Alex's Point of View
"Know knock."
"Who's th-?"
"Race condition!"
Alex and Terry laughed uproariously. "You ready to test the tactical reasoning model in simulation?" Alex asked.
"Hell yeah!" Terry replied. He loaded up that flight simulator they'd modified on his computer. "Let's populate it with objects."
They were looking at a visual representation of the South China Sea, modeled in painstaking detail. On the second monitor was what was essentially a spreadsheet that included every militarily relevant object: warships, aircraft, missiles, and so forth, as well as their current coordinates, course, and speed. It constantly updated as new objects were created and old ones moved.
"So what are we thinking here? Worst case scenario?" Alex asked.
Terry nodded, updating the values in their object generator and pressing enter. "Let's see how ANIS does against the whole damned PLA."
The object tracker exploded in size, moving too fast for Alex to follow. ANIS, or Aero Naval Intelligent Strike, was a tactical decision making model for reasoning about target selection in an intense electronic warfare environment. Every ANIS missile, whether launched from an aircraft, ship, or land-based platform, was one node in a network, a "kill web". It was pretty complicated, but decisions ultimately amounted to three fundamental roles: spotter, decider, or shooter.
Any node on the network could perform any role, or outsource its decision-making to other nodes in the network. Special attention was paid to detecting and disregarding enemy jamming and spoofing. They'd been training the ANIS reasoning model against known technology and tactics used by the PLA Navy and Air Force. It was time to see how ANIS performed under simulated war conditions. Could it handle the immense amount of data it would have to process in a short space of time?
Terry finished setting up the scenario. "We're assuming normal fog of war. ANIS will react as PLA assets are detected. Teri, you want to watch?" he called his sister over.
"Yeah, hold on," she said back. "Let me run to the bathroom real quick, don't start without me."
Teri Tsai got up to powder her nose or something. With how little she ate Alex found it hard to believe she ever actually went to the bathroom.
Alex pulled up a chair to sit next to his friend. "You nervous? We've been at this for over a month."
More people in the office were gathering around to watch the show. Terry looked back at them and smiled. "I have the same feeling I used to get after we completed a project that would get an 'A' back in college. ANIS is a solid piece of work, maybe the best we've ever done. This is going to be a flagship product for Lockhole-Merlin, man. We made it, us, and ANIS will make our careers. Promotions, raises, running our own teams, you name it. We're about to hit the big time."
Teri came back. She'd taken off her jacket and was wearing only a thin blouse. Strange, the air conditioning in their office was set to "arctic blast" and the other Tsai twin was always complaining about it.
"You okay?" Alex asked her.
She smiled radiantly at him. "Thanks for worrying, but yes. That jacket was scratchy. My new detergent doesn't agree with my skin."
Well, if she said so. "Ready to start, Terry?"
"Yeah, let's do it!" He pressed the button marked "begin simulation" and the show began.
At first, it didn't look like much, just one blob of dots heading towards another blob of dots.
Terry's eyes flicked over to the object tracker. "Red team will be within detection range of blue team in about," he trailed off, "now."
The blue dots reacted like a disturbed hornet's nest, bearing down on the red dots aggressively. Suddenly both blobs of dots multiplied and the object tracker exploded with activity.
"Missiles away," Terry explained.
Alex studied the map. The battle was spread out over a thousand kilometers, sped up to be five times faster than reality. One hundred kilometers was nothing. The missiles rapidly overtook both blobs of dots.
Objects started blinking out and disappearing from the tracker, shortening the spreadsheet. "Some hot missile on missile action!" Terry was acting like a sports announcer. He always really got into stuff like this.
More red dots appeared as if from nowhere. A man from a non-engineering department, accounting maybe, asked why. "The red dots were always there," Alex explained. "ANIS just detected them."
With more data, the behavior of the blue dots changed, diverting to engage more valuable targets in the red swarm.
"I can't tell what's happening," complained a woman in the audience. "It's just a bunch of dots."
Terry looked like he'd been waiting for someone to say that. "Let me just zoom in, so you can get a sense of what's going on."
Their current view was highly abstract, just an overhead of the South China Sea. Terry picked a red dot and brought the camera close.
Now the view was of a Chinese fighter.
"It just looks like it's flying," the woman said. "What's it doing? Why?"
"Wait for for it," Terry said. He zoomed out a little so you could see anything that got close to the plane.
Something was headed towards the plane, moving fast. The Chinese fighter veered off and released flares.
"Too late," Terry said triumphantly. The ANIS missile ignored the flares and went straight for the enemy fighter, blowing it out of the sky. "Stuff like that is happening all over the map. ANIS is hunting the red dots, one by one. They can run, but they can't hand. That fighter tried to fool ANIS, not happening."
Red dots started winking out, slowly at first, then rapidly. "The longer ANIS fights, the better it gets," Alex said. "It doesn't always get its target but it learns from everything the enemy does."
"They're running," a man in the audience said. He was right. Red team was disengaging after heavy casualties.
"We're running out of missiles," Alex said worriedly. "Heavy combat eats up munitions like popcorn. Blue team will have to retreat soon as well."
Not every missile was fired at the enemy. Ten to twenty percent were held back to defend their assets and cover their own withdrawal. Once stocks ran low, blue team turned around. The simulation ended once both clouds of dots exited the map.
Some people in the audience clapped, but Alex wasn't quite ready to celebrate. "Let's look at the data," he said.
Terry switched the object tracker spreadsheet to his main monitor and tinkered with it. "The Chinese suffered massively disproportionate casualties, especially in the air," he said after checking a column of data. "They were more conservative about deploying sea-based assets, as predicted. They lost some frigates, but anything larger was kept well back."
"Still, blue team couldn't hold the field. I'm calling it a tactical victory, strategic draw," Alex said.
Terry snorted. "The PLA just got their shit pushed in and ran for it. You think they'll come back for more?"
Alex didn't actually know. "Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that its possible we run out of missiles before they do."
Teri put a hand his shoulder. Alex wanted to jerk back but they were in public and it would be rude. He'd need to have a conversation with Teri about touching him later.
"Don't worry, Alex," she said. "Our new missiles will be cheaper, easier to mass produce. The company knows peer warfare isn't like the War on Terror where you could wait on things and fight at your own pace."
Alex spotted Chip Lackland over her shoulder and used him as an excuse to get out of arm's reach of Teri. "Hey, Chip! Looks like we've got it! You want to see the data?"
"Better yet, let's go again! Just let me up update the ANIS model real quick with everything it learned in that battle," Terry said.
Chip breathed a sigh of relief. "It's working? Thank god. You guys just saved my ass, seriously. The higher ups need something concrete and today was the last day. Looks like they won't cut our budget or reassign engineers now, provided ANIS works like you say."
They were in danger of budget cuts? Getting reassigned? Why didn't Chip inform them sooner? This guy...
"Okay, round two: ready, steady, go!" Terry announced.
The simulation was pretty much the same as last time, with a blob of blue dots fighting a blob of red dots, until it wasn't.
"Damn, ANIS is getting vicious," Terry said in awe.
With every iteration, the spotter/decider/shooter loop got faster, more lethal. The red dots were rapidly winking out. Terry was a bit of a showman with it, zooming in on red dots so the crowd could see the animated missile impacts and explosions in more detail.
"Boom, headshot!" Terry cheered as a Chinese AWACS plane with its big rotodome was hit. Planes like that were essentially the "brains" of the battle. ANIS blew past the screens and hunted it mercilessly.
From there, the red team lost cohesion, disintegrating into multiple smaller blobs that were eliminated one by one. Only the assets that were still out of range managed to escape.
"Get some! Get some!" Alex and Terry yelled together. It was hard not to get excited. ANIS was performing better than they'd ever hoped. This was like, the next generation of warfare. It would change everything.
"Well, shit," Chip said, sounding pleased as hell. "Make sure you save all the data and write up a report, guys. Once you're ready, I'm taking this to the big man upstairs."
Terry and Alex looked at each other. "You're the man," Alex said.
"No, you're the man!" Terry said back.
They were hugging and crying like they'd just won the Super Bowl.
When I get my bonus, I'm gonna buy Alice something real nice, Alex thought.