I have taken various liberties. Not least with London’s underground rivers and sewer system, but also including dropping into the Brompton Oratory a statue of St Isidore, which in reality does not exist. It is a stunning and very beautiful church, however, and I’d strongly recommend a visit. Another liberty is re-arranging the geography of the ossuary and charnel house of St Bride’s. There is indeed both an ossuary (complete with any number of bone and skull-filled boxes) and an astonishing charnel house where they used to place the bones dug up from the churchyard, but fiction demanded more of a maze and a secret charnel house beyond the one that actually exists. I owe a debt of thanks to James Irving, head of finance and fundraising (and David Bolton, verger and my tour guide) at St Bride’s for their kindness in allowing me to see the real thing. Similarly, liberties have been taken with the British Museum, including the location of the claymore in a gallery which currently contains the glittering treasures of the Waddesdon Bequest. At the time of writing, the claymore is not on public display, and of course the geography of the basements and storage rooms and security office are entirely fictitious. So too is the Grim City Waxworks.
For anyone interested in the London beneath our feet, among the resources I used were: London’s Lost Rivers (Paul Talling), War Plan UK (Duncan Campbell) and London Under London: A Subterranean Guide (Richard Trench). And anyone who would like to know more about the fascinating field of AI could turn to texts which include: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig) and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Max Tegmark). I’d also strongly recommend the brilliant Lex Fridman’s Artificial Intelligence Podcast and YouTube channel.
If you are worried about the idea of fully autonomous weapons systems, you should be. To find out more, visit the website of the Future of Life Institute, or catch up with Stuart Russell’s Slaughterbots video on YouTube. I would like to credit Dr Amitai Etzioni, professor of international relations at George Washington University, and Dr Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, who together authored a fascinating piece on the ‘Pros and Cons of Autonomous Weapons’ in the (May/June) edition of the Army University Press’s Military Review (the professional journal of the US Army). Syd’s own rationale for lethal autonomous weapons in its face-off with Esme as the final minutes slip by was heavily influenced by this article.