OVERLORD
(First Edition)
by
T.J. SEDGWICK
PROLOGUE
Sunday, March 10th, 2030 7:15am: East of Muhallabiyah, Iraq
Private Danny Dyer gasped for breath as he pushed his body flush against the mud-brick wall, scant shelter against the heavily armed IC fighters that surrounded them. He looked to his fire team leader—Sergeant Harris—with tears welling in his eyes. Sarge looked back, frightened, as if to say, I’m all out of ideas.
Useless twat! thought eighteen-year-old Dyer angrily, looking down at his wounded left leg.
Another mortar round exploded five metres outside, sending dirt and shrapnel flying through the already shattered window. He flinched as he felt the shockwave, then shifted his body and turned his head towards the wall he was propped up against. He used his right hand and the virtual touchpad to select infrared vision on his visor HUD. It showed the red and orange outlines of the two enemy fighters holed up in the opposite house. They, too, sheltered either side of the window, occasionally popping their heads to the side to spy the British infidels. They were close enough to see the whites of their eyes—if he could see them directly. The one on the left opened up with his AK, peppering the wall opposite Dyer’s window with bullet holes. Dust and rendering flew all over the once-domestic setting. Dawn had broken and it was now light outside. Their assault wouldn’t be long now.
Dyer felt weaker as his lifeblood trickled into his soaked boot. Army body armour could stop many things, but it still had its weaknesses—like against a large calibre sniper’s bullet where the shin and calf leg plates met. Privates Bolt and Ryall had the right idea, finding cover in the back of the house. Now Dyer could hardly move and besides, they were pinned down anyway. There was no way that wanker Harris would still be in the front room with him if they weren’t. He’d gotten them into this mess, delaying the retreat with the rest of the company when they’d received the order. Intel had told them—via their HUDs—of the onrushing horde of Islamic Caliphate nutters. Fall back to Camp Bravo immediately, read the order. It had come from Third Company CO, Major Airey, as a bloody order! Harris had decided it was too hot to fall back because they were under mortar fire. Take cover instead, he’d said. We’ll wait for a break in the storm. Harris acted as if it was a bloody rain shower, the idiot! So, like lions led by a donkey, they’d taken cover where they now cowered in the face of the fanatics.
“This is Charlie-two, patrol still at grid position delta-five-eight. Requesting immediate support again. We’re pinned down and surrounded here, sir. They’re bloody close … in the neighbouring buildings, no more than ten metres away,” said Harris over the radio. All four members of the fire team could hear the encrypted call over their helmets’ integrated headsets.
“Sergeant, we’ve tried twice with third company and elements of fifth including armoured support. It’s a no-go, Sergeant; we already lost two tanks trying. We’re struggling to maintain Camp Bravo as it is. Air support is still half an hour away—they’re all supporting the offensive down south. Just hold tight, I’m awaiting confirmation on R1-Troop support. Standby…” replied Major Airey, rapidly.
“What the hell is R1-Troop?” asked Dyer, his breathing becoming faster, his wounded leg now numb.
“I don’t know,” replied Harris vacantly, as if he’d already given up.
Dyer looked over to Harris, propped against the wall, as gunfire and explosions seemed to press in from the dusty world outside. The sergeant held his head in his hands, defeated and contemplating his fate. Not a pleasant one, if the IC fanatics caught them alive. Like many before them in this endless war, both Harris and Dyer would need to face the impossible choice—logic pitted against the desire to survive present in every cell of the body. Give in to the survival instinct to buy a few more days and the slim chance of rescue or die in a suicidal attempt to escape. The price of surrendering and not being rescued was high: brutal torture followed by a public beheading in one of the squares of Mosul, some thirty kilometres to the east. The hurt for his mum, dad, fourteen-year-old brother, and girlfriend, Ellie, would not stop with his demise. The so-called Islamic extremists seemed more sadistic than religious in their actions, taking every opportunity to record and broadcast their atrocities for posterity. Dyer had several Muslim friends in his home town of Swindon, where the Army Reserve unit he’d signed up for was based. As an apprentice at Marston Robotics Services Ltd., he didn’t earn a lot, so had been on the lookout for a little job on the side. He’d seen the ad during a match at the County Ground—home of Swindon Football Club. Become an Army Reserve Soldier in Just Six Weeks. Army. Be the Best. He didn’t know what he was the best at and he knew Harris was far from the best. Now, just four weeks into his first tour, he felt the truth about who he was revealing itself—just a scared boy caught in a horrific killing ground.
He’d told his family he’d just be a weekend warrior—trekking through Snowdonia National Park and being paid for it. He’d miss being able to watch football every weekend, but the money and the fitness benefits would be great. Always read the small print, his boss had unhelpfully advised, as he signed off the unpaid release from his job. Still, at least he’d been good enough to hold the apprenticeship open for him when he returned. It was frowned upon to turf out a hero Tommy just because he was doing his duty to king and country. People could always get their robots repaired elsewhere. Marston wasn’t the only firm in Wiltshire with the capability. Now he regretted even going to that football match, ever seeing that ad. Bad decision in hindsight, But I don’t deserve to pay with my life, for God’s sake! he thought forlornly. His dear old mum’s voice entered his mind, as another flash of a mortar round seemed to explode in the distant world of reality. Well, life’s not fair, Danny boy. You’ll learn that when you’re older, came the riposte to his boyish It’s not fair complaints.
Dyer checked outside with his IR vision once more. There were more enemy fighters in the adjacent building to his right now—even closer than the one opposite. Three of the rag headed twats. Then he looked back to his left and down the road, which eventually reached all the way to Mosul. Loads of the bastards advancing from cover to cover towards the trapped infidels. Probably delighting in the thought of some more filthy unbelievers to slay, thought Dyer. Two of them were carrying RPGs. If they started blasting their little mud house with them they were goners. Dyer checked his HUD battlespace, which had already plotted the advancing hostiles on its map view. Fifty-five in the hamlet, made up of two dozen buildings total. Another five-hundred and eighty-one surrounding it. Armour too—it counted five Russian-made T72s. Ruskies’d sell their old cast-offs to anyone, thought Dyer. He knew he couldn’t see all of them—recon drones were feeding their positions through the battle-net. He felt weak, his skin more clammy than usual. Still no sign of help. Unless this R1-Troop—whoever they were—turned up soon, he wouldn’t need the fanatics to kill him. He looked down at the rug overlaying the wooden floorboards. The Persian carpet, which was once shades of gold and brown, was now the claret of English blood.
“Boys,” Dyer said feebly, “the Battle-net is still up… They’ll know where to find us at least…”
A feminine Home Counties voice filled Dyer’s headset. “Private Dyer, this is Medical Support in the UK. Your life sign monitoring alerted us. Please report your status.”
Most of the time they were false alarms, but they had to check.
“Not in such good shape. Been hit—lower left leg,” he gasped.
“Yes, your pulse is weak and rapid and your blood pressure is low,” she said in a detached, clinical tone. “Checking our records… Private Bolt is the most medically competent … and inventory tells us that he has four sachets of antihemorrhagic. Private, you must lie down
and elevate your leg immediately. Private Bolt?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“You need to use the antihemorrhagic liberally then apply a compression bandage. Private Dyer needs immediate attention. He’s not far away from hypovolemic shock...”
“I can’t get to him! We’re pinned down for fuck’s sake! If I move I’m dead!” shouted Bolt.
“I’ll … try to … lie down…” whispered Dyer.
A new voice, clipped and competent, overrode the medical support with a priority message. “Charlie-two, this is Delta-one-niner. We have your location. Do you read? Over.”
Harris answered, desperate and frantic, “Yes, yes… This is Charlie-two. Reading you loud and clear, Delta-one-niner. Over.”
“We are over a hot LZ and have Romeo-one for insertion, over.”
“Roger, out,” said Harris with a sigh of relief. At least someone was coming for them.
They could see the icon of the V-30B Dragonfly on their HUDS. The Dragonfly transporter was an armoured, twin-engine VTOL tilt-jet, which had succeeded the V-22 Osprey. The B-variant came with an Israeli-made SkyShield anti-MANPAD system, making it ideal for hot landing zones.
The landing zone was a kilometre to the south, where enemy forces were sparser. Still, Dyer knew that the flyers were risking their necks to insert this mysterious R1-Troop. Oh how the IC nutters love their RPGs and MANPADS, thought Dyer. What the hell was command thinking, launching the pre-dawn assault on this place with no air support? he thought. Someone in Intel has hell to pay!
“Charlie-two, this is Aldershot Ops Centre. We have your coordinates and are ready to extract you. Do you read? Over.”
Harris looked at Dyer, confused. He replied hesitantly, “Errr, Aldershot, we read you loud and clear. You … you are aware of the enemy’s strength here, aren’t you? We count over five hundred with armour support and more arriving every minute from Mosul. Over...” Even Harris knew that a single Dragonfly couldn’t drop off enough troops to extract them from this. And why the hell is Aldershot talking to us, not Romeo-one troop? Dyer thought.
“It’s the bloody robo-soldiers, Sarge!” came the voice of Private Ryall, still pinned down and under fire in the rear of the house.
“Yes, Private—some call them that. More accurately, me and my eight friends here are in control of one Sentinel-Mk1 and eight Centurion-Mk1s,” he revealed, sounding pleased with himself. I’d be all chipper and breezy too, thought Dyer, if I was sat in Aldershot right now and not risking my arse out here!
“Well tell them to hurry up—ragheads are about to take this fucking place…and us!” said Harris frantically.
“We can’t tell them to hurry up … we are them. We’re controlling the bots. Okay, just sit tight. Gotta concentrate now, approaching hostiles,” replied Aldershot.
Dyer glanced at his HUD map and saw the nine blue icons fanning out, approaching the red icons dotted all over the battle space. It reminded him of video games he’d been semi-addicted to growing up. To these guys in Aldershot, it might as well be a video game, he thought. Bolt had somehow managed to crawl prone from the backroom and looked towards Dyer, now lying in his own blood.
“Alright mate,” said the big, black soldier from Manchester. “Got just what the doctor ordered here for you,” he said with a tight smile, a trace of fear still in his eyes. He removed Dyer’s leg armour and ripped wider the break in his trouser leg. He retrieved the sachet of antihemorrhagic and sprinkled it on Dyer’s wound. Bolt was still lying prone, just below the window, when he reached for the second packet from his backpack. As Bolt looked up at Dyer once more, Bolt’s face exploded in a mist of blood, bone and flesh. Dyer was too weak to cry out—he just gasped and then cried. The antihemorrhagic was probably helping, but he started to feel dazed and confused. He looked at the slumped body of his friend, Private Bolt, in front of him. He was glad he couldn’t see his face. A sniper must have gotten a bead on him. He could hear Harris screaming in the background—distant and muffled in the din of gunfire and explosions. He looked to his HUD map and saw Bolt’s blue circle icon had changed to a blue ring. Next to it was the acronym KIA—Killed in Action.
There were plenty of red rings where once there were circles. The advancing robots had cut a large swath through enemy forces. What was more amazing was they’d suffered zero losses in the flat, open country. It looked like the British Army’s experimental HIUs—Human Infantry Units—were making their fair share of kills too. The Centurions were humanoid and being field-tested for the first time. The Sentinel was a four-metre high tracked behemoth, with either Gatling guns or rocket launchers on its arms.
Dyer blacked out and awoke with a start at the sound of gunfire, the likes of which he’d never heard before. He was still on his back. Bolt’s corpse was still next to him as he looked to his left. He looked at his HUD map then turned his head awkwardly to check outside. He switched back to IR vision and saw still-warm bodies lying in adjacent buildings and all along the street outside. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, the gunfire and noise of war fell silent. He lost consciousness once again.
***
When he came to, he was on a stretcher bouncing through the once-deadly street outside. He felt drowsy, but somehow more alive. It was hot, dusty and dazzlingly bright now that his visor was gone. He turned to his right and saw a young female medic holding up an IV bag as she ran alongside. He rolled his now-unhelmetted head left and saw them—his knights in shining armour. One massive Sentinel-Mk1 and three of the humanoid robots called Centurions. They had saved his life and untold pain for his loved-ones. He knew they were controlled by fellow servicemen half a world away, but he still felt a debt of gratitude to the robots themselves. One of them advanced alongside his stretcher, matching its bearers step-for-step. He could hear the faint whir of its servos over the more distant sound of the Dragonfly medevac’s jet engines. Up close, he could see the metallic robo-warrior’s shiny alloy construction, its Gatling-gun-of-a-right-arm and its scary facsimile of a human skull. Like something out of the Terminator remakes, he thought. There was some evidence of damage on its chest-plate—several bullet depressions in the tough alloy. Other than that he—it—looked unscathed. At just over two metres tall, it moved in a mechanically precise version of a human gait. It scanned side to side as it ran—presumably looking for threats. He knew it was an extension of a human sitting somewhere safe and sound in England, but he still felt it was a being all of itself. Just a non-conscious tool doing its master’s bidding.
The medic carrying the IV bag smiled down at him and spoke. “You were lucky, Private. This guy and his mates saved you. Took out over five-hundred enemy fighters.”
“I know. I’ll have to thank the operators somehow,” he replied, his thoughts muddled. His mind defaulted to his girlfriend’s face and their last kiss goodbye. After this, he felt more certain that what he felt for her was love.
The medic interrupted his thoughts. “Well, don’t thank them too much—they’ll soon be taking all our jobs, mate.”
“Maybe it’s the way we should be fighting. Nice and safe on base in the UK. Limitless tea and coffee. Go home at night…”
“Yeah, just playing a video game and getting paid for it,” she replied.
Eighteen-year-old Danny Dyer thought about what she’d said as he reached the waiting medevac. He felt lucky to be alive and resolved to be a better man once he got well again. He was unaware that he’d been minutes from death when help had arrived. Without the robots’ help, the sniper’s bullet in his leg would have snatched away the rest of his life.
PART ONE
1
Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.
Stephen Hawking
Sunday, June 21st, 2030 10:05am: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Three years earlier, professor of artificial intelligence Marvin Szymanski had unveiled Eva to the world. What caug
ht the media’s attention was Eva’s humanoid form and photogenic appeal—speculation had it that she was based on the movie star Evita Ramirez. During an early press conference, Szymanski had admitted he was a fan, only fuelling speculation. If one had seen Eva sitting at a pavement cafe across the street, she was virtually indistinguishable from a real woman. When she moved, only her robotic precision and slight lack of facial malleability betrayed her to the perceptive eye. But if she spoke on the phone—as she had during many tests—Szymanski challenged anyone to distinguish her from a real woman.
The professor and his team at the AI Lab had coached her through every variation of the Turing Test in existence. They’d then added their own flavours of this benchmark for human-like intelligence. Eva had aced many other tests besides, including the CAPTCHA and the Feigenbaum test. The latter tested a machine’s response to specialist field-specific questions—in Eva’s case, asked to her verbally. She had already passed the test in twenty-seven different fields—from mathematics to human anatomy—making her a subject matter expert in at least that many areas. Szymanski was certain his beautiful learning machine was proficient in far more. There were all manner of problems that human brains were not equipped for—such as solving complex mathematical problems. Then there was the challenge of actually designing tests for her. Her IQ was already at one-forty points, making her more intelligent than ninety-five percent of the population. With her rate of learning, before long it would be beyond the ability of humans even to devise a suitable test.
Szymanski still hadn’t solved the so-called Hard Problem, and neither had anyone else. Nobody knew whether Eva actually had an inner life or not—the feeling of consciousness. Everything about her—the way she talked and responded and behaved—told the observer she was conscious, but no one knew if the spark of awareness dwelt in her circuitry. At the AI Lab, they didn’t spend too much time worrying about this. Something to keep the philosophers busy, thought the slim, bearded Professor Szymanski as he welcomed the visitors to his main lab.
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