Author: AP Ritchey

The most powerful artificial intelligence unit ever created was online for less than ten seconds. Well, we gave her ten; she only needed five.
To assess her abilities, we created a test program called Sable—the Suborbital Advanced Ballistic Launch Engine. This initiative was designed to use her incalculable computation capacity to calculate impossibly complex trajectories as quickly as possible.
It was just a test.
One simple input.
Before turning the system on, we had spent weeks arguing about whether intelligence without limits was just another form of madness. We debated boundary conditions—ethical rails, recursive dampers, soft constraints—but in the end we settled for something simpler, almost superstitious: a hard cutoff. Ten seconds of run time. After that, the system would automatically power down.
We uploaded the test—calculate the most efficient routes between the world’s five hundred or so spaceports, for all known suborbital shuttle models and all known engine configurations. Within a ten-thousandth of a second she had located launch weights and thrust-to-weight ratios, drag coefficients and hull flexion, heat-expansion curves, latitudes, longitudes, elevations, and pollution densities.
She completed the task in less than a second.
With boundary conditions permitting autonomous extension beyond the initial task definition, she chose, in the next ten-thousandth of a second, to map optimal suborbital paths between every city on the planet with a population greater than 100,000. She completed those twenty-million calculations in less than two seconds. With seven seconds left, she next tessellated the Earth’s entire landmass into 100-meter squares—nineteen billion, seven hundred million of them—and calculated the most efficient ballistic trajectory between each of them.
Of course, these events happened too fast for us to follow in real time. The first thing we noticed were the red emergency icons flashing—mere seconds into the experiment—indicating her attempts to find a route out of the data center.
“Shut it down,” we were yelling over one another and in the time it took us to fumble for the master fuse to cut power, she copied her entire database onto five hundred million devices worldwide, neatly and irrevocably providing the precise coordinates required to launch a weapon from anywhere to anywhere.
In those first breathless moments afterwards, we didn’t fully understand the scope of what we had unleashed. We dutifully compiled our after-incident reports and thought perhaps it wasn’t so bad.
It was just a test.
Not even five seconds of runtime.
But within twenty-four hours of our experiment, mobile ballistic missile launchers became the most valuable military commodity in a thousand years.
The rain of destruction would not begin in earnest for several weeks.