michael tinker pearce

This short story was the author's first published work of fiction in 1991. It has been presented in its original form with minimal editing.

A young soldier must work with an alien. Not an extraterrestrial, but one of our own making; an Autonomous Combat Vehicle with such sophisticated AI and Expert Systems that it blurs the line between machine intelligence and sentience. It is powerful, self-teaching, self-directed and in the absence of specific orders it makes its own decisions… But when it comes down to life and death, which of them is really the killing machine?

Approx. 3300 words

Contains strong language and violence