“What the hay…?”
Kayla watched her exec scroll through page after page after page of performance information connected to the exercise they’d just completed. When she’d left the bridge, after the ship had been parked back in its orbit, Captain River Song had been putting her background to good use and helping the helmsmare- a midshipmare fresh out of training- pull off a few moves in a simulated exercise. She’d headed for her day cabin, pulled up the exercise results…
In the fleet exercise, her ship had been one of the top performers, despite taking on over ninety-five percent of her crew hardly two days before- including her helmsmare. She’d had a few amazed comments from the other admirals, and at least one asking her how much she thought the uniqueness of the ship itself had either contributed or detracted from that number.
Then, like every other computer terminal on the ship, her terminal seemed to have a bit of a mind of its own as well. While she was looking at the overall fleet performance breakdown, a little notification had popped up in the corner of the screen, declaring a crew performance breakdown was available for her review.
Naturally, she’d clicked on it.
This performance breakdown had been… interesting, to say the least. The document was arranged a little differently from the Fleet ones, and it broke down the performance all the way down to not just per-crewmember but per-task as well, with excruciating detail… and a final percentage performance rating for each person.
Apparently, she herself had demonstrated good command of her tactical instinct, but had missed a couple of potential situations and an opportunity to inflict massive damage to the Aggressor force very early on… and demonstrated very little knowledge of the abilities of the vessel, and at least one false belief in that regard as well. She’d been assigned an overall performance rating of hardly fifty-eight percent.
She hadn’t noticed Captain Song doing much during the exercise- but the performance review told the story of some hard calculations and other preparations that ended up not being necessary, but were classified under the Exec Officer’s duty to be ready for whatever the Captain needed. She had the highest performance rating out of any of them, at a mere sixty-two percent.
A couple of the other senior officers had decent percentages- and Commander Cannon was the only other one above fifty. All the junior officers, however, had performance ratings in the single digits- and at the bottom of the list, there were nearly four hundred that had actually slept through the maneuver and been assigned zeroes.
Finally, the hundred-thousand-and-oneth (and very last) entry on the list, was also the highest percentage on the list, even though it was sorted by percentage.
The reason was clear, though- as was the reason this entry wasn’t accompanied by a performance breakdown.
It was, after all, titled ‘AI Completion of Crew-Assigned Tasks’... and marked at a whopping eighty-seven percent. Its brief description indicated it to be the ratio of the number of crew tasks that had been completed by the ship AI to the total number that had been presented to the crew.
So she had called Captain Song down to look at it.
It took the mare nearly five full minutes to read down it- and she let out a gasp when she reached the bottom.
“... Well,” Captain River Song began. “I… suppose we know where we need to improve.”
Kayla nodded. “That and I think we have a pretty good clue, now, to exactly how much computer support we have, too.”
River nodded. “Part of me worries about having the computers covering our backs like this, but…” She tapped the tablet with a hoof. “That’s going to be pretty handily offset by a performance monitoring function like this.”
Kayla nodded again. “It’s going to be pretty hard to slack off or miss something and never realize it- and considering that our performance in the Fleet exercise was not perfect, either our AI is also imperfect… or it waited for us to catch our mistakes before stepping in at the last possible second.”
“Well the first of those is definitely true,” River agreed. “The latter…” She looked at the tablet again. “Let’s be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true as well.”
Kayla sighed. “Makes me wonder if that AI is actively monitoring anything right now, or if it’s just waiting for us to do something?”
River scowled. “Well, nopony ever pushed an ‘AI On’ switch, so I’d guess it’s at least watching for exercises like that one. And this kind of detail suggests it’ll be watching us basically anytime we’re on duty…” She tilted her head. “Come to think of it, how did you come across this breakdown?”
She blinked. “It popped up while I was looking at the Fleet breakdown,” she muttered. Then she stopped, and facehooved. “Well of course it’s watching what’s on my screen. It’s displaying what’s on my screen.”
“And predicting our lift destinations with an alarming degree of accuracy, and on my way down here, I ran into Corporal Bringing Thunder in the lifts- she was headed out to address an automated alert pertaining to undue violence in the passages. Third one today, she said- and none of them false alarms, so far.”
Kayla raised an eyebrow at the mention of the head of the ship’s Marine contingent, and so also the head of the shipboard police. “So, we can probably assume that it’s either watching us or ‘using its discretion’ at basically all times, for various purposes. And is probably listening to every little thing we’re saying, too.”
River nodded. “Probably analyzing our words not just to tell when we’re assigning tasks to each other, but also possibly to help it do its own job better.”
Kayla nodded as well. “Whatever its ‘job’ is, beyond watching us and covering our backs, yes.”
“Come in,” Kyla called, as the door into her day cabin slid open. It was only two hours after her exec had left, and fast approaching dinnertime.
It was Commander Quick Thought, her Electronics officer. “Captain,” she greeted, with a bow.
Kayla nodded. “Commander.”
“Well, I… did a little digging, in the records from the exercise,” Commander Thought admitted. “It didn’t feel like that kind of exercise should have felt. So… I turned up a little snippet. During that exercise, the ship was operating in ‘Commanded Autonomous Mode’... and as near as I can tell, it has been from when you first stepped aboard to now.”
“Commanded Autonomous Mode?” Kayla asked, one eyebrow raised. “What’s that?”
“Well, I did some more digging, and it seems to be the lowest available autonomous mode of operation. Basically, the ship is running every aspect of itself, but it is doing so with the direct goal of doing what we tell it to- well, specifically, what you tell it to. It looks like it has acknowledged that we are operating it with your permission, and so has interpreted… well, everything, to mean that you want it to work with the crew… Not simply obey the crew, that’d be a ‘manual’ mode of operation, but work with them. And as near as I can tell, it’s decided that the best way for it to work with the crew at this point in time would be to train the crew to better work with it.”
“Then the exercise…?”
“More of the same, I guess. It did what it could to train the crew with direct control, but was still under autonomous control, so the AI made sure that the ship as a whole did roughly what you were asking for- knowing that it was an exercise, of course. I think it also acknowledged the purpose of the exercise and tried to do the same for the other ships in the fleet, too.” She glanced down at her tablet, and back up. “Finally, it seems to have acknowledged gaps in knowledge on basically everyone’s part- for example, during the exercise, you gave the order to open fire on ‘all tubes’... but only about a percent of our missile tubes fired, because some forty percent were not loaded, another thirty percent only had war shots in them, and the rest would’ve caused us to burn through the practice shots too fast.”
She looked up. “... You mean to tell me…”
“That we loaded enough practice rounds for one shot each from only thirty percent of available tubes? Yes.”
She put her face in her hooves. “There were four thousand pallets.”
“I know.”
“Are we sure she isn’t a warship?”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t able to find anything definitive, but she certainly looks like one.”
The comms panel chirped briefly. Lieutenant Commander Sharp Ears tapped it a couple times, briefly. “We have our targets,” she announced.
It was a ‘random target practice’ exercise. Each ship was to proceed independently from the rest of the Fleet, which had all been parked in a singular orbit around one of Jupiter’s moons, and engage a set of probes floating in some random orbit… while maneuvering as if all the probes around the moon, including their targets, were enemy warships.
And of course, their initial orbit was the only orbit that didn’t intersect with any probes- the ‘safe zone’, so to speak.
This also meant that, no matter their target designation, they would have to leave the safe zone in order to reach their targets… then return to it in order to end the exercise. It didn’t exactly help that they were deliberately not informed of what orbit their targets held, only what codes they had printed on their hulls. It was supposed to incentivize coordinated teamwork- if the entire party engaged in such practice moved together, one ship of the resultant fleet would be allowed to engage each set of probes encountered. They were not, after all, allowed to engage each other’s probes.
Kayla gave a quick nod. “Alright. Commander Cannon?”
Commander Cannon gave a sharp nod, and tapped away at hers. “Probe IDs received and… Probes identified, they’re on the far side- and we’ve already got a shooting solution, too.”
She looked at the tactical officer. “What?”
The mare looked back up at her and shrugged. “I guess we can see through planets and shoot around them. Without using missiles.”
“Without using missiles,” Kayla repeated.
She nodded.
“Confirm for me that we won’t be shooting through Io?”
It took her only a couple taps. “... Confirmed. We’ve got curved trajectories for energy weapons, and my console is assuring me they’re possible.”
“... Alright. Make sure we’re firing in a direction that won’t hit anything if they don’t curve, and engage targets.”
“Got it. Engaging…” There was a brief pause. “Now!” She glanced up, then back down. “Targets eliminated?” She glanced up at Lieutenant Commander Sharp Ears.
The L.C. watched her panel for a second, before it chirped. She took a second to read the message. “Hits confirmed,” she announced. “Our targets have been destroyed.” Suddenly, her panel chirped again. “... Er, comms request from Admiral Northern Lights.” Another chirp. “And Admiral Southern Ice.” Another. “And Commodore Crushed Rock.” She ignored a fifth chirp, and looked up. “All requesting video.” A sixth chirp. She glanced at her panel. “And there’s the Space Lord.”
She rolled her eyes. “Onscreen, all of them, in conference.”
“Got it.” She made a couple of taps.
Finally, the massive display at the head of the bridge- normally a tactical display, to show the overall situation broken down on the various panels’ displays- blinked into a tiled comms mode. Nineteen separate comms feeds appeared in a neat grid display, with the last empty space occupied by a live view of her own bridge- the outbound feed.
Several of the other Admirals, Commodores, and Captains blinked a couple times, before Space Lord Matthews spoke.
“Captain Matthews,” he said slowly. “Did… Did you just fire energy weapons on a curved trajectory to hit a target that was on the far side of a planetary body?”
“Uh, Yes, Sir,” Kayla proclaimed. “It turns out the Athena can see through planets and shoot around them. With energy weapons.”
“Are you sure she’s not a warship?” he asked.
Kayla shrugged her wings. “We… haven’t found anything definitive, but she certainly looks like one.”