Where one person sees tragedy, another see opportunity, and that is how another school shooting led to Florian’s promotion to team lead on one of the slickest CIA operations in recent history.
Yet more exquisitely captured HD video footage poured across the screen, all helpfully captured by the shooter himself. The camera strapped to his forehead had broadcast the entire event to the world in real-time. This was of course of no consolation to the victims who’s bullet-riddled bodies had been dragged away, and who’s blood was mopped up off-camera in the grim aftermath or what was in reality, just another in a long list of school shootings.
Florian was digging through the files the FBI had been busy accumulating, ostensibly for the purpose of being able to handle the next one in a better manner; or perhaps in the fantasy of some higher-up in the FBI, his ass firmly strapped to a desk as far away from reality as possible, the purpose was to stop these school shootings from taking place.
To Florian, being based in a station in Germany, his business was in no way relevant to the efforts of the FBI, or the local police who were left to clean up the mess and deliver hollow platitudes to the parents of the dead. His business was the general mining of information for the purpose of finding exploitation. The FBI was a traditionally easy target for this, with their sprawling bureaucracy leaving holes in security all over their network.
The FBI had endless lists of school shootings, most of them never making it past the local news. They had data by the truck-load. The myriad ways in which the perpetrators got hold of the arsenal, break-downs of the planning they put into their killing sprees, and of course the banal manifestos they presented as justification for their crimes.
Then there were the psychological reports. Endless papers breaking down the mindset and reasoning of each school shooter, complete with their lists of warning signs that were present, but went unaddressed, and buried deep there was the proposal of developing a system that monitors for the warning signs so as to interdict a school shooting ahead of time. That investigation was cut in its infancy due to concerns over the legality of the proposal. In theory, people still had civil rights. Stuff like “innocent until proven guilty”, and some ideas about people’s privacy or at the least their delusions of having privacy.
The FBI might still have had at least the surface veneer of constitutionality in their operations, but the CIA had no such restrictions. Of course, the CIA also had no interest in interdicting school shooters. The CIA was more in the business of starting things, not stopping them.
Florian had his own idea though. Rather than stopping school shootings, why not repurpose them?
The shooting was not the problem. It was the shooting taking place in an American school that was the problem. After all, thousands of people are shot in the US every year, and only a fraction of them occur in schools. When a junkie shoots his drug dealer, the event is just shy of applauded. When some car-jacking gangster gets wasted by making the mistake of trying to rip off a PTSD riddled army veteran, it makes the news and the people line up to shake the veteran’s hand. Killing was never the problem, and the CIA is always in need of a few disposable killers.
Florian took his time and put together the project proposal, and only when he was happy that he had the angles figured out did he present it to his division leader back states-side. His division leader loved it, and the plan got pushed upstairs, before being sent to one of the senators who have CIA oversight for approval.
The senator denounced it in disgust, swore he would prosecute anyone who made any attempt to make the project actionable, and then spit off a section of budgeting to have the project funded; all in the black of course. This was his hands washed of the whole thing, and was simply how things worked in the business.
Although Florian had to return to the US briefly to liaise with a few of the higher-ups, the bulk of the operations were run out of Germany. They added a small team of Russian hackers to the front end of the plan. They would be needed later.
The bulk of the technical work would be handled in-house using the facilities of the major international internet company which would not be named; in who’s offices Florian was based out of.
They started with the very capable AI which their internet company hosts had been working on, which they set loose on the entire data-sets of every school shooter that Florian had lifted from the FBI database. This provided the back bone of the first part of the project.
In conjunction with a team of psychologists borrowed from a local university that was heavily funded by the company Florian was embedded in, they trained the AI to sniff through the absolutely enormous amount of data that flowed through the company’s network every day, looking for the tell-tale signs of a school shooter to-be.
The results were immediate, and they were astounding. They flagged six potentials within the first week. They dug deeper. The Russian team, armed with the names and initial datasets that the German team had uncovered, Did their hacking all from the safety of Russia, and dug out all the little secrets of all six candidates. Even at the earliest stages it was important to Florian to keep layers of deniability. It just made sense.
From there, Florian just watched and waited, seeing if his system was operational. While he waited, others were added to the list. Those others were data-mined. From these datasets both the AI and the psychologists generated a predictive list on which of their candidates were most likely to enact a school shooting.
Over the following month, two of those on the list chose to validate the project. One of them made international news, having used both guns and explosives, essentially bringing an entire school building down on top of himself as the police closed in. The other barely made a ripple, having only killed a few of his schoolmates.
The AI’s predictive list was so far pinpoint accurate, with the top two on it’s list being the perpetrators. The psychologist’s list was not quite there.
The time came to move the project on to the next stage. During the earlier stages, Florian had been observing his team of psychologists, looking for one of them that could see the project through with him. He got lucky. One of the team, a quiet man called Nolan by the others was just the guy he needed. He was suitably pragmatic to handle the realities.
The rest of the team of psychologists were sent back to their university, with the required NDA agreements all signed to ensure they would never talk. Later on some office functionaries would relocate each of them to different universities; promoting them out of the picture.
Nolan stayed. Florian had the conversation with him. Not enough to paint the plan for him in black and white, but enough was said for him to know where things were going. He was good with it. Wryly curious might have been more accurate.
Identification was one thing. Steering was the goal. Not stopping. Steering.
Back in the US, the project had been given a computer generated code-name that meant nothing, but within the select few who knew the details of the project, it was known as Team Kill.
Before they had their first success, the original six potentials were already wasted. They had all proven that the AI could near perfectly identify candidates.
This was a massive success. Not so much so to the scores of dead teachers and students, but this was not the kind of thinking that Florian bothered himself with.
Luckily the candidate list was replenished regularly.
The operation was simple in concept.
Identify a shooter: Easy.
Inject a new narrative to redirect the shooting.
Using the same AI that found the shooters in the first place, the plan was to generate a synthetic narrative which would then get fed into the candidate’s data exposure.
In this day and age where people have the vast amount of their interactions online, it was completely feasible to essentially hijack a person’s entire experience digitally, and that was exactly the plan.
The first actionable candidate, simply labelled Candidate One was a sixteen year old male, performing poorly in high school. He fit all the major criteria.
Narcissism, sense of entitlement, delusions of persecution, abusive home-life, and of course no supportive social bonds.
His media consumption was the usual doom-scrolling of dramatic hyperbole reinforcing his world-views.
There is one sure-fire way to distract any young boy, tried and tested through time: Female attention. It was a trivial challenge for their AI to script a female character to make a seemingly organic connection online, and over a relatively short period of time the boy thought he had a girlfriend.
There were the late-night text sessions. The selfies. The confessions. The shared daydreams.
This was trivial social engineering long-used in the areas of fraud or espionage.
This time though, there was no attempt to leverage the relationship to acquire credit card numbers nor extractions of state secrets.
This time, the person was the prize.
All good love stories have to have their tragic endings, and thus Florian’s team crafted their villain.
Vaughan was a local pastor of a local Christian cult; the kind even televangelists fear. Vaughan was a charismatic gentleman with only the most wholesome public persona. But something was not right under the surface. Behind his eyes there was just the slightest hint of the perversion.
Candidate One’s girlfriend was going through some difficulties with her parents, something Candidate One could identify with. Her parents, attempting to resolve these difficulties in an amicable manner had sought out the help of Vaughan, and he had graciously consented. Candidate one’s girlfriend found the counselling sessions quite helpful, and she appeared to grow close to Vaughan.
Naturally, Jealousy sent Candidate One to scour the internet for damning evidence for his imagined rival; and the internet in it’s ever so helpful way did not fail to provide.
Buried deep in the bowels of a forum he found claims that Vaughan had seduced and recruited young girls, converted them to his brand of religion, and then vanished them away under claims that they had gone to perform religious service in other far-off lands.
The girls were never seen again. Bodies were found, but all leads coming back to Vaughan dried up. Claims of intimidation and bribery were suggested.
Candidate One’s investigation didn’t go unnoticed, and a forum user reached out and contacted him with a warning. This user claimed that his girlfriend had been taken. He was sure she was raped and murdered, as he had followed her to Vaughan’s house when she had gone there to convert.
He had heard the screams from within, but the police had brushed him off as a crank; a nut-job out to smear the good name of Vaughan.
Attempting to gain entry to the house through force saw the boy forcibly ejected by private security. A time later a body-bag was dragged out and driven away in a dark van.
Candidate One was petrified. He rushed these allegations to his girlfriend hoping to sew the seeds of rightful distrust within her but she brushed off the claims, insisting Vaughan was a gentle and pious man.
Night-time conversations in these forums uncovered the lengths that Vaughan had gone to to scrub the internet of the evidence of his indiscretions.
Hacking by more capable forum members uncovered the evidence of the satanic rituals that Vaughan and his compatriots performed in secret, as well as the web of control over which he had the local police services.
How lucky was it that these new friends of his had such skills? They had uncovered a satanic cabal which was intent on consuming Candidate One’s girlfriend, and there was nothing they could do.
Florian couldn’t believe the gullibility of this guy. He was actually more eager to latch onto this nonsense than he was in living a normal life. If Florian had been the type to suffer pangs of guilt, this would have likely soothed them. Of course, if Florian had been the type to suffer from guilt, he would not have been here in the first place.
The rest was an inevitability. What to Candidate One felt like a one-man rescue operation was to everyone else an assassination by a random maniac. Candidate One made it through the secret service security detail who were caught off-guard. No one thought anyone would try to assassinate this congressman. As a bonus, the only government member to have knowledge of Team Kill was neatly removed, by the weapon he helped create. Wasn’t the inventor of the guillotine killed by the device of his own making? As such this was nothing if not in keeping with tradition.
Of course Candidate One committed suicide by cop in the incident. It had been arranged to be as such should he fail to do the deed himself. When the police were looking for the reasoning behind the crazy attack upon the congressman, the said-same internet company which housed Florian’s clandestine team helpfully provided the internet records to show that Candidate One had been involved in radical political discourse online, and that he had created a fixation on the congressman, making the political personal.
Team Kill had proven so successful that they had a shortage of viable targets.
The program was up to Candidate Fifty Six by the end of it’s first year.
That one saw a fifteen year old boy hack an investment banker to death with an axe. There were some crazy exchanges between the hostage rescue team and the boy over the phone before an overly-eager SWAT team shooter had shot the boy before he had been ordered to do so had been given.
A little more house-cleaning was needed on that one, but no matter.
School-shootings had gone down by nearly fifteen percent. Another unintended side-effect was a shift in the targeting by those who didn’t get enrolled by Team Kill, yet who were none the less intent upon killing.
Apparently Team Kill had made it fashionable for school-yard psychos to target politicians and businessmen now, and Florian had to answer some tough questioning within the agency about their targeting.
Some of those who were eliminated by Team Kill rejects had been valuable to the CIA, and thus in a roundabout way Florian was made responsible. Unintended consequences are a reality of unproven operational methods, but when the blowback causes phone calls like this, Florian was sure there would be repercussions.
That is why he hired the team of Russian hackers. He could just redirect the blame onto them.
Its not like the world would miss another Russian hacker team.