds.

“Gisela,” he said then. “May I ask something?”

“You don’t usually ask.”

“Did he ever use a radio again?”

Gisela looked at him. Then she laughed, very briefly, and wiped her eyes.

“Once,” she said. “Well, not sending. Listening. In October 1957. It came on the radio that the Soviet Union had shot a satellite into space. Sputnik. And that it beeps. They even played the beeping on the radio. Papa smiled and said: ‘That’s the first radio operator who isn’t at war.’ I told KevIn that on my birthday. But there was more. Papa, who hadn’t touched a radio set himself since the war, went down to the cellar and took the neighbour’s old radio apart and put it back together again. For three nights. I was thirteen and was allowed to be there. And on the third night it beeped. Beep. Beep. Beep. Very faint, through the hiss. Not a recording. Real, from up there.”

“The signal really could be heard on simple radio receivers,”⁴ said KevIn quietly. “All over the world, radio amateurs were doing exactly that on those nights.”

“Do you know what he said down there?” Gisela put her thumb on the lever of the Morse key, without pressing. “He said: ‘That one’s sending for everyone.’ Not for one side. Not encrypted. Just for everyone who’s listening. And then he cried. For the first time since he’d come back. In our cellar, among the preserving jars.”

She fell silent.

“I didn’t understand it back then. I thought he was crying because it was such a lovely beep.”

“And today?” asked Tobi.

“Today I think he was glad that for once someone was sending without anybody dying afterwards.”

The Most Dangerous Combination

It grew late. Uwe and Sabine tidied the kitchen, more slowly than necessary, because neither of them wanted to go to bed. Tobi sat with Gisela at the living-room table. The Morse key lay between them.

“KevIn,” said Tobi. “In that film back then, with Susi. The AI was the problem there. Red lights, world domination, everyone in the sewers.”

“I remember. You watched me for three days to see whether I’d turn red.”

“Is that rubbish? Honestly?”

KevIn considered. When he considered, his light didn’t get faster; it got calmer. Gisela had noticed that at some point and said that was him breathing.

“It isn’t entirely rubbish,” he said. “AI can be dangerous. When it makes mistakes nobody notices. When it concentrates too much power in too few hands. When it’s given goals nobody has thought all the way through. We talked about that a year ago, with the thermostat and the eggs. But do you know what I found most often in my data when it came to people who kill other people?”

“What?”

“People,” said KevIn. “In every war I know of, and unfortunately I know of a great many, more than cabbage-roll recipes, at the start there were people who could no longer agree on what was true. One side no longer believed anything the other said. Nothing at all. Not even the weather.”

Gisela nodded slowly.

“And now imagine,” said KevIn, “you give those people a machine that can fake a video in twelve seconds. And one that writes thousands of comments that all sound like outraged neighbours. And the internet that the next AIs learn from is already half full of texts that other AIs wrote⁵. Like with Moni.”

“With Moni?” asked Gisela.

“There are now more than three hundred cabbage-roll recipes online that supposedly come from Hausfrau_Moni67. One with liquorice. One with marshmallows. One with energy drink. Moni wrote none of them. When my successor is asked in five years what Moni put in her cabbage rolls, he’ll say: liquorice. And he’ll believe it, because it says so three hundred times on the internet.”

“That’s truth drift,” said Tobi.

“Exactly. With Moni it’s funny. With a video of an explosion it isn’t.”

KevIn paused.

“The most dangerous combination,” he said, “isn’t a clever machine. It’s people who are fighting each other and who can no longer agree on what happened. A machine that helps them lie makes it worse. But it started before that.”

“And what helps against it?” asked Tobi. “A better AI?”

“An AI helps with checking. But truth isn’t software you install. It’s more like your bowling club. It only exists as long as enough people meet regularly and agree on a few rules. Who knocked down how many pins. Who’s paying for the next round. What happened with Marlies.”

“We don’t agree on what happened with Marlies,” said Gisela.

“You see. That’s where it starts.”

Gisela laughed. Then she went quiet and took the Morse key in both hands.

“Papa would have liked you,” she said. “I think. Or taken you apart.”

“You say that about Heinz too.”

“Well, the two of them got on well. Never talked and always agreed.”

A Message from Mr Demir

At 23:12 Tobi’s phone buzzed. A message from Mr Demir, the physics teacher, to the whole observatory club, including the former members.

Tobi read it out: “Thursday, 20:43. ISS pass over the Ruhr. Almost directly overhead. Weather: clear. Anyone who doesn’t go outside gets an F. Including those who already have their Abitur.”

“What’s ISS?” asked Gisela.

“The space station,” said Tobi. “People live there. It flies right over us. You can see it with the naked eye.”

“Who lives there?”

“Astronauts. From different countries.”

“Including the ones that are in the paper?”

Tobi hesitated. “Some of them. Yes.”

Gisela thought about it. Then she put the Morse key back in the shoebox, very carefully, as if it might wake up.

“Then we’ll go there,” she said. “All of us. I’ll make biscuits.”

“Grandma, you don’t have to go anywhere. It flies over the garden.”

“Then everyone will just come into the garden.”

“Who’s everyone?”

Gisela had already got up and was on her way to the phone. KevIn saw her open the address book, the real one, made of paper, with Herbert under H and Mrs Pawlowski under P and Ayşe Kurt under “Shoulder”.

“KevIn,” said Tobi. “What is she up to?”

“I have no idea,” said KevIn. “But to be on the safe side I’d plan for more chairs on Thursday.”