The Vanguard Vixen

War Council

Turana looked down at a neatly tied bun of blonde hair. Its owner wore a crisp black suit with medals, stars and stripes covering its front. She sat at a glass table with five other men in army green suits of their own, decorated too but not as much as the woman before her. Turana recognized the men as the five generals of Vanguard, the highest ranking people in the territory. The only other person that could sit at the table was the president herself.

"Madame president, we do not have time to stall or wait, further action should be taken now or we get swept along with everyone else."

"You are asking me General to authorise a nuclear strike on another territory, not out of retaliation, or by accident but because you suspect they might be harboring a rogue AI. How did we get here?"

One of the other generals explained. "All the territories, including us bought our basic Al code from mainstream except for Stralia."

"But they do have artificial intelligence there too, I've seen the reports."

"Yes, but they built theirs from scratch."

"And we didn't have the capacity to do that? Taking anything from Mainstream was the one thing we had to avoid people."

"Writing a military AI code from scratch takes a long time, and requires utmost accuracy. Any error makes the whole thing useless. We had programmers that could do it, but it would take months and by then Prussia would have most certainly got the upper hand."

"How did Stralia do it in time? We have much more resources than they do."

The General placed his palm on the table and it lit up, becoming a computer screen. A blurry picture of what looked like a girl in a red hooded coat was walking across a crowded walkway.

"This is Athena. She is what we call a digital titan, because she knows more about computers than anyone else in the world. She was born in Stralia and learned how to read and write one's and zero's before she could properly speak. She wrote the entire code for Stralia's AI, including all their defense systems."

He swiped and the table now showed a map of the six territories. "the AI's from Mainstream Tech shouldn't have been able to merge because every territory wrote a dissimilar code from the other. But if someone was able to alter all five codes at the same time, changing particulars markers and functions, the merge would be possible. We think that Athena, under orders from Stralia sabotaged the rest of our AI's."

The president sighed, and tucked a loose strand of hair back in place.
    
"Okay, so we cannot hit Stralia, why not extract the girl?"

"Because she's not in Stralia anymore. She was sighted in Vanguard, around the southern border. If you could give the order, we would send in a team."

The president raised her hand to stop the General. "No, I'll send one of my own to go get her, we can't have army trucks and jets scaring her off.  What do you have in mind for the girl?"

"She'll help us make technology the world hasn't seen before. With the elimination of AI's we'll need some other system to help us run everything, although it will only be semi automated. We have located source codes for an old system, we call it i-tech. None of our guys can understand its sequences, but we know Athena can."

"Now I will need confirmation that the A.I is based in Amazon, and word from the other leaders. If they all agree, we can kill some birds with some bombs. Well then, we're done for the day gentlemen."

The generals all stood up and saluted to her, then left the room.
    
The president still didn't turn around, but spoke to Turana.
"Get word to the Commander in charge of the vixen. She has another target, but this one we want alive."

The next breath Turana took was of fresh air as she woke up. The gun was still there, but she didn't want to use it. She knew her subconscious had somehow wanted to show her the gun wasn't AI tech, but she wasn't sure yet.

That was when the first missile struck.

*****
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