He barked a laugh. “Yeah. We can sure can pick ‘em, eh?”
I shook my head ruefully. “It’s almost funny. Ortega kills the head of the DEA and a hundred people in New York, and now this crazy octuple presidential assassination -“
“Some of them are prime ministers. I think one’s actually a chancellor.”
“Don’t distract me with details. He kills the leaders of the free world so he can showcase his super-duper killer new technology to would-be customers,” a rationale that still seemed insane but was the only one available, “and meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, everyone who’s anyone already had it the whole time.”
“Yeah.”
“But what do you care, right? You’ll be cheering him on from the sidelines. Death to the Presidents! Down with the governments!”
“Hey,” he said sharply. “Being libertarian does not mean I support anyone’s murder, not even a president. And even politically I do not want Ortega to succeed. Far from it. From a proper perspective a few politicians less makes no difference, but if the G8 get whacked, I guarantee you governments everywhere will use it as the excuse for some seriously draconian fascism, and most of the sheep will be so scared they won’t even argue. Half will probably fucking applaud. We need him to fail if we’re going to have any chance at success.”
“Success?”
Jesse didn’t answer.
I decided to table that for later. “So you do want to stop him.”
“Sure I do. If we could.”
“But we can.” I took a deep breath. “I can. With the override sequence. That’s why I have to turn myself in.”
Jesse gave me an oh-for-God’s-sake look. “James, I am terribly sorry to be the bearer of such awful news, but there is still no overwhelming need for you to crucify yourself. I seem to recall that Sophie knows at least as much about the override as you do, and she’s working with the Americans now.”
“Is she really.”
“Well. Theoretically. Who knows what the fuck she’s really up to. But the G8 meeting begins in Greenwich in five days. You think you can make them listen to you before then? Nuh-uh. If they found out you’re not guilty, they would very quickly figure out that Sophie is. And that means she’ll have already manufactured nine different proofs of your guilt. Every system she’s ever built has multiple redundant levels of security. No way they’ll believe you.”
He was right, but – “How else are we supposed to stop him?”
“Maybe we could do it ourselves.”
“Right,” I said sarcastically. “Of course. I mean, not that I don’t admire your libertarian do-it-yourself ethos. But I happen to have more faith in the collective efforts of the British and American governments and their billions of dollars and millions of people and entire fucking militaries than your little network of would-be John Galts. Call me a crazy deluded socialist.”
“Fair enough,” Jesse said, unruffled. “But why not have both? Like I said, we can warn them without turning you in. I don’t know what you’ll have to add, honestly. There’s already all kinds of chatter that whoever hit New York will attack the G8 next. Probably mostly from conspiracy theorists who happen to be right for once, but they’re already taking that threat seriously.”
I stared at him. “Then they should cancel the meeting. Or move it.”
“They can’t. Imagine how that would look. The eight most powerful men and women in the world hiding from a nasty rumour? Might as well have everyone huddling in mineshafts forever. So they’re still going to hold it, but the security will be insane.”
“The security will be
“I know. Not that we know of. They’re already working on anti-drone drones, and by ‘they’ I mean a team headed by your girlfriend, using her Axon architecture of course. But I can’t see them being ready by next week.”
“Just for the record,” I said bitterly, “I’m not really still thinking of her as my girlfriend. Selling me out to a drug cartel that tortures people to death for fun is kind of a big relationship no-no in my book.”
“You’re so judgmental.”
“What can I say. My surname is Kowalski and my given name is James and there is a slight flaw in my character.”
He smiled at the reference and switched back to the subject of killing drones. “An electromagnetic pulse, maybe. That would knock them out of the air. Like Haiti.”
“Maybe. But multiple swarms, coming in at staggered times – they wouldn’t stop them all. And the bombs are triggered by impact, they’d still go off.”
Jesse shrugged. “Maybe there’s something else up their sleeve, but nothing we’ve heard about, and we hear about most things.”
“Right. Grassfire. Remind me again how exactly you conjured up this vast global conspiracy of top-secret informants? You went backpacking through hacker spaces around the world and they all just popped out of the woodwork?”
“Yes, exactly,” he said tartly. “No, of course not. We’ve spent years encouraging people who believe in liberty to seek out positions close to the gears of power, especially technical positions, and report on what they learn. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t just me. It wouldn’t have been possible without Anya’s uncle’s money. Also.” He took a breath. “You ever heard of a hacker named LoTek?”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah. Sophie told me once you were friends.”
“Grassfire is his baby as much as mine.”
“Huh. You ever heard of two other hackers?” I asked, remembering Dmitri’s tale of how he had gotten Sophie’s technology. “Shadow and Octal?”
“I think Anya used to know them. Black hats. Why?”
“Ortega bought his neural nets through them.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Makes sense Sophie didn’t deal directly.”
I made a noise that might have sounded like a laugh. “Says you. Nothing she did makes sense to me.”
“Did she ever tell you how she knew LoTek?” Jesse leaned forward. “How when she was still a teenager she got recruited into helping with illegal medical research that killed hundreds? She was just a kid. She was doing it for her father. I’m not saying she hasn’t changed. But still. It speaks to a certain callous disregard that I don’t think she’s yet outgrown. I think we’d both agree our Sophie doesn’t necessarily put much value on a single ordinary human life. That’s what scares me.”
I couldn’t argue with that either. “So what are you going to do? When you talked about success before, what did that mean?”
“Freedom,” Jesse said simply. “You see what drones are doing to the world already. Now try to imagine ten years from now, when they’re smaller, and smarter, and there are millions of them. They could be great equalizers, the most powerful weapon for individual liberty ever discovered. But if one person, one organization, can control all of them, which is exactly what Sophie is trying to do by giving away her technology and keeping her override, they’ll become a tool for tyrants that makes Orwell look like a pleasant daydream. Surveillance drones, killer drones, who knows what they might turn into in ten, twenty years’ time. Genocide drones? Pandemic drones? Thoughtcrime drones?” He shook his head seriously. “You understand the stakes here? We’re talking about the future of humanity. No joke. We can’t let that happen. No matter what the cost.”
I raised my eyebrows. Jesse had always had megalomaniacal tendencies but I had never heard him frame himself as the messiah before.
“I mean it, buddy.” He looked grim. “This is some seriously apocalyptic shit.”
Could he actually be right? It was true that by seeding her neural networks around the world Sophie was playing a game with the whole globe as her chessboard and colossal repercussions, win or lose. Might history look back on it as the beginnings of the ultimate struggle for the mankind’s future? Despite Jesse’s rhetoric, that didn’t seem likely – but I had to admit it wasn’t completely out of the question.
I couldn’t imagine why Sophie could have done what she had done, betrayed me, cut secret deals with nations and drug cartels and terror groups. Was Jesse right? Was she a power-mad sociopath? I couldn’t believe that.
