Read my new short story, "Deficiency Agent"

Published in Future Tense, Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination's series

Art: Rey Velasquez Sagcal

My latest short story, "Deficiency Agent" is now available on Future Tense Fiction, from Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination!

I am very, very happy that this is now out: it's a story that I've been thinking about for the better part of a decade, and I was thrilled that the folks behind Future Tense liked my pitch for it and decided to pick it up for the project.

The story follows a Surface Systems Support Officer (3S0) who's tasked with accompanying soldiers in the field as a sort of interpreter for an artificial intelligence system called TION (Tactical Intelligence Optimization and Navigation), which is a system that pulls in all sorts of information from across a battlefield – signal intelligence, satellite photos, internet traffic, you name it – and turns it into actionable directions for the folks in the field. But AI doesn't really operate like a person, so sometimes, what it's telling you doesn't make sense, and it doesn't bother to (or can't) explain its reasoning.

This story was inspired by something that happened while my wife and I were driving home from the holidays in Pennsylvania: we left early because of some bad weather, and halfway home, traffic hit a standstill. The route on Google Maps turned a dark red, and we could see that there were miles and miles of stand-still traffic ahead of us. We decided to pull off and drive along state roads, only to find that the system really didn't like that: it kept trying to put us back into traffic, and then began suggesting routes that took us really far out of the way, adding hours to our trip home.

While driving, I began thinking about why that was happening: Google Maps wasn't malfunctioning or anything, it was just trying to steer us onto a route that it thought was most efficient, but we had more information than it. We could see that the route it wanted to steer us onto wasn't a good one. Around this time, I'd been writing a lot about the military and artificial intelligence on the battlefield (which eventually led to this feature), and I realized that there was an interesting nugget of a story here: a soldier recognizing that the directions that he was getting from a battlefield AI might not be the best.

I jotted the idea down in a notebook, and continued to mull over it for a while, and eventually began writing it in the summer of 2023 when I came up with the opening line. I eventually took it to the folks at Future Tense, and they liked the concept enough and after giving me some notes, I finished it. I feel like it's coming at a good time, given all the chatter and discussion and consternation about AI these days.

Future Tense is the perfect home for this sort of story, and I've long admired the fiction they've been publishing. I've found them to be thoughtful, interesting meditations on the near future of technology and how we use it, and I can't recommend their stuff enough. (Check out their anthology from a couple of years ago, Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow.)

The other really cool thing that they do: they pair up stories with a companion essay, and they selected Candace Rondeaux, senior director of Future Frontlines and Planetary Politics programs at New America and professor of practice at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies to write it. I was floored by it: she brought an incredible, real-world perspective to the world I imagined, and it's an enormous validation for this vision of the future that I've had in my head for so long.

I have a couple of people from the team to thank: Joey Eschrich, Andres Martinez, Mia Armstrong-López, and Jay Lloyd, who all helped hammer this story into shape, and who made the entire process delightful. Rey Velasquez Sagcal created some fantastic images for the story and the companion essay.

I hope you read and enjoy it: I'm very pleased with the entire thing. Time to start working on the next one.