Three Laws Lethal

by David Walton

  “We have to get her out of there,” Naomi said. “. . . not moving,” Brandon said. “She’s facedown on the ground. Should we . . .” Brandon turned toward them, shook his head. “Ambulance on its way. They said don’t move her, don’t try to turn her over.”

  Naomi didn’t care what they said. She pushed Tyler’s hands away. Her sister was alive, and if she couldn’t move her, she was at least going to go to her. She ducked under the rail, onto the track, and after a quick glance at the cars to make sure they weren’t charging her, she knelt in the dirt. Then she saw the blood. It was underneath Abby, soaking into the dirt.

  The sight of it nauseated her, threatened to overwhelm her, but she choked the feeling down. She could hardly look at Abby’s legs, could hardly think of her bones and flesh, crushed. “Abby!” she said. “Oh, Abby.”

  Brandon rushed to Abby’s other side and took her hand. She saw the panic in his eyes.

  “She’s still breathing,” Naomi said.

  Tyler ran out onto the track as well, but he didn’t stop at Abby’s side. He ran past them, toward the cars. He slowed when he reached them and approached one from the side, hesitantly, arms out as if trying to calm a growling dog. It didn’t move. He yanked open the door. As quickly as he could, he reached across and killed the engine, then tore the actuator assembly out of the driver’s seat and threw it on the ground. When Brandon saw what he was doing, he ran out and joined him. In moments, they silenced all four cars. The cars never moved.

  Naomi found out later that the ambulance arrived only eight minutes after Brandon’s call, but it seemed like an hour. Naomi held Abby’s hand and talked to her, though she didn’t know if Abby could hear her. Mostly, she watched her sister’s chest expand and contract almost imperceptibly and prayed that it wouldn’t stop.

  The ambulance drove out onto the track and stopped a few feet away. By that time, many of the crowd had gathered around them on the track, and a man who claimed to be a doctor was shouting at them to stay back. EMTs poured out of the ambulance, five of them, wearing blue uniforms with patches on the shoulder. They splinted Abby’s legs and wrapped a collar around her neck. When they rolled her onto the stretcher, Abby groaned, and Naomi felt tears spark at the corners of her eyes. If she could groan, then she was still alive. Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t respond to questions, but she was still there.

  Abby’s bright green blouse was dark with blood, but it was the skirt they cut away, revealing deep wounds on her upper thighs that welled up fresh blood as soon as they wiped it. One of the EMTs applied pressure while the other wrapped a tourniquet above the wound. Naomi’s vision narrowed, blackness creeping in from the sides.

  “Are you okay?” Tyler asked her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Abby . . .” The world slid to the side. She found herself on the ground, being lowered gently by Tyler, who had apparently caught her. She tried to sit up.

  “Whoa, take it slow,” Tyler said.

  She sat up anyway. The world wobbled a little bit, but she willed herself to focus, angry that she would be so weak when her sister needed her most.

  The EMTs strapped Abby to the stretcher, but they didn’t lift her into the back of the ambulance. They just kneeled there, applying pressure and checking vitals. One of them, an older man with a mustache, peppered Naomi with questions. Was Abby allergic to any medications, had she had any previous surgeries, was there any possibility she could be pregnant? Naomi answered as best she could.

  Brandon paced back and forth on the other side of Abby’s prone form. Finally, he couldn’t take it. “Why aren’t you taking her to the hospital?” he demanded.

  The EMT with the mustache pointed up. “Lifeflight,” he said. “These are serious injuries, sir. The local medical center isn’t equipped, and it would take us too long to drive.”

  Naomi heard the helicopter before she saw it. The noise grew into a roar as it circled and then landed in the grass at the center of the track: a small blue chopper with JeffSTAT emblazoned on its side, whipping up a stiff wind with its rotors. The EMTs lifted Abby’s stretcher with a practiced motion and walked across the field to meet it.

  Naomi scrambled to her feet with an effort and caught up with them. “I want to come!” she shouted.

  The EMT shook his head. “No room,” he said. “They’re taking her to Jefferson. You’ll have to drive and meet her there.”

  The helicopter came with its own team of medics, and it took off almost as soon as they had Abby inside, leaving the rest of them on the ground. “She’s in the very best hands,” the man with the mustache said. “They’ll do everything they can for her.”

  Naomi felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to see Aisha al-Mohammad, her expression sad and compassionate. “I’m so sorry,” Aisha said. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Naomi barely heard her. The other investors were nowhere to be seen, and Naomi doubted she’d ever see Aisha again either. “I have to go,” she said. She turned and ran back to where Tyler and Brandon still stood, not registering the implication of the two uniformed cops with guns in their belts who stood talking to them.

  “They’re taking her to Jefferson,” Naomi said breathlessly. “Brandon, we need your car. We need to go there right now.”

  One of the two cops, a woman with a Logan Township Police Officer badge on her blue uniform, came forward and put a hand on her arm. “You’re Naomi Sumner?” she asked.

  “Yes. But I have to go. My sister . . .”

  “That’s why we’re here,” the woman said. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

  Naomi answered their questions with gritted teeth, anxious to be on the road. Practically, she knew she couldn’t do anything for Abby. She would be in surgery, probably, and at the hospital there would be nothing to do but wait. But Abby was hurt, maybe dying. She wanted to be there. Not here answering endless questions from local cops who wouldn’t have the first clue how to investigate this accident.

  She’d been so worried about Abby that she hadn’t given any thought to why it had happened. Now, prompted by the police-woman’s questions, she had to. They’d practiced that scenario again and again. In simulation, they’d run it thousands of times. There had never been any hint of a catastrophe like this. The cars knew when to stop, and they always stopped.

  And what about the kill switch? She had seen Tyler hit the switch, but it had done nothing. That switch didn’t have anything to do with the AI. It was purely mechanical, a radio signal that would disconnect the computers from the cars altogether. How could both the algorithm and the mechanical kill switch have failed at the same time? It didn’t make any sense.

  She heard Tyler talking to the male cop a few feet away. “I checked them last night,” he said. “They were tightly attached, all four of them. But after the accident, when I opened the doors, they were just lying on the floor. That didn’t just happen. Somebody disconnected them.”

  “And you threw the mechanism out onto the track?”

  “I was trying to make sure they were safe,” Tyler said.

  It was clear from their questions and demeanor that they thought they were dealing with a reckless car stunt, and that it wasn’t the first time they’d been called to the scene of an accident at the Bridgeport Speedway.

  Finally, Naomi said, “Please, my sister’s hurt, and I want to see her. Can we leave?”

  “They can’t keep us,” Brandon said. “Not unless they want to arrest us. Let’s go.”

  The police officers nodded. “Don’t go far,” they said. “We may need to ask you some more questions.” The male cop held out his hand. “And the automobile forensics people are on their way. We’ll need those keys.”

  Brandon handed over the key fobs. Naomi wanted to tell them not to mess with the computers, that only she and Tyler had the skill to figure out what had really happened, but she didn’t want to start another conversation. She pulled on Brandon’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The
y climbed into the Prius and took off for the city. Naomi wanted him to drive faster, but she didn’t say so. She just sat and thought: sabotage.

  There was no other possibility. That many pieces of equipment couldn’t go wrong at the same time by accident. All four kill switches had failed, and Tyler said he had found them disconnected on the floor. That could have been done by anybody. Some kid on the racetrack at night who was curious about the cars and fooled around with the equipment. Or somebody who intentionally disconnected it to cause a crash, for whatever reason.

  But before Tyler had tried to engage the kill switches, the demo had already gone wrong. The cars didn’t stop when they were supposed to. That had nothing to do with the kill switches. That had to do with the computers, and sabotaging them would require a great deal more sophistication, not to mention a familiarity with the AI interface. There weren’t very many people in the world who could have accomplished that, and she was sitting in the car with two of them.

  But why? She couldn’t believe Brandon or Tyler would want Abby hurt. Brandon loved her, she was sure of it. Could Tyler be jealous? It seemed unlikely. And even if he were, it would be Brandon he would want to kill, not Abby.

  Could it have been done a different way? A mechanical way, not involving the computer? Perhaps someone hacked their signal and controlled the solenoids remotely. It sounded good to her, but she didn’t know if it was actually possible. The same person who disconnected the kill switches could have loosened the solenoids on the brakes, she supposed, so they would slip off and fail at a random time. But that didn’t make sense. All four cars had failed to brake at the same time. It had to have been controlled remotely.

  Nothing made any sense. All of the ideas she could think of seemed outlandish. The multiple failures were far too unlikely to be a coincidence, and yet the skill and malice required to sabotage them seemed almost as unbelievable. Even the motive was a mystery. Who would want to kill Abby? She didn’t have any enemies. Did a rival company building an autocar fleet want to ruin their chances? But that didn’t make any sense, either. Their company had hardly done anything yet. They weren’t a threat to anyone.

  She had no doubt the local police would chalk it up to equipment failure, but she didn’t think that was possible. Someone had done this, and Naomi wasn’t going to rest until she found out who.

  They rode in silence. Brandon had tried to speak a few times, but the threat of tears choked off his words. There was nothing to say, anyway. They would find out when they arrived.

  Naomi didn’t cry. She never did. She couldn’t remember ever having cried, not really, though of course she must have as a child. She rarely laughed, either. Her emotions lived inside her head, where they belonged. If she showed emotions on the outside, they just felt fake, as if she had produced them on purpose for other people to see. People sometimes thought she didn’t have feelings, just because she didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve for everyone to gawk at, but that wasn’t true. She just kept them inside. Sometimes Naomi thought the world would be a better place if everyone just kept their feelings to themselves.

  Why wasn’t Brandon driving faster? This was no time to worry about the speed limit. Traffic into the city, even on a Tuesday night, was thick, but it was moving. He could swerve around people instead of just sticking to one lane. Naomi found that she was digging furrows into her palms with her fingernails, and with an effort, stopped.

  Finally, they arrived at the Jefferson ER and parked. The three of them ran inside together and waited impatiently for the family in front of them at the triage desk. It was an Asian family with three young children, and none of them seemed to speak much English. Finally, they understood that they should take a seat, and Naomi, Tyler, and Brandon stepped forward.

  “Abigail Sumner?” Brandon said.

  The woman checked her computer. “Spell the last name?”

  “S-U-M-N-E-R,” Brandon said impatiently. “She was just life-flighted in—maybe she’s not in your system yet.”

  “Are you family?” she asked.

  “I am,” Naomi said. “I’m her sister.”

  The nurse looked up, and Naomi could see it in her eyes before she spoke. She wanted to run, to throw something, to clamp a hand over the woman’s mouth, anything to prevent her from speaking.

  “I’m very sorry,” the nurse said.

  CHAPTER 9

  “You were supposed to check them!” Brandon shouted. “It was your job!”

  Tyler dropped onto the sofa and put his head in his hands. The apartment seemed hauntingly empty without Abby there. It was no good pointing out that Brandon hadn’t wanted to install the kill switches in the first place. And besides, he was right. It had been Tyler’s job.

  “I did check them,” Tyler said. “I know I did. The night before, they were fine.”

  “They weren’t fine. If they were fine, then Abby would still . . .” Brandon’s voice cut off, and he finished the thought with a vicious kick at an end table, knocking a lamp onto the floor.

  The police had yet to release their cars or equipment, and Tyler had no idea how long that would take. It meant he couldn’t check the kill switches for signs of tampering, and once he could, he wouldn’t be able to differentiate between tampering by the police and tampering by the person who sabotaged the cars. That made it difficult to know anything for sure, or to convince Brandon it hadn’t been just carelessness.

  The one thing he did have was the software. For the last three days, Tyler spent most of his waking hours trying to reproduce the accident in their Realplanet simulation. He had the exact version of the AI software that had been run in the cars the day before, unless it had somehow been switched out for a different one. He tried every variation he could think of to make the simulation match the reality of the demo, but no matter how many simulations he ran, he couldn’t make it happen. Every time, the cars stopped exactly when they should.

  Of course, the simulation, however detailed, could reflect only what Tyler himself knew. If the brand of solenoid they had purchased wore out after ten thousand uses, the simulation wouldn’t show it, because he didn’t know to program it in. But no equipment failure he could think of explained the simultaneous failure of all four cars.

  Which left only a software failure. Unless . . .

  “Our R/F signal wasn’t encrypted,” Tyler said. “Someone could have hacked it. Just bypassed the AIs altogether and taken control.”

  Brandon whirled on him. “What, so this is my fault now?”

  “No! I’m just saying . . .”

  “Because it couldn’t be the software, could it? The software was perfect. It’s inconceivable that a software bug could be to blame, even though that’s the obvious explanation.”

  “I’ve been testing it for—”

  “Oh, please.” Brandon rolled his eyes, his face curled in disgust. “There isn’t a software product on Earth that doesn’t have any bugs. That’s why there’s supposed to be error checking. Redundancies, backup audits, multiple calculation routes.” He advanced on Tyler, pointing a finger at his chest. “So that something like this can never, ever happen.” His eyes were rimmed with red, his face twisted in fury.

  “Listen to me,” Tyler said. “Say you have someone on some private crusade against self-driving cars. They wouldn’t even have to know the interface. If they scrambled the input signal, just for a few seconds, they could send conflicting data to the solenoids, cause them to seize up. That’s all it would take. Then, when the hacker stopped transmitting, the AIs would get control again and stop the cars.”

  It was a little crazy, as theories went, but not impossible. Audi’s self-driving car had been hacked just the month before, though the hackers had been able only to turn the radio on and make the windshield wipers go berserk, not actually take control. It wasn’t like he and Brandon had hardened against an attack like that. They were just college students. They weren’t expecting to be targeted. But the event had been advertised. Anybody at the track cou
ld have done it with a simple transmitter and a few off-the-shelf parts.

  Brandon backed away, pulling at his hair with an agonized groan. “Who cares? What does it matter? It’s over, can’t you see that? Everything is over.” He leaned against the doorframe. “We thought we could rule the world, and instead, we killed the sweetest, most beautiful . . .”

  “It’s not your fault,” Tyler said.

  “Don’t. Don’t you dare patronize me.” The words tore out of Brandon’s throat. “She trusted us. She stood there in front of our cars, and she trusted us to make them stop. We failed her. There’s no mystery to solve, no secret hacker conspiracy to blame. It doesn’t matter what exact sequence of malfunctions made it happen. Abby didn’t write a line of code or wire a single piece of electronics. That was our job. And there’s nowhere else to point the finger. We killed her. We did.”

  Tyler didn’t respond. There was nothing he could say.

  Brandon was right. Even if a hacker had maliciously attacked them, they at least shared the blame. She had placed her life in their hands, and they had accepted that responsibility. It had been their job to protect her. Tyler realized now that, despite the obvious dangers, despite everything he knew, he had never really taken that responsibility seriously enough.

  But he still wanted to know what had happened. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that they must have been hacked. The physical disconnection of all four kill switches and the inexplicable failure of the software in all four cars to apply the brakes on time implied a coordinated, planned attack. Someone must have sneaked onto the track the night before or arrived early in the morning and disconnected the kill switches. Then, during the demo, they’d intentionally scrambled the signals to cause the accident. It was even possible that they hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, just to ruin the demo.

  The explanation had holes, most importantly the question of who would want to do such a thing. But it was the only idea he’d come up with that didn’t require an unbelievable series of coincidences or specialized knowledge that only he, Brandon, and Naomi had. That made the theory at least plausible.