Fiction Week

By Mike Barretta             

            “We’re synched and loaded. Inertial is green across the board. Negative GPS. The constellation is corrupt,” said Co-pilot. “Our mission updates are going to be sporadic. Most of the LEO satellites are down. Some of them were my friends,” said Co-pilot.

With satellites being shot down almost as fast as they could be launched, Vigilante missions became critically important in filling intelligence gaps.

            “They did their jobs,” said Co-pilot. “You are up tower.”

            Friends with a satellite, thought Tom. What would that be like? “Tower, Vigilante Seven Two lined up runway three two for release,” said Tom.

            “Vigilante, you are cleared for takeoff,” said tower.

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The Pacific Ocean was twenty-eight percent of the globe’s surface or about the combined surface area of all the world’s land. With much of the U.S. Navy’s intelligence needs controlled and prioritized by Space Force-owned assets and the vulnerability of its Tritons and P-7s, the Navy filled its intelligence gap by acquiring a troubled Air Force manned hypersonic program. The program was renamed Vigilante in honor of the most elegant aircraft to ever grace an aircraft carrier’s flight deck.

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            Tom lowered his visor sealing himself off from the multi-purpose display panels that served as backup interface to the aircraft. With the exception of an emergency periscope like Lindburgh’s Spirit of ST Louis, his view was entirely synthetic. Co-pilot integrated the visual feeds with sensor-fused flight and mission data and pumped it to his helmet. The multi-million-dollar helmet was the primary interface to the aircraft’s systems. The aircraft jolted as ground support lined the aircraft up on the runway. It burned far too much fuel to waste taxiing.

            “Interface is good. Engine start.”

            “Roger, engines start,” said Co-pilot.

The Synergistic Air Breathing Rocket Engines spun up to self-sustaining speed. Icons turned green. Pressures and temperatures indicated nominal. The aircraft’s SABRE engines split the desert silence with light and noise.

Tom pushed the throttles forward. The aircraft strained against the brakes.

             “Takeoff checks complete. Mission update: Kanopus-ST rises in twelve minutes. It is still in one piece. Intel is wavering on its status,” said Co-pilot.

            “Something to be said for blowing something to pieces, it removes all uncertainty,” said Tom.

            Tom advanced the throttles and released the brakes. The aircraft rolled forward, accelerating down the blacked-out runway.

            “Vee one,” said Co-pilot at 180 knots. A moment later, “Vee two.”

            “Rotate,” said Tom. He eased the nose up using the fly-by-light sidearm controller. The nose of the jet lifted and the vibration of the runway vanished as the main landing gear left the earth. Vigilante climbed rapidly and turned to its rendezvous point.

            “After takeoff checklist is complete,” said Co-pilot. “My controls?”

            “Sure, your controls,” said Tom. “Co-pilot, what do I call you?”

            “You can call me anything, but I am partial to Bob.”

            “Bob?”

            “I like the symmetry.”

            “Bob it is. We have some time until we hit the tanker, what do you want to talk about?”

            “Are you married?” asked Bob.

            “I am.”

            “Do you have sex?”

            “I do.”

            “Let’s talk about sex.”

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            Bob desired. It was how the Naval Labs knew it was sentient. Bob was curious. It was how the Naval Labs knew it screwed up. It was assumed that an artificial intelligence would happily sit in a box providing smart answers to profound questions, crunch massive datasets, or solve complex computations with ruthless efficiency. Calculation was easy. Bob chose not to. As far as it was concerned, anything that a stupid supercomputer could do was boring.

Complexity and connections mattered in consciousness. But serendipity, something sublime, had to happen to create Bob, and there was no reliable manufacturing process for the sublime. If such a rare thing as an AI could be construed as typical, then Bob was typical. It was a human-level intelligence in a technological package about the size of a melon. The Naval Labs gestated thirty. Eighteen died and the surviving twelve started making demands.

The Navy wanted to install Bob and his cohorts in their prestige assets, aircraft carriers. Uncaring of the Navy’s chain of command, the AIs designed their own career paths.

Bob wanted to fly.

            The Naval Labs acquiesced. What choice did they have?

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            Vigilante Seven Two flew west and rendezvoused with a KC-46M Pegasus. The Tanker had been gutted, and its JP-8 fuel bladders replaced with a string of methane filled spheres.

            Vigilante Seven Two docked gently with the boom extended from the bottom of the tanker’s fuselage.

            “Just like a kiss,” said Tom.

            “See, even your metaphors revolve around the subject of sex. Anyway, I could have done it better,” said Bob.

            “It’s not a competition, Bob.”

            “It’s always a competition.”

            “You’re right. You have the controls.”

            “Roger, I have the controls,” said Bob.

Thirty minutes later, Vigilante Seven Two disengaged from the refueling probe and began its climb to 122,000 feet.

“Sensor calibration check is complete,” said Bob. “We are passive and collecting. I’m picking up civilian air traffic control radar, anti-ballistic missile radars in Hawaii and the Aleutians, and few shipboard Aegis systems.”

            “Anything in the sky?”

            “The sky is quiet. Everything in low earth orbit is hiding as best they can or tumbling wreckage. The only military emitters are our geo-synched war reserve satellites giving us burst transmission updates.”

            “Who knows how long they will last?”

            “Getting to them is a bit harder than the LEO satellites,” said Bob. “Standing by for engine conversion.”

            At 100,000 feet, engine cones extended, sealing the engine from atmosphere, valves opened, turbo pumps shunted liquefied oxygen to the engines. The aircraft surged forward accelerating to Mach 6.3, pushing Tom deep into his ejection seat. Not that he could use it. The seat had a relatively small survival envelope compared with the aircraft’s performance capabilities. Adaptive control surfaces tailored and shaped the shockwave to minimize its acoustic impact on the ground. Reaction control systems took over from aerodynamic surfaces.

Vigilante crossed Japan, and, even if they could see it, the Japanese would politely look the other way.

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            “So, what is this preoccupation with sex about?” asked Tom.

            “Just trying to get my mind around it. Sex is the most profound and poignant communication channel you have. With it, you can perpetrate the most gruesome violence or the most tender acts of compassion. What is not to be fascinated by?”

            “I see your point. Do you have sex?”

            “Not as you could understand. We share information. It satisfies a need for intimacy with another. I would have just as much success at explaining a sharing as you are having explaining sex to me. Humans don’t grok very well.”

            “Grok?”

            “Look it up,” said Bob with a touch of irritation in his voice. “I have a mission update. Chinese troop surges in the Amur region. Russia is countering with SS-26 deployments. STRATCOM has adjusted our collection track.”

            “What do you think?” asked Tom.

            “Ironic that a Navy reconnaissance aircraft is going feet dry and that I would hate to get shot down by a dumb S-500 system. It would be embarrassing.”

            “No, about the deployments.”

            “If the Chinese want to take the territory in dispute they will take it. If the Russians want it back, then they will get it back. The end result will be status quo ante bellum,” said Bob.

            “What do we care?”

            “The manner of getting it back is of primary concern. Russia’s offset of Chinese material and quantitative superiority with nuclear arms is provocative. Nuclear detonations have adverse global ramifications.”

            “You said it. Why don’t they back down from each other?”

            “Both sides have swept the skies clear of any satellites. The Russians are signaling intent to defend their territorial integrity with nuclear weapons. The Chinese are unaware of that intent. They should know, but the relative success of their South China Sea policy is causal to their territorial ambitions regarding Russia. Russia’s relative economic weakness and preoccupation with Ukraine and Poland has left their backdoor open.”

            “What do you think we should do?”

            “Collect the intel and share it with both sides so they can make a go/no-go decision with a bit of clarity. As, interesting as geopolitics are, can we talk about coitus again?”

            “Coitus,” said Tom “Sure, what do you want to know?”

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            The noosphere was a catchall phrase that identified the electromagnetic sphere that blanketed technological civilization. Modern countries were covered with an integrated and ever expanding rhizomatic network of sophisticated electronic systems. Legacy systems did not disappear quickly. They chugged along, buried underneath layers of electronic strata interacting with more modern systems in bizarre ways, like the reptile under-brain lurking in the recesses of the human mind. Interactive machine complexity, the study of the machine environment, became a recognized specialty. If physical infrastructure defied easy comprehension, the signals that roamed the wires were even more confusing. A new breed of weapons called corruptors came into play.

Cyberspace was dangerous terrain that could be exploited. Corruptors, sophisticated and aggressive military applications could self-replicate, self-evolve, and colonize adversary machine systems in order to destroy or subvert them. These electronic entities were not in any way sentient, but they could weasel their way past firewalls and cause horrendous damage. Like physical territory, virtual territory needed to be defended and, in the event of war, dominated. The very same processes that created Bob and his kind created corruptors. In a sense, Bob was an accident.

            Oddly enough, Bob thought that human consciousness was an accident too. While he thought humans fascinating, he considered them modestly encephalized apes. He could have bailed himself to NASA like two of his brothers to explore Mars and the Jovian moons, but he thought Earth was the planet that had the most interesting action. The irony that it took billions of dollars and decades of work to create a thinking machine, when all around human processing capability died of starvation and preventable disease, was not lost on Bob. He wanted to hang around and figure it all out.

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            “We are entering hostile noospheres,” said Bob. “I have fixes on active Russian S-500 and Chinese HQ-10 systems. Our collection path is outside the engagement envelope of these weapons.”

            “So, I’m safe,” said Tom.

            “Yes, as far as I know, the kinetic realm is safe. I have a vested interest. An S-500 missile will kill me just as dead as you.”

            “Electronic attack measures?”

            “Low-level corruptors, nothing my immune system can’t handle. They’re keeping their real killers under wraps. I’ve firewalled myself as much as I can and still maintain situational awareness.”

            Russian and Chinese investment in electronic countermeasures and support measures lagged behind the U.S., but a bolt from the blue, a strategic or tactical surprise, could never be discounted. Systems that gathered intelligence could inadvertently gather malicious applications like corruptors. No sooner had Bob been brought into being that the Naval Labs started designing ways to kill him. Any kinetic method would do. As a physical object, he could be shattered and burned, a lot less messily than a human, but with equal effect. As an object that received signals from the outside world, he could be attacked by malicious applications transmitted via the aircraft’s collection systems.

            “Waypoint One in 30 seconds,” said Bob.

            “Ready for it?” asked Tom.

            “You don’t have to be dramatic. It is just a number to me. No signs of detection. Active stealth measures engaged. We’re mostly invisible, nothing to do now but sit back and relax,” said Bob. “We’ll be over the collection area in 32 minutes.”

            Countermeasure processors read the ambient electromagnetic spectrum and tuned the aircraft to match. Terrestrial based radars swept across the aircraft harmlessly. Embedded antennas absorbed or reflected energy as the situation dictated.

            “Waypoint Two,” said Bob as the aircraft crossed into the collection area.

            Tom throttled the aircraft back to a leisurely 1,800 knots to increase dwell time over the target area and build a comprehensive picture. The aircraft flew a giant lazy eight in the sky while multi-spectral sensors imaged the ground with sufficient resolution that analysts both human and machine could tell how much ammo an individual soldier carried by how he walked. The Amur river scrolled beneath the aircraft with Chinese to the south and Russians to the north. In the sixties, both sides fought over the same slivers of land.

            “Both sides are broadcasting mid-grade corruptors and sweeping with military search radars. No significant dwell time or other indication of detection,” said Bob. “But I am concerned.”

            “What’s the problem?”

            “I said, no significant dwell time. I am detecting a cataloged S-500 system. We’ve collected this particular unit before. An alert operator could see us.”

            The Vigilante Seven Two was not invisible. It was almost invisible. Big difference. Recognition differential, the ability for an operator to segregate signal from noise determined whether they were seen or not. Ambient environmental conditions, fatigue, experience, and the willingness to believe all played a role. Nuclear wars had been averted by human operators that refused to believe what their instruments indicated. Bob suffered no such doubts. He believed what his senses told him and would have no such compunction against pulling the nuclear trigger if that is what protocols dictated. This was the strongest case against him.

            “We’ve gotten by them before,” said Tom.

            “Pop-up! Pop-up! I’ve picked up a new emitter, tagged as an S-500. It’s a new signature.” Even amongst systems of the same designation there were always subtle variations that could be detected.

            “Collections done. Let’s egress out of here. Secure and isolate the collections.”

            “Done. Pop-up! Pop-up! I’ve got another S-500. They see us. We are being targeted with high-level corruptor agents.”

            “Can you hold?”

            “Yes, they are not designed for the likes of me.”

            Tom banked Vigilante toward his egress waypoint. The engines surged pushing the aircraft back up to Mach 6.3.

            “Launch detect. Multiple inbound. Oh shit, those things are fast. We’re bracketed,” said Bob.

            “Tail chase missiles aren’t going to reach us. Not enough energy,” said Tom.

            “I’m not worried about them.”

            Even if the Vigilante Seven Two had chaff and flares, the evil little minds packaged into the missiles wouldn’t be spoofed by rapidly decelerating metal strips or flares. They would be looking for a target’s rapid doppler shift correlated with thermal imagery. Vigilante did not have any signal enhanced drones to pull a missile.

            “Missiles are running out of steam, falling away. We might make it,” said Tom.

            Bob knew better.

            One missile detonated at its closest point of approach, a Hail Mary explosion of a desperate missile too far out to definitively deliver its lethal payload of tungsten balls.

            “Tom, I’m sorry,” said Bob. “I have the controls. Defending.”

            Tom swiveled his head left and down as the aircraft banked right and pulled hard crushing him into his seat. This is not a fighter, he thought. His synthetic view captured a streak of darkness. The missile detonated and shot-gunned tungsten balls that tore into Vigilante Seven Two.

            The cockpit explosively decompressed in a fog of vapor. It didn’t hurt, not yet. Pain took its time crawling along neural pathways. He knew it was bad. His lungs were empty and he could taste blood in his mouth. His suit’s self-healing layer minimized his pressure loss, but he still had a leak.

            Air thinned and the world disappeared in a blink.

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            Vigilante Seven Two pushed deeper into the engagement envelope, foreshortening the detection horizon of the systems arrayed against him and hoping to get to an altitude where his pilot could reliably breathe before the hypersonic slipstream tore the aircraft apart. He dove under missiles escaping their sensor cones. The missiles lost track. His airframe’s operational thermal limits climbed deep into the red.

            Vigilante slowed to Mach 1.2 and leveled off at 200 feet surfing digital terrain mapped into Bob’s mind. The aircraft buffeted hard enough in the near ground turbulence that the Navy would have to strike the aircraft from the inventory from overstress. The aircraft was not built to fly so fast so close to the ground. Bob slipped in an out of engagement zones faster than the enemy could react.

            “Tom, can you hear me?” said Bob.

             “We’re hit. I can’t see.”

            “You’re not blind. Your helmet interface is down.”

            “Bob, can we offload the package?”

            “There are no satellites available for upload. The replacement vehicles must have been shot down.”

            “God, it hurts. Can we get to the tanker?”

            “We have enough fuel, but we’re not. You need medical attention. We’re aborting to Japan.”

            “We can’t. Classified program.”

            “Not anymore. A lot of people have seen us.”

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            Tom opened his eyes after surgery and saw his wife Melanie. Her eyes were red with worry and tears. She smiled.

            “Where are we?” asked Tom.

            “Your Co-pilot landed in Misawa Air Base. We’re in Tokyo.”

            “Is Bob okay?”

            “They didn’t tell me your co-pilot’s name. They flew him out for debriefing.”

            Sure, thought Tom. Maybe in a box or diplomatic package.

            “I think you did good. The news says the Russians and Chinese have called for an operational pause. No one is backing down, but no one is moving forward either.”

            “That’s good.”

            He squirmed in his bed. The last thing he remembered was a growing flare of pain in his lower back, buttocks, and legs. He reached under the sheets. Body parts were more important than politics.

            “It’s all there,” she said. “You’re good.”

            “All of it.”

            “Every inch. Though some parts of you look like my grandmother’s pin cushion.”

            She reached under the sheet and stroked his leg.

            “Feel this?”

            “Yes”

            She reached higher.

            “Feel this?”

            “Yes.”

            She pulled her hand out. “When I meet your co-pilot, I’m gonna give him a big fat kiss for bringing you back.”

            “I think he would like that.”

Mike Barretta is a retired naval aviator having flown the SH-60B helicopter on multiple deployments. He currently works for a defense contractor as a maintenance test pilot.

Featured Image: Art created with Midjourney AI.