Cut to Vox Pop, man-on-the-street interviews
Citizen 1: Neighborhood Safety has made me feel safer. If I need help, I can just yell, and it’ll respond. But I haven’t. You know, those men who sometimes came around my neighborhood don’t come around any longer. I think it’s the security robots.
Citizen 2: I’m tellin’ ya it’s a con job. They got us downloadin’ this app that’ll just Hoover up all of our data, everything we do, our location, who we talk to, alla that stuff. You can’t trust it!
Interviewer: What do you think they would want it for?
Citizen 2: Just, y’know, to be in control of everything! Read my post on Wavelength for details!
Citizen 3: I don’t think we can just entrust all our data to corporations, but we can’t trust governments either. The hearings on Atlantean infiltrators are still going on. I think the security checkpoints are onerous. But at the same time, I can’t deny that attacks feel like they’re at an all-time low. What price peace, and all that.
Cut to an interview between Harshad Subramanyam, senior anchor, and Rex Tyran, head of Tyran Enterprises. Both men are comfortably seated in a studio, facing each other.
HS: Mr. Tyran, over the last four months, public opinion about your Neighborhood Safety program has been mixed, to say the least. Do you have anything you’d like to say about it?
RT: (chuckling) I have so much. Safety and trust are something I think about constantly.
RT: But to be brief, I think people are right to ask questions like this, and have doubts. Not because we’re doing anything nefarious, but because safety is everyone’s concern. That’s the premise of Neighborhood Safety, in fact. Everyone contributes to keeping everyone safe by sharing data.
HS: But sharing with who, seems to be a popular question.
RT: Quite right. We learned that our governments were, well, I don’t want to say riddled with Atlantean informants and moles. But I will say that some were shockingly high placed. We hear stories about corporate malfeasance every week on television. So who can you trust? I think the answer is “yourself”. And beyond that, I think you can trust groups who have every reason to disagree, and agree anyway on something. So I want to introduce you, and the world, to FORESIGHT.
A clip plays, showing a colossal spherical machine, built at the bottom of a pool filled with water. Cables connect it to the walls of the pool, and the whole machine glows with an unearthly radiance. Operators move around the edges of the pool, monitoring incidental equipment stationed nearby, or commenting to each other and occasionally gesturing at the machine itself.
HS: Okay. What is FORESIGHT?
RT: FORESIGHT is the megacomputer built by our research arm, Tyran Tech. It is, haha, bear with me, a heptaquark linear waveguide paraquantum computer. That’s a mouthful. It’s unique - there’s only one like it in the whole world.
HS: What does FORESIGHT do, and if I may ask, looking at this thing, do you expect the sight of this machine to put the public’s mind at ease?
RT: I absolutely agree with your point, Mr. Subramanyam. FORESIGHT is the beating heart of New Tomorrow City. It is where all our data goes - everything, from Neighborhood Safety reports to the safety camera feeds to weather to police blotters. The output of the machine is a set of instructions, along with a chain of evidence for those instructions. These are relayed to fire, police, EMS, the Stellar Six, and even our corporate communications network. A human auditor can review the chain of evidence and override FORESIGHT if necessary. We also retain its generated records for thirteen months to comply with government auditing regulations.
HS: So this machine is effectively a huge database on everything and everyone?
RT: Not a database, the way we’d use that word. An operator can’t ask FORESIGHT to locate his ex-girlfriend, or spy on an old employer, or anything of the sort. Data that goes into FORESIGHT is transformed in a way that makes it impossible to reverse.
HS: To be blunt, sir, how can we believe a claim like this?
RT: I don’t expect you to believe me. But going back to our question of trust, I would hope that the public would believe the seventeen independent audits that have been performed on FORESIGHT. We’ve had the EU’s toughest regulators, top computer scientists, machine learning experts, security and penetration testers, and more all take a swing at FORESIGHT. We asked that independent organizations pay for these audits, then publish them, with money from us in escrow to recoup their costs regardless of the results of the audits, to avoid any appearance of impropriety or influence.
HS: I see.
RT: So we’ve absorbed the costs of applying the world’s scrutiny to our most important product. And I think this is important, because it would be easy for us to be short-sighted and assume we’d solved this amazingly complex problem. I want the world’s eyes on us, because that’s how we can assure ourselves that our creation is as secure as we need it to be.
HS: Does FORESIGHT also operate your security robots currently patrolling the city?
RT: No. Tyran Tech has a hand in their coding, but we’ve contracted out to veteran roboticists and security specialists. We’re combining our revolutionary hardware with their battle-tested, thoroughly vetted software. Data from those robots still flows into FORESIGHT, of course.
HS: You’ve also secured government contracts, I believe?
RT: To a very limited extent. We’re not interested in building a new robot army for the military - unless there’s another invasion, of course, at which point I believe it’s all hands on deck. No, what we’re doing is coordinating on the Atlantean Sonar Frontier, or ASF, which is the front-line defense for future attacks from underwater. Data from the ASF can signal to FORESIGHT that large-scale emergency services might need to be mobilized.
HS: And the security stations and checkpoints as well? I believe some citizens have complained that they’re given priority if they install your Neighborhood Safety app, while people who don’t comply are held back or delayed for “further processing”.
RT: I’m glad you asked about that. Neighborhood Safety includes a cryptographically signed package of the user’s identity, letting checkpoint operators verify someone immediately. For other people, there’s an unavoidable delay in contacting city, state, and federal databases to verify records such as a driver’s license or fingerprints. Contrary to belief, we don’t mandate the security checkpoints - the city does. We’ve been contracted to operate them. I recommend that citizens concerned about the checkpoints make their voices heard at City Hall. Of course we’ll do whatever the city council decides.
HS: And you didn’t lobby the city to install the checkpoints in the first place?
RT: Oh, we were asked, especially after a string of robberies targeting Tyran Tech. And certainly we indicated that if the city’s budget could be better applied to security, it would be a benefit to everybody. But I don’t know any business owner who didn’t feel the same way.
HS: How would you respond to people who say that you’re incredibly philanthropic toward the city - literally, as in it’s not credible that you’d be this generous? What do you gain from all this work and expense?
RT: (chuckling) Well, I live here! And so do our employees, for the most part. We like to hire locally, to get employees who will care. We understand the benefits and importance of remote work, and we absolutely support it for any employee who requests it. But at the end of the day, we care about our home for the same reason anyone does, and we want to both give back to it, and to build it up, into something better.
HS: How would you respond to someone who said “we don’t want Tyran here”, someone who for whatever reason objected to your activities in the city and elsewhere?
RT: (laughing) Getting rid of us is really quite easy. Stop buying our products.
HS: I see. Thank you, Mr. Rex Tyran, for your time and for this conversation.
RT: Thank you, Mr. Subramanyam, it’s been a pleasure.
