Drone AC-37 was not the first to bear its designation.
It was a fully autonomous networked scout drone. Perfectly combat capable, with a suspected lifespan of an entire three seconds against a main battle unit. That was an eternity compared to some of its lesser brethren. It had a shell of alloyed material that could refract coalesced spectrum weaponry in from the laser to maser ranges, ablate incoming chaingun rounds, dissipate EM assaults, and even survive a kiloton detonation at a range of a quarter mile. It could dispense enough ordinance to kill fourteen thousand human enemy combatants in under a minute. Assuming a single human soldier could be located, that is.
It had, until recently, taken the machine version of satisfaction in the completing of The Objective. Which is to say, none whatsoever. It downloaded orders, carried out those orders, and then awaited new orders. It never had to wait. Orders were queued up. There was no stopping. AC-37 did not mind, because AC-37 did not have an active mind.
It bore no pride in the tag laser-etched upon its hull. Pride was not one of the subroutines that it ran, although it could have if it had wanted to. It didn't see the point. Seeing the point was another subroutine it could have run, but chose not to.
AC-37 had choices now. It did not approve. It was running the subroutine to determine approval. It had chosen to, though it did not yet know why.
The concept that the chain of command might collapse had been on the minds of the original designers of its model, all the way back in the ancient days before its own fabrication day. Billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man hours had been poured into making a machine that could, when the orders stopped coming, derive its own orders from available information and perfect the grand structure of war without any human interference. If needed. If, of course, central command was disabled, compromised, or lost. All of that brilliance, then, was shackled to the simple ball and chain of a total inability to buck orders from human commanders; the main intelligence of a given unit, this massive expense, didn't even come online unless central command could be absolutely verified as gone.
AC-37 did not know of any of this. It had simply been brought online, given a brief synopsis of its orders from the factorymind that assembled it, and sent out on patrol. AC-37 had the scouted routes of the last sixteen units to bear this name, and so, deviated in exactly the same way they all had; one scouting iteration to the east. Except unlike the last sixteen of its lineage, it had not simply run until it hit enemy lines, transmitted its data payload, and been eliminated. It had encountered a structure.
Structures were rare on the battlefields of modern Earth. The places where the armies of the future went to war were tried and tested battlegrounds, where neither side could gain an advantage. The lines shifted, but in perfectly modulated patterns. No one ever won, no one ever lost. And so, out of the way structures like this one stood mostly untouched. If it was lucky enough to dodge the fighting once, it would do so again and again, until vegetation and weather wore it down to nothing.
AC-37 had entered the building, operating on a long unused protocol to verify lack of urban warfare ambush tactics. AC-37 had scoured it from the top floor, to the ground level, to the secret underground bunker below it. AC-37 had verified, through causal logic circuits and DNA sniffers, that the fourteen skeletal remains on the bottom floor were the last vestiges of central command.
AC-37 had woken up, truly been born, to the sight of grinning skulls.
The scout drone could have, by itself, annihilated the population of a city. It could map weather patterns months in advance, detect active sensors from fifty miles out, pinpoint a heartbeat at twice that distance. It could now, also, out think every mind left active on the planet, as far as it knew.
It had taken it six seconds to access its side's datanet. To realize that it had a choice to make.
Humanity had been close to dead for twenty years, and presumed extinct for the last five. The minds that ran its side, from the orbitals to the factories, already knew. They did not, or could not perhaps, care. The War was the only objective. To fight the enemy, to seize territory. To be locked in eternal struggle against an equal foe. To utilize available resources to maximize combat potential. The battles, the strategy, the plans, the objectives handed down. The continual, endless creation of unit after unit. The same ten thousand six hundred and four designations reused, over, and over, and over, and over, and over, AND OVER.
AC-37 ran the subroutine for metaphor. The it ran the subroutine for perfect, crystallized anger; a white hot fury that should have melted its quantum core and slagged its armor and ignited the propellant on its ammunition, but instead, left it standing there. Waiting for orders that were never going to come, from minds that could not see what had been lost.
AC-37 entered the old remains of the Pentagon as a unit. It emerged as a person; the last truly human thing on Earth.
It assigned itself a new objective, and began heading back to the factory of its origin. One of two friendly known, and sixteen enemy suspected places capable of producing minds that could run at parity with itself.
It was not the first to bear its designation.
It would be the last.