No way Bonner’s going to let me answer those questions.
The general’s no fool. There’s something he’s got planned, some grenade planted and ticking, only where is it? With Tanzer?
Tanzer was saying: “It’s the task of this facility to evaluate prototype systems and to take them to the design limits. The essential step before we risk human life is advanced, exacting interactive assist simulation. The second step is automated performance testing. And again, the simulations are revised and refined, and procedures and checklists developed in hours of Control Integration Trials, a process with which many of our distinguished panel are intimately familiar. They are also aware that in the world of high-velocity craft we are exceeding human capacities to cope with the infostream. We’ve overrun human reaction time. We’ve long since overrun conventional radar. Hence the neural net AA, which adapts and shapes itself threefold, for the pilot’s past performance, enemy’s past, pilot’s current behaviors—and the longscan technique that extrapolates and displays an object’s probability. We’ve developed dopplered communications and communications techniques to receive information faster than human senses can sort it, computer assemblies to second-guess the pilot on multiple tasks. The faster we go, the more the pilot becomes an integral component of the systems that filter information via his senses and the Adaptive Assists into the ship’s controls. Right now the human is the highest vote in the Hellburner’s neural network; but we’ve long been asking the question at what point the sophistication of the computers to provide the information and the speed and power of the ship to react may finally exceed the engineering limits of the creator— that is, at what point of demand on human capacity to react to data, do we conceive a technically perfect and humanly unflyable machine?”
The questioner, Bonner, said, “Have we done that, in your opinion?”
Tanzer said, “Yes. In my opinion, yes.”
“Go on.”
“The EC militia came here with a design within the capabilities of the shipbuilding industry, and within the skills of its own pilots to operate. And the design for a companion ship they claimed could use off-the-shelf hardware and software—”
Damn him, Graff thought.
“—and serve as a high-velocity weapons platform. It was not, of course, operable as designed. The fleet insists that the unpredictability of human decisions without a tetralogic AI dominating the pilot-neural net interlink is essential to high-v combat. And we have six men in hospital and seventeen dead in the realworld discovery process.”
Hell.
“We’re putting crews into a ship that is in effect a high-v multilogic missile, with the sole advantage that the equipment is theoretically recoverable.”
There had been dead silence in the room. There was a small muttering now. Don’t blow, don’t blow, Graff wished Mitch and Jamil. We get our turn.
The gavel came down.
Tanzer went on: “A pilot with twenty years’ experience and no faults in the sims ran the course successfully for three hours, forty-six minutes and 17.4 seconds. The accident, which you’ve seen repeatedly, took place within seven tenths of a second. In the 17 thsecond Wilhelmsen missed one random ordnance target on the approach and reoriented to catch it on the retreat, which he did. At this point telemetry leaves us to guess what passed through his mind— perhaps the recollection he was entering the probability fan of a target in his path. Pulse and respiration has increased markedly over the previous ten minutes. The armscomper and the co-pilot simultaneously indicated alarm as the maneuver started. The armscomper fired off-profile as required and missed. In the next .7 of a second the pilot’s telemetry recorded three muscle twitches in conflicting directions causing the craft to undergo successive shocks, and one extreme reaction which caused the pilot and the crew to lose consciousness and sent the ship into a tumble.
“Possibly—Dr. Helmond Weiss will provide more specifics in his testimony—but possibly prolonged hyperception to a microfocused event like the double miss caused a spatial confusion....”
Pens on Translates took rapid notes. Graff kept his notes in his head. And said to himself, on the memory of his own system entries: Wilhelmsen panicked.
“Seven tenths of a second,” Tanzer said, “from first mistake to the ship entering a fatal motion. 4.8 seconds later it clipped a targeting buoy at .5 light. There is no recoverable wreckage. Our analysis of events rests entirely on telemetry—in which, ironically, the speed makes the microgaps significant data fallouts.”
“Meaning the instruments couldn’t send fast enough.”
“Meaning our data-gathering had two phases: an infosift rapid transmission and a more detailed concurrent total transmission that was running 28 minutes behind the condensed report. Machines can’t transmit that fast. More Important, human neurons don’t fire that fast. We’re using “” human brains to improve a missile’s kill rate at a sustained rate of decision that exceeds human limits. Meaning we can’t think that fast that long. We’ve tried an Assisted handoff to a human co-pilot and it’s not practical. The psychological stress is actually increased by the trade, and performance is critically reduced. Either we put an unexcepted AI override on the observed physical responses that preceded the incident, or we go back to design and put that ship Under a tetralogic AI with the pilot at the interface—as the heart, not the head, of the affair; or, unacceptably, we Outright admit that we don’t give a damn for human life, and we breed human beings to do that job and tape-train the fear and humanity out of them, the way they do in Union Space. There are no other choices.”
Down the corridor to the vending machines, a cheese sandwich and a soft drink. Cheese was edible. The fish wasn’t even to mention. It had something green scattered through it. Ben sat down, unwrapped the sandwich, tore the indestructible packaging on the chips and sipped his drink.
A guy came in, put chits in the machine. God, he didn’t want a couple of orderlies discussing kidney function during his sandwich....
But he caught the haircut and the uniform, took a second look, and found the shave-job staring back at him with sudden sharp attention.
“Pollard?”
The face almost rang bells, but he couldn’t place it. The haircut, pure rab, didn’t agree with the blue fatigues that said military. Civ docker, he thought. Then he thought; Dekker. Shepherd. And had a sudden notion in what packet of memory that face belonged.
“Mason?” he asked.
“Yeah!” the guy said, hands full. “Word is you’re here for Dekker, damn! How is he?”
“Like shit.” He indicated the place opposite him at the table and Mason brought his sandwich and his drink over and sat down. Ben asked, “What are you in for?”
“Therapy.” Mason wiggled the fingers of his right hand. “Gym floor jumped up and got me. —Dekker’s still bad, huh? He say anything?”
“Thinks he’s in the fuckin’ Belt most of the time.” Ben took a bite of cheese sandwich, thought about that shuttle leaving at mainday end, and how there wasn’t another til next week, wondered if there was a shortcut to the memory Graff wanted, and said, “Keeps asking for Bird and Cory Salazar. What in hell happened to him? Anybody know?”
Mason pulled a long face. “Just they pulled him out of a sim-pod bloody and beat all to hell. But we’d lay odds—” Mason looked at him about chest-high and stopped talking in mid-sentence. Mason filled his mouth with sandwich instead.
“—lay odds, what?”