The Great Hack: Part One — ATTACK!
On a lovely, warm Saturday afternoon in September 2020 you’ve got the kids packed into your brand-new Volvo XC90 for a drive round to the shops. The traffic isn’t particularly bad, and because you’re running the quasi-legal Enlighten app, you and your XC90 know just how to pace your driving speed so you meet only green lights from home to the front of the brand-new Westfield.
You pull up to the curb — at the specially marked out ‘drop-off zone’ — get out of the car, and slowly remove your children from their various restraints, placing them, one after another, on the curb beside you. Thoroughly decamped, you close the driver’s side door. The car rests for a moment, then — as if it has suddenly realised something — slowly rolls off toward the entrance to the mall’s parking structure.
You see your Volvo join a slow queue of other vehicles — none with drivers behind their wheels. The car park has a special entrance for autonomous vehicles, which it can treat much more cavalierly than those operated by humans. The cars huddle close together, like pre-kindy kids out on a field trip, as they file through the entrance and toward parking spots assigned to them by the IT system servicing the parking structure. As the vehicles enter the structure, they surrender some of their autonomy to the parking structure itself, which has a better sense of where to go and how to get there than the cars themselves could.
It’s free to use this part of the parking structure. But at the other entrance — the human entrance — the per hour price to park your car yourself has tripled, because the liability insurance for a parking structure strongly favours keeping people out of the parking structure altogether.
Your car disappears and you turn away without another thought, walking into the mall. As you pass through the entrance your presence — specifically, the unique signatures broadcast by your smartphone — is detected by an arrangement of beacons that subtly decorate the structure. As you move through the mall, your location and direction of travel are constantly monitored.
Five years ago, when such systems started to be introduced, you might have found them a bit creepy. These days, though, you like the fact that the world around is constantly aware of your presence within it, and doing whatever it can — adjusting the lighting, air conditioning, even the choice of Muzak floating through invisible speakers — to keep things just the way you like it. You and family occupy a little bubble universe of subtle environmental tweaks as you trek between the shops. The shops which are best at listening to your suggestions are the ones where you’re most likely to linger and make some purchases.
The kids are well-behaved. Surprisingly so. You wonder when that’s going to change — it always does — but savour the moment and try to squeeze in a bit more shopping than you might have otherwise. When, two hours later, you emerge at the curb of the pick-up zone, you’ve filled an entire shopping trolley with your purchases. Fortunately, the trolley is autonomous as well, trailing the lot of you at a carefully calibrated distance.
At this point you reach for your smartphone to launch the app that will summon your car from its park. It’s exactly three eleven PM. You remember that, because you’ll remember this moment for the rest of your life.
The first thing that happens is nothing. Your smartphone stays black while you swipe at it and press the various buttons. Has the battery gone flat? You could have sworn you left the house with a full charge. Now you start to wonder how you’ll get your car out of the parking structure without a working mobile. That thought hadn’t occurred to you before.
It’s the least of your worries.
Still fussing with your smartphone, you gradually begin to realise you’re not the only one having this problem. In fact, it would seem that everyone waiting at the pick-up area is in various stages of agitation with their own smartphones. Some are pressing odd combinations of buttons, trying to reset the little beasties. Others, who have clearly had rough days now made worse, start to swear at their dead screens, as if cursing might shock them into life.
It’s weird, and almost a bit funny. For a brief moment.
The first smashing can be felt more than heard, a subsonic strike something like a vast drumhead being struck with a metre-wide mallet, but so quick, you barely even notice it until it’s over. The second one, however, isn’t far behind, and it’s a bit louder. That second thump gives away its location — whatever it was seems to be happening quite close by — in the direction of the parking structure.
At just this moment a car cruises through the pick-up zone at full speed, barreling along at least 100 kmh. It’s only because of some very fast reactions that no one gets hurt as it passes by. As it zooms past, you notice there’s no one behind the wheel.
Before you have any time to process that, another huge thump nearby causes a section of the barrier wall of an upper floor of the concrete parking structure to shear off. A pile of rubble falls to the ground not very far away from you.
Ok, now you’re flipping into protect-the-kids mode. Safest thing is to get them indoors. So you turn them around — they’re not really even scared yet, because they don’t quite know what’s going on — and hustle them toward the mall entrance. Keep them inside and safe until all of this gets sorted out.
You get to the doors, but they won’t open. You pull and push, but they don’t budge. On the other side of the glass, you can see a lot of very desperate people trying to do exactly the same thing. They want out as badly as you want in. Peering beyond them you see a corral of autonomous shopping trolleys scuttering back and forth at high-speed, knocking over everything in their way. The people on the other side of the glass genuinely look like they’re starting to panic.
From behind you, the subsonic thuds and full throttle smashes continue. The entire parking structure seems to be shaking apart under the impacts. That’s pretty much all you can focus on, because by this point, you’re starting to panic too. What’s happening? Why is everything going nuts?
Suddenly, with the god-awful sound of a wall being smashed through at high speed, a vast, black shape leaps free from the top floor of the parking structure, tracing a narrow, accelerating arc down to the ground in front of you, where it lands with such force the windows shatter.
It’s your Volvo XC90.
“The Great Hack” continues in Part Two — FORENSICS
