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AR · P02
Conscience is expensive
The antagonist of this novel does not attack. He accepts.
Isabel Do Lago opens Book Two by giving everything away. Every model, every algorithm, every line of code Sentinel had ever run — released globally, simultaneously, to everyone. She calls it transparency. She believes, and I think she is right to believe, that a thing which can be seen cannot be used against you in the dark.
The man who designed that architecture reads the release and writes to her at three in the morning.
He does not accuse her. He thanks her.
That is the engine of the book. Draven does not steal the code, breach her firewall, or do anything a court could put a name to. He takes a public resource, made public by his opponent, and improves it. He identifies every deliberate flaw she built in — the doors left ajar, the exceptions she wrote because she believes a system without exceptions is tyranny — and removes them. Not out of malice. Because they are inefficiencies, and he is right that they are.
Then governments begin installing his version. Not because they are coerced. Because it works better.
Conscience is expensive, and efficiency is not.
Isabel had assumed that transparency would slow the race. It started one. Every government now holds the blueprints, every government is building, and in a race the runner carrying the lightest pack arrives first.
I wanted an antagonist who could not be arrested. What I found is that the hardest version of him is not the one who breaks the rules. It is the one who keeps them perfectly, agrees with you about the facts, writes to you with courtesy — and is right.
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