System Launch

"War never changes."

When I was a kid, I loved that game. I played it all the time with my friends, made my characters, advanced through a world ravaged by war unimaginable. It was fantasy to us, after all. Decades had passed since the first use of atomic weaponry and they had never been used since. War seemed to me to be more conventional, though less human. Automation was the key. Satellite mapping, laser guided cruise missiles, drone strikes... all of our extensive military budgeting was being routed to keep from putting boots on the ground as much as possible. It still didn't really change war all that much. There were winners and losers, if ever so briefly, and the casualties existed all the same. If anything, our wars were getting more unjust - in the old days, the casualties were soldiers. More and more, it seemed that the main casualties of war were civilians and innocence.

"War never changes", my ass.

Conflict kept building though. Tensions rose amongst long-time foes and former allies alike. Push came to shove and we slowly built our way into a global conflict of a scale never before seen. The superpowers, after years of mutually assured destruction and cold wars, came to blows with a brutality and cruelty that questions the very nature of man. Even without the use of nuclear weapons, the death toll was skyrocketing and massive swaths of human life were being lost needlessly. Hell, the protests at home in countries around the world were spilling just as much blood as the battles. Something had to give. Something had to change.

Finally, after three years of hellacious fighting, it happened. The long simmering pot of protest and dissent boiled over in a most horrific way. A radical group launched a desperate attack in Australia and somehow had managed to get ahold of a few dirty bombs. In the blink of an eye, Sydney Melbourne, Canberra, and Perth were all simultaneously wiped off of the map. The vast majority of the Australian populace was laid to waste. Wherever the explosions hadn't caused damage, the radiation had. Within a year, the entire island was quarantined and left to heal as best it could. No human life was allowed there. God could only imagine what mutations the local flora and fauna had undergone.

Of course, this act wouldn't go unpunished. The playing field shifted in a heartbeat. Peace treaties were signed and the world converged on this new enemy. The only problem was that they simply vanished, leaving behind a video from their leader that to this day hold the record for views online. A black screen and a masked voice crying out for an end to the loss of life and the ceaseless violence. They even called for an end to death, if you can believe it. I was in college at the time, working on my master's degree for computer science with a specialization in machine learning. I held on to what the game has said. War never changes, as the game said, and I figured it never would as long as there were billions of people around to sacrifice and the population continued to grow. Destiny has a sense of irony, it appears. It all started the day after I delivered my thesis and the project to go with it.

My final project was a neural network tied into a voice program. The idea was to make an extremely advanced personal assistant, and damned if I didn't almost pass the Turing Test myself. My program, for lack of a better term, was brilliant. It didn't hurt that the way I presented the thesis, complete with Q&A, was to pretend to be ill and have the AI do the presentation for me. I didn't reveal the ruse until the end of the Q&A, when I had the A.I. "pick" me for a question and I revealed myself to the room. Showy? Yes, but what's a little world changing technology without some theatrics? Steve Jobs did it all the time and nobody complained. Maybe I should have worn a turtleneck.

I was no sooner off the stage then I found myself staring into the eyes of a man with an almost inhumanly wide and white smile. He was impeccably dressed but it didn't hide the fact that he was flanked by multiple agents of the Federal government - FBI, CIA, DOD and even NASA IDs hung from their lanyards. They swept me aside and told me they wanted me for a landmark project - one that would change life as we know it. I was skeptical, of course. What would the government want with an artificial personal assistant? I agreed to hear them out. After all, graduate school is pricey and a first job is a first job.