Blue Warrior

Dr. Weng Litong was officially listed as an adjunct faculty member in the electrical engineering department, but in reality she was the head of the Expert Working Group for Robotics Weapons Systems, which was under the direction of the PLA’s General Armament Department, which itself was under the authority of the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China. She was, in fact, the most powerful person on the university campus and, arguably, in the entire province of Shaanxi. The Central Commission recently turned its focus to unmanned weapons systems, particularly LARs — lethal autonomous robotics — which they now considered to be the future of warfare.

Weng was the daughter of a prominent PLA Air Force general who sat on the Central Military Commission, and her mother was an active Party functionary and a noted economist in her own right. But Weng’s brilliant mind and ruthless cunning had won her the honors and responsibilities she now enjoyed, including her top-floor office towering over the tree-lined boulevard.

Weng earned her first engineering doctorate at the age of eighteen at the prestigious Tsinghua University, where she was first recruited by the General Armaments Department into their “Flying Doves” program, sending tens of thousands of talented young Chinese students abroad for espionage and intelligence-gathering activities. Weng was provided a new identity and legend and sent to MIT, where she earned a second doctorate in robotics and electrical engineering.

The specially selected “doves” were expected to demonstrate the mythical qualities of the favored bird: fierce loyalty and fecundity. Weng exhibited both qualities admirably. Besides distinguishing herself as an engineering student, the young spy recruited and ran eleven Chinese expats and Chinese-American doctoral students, who all went on to significant positions within the American national security establishment. The lovely and brilliant young graduate student easily charmed her American colleagues with her gracious and unassuming demeanor, even as she arranged for the arrest and execution of Chinese nationals whom she identified as having betrayed the Revolution while studying abroad.

Weng’s nationalistic zeal and engineering brilliance, however, didn’t blind her to the reality that China was badly losing the drone arms race to the United States. Her Expert Working Group set up over a dozen RPV labs around the nation, each focusing on specific applications — land, sea, and air — and each had achieved some measure of success.

Bio-bots were proving to be one of the most promising developments. Animals were nature’s perfect machines, engineered by evolution to run, crawl, fly, and swim for survival. They also had the advantage of nature-engineered intelligence, still far superior to China’s feeble attempts at AI. During World War II, the Americans hired the behaviorist B. F. Skinner to train homing pigeons as autonomous guidance systems for bombs, and the Soviets deployed trained bomb-carrying dogs as autonomous antitank weapons against the Germans.

But as exciting as some of her bio-bot breakthroughs were, none was as startling or decisive as the drone technologies the Americans already deployed. This led her inexorably to the logical solution: steal everything the Americans made.

She accomplished this task through the vast network of international student and faculty exchanges — functions that NPU was famous for arranging — as well as planting vast quantities of Chinese-manufactured computer chips and processors with “back door” apps that were commonly installed in American systems. Hacking, of course, was another primary source — and the primary reason why so many Chinese weapons systems, manned or unmanned, bore such an uncanny resemblance to their American counterparts. Capturing or stealing platforms in the field, however, allowed Weng and her teams to reverse-engineer actual working systems, and no one was better at acquiring them than Guo Jun, her best operative. Thanks to him, she now possessed her first working model of a Silent Falcon.

But she had a problem.

She glanced out of her top-story window. It offered a 180-degree view of the sprawling campus, most of it ancient. But her glass-and-steel tower was in the new section. Construction cranes were raising four more towers nearby, all funded with PLA money. But her eyes focused on the famous statue down below. Even this high up, the white limestone torso of the warrior statue was gargantuan. It was one of the most famous sculptures on campus. Famous, but in the wrong location. So she had it moved to where she could see it daily. The giant warrior’s bowed head nearly touched the grass, his muscular back and shoulders exposed to the sky. In front of his head, two massive stone hands thrust up out of the grass holding a great stone sword parallel to the earth in obeisance to an unseen master. It was the image of the victorious, all-powerful warrior humbled before its master.