Jon Evans - Swarm

“Klaatu barada nikto,” she said. “The master control signal.”

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?”

“It’s not a showstopper,” Sophie said defensively. “It just means I have to tweak the master control signal to account for the differences. I was already narrowing it down when they arrested me. If they’d only listened to me -” She shook her head, frustrated. “All I need is access to some more of their neural networks. With only one I couldn’t afford to take it apart. Give me half a dozen to play with and I’ll have the new signal in an hour. Or get me their source code and I can do it all in simulation in five minutes.”

“All you need is six of their drones,” LoTek repeated incredulously. “Or their source code. Well, that’s not asking much, is it?”

Sophie grimaced. “I fucked up, OK? I made a mistake. What do you want me to say? I know I’m supposed to be smarter than everyone else, but you know what, maybe sometimes I’m not smart enough.” She said it like she was admitting a war crime. “I’m doing the best I can. What more do you want?”

“A little humility, maybe,” Danielle said quietly. “A little humanity.”

Sophie looked at her mystified, as if she had spoken in a foreign language. “What I need is to fix this bug. We need that more than we need to stop the Russians. What they’re doing is just a single instance of the general drone problem. If I can’t fix it… ” She shook her head as if that alternative was unthinkable. “But I can. Honestly, it’s not that big a deal. The new signal will still be somewhere in the mobile-phone spectrum. Once I work it out we just need to get the Americans to give me control of all the USA’s cell towers, and I’ll take down every drone anywhere in cell coverage. We can still solve this problem. We’ve still got time.”

I shook my head, overcome by hope and awe. No one could ever accuse Sophie of not thinking big.

“And how exactly did you expect to convince the US government to give an escaped fugitive control over the country’s entire cellular network?” Jesse asked.

“The fugitive part wasn’t supposed to happen,” Sophie admitted. “But they’re not going to launch the full-scale attack until the G8 meeting. That’s a test to see if we can stop them. We’ve got days yet.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Lisa said darkly. “What do you think the Russkies are going to do after they find out you got busted out of Iraq? After yammering on to your interrogators about how you knew about a massive imminent drone attack and you thought you could still stop it? They might decide to jump the gun and push the button right away, never mind the G8.”

Sophie’s good cheer visibly wilted over the space of about two seconds.

“No, no, no.” I scrambled for a reason that was wrong. “How would they know?”

Lisa rolled her eyes. “Right. It’s not like we’re talking about a huge international intelligence network with a whole herd of moles inside the US government.”

We sat in silence.

“She’s right,” Jesse said. “If I were them, I might hit America right away, never mind the G8. Figure they take a day to find out what happened and make their decision. We have to be ready for them to launch tomorrow.”

“This is not good.” Sophie looked pale, and utterly aghast, as if she was considering the possibility and ramifications of failure for the first time. I wondered if this was what came of spending your life succeeding effortlessly beyond the wildest dreams of others; hubris and feet of clay when you were finally truly put to the test. “If they launch tomorrow then I need both a corrected control signal and the US cell network tonight. Or I won’t be ready to stop them. This is not good.”

Jesse said, “We might be able to get you that last one for free.”

“Access to the entire US cell network?”

“That’s the one.”