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I had to hear Jeremiah and Ron lecture me on why I was a fool and how I'd almost screwed everyone over. I'd had a few drinks with my friends and killed a bunch of Voodooists, but I'd crippled their second-in-command so badly that even after treatment Placid stuttered and twitched constantly. It's a pity they didn't kill him, but why worry? Sooner or later we'll crush the Voodooists, or do so much damage that they'll cease to be a threat forever.
The Netrunners are certainly good, one might even say great. But that's it. Only their ability to burn out brains through the net, a certain amount of stealth, and the widespread support of the refugees save them from being smeared into a bloody mess by one of the biggest gangs like Sixth Street or Valentino.
Even so, many gangs do not really want to occupy their territory, for it is, in fact, a big cesspool and lagoon. You have to live in the conditions of urban guerrilla warfare with the local population and wait for a stab in the back from competitors. And the purely economic benefit there is minimal, smuggling and other things can be transported through safer and cheaper places.
Finished with the discussion of my drunken adventures, began why I was actually called to the meeting. After TT armed its Archangels with AK-AN 74 on Soviet gunsmiths, there was a flood of orders, many big companies wanted to use TT to promote their pistols, rifles, grenades, body armor and other equipment. Even Militech, despite powerful lobbying, could not sell their assault rifles, Ajax was simply losing in all respects, and in some respects it was losing with a crushing score. The only thing that interested us was the Achilles.
Militech decided to come at it from the other side. Since it failed to sell guns, maybe something else with the Militech label? At first, there were frankly crazy ideas like selling a tank, but then they proposed a really interesting thing. They had just finished testing a small combat robot that showed good firepower, durability, and the fun part: it could somehow bypass AI limitations. The robot had a strictly limited self-learning function and the rudiments of consciousness, which should allow it to get better with each engagement.
After reading the technical data and watching a couple of videos showing comparisons of the robot before and after several fights, I was intrigued enough to buy it, but I still had some doubts. The thought in my head was:Militech equals Pentagon. So why such an interesting development is offered to us and not to the military? Simple lobbying would be enough to sign a multi-billion dollar contract, without even asking for help from the president, who used to work for Militech. Why do they need us? It is clear with advertising, but there is something else, because of which even the U.S. Army did not start ordering these robots.
So I had to do some banal bribery for answers. Everything turned out to be simpler, in pursuit of versatility for copovi army he turned out to be too armored and heavily armed for the police, but for the military everything was exactly the opposite. Then they decided to forget about universality and focus on the requirements of the military. When the robot was finalized, it turned out to be too expensive for the military, who preferred to use cheap and familiar Militeh drones. The last chance for the robot's creators was to position the robot as an elite product for elite forces.
Now I can see why they decided to offer it to us. Okay, we'll buy one for each Archangel squad after it passes the test in my squad.
The next day, the robot was delivered to us. So, what we have: strong armor, a light machine gun, and a versatile setup for any handheld weapon, including a small rocket launcher. Scanners and other electronics, of course, not bad, judging by what is written in the documents, but how they will show themselves in combat, will give only a test battle. There is also a first aid module, and in the brains of the robot recorded protocol for the evacuation of the wounded. That's certainly not going to hurt.
My guys were interested in the new toy and decided to conduct a couple of training sessions with the robot. The results were, uh. disappointing. The robot really needs a guide and trainer. In addition to the first aid protocol in its memory were added only the basic, and even reduced, protocols of attack and defense. We had to call our engineers and technicians to help Kowalski, who was trying to understand the robot's electronic brains. A couple hours of discussion, arguments, and calls to the developers later, we were able to figure out that the robot had been given such limited protocols for the sake of being able to effectively teach itself. As one of the programmers responded: teaching from scratch is easier than retraining. Well, thank you, Sherlock. We don't know, especially after the David-Kowalski thing.
All hell broke loose. The robot was learning and analyzing its knowledge fast enough, but it was still making gross mistakes and getting in our way. Kowalski practically never got out of the virtual testing grounds to teach the robot, and we all had to suffer together on the real testing grounds. That's when the rest of the robot's shortcomings began to show. It could not take additional modules because of overloading, and even just carry ammunition on it was impossible. And evacuation of the wounded was a bad joke, the robot itself was not badly protected and could cover the wounded with its body, but then the speed dropped, and if without covering the wounded, then the poor guy risked catching a couple of bullets.
- I even know what I'm going to call this techno-evolutionary error. Mort. Just as unkillable and just as dumb. He almost gave me a leg up a few times, and there's something wrong with his AI. You know, he once pushed Kowalski out from under Rico's shield and tried to hide behind it. You know, Jeremiah, I think that this robot has such a high price because of the bribes Militech gave out when he got the permission to use this bastard AI, - I share my first impressions about the robot with Jeremiah.
- Ehhh, so we can say that the robot, despite what we were told in Militech, is a piece of shit? - Jeremiah asked, sighing heavily.
- No, it's not exactly shit, but it's pretty close. You just have to spend a lot of time on it. Teaching a robot from scratch is only part of the problem. I've talked to our engineers and techs about solving the overload problems and installing additional modules. This is possible, but it also costs money. So to the price for which the robot was sold to us, albeit at a discount, add one-fifth on top of that for rework and modifications. Oh, and when we took a deep dive into his brain, we found a few hidden programs. - Handing him the chip.
- Hmm. Tracking system, expected. Weird telemetry? Control transfer?! What the hell?! - Jeremiah was getting angrier and angrier by the minute.
- Those who sold us the robot wanted to use us not only to promote the product, but also as free teachers for their robots. Roughly speaking, everything we taught the robot could be safely copied and passed on to the other robots. Apparently, realizing that the military didn't want to spend time and money training robots, they decided to use us and then sell the trained robots to the military with the phrase that they were giving them a fully trained unit with an AI with combat experience.
- Bastards. Decided to solve their problems at our expense. I'll have to talk to Meredith about that. But the handover. That's just dangerous. Sons of bitches. I can see them ordering a robot to do something nasty and then taking advantage of it. - Jeremiah called in the head of cybersecurity.
-It's a good thing we found out about this now. -Yes. When we figured it out, I had Kowalski cut the data feed, so a few hours later, unknown netrunners showed up. Then we got a strange email from one of the robot's developers asking if the robot was okay or if we had already killed it.
- I'm gonna have a lot of questions for Meredith. A lot of uncomfortable questions. Okay,robot to scrap.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't be in such a hurry. The robot has become quite useful. Our experts, I think, can take care of the problems I mentioned. You just need to nail those smart-ass Militech guys. If we clean the robot of all the third party crap and tweak it, we'll have a quality reinforcement for the Archangel squad.
- Yeah. Militech may have screwed us up pretty bad, but we don't want to fight with them. Okay, I'll talk it over with Meredith and get the techs to clean the robots. I knew this favor to Militich would cause a lot of problems.
Leaving Jeremiah to deal with Militech, I went back to my guys, who were trying to teach Mort not to use shelters that weren't the right size for him, or to push one of the humans out of the way so the robot could occupy the vacated shelter. Circus. I can't even tell which one of us is the clown.