Hacking the Narrative: How Technology is Scaring the Crap out of a Modern Protagonist

The road to hell will be paved by killer robots. That’s the conclusion I reached when researching Book #2 in the Porter Beck Mystery Series, Shades of Mercy. Living where I do, in close proximity to perhaps the most secretive piece of desert in the world, there is never a lack of material for a mystery. Juicy conspiracy theories abound when it comes to what goes on at Area 51 and the rest of the Nevada Test and Training Range, and I’m always on the hunt for one that will keep readers fascinated. But it’s the real stuff our government works on under ultra-tight security that makes for the best material.

And so it was this time. The development of high-tech military RPAs (Remotely Piloted Aircraft) was a key part of my story, but that seems like old news to many of us today. What’s new is the ability of bad actors (nations and individuals) to hack into these unmanned birds and reprogram them or bring them down. That’s what happens with software. It gets hacked. People find a way in. Systems are attacked every day. Credit card or personal information is stolen and used in nefarious ways. We have all been affected. But it’s the lesser-known hacks, those of defense systems, that should terrify us all. It was when I learned of those few actual cases that I became aware of the term Zero-days.

And now I can’t sleep at night. Neither can my protagonist.

A Zero-day is a vulnerability in software that is unknown to its creator or owner and for which no fix is currently available. When someone exploits that weakness, robots can become killer robots. And forget about what you’ve seen in the movies where it takes a global superpower to do these kinds of things. There’s a line in Shades of Mercy I’m particularly fond of:

That was the problem with drones. They were a gateway technology, opening the door for any country or any bad actor to weaponize artificial intelligence and execute lethal force while eating ice cream from the comfort of a recliner.

Put that picture in your brain and let it percolate a while. Understand that it is not science fiction.

If that doesn’t horrify you quite enough, what about this: Way back in 1999, a teenage boy from Florida installed a backdoor in US military servers that eventually provided him a way into the computers used by NASA, where he accessed the source code for the International Space Station (ISS). Had he chosen to do so, this teen hacker could have wreaked havoc on the station’s critical systems, most notably the life support system.

This is the reality we live in today, and in Shades of Mercy, it’s as important to the story as the physical setting of eastern Nevada. Everything in this novel revolves around the activities of fictional hacker, Mercy Vaughn, a teenage girl of questionable origins whose keyboard clicks can be weaponized by any number of bad actors. And just like in The Bitter Past, the super-secret desert is the ideal place for her abilities to be exploited. Mercy might well be the most accomplished hacker on the planet, but she’s still a child trying to figure out the world. Porter Beck might be the only person who wants to help her do that.

Underlying these first two books in the series (there will be at least four!) is the theme of a world on the brink. Dirty bombs and nuclear Armageddon are perhaps more a clear and present danger as they ever were. But now there’s AI, machines that can think for themselves and that will soon be more intelligent than humans by several orders of magnitude. Militaries around the world are already developing and testing weapons systems that can act autonomously, that can decide on their own what targets to hit. AI fighter pilots are already outperforming their human counterparts in simulated dogfights.

Where does this end? Do humans possess the patience and restraint to get us over the hump known as The Great Filter, that barrier that perhaps every extraterrestrial civilization must get beyond to reach the stars? Or do these machines that think for themselves realize one day that we are not worth saving? I’d love to share my thoughts, but I’m afraid my computer is monitoring everything I do 😊.