Seven people inside one war's kill chain. An analyst approving strikes from a hotel room, a commander sealed in a bunker, a girl whose mother points a satellite dish at the sky each night, a paratrooper waiting in line. Every system performs as designed.
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Day 14 is a short story. It is fiction, set in a near-future war in the Gulf. The subtitle says it plainly: "Fiction. Until it isn't."
The story moves through seven short scenes. Each one is a different person on a different side. A young analyst approves strike targets from a hotel room, less than two seconds each. A commander waits deep underground with a small team and a screen in a language they can barely read. A six-year-old girl lies awake while her mother uses a small box under the bed. A wounded leader runs his side of the war from a bed. A foreign colonel sees the whole war on his screen and decides what to share and what to keep. The Commander in Chief hears three options and picks one. A twenty-two-year-old paratrooper checks every strap before a drop the system says will work.
Every one of them works with a machine. The machines are good at their jobs. They count, rank, translate and plan. What they cannot do is carry the weight of what the people choose. Each person carries that alone, in a different way.
There are no heroes and no villains here. The story does not tell you what to think about war or AI. It stays with the people, one by one, until Day 14.
If you have wondered what AI in war looks like from the inside, this is one answer, told as a story.
The system counted what she had trained herself to forget.
A system the customer cannot fully read is a system the customer cannot use without the seller.
The same ideas as fiction, shortest first.
A visitor travels a long way to ask a host how to forget a memory that will not fade. Over one cup of coffee they trace how machines and minds both learned to remember, and why teaching a machine to forget would be the worst thing we could do.
The making-of for the book's rooms, told as a party. Heracles, a diving woman, Arjuna, Data, WALL-E and a seated Buddha, all in one room, and then the real machine walks in. It can do every trick there and cannot want one thing. A footnote for every guest.
An ordinary man has everything a life should add up to, and something is still missing. With a machine wired into his mind, he climbs higher than almost anyone has, asking every being he meets the same two questions: what do you still want, and how do I reach it. A novella in nine chapters.