Kill Decision(103)
She examined one of the dead drone’s antennas. “I don’t know it.”
“It’s an electronic nose that sniffs the air to detect human presence. Apparently there are fifteen chemicals that indicate human presence by the breath we exhale—things like acetone, pentane, hexane, isoprene, benzene, heptane, alpha-Pinene. You get the idea. They appear in a specific ratio wherever people are breathing—the more concentrated it is, the closer people are or the more people there are.”
“You’re saying this technology is currently in use?”
“The detectors were on a microchip.”
She manipulated the articulated antennas on the dead drone. “Then maybe these drones find people in their vicinity by the gases we exhale—just like weavers would detect food. That would actually work well with my model. They could be coded to identify whatever they’re hunting by chemical signature—moving toward greater concentrations of the target scent and away from decreasing concentrations. That relatively simple algorithm is how my model works, and it manifests itself as complex hunting behavior when scaled up to a swarm of stigmergic agents.”
“We were breathing fast. Keyed up. We must have seemed like glowing neon signs to these things.”
McKinney was already looking more closely at the drone’s innards.
The drone had an aluminum tube frame, in the center of which was a wire box acting as ribs protecting the core. There was a stack of computer boards there, vision sensors all around, thin antennas—both leading and trailing—and wiring. Then along both sides were what looked to be steel cylinders—four in all.
Odin tapped them. “Zip guns. These were thirty-eights. They slide in on tracks, so it looks like they can have various weapon loads. The other one had .410 shotgun shells.”
“They’re flying hand guns.”
“Dirt-cheap, highly inaccurate guns—but effective enough in close quarters.”
She examined what looked to be ports in the back. Charging sockets? There were also LED lights, all dead, but curious nonetheless. “If these run on my model, an appropriate number of workers would be ‘feeding’ the others. With weavers they pass along nectar—liquid food. Here, they probably pass along electricity, battery power. There seem to be electromechanical analogs for all the inputs and outputs of weaver swarm intelligence manifested in these things.”
She tossed it back onto the table in disgust. “But it looks like a toy. An evil toy designed by some sick, twisted—”
“Those ‘toys’ nearly killed all of us, and if we hadn’t fled, they would have. Lalenia pulled ten bullets out of our team, and that’s with body armor on.” He rewrapped the drone in its burlap shroud. “These things could be churned out of just about any contract factory in the industrialized world. Shipped anywhere by the thousands—just like toys.”
She looked up at him. “Oh, it’s worse than that. Those inputs and outputs—the stimuli and the response—they can take just about any morphology. These zip guns could just as easily be missiles. Those tiny rotors just as easily jet turbines.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“Ants are what’s called a ‘polymorphic’ species—they have various caste groups that can differ widely in size. For example, Pheidologeton diversus—the marauder ant—has supermajor warriors that are five hundred times the mass of one of their minor workers. And yet they are the same species and operate with the same brain—and belong to the same colony.”
“You’re saying these things could be easily scaled up using the same software brain.”
She gestured to the dead drone on the table. “I’m saying this might just have been a low-cost test version. A prototype. They could easily be made bigger.”
He contemplated this news. “Which means they will be. And I’ll need to take action before that happens.”
“Take action?” she asked. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re all in hiding. The entire military-industrial complex wants us dead.”
“Not the entire military-industrial complex.” He looked calm and sipped his coffee. “Just part of it.”
She threw up her hands. “Oh. Well, then it’s the part that can monitor the FBI, fake your satellite communications, launch killer drones, and manipulate the media.”
He nodded. “Most of the military’s logistics have been privatized. Its computer systems. Its networks. Satellites. But there are still people behind it all, and most people who work in defense are just plain folks trying to protect their country. That’s our advantage. We just need to uncover who’s behind this. And I’m guessing it’s not a large group. That’s the appeal of these machines. They seem like something that would save American lives, but once built, they can be quietly controlled by a small number of unaccountable people. No coffins coming home from their secret wars.” He nodded to himself again. “But finding a small number of unaccountable people is doable.”