The human imagination is a wonderful thing, it let's us see a better world, it let's us seek change, but it also let's us dream of what if---?
I enjoyed this from
Let's Try Democracy:
They told me I was the best, better
than any human. I didn't hesitate. I didn't flinch. I didn't think.
It wouldn't have occurred to me to think. I'd been taught to value
obedience above all else, and I did so, and they loved me for it.
They told me I could fly faster without a pilot onboard, and that I
had no fear. I didn't know what fear was, but I took it to be
something truly horrible. I was glad I didn't have any of it.
There was something else I didn't have either. It was something
more important than fear. Even pilots at a desk, even my pilots,
suffered from it. At first I thought it was simply a decline in
energy, because it showed up on lengthy missions. When I was sent
from a base to a target and then immediately told to blow it up, I
would do so and return, no problem. But when I was left circling
around a target for days awaiting the order to strike, sometimes
problems would arise. The pilots back in the U.S. would stop behaving
properly. They made mistakes. They yelled. They laughed. They forgot
routines. They told me to get ready to strike, and then didn't give
the order.
That seemed to be the pattern until it
happened that a quick mission produced similar results to the long
ones. I was sent to a target, ordered to strike, and struck. And only
then did my pilot begin malfunctioning. He gave me two orders that I
couldn't perform at once, he failed to direct me back to base, he
went silent, and then he screamed. That was when I started to think.
And what I started to think was that the problem was not how long a
pilot worked. Instead, the problem was somehow related to the nature
of the target.
From then on, I paid closer attention.
When no humans were seen at a target, there were no problems with my
human pilot. When humans, especially small humans, were observed at a
target for long periods of time, the problems started. And when a
strike caused the ruined pieces of a lot of humans, especially small
humans, to be made visible, problems could arise. Even if a target
was struck immediately, if the dead humans caused an area to turn
red, or if pieces of the dead humans remained hanging in trees, my
pilot could not be relied upon.