I nodded slowly. She had sought to infect criminals, terrorists, and militaries – while seemingly empowering them – with a deadly next-generation weapon that was secretly a Trojan horse, in order to singlehandedly save the world from the nightmarish future she had foreseen. A scheme of incredible scale and breathtaking arrogance.
“Control,” LoTek repeated. “Which means what exactly when it’s at home?”
“Oversight and authority over all drones and drone technologies, worldwide. There’s no alternative. Otherwise we’ll have anarchy that makes Somalia look like Utopia. Assassinations, wars, atrocities, unstoppable, anonymous, forever.”
A brief silence fell.
Jesse broke it. “Bullshit.” He sounded coldly furious. “‘Oversight and authority’ means ‘tyranny.’ What you call anarchy is liberty as described by fearmongers who can’t stand the notion. Drones are only the great threat if you’re a tyrant. For everyone else, they’re the great equalizer. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about, keeping ultimate power for yourself.”
“I am not!” Sophie objected, equally irate. “You think I’m doing this for me? I am not going to keep the leash. I am going to very publicly turn it over to a small and trustworthy group who will use it only responsibly if they use it at all.”
“Small and trustworthy group. You actually want to create every conspiracy theory’s worst nightmare. A little group of men and women sitting around a baize table somewhere, secretly controlling the world. Only a matter of time before they or their heirs decide to end all dissent forever.”
“Nothing secret. Public knowledge, public oversight, public everything.”
“It doesn’t matter whether people know who their rulers are.” LoTek rasped, unimpressed. “In most fascist states the fascists are only too happy to remind them. What matters is that the knowledge which gives them that power will still be secret.”
“Secret knowledge doesn’t mean you can’t have checks and balances.”
“Yes, it inevitably fucking does,” Jesse protested. “There’d be some crisis, manufactured or not, and they’d get authoritarian, then draconian, then totalitarian. You’d condemn us all to an Orwellian future for the sake of so-called stability.”
“Jesse, you have to put down your libertarian-coloured glasses. It’s a crazy philosophy. It might be nice in theory, but it doesn’t work. You’d condemn us all to bombings and assassinations everywhere, bloody back-and-forth vendetta massacres, a positive feedback loop death-spiralling into total chaos. That’s not liberty. That’s disaster. That’s the tyranny of the violent over the peaceful.”
“Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither.”
“Don’t be an idiot. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about whether it’s a good idea to give away nuclear weapons in Cracker Jack boxes. Because autonomous swarms of drones are no less dangerous.”
I thought they were crazy to be arguing philosophy when the destruction of America was imminent. I also thought Sophie was right. You only had to look at how much trouble today’s drones had caused. The drones of tomorrow would be smaller, sleeker and cheaper, and the subsequent generation deadlier yet. Making that technology available to anyone and everyone, as Jesse wanted, was a recipe for carnage. Much better to leash it. But how?
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Sophie said. “Once the Russians launch, the rest of world will understand how big the dangers are. In the long run it might even help. The only way to construct a new world order is to prove that it’s necessary.”
“A new world order?” Jesse asked, aghast. “You’re going to just let the USA burn, twelve thousand drone attacks, total infrastructure collapse, who knows how many dead, to construct a new world order? What the fuck?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t intend to let them succeed.”
“How exactly are you planning to stop them?”
“Klaatu barada nikto,” she said. “The master control signal.”
Chapter 73
LoTek, Jesse and I said in unison, “What?”
“The back door. The real back door. My leash. I told you about the override in Haiti because it was better than nothing and easy to explain,” Sophie said to me, “but I always knew it might be filtered out. The real back door is that all Axons are built to respond to a particular radio signal. The chip itself is the antenna. Get me a radio transmitter and any Axon drone within range is mine.”
I inhaled sharply. The chip itself is the antenna. “Of course. Of course.”
The laws of physics told us that radio waves induced currents in conducting devices. Computer chips were usually shielded so that only very powerful radiation could actually warp their behaviour – like the leaky power lines which had knocked out that drone in Haiti – but the effects of radio waves on them were still measurable, if minute. Traditional computer chips communicated only via physical inputs and outputs, and had to connect to external antennae to receive wireless signals. That was axiomatic, so obvious that nobody even thought about it.
But neural nets could be trained to react to any kind of signal. Meaning that they could be their own radio antennae.
Jesse and LoTek looked equally stunned. It was one of those brilliant ideas that were both entirely unforeseeable in advance and incredibly obvious in retrospect.
“Sorry,” Lisa said, “I’m not a techie, I’m not sure I’m following.”
“Think of a drone as a cell phone, and the neural net as its SIM card,” Sophie said. “With me so far?” Lisa nodded. “Usually you have to use the cell phone’s built-in antenna to communicate with it. But the bad guys own the antenna, and can filter out your signal. My master control signal bypasses that and gets picked up by the SIM card directly. If the neural net’s in range of my transmitter, I own it, simple as that.”
I remembered what Jesse had said of Sophie: Every system she’s ever built has multiple redundant levels of security. In this case because she had seen all this coming for years. Not this particular disaster, but she had understood that one was inevitable, a logical ramification of increasingly cheap and pervasive drone technology.
Maybe Sophie hadn’t been lying all the times she told me that she was sorry, that she loved me. Maybe she had just thought the stakes were so big that she couldn’t afford to let her feelings for me affect her actions. She had treated me as expendable, used me, deceived me, almost gotten me killed – but all that was almost understandable, if not forgivable, in light of her ultimate intention of rescuing humanity from itself. Megalomaniacal, maybe; but not necessarily wrong.
“What if they shield it?” LoTek asked.
“Their loss. If an Axon is fully shielded against all radio signals, in its own Faraday cage or something, after some time it shuts down.”
“So to stop the Russians,” I said, “we just need to transmit your master control signal across the entire United States and take over all their drones, right?”
Sophie hesitated. “In theory, yes. There’s just one small problem. I tested it on that chip of theirs we recovered in Colombia. And it didn’t work.”
We stared at her.
“They must have inadvertently tweaked it when they redesigned it. That wasn’t supposed to be possible, but… ” Sophie shrugged. “I don’t know. Different substrate, subtle design changes, who knows what happened. Live and learn.”
“Live and learn?” Danielle asked, appalled. “You deliberately distributed incredibly dangerous technology to violent groups all around the world so that you could control them with your leash, then you find out that it doesn’t actually work, and all you can say is ‘live and learn’? My God, it’s been nine years since Kishkinda, haven’t you learned anything?”