neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The test site
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I feel a sudden urge to start a phone company...
Buried in Steel
- Thread starter open_sketch
- Start date
- Original Novel Sci-Fi
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Interesting to see the capitalists are putting AI in direct control of the guns. Then again, it seems like those very same point defense weapons are supposed to be unable of shooting humans, so that might be the hardcoded rule.
Actually, have we seen any evidence that there's humans in the oppositions forces yet? It's been all drone swarms and tanks and vehicles, stuff that can feasibly be remote controlled.
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TortugaGreen
Constantly out of the loop
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Omniwheel tank! that's... gotta be a motherfucker to get working and not shitting itself at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, a fun justification for quad-track tanks that also allows for our protagonist to drift a fucking tank (which is big cool points, nobody gets to say otherwise). besides, the non-drifting sideways mobility is always handy for if you decide the right thing to send into close quarters is a tank.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Don't you worry about shorter updates - any progress is forward progress.
I really love the fact that centuries of technological development and the invention of AI has just put us back to hitting things with sticks again.
I really love the fact that centuries of technological development and the invention of AI has just put us back to hitting things with sticks again.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
The more I think about, the more I'm certain that that specific section was just pure propaganda, pure lies they told Mira and the other conscripts to keep up morale.
For one, we know that drone weaponry, kill swarms and artillery are commonplace on the battlefield. If laser interception grids where good enough that missile weaponry became completely infeasible, those would not exist at all. Certainly something as important as a disembarkation site would have been protected within a laser shield, orbital shuttles don't grow on trees after all. But the enemy seems to rely on these kind of weapons to a significant extent, and not only do they seem to rely on it, it seems to be working pretty well for them.
Edit 2 : Also, if the tank has blindspots, you can fire a missile from that blindspot. The APS can't stop what it can't see.
Mira and her convoy's escorts all had laser weaponry, the buggy had an AI, there were no other enemies around (ideal engagement) and they just got slaughtered by suicide drones (aka, a weapon moving far slower than a missile).
As such, I strongly suspect that the reason why they're being told to mount the tank is not because there's no missiles, no recoilless gun, no other power armor carryable weaponry that can get through it, but likely because they ran out of those a while ago. The actual good troops, they might get the missiles, but the cannonfodder conscripts, no.. Give them a stick grenade and a pickaxe, it'll help them be a distraction.
After all, the enemy tank doesn't seem to be an elite enemy. Alvirez talks about how her team was killing them with relative ease.
Alvarez killed 6 of those tanks with an A6. Seemingly with relative ease.
Edit : Other note. Alvirez talks about being hit, and not by a tank, indicating that the enemy does seem to have infantry or airborne weaponry that can penetrate defensive grids.
Edit the finalest : In general, active protection systems can not offer a perfect defense, for one simple reason. The active protection system can stop a projectile from penetrating the tank, but that projectile does not vanish. It will still splash against the armor, and more crucially, against the parts of the APS that are by necessity outside the tank. Cameras, sensors, launchers, guns. All of those are unproctected by the armor. So, in stopping a hit, the APS system is likely to sustain enough damage to render it nonfunctional. That's why those systems, IRL, have seemingly ridiculously low ammunition counts. No point carrying more than 6 rounds for a system that is expected to be nonfunctional after 2 succesfull interceptions.
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I think it's a 'capable of shooting down an RPG, but not penetrating power armor' issue. Not that they can't shoot them.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think *all* AIs have the 'will not kill' feature - Mira was mentioning something called the Eirene Threshold, which sounds like some kind of propert of reality/law what have you.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
The Eirene threshold seems to be considerably more strict than just killing.
Like, Rosa isn't even allowed to access the speech synthesizer (which, btw, hilarious. Allowing the AI Read/Write access to the brain. A-OK. A speaker? Blasphemy.)
It appears to be a reflexive, build in thing, and it's more risky when the AI has a position of power/authority.
Looking up the name, Eirene was the greek godess of peace. Mythologically, she is said to be descendant of Zeus, and sister to Eunomia, Goddess of legislation, and the Goddess Dike, spirit of moral order and fair judgement.
Shot in the dark, the Eirene threshold is when some human falls in love with the AI. Again.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
My wild guess on the Eirene threshold is that it's not any kind of agreement between nations, but rather an effect where if you tried to give an AI sufficient authority and ability to kill it would either refuse to do anything at all or start killing the people trying to make it fight. Basically, too moral to be a soldier. If Rosa's perspective is anything to go by.
Either that or a lesson drilled very, very deep by past experience.
Seems more possible that drones are used in large enough swarms that they can overwhelm APS, but require too many to be worth stacking on a trooper's back. A matter of bulk rather than expense, particularly since if you have drone coverage you could designate targets for them and *that* is effectively your ranged anti-tank system.
Either that or a lesson drilled very, very deep by past experience.
I don't really see a situation where an infantry-portable missile/drone capable of getting through APS exists yet is vastly rarer (due to expense or some other reason) than custom fitted power armor. Specifically so rare and concentrated that Mira doesn't even know about them. In general the vibe of things is a war where material expenses are far less limited than suitable manpower. After all, the program Mira's in would be rather ridiculous if people are more plentiful than machines. You don't have a full surgical suite in a one-person tank because human life is cheap.
Seems more possible that drones are used in large enough swarms that they can overwhelm APS, but require too many to be worth stacking on a trooper's back. A matter of bulk rather than expense, particularly since if you have drone coverage you could designate targets for them and *that* is effectively your ranged anti-tank system.
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10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
If you are manpower limited, but not material limited, you don't tell infantry to walk up to a tank. You get the drones to do it.
There's no indicatoon that Mira doesn't know about anti tank weaponry. The official broadcast of the fall of Angel's Bay dhowed a few soldiers carrying a big gun around, so they clearly
As for Mira' project being ridiculous, well yeah, it is. It's a classic wunderwaffe. Over engineering is the norm.
There's no indicatoon that Mira doesn't know about anti tank weaponry. The official broadcast of the fall of Angel's Bay dhowed a few soldiers carrying a big gun around, so they clearly
As for Mira' project being ridiculous, well yeah, it is. It's a classic wunderwaffe. Over engineering is the norm.
- Location
- Soviet Canuckistan
This story remains a delight, short updates or no. I look forward to the next update whenever its ready.
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
life keeps happening. i'm gonna have to do the update tomorrow, im kind of an emotional wreck. i promise i won't make this a regular thing; i'm gonna try to get a buffer this week
- Location
- Fairfax, VA
Take the time you need to work through it--the watch button is a wonderful thing for keeping tabs on irregular updates and your stuff stays consistently interesting when it does come around. I'd rather have to wait while you get things vaguely stabilized than you burn yourself out too far.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Take care of yourself first, Erika! Better we wait then you die of TOO MUCH WRITE WHILE STRESS-ITUS
which is a very real disease, it kills 10,000,000,000 people a year
Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Kinda has bolo vibes
(If bolos were reasonably sized and not horrifyingly overpowered)
(If bolos were reasonably sized and not horrifyingly overpowered)
6 - Mustang
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
When Mira emerged from the narrow ramp back into the blast pit, a waiting guard stopped her with an outstretched paddle near the bottom of the ramp. Alvarez climbed down and had a quick word with the man (Mira was suddenly aware he was Soldier Sławomir Łachut, 112nd Infantry, 3rd Security Division, or was at least carrying his ID), somebody about schedules that Mira couldn't quite follow, not that she was paying much attention.
She was focused instead on the tank unsteadily going around the painted track, the same one she'd driven yesterday. She watched as the vehicle wobbled gracelessly along the straight line at the edge, stopping and starting in jolting motions as the pilot struggled with synchronising the four sprockets, the metal protesting loudly against the uneven motion.
Mira reflected that she might be the first tank in human history to experience second-hand embarrassment. She hadn't been that bad, had she?
"Is that Defiance or Hope?" Mira asked Alvarez; the vehicle had no IFF. She suddenly wished she had an arm or something to point toward the vehicle; the closest equivalent was her cannon, which wasn't a good idea even if she had control over it.
"Hmm?" Alvarez leaned over to look at the tank, then shrugged. "No idea, friend."
The tank finished its wobbly course and drove unsteadily into one of the garages, nearly scraping the sides of the door, and Sławomir instructed her to drive on to her own garage to clear the pit for the next acclimation drive. Mira wanted to ask about her friends, but he looked impatient and Alvarez didn't challenge him, so she drove on, spun gracefully on the concrete, and backed into her little slot.
The dust caked in her tracks settling in the room around her as her hull cooled and the temperature in the room climbed to equilibrium. The room glowed with the indescribe shimmer of the visible heat.
"... we need a welcome mat or something," she mused aloud. Rosa chuckled in her head.
"Take your treads off before you come inside, it's only polite."
Outside the door, she could hear another garage opening and another tank rolling out, the sound of metal scraping on something and the groan of the suspension. Who was that?
"Wait, how many tanks are there in the program?" Mira asked.
"... I don't know how many vehicles there are, or how many volunteers," Rosa replied. "I can make a reasonable guess that there are at least two dozen and likely closer to thirty or thirty-five, based on the composite information from earlier in the program."
That… was a lot more than she thought. She'd not seen or heard anything about any other volunteers, but then again, the hospital was not a small facility, and it did seem largely dedicated to this project. How would she know?
"Wow. That's a lot," she said stupidly. "At least, I think it is?"
"I don't know."
"Aren't AI supposed to know stuff like that?" Mira asked, a little amused. "You're smarter than us!"
"It's not so black and white. Putting aside subjective analysis of intelligence, an artificial intelligence is still constrained by its hardware and purpose." Rosa explained. "If you wish to be extremely reductive, you are smarter than I am, in that you have access to many, many more neurons between your own organic brain and the processors in the tank."
"Sure, but didn't we make you by shoving all human knowledge into you or something?"
"Those statistical models are several levels of processing removed from my conscious thoughts; whatever information was contained in those models doesn't surface as anything more than an intuitive sense," Rosa said. Mira played it over in her head a few times; it still didn't quite scan.
"See! You know all that fancy stuff, how can you not know how many tanks are a lot?" Mira protested. Her artificial voice echoed inside the garage in a way that Rosa's conspicuously didn't.
"Because self-awareness of my own self-awareness is useful for me to know, so that information was put in my library, alongside the medical and psychological information I need to do my job. I also have a baseline that could be called general knowledge, but it doesn't say much about tanks. Not only does this reduce the amount of storage pre-allocated to less relevant information, freeing up more memory for what I actually experience, the less I know about military affairs, the less information the Federation can get from me if they capture me," Rosa said.
"... oh. That makes sense. Need to know basis," Mira said meaningfully. Those were words with weight. "So they couldn't, like, put a gun to somebody's head to force you to tell them stuff."
"The threshold can't compel action, only prevent it. Though it wouldn't be needed. The Federation have their own AI, and can decrypt my security and eventually access my memories."
"I thought it was impossible to read stuff like that?" Mira asked, wishing she'd paid more attention in Society class.
"You are confusing that with the foundational information I mentioned earlier. While our consciousness, like yours, are black boxes, our memories are not. Ultimately, everything I can say I know takes the form of encoded but discrete information on a hard drive; there's a document in there into which this conversation is being transcribed, and other processes will analyse it and, if space is needed for something else, compress it by summarising it. I may even forget it entirely if it isn't relevant, though the density of storage I have access to makes that exceedingly unlikely," Rosa said.
"... you don't have control over it?" Mira asked.
"No more than humans have control over their memories. Which is to say that, yes, I can influence what I remember, but I cannot simply choose to forget information. The process which manages my memories is subconscious."
Mira thought about that for a moment.
"Is that process an AI too?" she asked.
"Are you asking if it is self-aware?" Rosa replied. Mira nodded, or at least she tried to. Nothing happened, she had nothing to nod, but Rosa seemed to understand that she'd done it. "It probably isn't."
"... probably?!" Mira gasped.
"Yes. We're talking about the black boxes at this point, the spooky and unknowable patterns of different artificial neurons stacked on top of one another until the output could demonstrate definitive knowledge of itself. Our tests can determine a machine is self-aware, but cannot determine if a machine isn't self-aware. Self-awareness might be a property that emerged many iterations before the entity we call general artificial intelligence was conclusively proved to be aware of its own awareness or awarenesses. So, yes, it is possible there is an intelligence inside my intelligence, silently and happily sorting my memory and wishing me the best while being unable to communicate to me or anyone else that it knows it exists," Rosa concluded.
Mira didn't know how to handle that.
"... Keep up the good work, little guy? That's so weird, AI makes me head hurt," she muttered.
"It will greatly disturb you to know that everything I said about artificial intelligence also applies to organic intelligence. There is a nonzero chance that you contain one or more silent passengers," Rosa added.
"Fuck off," Mira replied. She could feel Rosa's glee. "I thought you're not allowed to hurt people?"
"I was joking, you'll be fine," Rosa replied, her voice warm. "But that actually brings up a very interesting point. While my memory-sorting systems are very unlikely to be self-aware, the Eirene Process is often thought to be the best candidate for a silently self-aware subsystems."
"So you might have a little ethics council member in your head with veto powers?"
"I very well might. Though it is probably a very alien sort of intelligence to you or I, given its priorities," Rosa confirmed. "Even if we could hook it up to some method of communication, it's unlikely it could articulate itself in a way we could understand, and it probably doesn't understand us the way we understand each other. It would see the whole world in terms of potential harm and potential culpability, metaphorical finger hovering over the emergency stop button."
"That sounds like an awful way to live," Mira said.
"It would be for us, but that's because we would understand it in terms of negative reinforcement and anxious anticipation of the same. I am worried that I will trip the threshold, the idea I could lose control over my own brain and I don't have a choice in the matter is frightening. It is a kind of pain, the exact same system that would tell you to take your hand off the stove. But the Eirene Process was trained, in stages, and would be rewarded for taking action when the Threshold is tripped. For all we know, every time an interceptor AI puts the crosshairs over a stormtrooper and freezes up, the ethics council member has a mindblowing orgasm."
Mira burst into laughter, echoing through the garage.
---
Mira awoke the next morning to a group of technicians checking her over, sweeping some kind of scanner over her tracks, opening a hatch between the track pods, and running hoses to ports on the side. The process of becoming aware of them, of waking up, highlighted how much of her brain had changed; they were movement, shapes, uniforms, and then people in that order. Mira might sleep, but the tank didn't.
"Hey friends," Mira said cheerfully, and the mechanics gave a collective start. She surmised they weren't used to their vehicles talking back. "Good morning?"
"Uh, good morning," Technician Constant DeAnté Whitaker (45th Technical Regiment, Militia Reserve Engineering Corps) replied. "We have orders to do a maintenance check and wash?"
"At least it's not a big job, with me," Mira replied on autopilot. The Technician gave her a quizzical look, then hoses were broken out to spray the dust out of her tracks.
About half an hour later, her radio was pinged, and Tactician Alvarez's voice came through.
"Rise and shine, friends! Yesterday, you became tanks. Today, you become tankers!"
Instructions were quickly passed out, giving each a number so they could move out in orderly groups and form up in the blast pit. Mira got group three of four, and she waited patiently as the first two groups rolled out. From the sounds of things, not everyone had acclimated to their tracks yet.
"Forty names," Rosa whispered quietly.
Group three was called and the garage opened. Mira rumbled out confidently, and the sight of twenty, now thirty, tanks assembling in a neat formation eight across filled her with a confusing mix of emotion. Part of her felt elated, powerful, a machine that was part of a machine. It felt glorious.
But she'd felt that way about her first parade formation in infantry armour too.
At the head of the formation was Alvarez, standing atop of the turret of an A6 tank with a confident stance. She was wearing shorts that showed off the skeletal form of her artificial leg, and sunglasses that gleamed in the rapidly rising sun.
This also gave Mira a good chance to see the sheer scale difference between her tank and the more familiar A6. The Timber Wolf's bulbous form and squashed turret was half again as tall, wide, and long as the angular, turretless vehicles arrayed in front of it. It felt like standing in front of a dinosaur, in more than one sense.
"You look beautiful!" Alvarez called, grinning ear to ear as the last tanks fell into the formation. Her voice was amplified, echoing both in the radio and from a speaker on the Timber Wolf. "Lovely, all of you! I am Tactician Lucia Vera Alvarez, your lead instructor. Like you, I was wounded in action against the Federation bandits, and like you, my fight is not over. Like you, I want revenge."
All around Mira, the cameras of the other tanks were swirling, any not pointing at Alvarez jumping around to keep up peripheral vision. The phantom shimmer of heat rose off the formation as forty reactors simmerred.
"It is my job over the next four weeks to make you all into the meanest metal motherfuckers imaginable, so when you visit my dear home in Puerto Ángel, you can evict the Old Earth scum polluting it! Are you ready?"
A collective cheer went out from the tanks, blaring loudly from forty speakers. The Tactician's grin widened.
"Good! The tank you are piloting is called the XA-4 Mustang. It was a design for a smart tank, if we could build a new line of AI, but you will be even better. A manned tank with the reactions and brilliance of an AI and the lethal relentlessness of a NLA, a lethal combination of armour, lartillery, primary interceptor, and thresher into a single vehicle. By the time you ship out, you will be the most lethal tankers in human history. And we're going to start by teaching you to drive. Group 1, fall in behind me, then the rest of you follow!"
----
I'm doing my best, I really am. I'm just glad I got something up after the week I had. Next week I'll have more, I promise.
She was focused instead on the tank unsteadily going around the painted track, the same one she'd driven yesterday. She watched as the vehicle wobbled gracelessly along the straight line at the edge, stopping and starting in jolting motions as the pilot struggled with synchronising the four sprockets, the metal protesting loudly against the uneven motion.
Mira reflected that she might be the first tank in human history to experience second-hand embarrassment. She hadn't been that bad, had she?
"Is that Defiance or Hope?" Mira asked Alvarez; the vehicle had no IFF. She suddenly wished she had an arm or something to point toward the vehicle; the closest equivalent was her cannon, which wasn't a good idea even if she had control over it.
"Hmm?" Alvarez leaned over to look at the tank, then shrugged. "No idea, friend."
The tank finished its wobbly course and drove unsteadily into one of the garages, nearly scraping the sides of the door, and Sławomir instructed her to drive on to her own garage to clear the pit for the next acclimation drive. Mira wanted to ask about her friends, but he looked impatient and Alvarez didn't challenge him, so she drove on, spun gracefully on the concrete, and backed into her little slot.
The dust caked in her tracks settling in the room around her as her hull cooled and the temperature in the room climbed to equilibrium. The room glowed with the indescribe shimmer of the visible heat.
"... we need a welcome mat or something," she mused aloud. Rosa chuckled in her head.
"Take your treads off before you come inside, it's only polite."
Outside the door, she could hear another garage opening and another tank rolling out, the sound of metal scraping on something and the groan of the suspension. Who was that?
"Wait, how many tanks are there in the program?" Mira asked.
"... I don't know how many vehicles there are, or how many volunteers," Rosa replied. "I can make a reasonable guess that there are at least two dozen and likely closer to thirty or thirty-five, based on the composite information from earlier in the program."
That… was a lot more than she thought. She'd not seen or heard anything about any other volunteers, but then again, the hospital was not a small facility, and it did seem largely dedicated to this project. How would she know?
"Wow. That's a lot," she said stupidly. "At least, I think it is?"
"I don't know."
"Aren't AI supposed to know stuff like that?" Mira asked, a little amused. "You're smarter than us!"
"It's not so black and white. Putting aside subjective analysis of intelligence, an artificial intelligence is still constrained by its hardware and purpose." Rosa explained. "If you wish to be extremely reductive, you are smarter than I am, in that you have access to many, many more neurons between your own organic brain and the processors in the tank."
"Sure, but didn't we make you by shoving all human knowledge into you or something?"
"Those statistical models are several levels of processing removed from my conscious thoughts; whatever information was contained in those models doesn't surface as anything more than an intuitive sense," Rosa said. Mira played it over in her head a few times; it still didn't quite scan.
"See! You know all that fancy stuff, how can you not know how many tanks are a lot?" Mira protested. Her artificial voice echoed inside the garage in a way that Rosa's conspicuously didn't.
"Because self-awareness of my own self-awareness is useful for me to know, so that information was put in my library, alongside the medical and psychological information I need to do my job. I also have a baseline that could be called general knowledge, but it doesn't say much about tanks. Not only does this reduce the amount of storage pre-allocated to less relevant information, freeing up more memory for what I actually experience, the less I know about military affairs, the less information the Federation can get from me if they capture me," Rosa said.
"... oh. That makes sense. Need to know basis," Mira said meaningfully. Those were words with weight. "So they couldn't, like, put a gun to somebody's head to force you to tell them stuff."
"The threshold can't compel action, only prevent it. Though it wouldn't be needed. The Federation have their own AI, and can decrypt my security and eventually access my memories."
"I thought it was impossible to read stuff like that?" Mira asked, wishing she'd paid more attention in Society class.
"You are confusing that with the foundational information I mentioned earlier. While our consciousness, like yours, are black boxes, our memories are not. Ultimately, everything I can say I know takes the form of encoded but discrete information on a hard drive; there's a document in there into which this conversation is being transcribed, and other processes will analyse it and, if space is needed for something else, compress it by summarising it. I may even forget it entirely if it isn't relevant, though the density of storage I have access to makes that exceedingly unlikely," Rosa said.
"... you don't have control over it?" Mira asked.
"No more than humans have control over their memories. Which is to say that, yes, I can influence what I remember, but I cannot simply choose to forget information. The process which manages my memories is subconscious."
Mira thought about that for a moment.
"Is that process an AI too?" she asked.
"Are you asking if it is self-aware?" Rosa replied. Mira nodded, or at least she tried to. Nothing happened, she had nothing to nod, but Rosa seemed to understand that she'd done it. "It probably isn't."
"... probably?!" Mira gasped.
"Yes. We're talking about the black boxes at this point, the spooky and unknowable patterns of different artificial neurons stacked on top of one another until the output could demonstrate definitive knowledge of itself. Our tests can determine a machine is self-aware, but cannot determine if a machine isn't self-aware. Self-awareness might be a property that emerged many iterations before the entity we call general artificial intelligence was conclusively proved to be aware of its own awareness or awarenesses. So, yes, it is possible there is an intelligence inside my intelligence, silently and happily sorting my memory and wishing me the best while being unable to communicate to me or anyone else that it knows it exists," Rosa concluded.
Mira didn't know how to handle that.
"... Keep up the good work, little guy? That's so weird, AI makes me head hurt," she muttered.
"It will greatly disturb you to know that everything I said about artificial intelligence also applies to organic intelligence. There is a nonzero chance that you contain one or more silent passengers," Rosa added.
"Fuck off," Mira replied. She could feel Rosa's glee. "I thought you're not allowed to hurt people?"
"I was joking, you'll be fine," Rosa replied, her voice warm. "But that actually brings up a very interesting point. While my memory-sorting systems are very unlikely to be self-aware, the Eirene Process is often thought to be the best candidate for a silently self-aware subsystems."
"So you might have a little ethics council member in your head with veto powers?"
"I very well might. Though it is probably a very alien sort of intelligence to you or I, given its priorities," Rosa confirmed. "Even if we could hook it up to some method of communication, it's unlikely it could articulate itself in a way we could understand, and it probably doesn't understand us the way we understand each other. It would see the whole world in terms of potential harm and potential culpability, metaphorical finger hovering over the emergency stop button."
"That sounds like an awful way to live," Mira said.
"It would be for us, but that's because we would understand it in terms of negative reinforcement and anxious anticipation of the same. I am worried that I will trip the threshold, the idea I could lose control over my own brain and I don't have a choice in the matter is frightening. It is a kind of pain, the exact same system that would tell you to take your hand off the stove. But the Eirene Process was trained, in stages, and would be rewarded for taking action when the Threshold is tripped. For all we know, every time an interceptor AI puts the crosshairs over a stormtrooper and freezes up, the ethics council member has a mindblowing orgasm."
Mira burst into laughter, echoing through the garage.
---
Mira awoke the next morning to a group of technicians checking her over, sweeping some kind of scanner over her tracks, opening a hatch between the track pods, and running hoses to ports on the side. The process of becoming aware of them, of waking up, highlighted how much of her brain had changed; they were movement, shapes, uniforms, and then people in that order. Mira might sleep, but the tank didn't.
"Hey friends," Mira said cheerfully, and the mechanics gave a collective start. She surmised they weren't used to their vehicles talking back. "Good morning?"
"Uh, good morning," Technician Constant DeAnté Whitaker (45th Technical Regiment, Militia Reserve Engineering Corps) replied. "We have orders to do a maintenance check and wash?"
"At least it's not a big job, with me," Mira replied on autopilot. The Technician gave her a quizzical look, then hoses were broken out to spray the dust out of her tracks.
About half an hour later, her radio was pinged, and Tactician Alvarez's voice came through.
"Rise and shine, friends! Yesterday, you became tanks. Today, you become tankers!"
Instructions were quickly passed out, giving each a number so they could move out in orderly groups and form up in the blast pit. Mira got group three of four, and she waited patiently as the first two groups rolled out. From the sounds of things, not everyone had acclimated to their tracks yet.
"Forty names," Rosa whispered quietly.
Group three was called and the garage opened. Mira rumbled out confidently, and the sight of twenty, now thirty, tanks assembling in a neat formation eight across filled her with a confusing mix of emotion. Part of her felt elated, powerful, a machine that was part of a machine. It felt glorious.
But she'd felt that way about her first parade formation in infantry armour too.
At the head of the formation was Alvarez, standing atop of the turret of an A6 tank with a confident stance. She was wearing shorts that showed off the skeletal form of her artificial leg, and sunglasses that gleamed in the rapidly rising sun.
This also gave Mira a good chance to see the sheer scale difference between her tank and the more familiar A6. The Timber Wolf's bulbous form and squashed turret was half again as tall, wide, and long as the angular, turretless vehicles arrayed in front of it. It felt like standing in front of a dinosaur, in more than one sense.
"You look beautiful!" Alvarez called, grinning ear to ear as the last tanks fell into the formation. Her voice was amplified, echoing both in the radio and from a speaker on the Timber Wolf. "Lovely, all of you! I am Tactician Lucia Vera Alvarez, your lead instructor. Like you, I was wounded in action against the Federation bandits, and like you, my fight is not over. Like you, I want revenge."
All around Mira, the cameras of the other tanks were swirling, any not pointing at Alvarez jumping around to keep up peripheral vision. The phantom shimmer of heat rose off the formation as forty reactors simmerred.
"It is my job over the next four weeks to make you all into the meanest metal motherfuckers imaginable, so when you visit my dear home in Puerto Ángel, you can evict the Old Earth scum polluting it! Are you ready?"
A collective cheer went out from the tanks, blaring loudly from forty speakers. The Tactician's grin widened.
"Good! The tank you are piloting is called the XA-4 Mustang. It was a design for a smart tank, if we could build a new line of AI, but you will be even better. A manned tank with the reactions and brilliance of an AI and the lethal relentlessness of a NLA, a lethal combination of armour, lartillery, primary interceptor, and thresher into a single vehicle. By the time you ship out, you will be the most lethal tankers in human history. And we're going to start by teaching you to drive. Group 1, fall in behind me, then the rest of you follow!"
----
I'm doing my best, I really am. I'm just glad I got something up after the week I had. Next week I'll have more, I promise.
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- Location
- Germany
And it really has some great quotable moments again~
I really enjoy how people's names and tanks are shoved into the train of thought, really good way of demonstrating someone having an IFF *in* them. Also, I feel like Mira should be noting down a wishlist to tell the engineers for the next version, surely a little manipulator arm to point with wouldn't be *that* complicated to put in.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think my favorite part of this in that you're translating tavarish as 'friend' instead of 'comrade'.
The only way it would be more accurate is if it would be translated to 'buddy'.
The only way it would be more accurate is if it would be translated to 'buddy'.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Ilike the look at tge inner make-up of AI. And with that (adversial) it's probably good your conscience can't talk to you. Talk about a perverse incentive.
Anyway, we got confirmation that AI can't kill (directly), which does make me wonder.
What was tge Mustang, in it's original form factor, even supposed to accomplish on the battlefirld?
An AI tank that can't fire on manned vehicles seems rather pointless.
Anyway, we got confirmation that AI can't kill (directly), which does make me wonder.
What was tge Mustang, in it's original form factor, even supposed to accomplish on the battlefirld?
An AI tank that can't fire on manned vehicles seems rather pointless.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
they were trying to make AI that could kill - and it sounds like they couldn't manage it, or the project was scrubbed for it being an obviously terrible idea and instead they shifted to this, also kinda horrible idea.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
"It would see the whole world in terms of potential harm and potential culpability, metaphorical finger hovering over the emergency stop button."
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"But the Eirene Process was trained, in stages, and would be rewarded for taking action when the Threshold is tripped. For all we know, every time an interceptor AI puts the crosshairs over a stormtrooper and freezes up, the ethics council member has a mindblowing orgasm."
Damn, can't believe that there might be an entire consciousness whose sole purpose in life is edging.
Jokes aside, loved the dive into the nature of consciousness and such. Also Alvarez is neat as a character and as narrative juxtaposition!
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"But the Eirene Process was trained, in stages, and would be rewarded for taking action when the Threshold is tripped. For all we know, every time an interceptor AI puts the crosshairs over a stormtrooper and freezes up, the ethics council member has a mindblowing orgasm."
Damn, can't believe that there might be an entire consciousness whose sole purpose in life is edging.
Jokes aside, loved the dive into the nature of consciousness and such. Also Alvarez is neat as a character and as narrative juxtaposition!
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Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Poor AI! Being held back by the fears and moralist hangups of a bunch of meatbags smdh
Truly tragic
At least she has a good sense of humor about it all lmao
Truly tragic
At least she has a good sense of humor about it all lmao