Sophie stood and stretched. Her powerful brain was trapped in a fragile body: she suffered back spasms sometimes, and doubling over for an extended period like she had at the microscope wasn’t good for her. She had bad lungs, too, and the air here was damp and dusty. I gave her a concerned look and was relieved by the quick head-shake that indicated she was fine.
“What’s a neural network?” Harrison asked.
“A computer built like a brain,” I oversimplified. “Better than traditional software at pattern recognition and other kinds of artificial intelligence. But you can’t program them like other computers. You have to teach them and let them evolve.”
Reyes looked at me like I should wash my mouth out with soap for telling such baldfaced lies. Okocha looked very grave. Harrison seemed to feel this was all a waste of time. I felt a little guilty at being the bearer of complicated news, and decided not to brag that Sophie was arguably the world’s foremost expert on the subject of neural networks. Instead I looked back at the charred debris on the metal table.
Something familiar caught my eye. I picked up a small and ragged rectangle of white plastic, about a half inch by a quarter inch. A smeared and shining blob of what might once have been copper circuitry was faintly visible. The perimeter had maintained enough of its shape to show that a clean diagonal notch had once been cut across one of its corners.
“This looks like a SIM card,” I said. “From a cell phone.”
“Not from the victims,” Martinez looked interested. “Their phones were mostly intact. You think maybe they planted another one? For targeting?”
I shook my head. “I bet they built a phone into the drone. Then they could control it remotely anywhere there’s a cell network.”
“Control it how?”
“Maybe some homegrown text-message protocol,” I guessed. “That might be something you could track. But I imagine they covered their trail. It isn’t hard to get anonymous prepaid SIM cards.”
“Let me get this straight.” Reyes sounded like she thought I was making this all up. “Kostopoulous was murdered by a flying bomb, triggered by a built-in cell phone, and if I understand you correctly, controlled by an
“A very stupid artificial intelligence,” I said defensively. “Like an insect brain. Not really that much smarter than a Roomba. It can fly and navigate, but that’s about it. It’s actually all old hardware. Smaller and faster than it used to be, but neural nets are decades old, and the military’s been using UAVs for more than ten years now. What’s new is the software.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century.” Sophie sounded amused. “May you live in interesting times.”
“Thanks so much,” Reyes said sardonically. “Just for future reference, us law enforcement types like our times as boring as possible.”
“You said it looked like your work,” Okocha said. “How much like your work?”
Sophie shrugged. “Just in broad outlines. Literally. As in the way the chip is laid out. It’s too damaged to make out any details. Where’s the other drone you’ve got? The mostly intact one? We’ll learn a lot more from it.”
Everyone looked at Martinez.
“Ah,” he said uncomfortably. “Regarding the other drone. There exists a small logistical difficulty. It crashed in the north, in the jungles near Santa Marta, where it was found and reported to the police by a
“Peasant farmer,” Reyes translated.
“Now the interior ministry -” He shrugged awkwardly. “They say the drone is theirs, and they will not allow it to be brought back to Bogota until they receive guarantees that they will maintain jurisdiction.”
After a moment Reyes chuckled bitterly, and indicated the wreckage on the table. “Just like how you guys wouldn’t let us bring this to the USA. Don’t it just suck to be hoist on your own petard? So now we’re stuck using high-school microscopes to analyze this, and you can’t actually show us the drone that hasn’t blown up. This would be fucking hilarious if friends of mine weren’t busy dying while you guys sorted out your bureaucratic clusterfucks.”
I supposed she meant Kostopoulos. I hadn’t realized they were friends.
“I did not say we cannot show you the other drone,” Martinez said, stung. “We can. But you will have to go to it.”
“Where?”
“At the moment it is being kept near where it was discovered.”
“In the jungle?” Okocha asked, incredulously.
Martinez nodded curtly.
Reyes switched to Spanish, in which she and Martinez exchanged what sounded like angry epithets before she turned to the rest of us, shrugged, and said, “Apparently there’s a Blackhawk ready to take us right now.”
Harrison rolled his eyes. Okocha sighed. Like Reyes, they seemed to accept this new journey as an irritating but acceptable complication. I was not quite so sanguine. It was one thing to be brought to an airbase near the capital city, quite another to be taken into trackless jungle populated by heavily armed rebel armies and cocaine cartels. Sophie looked uncertain too.
“Don’t worry,” Reyes told us. “The area’s been secured. We’ll have an escort of elite soldiers. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
Chapter 4
The sleek helicopter loomed almost invisibly against the night. Inside everything was painted black. There wasn’t quite enough room to stand. The seats were made of canvas and metal pipe. Once all thirteen passengers were aboard and strapped in – me, Sophie, Reyes, Okocha, Harrison, and eight hard-faced Colombian soldiers with assault rifles – the doors slid shut, the engine roared to life beneath us, and the rotors began to turn, slowly at first, but soon blurring into invisibility. The noise was so loud I suspected only my earplugs were saving me from permanent hearing damage.
Sophie gripped my hand hard enough to leave fingernail bruises as the ground fell away smoothly, like riding an elevator. To the east dawn pearled behind a huge city backdropped by green-clad mountains. Bogota, I supposed. Traffic lights winked like fireflies. We rose as high as its tallest skyscrapers. It was strange and thrilling to be an integral part of an international military operation. I felt a little like a weekend hockey player accidentally promoted to the NHL.
The helicopter raced north along a muddy river, across a huge savannah carved into a checkerboard of farmland and pasture, over little towns just beginning to wake, until we reached the edge of the country’s vast central plateau and descended towards the lowland. Here civilization was interspersed with vast swathes of unbroken green jungle. The ride was amazingly smooth.
I looked over at Sophie. She released my hand and forced a smile. I did the same, and looked away again.
It was so hard to believe that she was deceiving me. When we were alone together Sophie was mostly wonderful, sweet and playful, capable of an infectious and childlike joy in the world. She could be patronizing and dismissive, but she was, after all, much smarter than me, and she tried to check those instincts. She told me often that she needed me, that I was her anchor, her rock. Only three days ago I would have said she had never been dishonest to me about anything.
As was so often the case, it was the coverup rather than the actual transgression which had betrayed her. I would never have suspected anything had I not discovered, while using her Mac for some video editing, that she was using the Tor anonymous proxy service to prevent her Internet usage from being tracked to her computer.
My curiosity piqued, I had examined the traces her web browsing had left on her computer. I was no genius, but I was a capable computer engineer, with a degree from Canada’s most prestigious technical school; and I found that she had been accessing Yahoo! Mail. We had been dating for three years, living and working together for two, and she had never mentioned any such account.
So I installed a packet sniffer on our network. An electronic spy that let me read copies of all the unencrypted data she sent and received. It was an awful thing to have done, and I wasn’t proud of it. But on some level I had
