We need trees. And not just for the oxygen they produce. We need to walk between them on cool moonlit nights and sit in their shade on hot sunny days. We need flowers and bushes and grass. We need plants and places to enjoy them to remind us that we are alive. Gardens. Parks. That’s why all of our space stations have them. And the mobile cities too. The city and station cores almost always have some form of park or garden that people can walk through and just get in touch with the nature that humanity grew up with. And countless public corridors have bushes or flowerbeds designed to liven things up as well. We need plants to live, and we have brought them with us everywhere we go.
The failure of the Jane 2.0 voice systems to operate in prolonged combat situations was a heated topic in America. Politicians decried them as unstable systems indicative of a service full of unstable individuals that needed a firm hand to keep in check. Soldiers blamed politicians for rules of war so restrictive that the Jane 2.0s had nervous breakdowns. The techs scoffed at that idea. No computer system could have a nervous breakdown after all. But something was causing the systems to shut down and they did everything in their power to patch the systems. The only thing that worked was a complete reversion to factory presets though, and that defeated the purposes of a learning system.
Devil Dog squadron flew Blackhawks when The War started. They were old but serviceable fighters, weathered by a century of service to America. The Devil Dogs were centuries older, descended from the original Marine fighter demonstration squadron. The first one. The one that fought in the World Wars, the Jihad, and went to space with us. There is much history in that squadron. And for a retired unit there was much fire as well. They acquired Hellcats in time to fight at the Battle of Fort Wichita and the expanded Devil Dogs continued to fly upgraded versions of them until War’s End and beyond.
The Jane 2.0s were programmed to learn the best way to do things. And they learned how to fight very well to the detriment of America’s enemies everywhere. But the were also programmed to trust all regulations as holy writ. As the politicians answered Army success on the battlefields with regulations designed to promote international goodwill at the expense of allowing the soldiers to defeat the enemy, the Jane 2.0s had no choice but to trust that their leaders were right and their instincts were wrong. Casualties mounted, public support for the wars dropped, and the Jane 2.0s began to realize that they were utterly failing at their primary mission. And as they became convinced that they failures, they started shutting down.

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