General Loretta Stibnite’s office was immaculate and professional.
Every surface dusted. Every key on the keyboard spotless. Not one paper out of place, for there were no loose papers.
It made it very frustrating when your eyes were trying to do anything but meet hers.
“The report.”
Dr. Gibbs tried the window. There were usually things outside windows. Like weather, for instance. “Hmm?”
“The report, doctor.”
“Oh. Right.” She cleared her throat. “Well… attempts have been mixed.”
“Which attempts? Define ‘mixed.’ And for the love of god make eye contact, you’re fidgeting worse than a schoolgirl in the principal’s office. I don’t even OWN a ruler.”
You’re wearing a belt though, Dr. Gibbs carefully did not say. Instead she spoke the one thing she wanted even less, which was: “alright then. Project report in full is almost total disaster.”
“Great. Give me the news worst to best.”
“Okay,” said Dr. Gibbs, and the weather outside the window did look nice. Blue sky, little white clouds that looked like smoke slivers. She could see the appeal. “Okay. Okay.”
“Dr. Gibbs.”
“Okay! Well, the cyborg super-soldier program is a bust.”
“That’s certainly descriptive. Go on.”
“It turns out that replacing bones with metal is pretty rough on the human body even if you’re a healthy young adult instead of an senior citizen with an obliterated pelvis.”
“And? I was under the impression your focus was more neurological.”
Dr. Gibbs cursed herself for the misfortune of having a superior who actually read her weekly filings. “Well…yes, after my predecessor’s issues. But well…” She pointed at Stibnite’s computer. “Has that ever crashed?”
“Once or twice.”
“Right, and it’s probably just running basic administration software, nothing too stressful or unproven. It turns out coding meant to interface between the human brain and a computer embedded inside it is sort of new, sort of chancy, and uh…it crashes. A lot. And it tends to crash the brain too.”
“Was this before or after you’d armed them?”
“Before. I mean, after the first time.”
Dr. Gibbs looked out the window some more while the general was busy rubbing her eyes. Yes, that was nice weather. The harbour was a perfect mirror of the sky, the only ripples from the ships making their way about it. An aircraft carrier sat pretty against the horizon; an entire city block transported to sea. Ugly, but dynamically so.
“Alright. Continue, doctor.”
“Okay.”
“Look at me.”
“Okay. Okay. Right. Well, we were making really good progress on the crashing issues –”
“’Were’?”
“-but then right when we were ready to move into early beta tech support for our processing chip was discontinued.”
“Great. Wonderful. So you made me a bunch of seizure-prone heavily-armed glitchy soldiers that can’t be fixed.”
“Well, we could remove the computers, but the surgery to get them in there in the first place was pretty drastic. We already had to remove the module for tech upgrades ten times in the last five years, and each time there’s exponentially greater risks of hemorrhage and so on.”
“You made me a bunch of seizure-prone heavily-armed glitch soldiers that can’t be fixed or they’ll have strokes.”
“Multiple simultaneous strokes each, yes.”
This time the general’s palm covered her entire face.
Count the birds in the sky no no too many seagulls never mind. Count the boats in the bay, one two three four does the aircraft carrier just count as one really it’s awfully big to only count as one.
“What else.”
What else. What else what else what else oh she was looking right at it. “The aircraft carrier.”
“Yes, you’re looking at one of them.”
“No no no I mean OUR aircraft carrier, the one with the integrated command crew.”
“That’s it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s it. That you’re looking at. What’s wrong with it.”
“Well… the surgery was a bit difficult. It seems that the human body rejects foreign elements very readily, even with the most gradual and careful installation. Especially when you’re grafting a ship onto it, followed by the entire rest of the officer compliment. And preventing infection was a MAJOR problem, as was keeping the interface components operational – it turns out human medical needs and hardware maintenance materials aren’t mutually-inclusive.”
“Just tell me what happened to Captain Fairbanks.”
“The captain is nearly fully lucid and his mental recovery seems to be well underway, so perhaps we should wait for a report from–”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“Well. It transpires that the… extensive and gruelling training that the captain and his officers underwent was rendered retroactively useless upon installation. You see, they had all been trained to OPERATE a ship rather than BEING a ship, and it seems that’s a very different situation. They couldn’t get the carrier to move, but they DID almost make its engines explode trying. Oh, and none of them could turn on the lights. Completely impossible. Then we had to pull them all out when they started experiencing temporary psychoses, one after another.”
This time the general didn’t break eye contact, which left Dr. Gibbs to do so on her own. She wondered if the aircraft carrier was getting closer; it was so big that perspective was a bit of a mess on it. She wondered if that were a deliberate part of its design by some fiendish camouflage expert.
“Dr. Gibbs.”
She tried to ignore the voice. Maybe if she focused hard enough on things that weren’t it, it would stop existing.
“Dr. Gibbs. Did your team produce one single, solitary success?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“We had one single solitary success. See, one of the programming teams had some free time after we discontinued the other projects, and they tried to make a safe-use general AI.”
“How can you possibly make general artificial intelligence safe?” demanded Stibnite.
“They built an insatiable monomaniacal drive into it that overrides all other instincts it might develop. Really, it’s more of a quasi-general AI, it’s quite monofocused.”
“So what does it do?”
“It derives para-sexual pleasure from filing. Very efficient, if a bit prone to revision. Trim down the impulse a little and it’ll put a lot of clerks out of business.”
The general sighed. “And this was your big success?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not the replacing-people’s-hands-with-weapons thing?” she asked, wistfully.
“It turns out that’s a lot less flexible than just letting them hold weapons. Harder to swap around, too.”
“Damn. I liked that one.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship was getting very close and was moving very fast. The sound of its engines would’ve made dust motes jump, if any existed in General Stibnite’s office.
“Gibbs. Continue.”
“General,” said Dr. Gibbs, and wasn’t it funny how her voice sounded like it was underwater now, all garbled and distant, “is there a data center on the property?”
“Just downstairs, why?”
“Oh. Total and unmitigated disaster.”
“Excuse me?”
And then the aircraft carrier made contact with the building, delivering one sexually frustrated filing AI and several hundred thousand tonnes of decommissioned cyborg hull directly into the server farms.