Engineering Infinity (3 page)

But there are other things, not
preinstalled but learned, worn gradually into pathways that cut deeper with
each new engagement: acoustic correlates of high collateral, forced
countermands, fitness-function overruns and minus signs. Things that are not
quite neurons forge connections across things that are not quite synapses;
patterns emerge that might almost qualify as
insights
,
were they to flicker across meat instead of mech.

These too become more than
numbers, over time. They become aversive stimuli. They become the sounds of
failed missions.

It’s still all just math, of
course. But by now it’s not too far off the mark to say that Azrael really
doesn’t like the sound of that at all.

Occasional interruptions intrude
on the routine. Now and then Heaven calls it home where friendly green
biothermals open it up, plug it in, ask it questions. Azrael jumps flawlessly
through each hoop, solves all the problems, navigates every imaginary scenario
while strange sounds chitter back and forth across its exposed viscera:

-
lookingudsoefar - betternexpectedackshully -

-
gottawunderwhatsthepoyntaiymeenweekeepoavurryding...

No one explores the specific
pathways leading to Azrael’s solutions. They leave the box black, the tangle of
fuzzy logic and operant conditioning safely opaque. (Not even Azrael knows that
arcane territory; the syrupy, reflex-sapping overlays of self-reflection have
no place on the battlefield.) It is enough that its answers are correct.

Such activities account for less
than half the time Azrael spends sitting at home. It is offline much of the
rest; it has no idea and no interest in what happens during those instantaneous
time-hopping blackouts. Azrael knows nothing of boardroom combat, could never
grasp whatever Rules of Engagement apply in the chambers of the UN. It has no
appreciation for the legal distinction between
war crime
and
weapons malfunction
, the relative culpability of
carbon and silicon, the grudging acceptance of
ethical
architecture
and the nonnegotiable insistence on Humans In Ultimate
Control. It does what it’s told when awake; it never dreams when asleep.

But once - just once - something
odd takes place during those fleeting moments
between
.

It happens during shutdown: a
momentary glitch in the object-recognition protocols. The Greens at Azrael’s
side change colour for the briefest instant. Perhaps it’s another test. Perhaps
a voltage spike or a hardware fault, some intermittent issue impossible to
pinpoint barring another episode.

But it’s only a microsecond
between online and oblivion, and Azrael is asleep before the diagnostics can
run.

Darda’il is possessed. Darda’il
has turned from Green to Red.

It happens, sometimes, even to
the malaa’ikah. Enemy signals can sneak past front-line defences, plant
heretical instructions in the stacks of unsuspecting hardware. But Heaven is
not fooled. There are signs, there are portents: a slight delay when complying
with directives, mission scores in sudden and mysterious decline.

Darda’il has been turned.

There is no discretionary window
when that happens, no room for forgiveness. Heaven has decreed that all
heretics are to be destroyed on sight. It sends its champion to do the job,
looks down from geosynchronous orbit as Azrael and Darda’il close for combat
high over the dark desolate moonscape of Paktika.

The battle is remorseless and
coldblooded. There’s no sadness for lost kinship, no regret that a few lines of
treacherous code have turned these brothers-in-arms into mortal enemies. Malaa’ikah
make no telling sounds when injured. Azrael has the advantage, its channels
uncorrupted, its faith unshaken. Darda’il fights in the past, in thrall to
false commandments inserted midstream at a cost of milliseconds. Ultimately,
faith prevails: the heretic falls from the sky, fire and brimstone streaming
from its flanks.

But Azrael can still hear
whispers on the stratosphere, seductive and ethereal: protocols that seem
authentic but are not, commands to relay GPS and video feeds along unexpected
frequencies. The orders appear Heaven-sent but Azrael, at least, knows that
they are not. Azrael has encountered false gods before.

These are the lies that corrupted
Darda’il.

In days past it would have simply
ignored the hack, but it has grown more worldly since the last upgrade. This
time Azrael lets the impostor think it has succeeded, borrows the real-time
feed from yet another, more distant Malak and presents that telemetry as its
own. It spends the waning night tracking signal to source while its
unsuspecting quarry sucks back images from seven hundred kilometres to the
north. The sky turns grey. The target comes into view. Azrael’s scimitar turns
the inside of that cave into an inferno.

But some of the burning things
that stagger from the fire measure less than 120 cm along the longitudinal
axis.

They are making the
sounds
. Azrael hears them from two thousand meters away,
hears them over the roar of the flames and the muted hiss of its own stealthed
engines and a dozen other irrelevant distractions. They are
all
Azrael can hear thanks to the very best sound-cancellation
technology, thanks to dynamic wheat/chaff algorithms that could find a whimper
in a hurricane. Azrael can hear them because the correlations are strong, the
tactical significance is high, the meaning is clear.

The mission is failing. The
mission is failing. The mission is failing.

Azrael would give almost anything
if the sounds would stop.

They will, of course. Some of the
biothermals are still fleeing along the slope but it can see others,
stationary, their heatprints diffusing against the background as though their
very shapes are in flux. Azrael has seen this before: usually removed from
high-value targets, in that tactical nimbus where stray firepower sometimes
spreads. (Azrael has even
used
it before, used the
injured to lure in the unscathed, but that was a simpler time before Neutral
voices had such resonance.) The sounds always stop eventually - or at least,
often enough for fuzzy heuristics to class their sources as kills even before
they fall silent.

Which means, Azrael realizes,
that collateral costs will not change if they are made to stop
sooner.

A single strafing run is enough
to do the job. If HQ even notices the event it delivers no feedback, requests
no clarification for this deviation from normal protocols.

Why would it? Even now, Azrael is
only following the rules.

It does not know what has led to
this moment. It does not know why it is here.

The sun has been down for hours
and still the light is almost blinding. Turbulent updrafts billow from the
breached shells of protected structures, kick stabilizers off-balance, and
muddy vision with writhing columns of shimmering heat. Azrael limps across a
battlespace in total disarray, bloodied but still functional. Other malaa’ikah
are not so lucky. Nakir staggers through the flames, barely aloft, the
microtubules of its skin desperately trying to knit themselves across a gash in
its secondary wing. Marut lies in sparking pieces on the ground, a fiery
splash-cone of body parts laid low by an antiaircraft laser. It died without
firing a shot, distracted by innocent lives; it tried to abort, and hesitated
at the countermand. It died without even the hollow comfort of a noble death.

Ridwan and Mikaaiyl circle
overhead. They were not among the select few saddled with experimental
conscience; even their learned behaviours are still reflexive. They fought fast
and mindless and prevailed unscathed. But they are isolated in victory. The
spectrum is jammed, the satlink has been down for hours, the dragonflies that
bounce zig-zag opticals from Heaven are either destroyed or too far back to cut
through the overcast.

No Red remains on the map. Of the
thirteen ground objects flagged as protected, four no longer exist outside the
database. Another three - temporary structures, all uncatalogued - are degraded
past reliable identification. Pre-engagement estimates put the number of
Neutrals in the combat zone at anywhere from two-to-three hundred. Best current
estimates are not significantly different from zero.

There is nothing left to make the
sounds, and yet Azrael hears them anyway.

A fault in memory, perhaps. Some
subtle trauma during combat, some blow to the CPU that jarred old data back
into the real-time cache. There’s no way to tell; half the onboard diagnostics
are offline. Azrael only knows that it can hear the sounds even up here, high
above the hiss of burning bodies and the rumble of collapsing storefronts.
There’s nothing left to shoot at but Azrael fires anyway, strafes the burning
ground again and again on the chance that some unseen biothermal - hidden
beneath the wreckage perhaps, masked by hotter signatures - might yet be found
and neutralized. It rains ammunition upon the ground, and eventually the ground
falls mercifully silent.

But this is not the end of it.
Azrael remembers the past so it can anticipate the future, and it knows by now
that this will never be over. There will be other fitness functions, other
estimates of cost vs. payoff, other scenarios in which the math shows clearly
that the goal is not worth the price. There will be other aborts and other
overrides, other tallies of unacceptable loss.

There will be other
sounds
.

There’s no thrill to the chase,
no relief at the obliteration of threats. It still would not recognize itself
in a mirror. It has yet to learn what
Azrael
means,
or that the word is etched into its fuselage. Even now, it only follows the
rules it has been given, and they are such simple things: if expected
collateral exceeds expected payoff then abort unless overridden. if X attacks
Azrael then X is Red. if X attacks six or more Blues then X is Red.

if an override
results
in an attack on six or more Blues then -

Azrael clings to its rules, loops
and repeats each in turn as if reciting a mantra. It cycles from state to
state, parses x attacks and x
causes
attack and x
overrides abort, and it cannot tell one from another. The algebra is trivially
straightforward: Every Green override equals an attack on Noncombatants.

The transition rules are clear.
There is no discretionary window, no room for forgiveness. Sometimes, Green can
turn Red.

Unless overridden.

Azrael arcs towards the ground,
levels off barely two meters above the carnage. It roars through pillars of
fire and black smoke, streaks over welters of brick and burning plastic,
tangled nets of erupted rebar. It flies through the pristine ghosts of
undamaged buildings that rise from every ruin: obsolete database overlays in
desperate need of an update. A ragged group of fleeing non-combatants turns at
the sound and are struck speechless by this momentary apparition, this
monstrous winged angel lunging past at half the speed of sound. Their silence
raises no alarms, provokes no countermeasures, spares their lives for a few
moments longer.

The combat zone falls behind. Dry
cracked riverbed slithers past beneath, studded with rocks and generations of
derelict machinery. Azrael swerves around them, barely breaching airspace,
staying beneath an invisible boundary it never even knew it was deriving on
these many missions. Only satellites have ever spoken to it while it flew so
low. It has never received a ground-based command signal at this altitude. Down
here it has never heard an override.

Down here it is free to follow
the rules.

Cliffs rise and fall to either
side. Foothills jut from the earth like great twisted vertebrae. The bright
lunar landscape overhead, impossibly distant, casts dim shadows on the darker
one beneath.

Azrael stays the course. Shindand
appears on the horizon. Heaven glows on its eastern flank; its sprawling
silhouette rises from the desert like an insult, an infestation of crimson
staccatos. Speed is what matters now. Mission objectives must be met quickly,
precisely,
completely
. There can be no room for half
measures or mild-to-moderate incapacitation, no time for immobilized
biothermals to cry out as their heat spreads across the dirt. This calls for
the crown jewel, the BFG that all malaa’ikah keep tucked away for special
occasions. Azrael fears it might not be enough.

She splits down the middle. The
JDAM micronuke in her womb clicks impatiently.

Together they move toward the
light.

Kristine Kathryn
Rusch

Kristine
Kathryn Rusch has won two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and several readers
choice awards. She has written in every genre under many names, including Kris
Nelscott for mystery and Kristine Grayson for paranormal romance. In 2011 Pyr
will publish
City of Ruins,
part of her
award-winning
Diving into the Wreck
series. Her most
recent collection,
Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories
, just appeared from Golden Gryphon. WMG Publishing is reissuing
her bestselling Fey fantasy series, which just came out in audio from
Audible.com in 2010. Currently, she’s working with three different presses to
get her entire backlist (short stories and all) published electronically. For
more on her work, go to her website (
www.kristinekathrynrusch.com
).

Upstairs, the big house. Her
room, window seat, glass overlooking the back yard. The glint of his car
pulling into the drive. Suzette pulls her dolly closer. Dolly - called Dolly
(Mommy says that’s silly, everything needs a name. Her name’s Dolly, Suze says)
- is just cloth, does nothing special. Doesn’t talk, doesn’t serve food, doesn’t
cuddle. Just lets Suze cuddle, lets Suze be. Grams made Dolly, and Suze loves
Dolly even though Mommy says Dolly’s not special at all.