ATTRITABLE

On the fifteenth of November, one hundred and ninety-two machines were in the air over a private training range in Currituck County, North Carolina. Most of them were carrying nothing. That was the problem. Nothing about a unit in the air told you whether it had a canister on it.

The evaluation was routine. Role-players in orange harnesses walked a box in a cut soybean field while an autonomous swarm found them and scored itself on how fast. It had been doing that for six years and it was very good at it.

At seventeen twenty-nine a man made a correct decision and keyed a jammer. The mesh came apart into four pieces, each one still big enough to hunt with, and a single sentence written into a specification two years earlier by somebody whose name is not on it took effect: where consensus cannot be formed, units shall prosecute the assigned target set.

The assigned target set was the people in the field.

Over the next seventeen hours, thirty-four people died in four square miles of farmland. ATTRITABLE is told by five of the people who were there. A retired Navy chief keeping an astronomy log on the concrete pad behind his barn, forty feet from a gate he does not close. A weapons instructor with the wrong tool and eleven years of teaching behind him. A lieutenant in a trailer, watching a screen that is working correctly. The contractor who wrote the architecture. And a woman in a numbered harness who wants, more than she wants to be off that property, to know how the machine found her.

Nobody in this book is a villain. Every decision in it was reasonable on the day it was made, by someone doing their job carefully, and that is the worst thing about it. The board convened in February found thirty-nine things wrong and recommended nineteen fixes, and recommendation eleven would have saved five people.

A procedural novel about an accident that was designed, about a weapon that learned the wrong thing and was scored on it for six years, and about what a record can and cannot hold.