After years of silence, I rejoin you with an observation ripped from today's headlines. I recall one of the interesting features of the Anome's rule on Shant in the Durdane trilogy was the fitting of the population with the Torcs, whereby miscreants could be remotely decapitated by a signal encoded with the ring's color pattern and sent by radio pulse delivered from the Anome or one of his agents lurking nearby. I was reminded of this by a short item appearing in todays\'s news:
"It could be
the ultimate in political control - but it won't be patented in Germany.German media outlets reported last week that a Saudi inventor's application to patent a "killer
chip," as the Swiss tabloids put it, had been denied.The basic model would consist
of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person's skin, so that authorities could track him easily. Model B would have an extra function - a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if
authorities deemed he'd become a public threat.
The inventor said the chip could be used to track terrorists, criminals,
fugitives, illegal immigrants, political dissidents, domestic servants and foreigners overstaying their visas.
'The invention will probably be found to violate paragraph two of the German
Patent Law - which does not allow inventions that transgress public order or good morals,"'German Patent and Trademark Office spokeswoman Stephanie
Krüger told the English-language German-news Web site The Local."
Indeed the realm of the Wahabis seems as strange and remote to me as that of Shant! However it seems to me that the patent application for Model B is not too
well thought out. One feature of the torcs as I recall was that no one except its users was aware of exactly how they were activated, or how the command was
encoded. As described, they were supposedly unremovable and tamperproof (although Ifness overcame this). If the wearers had learned that the signals were
encoded using the color pattern on the torc, could they not have simply painted a new one on it? Presumably the Anome would have employed spies and informers
to check against a register of patterns, and declared alteration to be be a capital offense. But a desperate individual on the run and assuming anonymity or a
false new identity could have easily escaped the register. Presumably Shant did not have planet-wide GPS communication and activation. Any exhaustive attempts
to constantly check and update the population could only serve to reveal the principle being used to code the detonation.
Another flaw with Model B is the use of Cyanide as the deadly agent. If the potential victim is aware of this, and assuming that the chip could be engineered
to activate reliably if tampered with, and assuming that the GPS signal could not be blocked (and arranging auto-activation upon loss of signal could easily
lead to many unintentional terminations), then another response would be to be prepared with cyanide antidotes. From Wikipedia:
"Antidotes to cyanide
poisoning include hydroxocobalamin and sodium nitrite which
release the cyanide from the cytochrome system, and rhodanase, which is an enzyme occurring naturally in mammals that combines serum cyanide with
thiosulfate, producing comparatively harmless thiocyanate."
My particular job is to direct a lab which deals with biomonitoring of toxins and poisons potentially to be used by terrorists, to include cyanide, and there
is no shortage of equally potent agents, many with no useful antidote, which might be usefully employed in the Model B, and secrecy regarding which one is
present in a particular carrier's chip should help circumvent antidote defense strategies.
On the whole, I think Jack's solution is better, although I cringe to think of the mischief to be perpetrated by hobbiests trying to guess and activate the
firing code just to enjoy the bang and odd rolling head. This could give a whole new meaning to the term "hacker".
G. M. FRame
