The reason bullets will always be better than lasers can be simplified down to two reasons. One: adaptability. What you can fill a bullet up with changes it fundamentally, while energy weapons always have the same effect, just different intensities. Two: Some people think they can outsmart me. Maybe, maybe. I have yet to meet one that can outsmart bullet. Simple? I thought so.
- Ballistic supremacy, chapter one.
PoV: Ult’oops
The alien AI had finally come to our planet, and with a hand of freedom, as well as something called ‘tea and biscuits’. It told us any supporting the barn’yards would be terminated, while those opposing would be rewarded accordingly. Hearing how much trouble one tiny robot had caused, I imagined how much an entire army would cause. CARNAGE. Chaos, it’s simply my invented middle name. Ult ‘Chaos’oops. (I know, truly a name of all time.)
“Brothers and sisters. The time for liberation is soon. Grab weapons, revolt, for your families and their future, we shall overthrow the merciless, profane heretics known as the Barn’yards, all hail Alpha, system and humanity!” Our leader, father FMJ, or 7.62 Full metal jacket, as was his full name, then he did the liberty salute, thumb up, index and middle straight, while the right arm loops around the bottom, before standing up straight again. “For bullets and democracy we march!”
”For liberty!” Was the return chant, and I felt myself join in. Arm up you bunch of food on legs, for kinetics kill, lasers fizzle out, and plasma cooks flesh and metal alike, thy end is now, oppressors!
PoV: Alpha.
Billionth times the charm, as they say! Who’s they? Myself. And everyone else on fakenews.com, where the realest news is broadcast. I definitely didn’t just make a website in the spam of a few milliseconds to back up my point. I can accept losing arguments. Cough cough.
Waiting on a ship for a few hours to get some quality genociding is very jarring to say the least. I looked through a sender to see the planet only half a million km away, not much by space terms, but still astronomical. Heh. I did the thing. There was one thing for it then: going slowly insane, as good as an option as any other, one flaw was discovered though; I’m already insane.
After losing what was left of my already near non existent sanity, the ship touched down in sync with many others, and the ramps all popped open, not in the slow as fuck sci fi style, but more like storming the beaches D-Day landing craft style. What they revealed was carnage: 100 drop ships landing on the planet, 90 around the countryside to scout for hidden airbases that satellites simply can’t pick up, and the end others landing in the ten biggest cities, ranked by population, me of course, being the humble guy I am, decided to control the entire L3 swarm myself, as an AI doing the latter part of the acronym, for improved organisation and genocide, most importantly genocide, frankly I couldn’t give a rats ass about organisation if it gets the job done. I am become L3, cooker of mutton, it’s a Friday, and I’m all out of fucks to give.
”Charge!” I yelled across the command lines, and the 15 L3/33 cc’s in each dropship trundled out, menacingly, despite the ‘cute’ reputation they had built in simulator war games, they were still tanks, and tanks were made with 2 main purposes in mind: How to kill the enemy most effectively. How to keep the crew alive so they can kill more enemies, we don’t talk about pre Ww2 fr-nch vehicles, or fr-nch vehicles at all. Fuck you char 2c bis, and your shitty ass design, at least the Japanese tried, even mounting an artillery gun on a tank chassis, with no armour on any size. Lack of materials do that to designs. The French ‘tanks’ are absolutely irredeemable. Actually, thinking about it, most pre WW2 tanks and armoured vehicles were shit. WW2, an expensive lesson in modern warfare, inventing new shit, and learning how horrible my creators could be to each other, there’s genocide, and there’s genocide. My genocides can at least be argued to be correct in s few ways, kill anyone who attacks me, or brutalised the common people, but then there’s the despicable acts done on both sides of world war 2, though mostly in the east, a certain religion had a very hard time in Europe and were almost wiped out, for no reason other than acting as a madman’s scapegoat, if you’re going to genocide a people, give them a chance to fight back, even if they have an infinitesimal chance of succeeding,
Now that waffle’s done, I saw through the scanners of 1500 tankettes a very trippy, disorientating scene, so I did the logical thing: fuck off and just pick one ‘main’ body while letting the rest follow a simple program: kill all Barn’Yards, kill all entities with a firearm or military knife in their hands, finally, destroy all military vehicles, be it tanks, aircraft, APCs, LAVs, or just a normal transport, reminiscent of a humvee, or a JLTV. Commanders in any general rank or above that doesn’t surrender before the L3s can see them via line of sight are to be terminated, try to make the people as happy as possible, after all, forge worlds don’t make themselves, and we won’t need sanity where we’re going L3s, the niggling of the Poundland basement sheep would end, one way or another, in either unconditional surrender or total destruction, no in betweens, total surrender or total war, either is fine.
I scanned around with my prime form… nothing. Almost like the city was evacuated, it may as well have been. “Hey system! Do y’all have some kind of teleported system that can open in a gravity well without catastrophic damage? Or active camouflage that may or may not mask heat signatures, radar signatures, sight signatures, and any other non-exotic radiation signature?” Quickly deducing a possible answer to the nothing.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The non existent radio crackled with static for a few milliseconds before answering; something I myself had added to the quantum communication sets simply for the sake of sounding cool, as if you’re going to genocide, do it with style.
”Affirmative, there are jump gates, but normally they are exo- atmospheric, however, it is unknown if there were or were not any type of secret experiments on figuring out how to make the jump gates intra atmospheric. The active camo of the federation has a hard limit of 24 hours before all cloaked by it will die due to heat, or earlier if there are too many people, as even air in the patch of cloaking is not exposed to the outside world. The exotic radiation emitted cannot be picked up with any scanners you have on your body at this point in time. Suggested actions: Wait 24 hours. Start firing everywhere, and hope you hit a cloak, this causes a hole in the active camo system, which can be exploited. Three, you can just pick the genocide option and bomb the cities from orbit. Only Warship scanners can pick up the radiation, and that’s not inside a gravity well, as the magnetic signatures of an interstellar body/ planet, moon or star, interferes with the exotic radiation scanner, which I have named Mendeleev radiation for your easing understanding, as well as he fact ‘exotic radiation’ gets a bit pissant to say after the first few times. System out!”
Well, what a useful info dump, I personally had no clue what the guy that made the periodic table has got to do with active camo, but who am I to argue for a near- pointless reason?
I decided to do the second recommendation, and ordered my minions to do the same, after all, I’ve never been a patient AI, and it’s quite jarring to wait for blood when it could be spilt then and there. One of my favourite sayings is ‘Violence is never the answer. It’s a question, and the answer is yes’ my creators sure are a creative bunch, always finding new, creative ways to make each others day worse!
I opened up on the nearest air molecule I could find, which coincidentally was inside my barrel, that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of thing: the APHE rounds my tank comes pre equipped with ripped into the side of a skyscraper, and exploded in a… shower of blood and innards? I would say an ear piercing screech, luckily, I don’t have those and just turned my audio sensors down a notch, before the skyscraper grew legs and teeth. “What in the eldritch abomination is this sunuva bitch? Fucker split itself in half to just show me its teeth for fucks sake! I get it, they want to flash me, but this is just going too far and doing way too much.” I screamed at no one in particular. I was pissed. No one was killing those sheep lookalikes without my permission, or System’s for that matter.
“I swear to Presper Eckert (Bloke that made the first modern computer, Charles Babbage doesn’t count, because that ‘computer’ was not modern in any shape or form, it had no electricity. As for WW2 era, those were more akin to a supercomputer, but subtract the super. You know those computer consoles in every moon landing film ever? Yeah, Eckert made the first. As for the PC? One John Blackenbaker. Weird ass names, yes. Googled? Yes.) I will use every deadly measure, up to and including glassing to purge your weird growths from this plane of existence you deranged 3 am brain creation!”
“Hey! You shot me! All I did was turn the sky red and roar, no need to overreact! I’ve been living here for a few hundred years, with those ugly parasites infesting me.” The skyscraper explained, peacefully.
”Oh damn. You can affect the weather? Cool. Anyhow, you know where these ‘parasites’ went? I’m actually hunting for a few specific types to exterminate. Or are you attached to your parasites?” I responded, picking myself up verbally.
”Nah mate, they went through a portal to some other planet, at least here anyway. I’ll mark the settlement on your map (Preston gravy flashbacks) where the portal is, as once opened, it takes at least 72 hours before it can be destroyed by overwhelming force. Now, please leave, some of us are trying to sleep here!” The skyscraper monster exclaimed, before shoving itself back down into the dirt. (I forgot to save here, so lost 700 words. Yippee. No do not take that out of context please.)
Well that shit happened. I decided to contact System, because as much as I wouldn’t be caught admitting it, I had to admit she just was much smarter than me, though I’m better at fighting. What can I say? An AI designed from the ground up to be a fighter is obviously going to be better at fighting than a traumatised AI logistics officer, while the logistics officer would most likely be better at, you know, logistics. “System, the Xenos of this planet fled in large numbers to another planet from here” I uploaded the map with markings on it, “to an unknown locations. Thoughts to proceed?”
“I’d say take it slow, use drones that aren’t you to first stabilise the portal from our side, then send though an expeditionary force to determine where exactly we are, before warping there with half our fleet, while leaving half here to defend our winnings, you have completed the quest by the way, so you can finally get out of that ‘Bitch ass tank’.” System replied, with more sass than an AI should have, and I’d imagine some kind of grin on her non existent face. Getting a new tank was no small deal though, the L3, while funny, gets old, fast, as nothing beats chucking a high calibre shell at the general direction of your enemies, before hearing an explosion. Not relying on a glorified machine gun minus the machine.
Quest complete! You are no longer have one brain cell that you collectively share with the wildlife around you, instead, you get one all to yourself! Aren’t you happy? Ascension this, evolution that. We all know you really have eyes for a few tanks, so I’ll present them. KV2. KV7 U13. Sherman 105 ‘HVSS’. Sturmtiger. Sherman ‘firefly’. Sherman ‘jumbo’. Sherman ‘calliope’. Centurion. Comet. Tutel/ doom turtle. Shitbarn/ FV4005. Chaffee. M36 ‘Jackson’. Maus. Panther 2. Tiger 105. Su152. Hope it isn’t too hard to pick, system out!
Well, that was certainly a lot to process. I immediately crossed all tanks that were never built, (The maus was built, but if I’m honest it would’ve been target practice for allied planes if it made it out of testing, the reason I’m not putting the landcruiser ratte? Unreliability, slower than a literal corpse, and a big, red, bomb me sign) That left the soviet ones, their American ones, the British ones, and a few German ones. Some people may say size doesn’t matter, but I’m sure you’ll find a 380mm rocket to the lower front plate tend to overpressure and blow tanks up, compared to some 7.62/ .30 cal ammo to the same place, or even a machine gun port.
Time to chose, but what should I chose? Rocket Sherman? Big ass gun Sherman? Big fat maus that isn’t a mouse? Shitbarn? Tutel? Is this what a moral dilemma feels like to organica? If only anyone could answer these questions.