658 658 New Hangar
Once the Hunters were safely back at their ship, Max unloaded a barrage of Antimatter shells at the final vessel of their fleet, leaving nothing that could potentially spawn more Klem or send back a message to the Klem homeworlds.
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It was highly likely that they had already done that, and he would have to get Nico and the other language specialists to analyze that later, but for now, he had more annoying matters to deal with.
[Commander Keres. We have a significant number of questions about the new weapons that you have displayed here. The Alliance government is quite concerned about the potential of such weapons and requests you to schedule a meeting with the Envoys at your earliest convenience.]
The text reminded Max that he could never really be free of the duties of leading a Reaver Company now that he had started, no matter how hard he tried to pass the duties to someone else.
In the eyes of the Alliance and many others, only two people in a Reaver Company had high enough standing to negotiate, and that meant him and Nico, neither of whom were actually interested in politics as anything other than personal amusement.
[I will return to Terminus and pick the Envoys up as soon as I have finished relaying the targeting data for the next round of zone clearance events. Please ask them to prepare for a tour of Absolution as well.] Max replied, using a text message so that they couldn’t see how annoyed he was at having to leave the battle early.
Of course, he could claim that he was needed on the surface for the battle, but that clearly wasn’t true. His latest sensor sweep showed over a hundred groups of Hunters among his Mecha units and casualty rates that were still mostly under ten percent.
The reinforcements had arrived for the more damaged units, and the Mecha units that had joined the space battle were on standby outside the World Ship, awaiting orders.
[Units on standby outside Absolution, you may now return to your hangars and begin any necessary repair, maintenance and reloading procedures to return to readiness.] Max ordered.
The Mecha began to move immediately, and Max turned his attention to Nico and the Hunters, which she was fighting alongside. They had all chosen to allow their suits to be covered in Klem blood so that they would disguise the distinctive smell of Mecha, and they were carving a wide swathe through the zone that they had just entered, using the Super Heavy mecha to herd the Klem in front of them with a Thunder Gun barrage, and the Fast Attack Mecha to burn out any possible signs of pods or survivors.
With all of the expertise both on the ground and in the air, he really was free to take the traditional position of a Company Commander as the organizational head of the battle.
Cleansing Light had a dedicated hangar assigned aboard Absolution as well, which Max hadn’t yet had a chance to examine.
The technicians ran up as soon as he had landed and powered down the Mecha. One Human Technician was accompanied by twenty Androids, who all looked exactly like him. It was a bit creepy, and Max wondered whose idea that was.
The Human was giving directions, sending them to check every external system and component for damage or wear, when Max exited the Mecha with a smile for efficiency.
“Good Morning, Commander. I am Chief Technician Johan, in charge of Cleansing Light, as well as the Mecha Repair Androids. Miss Nico determined that it was unlikely that your Mecha would require full-time attention, so I was given a secondary task.
The Androids won’t require much, either. They’re supposed to be designed for a million-hour active life, but checking on them gives me something to do.” The Technician greeted him.
“And whose idea was it to make them all look like you?”
The excitement in the man’s mind made Max smile even before he started speaking. “It’s brilliant, isn’t it? They look just like me, so when the junior techs come by, they won’t be able to tell if they’re only looking at Androids or if there is a supervisor present that will be keeping an eye on them.
The Androids don’t care for much outside their assigned duties unless it becomes a nuisance or hazard, so they’re not good at reporting on staff performance, and it would waste limited computing power to have them add another additional task.
They seem quite advanced with their adaptive AI, but they are already approaching the limits of their computing power, so we had to limit their task lists to prevent crashes and hung operations.
Basically, if you tell them to do too much at once, the priority gets out of whack, and operations get put on hold, which leads to some very strange interactions. We were going to work on it, but Nico said it’s not a bug but a feature.
Keeping them focused on their assigned tasks should help with the randomness usually associated with artificial intelligence since they’re only computing things related to their work and are limited in capacity for new information.”
That was actually a great idea. The AI would let them learn new things, but only inputting data from specific activities kept the data from adding irrelevant nonsense. Proper limits were the key to a well-functioning learning program, as Max had learned as a child.
His first attempt to create one that would learn to hack passwords more quickly was a colossal failure, and it got stuck in a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories since he didn’t set proper limits on the data that it was taking in.
Max thought back to his past life and wondered if there was a better way to do it, but he didn’t find anything particularly appealing. There were memories of AI species, but they were kept within boundaries by Religion, and he wasn’t going there in this life. Too many humans already carried random superstitions from their home planets. He didn’t need to start teaching them to the Androids.
It would also require multiple branches since the programming for the Pilots and the staff was so different. It seemed that they had it under control, though, and Max knew that Nico had built in a reset switch, where she could set every Android back to default databases in an instant if things went wrong.