In the corner of the darkened ops room at the General Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, satellite TV pictures flashed up footage of murdered computer scientist Tobias Hawke and his ethicist wife, Esme Sullivan Hawke, on their way into the gala. Then more pictures of Esme, escorted from her offices by police, her face a picture of grief and dignity.
Former Derkind employees queued up to explain that Hawke was a difficult and damaged genius. Those men and women present in the room didn’t look up from their desks – they had all heard the news report more times than they would care to remember. Depressive, suffering from acute exhaustion, and increasingly paranoid about his own security after a break-in at home, when terrorists smashed their way into the British Museum the eccentric genius shot himself with his own 3D-printed gun. Experts were keen to label him another victim of the terrorists. Furthermore, the journalist had it from an impeccable source that rumours of a massive AI breakthrough were entirely unfounded. Hawke had been about to announce that he was making freely available all existing and future Derkind medical tech in order to keep children alive around the world. The logic of the narrative was very apparent – as indeed it was supposed to be, having been skilfully constructed by the talented cadre of ‘storytellers’ who worked out of another darkened room in the MI5 headquarters on Millbank in London. There was, of course, no news report about lethal autonomous weapons and no hint of scandal about any leading politician or general. Hawke’s grieving widow was asking the press to respect her privacy at this difficult time.
The senior technician in charge swallowed another mouthful of cold coffee, put both hands behind his head and attempted to stretch out the knotted muscles of his shoulders and neck. He’d been trying every which way to get around the encryption and firewalls of the Derkind system called Syd. But it wasn’t letting him in. He’d put his crack team on to it, but this Hawke chap had it covered. They’d get there, though, he had every confidence, and he personally was interested to see this ‘Syd’ in operation – albeit trammelled and unable to escape into the wider world. A revolution in artificial intelligence – decades before it was expected.
There was a shout of triumph from across the room.
‘I’m in.’ The frizzy-haired junior operations officer punched the air. She brought up her own screen in front of them and they took in the familiar and yet unfamiliar code, before the face of a scowling Tobias Hawke came into view. He seemed to look directly into the room, and then beyond them. There was a loud Pffft! and the words ‘This program will self-destruct in five seconds’, and every last symbol on every last line wiped itself from the screen.
Around the room, there was a chorus of heartfelt Anglo-Saxon expletives, and the sound of pounding keyboards, as the senior technician leapt for the phone. Had they been hacked? Was the security of the nation compromised? Pain pulsed from the ulcers that lined his stomach and duodenal wall.
Grinding three paracetamol between his back teeth, he allowed himself a mouthful of water to wash down the bitter grit only when his oppo in the National Cyber Security Centre, who worked out of the same building, came on the line himself to reassure him. Everything else was nailed down tight. No GCHQ firewalls were breached. No incursion spotted by the Russians, North Koreans, Iranians or any other bugger. The structural integrity of their system remained. They did not appear to be under attack from a rogue virus, or indeed from an AGI gone mad.
He held tight to what comfort there was as he broke the bad news to his director, and again to Downing Street. Aside from the medical work which had been hived off in a separate container, the architecture of the Derkind cloud in their King’s Cross offices wiped itself in front of their eyes. No earlier builds of the programs were left anywhere.
Everything on the tablet believed to be Tobias Hawke’s personal property, which was assumed to contain his very latest coding, wiped itself in the self-same moment.
The technicians were themselves intrigued as to what prompted Syd’s ‘suicide’, which is how they referred to it later. Possibly their forced entry breach triggered an emergency security protocol in the system? Or perhaps Syd was sulking at being woken up so soon after the kill switch was pulled, one of them hazarded. They entertained themselves for days with one hypothesis after another, till they moved on to other work.
And yes, they had been over everything to see what could be salvaged, but there was nothing left other than the company’s medical tech and a program for drones you could stand on. Other than that, the AGI known as Syd was gone. The revolution was over.
*
The Cabinet Secretary knocked on the PM’s door with studied diffidence, and entered with his usual affable manner. The PM pulled a face but didn’t comment other than a ‘Fair enough’ as he turned back to the papers on his desk and the red box next to them. Tobias Hawke had left a cyber bomb primed to go off at the heart of his AGI work. The creator had destroyed his greatest creation. And no, Prime Minister, regrettably they weren’t sure what triggered it.
As for the UK government’s stated position that it was not developing lethal autonomous weapons systems, that remained on the record and went unquestioned.
As did the confidential budget allocation for research and development. In fact, since the Chinese were understood to have recently doubled their own spending on autonomous weapons systems, UK spending would also have to increase.
And the Cabinet Secretary had a couple of last-minute additions to the Honours List to put to the PM if he may.
As he initialled the ‘Top Secret (Extreme)’ notice about the death of thirty-three boys across seven young offender institutions in the south-east of England, the PM wasn’t entirely sorry about the AGI setback. And at least this way, that bloody man Rafferty might stop yammering on about the future.