HEO by Tom Fynes

 

Tycho was loaded for bear. And he knew it. The CIA prosthetic department had used their world class inhouse skills to turn him into a native. 

A former New Yorker was in country and looked like he'd always lived there. The rough well-worn cloths. Woven with graphene, so they were light and bullet proof. His Pakol, which was worn on his head, was also high-tech material. With inbuild receivers to take in the torrent of information, that was being digested, by his ultra slimline backpack AI Comanchero. 

Tycho had named him Quanah Parker, after the famous Comanche Chieftain. Quan had argued the point with him. Saying a Comanchero was one who traded with the Indians. So, he should not have been called after such a great Indian legend. 

Tycho just knocked this back with, “Quanah was a bad ass, and so are you.”

Tycho was operating with the latest AI high tech called, ‘HEO’ or, ‘Hyper-Enabled Operator.’ This concept would allow the US to dominate the battlefield. As its information gathering was phenomenal. Every nano second that Tycho moved through the enemies territory, it was pulling and pushing Giga loads of information back to drones, and satellites, or analysing and dismissing local data on the fly. Languages, all dialects, facial recognition, network information. 

Quanah Parker was sucking in information on all wavelengths, and removing the non-threatening and providing Tycho with compressed real time evaluations of what he was looking at. 

Quan was also listening in to the Russian Spetsnaz team, that were in the process of putting together their daily search routine, to track and kill US operatives. But shortly their day would be ruined by a missile strike, under the direction of Quan.

Quan was operating under a mashed-up version of the “Asimov Robotic rules. Which state:

“An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 

An AI must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the US Army HQ Directive. 

A robot must protect its own existence if such protection does not conflict with the US Army HQ Directive.”

The Chinese were also here in big numbers. The Pakistan Secret Police were interrogating a prisoner in some deep dank dungeon. Quan was listening in and sending that information straight back to the US Army HQ in Qatar. 

Quan’s graphics processing unit, neural processing engine, and tensor processing unit capabilities was on steroids. 

Tycho was a walking God, compared to the Special Ops guys that had patrolled these streets, not so many years ago.

He was listening intently into the conversations of, Jamaat al Dawa al Quran, a hard-line Islamist organization, that seemed to be doing a deal with the Taliban. And never registered the blow to the back of his head that killed him.

Sayed had been studying this, ‘Farang’ and had waited in a side shop for his chance to strike.

Now he quickly stripped the, ‘Farang,’ of what valuables he had. Which was not a lot. No dollars? He had expected a stash of Gold or dollars.

“What is this?” Sayed said, as he discovered the AI backpack.

Which was his last thought, as the whole quarter disappeared in a massive fireball.