1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.2      An Awakening Epiphany

1.2.2.27   The stable door

Nadine: {Minion, I think Balthazar said something about his bier mod being usable for an effect similar to increasing the INT stat in-game. Can you activate that while I’m in orglife mode, or do I need to be lying down in velife?}

Minion: {I’d need to move the jewels to their skull contact positions, but you could remain in orglife mode; I wouldn’t be overriding your sensory information or movements.}

Nadine: {Minion, do it.}

She felt the pads moving hair aside and the now familiar touch. Think, Nadine, think. She reviewed her conversations that day, about expert systems, ninja battles and dancing drones exchanging payloads in a whirl.

Slowly she asked Wellington: {If there had been a thousand drones on standby, and the Immortals didn’t know which one was carrying Tlaloc, would they still have caught him?}

Wellington: {Probably not. If they had access to city-wide surveillance, they might have been able to see where each of the thousand drones landed, but they couldn’t have scrambled enough assets to intercept all those landings. He could have disappeared into a surveillance shadow, laid low inside a friend’s room, and have escaped the cordon once the heat died down. But not only would that many drones be expensive, it would be impossible to keep them all inconspicuous. They couldn’t even fit into his house, let alone into a cupboard.}

She could feel where the idea was taking her now. With more confidence she asked a question of Heather:

Nadine: {As part of the MythOS project, you were looking at creating some large cargo carrying drones. How hard would it be to design them to swap cargos swiftly, preferably in mid-air? So swiftly that an observer would have a hard job of keeping track of which cargo ended up with which drone?}

Heather: {If you’re thinking about a container carrying a human, you couldn’t do it swiftly enough to fool a camera, even if the containers were outwardly identical, without turning the contents into jam. But it might be possible to briefly mask the exchange with enfolding wings, or similar. You’d want to build in a behavioural explanation of why it was in their nature to do this.}

Terah: {Pah! Just make them take breaks together under bridges or shady trees. They like to gossip, or smoke perhaps? Flying is hard work, they want to rest their wings, groom each other.}

Nadine: {Do you both remember the Pirates versus Ninjas event, back at UCL? What if, instead of gold being smuggled away from an island by cascading numbers of ninjas, we have a student being smuggled away from killers by a cascading number of drones? The student would only need one drone on standby nearby, but if drones in a crowded urban area met up every 2 minutes to do a swap, after 20 minutes there’d be at least a thousand possibles the killers would need to track.}

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Heather said, thoughtfully: {You wouldn’t want to do it that frequently out in the countryside. And you’d need to allow for variable numbers of birds at a swap, and how much range each bird had left. Maybe something like the Anonymous Songhai Special Interest Group NATION protocol, to let birds opt-into nearby meets. The longer the bird has been without meeting, the dirtier its feathers get and the further out of its way it is prepared to go for a good grooming and to catch up on the gossip.}

Wellington: {There’s been a lot of work done on how to construct a physical analog of a packet switching network. It works fine when one organisation owns all the drones. Things get problematic when you add in transport fees and the possibility of somebody’s drone running off with a valuable cargo, or just inspecting it and selling the information. What you’re talking about here is adding a mix network on top of that; preferably a variant with cryptographic routing that prevents birds in the middle knowing the ultimate origin or ultimate destination of the package. And you’re asking some birds to be inefficient, flying with light cargos but pretending to fly as though they’d continued with their previous heavy cargo.}

Nadine: {Oh, sorry.}

Heather gave Wellington a pointed look.

Wellington: {I didn’t say it was a bad idea. It would certainly work short term on a local scale, and might have saved Tlaloc. Whether it can be more than that? Well, I’m going to have to do some serious thinking, probably get some other folks involved. We’ve learned a lot about crafting trust metrics and setting up resilient reputation economies over the last ten years. There might be some approaches that are workable now that weren’t previously feasible.}

Heather: {Perhaps it doesn’t need to be quite as reliable or as efficient as the insecure transport network. Especially in areas where people fear being watched by the state, they’ll just need an excuse to use it, even if they have to claim they’re using it because the birds are cute, or they make less noise. If Mary-Lynn were here, she’d say it’s all a matter of presentation. We should run some models, see what it will take.}

Nadine felt much happier, and smiled at Heather.

Nadine: {We’re already wanting to get bots into the hands of local communities. I don’t know what the plans are to reduce the cost of buying them, but if we can use the same method to make drones cheaply, and get hold of cheap power too, maybe our secondary selling point can be “slower but cheaper”? Birds have nothing to gain by being idle, so they might as well be flying circuits acting as decoys.}

Goodness, her mood was acting like a yo-yo. Ready or not, she was going to go try that meditation room.

Nadine: {I’ve had a busy day. I’m going to leave you to it and take a break. Have fun!}

Terah banged his staff: {You just make sure, when it comes time to patent this, that you give due credit to Miss Sabanagic.}

Heather came over to give her a hug and retrieve the ear protectors, which she hung on a peg by the door. Wellington gave her a nod, before turning back to his virtual screens floating in the air of the barn.

Nadine: {Minion, cancel orglife, cancel brain boost. I’m going to take a long hot shower and then log into The Burrow from my own bed. Tell Balthazar he’s got until then.}

And with that she removed her crown and walked slowly back down the slope and across the fields, alone in her own mind at last.