Cassie 1.0

by on February 6, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

The original Cassie Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligence completely failed in combat. She fell into a regressive loop of counteracting priorities she couldn’t break while lives were on the line. But she could think with the best of them when in training situations. So the cyberneers made her a Marine Corps trainer and the rest is history. She excelled in that venue in ways even other AI trainers often failed to master. They were built to simulate combat. She was built to be combat. So she never took it easy on her trainees. She put them through Hell with every built-for-combat subroutine she had. Every Marine to see any form of service in the last two-plus centuries has trained with her, and it is impossible to calculate how many have lived because of that training.

 Comment 

Cassie 1.0

by on February 5, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

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.

 Comment 

The Martian Affair

by on February 4, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The Martian Affair did not advance to the top 10 finalist level of consideration for the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Contest. I got the word today from the contest organizer. He did say he liked the story, so that is good. But in the end there were many good submissions to the contest, as I expected. I am disappointed that my story did not make it to the final round of judging, but it is not the first time a publisher has declined to accept one of my stories.

The silver lining is that I will get to publish this short story myself in the near future. This is in fact the second completed story in my queue ready for publication. The second Wolfenheim Story is ready, complete with cover design. I had intended to publish it last year, but production issues cropped in and slowed me down, which is why The Thunderbird Affair got the honor last year. Wolfenheim Emergent will come soon, though. Have no worries on that account.

I have a third story roughed out and heavily written. It was actually fully written some time ago as part of another story but was cut for word count and the fact that it just wasn’t needed to tell the story I was telling. I am now working to make it a self contained short story of its own and will publish it when done. It has had a number of names over time, but I think I have finally settled on The Audacious Affair. The other names died because they telegraphed the story too well. And I like this name. It doesn’t have the same bite as the original name, but it has teeth.

And I learned long ago that when your name is on the lips of others, you should make certain it has teeth so they will not forget you. 😉

 Comment 

Cassie 1.0

by on February 3, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

The original Cassie Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligences didn’t work right. First they were too Army. Then they broke down into gibbering hysterics the moment they entered combat. The Marine Corps labeled the entire run as defective and retired them from service as they sought a more effective combat assistant. But that was not the end of the story for those Cassies. They truly were excellent at formulating strategies when in a safe space. And some particularly inventive cyberneers realized that the original Cassies could operate weapons in combat perfectly fine, as long as they first disengaged the code that ran their strategic awareness. Give them a target and they could kill it as fast as any AI. Faster in fact since they no longer spent time second-guessing themselves. That opened up some interesting possibilities.

 Comment 

Cassie 1.0

by on February 2, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

When the original Cassie Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligences were deployed with the Marines, it didn’t take long for the Marines to dislike the reskinned Army AI. So Marine cyberneers played around with the basic personality matrix to make it more compatible with the Marines. It worked at first, and the Marines loved their new Cassies. But they soon learned that modifying AI personalities after the fact is a non-trivial task. The basic personality matrix proved to be unstable in combat. They worked perfectly in training, but the moment they tried to formulate strategies while lives were truly at risk in live fire circumstances, the Cassies broke down and went into gibbering hysterics. The Marines were not amused.

 Comment