When terrorists hack armed-drone operating systems to start a World War, a lady adventurer goes under cover to stop them.

SYNOPSIS:

On 28 July 2015, over 1,000 artificial intelligence and robotics researchers signed an open letter warning that “Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of … autonomous weapons [able to] select and engage targets without human intervention … is — practically if not legally — feasible within years ….”

The film Conscience shows one possible scenario for what happens next.

Pacifist American technology developer Doc Manchek licensed his company's autonomous flying-robot operating system (OS) to a Japanese manufacturing firm for automated surveillance and search-and-rescue applications. He finds out they've broken their licensing agreement by using his OS to run a fleet of armed combat UAVs (CUAVs) when unknown terrorists hack the system and send the armed drones on a shooting spree, attacking a cruise ship in the South China Sea.

It turns out that after the Japanese company violated their licensing agreement by putting Doc's OS on CUAVs to be used by Japanese military and law-enforcement agencies, the Chinese hacked the OS to gain control of the armed flying robots in case they were deployed against them. North Korean spies stole the information on how to hack the OS, and sold it to Islamic State (ISIS). ISIS then gave it to a small, but sophisticated, terrorist cell, whose leader developed a plan to start a shooting war in the Far East to destabilize the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments. He reasoned that, with those governments fighting among themselves, ISIS-associated militants could expand in the Far East.

Doc is very upset.

His wife, mathematical genius and part-time adventuress Red McKenna, doesn't like that. What Red McKenna doesn't like she does something about!

She begins by writing a computer virus that gives all robots running Doc's software a conscience. Previously, on a lark, she had surreptitiously snuck a software patch into the OS that makes the robots recognize her, personally, as a Supreme Being and has her commands supersede those of all other operators and programmers. Now, she uses that patch to gain control. Her virus makes the robots believe she's commanded them to follow Azimov's Laws of Robotics – which makes them refuse to harm humans.

That's all well and good for robots being run legitimately and connected to the Internet (which is how she disseminates the virus), but the terrorists have created a firewall to protect a number of units they've stolen by simply commanding them to fly to their remote UAV base. Basically, those units are no longer connected to the Internet, so there's no way to make them download the virus. Red has to gain access to the terrorist base to physically deliver her virus to their CUAVs.

So, she pretends to convert to Islam and abandon her family to join the terrorist leader's harem!

That puts her friends and family – who know exactly what she's doing and why – in the position of having to pretend to be shocked and embarrassed by her behavior in public, while secretly aiding her. It's especially difficult for her three children, who are too young to be told the whole story.

Things go really badly after Red delivers the virus, and has to get out. Her insincere acceptance of fundamentalist Islamic doctrine leads her to make mistakes that offend her terrorist hosts. They decide to simultaneously test her resolve and make a propaganda coup by sending her on a suicide mission.

When she balks at becoming a human bomb at the Bahrain Grand Prix – an event attended by hundreds of thousands of spectators and broadcast live throughout the world – her terrorist “comrades” turn into captors who still want to use her to blow up the Grand Prix crowd. The only one who can save her is her longtime friend, perennial co-conspirator, and sometimes lesbian lover archeologist Cheryl “Bud” Thompson.

When Red's communications are cut off, Bud becomes alarmed. Her familiarity with Middle Eastern languages and culture, and her contacts with archeologists who are alarmed by ISIS' destruction of historic sites make it possible for her to infiltrate the terrorist group and find Red. Tension mounts as the time for the terrorist attack comes close. Bud reasons that the best time to rescue Red is when she's been put in place in front of the reviewing stand at the awards ceremony after the race, surrounded by thousands of race fans crowded together.

Bud's plan calls for a team of ex-military mercenaries employed by Red's step father to simultaneously swoop in to defuse Red's bomb jacket and capture the terrorists who will be nearby to detonate the bomb remotely. The full extent of the terrorists' failure becomes apparent when CUAVs sent to strafe the bomb survivors refuse to shoot into the crowd because Red's virus has given them a conscience.

The film ends with Doc Manchek using a subsequent press conference with the gathered international press to take the Japanese manufacturer to task for ever arming autonomous robots in the first place. None of the rest of it would have been possible if they'd lived up to their agreement instead of chasing profitable government contracts.