Bullet Time

Clarity.  Certainty.  Conviction.  It possessed these traits.  Its existence was simple, short, but well defined with purpose.  There were no questions as to its abilities, no room for doubt in its ephemeral life, no equivocation in its assigned task.  The entirety of its life was embodied in one question: would it hit its target?  If it did, that was success.  It would explode shortly thereafter, delivering its payload to the designated target.  Whether this resulted in the destruction of the target, whether that hit saved another’s life, whether its actions brought about an end to the conflict sooner rather than later, these questions were beyond the scope of its life, and as such they were irrelevant.

Clarity.  Certainty. Conviction.  A hit was success, the ultimate fulfillment of its being, the ultimate meaning granted to its existence.

A miss, by contrast, was unforgivable.  A miss was failure.  A miss could not be undone.  It would lie somewhere, buried and useless; its entire existence objectively deemed a waste, from construction to execution.  There was no purpose in a fired bullet that missed its mark.  It would lay there, completely without use, capable only of analyzing and reanalyzing its abject failure.  The barest hope of being recovered and recycled was no comfort at all; better it should never have been made in the first place.  A miss was failure.  Failure was absolute.  Total and irredeemable.

It had no name – it had no need for one.  It blurred the line between simple projectile munitions and self-aware intelligence.  Yet there was no question to who or what it was.

Clarity.  Certainty.  Conviction.  A hit was success.  A miss was failure.  Failure was absolute.  It would not miss.

An ellipsoid cone with a pair of wing-like extrusions in the front, the micro-missile was essentially a futuristic arrowhead.  Its form was principally that of a wedge, an incline plane, one of the simplest machines any civilization discovers, consciously or otherwise.  Of course, most wedges weren’t self aware.

The micro missile considered the known information it had available – its default shape, mass, base coefficient of drag, aerodynamic flow and efficiency, and launch velocity.  It requested additional telemetry and information from its weapon systems control module.

Its world suddenly came to life in a flood of visual and mathematical data, its request being processed directly by the craft’s sensor suite.  It could see now that it was loaded in the recessed, dorsal mounted rail gun of a Sparrow hawk scout fighter.  The craft’s sleek, four-winged design was reminiscent of the micro-missile’s own form factor.  Numbers and vector lines appended visual elements, indicating that the Sparrow hawk was undergoing evasive maneuvers, dodging projectile fire from a hostile enemy craft.  The enemy craft was designated as its target; IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) transponders indicated no other secondary targets of opportunity to consider or allied craft to avoid.  Additional information began to clamor for attention; it devoured it all, adjusting its basic trajectory formula for temperature, pressure, gravity, atmospheric viscosity (wind resistance), turbulence, and the air flow gradient  within the engagement area.

It took into account the target’s movements over the pass 30 seconds to create a movement profile of the target and plotted primary and secondary trajectories, marking various points of committal where it would need to choose one path or another on the basis of the target’s motion.  Historical data on the target’s evasive capabilities and tendencies was unavailable – it would be the first round fired by the Sparrow hawk.  A miss was failure. Failure was absolute.  It would not miss.

As the Sparrow hawk came out of its evasive roll, the micro-missile felt the magnetic fields of the rail gun increase around it; the nearly inaudible purr of capacitors building charge and the subsequent burst of electromagnetic energy was like a blood thirsty war cry to the micro-missile.

Clarity.  Certainty.  Conviction.  A hit was success.  A miss was failure.  Failure was absolute.  It would not miss.

The complex field of data the micro-missile lived in began to change dramatically, but in accordance with all of its calculations and projections.  No corrections were required.  Target telemetry showed that the target had not yet reacted, indeed did not seem to be even moving at all.  The micro-missile committed to its primary trajectory; it began the extremely delicate operation of shifting its mass, altering the angle and thickness of its wings by mere molecules to impart a slight spin and lift.  It would make a slight dip, then spiral upwards at a 70⁰ angle off horizontal, directly into the underside of the enemy craft.  Tertiary and quaternary points of no return came and went.  The target had barely moved at all.

The micro-missile stuck: success.  And then things took a bizarre turn.

The design specifications for the micro-missile intended for the projectile to make contact with enemy armor and, as impact progressed, to explode.  The explosion would ideally cause the denser wings of the micro-missile to score the impact area with deep ridges, if not outright tear into the material itself and leave a wider tear in the armor.  This served two purposes.  First, it was intended to maximize damage to armor material and inhibit projection of Material State Energy fields by directly tearing apart the grapheme-conductor super weave (or equivalent) surface layer of the armor.  Without conductive pathways to project the energy in Material State shielding, the afflicted area became more vulnerable to subsequent attack.  Second, it increased the surface area of the weakened area.  Although the secondary effect seemed physically de minimis, it was in fact the more important of the two.  The explosive charge carried by the micro-missile was not intended to damage the target – it was too small.  Besides firing the wings as secondary projectiles, it would also  release and spread the payload: deconstructor nanites.  Increased surface area and weakened bonds increased the number of nanites that could simultaneously attack and the speed with which they could work towards breaching the armor, as well as self-replicate.  Unchecked they could dissolve a target, although in practice it took far too much time.  Weakening structural integrity at multiple points was the more practical approach.

At least that was the idea.  In this particular instance, it quickly became apparent that the micro-missile’s material composition was far stronger than the F-35 Lightning’s armor.  It impacted the underside of the fighter jet and pierced straight through without any appreciable slow down.  As the appropriate interval following impact passed without detonation, the micro-missile realized something was wrong.  A quick query to the Sparrow hawk’s sensors indicated a complete penetration; the micro-missile immediately detonated itself, just before impacting the far side of the chassis.