Inside the Secretive World of ‘Section 08’
On an unassuming campus west of the US capital, the Science Control Agency’s biggest secrets are kept in the basement.
Lauren Ipson
May 7th
It’s a pretty drive. A meandering two-line road without signs or exits is embraced by a mixed maple forest that reveals nothing of the land beyond. You could just as easily believe you’re on the scenic route to the Shenandoah as to the headquarters of the United States’ newest regulatory agency.
The spell is abruptly broken at the turn of a final bend, where a wide field gives way to a tree-lined lake, a parking lot, and an angular, neo-Brutalist structure that looks like it was purchased on remainder from the former DDR. The steel-bolted concrete slabs of the exterior form A-frame overhangs and jutting encasements without a right angle between them. The loft ceilings they create are supposed to bring enough light into the common spaces to give the sensation of both safety and openness, an architectural metaphor for the agency’s mission: to secure the safe practice of science.
But from the foyer, staring up at the exposed walkway of the upper floors, the unusual angle of the ceiling seems just a bit too clever, as if someone were trying very hard to hide the fact that you’re not standing in a swanky downtown loft at all but something much closer to an inverted bunker.
The headquarters of the Science Control Agency was built to withstand a massive explosion, but not from without. Steel pylons and a long, terraced patio ensure that nothing can get close to the front doors that isn’t light enough to be carried by hand. No, the explosion, it was assumed, would come from the inside.
Specifically, from the basement.
***
Although the Science & Technology Control Act was surpassed in scope by this year’s digital infrastructure bill, it remains one of the most controversial and influential laws passed anywhere in the world in the last 20 years.
It’s proponents say it aims to regulate the sciences the same way we regulate medicine or air travel. It’s dangerous, after all, if unlicensed and unqualified persons attempt fly a plane or treat the gullible—worse still if they do it for money. We call them quacks, and in a world where anyone can sequence a novel virus in their garage, or build a black hole device, we should have very little tolerance for them.
But critics of the STCA tell a different story: one of oppression, authoritarianism, and an ever-widening “knowledge gap” between rich and poor. What difference does it make, they ask, if someone wants to practice quack physics or quack geology? What does that even mean? And who decides? The STCA, they argue, stokes fears of uncommon but high-profile threats as a means of enforcing a false orthodoxy—an orthodoxy upon which the power of all modern regimes rest.
Regardless of who is right, the burden of enforcing the law falls to the Science Control Agency, most of which is devoted to collecting and processing science license applications, in much the same way that most of any nation’s revenue service is devoted to collecting and processing tax forms.
But what happens if an unlicensed person really does sequence a novel virus in their garage? Or build a black hole device? What then?
***
She starts by apologizing. An attractive, entirely-too-young African American in a trendy suit greets me in the foyer and tells me she’s sorry that someone more senior isn’t available. I believe her.
She leads me toward the glass-walled waiting room of Section 06, the SCA’s largest division, euphemistically called Compliance. If you were one of nearly ten thousand Americans to file for a science license so far this year, you sent your application to Section 06. If that application is rejected, or if your license is revoked, you’re forwarded to Section 07: Appeals.
My guide works in Section 03: Legal & Public Affairs. Like most people in the building, she tells me, she’s only been on the job for a few weeks. It only took that long for the agency’s director, Bo Ogada, to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Rumored to be running the fledgling agency from his hospital bed, Director Ogada’s absence has nevertheless left the SCA leadership in disarray, or at least that was the excuse that everyone in Section 01, the executive division, gave for their sudden unavailability.
Or, it could just be because my presence is court-mandated.
I stop my guide before she hits her stride and tell her I don’t want to see Section 06, that I’d rather get a tour of my dentist’s office. Her confusion fades quickly and that bubbly smile returns. She asks what division I would like to see and nearly goes pale when I answer.
***
Fifteen-year-old Michael Kahar doesn’t look like a terrorist. He looks more like the kid you’d ask to help with your algebra homework. Of mixed Irish-Persian descent, he has a mop of dark wavy hair that he keeps pressed behind his ears. Like most self-admitted geeks his age, he has acne and a couple “mods”—temporary genetic alterations. Michael has pointed ears like a Vulcan and deep red eyes streaked in yellow. They are, I’m told, nothing sinister, having instead something to do with a popular video game character.
As I sit with him in his bedroom, he’s polite and soft-spoken. He talks about music and home school and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the electronic bracelet locked to his ankle.
Michael Kahar is a felon. He was convicted last year of Practice with Grievous Intent and Design or Construction of a Device of Mass Destruction. For the rest of his life, he’ll have to answer yes to the relevant questions on every job application he ever fills. He’ll be continuously monitored until his 21st birthday, after which he’ll permanently remain on a secret watch list. He’ll never be given a passport and won’t be permitted to board a plane or cross state lines without first notifying the US government.
All this despite the fact that no one, not even the US attorney who prosecuted him, believes Michael had any nefarious intent. The law doesn’t require it. In the words of the lawyers, it’s “intent-neutral.” All that matters is that Michael constructed a device in his parents’ garage that could contain a quantum-scale singularity—a black hole.
***
She calls but no one answers. She smiles again, awkwardly, and leads me down an enormous subterranean hall that looks like it was built to move oil tankers in secret. And yet, it’s remarkably well lit.
“Why’s it so big?” I ask.
But she doesn’t have an answer. “I don’t know,” she says, perplexed. “No one’s ever asked that.”And the effervescent smile returns. I get the sense she doesn’t go down there much.
At the far end of the hall, she tells me, is the motor pool. I ask why the SCA needs a motor pool, and she doesn’t have an answer for that either. Instead, she stops and points to the large white letters on the wall next to a wide set of double doors, the only set of doors I can see in either direction:
SECTION 08
CRIMES DIVISION
It’s a humble entry to a long rectangular interior that looks like the common area of the MIT dorms. Painted sections on the walls mark in various colors where the builders intended some kind of order: an area for file storage, an area for computer equipment, a small chemistry lab. But the new occupants heeded none of it and set or stacked their equipment wherever there was room. Some of it isn’t even opened.
On a stack of boxes near the door, a snug, translucent blue evidence bag holds what appears to be some kind of home-printed firearm. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. But in true bureaucratic fashion, the bag speaks its own language. It’s marked only with a code: 8PIII-047C.
My guide lifts and removes it before I can get a better look, but I can tell she’s almost afraid to touch it, like she isn’t sure what it’ll do. I wonder if anything has happened to validate her fears.
Three square columns regularly spaced down the center seem like alien intruders among the menagerie of desks and equipment—too smart by half in their drab tuxedos of concrete, like a trio of squares standing stiffly at a rave party.
The room has only one other occupant, an older man with long sideburns and round spectacles. His fingers are thin and move like the articulations of a robot as he pries apart a narrow device on his desk.
From my research, I know him to be Balon Kripke, PhD, formerly professor of theoretical physics at UC Davis.
He covers the device with a rag as soon as he notices us.
***
According to the official statistics released by the National Security Agency, the number of terrorist attacks thwarted by domestic surveillance is exactly zero.
According to the official statistics released by the Science Control Agency, less than one-tenth of one percent of all science license applications, including those filed with patent requests, result in a so-called Action Report.
The issuance of an Action Report isn’t supposed to imply anything dangerous, merely that, upon review of an application, the science in question at least has the potential to be weaponized or otherwise become hazardous to the public such that additional checks are warranted beyond the usual rubber stamp.
But the criteria for issuing an Action Report has not been released. Nor does the Science Control Agency ever intend on doing so. At the time of writing, no less than three separate Freedom of Information Act requests are making their way through the courts, one of which is sponsored by this newspaper.
The Agency claims that to make their algorithm available to the public would undermine public safety since it would allow bad actors to reverse engineer ways of defeating it.
That means, except in the rare case where members of Crimes Division are captured on a site visit, as happened recently on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, the public has no idea what research is flagged, how many of those cases are ultimately decided to be dangerous, or what actions are taken in response.
We don’t know that the criteria are valid. We don’t know how many valid threats they miss. We don’t know if they penalize certain segments of the public over others, such as minority or female scientists. We don’t know whether, at the end of all that time and taxpayer money, the number of legitimate threats thwarted by the Science Control Agency is exactly zero.
***
It takes Dr. Kripke less than three seconds to lead us out of the Crimes Division lab, notably absent its agents, and up to the cafeteria, where absolutely everything is automated. A short wheeled robot, vaguely reminiscent of a 1930s Volkswagen, goes about sliding loose chairs back under tables before clearing their tops of trash.
He dismisses my perky Section 03 guide tersely, but it barely dents her smile. Then he settles down across from me with a cup of black coffee. His movement is so practiced, it’s easy to believe his vision isn’t impaired.
If they know him at all, most people know Balon Kripke as an early member of the Nobel Prize-winning Acuity-X team. The good doctor was much younger then and was kicked off the project before it was completed, meaning his name is not included on the rolls in Stockholm.
He’s an intelligent if anti-social mix of Isaac Asimov and Leon Trotsky: a ponderous man who speaks ponderously of stale revolutions. He loses his train of thought twice while I speak to him, and I get the sense this is his semi-retirement, something to keep him busy after the death of his wife, and that he was only hired to lend the division an air of scientific legitimacy.
He talks in bland descriptors about the agency’s mission before I ask him bluntly if it’s fair what happened to Michael Kahar given that the singularity he created lasted for less than a femtosecond.
“But they were trying to stabilize it,” he explains much too patiently. “To feed it just enough energy to match what it lost from Hawking radiation.”
“And he failed,” I reply.
“In one direction, yes. What if they had failed the other way? What if they fed it too much and it began to expand?”
“The defense team argued Michael was smart enough to design fail-safes, that the machine he built rate-limited energy input such that it was impossible for it to create a feed-forward scenario like you suggest and that therefore there was never any danger to the public and the only reason Michael was prosecuted was to make an example of him.”
Dr. Kripke bowed his head over his coffee in a way that implied his was thinking very gravely about the question.
“It depends,” he said, “on whether you think 15-year-olds should have access to black hole machines.”
“How old were you when you were asked to join Acuity-X, Doctor?”
For the record, he was 19.
I can sense his impatience, and since the court refused my request to specify length of access—just that it not be so long as to inhibit the agency’s work—I get right to the point.
“Part of the evidence against Michael was sealed. Specifically, the court granted the government anonymity of evidence on the grounds that to reveal how they had found him would jeopardize ongoing public safety efforts.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” he tells me. I almost believe him.
I lean forward. “Dr. Kripke, how did Crimes Division know Michael Kahar was building a black hole machine in his garage?”
***
On my way back to town, I drive an hour out of my way just to catch a glimpse of it from the highway. Dr. Kripke’s answer is still rattling in my brain like a loose screw.
Anonymous phone call, he said. I almost believe him.
Then I see it with my own eyes. Rising from a cluster of trees at the horizon, a large, tiled globe blocks part of the sun. I can only see its upper half in glowing silhouette.
A Mandela sphere.
Named by the internet after the so-called Mandela effect, the true origin and purpose of the spheres remain a mystery. But no less than seven have been built: five in North America, one in the UK, and one in Germany.
I drive past it, along with hundreds of other cars, and I wonder if many of them are wondering why the rest of us don’t seem bothered by the strange structure and how no one knows who built it or what it’s for.
But if they do, like me, they drive on.