The Mech Touch novel Chapter 898

Ves recognized an important crux in this unexpectedly tragic outcome. "The AIs that govern the battleship shouldn’t be that stupid, right? The people they shoved into the safe zone all consisted of genuine CFA servicemen. Shouldn’t the virtual officers recognize their former human masters?"

"It’s not as simple as that." Miss Calabast shook her head. "The executive officer goofed up because he developed Emergency Protocol Theta-Thirty-Seven in secret. As the nominal second-in-command of the ship, the executive officer is subject to a lot of monitoring. You have to realize that it’s impossible to keep a secret on a ship where monitoring is pervasive. The captain firmly held the internal security department in his grasp. Someone as power hungry as the captain won’t let the executive officer muck about out of sight."

"Even so, the virtual officers are just AIs pretending to be in command. Shouldn’t they have the power to disable the safe zone or reduce the difficulty of the recruitment tests once they realize they’re missing the mark?"

"Much like mechs, the CFA has a love-hate relationship with AIs and automation. They’re absolutely essential in the running of a complex warship. There is no way a human can replace the sheer precision, processing power and response time of a properly coded AI. However, there are plenty of examples where AIs gained so much autonomy that they usurped the human officers and went on to scour entire planets of life because their programming forced them to. So while the CFA still depends heavily on AIs and advanced algorithms, they set extremely draconian rules on what they are allowed to do. Every CFA officer is taught never to give AIs the flexibility to bend the rules."

"What can go wrong will go wrong." Ves summed up the CFA’s standpoint on this issue.

"Exactly. The executive officer is a product of the CFA and inherited all of their values. When it comes to programming the AIs, he would rather err on the side of caution than to provide them with too much decision-making power. He was deadly afraid that the captain and admiral inserted backdoors in the automation system of the Starlight Megalodon. This is why he went as far as stripping everyone, including himself, of their positions, so that the captain and admiral no longer possesses the authority to access these backdoors."

"That’s a rather extreme solution, but one that sounds effective." Ves nodded. "Yet extreme solutions always have a way of backfiring upon themselves. Why didn’t the executive officer do a more thorough job?"

Miss Calabast smiled. "The executive officer faced too much restrictions. Not only did he have to work in total secrecy, the civil war between the factions constantly intensified. If he took his sweet time to program the perfect set of rules, the factions would have exterminated each other by then! Therefore, he decided he would rather implement a hasty solution than postpone it and risk becoming irrelevant."

Ves recognized this dilemma. Having worked on many design projects with strict time limits, he often chafed at the fact that he could have designed a much better mech if only he had more time.

"Alright, I understand a little bit what went on. So right now, the virtual officers are in control of the battleship, right? Haven’t they changed at all since the last CFA officer died? It’s been thousands of years. Surely the AIs must have found some loopholes?"

"They did find some loopholes. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to find out about the Starlight Megalodon’s existence and enter the Aeon Corona System in the first place." Miss Calabast responded, confirming his suspicions. "However, the executive officer’s original directives are simply too restrictive. They haven’t given the virtual officers any leeway at all when it comes to changing their predetermined roles. They are slaves to the rules that forces them to wait for a human that never comes because the recruitment tests are meant to be nearly impossible to pass."

Ves wanted to shake his head at the comedy of errors that led to this result. "It’s kind of tragic that they fell due to their own mistakes. The aliens didn’t kill them. The planet didn’t kill them. The exobeasts didn’t kill them. A superpathogen didn’t kill them. Instead, they insured their own destruction from the same mistakes of the past."

He found it rather ironic that the survivors of the Starlight Megalodon fell for the same mistakes the CFA claimed to guard against. As the successors of the war fleets that used to dominate human space, the CFA always claimed to have learned the lessons of the Age of Conquest.

Instead of tempering their ambition, their commanding officers instead engaged in unrestrained power mongering. The split authority of the captain and the admiral led to a humongous power struggle to the point where they allowed their subordinates to kill each other with the destructive weaponry of the Starlight Megalodon! It was like the latter half of the Age of Conquest all over again!

As for the executive officer, perhaps he was the only senior officer who adhered to the ideals of the CFA. Yet even he couldn’t help but repeat another mistake of the past, and that was to transfer too much authority from the human officers to the virtual officers. Only this time, the lack of flexibility in the rules governing virtual officers led to the downfall of the survivors. This was different than the classic mistake of extending too much autonomy to artificial intelligences, but led to the end of civilized humanity on this planet.

"What’s the deal with the blessed people and cursed people, then?" Ves asked. "The blessed people live in their ancient cities in complete ignorance of their once-glorious past. As for the dwarves, their level of civilization is so primitive they haven’t invented toilets yet!"

"We’re not sure about the purpose of their existence either." Miss Calabast shrugged. "The terraforming of the planet and the distribution of the genetically-modified offspring across the planet is related to highly sensitive secret research projects. The details are buried under strict confidentiality. There is one fact we know for sure. The executive officer was in charge of all the research projects."

"Does that mean he called all the shots?"

"Not really. The captain and the admiral both wanted to take the Research Department for themselves due to their vital role in helping the survivors adapt to the planet. Neither of them wanted to concede control over the numerous and highly capable researchers that survived the sandman mothership’s attack and subsequent crash. In the end, they both took a step back and let the executive officer be the man in charge. This way, not only would the researchers be able to stay out of the developing factional strife, the executive officer also made sure that the pet projects of the captain and the admiral received equal attention."

"Yet this also opens the possibility that the executive officer pursues his own projects in secrets."