Vision Impossible Read Free Page B

like it fell all the way down to my toes. There was another click and the slide moved to a clip of the British prime minister, then the French president and on and on with each allied national leader’s aura vividly portrayed.
    It took me several seconds to realize I’d stopped breathing.
    The lights came on then and I squinted in the brightness, while my mind raced with the possible horrible implications of having this particular technology in the wrong hands. “Now do you understand why your country so desperately needs someone with your talents, Ms. Cooper?” asked Tanner.
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said gravely. “Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it.”
    “Good,” she said. “Then let’s get started. . . .”
     
     
    D utch and I spent the next several hours being briefed on Intuit and its capabilities. I was somewhat relieved to hear that the original software was still with the good ol’ U.S. of A., but the drone carried the actual working portable prototype, so if it was placed into the wrong geeky hands, it was only a matter of time before one of our enemies figured out how to reverse engineer it. The implications were beyond frightening.
    “Imagine that you are a terrorist,” said Professor Steckworth as if he’d been doing much of that lately. “You could easily sneak Intuit and the drone into any country, and fly it anywhere within fifty miles of your location. The battery on the drone is good for up to one hundred miles, or round-trip to your target and back. The software is programmed to look for whatever signature aura you input. If you are an enemy of Israel and you want to kill the Israeli prime minister, simply upload the PM’s aura off of any film footage and send the drone over the border.
    “Your only worry is that the drone will run out of battery life before it finds your target, but we know with certainty that there are some solar panel technologies being developed right now that are quite lightweight. One of the next improvements we were about to make to the drone was mounting some of these ourselves to extend the drone’s range, and we’ve already calculated that it is possible to mount these on the top of the drone without compromising lift. As long as there are at least eight hours of sunlight available to charge the battery, your drone could run day and night. In theory, given the right climate, like, say, the Middle East, the drone could stay aloft for weeks and weeks.”
    “How good is the camera system on the drone that was stolen?” Dutch asked.
    “Moderately sophisticated,” Steckworth admitted. “But it doesn’t need to be more than that. Again, Intuit itself is highly sensitive to the color patterns of the auras of your target. It does not need especially good camera quality to recognize the pattern and instruct the drone to fly lower to take a closer look. The software would need to be within five hundred feet or so to make a positive match, and the drone is quite small, only three and a half feet from tip to tail. It is also nearly completely silent. Anyone with a keen eye would think it a large bird gliding on air currents, not a man-made drone.”
    “Besides the obvious enemies of the U.S., who would want this technology?” I asked.
    Steckworth leveled his eyes at me. “Who wouldn’t, Ms. Cooper?”
    It took me a minute to get the clear meaning of that. “You’re telling me that even our allies would try to take the technology away from us?”
    “Yes,” he said flatly.
    I opened my mouth to protest, but Steckworth cut me off. “Possibly not all of our allies will attempt to acquire the drone, but enough of them know about it that it gravely concerns us.”
    “You mean to tell me, countries like Canada, England, France, and Australia—countries that actually like us—might want to take it?”
    “Quite possibly.”
    I sat there for a full minute with my mouth hanging open. I couldn’t believe it. How had our world come to this?
    “So the drone gets