I had helped to kill them. I had tested the software that had murdered more than a hundred people. Central Park had been a cluster attack, the subway a tunnel attack, exactly what I had trained those drones to do.
I put the newspaper down with shaking hands and stared dumbly up at Dmitri. One hundred dead. I thought of Oppenheimer’s famous quote: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Sophie was Dr. Frankenstein, I was the sorcerer’s apprentice, and the world was reaping the whirlwind we had sown. It had taken a hundred innocent lives already, and I already knew there would be many more to come.
“What you will not read in that newspaper, but is also true,” he said, “is that the Americans have learned that you have been working here with us.”
“What?” I could barely speak, these were too many shocks at once. “How?”
“We told them.”
“You… ” My voice trailed off.
Dmitri smiled. “They think they have a source in the fringes of our organization, but in truth, we have a voice in the heart of theirs.”
Every time I thought things couldn’t get worse, they got worse. Ortega had a mole somewhere high in American law enforcement. That explained how he had known Sophie and I were in Haiti.
“But why?” I looked back at the New York Times with growing horror. The reality of its catastrophic news was still only beginning to filter into my brain. “What possible reason? You just killed a hundred innocent people. For what?”
“Innocent of what exactly?” Dmitri asked, with his twisted smile. “It’s important you understand, James. This binds you to us forever. Even if we were to let you go tomorrow, the American will hunt you until death. They think of you as Ortega’s chief lieutenant, his technical genius.”
“You mean they think I’m you,” I muttered.
“Neither of us are geniuses. But that doesn’t matter. They will never believe your innocence. Do you understand? This is your life now. We are your people, now and forever. The sooner you accept this, the better.”
I didn’t answer.
“Come,” he said. “Let me show you.”
There was a TV in a room that opened onto the courtyard, the room where the keys to the vehicular fleet were kept, and where the guards hung out. I followed Dmitri there, shambling more than walking, my mind still reeling from the enormity, the insanity of the news. Manhattan attacked, a hundred dead, because of me.
I looked at the iron ring I wore on my little finger, a ceremonial prize given to all engineering graduates in Canada, built from the steel of a bridge that had collapsed, meant to remind us that lives might depend on the decisions we made. I hadn’t even forgotten that. I had known, and I hadn’t cared.
CNN’s anchorwoman sounded brittle and distraught. “Many viewers may find the footage we are about to display deeply disturbing. We feel it is our duty as a news organization to depict important news even when it may be traumatizing.”
After that warning, what they actually showed wasn’t that bad, obviously edited to remove onscreen violence and gore; but the images still stabbed through me like rapiers. Grainy cell-phone footage of a drone whizzing through a subway station. More professional shots of spindly drones wheeling over Central Park. Chaotic, shaky-camera footage of panicked New Yorkers in the park, and the sound of an explosion, followed by screams of pain and fear.
“Why?” I demanded again, my own voice quavering. “What possible reason -“
Dmitri shrugged. “Ask Ortega himself, if you like. Tomorrow he will be here.”
Chapter 46
I sat in my room and stared at nothing. I couldn’t stop thinking about New York. I tried to distract myself, tried to play video games with numb fingers, but moments later what had happened hit me again like an electrical shock, and I grunted as if struck by a hammer. I remembered walking through Central Park. I remembered standing in the 116th Street station with Sophie, after she had given a talk at Columbia University. I couldn’t help but envision the drones soaring down the subway tunnel, and diving into the densest crowds of humanity in the park. My ears replayed those awful screams I had heard on CNN again and again.
That night I knocked on my door until one of the guards on patrol let me out, and convinced him to take me by Dmitri by the simple expedient of repeating the Russian man’s name.
Dmitri’s room was much like mine, but almost pathologically clean. He answered his door dressed in underwear and a MONSTER 666 T-shirt. It was a popular brand in Mexico, at least among drug cartels; the stack of threadbare clothes they had brought me included two such shirts.
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.
He nodded curtly, dismissed the guard in Spanish, motioned me in. The room had been built for double occupancy: two beds faced each other across a narrow central corridor. We each sat on one. Dmitri took a swig from a half-full bottle, passed it to me. It was vodka. He was already half-drunk, in an overly controlled way.
“What is it?” he demanded.
I took a deep breath. It was time to feign Stockholm syndrome, and hopefully earn some trust. What I was about to do seemed like high folly, like discarding a trump card – but then, I had already proven that I wasn’t willing to play it. And a hundred innocent people had already paid the price for that cowardice.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “About what you said. Me accepting being here for life. I decided, there’s something I should tell you.”
“I’m listening.”
“There’s a kill switch. A command that will disable any of your drones.”
He didn’t look surprised. “Yes. We were wondering.”
“Whether it existed?”
“If you would tell us.”
I nodded slowly. “Well, I’ll tell you what it is. You’ll want to blacklist it from your network, filter it out before it reaches the drones.”
Dmitri smiled in a superior way. “No need.”
I was flabbergasted. “You already knew it?” Only Sophie and I had known the kill-switch syntax. If they knew, then she had told them, which in turn meant that she was the one secretly retraining their drones -
“No,” he said, shattering that particular theory. “We’ve whitelisted the network. Only a fixed subset of commands are allowed through. Everything else is filtered out.”
Like a cell network that only allowed full and proper words in text messages. I opened my mouth and closed it again. That meant the override sequence, my last hope, would likewise be eaten by their radio network before it ever reached the drones. Dmitri was right. There was no escape.
“How did you find out?” I asked.
“Our secret friends among the Americans.”
I noted his use of the plural. Every time I thought it couldn’t get worse. I consoled myself that at least the deaths in New York were less my fault than I had thought; if I had tried to trigger the defanged kill switch when I had the chance, I would only have condemned myself to death for nothing.
“I’m glad you told us, James. I’m glad to see you are beginning to understand your situation.” Dmitri’s voice was strangely avuncular. “You will soon see that there are certain advantages. Over time we will expand your liberties. Think of this as a probationary period.”
“Right,” I said. “It’s just another job.”
“Exactly.” He remembered something amusing, and his twisted smile reappeared. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. A little tidbit you might appreciate. Do you know how we trained the Axons for New York? We used a copy of Gangs of Gotham‘s virtual world.”
I shook my head, amazed and appalled. Gangs of Gotham was a massively multiplayer online game set in an exact virtual reproduction of New York City, down to individual buildings and trees. They had connected that simulated world to the neural networks’ visual inputs and taught them what routes to take, how to recognize their target territory. They had used a video game to help kill real people.