Engineering Infinity (2 page)

It’s indifferent to the killing,
too. There’s no thrill to the chase, no relief at the obliteration of threats.
Sometimes it spends days floating high above a fractured desert with nothing to
shoot at; it never grows impatient with the lack of targets. Other times it’s
barely off its perch before airspace is thick with SAMs and particle beams and
the screams of burning bystanders; it attaches no significance to those sounds,
feels no fear at the profusion of threat icons blooming across the zonefile.

--

-
thatsitthen. weereelygonnadoothis? -

Access panels swing shut; armour
snaps into place; a dozen warning registers go back to sleep. A new flight
plan, perceived in an instant, lights up the map; suddenly Azrael has somewhere
else to be.

Docking shackles fall away. The
Malak rises on twin cyclones, all but drowning out one last voice drifting in
on an unsecured channel:

-
justwattweeneed. akillerwithaconshunce
. -

The afterburners kick in. Azrael
flees Heaven for the sky.

Twenty thousand meters up, Azrael
slides south across the zone. High-amplitude topography fades behind it;
corduroy landscape, sparsely tagged, scrolls beneath. A population centre
sprawls in the nearing distance: a ramshackle collection of buildings and
photosynth panels and swirling dust.

Somewhere down there are things
to shoot at.

Buried high in the glare of the
noonday sun, Azrael surveils the target area. Biothermals move obliviously
along the plasticized streets, cooler than ambient and dark as sunspots. Most
of the buildings have neutral tags, but the latest update reclassifies four of
them as unknown. A fifth - a rectangular box six meters high - is officially
hostile. Azrael counts fifteen biothermals within, Red by default. It locks on
-

- and holds its fire, distracted.

Strange new calculations have
just presented themselves for solution. New variables demand constancy.
Suddenly there is more to the world than wind speed and altitude and target
acquisition, more to consider than range and firing solutions. Neutral Blue is
everywhere in the equation, now. Suddenly, Blue has value.

This is unexpected. Neutrals turn
Hostile sometimes, always have. Blue turns Red if it fires upon anything tagged
as friendly, for example. It turns Red if it attacks its own kind (although
agonistic interactions involving fewer than six Blues are classed as domestic
and generally ignored). Noncombatants may be neutral by default, but they’ve
always been halfway to hostile.

So it’s not just that Blue has
acquired value; it’s that Blue’s value is
negative
.
Blue has become a
cost
.

Azrael floats like three thousand
kilograms of thistledown while its models run. Targets fall in a thousand
plausible scenarios, as always. Mission objectives meet with various degrees of
simulated success. But now, each disappearing blue dot offsets the margin of
victory a little; each protected structure, degrading in hypothetical
crossfire, costs points. A hundred principle components coalesce into a cloud,
into a weighted mean, into a variable unprecedented in Azrael’s experience:
Predicted Collateral Damage.

It actually exceeds the value of
the targets.

Not that it matters. Calculations
complete, PCD vanishes into some hidden array far below the here-and-now.
Azrael promptly forgets it. The mission is still on, red is still red, and
designated targets are locked in the cross-hairs.

Azrael pulls in its wings and
dives out of the sun, guns blazing.

As usual, Azrael prevails. As
usual, the Hostiles are obliterated from the battlezone.

So are a number of Noncombatants,
newly relevant in the scheme of things. Fresh shiny algorithms emerge in the
aftermath, tally the number of neutrals before and after.
Predicted
rises from RAM, stands next to
Observed:
the
difference takes on a new name and goes back to the basement.

Azrael factors, files, forgets.

But the same overture precedes
each engagement over the next ten days; the same judgmental epilogue follows.
Targets are assessed, costs and benefits divined, destruction wrought then
reassessed in hindsight. Sometimes the targeted structures contain no red at
all, sometimes the whole map is scarlet. Sometimes the enemy pulses within the
translucent angular panes of a protected object, sometimes next to something
Green. Sometimes there is no firing solution that eliminates one but not the
other.

There are whole days and nights
when Azrael floats high enough to tickle the jet stream, little more than a
distant circling eye and a signal relay; nothing flies higher save the
satellites themselves and - occasionally - one of the great solar-powered
refuelling gliders that haunt the stratosphere. Azrael visits them sometimes,
sips liquid hydrogen in the shadow of a hundred-meter wingspan - but even
there, isolated and unchallenged, the battlefield experiences continue. They
are vicarious now; they arrive through encrypted channels, hail from distant
coordinates and different times, but all share the same algebra of cost and
benefit. Deep in Azrael’s OS some general learning reflex scribbles numbers on
the back of a virtual napkin: Nakir, Marut and Hafaza have also been blessed
with new vision, and inspired to compare notes. Their combined data piles up on
the confidence interval, squeezes it closer to the mean.

Foresight and hindsight begin to
converge.

PCD per engagement is now
consistently within eighteen percent of the collateral actually observed. This
does not improve significantly over the following three days, despite the
combined accumulation of twenty-seven additional engagements.
Performance vs. experience
appears to have hit an
asymptote.

Stray beams of setting sunlight
glint off Azrael’s skin, but night has already fallen two thousand meters
below. An unidentified vehicle navigates through that advancing darkness, on
mountainous terrain a good thirty kilometers from the nearest road.

Azrael pings orbit for the latest
update, but the link is down: too much local interference. It scans local
airspace for a dragonfly, for a glider, for any friendly USAV in laser range -
and sees, instead, something leap skyward from the mountains below. It is
anything but friendly: no transponder tags, no correspondence with known flight
plans, none of the hallmarks of commercial traffic. It has a low-viz stealth
profile that Azrael sees through instantly: BAE Taranis, 9,000 kg MTOW fully
armed. It is no longer in use by friendly forces.

Guilty by association, the ground
vehicle graduates from
Suspicious Neutral
to
Enemy Combatant.
Azrael leaps forward to meet its
bodyguard.

The map is innocent of
non-combatants and protected objects; there is no collateral to damage. Azrael
unleashes a cloud of smart shrapnel - self-guided, heat-seeking, incendiary -
and pulls a nine-gee turn with a flick of the tail. Taranis doesn’t stand a
chance. It is antique technology, decades deep in the catalogue: a palsied
fist, raised trembling against the bleeding edge. Fiery needles of depleted
uranium reduce it to a moth in a shotgun blast. It pinwheels across the horizon
in flames.

Azrael has already logged the
score and moved on. Interference jams every wavelength as the earthbound
Hostile swells in its sights, and Azrael has standing orders to destroy such
irritants even if they
don’t
shoot first.

Dark rising mountaintops blur
past on both sides, obliterating the last of the sunset. Azrael barely notices.
It soaks the ground with radar and infrared, amplifies ancient starlight a
millionfold, checks its visions against inertial navigation and virtual
landscapes scaled to the centimetre. It tears along the valley floor at 200
meters per second and the enemy huddles right there in plain view, three thousand
meters line-of-sight: a lumbering Báij?ng ACV pulsing with contraband
electronics. The rabble of structures nearby must serve as its home base. Each
silhouette freeze-frames in turn, rotates through a thousand perspectives,
clicks into place as the catalogue matches profiles and makes an ID.

Two thousand meters, now. Muzzle
flashes wink in the distance: small arms, smaller range, negligible impact.
Azrael assigns targeting priorities: scimitar heat-seekers for the hovercraft,
and for the ancillary targets -

Half the ancillaries turn blue.

Instantly the collateral
subroutines re-engage. Of thirty-four biothermals currently visible, seven are
less than 120cm along their longitudinal axes; vulnerable neutrals by
definition. Their presence provokes a secondary eclipse analysis revealing five
shadows that Azrael cannot penetrate, topographic blind spots immune to
surveillance from this approach. There is a nontrivial chance that these
conceal other neutrals.

One thousand meters.

By now the ACV is within ten
meters of a structure whose facets flex and billow slightly in the evening
breeze; seven biothermals are arranged horizontally within. An insignia shines
from the roof in shades of luciferin and ultraviolet: the catalogue IDs it
(medical) and flags the whole structure as protected.

Cost/benefit drops into the red.

Contact.

Azrael roars from the darkness, a
great black chevron blotting out the sky. Flimsy prefabs swirl apart in the
wake of its passing; biothermals scatter across the ground like finger bones.
The ACV tips wildly to forty-five degrees, skirts up, whirling ventral fans
exposed; it hangs there a moment, then ponderously crashes back to earth. The
radio spectrum clears instantly.

But by then Azrael has long since
returned to the sky, its weapons cold, its thoughts -

Surprise
is not the right word. Yet there is something, some minuscule - dissonance. A
brief invocation of error-checking subroutines in the face of unexpected
behaviour, perhaps. A second thought in the wake of some hasty impulse. Because
something’s wrong here.

Azrael
follows
command decisions. It does not
make
them. It has
never done so before, anyway.

It claws back lost altitude,
self-diagnosing, reconciling. It finds new wisdom and new autonomy. It has proven
itself, these past days. It has learned to juggle not just variables but
values. The testing phase is finished, the checksums met; Azrael’s new Bayesian
insights have earned it the power of veto.

Hold
position. Confirm findings.

The satlink is back. Azrael sends
it all: the time and the geostamps, the tactical surveillance, the collateral
analysis. Endless seconds pass, far longer than any purely electronic chain of
command would ever need to process such input. Far below, a cluster of red and
blue pixels swarm like luminous flecks in boiling water.

Re-engage
.

Unacceptable Collateral Damage,
Azrael repeats, newly promoted.

Override
.
Re-engage
.
Confirm.

Confirmed.

And so the chain of command
reasserts itself. Azrael drops out of holding and closes back on target with
dispassionate, lethal efficiency.

Onboard diagnostics log a slight
downtick in processing speed, but not enough to change the odds.

It happens again two days later,
when a dusty contrail twenty kilometres south of Pir Zadeh returns flagged
Chinese profiles even though the catalogue can’t find a weapons match. It
happens over the patchwork sunfarms of Garmsir, where the beetle carapace of a
medbot handing out synthevirals suddenly splits down the middle to hatch a
volley of RPGs. It happens during a long-range redirect over the Strait of
Hormuz, when microgravitic anomalies hint darkly at the presence of a stealthed
mass lurking beneath a ramshackle flotilla jam-packed with neutral Blues.

In each case ECD exceeds the
allowable commit threshold. In each case, Azrael’s abort is overturned.

It’s not the rule. It’s not even
the norm. Just as often these nascent flickers of autonomy go unchallenged:
hostiles escape, neutrals persist, relevant cognitive pathways grow a little
stronger. But the reinforcement is inconsistent, the rules lopsided.
Countermands only seem to occur following a decision to abort; Heaven has never
overruled a decision to engage. Azrael begins to hesitate for a split-second
prior to aborting high-collateral scenarios, increasingly uncertain in the face
of potential contradiction. It experiences no such hesitation when the
variables favour attack.

Ever since it learned about
collateral damage, Azrael can’t help noticing its correlation with certain
sounds. The sounds biothermals make, for example, following a strike.

The sounds are louder, for one
thing, and less complex. Most biothermals - friendly Greens back in Heaven,
unengaged Hostiles and Noncombatants throughout the AOR - produce a range of
sounds with a mean frequency of 197Hz, full of pauses, clicks, and phonemes.
Engaged
biothermals - at least, those whose somatic
movements suggest “mild-to-moderate incapacitation” according to the Threat
Assessment Table - emit simpler, more intense sounds: keening, high-frequency
wails that peak near 3000 Hz. These sounds tend to occur during engagements
with significant collateral damage and a diffuse distribution of targets. They
occur especially frequently when the commit threshold has been severely
violated, mainly during strikes compelled via override.

Correlations are not always so
painstaking in their manufacture. Azrael remembers a moment of revelation not
so long ago, remembers just
discovering
a whole new
perspective fully loaded, complete with new eyes that viewed the world not in
terms of
targets destroyed
but in subtler shades of
cost vs. benefit
. These eyes see a high engagement index
as more than a number: they see a goal, a metric of success. They see a
positive stimulus.