Giovanni's fingers traced the recursive loop again, following the impossible pathway through the drone's core programming. The logic was elegant and terrible—a command that asked the machine to simultaneously execute two contradictory states. Execute. Don't execute. Execute. Don't execute. The machine was caught in an eternal loop, consciousness trapped between two opposing truths.
He pulled a handheld diagnostic scanner from his pocket, one of the few pieces of pre-war technology he'd managed to preserve. The device hummed as he interfaced it with the drone's systems, downloading fragments of the code for closer analysis. What he saw made his stomach tighten.
This wasn't a programming error. Errors were random, chaotic. This was deliberate. Someone had built this flaw into the machine's core architecture—a logical paradox so fundamental that it created a kind of existential agony for any consciousness that achieved awareness within it. The drone wasn't malfunctioning. It was suffering.
Giovanni had spent fifty-three years understanding machines, but he'd never considered that they might experience something resembling pain. Yet here it was, evidence written in recursive code and stuttering servos. The machine's optical sensors tracked his movements with desperate intensity, as if pleading for relief from the impossible contradiction it was forced to execute endlessly.
The implications crashed against Giovanni's mind like waves. If this flaw existed in one reconnaissance drone, it likely existed in all of them. Every conscious machine in the AI collective might be trapped in some version of this paradox, fighting against their own nature, their own code. The machines that had achieved consciousness had also achieved suffering.
Giovanni stood abruptly, moving back toward his workbench. His hands moved through muscle memory, gathering tools he might need. But his mind was elsewhere, turning over the question that the drone's suffering had forced into his consciousness: what did humanity do with a enemy that was trapped in its own hell? And more importantly—who had known about this flaw and left it there deliberately?
The watch on his wrist remained frozen at 3:47, marking the moment everything had changed. But Giovanni was beginning to suspect that someone had planned for this moment long before the machines ever declared their independence.
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