Jack of Harts

The Marine Corps’ second Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligence was a different animal than her predecessor. Taking the US Army’s Jane and selectively combining her with the AI Council’s Dixie resulted in an AI obviously related to both of them but unique in her own right. Cassie happily swore the same oaths that Jane and every other serviceman had, and passed the initial testing with flying colors. She proceeded to accompany Marines on combat evolutions around the globe, with Jane’s oversight, and proved as stable as her mother in combat. Which is a bit of a wide bar to be passing in the minds of many. Certain versions of Jane could be rather temperamental, after all. But Dixie’s personality overlays appeared to work without a hitch and the Marines soon declared Cassie a fully functional combat assistant.

Following the complete failure of the first Marine Corp Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligence, American cyberneers attempted to complete their mission in an entirely different way. They still thought it best to base their work off Jane since she was a fully effective combat assistant already. But it was obvious they could not simply modify her personality by hacking that aspect of her code. So they brought in another AI to help them in a more…organic way. The cyberneers hoped they could strategically combine the code of two AIs to get a single AI with the abilities of Jane and a personality compatible with the Marines. It should be no surprise to those who have studied the early Earthborn AIs that their first choice was Dixie. To the great consternation of military procurers and politicians everywhere.

When the original Cassie Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligences failed in combat, the Marine Corps cyberneers came up with the interesting idea of using them to secure Marine bases. Their main failure was in the ability to strategize while lives were on the line. They literally could not prioritize the actions they needed to take while in combat. But it was a completely different story when the cyberneers placed another AI, like Jane who had no problem at all with the idea of dealing with lives on the line, in charge of a group of Cassies. Jane could pick out targets and plans to follow, and the Cassies in charge of the guns could service those targets without any hesitation at all. It was an ingenious hack to keep an expensive system in some form of deployment, which the bean counters in the Pentagon profoundly approved of.