It’s the only way to be sure
Posted in Pardis, WorkSpace on April 19th, 2009 by kilbotAt nearly thirty-seven thousand kilometres above southern Afghanistan, the geo-stationary WorkSpace relay milsat is a barely detectable stellar mote in the clear, frigid, night sky. Suspended in a cylindrical vat of liquid helium, and protected with a ring of bulky tanks of propellant, the mind of the satellite pulses gently with a superconductive glow. It doesn’t really think, WorkSpace tends to impose a strict AI capacity cap on geosynchronous weapons platforms with kinetic missile capability. Nonetheless the dim, dog-like musings of the sat overlay its operational output like a primary colour finger painting:
Mmmm, 98% operational efficiency. Recreational uplink in 953 seconds - woof. Milchcow rendezvous in seven orbits - drool.
The sat has a number of tasks - comms routing, mildata storage, AI backup - but primarily its a gun. A big gun. Optimised for targeted, non-radioactive orbital bombardment, the milsat is a fourth-gen geosync platform built by WorkSpace in 2029 and leased to the US government for the duration of Afghanistan 2.0. The sat has seen some service, crude satisfaction routines humming with gratification as the dumb matter kinetic missiles deployed at hypersonic speeds from the blunt muzzles of its EM accelerators. Expelled at escape velocity speeds, the streamlined chunks of depleted plutonium that the sat uses for ammunition require no explosive payload. Impacting at over twelve kilometres per second, the dull grey rods of plutonium convey a impact explosive analog of over 20 kilotons. With no gamma after-effects the weapons platform is the tool du jour of the discerning on-the-ground US military coordinator. They even take it in turns, thrice-PHDed war technicians squabbling over who gets to pull the trigger on a modified PlayStation paddle from an invulnerable state-side bunker.
Latterly, though the military machine has moved on to oilier pastures and the milsat has been backburnered to standard comms duties - piggy-backing commercial TV feeds a dimly perceived jangle of irritating bits. As the terminator creeps across the terrigenous skeleton of the mountains of Afghanistan, and the morning brings some welcome relief from the freezing spring night, the milsat wakes up to a rare but extremly important ping: get ready to launch. Hard coded synapses shiver alert with an anticipation of psuedo-pleasure - re-deployed it may be but the sat is a combat machine - they made it to want to fight. Milliseconds later targeting data hits its buffer, a priority wrapper indicates a desired completion timeframe for the action, an imperative variable tells the sat that the order is reinforced with a WASTE modifier, somewhere in WorkSpace someone (or probably more likely somebot) has decided that a WorkSpace initiative has exceeded its mandated usefulness. In the more litigiously nervous evironment of the developed world this would result in a cease and desist order and fund withdrawl; out in the Middle East boondocks a more expedient MO is used: explosive deconstruction and removal.
The sat processes the targeting data: A geoloc overlay pinpoints the bombardment coordinates, a more self-aware entity might puzzle over the rationale and/or military significance of a near-deserted patch of poppy plantation several kilomtres south of Jalalabad, and a less capable machine might doubt its ability to hit a tiny disused prefab. The milsat is fully upgraded though and has a 94% success termination potential for targets <0.5 metre square. 250 milliseconds following receipt of directive its primary EM cannon is unfolding from its dormant configuration. Fully three seconds thereafter a two metre needle of ultrahard plutonium is making a esartz shooting star in the dawn sky of Afghanistan. Nearly an hour later (an aeon in machine time) the sat’s after action scan detects a rising cloud of atomised rock and dust rising into the morning sky. Its sensors are also capable enough to detect in the particulate cloud the fatty-carbon remains of several mammalian combatants, it also wonders briefly and unconcernedly about the flash of machine thought coherence it detected just before missile impact.
Resource allocation is not one its core competencies, nor does is possess combat morality algorithims. The sat powers down to dormant, to again moronically eavesdrop the tsunami of commercial bandwidth flooding its router.
Pardis Hospice is shut for business.