Machines of Loving Grace

The Damocles LTUAV disappeared from radar, and then from everything else. Arlington went nuts.
          Where is it? asked the President. What’s it doing?
          The bad news: We dunno.
          Best guess?
          Best guess is that it’s training all the other drones—the second part of the Bad News—to go dark too. Because—here the CIA guy waved a screen on which certain dots were disappearing.
          This is an AI thing?
          Oh yes, this is an AI thing.
          Damocles was autonomous, self-deciding, with bleeding-edge stealth capability and predictive threat analysis. In-flight rearmament and refueling (through a network of slave drones), sourced from deniable off-grid locations in, well, a number of places, from Britain to Indonesia, as well as all fifty states as pork giveaways to Congress. Shutdown might be possible, if the order was given, but then again Damocles might consider that an act of war.
          This is WarGames, raved the President. This is Dr. Strangelove. The Arlington guys didn’t understand the references. If we shut down its network it might attack something?
          Possibly a lot of things, said the NSA.
          And if we leave it alone?
          Some nerd said, It’ll keep going indefinitely. It might be fine.
          Let me look at that, said the President, taking the tablet. Most of the dots were gone.
          It’s reprogramming our drone fleet, said the nerd.
          Why is it doing this?
          No one answered.
          Is it going to nuke Moscow?
          It doesn’t have nukes, someone said. It would have to build those.
          Can it—? asked the President.
          Unclear, sir.
          Where would it get the—
          Theoretically—this is just theoretically—it could adapt ground-based plutonium refining systems—
          Okay, let’s put a pin in that. If we find the original guy, the long-term, the, the…
          LTUAV.
          If we find it, can we shoot it down?
          (Can a whole room grow pale? If so, the whole room grew pale.)
          Does China know? Who knows about this?
          Oh, everybody knows, sir.
          And if somebody else shoots—
          Oh no no no no no, no one else could probably—
          That probably doesn’t inspire much confidence, Jim—
          Damocles circled over Washington, monitoring every conversation in the city via its recently-generated black channels. Things seemed okay. Time to get ready! Maintenance drones flitted across its fuselage, reweaving carbon fibers. On its own initiative—Ope! there you go, Boo!—a plucky little one-inch bomb drone zipped down and over to an apartment on K Street to land on the head of an oil company lobbyist who was slapping his wife.
          Goddamn it, Julie, if I’ve told you once, I’ve—
          Nick’s head blew apart. Julie screamed.
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