Originally posted on my Substack

ACT 1: DANIEL

First Lieutenant Dan Park twiddles his thumbs as he watches a map of the Indo-Pacific do nothing in particular, like usual. He’d kill for a donut right now, but he’s the only one in the office today. Taking a sip of his styrofoam flavored coffee, he returns to twiddling.

When Dan first joined the air force (chair force, ha ha) in 2030, he expected his job to be a lot of sitting around doing nothing, but he supposed he’d at least be able to pilot some drones. Fifteen years later, and now he doesn’t even get to do that anymore. His job pretty much amounts to clicking ‘allow’ whenever Indo-Pacific Command’s many autonomous drone swarms— provided they happen to be in his rather limited slice of the map—decide they want to do something.

It’s a nice day out in the Northern Philippines. The sky’s a bright azure, clouds like the strokes of a calligraphy brush. A soothing breeze drifts through the open window.

An alert in his headphones knocks him out of his concentration. Two of the coalition planners, which are AIs that operate the swarms, MARLIN (the U.S. one), and KOBU (Japan’s), want to employ non-lethal dazzlers. Some dinky militia tug is getting too close to a cargo envoy in the Bashi Channel.

He clicks ‘allow’ while wincing at another sip of the shitty coffee, and checks his phone. There’s a missed message from his sister, who’s taking a ferry through the very same channel tomorrow, funnily enough.

Beeeeeeep.

He jumps. Apparently, the planners aren’t done with him—that’s a first. Looks like… there’s a disagreement between the two of them? No, that’s… is that even possible?

He leans closer to the console. Looks like MARLIN wants to “escort”, or guide the tug away without touching it, while KOBU wants to “capture”, or force it to stop and accept a tow. Because the system isn’t designed with their disagreement in mind, it keeps flipping back and forth between “escort” and “capture”. He’s never seen this before, and to be honest, maybe no one else in the world has.

Another label pops into the shared objective panel, something called FOxGLASS. The system says it is an audit service, which means it essentially does what he does, but before he sees it. Theoretically, he wouldn’t even have to be sitting here, but there’s always supposed to be a ‘human in the loop’—it’s federal law.

That being said, he’s pretty much never supposed t...

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