by John Marrs
“I . . . I . . . don’t believe we have . . .” said the woman in plaid.
“Shouldn’t we have that kind of information before we can make a judgement?”
“Miss Dixon . . .” began Jack, and he walked towards Libby, stopping in front of her. She felt small and insignificant as he towered above her. “Would you have preferred it if the vehicle had calculated a course of action that sacrificed the life of the Passenger and pedestrians to save one foolish girl? Should more people have been made to pay with their lives because of her idiocy?”
Libby bit the inside of her bottom lip to stop it from quivering. “I thought that’s what these inquests were about, to discuss what happened and to make that decision together?” she said. “Today is turning out to be just like yesterday—you’ve already decided on a verdict and it’s never the fault of the car.”
Jack took a step back and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is, what, your second day here? I don’t expect someone like you to grasp the ins and outs of software development. I do, however, expect you to trust what your government has told you. The software used in AI has been embedded with human principles to help to guide the vehicle’s decision-making process.”
The more condescending Jack became, the more it spurred Libby’s defiance. “Are you trying to make me believe AI has the same cognitive abilities as you or me? A car can’t feel sympathy and empathy or operate with a moral code like we do.”
“We have a lot to get through so perhaps it’s best we move on,” said Jack. “Unless anyone has anything else to add that is pertinent to this case, then shall we take a vote?” The others, with the exception of Libby, voiced their agreement.
“If you could please tick one of the two boxes in the corner of the screen—”
A ringing phone coming from the corner of the room interrupted him. One of his assistants answered, and Libby noticed the colour draining quickly from his face.
“Sir,” he directed towards Jack. “We will need to suspend proceedings for the time being.” The hologram disappeared and at a beeping sound, all heads turned towards the large double doors as they unlocked and opened wide. The two bulky security operatives who had searched Libby on her arrival hurried inside, followed by their colleagues.
“Will someone please explain to me what is happening?” Jack asked.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” the shorter of the two security men began sternly. “But a situation has arisen that requires your immediate attention.”
With his own tablet he swiped the screen until a television news channel appeared. He projected it onto one of the television screens on the large wall. It showed a rolling news channel and what appeared to be a distressed woman inside her moving vehicle, scrambling from window to window, banging on the glass with her fists. Libby immediately noticed she was pregnant.
“Who is this?” asked the religious rep. Around the image of the distressed stranger, four smaller screens flickered to life. Each appeared to contain other Passengers inside more vehicles, and all were clearly scared and confused.
“Jack?” asked the woman in plaid, looking to him for answers. Libby assumed by his blank expression that he had no more knowledge than she did. “Turn the volume up,” he said as a female news anchor spoke.
“For those viewers just joining us, we are still trying to verify the validity of this live feed. But if what we are being told is correct, then it appears that four driverless vehicles are no longer under the control of their Passengers. We are still awaiting an official statement, but there is speculation that the vehicles you are watching have been hacked.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Jack said dismissively. “It’s not possible.”
“They’re scaremongering,” the woman in plaid replied. “How can they broadcast this? It’s irresponsible.”
Jack turned to the shorter of the security operatives. “Get me Westminster on a secure line now.”
Libby’s eyes moved from Passenger to Passenger, each of them responding to what was happening to them in contrasting ways. Suddenly, as a fifth screen appeared, her jaw dropped and she struggled to catch her breath.
CHAPTER 12
Global Headlines Foundation
EDITION—UNITED KINGDOM London, April 6
SOFTWARE MALFUNCTION FOUND IN LEVEL 5 DRIVERLESS CARS
Passengers in some British autonomous cars have been reportedly experiencing problems when attempting to exit them.
Footage of distressed Passengers in different locations is being broadcast live on social media by an unknown source. Government transport secretary Harry Dowling has used Twitter to reassure Level Five Passengers there is “nothing to be alarmed about” and that they are investigating.
CLAIRE ARDEN
The voices of the other trapped Passengers offered Claire a tiny shred of comfort that it wasn’t just her being held against her will. But when the sound from her stereo was switched off as quickly as it had begun, her solitude returned. Anxiety tasted like acid repeating on her, so she swallowed hard to hold it back rather than risk having it consume her.
Ben will know what to do, she thought, Ben always knows what to do. She stopped in her tracks—she had momentarily forgotten that she couldn’t call him.
Claire ran through her options. She couldn’t contact the police or her girlfriends for help—that would require too much explaining. It left only one person. Andy. He’s the only one.
She hadn’t seen her estranged brother in person for three Christmases, but they had stayed in touch through vague, sporadic voice notes. However, she couldn’t be sure where he was staying since the parole board had granted him an early release. She could only hope that he wasn’t living too far away. If he answered his phone and she told him the whole truth about what had happened earlier that morning, she was sure he wouldn’t judge her. But knowing him as well as only family could, she had no doubt that he would expect to be financially compensated in return for his assistance and his silence.
“Roxanne,” she said aloud, the name Ben had christened the car’s operating system. He named it after an ex-girlfriend whom Claire had met once and taken an instant dislike to. Ben had thought it funny. “I need you to telephone Andy . . .” But she didn’t get the opportunity to say anything else.
“Communication system offline,” Roxanne replied. Claire made several attempts to repeat the command but with no success.
The realisation hit her hard—there was no way out of that car. She was completely alone. As if to remind her of his presence, she felt her baby kicking inside her again. Claire corrected herself: she wasn’t on her own; she was with her son. And for his sake, she had to survive this ordeal. She would need to protect him like she had never protected anyone else before, even Ben. She could not give up on him.
When her baby wriggled and kicked again, Claire hoped the stress of what was happening that morning was not hurting him. All she could do was put into practice the breathing techniques she had learned in her Lamaze classes. She recalled how both she and Ben had giggled their way through the lessons and how the colour had drained from his face when he was forced to watch a childbirth video. Now, she began with a deep, slow, cleansing breath before continuing with gentle, shallow ones. After a few moments, it seemed to work, and her baby settled again.
“We are going to be okay,” she whispered to him, her hands gently massaging the football-sized shape of her stomach. “Just stay calm and we’ll find a way out of this. We have managed to get this far; we’re not giving up now.”
Claire gave a furtive glance towards the rear of the car and the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up on end. “Mummy’s going to do whatever it takes, no matter what.”
CHAPTER 13
It can’t be!” Libby whispered, staring at an image on the screen and scarcely able to believe her eyes. She tilted her head as she gave him an unrelenting star
e and tried to regain control of her breathlessness. She ignored the other Passengers and confusion in the inquest room to concentrate on just one face.
The person you’ve spent six months searching for is trapped inside a driverless car.
The rational side of Libby’s brain took charge and questioned whether it was really the man she met in the bar six months earlier. Was her mind playing tricks on her? Or was it someone paying him a very close resemblance? She couldn’t be sure.
Slowly, she took in his appearance. He was slimmer than she remembered him. His cheekbones were more pronounced and his eyes drained of the sparkle she so clearly recalled. But she was sure that if she were in his position, the shine would have left her eyes too.
The only way she could be sure she was staring at the right man was if she heard him speak. His lips were moving but no sound was being emitted from the speakers in the room. Libby considered sharing her news with the other jurors, but the confidence she had conjured up moments earlier to argue with Jack had vanished as quickly as it arrived and taken her voice with it. For now, she would hold her tongue.
Libby looked away from the screen, momentarily distracted by the operative responsible for beaming video footage onto the largest of the walls. He frantically swiped the screen of his tablet in all directions before reaching for the stenographer’s device and repeating the action. “Nothing’s happening,” he said. “I don’t understand it. I no longer have any control over what’s being shown.”
“Then who does?” his colleague asked. He shrugged.
Meanwhile one of the security men handed Jack a telephone. He strode towards the doorway and hovered under the architrave out of earshot as all eyes fell upon him, awaiting a logical explanation for what was being broadcast. It was clear from Jack’s slowly reddening face and expanding veins on either side of his thick neck that he was losing his patience.
“Well, find someone who can tell me!” he barked, and hung up.
“Jack?” asked the only other male juror. “What’s happening?”
Jack took a moment to gather his thoughts. “This has yet to be confirmed, but there’s a possibility a handful of vehicles may have been . . . temporarily compromised.”
“What do you mean by ‘compromised’?” asked the religious rep.
“Are you saying they’ve been hacked?” her male colleague chipped in.
Jack said nothing, and Libby felt her stomach tighten into a fist-sized ball.
“I am not saying that is what has happened; I am saying that it is a possibility something along those lines may have occurred. I am awaiting further information from my colleagues in the Home Office and the Ministry for Transport.”
“Hacked?” the woman in plaid repeated. “But that doesn’t make any sense. These vehicles are unhackable. That’s what we were told from the very start, isn’t it?”
“It’s how you persuaded the public to place their trust in driverless cars,” added the dark-haired man. “Cast-iron guarantees were made that because vehicles only communicate with the outside world when they have to, there’s no continuous line or cloud to be hacked. Are you telling us now they can be compromised?”
“I’m sure this is nothing more than speculation and rumour,” Jack replied, but his thin smile disappeared quickly and he struggled to mask his concern.
Suddenly, another of the twelve television screens became filled with an image: this time of an elderly man with a handful of medals pinned to the left breast of his jacket. His body language contrasted with that of the others—he appeared relaxed as he stared from the windows of his moving vehicle.
“That makes six of them,” the male juror commented just as the sound feed to the TV news channel returned.
“And we have just had government confirmation that the people you are watching have had their cars taken over by a third party, but by whom and for what purpose, we do not yet know. All we can tell you is that they all appear to be travelling from different parts of the country to the same destination. Police have also admitted each Passenger has also been warned they may end up dead by the end of the morning.”
“Dead?” gasped the religious rep, and turned to Jack. “You just this minute said it was only a possibility those cars had been hacked! These people are now, what? Hostages? Do you even know what is going on out there?”
Jack could no longer hold back his frustration. “Why am I hearing this from a news channel and not from any of you?” he yelled at the nearest member of his team. “If cars on my roads are being hijacked, then why am I the last to hear about it?”
“We are trying to identify who is in each car and the makes and models being driven in the hope the manufacturers can find a way of bringing them to a halt remotely.”
“In the hope?” said Jack. “Don’t give me ‘hope,’ give me results. And why has nobody from my own office called me back? Get me the Government Communications Headquarters online now.” Jack pinched his eyes and shook his head as the assistant scurried away.
“There’s number seven,” the dark-haired man noted as another petrified face filled a screen, this time a woman of Asian origin.
“When is it going to stop?” asked the religious rep. “Who are these people? How are they being chosen? Why are they being targeted?”
“Shouldn’t you be praying for them instead of asking so many bloody questions?” snapped Jack, and stared at the phone in his hand.
“Number eight,” the dark-haired man continued. A woman wearing a hijab appeared inside another screen. “How many more will there be?”
Libby spotted Jack’s hands curling into tight fists, his eyes burning with rage. “For God’s sake, I can see what is happening. I don’t need a running fucking commentary! I need you all to shut up so that I can think.”
“Isn’t that Sofia Bradbury, the actress?” asked the woman in plaid.
“No, it can’t be,” the religious rep replied. She perched on the end of her chair to get a closer look. Meanwhile the news channel focused on Sofia and compared it to stock footage of her in an acting role. “You’re right. Well, I’ll be . . .”
She was interrupted by the news anchor. “The footage we are about to broadcast has been taken from social media sources. It contains the moment each of these people, who are now being referred to as the Passengers, was informed of what is happening to them.”
Each pair of eyes in the room was directed towards the largest of the screens as Claire Arden climbed into her car before it pulled away. Soon after, a voice informed her of her hijack. More Passengers’ stories followed, and all were similarly informed they were facing a death sentence. They reacted with a combination of disbelief, fear, and confusion. Libby felt for all of them, but one more above the others. Him.
She absent-mindedly twisted a silver ring around her finger over and over again until his clip finally began to play. The Hacker called him Jude and when he replied, she listened intently to his voice. “Who is this and how did you get my number?” he asked. It was the confirmation she needed and dreaded in equal measure.
It is you, she thought.
CHAPTER 14
Libby didn’t know how to react. She wanted to grin, cry, scream, and bang her fists on the table, yelling how unfair it was. But she knew she must keep a firm grip of her emotions. She had to process what she knew about Jude before she revealed her truth to a group of strangers she didn’t much care for.
Jude, she repeated to herself—he now had a name. It was like the Beatles song her brother Nicky played often. She couldn’t help but wonder if only she’d heard Jude’s name the night they’d met, perhaps she might have located him sooner. Then he might not be on the screen ahead of her, locked inside a car, threatened with death. Each Passenger’s name now appeared on their screens, and suddenly they became people and not anonymous faces.
“Updates, now!” Libby jumped as Jack bellowed across the
room.
“The National Cyber Security Centre is trying to trace the servers where the live streaming is coming from,” said one of his team. “But they could be located anywhere, re-routed through numerous countries. And even if they do find them, it’s unlikely they’d be in an enforceable jurisdiction.”
“Well, order the news channels to pull the plug on their coverage. The public doesn’t need to know any more about what’s happening than what’s already been reported. It’ll only make things worse.”
“We have no influence over them.”
“We do when it’s an act of terror. Who do I need to talk to about an immediate news blackout?”
“But it’s not just this channel, Mr. Larsson, it’s every major news station on terrestrial, cable, and satellite. Even if they’re all taken off-air, people will be able to watch it online as everything is also being broadcast as it happens on social media. Facebook Live, its own TV channel, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube Live, Instagram Stories, IGTV, and Vevo . . . and they’re only the major ones. There are countless other start-ups . . .”
He ceased talking at the sound of Jack’s telephone ringing. Moments later, his employer’s conversation ended abruptly and Jack emitted a long breath.
“I have been informed that this incident is now being treated as a critical attack on our country,” he said.
“Who by?” asked the dark-haired man.
“No faction or political group has yet to step forward. I’ve been informed that everyone available at GCHQ is working on this as a priority. They’re getting assistance from the US and Russia too.”
“There must be a procedure in place in case something like this happens?” Libby asked. Jack narrowed his eyes but it didn’t stop her questions. “Surely there’s a plan B for everything?”
