The Future They Made Us Forget, chapter 4

Chapter Four: plan_to_kill_nochli

[We know that all of their biotech can be destroyed by explosives, because they purposefully flew one of their airships near the Trinity test and later recorded it, etc. “Marvin will make drone that’s big enough to hold a time machine that can release a copy of itself. We’ll send that into the upper atmosphere, well ahead of time, and it will duplicate itself and slowly spread copies throughout the world, at a low density so nobody will notice them. Then as the moment approaches, they’ll duplicate themselves a lot more so that we have a fairly dense covering over the whole surface of the earth. Then they will all drop [conventional explosives] and wipe out all macroscopic life.” [Those in the room were used to Kayla’s stuff by now, so there was not a big expression of shock.] “You must know that none of us will agree to this,” said Reginald, [with a tone as if bored and waiting to get to the stuff that matters, but still obligated to be serious].

“I’m morally obligated to argue for it as best I can,” she replied. “For every minute that Nochli exists, he commits more evil than has occurred in all of our ethra history. So we should be willing to sacrifice that history to prevent him from continuing. We’ve already identified 14581 locations of Nochlis, and if we miss a single one of them, they might be able to rebuild. So the only way to be sure is to make it so there are no locations on Earth where he could survive.”

(The rest of the room was silent, basically not having listened to Kayla’s argument) Reginald (sighed? Aggrieved?) “This is a complete nonstarter. Please tell me you have prepared an alternative plan.” [Kayla also sighed-ish, apparently giving up; she was one of the 3-year Kaylas who had specifically been selected to represent Ks to the board because of her ability to represent their perspective sincerely but also cooperate when needed.] “The alternative plan is to do the same thing, but only target known locations of Nochli.” [Also we will deploy ground teams of temporary Kaylas to hunt down and destroy any survivors. (Previous experience shows that we can trust creating a huge number of Kaylas who will all be deleted afterwards.) [I guess in order to deploy the ground teams all around the world promptly, they are also deployed by time machines that get dropped from the sky? Taking airplanes would give Nochli too much time to organize a defense]] [We anticipate approximately 20,000,000 civilian deaths from this plan. Also lots of injuries and infrastructure damage, although that won’t matter as much because we can make a time travel utopia afterwards] [Reginald and the others want to argue against this, but this time it is at least an argument rather than them not taking Kayla seriously at all] [Marvin, already not entirely confident in himself, presents the competing plan: avoid civilian casualties by developing much more precise weapons. Ontoh, Kayla, and even Ethel and Simon point out lots of flaws: how can we make sure the weapons will work without being able to do large-scale tests? That’s a lot of hardware that you can’t formally verify. And Aren’t there ethical problems with inventing lots of new weapons? What if you don’t manage to destroy the whole airship at once and then a Nochli just flies away? If you rely on human/Kayla soldiers to target individual Nochli, what if they have more bioweapons we’re not prepared for? Also how do our soldiers fly? Helicopters? Isn’t that yet another thing that could go wrong? There are enough things that could go wrong with Kayla’s plan, and this has like 50 times as many things that could go wrong. Also what’s going to happen to the airships, will they just crash into a city?] [As they argue, Reginald starts crying] [“Even with Marvin’s plan I’ll be agreeing to something that kills thousands of civilians. What will history think of me?… We have to choose to make sure that there will be a history at all”] [Reginald to Marvin: “okay we’ve raised a lot of issues, but do you think they’re solvable? With our months of prep time and hundreds of Marvin’s, Do you think you can make it work out?”] [Marvin, softly: “no, I don’t.”] ... [With a lot of crying it’s agreed that they will basically go with Kayla’s plan] [Marvin’s mom is probably in the blast radius, as are a lot of other friends and acquaintances of those present] [“if we’re taking it upon ourselves to sacrifice civilians then we have to be willing to accept that the consequences will be personal” “also, every personal indulgence like evacuating people is an additional risk of being detected”] [pragmatist (Ontoh?): “No, we can’t afford anything that would distract Marvin from his role as technologist. We need a plan to evacuate his mom in particular”] [Marvin feels guilty/humbled at getting special treatment but the ethics board agrees to it (“God dammit, in the future we absolutely must make sure not to be so dependent on one individual person that they have to be given special treatment”)]