"Confessions" Serial
Over the past couple of years, I’ve written 123 blogs averaging three pages each for a total of 372 pages. This has covered most of the highlights and some lowlights of my adventurous life. There’s not much left. So, I’m now starting a weekly fictional serial which will, hopefully, keep you entertained.
Tech Wars 1
In the unnerving silence of the Namib Desert, Brett wondered what on Earth he was doing there. Two weeks ago, he had been carrying out his usual tasks as a private investigator in New York. Then he had been made an offer he could not refuse – an obscenely large sum of money to do a job in what was described as “an exotic location.”
As he stared out at the barren terrain of the crumbling cliffs surrounding the oasis of Gonakontes, with the desert sands rolling away in every direction, he tried in vain to relate his present environment to the term “exotic.” It was in its way spectacular; he had to admit that the massive dunes of the Namib had a certain minimalist beauty of their own. However, the two young techies with him were poor company. They spent most of their time with their heads buried in pages of code and, when they spoke, much of their language was in “computerspeak,” mostly incomprehensible to him. He was surrounded by sophisticated electronic equipment, some of which he did understand, like the radar tracking screens. None of it compensated for his more normal trip to his favorite New York deli where he could order the best pastrami on rye in the world, accompanied by the traditional humorous rudeness of the waitresses.
Here, there was literally nothing happening. He figured that the techies could have been posted to the moon and they would happily play with an infinity of “0”s and “1”s. He had been warned that the attack, if and when it came, would be sudden. It could also be violent, but that was why he was being so well paid, as well as heavily armed.
Brett gloomily started to read a Baldacci crime novel but wished that the baddies would make their move so that he could go home. His wish came true sooner than he expected. His radar scanner (which had been devoid of movement for days except for a small herd of elephants passing by on their way to the waterhole) suddenly showed five or six very small, rapidly moving objects converging on his trailer. Brett and his handlers had expected that the attack would be in the form of one or more heavily armored vehicles, but these objects were clearly airborne.
The penny dropped. They were using drones! Brett reached out with one hand for the rapid-fire machine gun mounted on a swiveling pedestal next to the laptop immediately in front of him. With his other hand he flicked the laptop’s lid closed, as instructed. Before he could focus on any target, a hail of bullets crashed through the windows and sides of the trailer. He ducked instinctively but realized that the gunfire was aimed above his head, serving as a warning, rather trying to kill him. He could now see the drones lined up outside the trailer. All of them except one had guns mounted on them. The exception had a camera pointed at the trailer with a speaker next to it. He vaguely noticed that one of the gun drones had a basket mounted below its frame. A deep and menacing voice came through the speaker.
“Don’t try to resist. We can kill the three of you in seconds … but all we need is the computer and any material that relates to Artificial Intelligence Developments, the company you work for. Pick it all up, bring it outside and place it in the basket. As soon as we leave, you can return to New York, where I’m sure you’ll feel more at home.”
Brett was not easily intimidated. He called out through the window.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes, but I’m not interested in anything you have to say.”
“I just wondered how you found us.”
“Let that remain one of the great mysteries of your life. So, stop talking and give us the material.”
Brett shrugged. He wasn’t being paid enough to risk his life. With the drones there, there was no way he could identify his attackers, so the chances were they would let him live. He turned to the techies, Sven and Malcolm.
“Is all the data on the computer?”
Sven looked at his compatriot. They were clearly confused.
“Er…should we …?”
Brett cut across him harshly: “Listen, it isn’t worth losing our lives over this. They’ve outgunned us. Give ’em what they want. All of it!”
Sven nodded. He closed up the main computer and reached for a box on the desk next to it. He handed all of it over to Brett.
“In the box there’s an external hard drive and a few flash drives. The computer has most of the program.”
Brett nodded silently, took the material, opened the door to the trailer and stepped outside.
The drones continued to buzz, and their guns adjusted to cover him. He had to admit they were pretty smart. He stepped up to the drone carrying the basket, placed the material inside it and fastened the straps to keep the lid in place.
The voice spoke again. “Step away and tell your bosses to forget about their new invention. We’ll take good care of it.”
The camera drone led the way as the little machines turned around and flew away in formation. Brett watched them rise above the cliffs and head off across the desert. He shook his head as he headed back into the trailer to collect his things.
*
Many thousands of miles away on a ranch outside of Anchorage, Alaska, Professor Elliot Erskine watched the scene play out on his computer. He turned to his assistant, Amanda van Blumen.
“Send the chopper to pick up Brett and the techies. Make sure they stop off in Swakopmund. I promised them a really great meal. The German cuisine in that little desert town beats anything I’ve ever had in Deutschland itself.”
Amanda shuddered. “They could’ve killed the guys.”
“That’s why we paid them a premium, but I didn’t think they’d be harmed – especially when the others used drones so they couldn’t be identified.”
• • •
Two days later, Zoltan, the drone team’s boss, entered the basement workshop of his offices in Budapest and looked expectantly at his chief technician, who shook his head.
“Having problems with the encryption?”
“No, boss. We cracked that easily enough. It’s the program itself. it doesn’t make sense. I think they’ve scammed us. They even left us a rude note.”
“You sure about this?”
“Afraid so, boss.”
Zoltan turned on his heel and left the workshop with murder in his heart.
• • •
Amanda looked at the Professor.
“What happens next?”
“I’m ready to launch next week. We just needed to distract those guys by giving them an unworkable technology. By the time they’ve decrypted the code – and they will – we’ll be making headlines. I hope they appreciate my little note.”
Amanda chuckled. The Prof was always a step ahead of his competition. “What did you say?”
“What you have now is artificial. We’ve simply removed the intelligence!”
Brought to you by courtesy of ExoBrain Pty Ltd., Bermuda.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.