H!GH N00N
Within four hours of the hijacking, Lloyd’s Unmanned Transport Division assigned their top investigator to review the security drone’s final transmission, streamed via VPN from the DHL Risk Mitigation Datacenter. After an hour of examination, she detected an irregular disturbance in the wheat field next to the road down which the attacked convoy had been traveling. Looping the video, Miles saw what looked like an irregular wake moving through the wheat stalks at the last trailer’s 5 o’clock. After all, air is a liquid, just like water. But that was no breeze. It was… something.
Nine more minutes of staring at infrared video of wheat stalks on repeat and she had the bright idea to pull up the opposite view at the same time index. Sure enough, thirty seconds before the quarter-mile-long, automated long-haul convoy was hit, she saw a second “wake” at the convoy’s 7 o’clock. Whatever had done it, were at least two of them. Like predators.
The feed played out one last time, the monochrome turning to static at 02:52:14 HLT in a flash of bright, infrared light that leapt out from the mystery wake at 5 o’clock. The beam had fried the drone’s omnidirectional photon receptors; a fraction of a second later the drone’s internal monitors had reported it tumbling end-over-side, six micro-turbofans spinning out of control, uncoordinated, and finally plowing into a field sixty miles west of Iowa City.
Perhaps it had been one of those new Ruger directed energy rifles.
Total cost of the investigation was to be less than $200,000. The commercial invoice value of the container was approximately £17.5 million — a rounding error in the daily budget of this particular Lloyds subsidiary — and she was simply tasked to figure out what had happened in order to modify the movement protocols for the rest of the fleet and prevent similar attacks. The technical resources, travel to the incident site, and additional travel to the data center, she was running out of money and had other tasks back at headquarters. Time to wrap things up.
The recommendations, sent in a blockchain-encrypted document to her executive supervisor was to emplace a second human security guard (“co-pilot” was the euphemism of choice) at the rear end of each convoy, and a second drone at a higher altitude (2500 feet), though that would require DHS approval. Total cost would be an additional $5.53 per convoy-mile, or approximately one ten-thousandth of a cent per pound — which would of course be passed on to their customers.
Back in the ‘aughts, the smart money had gone in to pure code. 1’s and 0's that could be scaled out to every man, woman, and ’bot on the grid. Not that it was rocket science but people understood that all it took was a few keystrokes and your product behaved differently worldwide. Entire companies could be modified in minutes, whereas in meatspace you had to bring in consultants, trainers, and any number of managerial accoutrement to bring about the same kind of organizational change. Want your baristas to pour cream first, then coffee? It took $15 million of instructional videos and strategy sessions with your global team of semi-competent middle managers to “bring everybody on board”. One of the luminaries at the time had said that software was “eating the world” — many hadn’t fully thought through the full implication of the metaphor. Kodak. General Motors. Sony. Analog companies broken down by computer science wielded by sharp twenty-somethings.
Then came the “automa” revolution.
Prognosticators had thought for decades that “robots” would take over for human beings, like some 21st century Zeus, with progeny in his image. That made sense in fiction, not on a balance sheet. Once the MBA’s got involved, people realized that servos and opposable thumbs weren’t nearly as effective as software and advanced industrial control systems.
Humans weren’t replaced by humanoid robots, they simply disappeared. Replaced by upgraded electronics and SATCOM uplinks that distributed processing power from massive cloud-based machine intelligences whose tendrils wove across global sensor networks, gently guiding things like 50-container long-haul trucking convoys across the vast expanses of middle America.
Industries transformed in less than a decade to the point where they, too, could be optimized with an afternoon’s A/B test. Direct human operators were no longer needed, replaced by the same 1's and 0's that had turned friendship into searchable data-sets to be mined and re-marketed.
The truckers had taken it particularly hard. Many of those put out of work had gone on to find other types of employment. Though their new jobs were not so fantastic as driving across the pristine Continental divide with a hundred thousand pounds of sneakers or steel forms in a large corrugated metal container dragging behind the PETERBILT cabin, some picked up local work like non-consumer last-mile delivery, which for insurance purposes still required manual observation. Some of the younger ones found stable work as low-level artificial intelligence assurance inspections confirming that yes, Siri, that is a cat photo, and the like. But with a culture steeped in chemical modulation, independence and solitude, 9–5 jobs helping computers better pretend to be human didn’t exactly result in stable workforce transitions. Some turned to crime.
Outside of Iowa City, the target had been their replacements: vast convoys that now snaked their way across the country, solar-charged powertrains guided by global positioning satellites, LIDAR, and one or two human “co-pilots,” at the front whose job was, essentially, to testify in any potential insurance litigation that might arise (AI’s still made for poor witnesses).
The attack itself had been fairly straightforward. The robbers, like their 19th century industrial-age predecessors, had good intel, and knew the copper pipes were in the last rolling container. After taking out the convoy’s situational awareness drone with a rifle-fired electro-magnetic disruptor node, they deployed two of their own drones with small onboard chemical lasers. A simple maneuver program brought the drones into the seam between the last two “cars” on the convoy, and simply melted through the connectors. The final container-car drifted back from the convoy as physics and its electro-mechanical safety protocol (“if disconnected, slow to a stop staying within road lanes, move to shoulder if possible”) worked its magic.
The two quad-rotor air cycles that had slipped in behind the train simply maneuvered into position, disabled the navigational and communications relays onboard, and dragged the errant container to an off-book recycling/decompiling facility outside of Iowa City, where they melted down the copper and deconstructed the container. They mixed in a few commonly utilized alloys to anonymize the resulting molten liquid.
It wasn’t a lot of money, but for the “Four Horsemen” (as they had taken to calling themselves) the $3.5 million split five ways, with their fence getting the final portion, paid out in the latest cryptocurrency made for a nice little payday. There was always a market for anonymous molten copper.
H!GH N00N is a collaboration between Ian Crone and Joshua Steinman, both of whom recently separated from Active Duty with the United States Navy. They served together on a special task force that advised senior officers of the impact of emerging technologies on the theory and practice of war.
