we be prepared for the next bomb? Or whatever they try after that?”
“Uh,” Gilly said. “I mean, you’re asking me to hypothesize about an unknown tactic, which I can’t do.”
“What if we assumed manual control?”
Gilly blinked. “Of what?”
She gestured shortly. “The ship.”
“The ship?” He looked at Talia like he wanted her to jump in. But Talia wasn’t following the conversation closely enough for that. She was not available for dialogue guidance right now. “You’re asking what I think about manually controlling the ship?”
“Yes.”
“I think it’s insane.”
“Why?”
“Which part are you even talking about? Piloting?”
Jackson shrugged. “Say next engagement, we take direct control over Weapons, so that if a bomb strike neutralizes the AI again—”
“Can I stop you there?”
“—we retain the ability to fire on the enemy.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Anders said, “Can’t be more ridiculous than sitting at station with no systems and a dead AI.”
“This . . .” he said. “This is not a manual ship. This is an AI ship.”
“I understand your stance,” Jackson said. “Now talk me through why.”
Gilly took a breath. “First of all, the ship is orders of magnitude faster than us at battlefield analysis. So even if we assume that we could arrive at the same decisions—which is absolutely not the case, by the way—we’d do it slower. Much slower.”
“Why do we want to arrive at the same decisions?”
Gilly struggled for a response. “Because . . .”
“I’m just talking it through,” Jackson said.
“Because before Providences, people used to die a lot,” Gilly said. “Now they don’t. Are we really going to question the effectiveness of AI decisions? That’s . . . Everything we do is founded on that.”
“What’s second of all?”
“Second of all, some of the systems you’re talking about, like Weapons Targeting, are flat-out beyond human capability. We’re aiming at small, fast-moving targets thousands of miles away. Our hit rate would be near zero.”
Anders said, “What’s the computer’s hit rate?”
“You should fucking know that,” Gilly said. “It’s a hundred percent.”
Anders shook his head. “Wrong.”
“I’m rounding. It’s effectively a hundred.”
“It’s less than a hundred.”
“I’m getting aggravated,” Gilly said, “because it feels like you’re saying that since it’s not perfect, it might as well be near zero.”
“When the AI goes down, the hit rate is zero,” Anders said. “Not near zero. Actual zero.”
Gilly took a breath. “Third of all, I don’t even want to imagine what happens if the ship discovers that we’ve rendered its weapons systems inoperable. It’s not going to sit there and rely on us to peashoot hostiles. It’ll try to route around the problem in ways we can’t predict.”
“Hmm,” Jackson said.
“Fourth of all, some systems can’t be run manually. At all.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Jackson said. “If it’s impossible, open with that.”
“Which systems?” Anders said.
“Anything that requires coordination between multiple subsystems. The laser matrix. The mass projectors. The plasma planet-killer. The engines you can only enable or disable, not maneuver.”
“What about the pulse?”
He hesitated.
“That sounds like yes,” Anders said.
“We could probably pulse,” Gilly admitted. “But I’d have to detach it from the ship’s control. Which would be idiotic, for the reasons I mentioned.”
Jackson said, “Can you set it up so that if we lose the AI, we have the option of asserting manual control?”
He screwed up his face. “Not easily.”
“But you could?”
“I can look into it.”
“Look into it,” Jackson said.
“I don’t mind going down fighting,” Anders said. “But I don’t want to be sitting in the dark with no weapons while they’re swarming the ship.”
“That won’t happen,” Gilly said. “It was one in a million, and the ship already learned from it. I’m not just saying this because I’m Surplex. This is the way it works.”