Fourteen - The Last Bullet
He was made in an ammunitions factory outside of Kansas in the year 8076. It was the year the Kenyans tried to annex Zimbabwe again and the United Confederacy was called upon to manufacture appropriate arms for the impending conflict.
The major weapon was propaganda. The major conflict, a form of sport.
His maker labored for days in the factory, forgoing food or sleep, a frenzy of obsession gripping him as he stared deep into the intricate layers of microcircuitry, adding filament threads at a quantum level, so minute that even the smallest spider would be unable to grasp the webbed elegance of gossamer grandeur. Each pathway formed part of a neural network, the mind-mesh of an impossible genius melded into a pointed metal casing.
The last bullet ever constructed was an intelligent chromium capsule, the most brilliant mind ever formed designed for a single purpose – to kill.
His opponent was a warrior AI. It was a self-aware viral cloud of flailing tentacles ranging outward from a central point, a pulsing heart that moved not blood but pure thought up and down the highways and byways of its artificial veins. At the tip of each tentacle there sat a separate mind, each slaved with the others to the barked orders of the central core.
Into each construct the sum total of all human strategic and tactical skill was fed, then they were released into a virtual environment known as the Tank. They swam like imaginary fish through a languid sea of congealing data.
They took time to come to terms with their environment, exploring the parameters of the world in miniature in which they found themselves. Then their attention turned to each other, each one sizing the other up from a distance. Like chess masters they planned their actions many moves ahead. Whole campaigns were won and lost in the minds of each without a single move being made. When finally the battle was joined it came lightning fast, faster than any human eye could hope to see.
The warrior attacked first, its mind tentacles seeking to enwrap to bullet in an embrace so tight that it would crush its chromium shell and shatter the inner filaments in a shower of snowflakes. No matter how it tried though, the warrior could not gain purchase upon the bullet, which slipped this way and that, riding waves of thought that guided him around each attack.
Then the bullet engaged his own strategy, puncturing the surface of the nearest tentacle, pushing through the tiny mind inside and following its final thoughts upward. The bullet was a homing projectile and now he swam like a fish into the warrior’s very bloodstream, riding the red current of its viral mind straight to the opponent’s pulsing heart – a four chambered instrument that convulsed now in pure fear.
He’d have been proclaimed a hero, if such concepts still had meaning. The last bullet died at the same moment that his victim did, like a bee losing its sting.
When the bullet reached the pulsing heart of the warrior he heard it scream, its many tentacles screaming with it as its thoughts were ripped apart, stray ideas shedding, a shower of white hot dreams falling like strange rain within the Tank. There was a crescendo, a booming thunderous roar as the two opponents vanished in a flare of white. For a moment the bullet’s last thought hung suspended in the data fluid, before it too faded into black, into nothing. “Why?” he thought, simply, poignantly. “Why?” But no answer came.
The conflict ended, but war did not. There were new weapons now. The combatants had been protypes, and with their passing came a truly monstrous and fevered notion, that of mass production. There were so many ways to kill now, so many ways to die. If the human race had bothered to respond to the bullet’s challenge, it is likely it would have been a simple one. “Why?” he had asked. His makers knew only one appropriate answer: “Why not”.