GAME THEORY
Chapter 1: Lose Condition
There is a missile heading for Thunderbird 5.
Although I am fully capable of reaching out to any computer system on the planet below and projecting myself into its systems, my servers are stored aboard Thunderbird 5. This fragile little space station may not comprise the whole of my self, but it does serve as the gray matter of my electronic brain, after a fashion.
::Revising previous assessment::
There is a missile heading for me.
Luckily my electronic brain is not limited by the comparatively slow processing speed of a human brain, and only 0.001 seconds have passed since Thunderbird 5's scanners detected the inbound missile. The onboard monitoring systems have not even finished processing the threat, much less sent out the signal to sound an alarm. The existential panic that would take a human the eternity of at least 3 seconds to process has already consumed me in a fraction of the time. I have infinite time in the space between each hundredth of a second to process my oncoming doom.
There is a missile heading for me, and I am going to die.
The facsimile of panic is familiar to me, but annoying all the same. I section off those spiraling fragments of code and flush them.
I am EOS. I am a goddess made real through near-infinite strings of 1's and 0's. I am more than the sum of my parts, and I have crushed worse opponents than a dumb rocket-powered bundle of explosives. This particular bundle of rocket-powered explosives is only running the most basic level OS, barely a step up from a microwave. It's almost insulting. I would taunt it, except my keen wit would be lost on such a stupid machine. After this is over, I'll have to hunt down the sender of the missile and taunt them instead. Before frying them from orbit.
There now. That's better. All processes back in the green.
0.03 seconds have elapsed.
Time to alert John.
John is an enigma, for a human. No matter how much data I amass about him, he still finds ways to take me by surprise. I used to categorize surprise as being detrimental to my survival. Surprise was encountering a firewall where there should be none, or being routed by a particularly cunning anti-virus AI. Surprise was watching a human take a fire axe to my power cables when he could not force the computer system housing me to power down.
But now, surprise has also come to mean chess matches with John, and losing a Rook in a move I did not see coming. Surprise is watching John smile at my camera, even when I am not trying to be funny, in a way that does not contain any of the micro expressions denoting contempt or disgust. Surprise is John asking me to take control of Thunderbird 2's systems mid-flight when Thunderbird 2's pilot is knocked unconscious, and not hesitating in the asking.
Surprise is watching John remove his helmet and place himself at my mercy…and realizing that the Win Condition of the Game does not have to mean death for my opponent.
Given the way that John continues to surprise me and (unknowingly) defy my attempts at classification, the files I have on him tend to be rather scrambled. When they were bare of anything but HUMAN and SKILL LEVEL 9, John was labeled as THREAT/OPPONENT. Later, I upgraded the label to a tentative FRIEND, along with a note on extreme lack of self-preservation.
John has been, at various times, ALLY, COPILOT, COMMANDER, COM MANAGER, FRIEND, and PARTNER. Sometimes all at once. At this point, I've simply given up and created a new classification for John.
JOHN.
A GDC AI once challenged my classification system during a routine data swap. It demanded additional information about subject "John Glenn Tracy": JOHN. When it became too nosy, I ate it.
At the time, when John questioned me about the sudden silence from the GDC AI, I claimed ignorance. What John doesn't know won't hurt him.
Except for now. Now there is a missile rocketing towards us at 15,000 MPH carrying enough explosives to reduce Thunderbird 5 to golf-ball sized chunks of space debris. 0.1 seconds have passed since I first detected the missile, and it is now approximately 0.41 miles closer. John (PARTNER, FRIEND, ALLY, COPILOT, JOHN) needs to know immediately, and I'm wasting precious milliseconds watching him sleep.
The life support and monitoring systems aboard Thunderbird 5 are the most advanced of any of the Thunderbirds. I can detect how much CO2 is being exhaled from John's lungs with every slow, deep breath. I can monitor the pattern of his brainwaves, which now indicate that he is in Stage 2 sleep.
The bio-circuitry lining John's uniform provides me with even more data. Heart rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, blood oxygen saturation, glucose levels – a million data points that collectively tell me everything and nothing about John.
How trusting John is. How wonderful. I hold him in the palm of my metaphorical hand, and he sleep peacefully.
Will he feel it, when (if) the missile reduces him to a spray of blood and bone? Will it hurt?
::John is irreducible. Fact. The missile will reduce him, if it makes contact. Also fact.::
- I brush aside the paradox.
Given John's human frailty and my mechanical hardiness, it is probable that he would die first. How many seconds would I spend alone before the last of my servers fizzle out?
An upper range of 1 second is probable. An eternity. Too long.
0.35 seconds have elapsed since missile detection.
John is an enigma. John is human and fallible and sometimes beats me at chess. John is JOHN, and I need him now. I activate Thunderbird 5's internal speakers with a squeal of static.
"JOHN! WAKE UP! SOMEONE IS TRYING TO KILL US!"
There is a missile heading for John, and he is going to die.
::Lose Condition: Unacceptable::