“This isn’t abstract,” LoTek argued, “this is the future of humanity -“
“This is the future of humanity,” she said, reaching down to touch her own belly gently. “You’re not talking about abstract lives, you’re talking about our baby’s survival. Do you understand?”
Her normally soft voice had a razor’s edge. Nobody dared to reply.
“The immediate problem,” Danielle resumed, soothing again, “the concrete problem, is that Sophie, you need some of their drones to experiment on. And our best bet is probably their factory. Right?” Sophie nodded. “If you can’t do that, then this whole other dispute is completely theoretical anyways. So why don’t we agree to put it aside until we get to the point where it’s actually relevant to the real world?”
Jesse nodded, and quoted Heinlein: “When faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, and then look at it again.”
“I think the problem is we understand this problem perfectly,” Sophie said.
Danielle rolled her eyes. “Yes, of course. You’re all much too brilliant to even imagine that your ideas might be wrong or incomplete or prematurely conceived.”
“I’m not,” I said cheerfully.
“Me neither,” Lisa added.
Jesse, Sophie and LoTek remained resolutely silent.
“Question authority,” Danielle told them. “Especially when you’re the authority.”
Sophie asked her, “What do you think we should do?”
Silence fell, as if Danielle’s vote might decide the issue.
“First, I want you all to lose the hubris,” she said. “Second, I don’t want anybody killed for the sake of a philosophical principle. I almost hate to say it,” she looked apologetically at her frowning boyfriend, “but I’m on Sophie’s side here.”
His expression tightened. Sophie looked triumphant.
“Which makes the vote two to two,” Lisa mused. She looked at me. “Suppose James and I voted the same way. That would be two-thirds. A supermajority. Would that be good enough for all of you? Would you all agree to abide by that decision?”
The offer hung in the air. None of the three geniuses at the table seemed particularly impressed by it.
“Let’s focus on finding that factory,” Danielle said. “Worry about later later.”
LoTek looked at Sophie. She nodded. He responded with a curt nod of his own, and re-opened his laptop. Lisa and I exchanged a relieved look.
“All right,” Jesse said briskly. “All we know is that there’s a drone factory somewhere in the Jebel Ali free trade zone, south of here between the palm peninsulas. That’s a pretty big haystack.”
“Pretty big factory, too,” Sophie pointed out. “A drone assembly line and a chip fabrication plant? Even with today’s tech you’d need major real estate. We might be able to narrow it down to the largest properties from satellite shots.”
LoTek shook his head. “That zone is full to bursting with huge factories and assembly plants.”
“We could go through public records and see who’s hiding something -“
“Sophia,” he said acidly, “do me the courtesy of imagining I’ve thought about this problem myself once or twice over the last few days. Half of those factories are owned by obscure Asian companies, all of whom are paranoid about industrial espionage. I would have found any obvious red flags already.”
“Then what’s your big idea?” Sophie demanded.
The British hacker shrugged, frustrated. “It was shipping. We know drones go out in containers with false manifests, dressed up as drilling machinery. But before they reach the port they go through several layers of middlemen, few of whom seem to keep their real data online, if they keep it at all. I was going to try to salmon-jump up that chain this week, but in one day? With records written in Arabic or Russian? Not likely. Only so much you can do from behind a laptop.”
“What about your drones?” I asked.
“Fresh out. Used everything we had on this side of the pond breaking you out of Anaconda. Not that I’m starting to regret it or anything.”
Sophie gave him a look. “Don’t do me any favours.”
“That include retroactively? Like that time I decided not to strangle you to death?”
“Wait,” Jesse said, suddenly alert. “They scan the shipping containers how?”
LoTek shrugged. “Bar codes, probably.”
“No. Bar codes are two years ago.” Jesse actually cracked a smile. “You’ve gone all software on us, buddy. Time to come back to the dark side.”
“Hardware is Mulligan’s remit. And dilettante dabblers like you.”
Jesse held his smile, but its cheer withered at that disrespect from an intellectual superior. I supposed it hadn’t happened much in his life. “Specialization is for insects,” he shot back. “Shipping containers use RFIDs now.” Radio frequency identification, pronounced arphids. “If we could get a drone, we could mount an RFID detector and fly it around -“
LoTek cut him off. “First, we don’t have any drones. Second, you couldn’t mount a detector with sufficient range. Third, containers are highly fungible and we don’t know which ones to look for.”
A dejected silence fell.
“Come on,” Sophie said, “it’s a huge fucking factory, there has to be some way to find it.”
But the silence continued unbroken. Nobody seemed to have any more ideas, and the clock was ticking. We had no leads to the factory, and if Jesse was right, the Russians might launch their attack tomorrow.
“Never mind the factory,” Lisa suggested. “What if we lured some drones to us?”
“Might not be a bad idea.” Jesse looked speculatively over at the squat metal box the size of a bedside table with winking LEDs and a flared cannon-like barrel mounted on top, connected to the body by thick metal cables. It looked a bit like a steampunk blunderbuss atop a cyberpunk fridge. “We do have that homemade EMP cannon. Should knock out drones at a hundred metres.”
“And scramble everything else electronic within fifty feet,” LoTek pointed out, “after which it takes two minutes to recharge, during which we’re at the mercy of any follow-up. If we broadcast our location I somehow doubt they’ll be kind enough to send exactly the right number of drones for us to skeet shoot and test. If we put out a honeypot they’ll blow it to smithereens and keep sending more until we’re all dead.”
Danielle said, “They might not even bother with drones. Not long ago a Chechen dissident was murdered in a hotel near the gold market here. By Russian assassins, everyone assumes. I really don’t think it’s a good idea to tell them we’re in town.”
Jesse conceded the point. “Then what?”
Nobody had an answer.
“This ultimately might not be a solvable problem,” LoTek said grimly. “We need more data, we don’t know how to get it, and we don’t have much time.”
I looked at Sophie’s face, hoping for some sign of a brilliant insight. But she didn’t look thoughtful. She looked it was beginning to dawn on her that her whole world, our whole world, might slowly be coming apart.
“Jesus,” Lisa said. “I can’t believe this.”
Nobody said anything.
“Maybe they won’t do it. They’ve just been testing the waters, right? They won’t really want to launch a major military attack. Kill thousands of people and start a war for no good reason.”
LoTek shrugged. “Who knows? It’s the one chance they’ll ever have to knock out and maybe replace the world’s hyperpower, so I wouldn’t bet my life against them taking it. The men who run Russia are as vicious as they come, and risk-takers by nature, you don’t get to the Kremlin without taking a few chances. And who is the US going to declare war on? One of the big problems with drones is that you can’t prove who sent them. I expect there are whole disinformation campaigns ready to point to the Chinese, or the Iranians, or both, as the real masterminds. And that’s if the Americans can get their act together at all. The USA might be the most powerful nation on earth, but it’s not a resilient society. Hit it hard enough and it really might just fall apart.”