Coming Soon Enough: Six Tales of Technology’s Future

  Natalie stared at the kidnapper, who’d asked her to call him Lewis. The food court to which he’d invited her was as busy as she’d ever seen it on a Wednesday night; she had even spotted a few cops. The undeniable fact of their meeting proved nothing incriminating, but how could he know she wasn’t recording his words?

  She said, “You’re not a loan shark.”

  “No.” Lewis had an accent from far out of state, maybe the Midwest. He was a dark-haired, clean-shaven white man, and he looked about forty. Natalie tried to commit these facts to memory, terrified that when the police finally questioned her she’d be unable to recall his face at all. “We’d like you to consult for us.”

  “Consult?” Natalie managed a derisive laugh. “Who do you think I work for, the NSA? Everything I know about drones is already in the public domain. You didn’t need to kidnap my brother. It’s all on the Web.”

  “There are time pressures,” Lewis explained. “Our own people are quick studies, but they’ve hit a roadblock. They’ve read your work, of course. That’s why they chose you.”

  “And what am I supposed to help you do? Assassinate someone?” The whole conversation was surreal, but the hubbub of their boisterous fellow diners was so loud that unless she’d stood up on the table and shouted the question, no one would have looked at them twice.

  Lewis shook his head. At least he hadn’t insulted her intelligence by feigning offense. “No one will get hurt. We just need to steal some information.”

  “Then find yourself a hacker.”

  “The targets are smarter than that.”

  “Targets, plural?”

  Lewis said, “Only three that will concern you directly—though in all fairness I should warn you that your efforts will need to synchronize with our own on several other fronts.”

  Natalie felt light-headed. When exactly had she signed the contract in blood? “You’re taking a lot for granted.”

  “Am I?” There wasn’t a trace of menace in his voice, but then the stakes had already been made clear.

  “I’m not refusing,” she replied. “I won’t help you to inflict bodily harm, but if you’re open with me and I’m sure that there’s no chance of that, I’ll do what you ask.”

  Lewis nodded, amiable in a businesslike way. He, or his associates, had been cold-blooded enough to mutilate Sam as proof of their seriousness, but if they planned to kill her once she’d served her purpose, why meet physically, in a public space, where a dozen surveillance drones would be capturing the event?

  “The targets are all bitionaires,” he said. “We don’t plan to touch a hair on their heads; we just want their key strings...which are not stored on anything vulnerable to spyware.”

  “I see.” Natalie’s own stash of electronic pocket change didn’t merit any great precautions, but she was aware of the general idea: Anyone prudent, and sufficiently wealthy, kept the cryptographic key to their anonymized digital fortune in a purpose-built wallet. The operating system and other software resided solely on read-only media, and even the working memory functioned under rigid, hardware-enforced protocols that made the whole setup effectively incorruptible. “So how can I get around that? Am I meant to infiltrate the wallet factory?”

  “No.” Lewis paused, but he wasn’t turning coy on her, merely hiding a faint belch behind a politely raised hand. “The basic scenario is the kind of thing any competent stage magician could pull off. The target takes their wallet from its safe, then gets distracted. We substitute an identical-looking device. The target commences to log in to their exchange with the fake wallet; we’ve already cloned their fingerprints so we can mimic those preliminaries on the real wallet. The target receives a one-time password from the exchange on their cellphone and enters it into the fake wallet, and we use it to enact our preferred transactions via the real one.”

  Natalie opened her mouth to protest: Her understanding was that the message from the exchange would also include a hash of the transaction details, allowing the user to double-check exactly what it was they were authorizing. But she wasn’t thinking straight: To the human looking at that string of gibberish, the information would be invisible. Only the wallet itself had the keys required to reveal the hash’s true implications, and the fake wallet would blithely pretend that everything matched up perfectly.

  She said, “So all you need to do is invite these people to bring their wall safes to a Las Vegas show.”

  Lewis ignored her sarcasm. “The transactions can’t be rescinded, but it won’t take the targets long to discover that they’ve been duped—and to spread the word. So we need to ensure that these individual operations are as close to concurrent as possible.”

  Natalie struggled to maintain a tone of disapproval even as her curiosity got the better of her. “How do you make all these people get an itch to buy or sell at the same time?”

  “We’ve already set that in motion,” Lewis replied. “You don’t need to know the details, but in seven days and thirteen hours, unless the targets are comatose they won’t be able to ignore the top story on their news feeds.”

  Natalie leaned back from the table. Half her experience, and all of her best ideas, had involved maneuvers on a scale of tens of meters by devices that were far from small or stealthy. Dexterous as a well-equipped quadrocopter could be, sleight of hand was a bit much to ask of it.

  “So do you want me to program robot storks to carry the fake wallets down chimneys?”

  Lewis said, “The fake wallets have all been in place for a while, concealed inside innocuous-looking items.”

  “Like what?”

  “Cereal packets. Once people find a brand they like, they stick to it.”

  “I knew there was a reason I didn’t use my supermarket’s loyalty card. And the drones?”

  “They’re on-site as well.”

  “The wallets are how big?”

  Lewis held his fingers a few centimeters apart. “Like credit cards. And not much thicker.”

  “So...how many dragonflies?”

  “Six at each site. But they’re not dragonflies; they’re custom-built, smaller, and quieter. From a distance they’d pass for houseflies.”

  Natalie crushed the urge to start grilling him on detailed specifications. “So you have a plan. And you’ve got the tools in place. Why do you need me at all?”

  “Our plan relied on real-time operators,” Lewis confessed. “The whole thing seemed too complex to deal with any other way—too many variables, too much uncertainty. All of the sites have countermeasures against radio frequency traffic, but we believed we could communicate optically; some people don’t consider that at all, or don’t make the effort to lock things down tightly.”

  “But...?”

  “In three cases, it looks as if our optical routes have gone from mostly open to patchy at best. Not from any deliberate blocking strategies—just minor changes in the architecture or people’s routines. But it means that a continuous link would be too much to hope for.”

  Lewis’s team had been given the right advice: This was a job for humans. And now she was expected to program eighteen drones to perform three elaborate feats of prestidigitation, using nothing but their own tiny brains?

  Natalie said, “Before we go any further, I want you to prove to me that my brother’s still alive.”

  4

  “I ran into your fifth-grade teacher last week,” Natalie remarked, once the pleasantries were over. “The one you had a crush on.”

  Sam responded with a baffled scowl, too quickly to have needed to think through his reaction. “I don’t even remember her name. I certainly didn’t have a crush on her!”

  However much intelligence the kidnappers might have gathered on the two of them—all the family pets and vacations they’d shared, all the confidences they might have exchanged—there
was no proving a negative. Natalie was sure she wasn’t watching a puppet.

  Someone else was holding the phone, giving the camera a wider view than usual. Apart from his splinted and bandaged finger Sam appeared to be physically unharmed. Natalie refrained from upbraiding him; she was the reason he’d been abducted, even if some idiotic plan to keep the restaurant afloat had made him easier to trap.

  “Just take it easy,” she said. “I’m going to give these people what they want, and you’ll be out of there in no time.” She glanced at Lewis, then added, “I’ll talk to you every morning, OK? That’s the deal. They’ll have to keep you safe, or I’ll pull the plug.”

  “Do you think you can check in on the restaurant for me?” Sam pleaded. “Just to be sure that the chef’s not slacking off?”

  “No, I really can’t.”

  “But Dmitri’s so lazy! If I’m not—”

  Natalie handed the phone back to Lewis and he broke the connection. They’d gone into a side street to make the call; apparently Lewis hadn’t trusted Sam not to start yelling for help if he saw other people in the background.

  “I get to call him every day,” she said. “That’s not negotiable.”

  “By Skype,” Lewis replied.

  “All right.” A Skype connection would be much harder to trace than a cellphone. Natalie was beginning to feel nostalgic for her previous nightmare scenario of loan sharks and intransigent banks. “What if I do my best, but I can’t pull this off?” she asked.

  “We’re sure you can,” Lewis replied.

  His faith in her was not at all reassuring. “There’s a reason your experts told you they’d need human pilots. I swear I’ll try to make this work—but you can’t murder my brother because I fall at the same hurdle as your own people.”

  Lewis didn’t reply. On one level, Natalie understood the psychology behind his strategy: If he’d promised that she’d be rewarded merely for trying, she might have been tempted to hold herself back. She suspected that she’d be unlikely to face criminal charges, regardless, but sheer stubbornness or resentment might have driven her to indulge in some passive sabotage if she thought she could get away with it.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “By the time you get home, we’ll have e-mailed you briefing files. We’ll need the software for the drones by midnight on Monday.”

  Natalie was so flustered that she had to count out the interval in her head. “Five days! I thought you said seven!”

  “We’ll need to verify the new software for ourselves, then install it via infrasound. The bandwidth for that is so low that it could take up to forty-eight hours.”

  Natalie was silent, but she couldn’t keep the dismay from showing on her face.

  “You might want to call in sick,” Lewis suggested.

  “That’s it? That’s the best advice you have for me?”

  “Read the briefing.” Lewis paused, then nodded slightly. He turned and walked away.

  Natalie felt herself swaying. If she went to the police, Sam would be dead in an instant. Lewis couldn’t deny meeting her, but he would have prepared a well-documented explanation in advance—maybe log files showing that they’d been matched up by a dating site. The e-mailed briefing could have come from anywhere. She had nothing on these people that would make them pause for a second before they graduated from fingertips to heads.

  Three targets for her special attention, and many more in the whole blitz. The total haul might reach ten or eleven figures. She’d walked willingly into the aftermaths of hurricanes and earthquakes, but she’d never been foolish enough to position herself—in any capacity—on the route between a gang of thugs and a pile of cash.

  5

  Natalie spent five hours going through the files before she forced herself to stop. She climbed into bed and lay staring into the humid darkness, soaking the sheets in acrid sweat.

  There was no information missing that she could have reasonably demanded. She had architectural plans for the victims’ entire houses, complete down to the dimensions of every hinge of every closet. She had three-dimensional imagery and gait data for every member of each of the households; she had schedules that covered both their formal appointments and their imperfectly predictable habits, from meal times to bowel movements. Every motion sensor of every security system, every insect-zapping laser, every moth-chasing cat had been cataloged. Navigating the drones between these hazards was not a hopeless prospect—but the pitfalls that made the whole scheme unravel would be the ones nobody had anticipated. It had taken her years to render her bridge-building algorithms robust against wind, rain, and wildlife, and she had still seen them fail when grime and humidity made a motor stall or a cable stick unexpectedly.

  She dozed off for fifteen minutes, then woke around dawn. Somehow she managed to fall asleep again, motivated by the certainty that she’d be useless without at least a couple of hours’ rest. At a quarter to nine she rose, phoned the engineering department claiming flu, and then took a cold shower and made toast and coffee.

  The call to Sam took a minute to connect, but then it was obvious from his appearance that his captors had had to rouse him.

  “The job they’ve given me isn’t too hard,” she said. “I’ll get through it, then everyone can walk away happy.”

  Sam replied with a tone of wary optimism, “And the ten grand they gave me for the restaurant? They don’t want it back?”

  “Not as far as I know.” Natalie wracked her brain for another puppet test, but then she decided that she’d already heard proof enough: No one else on the planet could make it sound as if $10,000 sunk into that grease-pit would more than compensate for any minor inconvenience the two of them might suffer along the way.

  “I owe you, Nat,” Sam declared. He thought she was simply working off his debt—the way he’d mowed lawns as a kid to pay for a neighbor’s window that one of his friends had broken. He’d taken the rap to spare the boy a thrashing from his drunken father.

  “How’s your hand?” she asked.

  He held it up; the bandage looked clean. “They’re giving me pain-killers and antibiotics. The food’s pretty good, and they let me watch TV.” He spread his hands in a gesture of contentment.

  “So, three stars on Travel Adviser?”

  Sam smiled. “I’d better let you get back to work.”

  Natalie started with the easiest target. A man who lived alone, rarely visited by friends or lovers, he was expected to wake around seven o’clock on D-day morning and go jogging for an hour before breakfast. That would be the ideal time for the drones to break out of their hiding places in the spines of the first editions of Kasparov’s five-volume My Great Predecessors, which presumably had appeared at a seductively low price in the window of a local used book store. The fake wallet was concealed in one of the book’s covers, along with the sliver of whorled and ridged biomimetic polymer that would need to be applied to the real wallet. Thankfully, Natalie’s predecessors had already done the work of programming the clog dance of drone against touch screen that could mimic a human tapping out any sequence of characters on a virtual keyboard. The jobs they’d left for the pilots had been of an entirely different character.

  The shelves in target A’s library were all spaced to allow for much taller books, leaving plenty of room for a pair of drones to slice into the wallet’s compartment, grab the hooks attached to the cargo, draw it out, and fly six meters to deposit it temporarily in a poorly illuminated gap between a shelving unit and a table leg. The safe itself was in the library, and prior surveillance had shown that it was A’s habit to place his wallet on the table in question.

  The distraction was to be a faucet in the kitchen, primed to fail and send water flooding into the sink at full pressure. The house was fitted with detectors for any ongoing radio traffic—the bugs that had collected the latest
imagery had used multipath optics successfully until a new sunshade had been fitted to a crucial window—but a single, brief RF pulse from a drone to trigger the torrent would appear to the detectors’ software as no different from the sparking when a power plug was pulled from a socket.

  What if target A broke his routine and did not go jogging? The emergence of the drones and the fake wallet’s extraction would not be noisy, so those stages could still proceed so long as the library itself was unoccupied. What if target A had an early visitor, or someone had spent the night? The drones would need to start listening for clues to the day’s activities well before seven. Loaded with neural-net templates that would enable them to recognize voices in general, doors opening and closing, and footsteps receding and approaching, they ought to be able to determine whether it was safe to break out.

  But the surveillance images that showed the five books neatly shelved were three weeks old; it was possible that they’d ended up strewn around the house, or piled on a table beneath other books and magazines. GPS wouldn’t work inside the building, but Natalie used a smattering of Wi-Fi signal strengths collected in the past to equip the drones with a passable ability to determine their location, and then added software to analyze the echo of an infrasound pulse to help them anticipate any obstacles well before they’d broken out of their cardboard chrysalides.

  The doors and windows—and even the roof space—were fitted with alarms, but in the library target A had no motion sensors that would scream blue murder every time a housefly crossed the room. Not even two houseflies carrying an object resembling a credit card.

  Natalie put the pieces together and then ran simulations, testing the software against hundreds of millions of permutations of all the contingencies she could think of: the placement of the books, which doors were open or closed, new developments in the target’s love life, and his peregrinations through every plausible sequence of rooms and corridors. When things turned out badly from the simulator’s God’s-eye-view, she pored over the visual and auditory cues accessible to the drones in a selection of the failed cases, and refined her software to take account of what she’d missed.