Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell

terrible idea, it was the suggestion of how it should be used. I remember a hot summer morning in Washington, the heat rising off a sidewalk crowded with Boy Scouts touring the capital as Briggs and I argued. We were hot in our uniforms, frustrated and stressed, and I remember walking past the White House, people everywhere, and wondering what would be next. What other inhumanities would be offered by technology? And that was almost a decade ago, almost the Stone Age compared to now.
    “I’m pretty sure—in fact, more than pretty sure—that’s what’s parked inside the guy’s apartment,” Lucy is saying. “And you don’t buy something like that on eBay.”
    “Maybe it’s a model,” I suggest. “A facsimile.”
    “No way. When I zoomed in on it, I could see the composite parts in detail, some wear and tear on it from usage, probably from R-and-D on hard terrain and it got scraped up a little. I could even see the fiber-optic connectors. MORT wasn’t wireless, which was just one of a number of things wrong with it. Not like what they’re doing today with autonomous robots that have onboard computers and receive information through sensors controlled by man-wearable units instead of lugging around a cumbersome Pelican case-based one. Like the military guys are doing so their field-embedded operators are hands-free when they’re out with their robotic squads. This whole new thing with lightweight ruggedized processors that you can wear in your vest, saying you’re operating an unmanned ground vehicle or the armed robots, the SWORDS unit, the Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System. A robotic infantry armed with M-two-forty-nine light machine guns. Not something I’m comfortable with, and I know how you feel about that.”
    “I’m not sure that there are words for how I feel about it,” I reply.
    “Three SWORDS units so far in Iraq, but they haven’t fired their weapons yet. Nobody’s sure how to get a robot to have that kind of judgment. Artificial EQ. A rather daunting prospect but I’m sure not impossible.”
    “Robots should be used for peacekeeping, surveillance, as pack mules.”
    “That’s you but not everyone.”
    “They should not make decisions about life and death,” I go on. “It would be like autopilot deciding whether we should fly through these clouds rolling toward us.”
    “Autopilot could if my helicopter had moisture and temperature sensors. Throw in force transducers and it will land all by itself as light as a feather. Enough sensors and you don’t need me anymore. Climb in and push a button like the Jetsons. Sounds crazy, but the crazier, the better. Just ask DARPA. You got any idea how much money DARPA invests in the Cambridge area?”
    Lucy lowers the collective, losing altitude and bleeding off speed as another ghostly patch of clouds rolls toward us in the dark.
    “Besides what it’s invested in the CFC?” she then says.
    Her demeanor is different, even her face is different, and she’s no longer trying to hide what has come over her. I know this mood. I know it all too well. It is an old mood I haven’t seen in a while, but I know it like I know the symptoms of a disease that has been in remission.
    “Computers, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, the more off the wall, the better,” she continues. “Because there’s no such thing as mad scientists anymore. I’m not sure there’s any such thing as science fiction. Come up with the most extreme invention you can imagine, and it’s probably being implemented somewhere. It’s probably old news.”
    “You’re suggesting this man who died in Norton’s Woods is connected to DARPA.”
    “Somehow he is, in some capacity. Don’t know how directly or indirectly,” Lucy answers. “MORT isn’t being used anymore, not by the military, not for any purpose, but was
Star Wars
stuff about eight or nine years ago when DARPA stepped up funding for military and intelligence-gathering