Friendly Fire

The commander took his position at the console center, nimbly hooking up the webbing that would keep him stable as he looked down on the bloom of fireflies at the other end of the world arcing ever so slowly toward his country.

He felt no fear. The twenty-first century war story unfolding on his screens was too far away from blood and tears and death to cut through his extensive training. For all he knew this could just be another exceptionally realistic training exercise. The bad political news they had been getting from earth for the past month could have been faked to enhance the realism. Those fiery blossoms far below could well be a computer dream.

In any case, he had the best trained troops and the best equipment money could buy. All the sacrifice and expense his country had endured for decades was about to pay off. His battle platform, along with the others in his orbiting battalion, would snuff out the missiles before they even reached orbit. Orbiting pulse bombs would fall on the enemy and paralyze their computers and communications. The magnetic rail-guns on his country's moon base would quickly destroy the remaining launchers with kinetic weapons.

He hit the button to initiate his counterattack, as he had done so often in the drills. Nothing happened. Quickly skimming the instructions to find his error, he repeated the initiation sequence. Still the antimissile X-ray-laser battery he commanded in space stubbornly refused to fire. Meanwhile, the enemy's missiles were crawling toward apogee.

Suddenly, a crew mate at the other end of the capsule started to scream, somersaulting over and over in free-fall. She had forgotten to hook up, the commander thought distantly; there's always someone. Then as others began to scream the commander felt his own flesh beginning to sear. Something was seriously wrong.

Striving for calm, he scanned his displays for any fault, any problem. Too late, he realized that he was being fired on by the X-laser of another battle platform in his own battalion. The enemy, instead of spending ever more money on rail-guns, X-lasers, and pulse bombs, had concentrated on virulent software. Having invisibly infiltrated his country's weapons, the enemy's software was now fighting the war with two arsenals---theirs and his.

War had come full circle. From the first human hand using a rock to bash someone's head in, weapons had grown more and more autonomous, until no human hand directly controlled any weapon. Because everything went through computers, seducing the computers meant seducing the weapons. As death covered him in all its awful majesty, he knew his nation would soon follow him into oblivion.

When the Machine Awakes