Three Laws Lethal

by David Walton

  “Mr. Daniels, do you have any evidence that Ms. Brighton’s car was controlled remotely by a shadowy government agency and crashed into Mr. Copeland’s vehicle on purpose?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have evidence that any external agency was directly involved in causing the fatal crash?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any evidence that any Mercedes car has ever, on any occasion, been controlled remotely for any purpose?”

  “No.”

  “So the software you were at such pains to explain to us, however interesting, has no bearing on the death of Mr. Copeland.”

  Tyler smiled. They had laid a trap for Sullivan, and he had just blundered right into it. “On the contrary,” he said. “That code had everything to do with it. It requires the software to repeatedly check the satellite radio for signals during the crucial processing cycle when split-second decisions are made. That secret remote control slowed down the car’s reaction times, and was therefore directly responsible for Mr. Copeland’s death.”

  Sullivan gaped, completely blindsided. He opened his mouth to ask another question, and then closed it again.

  “Mr. Sullivan?” the judge prompted. “I’m here,” he snapped, angry now. “Mr. Daniels, you claim the slowdown was responsible for the crash. Do you have any evidence that this is the case?”

  “You mean, would Mr. Copeland have lived if the car’s algorithm hadn’t lost those critical few moments? That I can’t say. No one will ever know that for certain, because it didn’t happen.”

  Sullivan’s voice dripped with scorn. “So this is just speculation on your part?”

  “The primary loop is wasting time checking for input from the satellite radio. That’s not speculation.”

  Sullivan locked eyes with him, and a small smile played across his face. “Mr. Daniels, have you ever worked professionally as a software developer?”

  “I’ve contributed significantly to the open source software community. I’ve written code for projects that are used professionally in corporations around the world.”

  “But have you ever worked as an employee for a company, writing software?”

  “No. But thousands of professional software developers—”

  “Restrict your comments to answering the questions I ask, please, Mr. Daniels. Have you ever written software for an employer?”

  “No.”

  “In fact”—Sullivan made a show of examining his notes—“working for Ms. Karelis is the first job you’ve held since leaving school, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But in the software world—”

  “How old are you, Mr. Daniels?”

  “Objection!” Lauren stood smoothly to her feet. “Your honor, how is the witness’s age relevant?”

  “Plaintiff’s counsel has presented this man as an expert witness,” Sullivan said. “I’m exploring the breadth and duration of his expertise.”

  “Overruled,” the judge said. “The witness may answer the question.”

  “I’m the same age Page and Brin were when they wrote the Google search algorithm,” Tyler said. “I’m older than Mark Zuckerberg was when he started Facebook. I’m older than evan Spiegel—”

  “Just the number, please,” Sullivan said.

  Tyler stared at him, defiant. “I’m twenty-four.”

  It surprised him how much that stung. Sullivan had asked the question to call attention to his youth, but to Tyler, twenty-four was old. Zuckerberg and Spiegel had dropped out of college to start their companies. They’d been billionaires by Tyler’s age. Page and Brin started Google as PhD students at Stanford. Yotta Cars had been Tyler’s ticket into that world. Instead, he was here, interpreting somebody else’s obfuscated code in a lawyer’s back room. He felt like his dreams had passed him by.

  “Did you ever plan to start a company?” Sullivan asked. Tyler couldn’t answer for a moment. Could the man read his thoughts? Was he intentionally rubbing his face in his failures? “Yes,” he said.

  “What was that company?”

  “A transportation service company, using self-driving cars.”

  “And why were your plans abandoned?”

  Tyler took a deep breath. “Brandon Kincannon, the other founder, decided to break our association.”

  “And why was that?”

  Lauren came to his rescue with an objection. “Your honor, the question calls for speculation. Mr. Daniels can’t be expected to speak to the motivations of another person.”

  For once, the judge sustained her objection, and Sullivan tried again. “Didn’t your plans fail because of a demonstration of your software that went badly wrong?”

  “That was part of it, yes.”

  “Isn’t it true that your software was incompetently written?”

  “No, that’s not true. It was—”

  “So badly written that your cars killed a young woman?”

  “No! We were hacked! My software was fine.”

  “Fine? Your software instructed four cars to drive at top speed through the body of a twenty-one-year-old girl. You think that was fine?”

  “No!”

  “Do you think someone would want to hire a programmer who wrote software like that?”

  “No. Yes. I mean—”

  “Do you think this court should accept as a software expert someone whose software—”

  “Objection!” Lauren shouted. The judge looked at her, but she seemed uncertain what objection to make. “Counsel is badgering the witness,” she said finally.

  “Overruled,” the judge replied. “Counselor, repeat your question for the court.”

  Sullivan smiled and spoke in a softer voice. “Do you think, Mr. Daniels, that this court should accept as an expert witness someone whose autocar software was so badly written that it killed a young woman during a staged demonstration of its capabilities?”

  Tyler took a deep breath. Lauren had warned him about this, about getting caught up in the rhythm of the opposing attorney’s questions. He was supposed to take his time, think clearly, answer calmly. “I am an educated and experienced software professional,” he said. “Everything I have said about the Mercedes code is not a matter of opinion, but of fact.”

  “No further questions, your honor.”

  Lauren did her best to repair the damage on redirect, giving Tyler a chance to describe the software he had written and the places it was currently in use, but he doubted it would do much good. Once the jury had heard that his software had killed a young woman, they wouldn’t hear much else. It’s not like they understood the code themselves.

  When it was finally over, he stumbled back to his seat, feeling battered, as if he’d been in a boxing match instead of a trial. He had been Lauren’s last witness. The defense would now call witnesses of their own, probably including some expert with impeccable credentials from a software consulting firm who hadn’t written a line of code in ten years but was willing to swear blind that Tyler had gotten it wrong.

  The judge called an end to testimony for the day. The defense would begin calling witnesses in the morning. Tyler walked out of the courtroom with Lauren into a crowd of five or six reporters, shoving microphones in their faces. Andrea Copeland had already plowed through them without comment and was leaving the scene on her motorcycle. Lauren answered a few questions and then pushed on through, but Tyler stopped. If they weren’t going to win the case, at least he could speak his mind.

  “Don’t trust software,” he said. “Or any other company, for that matter. Don’t put your lives in the hands of any software the authors won’t let you read for yourself.”

  “Are self-driving cars a death trap?” one of the reporters asked.

  “No,” Tyler said, letting some heat flow into his voice. “But I’ll tell you what is. Every time you get in car with a human behind the wheel, that’s a death trap. We might not be able to cure cancer or heart disease, but we can cure this killer, and it takes almost as many lives. Self-driving cars are the future,
and Mercedes has that much right. It’s not putting a computer behind the wheel that’s the problem. It’s keeping the software controlling it a secret.”

  Another reporter said, “Do you think the government should force companies to turn over their software?”

  Lauren stopped and turned to watch him, but she didn’t seem upset. “I think the people should,” he said. “People shouldn’t buy cars from companies that won’t open-source their software. If your car is going to choose to kill you in certain circumstances—to avoid a pedestrian, for instance—you should know about it. And you should certainly know about it if there’s an interface in place that lets somebody else take control.”

  “Won’t giving out the code just make it easier for hackers?” the first reporter asked.

  “Not at all,” Tyler said. “It’ll make it so that any vulnerabilities are found quickly and patched.”

  Lauren made a show of looking at her watch, so Tyler waved off the reporters and pushed his way through. They threw more questions at him as he went, and when it was clear he wasn’t going to answer any more, they pressed business cards into his hand and encouraged him to call.

  He joined Lauren in her Tesla, the inside of which looked more like a conference room than a car, the four seats facing each other around a small round table. It navigated the steep Seattle streets without incident while he and Lauren rested in the back. They rode in silence. Tyler gazed out the window at the glimpses of Puget Sound occasionally visible between the buildings, not really registering the sight. The interaction with the reporters had left him dissatisfied. Was it fair for him to denounce Mercedes? They were, after all, doing the exact same thing that all the other autocar companies were doing. They all kept their software proprietary, and he would guess that most, if not all, had that same hook to allow Homeland Security, or whoever was paying the bills, the power to take over a car when they chose.

  All through this trial, he’d struggled with the feeling that he was fighting on the wrong side. How could he tell people not to ride in a Mercedes autocar when it was so much safer than driving any kind of car on their own? The industry already struggled with the perception that humans were better drivers than computers. If there were an alternative, a company that was leading the way toward an open software revolution, then it would make sense, but there wasn’t.

  And that, he realized, was why he was fighting this battle. Because “trust me” would go only so far. It was possible to have a transportation industry that was efficient and safe. But that would take an educated public that understood self-driving cars were safer and demanded the transparency to know how they made their decisions. The safety of computer precision with the control of human oversight. It would happen that way if consumers wanted it. And they would demand it only if they understood what was at stake.

  When it came down to it, Tyler didn’t care whether Andrea Copeland got a big payday in compensation for her husband’s death. He did care about stopping the horrible death toll that human driving exacted from the population each year. He cared about big companies hiding things from their consumers that could cost them their lives, and paying off judges to protect their reputations.

  And now that he realized what he wanted, he knew exactly what to do about it.

  “No, it’s not an exclusive,” Tyler said. “I’m telling all the networks, and you’ll all get it at the same time. You can skip it if you want. I’m just giving you a heads up.”

  Every reporter he’d called had said the same thing. They wanted an exclusive. It wasn’t going to be worth their while to show up with such scant information, and couldn’t he tell them more right now? In the end, though, he was confident they would all be there.

  Last of all, he called Yusuf. He explained what he wanted to do, and said, “What do you think? Are you in?”

  “Okay,” Yusuf said.

  “You’re sure? It’s probably illegal, and it’s going to get some attention. I can probably swing it without you, though it would be nice to have the help.”

  “I’m in,” Yusuf said. “Let’s stick it to them.”

  Tyler grinned. “Meet you at the office. I’ll bring some Chinese and some coffee. I don’t think we’re going to be getting any sleep tonight.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Tom Berkowitz climbed into his silver Mercedes F 015 and told the car to take him to the courthouse for what he sincerely hoped would be the last day of this wretched trial. At least his own testimony was over. That had been an ordeal. Given how much they’d paid Judge Carter, Berkowitz thought he could have made it go a little smoother. A few of that woman lawyer’s questions had struck a little too close for comfort.

  Why a hot young thing like Lauren Karelis would want to be a lawyer and go to work in a drab-looking gray suit, he couldn’t understand. She belonged on stage at a car show next to a red convertible, dressed in a bikini, or at least one of those little black dresses. Instead, she stood there in the courtroom all day, and he had to try to answer her questions without being distracted by her ass every time she turned to face the jury. They shouldn’t let women ask questions in court. At least not sexy ones. It wasn’t fair to the witness.

  He closed his eyes and was just starting to imagine what he would do to her if he got her alone and out of that suit, when the car’s entertainment system blared on at top volume. He thrashed in sudden terror, eyes flying open, heart pounding out of his chest. The music turned off as quickly as it had started. He looked from side to side, breathing hard, the flight reaction still surging through his veins.

  Then the windshield wipers turned on, making him jump again. For once, it actually wasn’t raining in this perpetually damp city, and the wipers scraped unpleasantly on the dry glass. “Mercedes, turn off the wipers,” he told the car, and the wipers stopped.

  A moment later, however, the heater turned on full blast, and the turn signals ticked on, first left, then right, then left again. The rear wiper surged to life, and then the music again. This time, it changed radio stations erratically, the ear- splitting volume making his head pound. “Turn it off!” he shouted. “Mercedes, turn the music off.”

  This time, the car ignored him. He tried to roll the windows down to escape the stifling heat, but the windows wouldn’t respond. He changed seats and swiveled around to access the manual controls, but they wouldn’t respond. He hit the emergency stop button, but nothing happened. “Mercedes, stop the car,” he said. The car accelerated.

  Berkowitz started to panic. He fumbled for his phone and dialed 911. The operator came on the line, a calm female voice that said, “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

  He hesitated. If he said that his car was out of control, they might send help, but any reporters who listened to police scanners would hear dispatch describe the problem. They would arrive at the scene, ready to film his ignominious rescue, and worse, to report a problem with a Mercedes car just as this embarrassing trial was winding down. Mercedes stock would plummet, and he might very well lose his job.

  He cut the connection. There had to be a way to stop this thing without involving the police. Instead, he called Martin, a tech head from back at the office, one of the engineers who really knew how this stuff worked. After four rings, the man finally answered.

  “I’ve got a problem,” Berkowitz said, shouting to be heard over the music. “My car’s gone crazy. All the systems are going haywire, and I can’t stop the thing.”

  “Hit the emergency stop,” Martin said, as if Berkowitz were an idiot. “It’s a red button, left-hand side, under the—”

  “I know where the emergency stop button is!” Berkowitz snarled. The car blew through a red light and made a hard left, tires screeching. Berkowitz, no longer strapped in, tumbled off his seat and knocked his head on the door handle. He scrambled up again, looking out the window. The car had deviated from his planned route, now heading in the opposite direction from the courthouse.

  “I’m being kidnapped!” he shouted into the phone. “
You’ve got to stop them. You can take over my car from there, right?” His voice had gone squeaky with fright, but he didn’t care. “Do it. Take over. Stop this before they kill me!”

  “Interface already up,” Martin said. “Give me five.”

  “I don’t have five minutes, you incompetent—”

  “Stand by. Don’t be afraid, I’ll take care of it.”

  “I’m not afraid! I’m furious!” Berkowitz could feel the spit flying from his mouth. “If you don’t fix this, I’m going to kill you. I’ll put you out on the street. I’ll make sure you never work in this industry—”

  “It’s not working,” Martin said. “What do you mean, it’s not working?”

  “Somebody’s already signaling the car, and they’re locking me out. I’ve got no control.”

  The car accelerated again, and Berkowitz clutched the seat. “No. Don’t you dare give up, Martin. You’ve got to do something.”

  “I suggest you call 911, sir.”

  Berkowitz hung up in disgust. If he lived through this, he would fire that idiot. In the meantime, though, 911 looked like his only option. He was about to call again when the car abruptly braked and turned neatly into a parking lot.

  The lot was crowded. Two other Mercedes already stood side by side, and his car smoothly glided into place next to them. Five news vans formed a perimeter, and probably two dozen reporters with cameras and microphones jostled for position around his car. In the Mercedes to his right, that year’s brand-new model, sat Judge Carter, blocking his face with one hand and trying to ignore the cameras just outside his window. Berkowitz couldn’t see the occupant of the third Mercedes, but he had no doubt that it was Sullivan.

  The music blared away, and heat continued to pump from all the vents. He couldn’t stay there. There was nothing for it but to get out of the car.