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That evening I ran some computer simulations. Which was not easy given the conditions. For the simulations to be accurate, you have to feed in a lot of data. When you don’t have enough data, then the simulations are, of course, worthless. But I wasted some time anyway. However, it did start me thinking.
Creativity. That might be the key. One of the weaknesses of androids, robots, AIs or a combination thereof is there’s no creativity. They “think” based on their programming. They can’t take great leaps of imagination. Even the most advanced are limited in that sense. The AIs may be able to think. Scientists still argue on that point, but they don’t have any imagination. There’s something about the human brain that can’t be duplicated. Humans can be very creative. What they can imagine they can build. If they can conceive of it, they can achieve it.
So...
A robotic race, for whatever reason, wants to annihilate the human race. Why? They had to have been ordered to. But by who? And again the question is “why”. There are always exceptions and maybe this would be one, but such a robotic race would not suddenly desire to commit genocide against humans. Perhaps the Creagers might conceive of such a plan. They would not have warm feelings against anything flesh and blood. But if they decided on genocide, it would be horrific but understandable from the Creagers’ point of view. They would wipe out the race who had defeated them twice.
But gold robotic men had not fought wars with humans. Neither did they act on emotion. The Creagers wanted to take over a few planets based on a lust for power. But gold robotic men are not motivated by power. Power means nothing to them. So who programmed them? Ralph was given his orders by his robotic superior who no doubt received his commands from his robotic superior and onward up the line. A dead end.
But the invasion fleet full of gold men would go by their precise battle plan. They wouldn’t deviate from it. Which gave a small advantage to the defenders.
Humans can suffer from this defect too. Gen. Burnside at Fredericksburg during the Civil War. From all reports he was a nice enough guy but was a terrible general, totally incompetent in any military task. The Confederates were safely dug in on the hills around the city. Burnside foolishly charged them and kept charging, as if expecting the third charge would do better than the first charge. It didn’t. The Union lost more than nine thousand troops that day. Brave men killed more by their foolish commander than by rebels’ bullets. That’s one of the problems with the military. A great many brave, kind and noble soldiers died to the stupidity of their officers. Officers who were rarely evil, but often incompetent.
I didn’t particularly like the analogy, since I had just ordered what many men on this ship would consider to be a suicide mission. But unlike Burnside, we had a chance. Or so I thought.
I could release the light-speed drones. They could do some surveillance and provide us some badly needed information. But it was a huge risk. We were counting on the element of surprise. If the Destroyers spied a drone, they would realize an enemy was in the area and start beefing up their defenses. The drones were not large. They could possibly slip in under any defensive shields. But if they were spotted, our element of surprise was lost.
I thought no. We’d have to go in blind. The risk was too great. We had long-range sensors. We’d have to use those. Beef up the defenses on the ship. Make sure our weapons were ready to fire. We couldn’t afford a malfunction.
It was late. I figured I could use a good night’s sleep. I had a glass of wine with Astrid before going to bed.