The Media Candidate – politics and power in 2048

CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Ultimate Identity

  In spite of the technical success of Project Dagger, the Asp was still concerned about a deficiency in the overall strategy. He’d wanted to disguise the hardware so that it could be manufactured and integrated into the robots by the vendor from whom the robots were procured. After several trials, however, it was determined that such a charade would fail and that the risk of the robot’s true mission being discovered outside of COPE was unacceptably high. He retreated to the less-desirable fallback position of modifying each robot in-house to perform the “enforcement” function.

  The modifications were refined to the point where a single technician could install the required injection device, rewire the harness, replace a few ICs, reprogram a few EPROMs, update the software, and test the totally integrated device in a realistic test range in the second basement. This young, hard-working technician could complete two such systems each week. The Asp wanted to keep the involvement at this critical stage to a minimum so it would be easier to decommission the activity at the desired time.

  In a nearby lab, several engineers diligently worked at building a totally different kind of robot that could perform precisely the modifications to the spiders that this technician was doing. The engineers knew only the mechanical, electrical, and control system characteristics of the device to be installed, not its function. These engineers would then instruct the technician how to teach the new robot its specific assembly and test tasks.

  The new robot would be able to complete six to eight modified spiders per week since it did not also perform such human overhead functions as eating, sleeping, and watching TV. In addition, the rework rate was near zero since the robot-building robot nearly always did the job exactly right the first time. When the time arrived for the transition from manual to automated spider modifications, the young technician was promised a promotion to a senior technical slot in the Advanced Systems Development Lab immediately following the month-long training, orientation, and debugging period for the new robot.

  On the last day of this shakedown sequence, the young technician was in the test range with the last spider to be tested. The transition testing had gone quite well. There were several bugs that were discovered and corrected early in the period, but since then the new robot had performed flawlessly. Each one of its modified spiders had passed all tests and had been assigned to a special computer, which dispatched it with its instructions.

  The final spider was nearing completion of its testing. The young technician noticed that the spider somehow looked different when it walked across the lab, but he was unable to decide exactly what the difference was. He’d never seen it before, but it was so subtle that he could not decide exactly what the difference was. He watched it walk. He watched it start. He watched it stop. He started and stopped the spider several times. There was something about the way it started to walk that didn’t seem right. Then it came to him. Every other spider had led off with its right front leg. This one began with its left. It seemed very odd to him, so he made a note of it in his data-log comments. But it was getting late, so he dismissed it as unimportant. If it passed all the tests, it must be okay.

  The final examination of a spider was a rigorous test of its capabilities. Since its function was to carry out silent assassinations, it was important for it to be agile enough to climb things and let itself into locked buildings and silently search strange and darkened interiors in preparation for its lethal injection. At another extreme of its duties, it must be able to run down a fleeing victim with stealth and accuracy.

  In the last planned activity of the test series, the spider was to run the length of the test range at maximum speed, avoiding or overcoming several moving and fixed barriers, and attack and inject a humanoid that was attempting to avoid the attack. After successfully completing that exercise, the spider returned to its station while the young technician sat at a computer console summing up the test series. The spider paused as it passed the hard-working technician whose back was to the graduate. It unsheathed the injection needle, leaped onto the technician’s back, and it sank its venom-dripping fang into young technician’s neck.