"Thanks. I worked hard for it." It's amazing just how brittle off-the-cuff sarcasm can sound when you've just finished laying out some of your deepest secrets like they're a goddamn straight flush.
"Well initially the project was supposed to pair human soldiers with AI to make them more effective in combat. Budgetary constraints meant that the project could only get one smart AI, made from a flashclone of the Director's brain: the Alpha. The problems started happening when the Director found out that his obsession with his dead wife - who was a soldier who died in combat - had manifested in Alpha as a complimentary program, Beta. She was meant to support Alpha, but she was still part of him. So he isolated Alpha, broke Beta off, put her in essentially a robot suit in armor, and renamed her Agent Texas.
"So on one side of the program - a program that sent agents out in teams for missions but emphasized individual performance over team success and visibly ranked every agent in the program - you have a brand new agent with a codename that was previously reserved going immediately to the top of the leaderboard and wrecking everyone who'd pinned their self-worth to their rank." Namely Carolina. Mostly Carolina. Just...Carolina. "That's actually how York fucked up his eye - they put Tex against him and two other agents in an exhibition match, gave them live ammo when there wasn't supposed to be any on the training room floor, and he wound up too close to a grenade. Tex was actually the only reason he didn't die." It was less odd now than it had been then, but nonetheless.
"On the other side of the program, you have an isolated smart AI being tortured to the point of developing a multiple personality disorder to try to protect itself, only to have those personalities siphoned out, treated as their own entities, and assigned to high-performing agents who had no idea where these AI were coming from. And the thing is, it worked - for three people and a couple months, and then it all went to shit.
"Those three people were technically successes - people who were better in the field with the help of their AI partners." Wash pauses. "Of course, the Director only had to commit a few atrocities to get them to that point, and they're all dead now. But the failure that caused the shutdown of the AI implementation program survived." One guess who that is, Chief. Your only hint is that he's standing right in front of you.
no subject
"Well initially the project was supposed to pair human soldiers with AI to make them more effective in combat. Budgetary constraints meant that the project could only get one smart AI, made from a flashclone of the Director's brain: the Alpha. The problems started happening when the Director found out that his obsession with his dead wife - who was a soldier who died in combat - had manifested in Alpha as a complimentary program, Beta. She was meant to support Alpha, but she was still part of him. So he isolated Alpha, broke Beta off, put her in essentially a robot suit in armor, and renamed her Agent Texas.
"So on one side of the program - a program that sent agents out in teams for missions but emphasized individual performance over team success and visibly ranked every agent in the program - you have a brand new agent with a codename that was previously reserved going immediately to the top of the leaderboard and wrecking everyone who'd pinned their self-worth to their rank." Namely Carolina. Mostly Carolina. Just...Carolina. "That's actually how York fucked up his eye - they put Tex against him and two other agents in an exhibition match, gave them live ammo when there wasn't supposed to be any on the training room floor, and he wound up too close to a grenade. Tex was actually the only reason he didn't die." It was less odd now than it had been then, but nonetheless.
"On the other side of the program, you have an isolated smart AI being tortured to the point of developing a multiple personality disorder to try to protect itself, only to have those personalities siphoned out, treated as their own entities, and assigned to high-performing agents who had no idea where these AI were coming from. And the thing is, it worked - for three people and a couple months, and then it all went to shit.
"Those three people were technically successes - people who were better in the field with the help of their AI partners." Wash pauses. "Of course, the Director only had to commit a few atrocities to get them to that point, and they're all dead now. But the failure that caused the shutdown of the AI implementation program survived." One guess who that is, Chief. Your only hint is that he's standing right in front of you.