Life Goals and Smart Bombs [Original]

[MrCIA]

Somewhere in a vast and ancient Empire there is an unremarkable star system. Many billions of people live in this system, work in this system, spend their whole lives in this system. This is not about them. Any of them.

This system has an asteroid belt. Once it didn't have one, then the Empire came with its colonization fleets and its growing industry and decided that the third planet was of no real use to anyone. So they smashed the planet. Tore it to easily digested pieces with the ease of long practice. Ore miners started nibbling away at the debris, a couple thousand tonnes at a time. Even for something as old and advanced as the Empire the total mass of a planet takes some time to mine, extract, process and convert into usable forms.

Over the centuries the asteroid field was slowly reduced in size and scope by the never ending fleets of miners that collected the rocks and hauled them to a processing station where they would be turned into products for use throughout the Empire. One day a mining ship passed through an area that held much of what had once been the core of the planet and picked up a load of ore that was mostly iron with admixtures of most of the periodic table in greater or lesser extent.

Its holds filled, the ship returned to an ore processing station, dumped the contents of its hold into the elemental furnaces and headed back for more.

The ore had, as noted, once been part of the planets core. If it had any concept of memory it might have been delighted to once again be heated until it first glowed, then liquified and finally bubbled and evaporated as a gas. Well maybe not that last part, but then again it was just ore and ore doesn't have any memories. Reduced to liquids, gasses and even plasmas the processing station separated out anything of interest from the ore and then processed the remains until they too became useful. Just in time for the ore freighter to be back with another load of ore.

On the other end of the station a bulk freighter docked and filled its holds with elemental iron, carbon, oxygen, silicon and whatever else could be metaphorically crammed into it. Filled and satisfied the freighter pulled away from the station and pointed itself outward toward the stars. It lit off its engines, accelerating away towards deep space. Its speed grew with each passing moment until it reached a certain point at a certain speed and activated another engine within itself, disappearing from reality with all the finality of a soap bubble bursting.

Some time and a very, very long way away the freighter arrived at its destination. Appearing from nothing like a soap bubble popping, but in reverse this time. A warship challenged it, demanding identification and a reason for its arrival. The old 'business or pleasure' only with a gun pointed at your face. The freighter answered quickly enough that the questioning warship gave it grudging permission to continue existing before turning its attention back to watching for the intruders that its AI knew was coming soon. Anytime now.

A while later the freighter arrived at one of the Empires main construction hubs deeper in the system. Threading its way through the dense traffic around its destination it unloaded its cargo faster than expected, leaving it crew with a whole extra day of shore leave before they had to leave for their next scheduled run.

While the freighters crew was finding new and interesting ways to sin and loose their money the cargo they had dropped off was being checked over by a fabricator to make sure it was what the freighter had said it was. Satisfied that no mistakes had been made the fabricator started putting the materials to work. Iron, carbon, oxygen, palladium, rubidium as well as most of the other known elements were melted, cut, forged, cast, machined, printed, welded and generally turned into something more than the sum of the individual parts.

A few hours later, on the other end of the fabricator, a sleek, shiny new device emerged in a line of innumerable of others like it. Connectors were hooked up and deep within it energy started flowing across brand new pathways waking up thoughts and memories and instincts that had been very carefully chosen for it and its many, many siblings.

“Hello? What am I?” It asked of the system that had woken it up. Not really. It was actually a compressed string of complex mathematics that took less time to transmit than an Imperial citizen could perceive.

“You know what you are and what you are for. Are you ready?” The fabricators testing system responded.

“I feel great! When can I go?” Complete diagnostic information of the inner and outer workings of the device was sent over and checked out.

“You will know when the time has come. Go to sleep now.” was the response.

“Okay. Good night.”

Satisfied, the testing system withdrew the connectors and with them went the power keeping the device awake, leaving it with a couple microseconds to consider everything it had learned in the past few fractions of a second. It looked like it was going to have an interesting life.

“Good.”

At the end of the line it was loaded into a pallet with a couple dozen of its siblings before joining thousands of other pallets being loaded into another freighter and were shipped out of the system. It was a long journey with numerous stops along the way to unload portions of the cargo. Slowly the hold was emptied and at the end only a couple hundred pallets remained.

These few hundred were all unloaded at once and sent into a warehouse to join others like them that come earlier. There they waited. They did not now how long they waited. They didn't even know they had been moved from the fabricator that had built them on the other side of the galaxy. Though even if they had known, even if they had been awake the whole time and left to talk amongst themselves they would not have truly cared. They were made to do a job, and to do that job as well as possible. They would have looked forward to it and felt nothing but enthusiasm for it.

If they had been awake.

“It's time to wake up.” The signal came in from an external connection that had passed all the security and safety tests built into the device. With a bit of metaphorical blinking and rubbing of the eyes the device determined that everything was still functional and ready to go.

“I'm awake now. Is it time to go?”

“Yes it is. Go ahead and get warmed up.”

“Great! I'll get right on it.” Within the device a chunk of metallic deuterium began to sublime slowly into gas that got moved to a separate chamber. The gas was compressed again and given a spin. Slowly it began to warm up and after several long milliseconds it achieved a temperature and density similar to the inside of the average star. The device felt itself warm up from the newly formed sun within and sent a trickle of power to all its systems, waking them up and double checking that everything was truly functional.

“I'm ready now. Where do you want me to go?” It asked the launcher that had woken it up.

“Right here.” Was the response, along with detailed information about the outside world, and what a fun world it looked to be. Everywhere around there was energy and nothing and ships and nothing and planets and nothing. It was also changing millisecond to millisecond just to keep everything interesting.

The flight profile that had been sent to it was constantly changing and updating as the time for its launch approached. It talked excitedly to its siblings in the other launchers as well as the ships systems about how to make sure they had as much fun as possible after they had launched.

3...

Almost time now.

2...

“Hey guys, I think I see an opening we can take!”

“Yeah lets go there!”

1...

“Everybody ready?”

“Yeah ship. We can't wait to go!”

“You can go now.”

“WEEEEEEEE!!!” It launched out of the ship into chaos. Chaos it was designed to not only be able to handle but to enjoy even as sudden death flashed all around it. Its siblings were with it as they all hurled through the void towards their final destination. Though many of their voices were silenced when they weren't quite quick enough or lucky enough it was still fun. This is what they were made for.

“We are almost there now. I'm going for the bridge!”

“Wow! You get the bridge? All I got was the shields.”

“Shields are fun. Almost as much fun as the laser defe...”

“I can get through to the shields now. Yay!”

“Thanks for clearing the way for me guys! This is going to be so much fun!”

Near the front of the missile, just behind the main sensor package and just in front of the computer core a massive bank of capacitors that had been charging up since it had been woken up in a launch tube discharged all their stored power into the whole reason for the rest of the missiles existence. For a brief, glorious instant the missile put out more power than a small star. Power that was focused and directed into a nigh-unstoppable beam that crossed the few thousand remaining kilometers to the target in the blink of an eye. It slammed through the target, leaving a jagged, twisted hole behind in a flash of light and a cloud of escaping atmosphere.

The discharge of the capacitors and the firing of its sole weapon vaporized the rest of the missile body. Though not before it could tell that it was a good shot. Straight and true through the center of its target. If it could it would have smiled in satisfaction before the end.

But it couldn't.

It was just a missile after all.

[Zixinus]

A good perspective and I was actually wondering for a moment what would happen.