The Persistent Cloud: Part I
by Andrew M. Samuels
Specialist Ethan Meyer walks outside his DRASH to take in the crisp clean air and head towards the mess for breakfast. The sun beams contently and focused. Nothing but clear skies if you ignore the lone cloud hovering in the distance moving towards Kandahar. Meyer occasionally did daily routines the old-fashioned way for nostalgia’s sake, he could have easily checked the weather on his Android mobile and synced it with his Packbot to bring him back some coffee. Admiring the generous weather, Ethan wished this was a vacation, but the resurgent Taliban seems to be attempting to put a damper on such fantasies.
Spc. Meyer’s squad set up their DRASH tent in about an hour as the rest of the company moved into the base set up just outside Kandahar. NATO forces and the new Afghan military had Kandahar under control for several years until an uptick in violence had spiked as a result of the troop surge. Taliban forces retreated and regrouped to hold out in Kandahar.
It didn’t take a very extensive analysis to understand that the Taliban insurgency was planning. They’ve seen the efforts of the insurgency in Iraq and wished to inflict the same type of damage in an attempt to wear down NATO’s political will through brutal violence in an urban setting. The enemy will disguise themselves as civilians, hiding like cowards amongst the innocent. Scoffing at our efforts to root them out while the civilian populace is made to suffer by the insurgents as distractions and shields.
It has been a little more than a decade since the fall of Baghdad in 2003. People have said that the Second Gulf War was a hopeless effort that solved nothing. But Meyer knew better, and more so, the defense strategists, scientists, and engineers knew better. War had changed. It took a decade to find any measurable adaptation, but it came. A few suits at the top with scientific degrees and an itch for problem solving put in the order for billions of dollars worth of funds, not for new weaponry, but for innovative minds. And these minds literally decided to put their head up in the clouds.
The lone cloud parked itself high above the base. It looked so distant, yet looming. You knew it was thinking. When you looked up at it you wondered if your supposed reality was a tug-o-war between your own dream and the dream of the machine. The brains at the Department of Defense research facilities dubbed it EPAC or Encrypted Persistent Airship Cloud.
When the public thinks of airships, they think of big burning crashing oh-the-humanity German zeppelins. If you rubbed your gym-socked feet against the carpet and touched the thing you would hear the “ka” and the “boom” walk hand in hand under the flames.
Airship design and engineering has evolved since your great grandma’s flapper days; in this case you didn’t have to worry about any souls lost on the ship because EPAC is unmanned. Controlled by some twenty-somethings in Nevada who had probably gotten their start in operating multi-million dollar aircraft on their Xbox 360. From the pictures Meyer had seen, they hardly had to leave their mom’s basement couch to operate EPAC. In fact, one of the pilots navigated the mechanical cloud with an Xbox controller.
Our parents tried to tell us those damn video games would get us nowhere. Now recruitment offices scouted new warfighters partly based on how many points a prospective recruit had racked up playing the Halo series on the Xbox Live network. Past gaming data starting at a time when it was still awkward to put your hands around the cute blond at the school dance. Courtesy of corporations that never disposed of years worth of data. And what was the need? Data storage was cheap. Cheaper than oil is these days. You could store mountains worth of data for peanuts.
The problem with all this data was never the storage. Just because you had petabytes worth of data about your target demographic, it didn’t mean you knew what the hell to do with it or what the data even meant. It wasn’t until the data was processed, organized, and interpreted that it actually became useful. Useful to a point where it separated your problems in real time before your eyes and placed them in cute little Tupperware containers for further inspection by the brains wearing boots.
This airship was built on imagination meeting application. It stood almost motionless, lofty, dreamy, it tried to fool you. At a high enough altitude where shooting projectiles at it with most conventional weapons would be pointless. Massive enough, where some will ogle at it, attempt to touch it like cats and yarn. EPAC housed an impressive array of sensors, communication devices, and parallel processing units inside its blank white hull. A supercomputer onboard that might convince you that it could learn. Maybe even think like you do. But EPAC’s supercomputer doesn’t think like you do. It does better, but has a different purpose. By no means did it replace the need for the intelligence operative, it worked with her, synced with her. Defense engineers synced every piece of equipment with a sensor of some sort to the cloud. Drones, MRAPs, mobile phones, battlechips, packbots, even the cameras mounted on a soldier’s helmet; EPAC inhaled the torrent of sensor data served by the darknet, an encrypted network of information flow facilitated by the airship.
The influx of data from the Iraq War was like no other in history, and DoD jumped on the mountain and fielded its best and brightest to climb it, contemplate it, and build powerful clouds that could rain down bytes to consume the mountain. No longer an obstacle, but an ally to the warfighter. Well, at least that’s the idea.
EPAC is an idea. An idea conceived in the humility of those willing to learn from the past, and use technology to soak up the sea of knowledge that the past and present battlefield contains. Warfighters on the field weren’t quite ready for the torrential rain of information the persistent cloud would unleash. Specialist Ethan Meyer looks down at his blinking mobile phone, a reminder that the syncronization with EPAC would begin in fifteen minutes. Meyer thought he just heard thunder in the mostly cloudless sky.
