by Andrew Lane
He led the way along the path through the forest. It ended in a clearing. A prefabricated hut had been built near the trees. A dark opening in the front of the hut looked big enough to drive a car through. From somewhere behind the hut, Tara could hear the chug chug chug of a portable generator.
A group of men was standing next to the hut. Some of them were wearing suits, and some were wearing uniforms, but they all had close-cut hair. A few of them turned as Rhino and Tara appeared. They glanced at Rhino, then at Tara, then looked away. And then they looked back at Tara again, and frowned. She guessed that the goth look was not the usual style of dress at these demonstrations.
‘Here,’ Rhino said. He handed her a pair of sunglasses. ‘Wear these.’
‘Protection from bright lights?’ she ventured.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Because it looks cool.’
He slipped on a similar pair of sunglasses as they approached the group of observers.
A grey-haired man broke away from the group and moved towards them. ‘My name is Chesterson – Brad Chesterson. I’m the technical director of the company that makes ARLENE. You must be the two visitors that Professor Livingstone requested be given access.’ His eyes were a faded blue, Tara noticed, and his skin looked as if it was permanently tanned. ‘We had to pull a few strings to get you accredited this late in the day.’
‘And we’re very grateful,’ Rhino replied smoothly.
‘Who exactly are you representing, if I may ask?’
Rhino made a movement of his head that wasn’t quite a shake, and wasn’t quite a shrug. ‘A potential user,’ he said quietly. ‘One who wants to remain . . . discreet.’
‘Ah, I understand,’ the man said. Clearly he didn’t, or he had made an assumption of his own based on what Rhino had said. Either way, he seemed satisfied. He turned to the rest of the group and announced: ‘Gentlemen . . .’ He turned back to look at Tara. ‘And ladies . . . it’s time to start. I won’t beat about the bush. I don’t have to tell you how much equipment our soldiers are carrying right now, in Afghanistan and in other theatres of war. What with weapons, armour, rations, radios, binoculars, video cameras, personal sensor systems, battery packs, ration packs, medical packs, water bottles and entrenching tools, it’s as if each man is carrying another man on his back. This situation has crept up on us bit by bit. Each new piece of equipment that we give to our soldiers is heavier than the piece it replaced. Every new piece of electronic equipment uses a different battery. Things have got to the stage where we are losing more soldiers through heat exhaustion, muscle strain and fatigue than to improvised explosive devices and small-arms fire. This situation cannot go on.’ He paused for effect. ‘That is why we have, on behalf of the US Army Research Labs, developed ARLENE. Now, I could spend the next ten minutes describing ARLENE to you, but I think it would be much better if I just let you see it.’ He turned his head towards the prefab hut that the group was standing in front of. ‘Corporal Higgs – if you please!’
A soldier emerged from the hut. He was wearing the kind of sand-coloured camouflage uniform and helmet that Tara was used to seeing on news reports, but he didn’t have the big backpack that she remembered from the broadcasts. He just carried a semi-automatic rifle. He ignored the group of watchers, and turned back to the hut.
‘ARLENE – follow!’ he called.
And something walked out of the hut after him.
It looked to Tara like someone had built the skeleton of a prehistoric animal out of stainless-steel rods, pistons, cables and lengths of black elastic. It stood shoulder-high to the soldier, and it was about the width and the length of a single bed. It had six legs, but these legs were articulated with hip joints and knee joints and ankles. Where a living creature would have a head, this thing, this device, had a thin neck that was topped with a selection of sensors – video cameras, infrared cameras, microphones and radio aerials. Where a living creature would have a tail, this thing had a radio antenna. Solar cells glittered across its surface, forming a kind of intermittent skin. Packs had been strapped to its sides, attached to convenient hooks and anchor points, partially covering some of the solar cells. They had been arranged so that the weight balanced out, left and right.
‘OK,’ Tara said. ‘Kinda impressed now.’
‘ARLENE,’ the corporal said, ‘mission mode: reconnaissance. Follow me at a ten-yard distance.’
He set off at a fast walk across the clearing towards the far trees. ARLENE obediently waited until he was ten yards away, and then ambled after him, matching his speed exactly. Tara had expected it to sound heavy and clanky, but apart from a slight hiss as the pistons expanded and contracted there was almost no noise. In fact, she thought that the soldier was making more noise than the robot.
The corporal reached the trees and vanished into the shadows. ARLENE stopped for a moment. Its sensor ‘head’ scanned back and forth for a few seconds, weighing up alternative paths, and then it followed him.
‘Mom, are you serious?’
Natalie Livingstone knew that she had that whiny tone in her voice again, the one that drove her mother mad, but she didn’t care. In fact, she was glad. If there was one time that she wanted to put a dent into her mother’s invisible protective shield, it was now.
‘Yes, Natalie, I am completely serious. I am always completely serious. I don’t have time to be trivial or humorous. You should know that by now.’
They were in a black London taxi, heading back to Calum Challenger’s apartment. It was morning, and everywhere Natalie looked she saw men in suits and ties walking along the sidewalk. No, not the sidewalk – the pavement. Stupid word. A sidewalk allowed you to walk along the side of the road. What the hell did a pavement let you do?
‘But, Mom, you promised that as soon as you’d given your speech at this conference thing we’d head back home. To Los Angeles.’
‘That was the plan.’ Gillian Livingstone gazed out of the taxi window at the passing crowds as if on the lookout for business opportunities. ‘Plans change. Get used to it.’
‘But Savannah is having an epic pool party on Friday. Everyone is going to be there. Everyone who matters. And if I’m not there people will think I don’t matter any more.’
Natalie’s mother shook her head, still not looking at her daughter. ‘That’s just stupid. Nobody will think any less of you because you aren’t at this party. And, besides, people have parties all the time, especially in LA. There’ll be another one along before you know it.’
‘When we were at home, you said that you had to be at this conference in England. When I asked you why, you said that it was an important conference, and that lots of important people were going to be there, and you said that if you weren’t there then people would wonder if you were still important. And I said that there’ll be other conferences, and you said that there wouldn’t be any conferences as important as this for a while.’ Natalie took a breath. ‘Well, that’s what Savannah’s party is going to be like. It’s really, really important.’ She paused, trying to force her eyes to well up with tears and hoping that her mother might turn her head for long enough to notice. ‘You don’t want my social development to be affected, do you?’
That hit a nerve. Natalie knew that her mother was paranoid about her having a wide circle of friends and lots to do. Natalie suspected that her mother had grown up without many friends, probably due to the fact that she was so intelligent and so career-oriented, and she didn’t want Natalie to turn out the same.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gillian said quietly, and this time she did turn away from the taxi window and – hurrah! – she did notice the tears in Natalie’s eyes. ‘I understand that this seems like the end of the world to you, but it’s not. It’s really not.’
‘What if I flew back to LA by myself?’ Natalie asked. She’d found that if she presented her mother with a reasonable alternative then she usually caved.
Not this time. ‘I’m not having you back in Los Angeles without a chaperone. I can’t trust
you.’
‘What about Dad? I could stay with him. He could look after me. I haven’t spent much time with him recently.’
Gillian looked away, out of the window again. Natalie could see from her reflection that her mother was angry; her lips had thinned, and she was frowning. ‘Your father needs more looking after than you do. I wouldn’t trust him with a kitten, let alone a teenage girl.’
Natalie knew from her mother’s tone of voice that there was no point in pursuing that line of argument. Whatever feelings had existed between her mother and her father had burned out a long time ago. He ran a moderately successful landscape-gardening business in LA, and seemed happy to just drift along in the sunshine, enjoying himself and not thinking about the future. Gillian Livingstone, on the other hand, lived in the future. She rarely thought about anything else.
There was silence in the taxi for a few minutes. Looking out of the window, Natalie recognized Trafalgar Square. They turned right down a wide, long avenue that was lined with old-fashioned buildings.
‘I don’t suppose you’d let me stay here in London?’ she asked quietly. ‘I could hang out with Calum Challenger while you’re doing your stuff in Georgia.’
‘Not going to happen. I like Calum, and I trust him, but he’s a teenager and so are you. I’m not leaving the two of you alone together.’
Natalie wrinkled her nose. ‘Mom, please! I’ve only just met him. And, besides, he’s . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well, you know.’
She could tell from her mother’s reflection that Gillian knew exactly what her daughter was getting at, but she was going to make Natalie say it. ‘He’s crippled! He can’t move his legs!’
‘And that matters why? Professor Stephen Hawking is completely immobile, but he still managed to leave his wife and move in with his nurse.’
‘Who?’
Her mother sighed softly. ‘Every now and then I can hear your father’s genes in your voice,’ she said. ‘This is one of those times.’
‘I’m not interested in Calum. Not like that.’
‘He’s handsome. And you can’t help but admire his upper-body muscular development. And he’s frighteningly intelligent.’
As if that mattered. ‘Mom, let’s drop the subject, all right?’ She shrugged theatrically. ‘If you really think it’s safer for me to be on some stupid ecological field trip with a couple of teenagers I’ve hardly met in the wilderness of a foreign country where I don’t even speak the language than going to a party with my friends in my own home in my home country, then that’s fine. Really.’
‘Rhino Gillis will be looking after you. He won’t let anything happen to you. And, besides, it’s not a stupid ecological expedition.’ There was something in her mother’s tone that made Natalie look at her carefully. ‘It’s actually a well-thought-out scientific expedition that might just pay off in spades.’ She glanced over at her daughter. ‘And, if it does, I want someone there that I trust who can tell me exactly what happens, as it happens.’
A cold chill ran down Natalie’s spine. ‘You want me to be your spy?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’ Gillian Livingstone smiled, but there was something in that smile which wasn’t in the least humorous. ‘It’s just that Calum doesn’t think about business opportunities the way I do, and if I’m going to be contributing my technical expertise to this expedition, then I want to make sure that it’s worth my while.’
‘Please, come this way,’ Brad Chesterson said to the group of observers in the Maryland forest clearing. He led the way into a prefab hut, where a large plasma screen was attached to a computer. Over to one side, a second computer was displaying fluctuating graphs. A technician sat in front of it, monitoring the graphs and occasionally typing instructions into the keyboard.
Brad Chesterson pressed a key on the computer keyboard, and the screen sprang to life. On it, Tara could clearly see the back of Corporal Higgs as he moved through the forest. The picture was obviously being relayed from the video cameras and sensor systems that made up ARLENE’s ‘head’.
‘We can watch from here as ARLENE follows Corporal Higgs on his mission. Notice that it maintains a constant distance from him, as ordered. If he stops, it stops. If he speeds up, it speeds up.’ His gaze scanned the group. ‘Does anybody have any questions?’
Tara surprised herself by raising a hand. ‘Yeah – I notice that you’re monitoring ARLENE’s performance parameters over there.’ She pointed to the computer that the technician was using. ‘Information is obviously being passed from Arlene to here, and it might be going the other way. Can you prove that you’re not actually steering ARLENE around by remote control – that it’s actually making its own decisions about which route to take?’
‘Of course,’ Chesterson said. He glanced at the technician. ‘Bob, step away from the PC for a moment.’ As the technician complied, Chesterson took a small radio system from his pocket. ‘Corporal Higgs, can you change ARLENE’s orders please? Over.’
‘Affirmative.’ Higgs’s voice crackled from the radio and from the plasma TV Seconds later Tara heard him say: ‘ARLENE, wait for one minute, then locate me and resume mission profile.’ He moved off through the trees. Within a few moments, he had vanished into the shadows. ARLENE stopped and waited patiently, as ordered. After sixty seconds, it started to move after the corporal. It seemed to be moving more slowly now that it couldn’t see the man it was supposed to be following. Its sensor ‘head’ scanned back and forth, looking for some sign of Higgs.
The picture on the screen suddenly changed from a straightforward camera view to a split screen. One side of the screen was the camera view as before, while the other side was an infrared view of the same scene. Most of the picture was cool and dark, but the body heat of the occasional small animal or bird stood out as a blotch of orange and yellow. ARLENE’s head continued scanning, and suddenly a bigger blotch of bright colour appeared. It was vaguely man-shaped, and it was moving away. ARLENE immediately started moving faster to try to catch up with the corporal.
‘You’ll notice,’ Chesterson said, ‘that ARLENE followed Corporal Higgs’s instructions directly, and then made its own choice of switching to infrared vision to locate him again. Now that it has located him, it will catch up and then resume following him.’
‘How does ARLENE know that she’s locked on to Corporal Higgs, and not someone else?’ Tara asked.
‘She?’ Chesterson said, amused. ‘It has exceedingly sensitive audio receivers. It matches the sound of the target’s heartbeat with previous readings it has taken of Corporal Higgs. If the two match, then it knows that it has found the right target.’
‘And what happens if it finds the wrong target?’ Tara persisted.
‘It will quietly back away and continue to seek the corporal.’
‘And if it can’t find him?’
‘Eventually it will make a decision either to try to locate the corporal by emitting an audio signal, or to terminate the mission and return here, to base. That decision will be made by balancing the importance of completing the mission with the importance of maintaining a stealthy presence.’
‘How have you implemented the artificial intelligence?’
Chesterson nodded. ‘An excellent question. As you’ll appreciate, a great deal of the programming is covered by commercial confidentiality, but what I can say is that her thought processes are based on a complex set of heuristic algorithms supported by a complex neural net.’ He smiled. ‘Does that make sense?’
‘You said “her”,’ Tara pointed out. ‘And, yes, it does make sense. I presume there’s a Bayesian statistical database underlying the whole thing.’
‘Indeed,’ Chesterson answered, the smile sliding from his face. ‘Does anyone else have any questions?’
‘Can ARLENE be run on remote control?’ Rhino asked. ‘You know, like a remotely piloted drone?’
‘There is, of course, a reversionary remote-control mode,’ Chesterson admi
tted.
‘But that will be highly dependent on available bandwidth, surely,’ Tara pointed out. She was pleased to see Chesterson scowl. A couple of the other men in the group turned to look at her with interest. ‘I would imagine,’ she continued, ‘that you could only remotely control three or four of these things in the same area, and that’s only if there aren’t any other remotely controlled things, like reconnaissance drones, around.’
‘That is . . . a limitation,’ Chesterson admitted, ‘but not a serious one. The intent, obviously, is that ARLENE works in robotic mode, making its own decisions in accordance with the orders it is given by the operator – in this case, Corporal Higgs.’
Tara decided that she didn’t like Chesterson. He was too officious, too smoothly corporate. She didn’t trust him. ‘It just occurred to me that this kind of technology would be ideal for all the generals who are sitting in their comfortable offices a long way from the fighting. They can get to see everything that’s going on, just as it happens, and they can give orders directly to the troops on the ground. And not just the generals – politicians could get involved as well. They could all sit around a set of TV screens and fight the whole war by remote control.’
A couple of the men in the group – mainly the ones without uniforms, Tara noticed – typed notes into their tablet computers and their mobile phones. Maybe she’d given them some ideas.
‘We provide the technology,’ Chesterson said smoothly. ‘It’s up to the buyer how it’s used.’
‘Could ARLENE be fitted with a weapon?’ Tara persisted. ‘Could it become a soldier in its own right?’
‘As I said, it’s not up to us what the user decides to do with the technology.’ Chesterson’s face was creased into an unhappy mask.
‘We’ll take that as a “yes”,’ Rhino said. He quickly asked another question, an innocuous one, and Tara could tell that he was trying to defuse the tension that her pointed questions had caused. She was uneasy though. The use of a robot that carried bags and rucksacks was difficult to deny, but a robot that carried a gun – that was another kettle of fish entirely.
