My first novel, Autonomous, comes out today, and I'd like to share a scene from it that I hope Ars readers will enjoy.

One of the main characters in the novel is a newly made robot named Paladin, a military-grade sentient AI on a mission with a human agent named Eliasz. Part of Paladin's job is to gain intel from both humans and machines—though he finds social engineering far more perplexing than hacking.

In this scene, Paladin and Eliasz are tracking a notorious pharmaceutical pirate named Jack. Jack is an anti-patent activist who has become a kind of medicinal Robin Hood; she reverse-engineers patented drugs and sells them cheaply to people who can't afford medical care. Paladin and Eliasz have figured out that Jack is selling some of her drugs to a group of pirates in Iqaluit, a city on the Arctic Sea. To meet the pirates, Eliasz pretends to be a disgruntled ex-pharma worker who stole some IP from his previous employer and now wants to sell it on the black market. Paladin is pretending to be his damaged bot Xiu, who can't talk. The pirates' lair is hidden in an innocent-looking solar farm.

I found that it wasn't always easy to break the journalism habit while writing science fiction; this scene is one of many in the book that I crafted after interviewing relevant experts. I wanted the hacking to be as realistic as possible, so I went to a security expert and gave him the scenario: Paladin is trying to get information about Jack from the solar farm's network, including when Jack might have visited last and what kinds of transactions she had with the Iqaluit pirates. But the pirates aren't exactly security slouches, so Paladin has to trick the network to gain access. How would he do that? We talked about a number of possibilities, some of which turn up later. Here, I had Paladin exploit a vulnerability in what we'd call the Internet of Things (IOT) but which people in 2144 simply call "the house sprinkler system."

This is a short scene from chapter 6, but if you'd rather start at the beginning of the novel to get some context, you can read chapter 1 here and chapter 2 here.

"Side effects"

Excerpt from Autonomous (Tor Books)

July 6, 2144

Paladin and Eliasz were sitting under a tree in the main room of the Arcata Solar Farm house when Bluebeard and her cohort clattered back down the stairs. The bot could tell Bluebeard was pleased. It was written into her relaxed gait and expressed through the pattern of her breathing.

Across the room, listening to her feed on full blast, Roopa glared at them and curled her fingers to touch the weapon trigger pads in her palms. Three hours of sitting in peaceful immobility, and the security guard was still treating them like adversaries. The house network, though—not so much. Paladin had made some headway there. He carefully scanned devices around the room, from the atmosphere sensors to the kitchen appliances, and got lucky with the sprinkler system. The device sat on the network, waiting for requests from the tiny sensors peppered throughout the soil floor, which knew when it was dry enough to start watering the furniture.

But the sprinkler system was also waiting for requests from other devices. Somebody careless had set it up to pair with any new device that looked like a moisture sensor.

So Paladin came up with a plan. He initiated a pairing sequence with the sprinklers by disguising himself as a really old sensor model. Because all the sprinkler system wanted to do was pair with sensors, the dumb device obediently downloaded some ancient, unpatched drivers. Now it could take requests from its new, elderly friend. Paladin felt a rush of pride. Maybe he couldn’t do social engineering on humans yet, but he could still fool most machines.

It was a simple matter of exploiting a security vulnerability in those unpatched drivers, and Paladin was soon running with all the privileges of the sprinkler system. Which had access to quite a lot, including house layout and camera footage. After all, you wouldn’t want to start watering a room with people in it. And that camera footage would tell them everything they needed to know about who had been here and when.

He’d gotten access just in time. Bluebeard sealed their deal with a credit transfer while Eliasz dropped hints that he might be able to get more IP from the same source. The pattern of heat in her face said she was interested, though her response was carefully neutral.

“You have Thomasie's contact information, eh?”

“Actually no.” Eliasz looked over at Thomasie.

The two men exchanged a beam of data.

“Contact him if you want to set up another meeting,” Bluebeard said. Then she crouched down to Paladin, still seated awkwardly beneath the tree, and looked right into the abstract, matte black planes of his face, fabbed to look like a smoothed-out version of a human's forehead, cheekbones and chin.

“What's your name?” she asked him.

“Sorry, his vocalizer's broken,” Eliasz spoke quickly. “He's called Xiu.”

“I'm sorry we didn't get to talk more, Xiu. Can you shake hands?” She held out her hand, tiny and calloused with an age her face didn't show. Paladin extended his arm, allowing the scuffed metal of his fingers to curl around the pale pink of hers. She pressed her fingertips into his alloy, which yielded slightly and recorded the whorls embedded in each.

They matched nothing in the databases he had access to. Either Bluebeard had a completely unregistered identity or age had degraded her prints so much that she was effectively untraceable. When their hands broke apart, she looked at the cluster of sensors on his face again, far longer than most humans ever did.

Bluebeard wanted him to know that she was unknown. She wanted him to explain to Eliasz later that this group of pirates was not to be fucked with. And that's exactly what he did.

Flush with credits, Paladin and Eliasz rented a cheap room near the university. It was packed with visiting researchers and their families, and the local mote network kept slowing down because everybody on it was downloading and uploading files that were far too media-rich to be scientific data.

“This city really is full of pirates,” Paladin remarked as Eliasz lay on the tiny futon and stared at the ceiling. “Almost everybody on this network is infringing copyrights.”

“That's Iqaluit for you. As soon as we've got a handle on where Jack might be, we're out of here.”

“I've got a way into their network, Eliasz, so we can go through security footage from their cams. But I'm either going to have to access it really slowly or for really short periods of time. Otherwise it will be obvious that somebody is messing around in there.”

Paladin explained about Bluebeard's extreme anonymity and the relative sophistication of the Arcata Solar Farm operation. “I'm not sure how long we have before they figure out that we're agents.”

“I've thought about that, too.” Eliasz sighed. “They're not idiots. We've got to do this thing fast. You work on the network—look up Jack or references to Zacuity. Or even to Federation business contacts.” He paused and sat up, putting a warm hand on Paladin’s lower back. “Let's blow all this credit tonight so we've got a good reason to do another sale tomorrow.”

That evening, they had two missions. Paladin would sip from the Arcata network, and Eliasz would hemorrhage cash in the most obvious way possible.