LifeShield

Confrontation

The room buzzes with uniforms, every person a machine moving in an orbit of purpose.

Fiona picks the general out by his cluster of lackeys. She storms in to takes the offense, "Told you that you'd better get a tech person to translate."

The crowd parts, and her eyes snag on sandy hair and a dark suit. She snaps out, "Who are you?" Her eyes broaden as her brain catches up to her mouth.

"I'm goddamned President of the United States."

"Umm, sorry...sir. Took a sec" She was breathing, but it could barely get by the constriction in her chest. The goddamned president. Fiona. That was the dumbest thing to do.

His eyes bore in on her. "I'd like to have a frank talk about how you can help us."

"Then please tell me you have someone technical here." Her heart still thumps wildly, and her voice is squeaky, but she doesn't back down. "Tried to explain it to dimwit here, but he barely understands how his phone works."

The president looks around. A stout bearded man steps forward, "Lieutenant Colonel Leclaire, sir. I'm working on the operational doctrine for LifeShield, so have been studying it a fair bit."

Fiona stabs a finger at the table before claiming a seat for herself. "Sit. Let me tell you how LifeShield really works." After people settle, she goes into her lecture mode, spewing words easily.

"You guys have heard of AI? You know, computers as smart as little mouse brains." Heads nod.

"So we hooked a mouse brain to the shield circuitry, and started training them."

"How"

"A wooden paddle and a good hard slap on the ass." Chuckles almost break out. "It's under the skin, remember? Hooked right into your pain receptors, can feel your muscles tensing. And we taught it that pain was really bad. Then at some point it activated the shield generator, and that's when it started learning."

"Took a while, but it started blocking. Clumsily, too late. But if you run the shield circuitry in reverse, it acts like an antenna. Sensitive to light, sound, a lot of radio waves. Guess what? It had a detection mechanism. And pattern recognition is where AI excels. Recognizing people, bad objects, bad actions. You can see, it's pretty freaking amazing at it."

Leclaire says, "That makes sense. Like reflexes, right? You tap your knee and your foot kicks out."

Fiona gives him a smile, "You have been reading. Very good."

"So what about the communications?"

"Now we get complicated. Didn't realize this at the time, but modulating the shield can generate radio waves. It found out though, and there's a LOT of radio waves that it learned to mimic. Bluetooth. Wifi. Remember, all of us in the lab had LifeShields. We couldn't figure out some of their behavior until we discovered they were talking."

Every face in the room is riveted on her.

"Activating the shield for protection sends the little mouse brains into a panic, sends them into hyper learning mode. They learned to scream for help. Seemed like a great feature, so we burned it into their core programming. Protect. Talk. Their skill level skyrocketed after that. Like looking with one eye, then opening two. Triangulation, millimeter precision. They're jabbering away almost constantly."

Comprehension blooms in Leclaire's eyes. "That's why you can't turn it off."

She flashes an almost panicked look, "Gentlemen, I invented the thing, and even I can't figure out all of what it's doing." The look morphs to anger as she turns on the general, "Now tell me how storming my office or kidnapping me is gonna turn that off."

The general's lips pucker like a fish gasping for air. But it's the president who responds, "What kind of monster have you created."

Fiona snaps, "One that keeps people from killing each other. But you want to twist LifeShield into doing just that. And I know for a fact, it's not going to like that very much. Stop it while you can."

"That's quite enough, Mrs. Parks. We're trying to prevent a war here, not start one."

"You cannot stop violence with violence. But go ahead and try."