Cyber Rogues (22 page)

“Yes I did.”

A gleam of unabashed malevolence came into Wescott’s eye, He was going to enjoy this exercise. He rubbed his palms together and stooped to use the tools that Chris had left on top of the bench.

“Want a hammer, Frank?” Ron called.

“That’s crude,” Wescott called over his shoulder. “I’ve never found a machine yet that I couldn’t outsmart.” And that’s why you’re here Frank, Dyer thought to himself.

Frank began with a simple trick. He removed a cartridge just as Chris had, and then located the connection from the Datastrip to the widget-maker’s processor and jerked it out. Then he removed a second cartridge. With the connection to the supervisor broken, there was no way that the supervisor could deduce that the second cartridge had gone. Frank wanted to know what it would do when the drone replaced the first cartridge and nothing happened.

The same drone as before emerged from its cell and did its party-piece. The widget-maker remained paralyzed.

“Don’t tell me it’s quit,” Wescott said scornfully. “A kid of two could have thought that one up.”

“Not on your life,” Hayes replied.

An electric-toaster drone came out, hovered alongside the computer-in-distress and plugged itself into an auxiliary test socket. Silently it communicated its findings back to the supervisor and the supervisor thought about the situation.

“It’s called in the flying doctor,” Chris mused.

A spherical drone, bristling with lenses, joined in the act next and proceeded to drift slowly back and forth a few inches from the honeycomb, rotating turrets to switch in different viewers while it studied the scene from all angles. The doctor unplugged itself and backed off to hover a couple of feet back, uncovering the point where the cable that Frank had disconnected was hanging an inch away from its socket. The scanning drone zeroed in immediately and a few moments later a crab drone descended and restored the connection. After that it was pure routine for the cartridge-injecting drone to do its thing again and the widget-maker was back in business.

“Come on, Frank, what’s the matter with you,” Ron jeered. “I thought you were gonna outsmart it.”

“Electrons one, humans nil,” Chris declared. “Round two coming up.”

Frank gritted his teeth and turned back to study the layout with a new respect. “Okay you bastard, you’ve asked for it!” he growled.

This time he didn’t bother trying swapping cartridges around. Obviously the drone would be designed to extract duds as well as inject replacements, and would therefore be just as capable of swapping them back again. He disconnected every cable he could find both at the machine’s control computer and within the mechanical labyrinth of the machine itself. But after a brief conference between the supervisor, the sphere drone and a scurrying-crab drone, all the cables were plugged in again. He traced the main data cable that connected the local computer to the machine, disconnected it at both ends, undid its restraining clips, removed the cable completely and threw it in the trash bin; a tubby, jolly-looking drone bustled down to attach a new cable and the crab showed off its versatility by nudging the cable into the restraining clips and snapping them shut. The audience were joining in the spirit of the game and suggested cutting cables, filling disconnected sockets with resin cement and flattening the pins of plugs with pliers, but after some debate they concluded that things like that would probably be of no avail; if the drones could replace cables, they could no doubt replace broken cables and fouled-up components just as easily. Hayes confirmed it and they believed him.

Frank tried a new approach. He disconnected the main drive motor of the machine, then used a spanner to dismount the whole motor and heaved it out of the machine completely. It was heavy and he needed both arms to hoist it. Everybody watched with rising suspense as the sphere drone fussed back and forth around the machine inspecting the damage. Surely there was little that the drones could do about that. The supervisor worried in silence for a long time, and Frank began to look grimly satisfied.

And then a drone larger than any they had seen so far trundled itself out along the floor. Obviously this one didn’t fly. It was about the size of an upright chair and looked something like a cross between a lawn mower and a forklift truck. As they watched in astonishment, it rolled across to the far side of the lab and slid its lift underneath a spare motor that was lying on a low shelf while the sphere drone followed it and hovered nearby, presumably to act as eyes. Then fork lift trundled back to the machine, jacked the motor up to the height of the mounting flange, and an extending ram pushed the motor off the lift and slid it neatly onto the studs. While the fork lift held it another drone secured it with a rotating nut-driver bit, after which crab drone restored the electrical connections and immediately the widgets started flowing again.

Frank got mad, stamped around to the rear of the wall modules and put an axe through the Datastrip rib. A garbage-disposal drone walked along the wall astride the rib, lifting it from the surface, cutting it into twelve-inch lengths and stacking them on its back while a strip-laying drone spun a new one behind it, followed by a chattering crab drone which fastened the new strip securely to the surface. Frank used an RF probe to measure the field being radiated from the strip to control the drones, and tried jamming it with an oscillator-fed antenna, but the supervisor simply changed frequencies faster than he could match.

In the end he did win, but only by deactivating the supervisory computer. It was a hollow victory, however; if the machine had been controlled through a network the size of TITAN instead of from a single computer isolated on a lab bench, the controlling processor could have been any one of thousands located anywhere. Deactivating that would have achieved nothing since the network could simply have substituted another.

When the demonstration was over, Dyer addressed the faces around him, which had become very quiet.

“Some of you might be wondering why we should bother giving the System things like this to defend itself with at all if it’s going to make our job more difficult. Why not simply lay off making drones in the first place?” A few puzzled heads nodded. “But there really isn’t anything especially significant about the drones,” he told them. “They just represent a situation in which the System has greater control over resources and over itself than anything we’ve seen with TITAN. In years to come there will be lots of other things around besides drones. The question is, if we ever gave a system autonomy comparable to this on a global scale, how far could it go in using it in ways that we never intended it to? That’s what we want to find out.”

“Is there any chance that these things could end up being used as weapons if the System turned nasty?” one of the CIM people asked.

“It’s a possibility that we have to allow for,” Dyer replied. “Fred and his crew have been working with the Japanese on developing some specially modified versions that use a number of methods to deactivate or destroy other drones. They can be operated independently of the System if need be, for example via lasers or wires as well as by radio. So if it does turn nasty, we can send in our own antidrone drones after its troops anywhere they can go. I think that when you’ve had a chance to see what we’ve got and play with them, you’ll find we’re in pretty good shape.

“You all know that the Janus System will be a step ahead of TITAN in terms of managing a whole planet. It will have control over the life-support, power distribution, transportation and that kind of thing, so obviously it could play a lot of unfriendly tricks if it ever recognized us as adversaries and discovered our weaknesses. Well, we’ve put a lot of work into analyzing the kind of things it might possibly do, and we’ve built in all manner of safety overrides to make sure we always have ultimate control over it. You’ll be seeing more of those over the next few weeks and until then don’t worry too much about it. Janus will be full of things that we’ll know about because we put them there, but the System won’t.”

A chorus of mixed murmurings broke out on all sides as he finished speaking. In the middle of it.

“You’re telling us the dumb bastard isn’t going to outsmart us, right?” Frank called out.

“Right!” Dyer told him and grinned. Everybody laughed and the atmosphere at once became more cheerful.

Later on, when some of them were having a nightcap in the Officers’ Mess, Ron turned to Chris. “What if Fred’s antidrone menagerie isn’t up to it? D’you figure an M25 could stop one of those things?”

“No problem,” Chris told him. “It’d drill straight through one of those tin cans.” Somehow his tone failed to echo the confidence of his words. He sat back and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then added, “Although to be honest, I wouldn’t mind having a Gremlin handy as well . . . just in case.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Up on Janus, work had been racing ahead at full speed ever since ISA obtained the official go-ahead to begin their program of special modifications. The early days of the project saw numerous clashes between the ISA technical teams who produced the plans and some of the senior military officers responsible for carrying them out. The military were daunted by the extent of the work called for and protested that the timetable set was impossible. The ISA people maintained that these fears were without foundation. It all stemmed, they said, from the military’s failure to appreciate fully some of the fundamentals of large-scale structural engineering in space as opposed to on a planetary surface, and to recognize the advances that had been made in automatic-fabrication technology over the previous decade. Everything would smooth itself out once the crash training program organized by ISA started yielding results and the first batch of army engineers came to grips with the real situation on Janus instead of imaginary ones in places like the Pentagon.

And it turned out that ISA was right. Most of the problems associated with putting up something like the Tokyo Bay Bridge or the mile-high tower cities in Europe resulted from maneuvering structural units into position against their own weight and holding them there until enough other units had been anchored in place to secure them. In space there were no such problems. Immensity could be bought very cheaply and concepts of scale that would have staggered the imagination of many architects at the close of the twentieth century were becoming commonplace. Lattice frameworks of aluminum and steel were assembled by automatic welding and riveting robots that worked nonstop for weeks at a time, slowly crawling out into space at the ends of the metal skeletons growing behind them. Shell sections to cover in the skeletons were formed by spraying successive layers of aluminum vapor onto enormous inflated balloons of the correct shapes. Huge as it was, the basic structure of Janus had taken shape in less than six months from the date Detroit was completed. That had been in the early 2020s. It was fitting out the inside that had occupied the years since then.

They built Pittsburgh first, to receive and process the raw material coming up from the Moon. Then they extended the main axis to form the Spindle and built Detroit around it, thus equipping the growing station to transform the ingots, girders, sheet and strip coming out of Pittsburgh into the tens of thousands of different types of parts that would be needed for the rest of the structure. Except for its prototype on Icarus B, Detroit without a doubt represented the most advanced concentration of mixed automatic manufacturing technologies that mankind had assembled in one place. The loads of gray and brown powder unloaded by the catcher ships flowed into Pittsburgh, through to Detroit, and emerged as everything imaginable from ceilings cast out of air-blown foundry slag and glittering draperies spun from tinted translucent fiberglass to plates of reactor shielding and liquid-cooled power transformers. The Spindle grew onward from Detroit and sprouted the Hub, after which came the spokes and finally the Rim. The solar collector and Earthward microwave transmitter originally planned for Icarus C were supposed to be constructed at the other end of the Main Spindle, below Pittsburgh, but this phase of construction had been aborted before it began, when the decision to use the station as Janus was made.

The comprehensive and efficient manufacturing capacity available in Detroit made possible the supply of parts needed for the Janus modifications, for which the military had failed to make adequate allowance. On top of this, they had based their calculations on the assumption that the labor would have to be carried out solely by the pilot teams of ISA and service engineers sent up to Janus, plus the reinforcements that would arrive in successive waves as the project gathered momentum. What they didn’t take into account. were the drones, which was understandable because at that stage they hadn’t known very much about them.

The Japanese consortium responsible for developing the drones had been less than forthcoming on the subject of progress, mainly for reasons of commercial security. The potential value of the drones in situations where manpower came at a high premium had been recognized at an early stage, however, and a few selected individuals from the Japanese Division of ISA were kept fully informed of developments. After all, ISA was destined almost certainly to become one of the biggest single customers. Over the next few years a number of senior officials in other parts of ISA were brought in on the secret as well, after signing strict nondisclosure agreements. Melvin Krantz had been one of these privileged few. So, when the magnitude and implications of the project became clear, he knew exactly where to go to mobilize a solution to that particular aspect of the problem. The Japanese had been reluctant at first, but conceded that the drones were practically through the development phase and about due for preproduction testing, which could hardly be kept under cover for long anyway. Finally they yielded to pressure from the Japanese Government, which in turn was acting under pressure from the Supreme Council in Geneva. Within a matter of days, manufacturing data on drones were beamed up to Janus and the first models began rolling off the assembly lines in Detroit.