He jumped into the command chair and strapped in; his hands danced across the keypad, keying in the frequency and the code. Then he saluted the console jauntily. “Congratulations, Herr Rommel,” he said, unable to keep the glee out of his voice. “You are now a Field Marshal.”
“Siegfried!” Yes, there was astonishment in Rommel’s synthesized voice. “You just gave me command of an armored mobile strike force!”
“I certainly did. And I freed your command circuits so that you can run them without waiting for my orders to do something.” Siegfried couldn’t help grinning. “After all, you’re not going against living troops, you’re going to be attacking AIs and mechs. The next AI might not be so easy to take over, but if you’re running in the middle of a swarm of ‘friendlies,’ you might not be suspected. And when we knock out that one, we’ll take over again. I’ll even put the next bunch on a different command freq so you can command them separately. Sooner or later they’ll figure out what we’re doing, but by then I hope we’ll have at least an equal force under our command.”
“This is good, Siegfried!”
“You bet it’s good, mein Freund,” he retorted. “What’s more, we’ve studied the best—they can’t possibly have that advantage. All right—let’s show these amateurs how one of the old masters handles armor!”
The second and third takeovers were as easy as the first. By the fourth, however, matters had changed. It might have dawned on either the AIs on the ground or whoever was in command of the overall operation in the mother-ship above that the triple loss of AIs and mechs was not due to simple malfunction, but to an unknown and unsuspected enemy.
In that, the hostiles were following in the mental footsteps of another pre-Atomic commander, who had once stated, “Once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, but three times is enemy action.”
So the fourth time their forces advanced on a ship, they met with fierce resistance.
They lost about a dozen mechs, and Siegfried had suffered a bit of a shakeup and a fair amount of bruising, but they managed to destroy the fourth AI without much damage to Rommel’s exterior. Despite the danger from unexploded shells and some residual radiation, Siegfried doggedly went out into the wreckage to get that precious access code.
He returned to bad news. “They know we’re here, Siegfried,” Rommel announced. “That last barrage gave them a silhouette upstairs; they know I’m a Bolo, so now they know what they’re up against.”
Siegfried swore quietly, as he gave Rommel his fourth contingent of mechs. “Well, have they figured out exactly what we’re doing yet? Or can you tell?” Siegfried asked while typing in the fourth unit’s access codes.
“I can’t—I—can’t—Siegfried—” the Bolo replied, suddenly without any inflection at all. “Siegfried. There is a problem. Another. I am stretching my—resources—”
This time Siegfried swore with a lot less creativity. That was something he had not even considered! The AIs they were eliminating were much less sophisticated than Rommel—
“Drop the last batch!” he snapped. To his relief, Rommel sounded like himself again as he released control of the last contingent of mechs.
“That was not a pleasurable experience,” Rommel said mildly.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“As I needed to devote more resources to controlling the mechs, I began losing higher functions,” the Bolo replied simply. “We should have expected that; so far I am doing the work of three lesser AIs and all the functions you require, and maneuvering of the various groups we have captured. As I pick up more groups, I will inevitably lose processing functions.”
Siegfried thought, frantically. There were about twenty of these invading ships; their plan absolutely required that Rommel control at least eight of the groups to successfully hold the invasion off Port City. There was no way they’d be anything worse than an annoyance with only three; the other groups could outflank them. “What if you shut down things in here?” he asked. “Run basic life-support, but nothing fancy. And I could drive—run your weapons’ systems.”
“You could. That would help.” Rommel pondered for a moment. “My calculations are that we can take the required eight of the groups if you also issue battle orders and I simply carry them out. But there is a further problem.”
“Which is?” he asked—although he had the sinking feeling that he knew what the problem was going to be.
“Higher functions. One of the functions I will lose at about the seventh takeover is what you refer to as my personality. A great deal of my ability to maintain a personality is dependent on devoting a substantial percentage of my central processor to that personality. And if it disappears—”
The Bolo paused. Siegfried’s hands clenched on the arms of his chair.
“—it may not return. There is a possibility that the records and algorithms which make up my personality will be written over by comparison files during strategic control calculations.” Again Rommel paused. “Siegfried, this is our duty. I am willing to take that chance.”
Siegfried swallowed, only to find a lump in his throat and his guts in knots. “Are you sure?” he asked gently. “Are you very sure? What you’re talking about is—is a kind of deactivation.”
“I am sure,” Rommel replied firmly. “The Field Marshal would have made the same choice.”
Rommel’s manuals were all on a handheld reader. He had studied them from front to back—wasn’t there something in there? “Hold on a minute—”
He ran through the index, frantically keyword searching. This was a memory function, right? Or at least it was software. The designers didn’t encourage operators to go mucking around in the AI functions . . . what would a computer jock call what he was looking for?
Finally he found it; a tiny section in programmerese, not even listed in the index. He scanned it, quickly, and found the warning that had been the thing that had caught his eye in the first place.
This system has been simulation proven in expected scenarios, but has never been fully field-tested.
What the hell did that mean? He had a guess; this was essentially a full-copy backup of the AI’s processor. He suspected that they had never tested the backup function on an AI with a full personality. There was no way of knowing if the restoration function would actually “restore” a lost personality.
But the backup memory-module in question had its own power-supply, and was protected in the most hardened areas of Rommel’s interior. Nothing was going to destroy it that didn’t slag him and Rommel together, and if “personality” was largely a matter of memory—
It might work. It might not. It was worth trying, even if the backup procedure was fiendishly hard to initiate. They really didn’t want operators mucking around with the AIs.
Twenty command-strings later, a single memory-mod began its simple task; Rommel was back in charge of the fourth group of mechs, and Siegfried had taken over the driving.
He was not as good as Rommel was, but he was better than he had thought.
They took groups five, and six, and it was horrible—listening to Rommel fade away, lose the vitality behind the synthesized voice. If Siegfried hadn’t had his hands full already, literally, it would have been worse.