swallowed
hold the invasion off Port City. There was no way they’d be anything worse than an annoyance with only three; the other groups could outflank them. “What if you shut down things in here?” he asked. “Run basic life-support, but nothing fancy. And I could drive—run your weapons’ systems.”“You could. That would help.” Rommel pondered for a moment. “My calculations are that we can take the required eight of the groups if you also issue battle orders and I simply carry them out. But there is a further problem.”
“Which is?” he asked—although he had the sinking feeling that he knew what the problem was going to be.
“Higher functions. One of the functions I will lose at about the seventh takeover is what you refer to as my personality. A great deal of my ability to maintain a personality is dependent on devoting a substantial percentage of my central processor to that personality. And if it disappears—”
The Bolo paused. Siegfried’s hands clenched on the arms of his chair.
“—it may not return. There is a possibility that the records and algorithms which make up my personality will be written over by comparison files during strategic control calculations.” Again Rommel paused. “Siegfried, this is our duty. I am willing to take that chance.”
Siegfried swallowed, only to find a lump in his throat and his guts in knots. “Are you sure?” he asked gently. “Are you very sure? What you’re talking about is—is a kind of deactivation.”
“I am sure,” Rommel replied firmly. “The Field Marshal would have made the same choice.”
Rommel’s manuals were all on a handheld reader. He had studied them from front to back—wasn’t there something in there? “Hold on a minute—”
He ran through the index, frantically keyword searching. This was a memory function, right? Or at least it was software. The designers didn’t encourage operators to go mucking around in the AI functions . . . what would a computer jock call what he was looking for?
Finally he found it; a tiny section in programmerese, not even listed in the index. He scanned it, quickly, and found the warning that had been the thing that had caught his eye in the first place.
This system has been simulation proven in expected scenarios, but has never been fully field-tested.
What the hell did that mean?