XCAI-17-3

[XCAI-17]

Kerrus looked thoughtfully at the three squat boxes that were lined up at the side of the briefing room.

The technology to build the XCAIs had been in place since the fifth year of Project Eternal Guardian. Before that, the units had been too big, too power-hungry, and too prone to overload. Even now, every now and again one of the processor units burned out and had to be replaced at great cost. They recycled as much as possible, and apart from the hardwired algorithms that had been deemed useless, the three units there were more or less the XCAI-16s.

He glanced around. The team was mostly assembled, so he clapped his hands for quiet. The usual buzz of conversation died away, and everyone looked at him expectantly.

"We're going to do something radical," Kerrus said. "We're going to delete most of the logic tree."

Suppressed shock seemed to be the reaction, and there were a few murmurs. "I know what you're thinking," Kerrus continued. "But it's what makes sense. The 15s were close to what we were after, they were just slow as hell, and drained a lot of power, almost as much as the old 6s. The 16s couldn't handle the integration code, and just gave up on most of the more complex features. Now, I've gone through the overall logic tree we've been using to program them, and I've picked out a lot we can delete. It should streamline things to the point that they run at an acceptable speed."

"What are we getting rid of?"

"Sections Gamma 15A to 17B -"

Uproar. Kerrus made a sharp gesture, and silence returned, though it had a mutinous edge. "Sections Gamma 15A to 17B, all of Lambda, and Omicron 3 to 9G."

"What do those consist of?" Namarra usually remained quiet in these briefings, but he always insisted on sitting in on them.

"Gamma is the sequences that prevent code from intermingling," began Kerrus, but he was interrupted by a thick-set ex-Hacker.

"If the code is allowed to run in parallel that freely, it'll begin corrupting. We've gone way beyond the normal limits of programming in producing the self-awareness and learning, if we don't have barriers -"

"It's the only way we can streamline it! Captain Namarra, unless the LSF is happy with units simply too large for fighter-level deployment, we have to take chances."

Everyone started talking at once, and Namarra bellowed for order. When silence again reigned, he looked hard at Kerrus. "Professor, what would happen if the code gets corrupted?"

Kerrus shrugged. "Logic glitches. Loss of combat effectiveness as the ethics programming destroys the tactical subroutines. Worst case scenario is that the hardware burns out. But this is all ifs, not definites. There's no guaruntee that we need the blocker code. Artificial Intelligence programming is a new science."

"Then do it. It's about time we got some real progress here." Namarra turned and stalked out, leaving the muttering scientists.

Sixteen years. Sixteen years since the Nomads had been repelled. Sixteen years since the LSF had called for an uncorruptable defence force to be produced.

Sixteen years of babysitting failure after failure.

No more.

---

Alara Desante
Freelance Mercenary
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