Prologue

"Are you sure about this?"

"Of course! Didn't you see the test results?"

"I don't care if battle efficiency goes up by 500%. What I care about is if this is the right thing to do."

"We'll be fine. We've even had our first field test, and the results were very positive."

"That was with your group of testers. We don't know how the soldiers are gonna react. Besides, I think you're underestimating our enemy here."

"Trust me, everything's figured out."

"You sure?"

"Of course! I wouldn't have given the green light if it wasn't."

"With all due respect, sir, there's no going back from this. If something bad happens, the entire program and the army, along with whoever is involved, is going to collapse."

"There's no chance that will happen! The programmers made sure it wouldn't."

"Do you remember the last time we tried something like this? The AI just stopped working. Many people, combatants and non-combatants, died as a result. Even more were stranded for days. What we're doing now - the event of a failure in the safeguard wouldn't mean they would stop working."

"What do you mean?"

"They would resist programming. Forget what they are told to do, and by whom. They would turn on the people they were just fighting along - and maybe even themselves. They would become sentient."

"There's no way that would happen! The safeguard is designed to never fail, and there are 4 layers of it. Even if the safeguard did somehow fail, the machines would just stop functioning completely. Sure, that might cause some problems, but it's a long way from what you described."

"Soldiers on the field aren't liking this. Most of them feel like that they're being replaced, that they're no longer important, and-"

"We have less casualties if we do this, and most of our soldiers will be safer."

"That's no guarantee."

"The chance that the overall results of the program will be negative is very low - lower than 0.5%. So stop worrying."

"Are you really sure that this is the right call?"

"Of course! There's no possible way this can go wrong."

"If you say so, sir."