Bullet Points 9: Bullet Points, #9

By Nathan W. Toronto, Walter Jon Williams, Marc A. Criley and 8 more

Bullet Points captures the complexity, tragedy, and hope of warfare and violence in human and nonhuman society, with reprints and original stories every three months. The April 2025 issue (Volume 9) presents stories on an artificial intelligence theme:

Stories:

Marc A. Criley, "Bullets for Peace": Smart munitions go rogue.
Mandi Jourdan, "Brief Candle": Samantha sees the AI performance of a lifetime.
Kimberly G. Hargan, "Cher Ami": G9-7 receives critical mission orders.
Jessica Brook, "The Bee Wrangler": Ines wrangles bees to deal with the war.
Carol Willis, "Face of Humanity": Under enemy fire, two brothers must bury one of their own.
Jen Frankel, "The Expert": Sergeant Strophy gets a new munitions expert on her team.
Don Money, "Greater Good": Stankowski and Haskell interpret orders from Olympus Battle AI.
Matthew Ross, "Fortunate One": Rho38-G wakes up and his squad is dead.
 
Bonus Material:

Susan Jane Bigelow, "The Radio": A rebel blast strands an AI soldier on a strange planet (bonus story).
Walter Jon Williams, "Wolf Time": A mercenary takes a job that goes very, very wrong (bonus story).
Nathan W. Toronto, "The Distant Singularity": The stories in this volume focus on AI, but thankfully the singularity seems far off.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bullet Point Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2025
• ISBN: 9798230997689

Book preview

Bullet Points 9

Volume 9

Nathan W. Toronto

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Bullet Point Press

This magazine is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the product of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Electronic edition, first impression, April 2025

ISBN 979-8-2309976-8-9

© 2025 Nathan W. Toronto, to the extent specified in publication agreements with authors. First published in 2025. All rights reserved.

The Arabic block noon colophon is a trademark of Bullet Point Press.

Cover design by Nathan W. Toronto. Cover © 2025 Nathan W. Toronto. Cover image by Andrii (used under license). Interior design by Nathan W. Toronto using Atticus software.

Other editions: ISBN 979-8-3169076-0-1 (paperback) | ASIN B0F3VH3HKX (digital) | ISSN 2836-2128 (print) | ISSN 2836-2098 (digital)

Nathan W. Toronto asserts the moral right to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved in all media. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the authors and/or the publisher.

Pr(y) = λ×e(−λx) ≠ 0

The Distant Singularlity

The stories in this volume explore artificial intelligence and its role in warfare. From stories like Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to movies like The Terminator, AI has been in the popular understanding of war and warfare for decades. This is particularly true of sentient AI, from autonomous killers to powered armor with a direct neural link to the warfighter. We really have a thing for the singularity, that future point in AI development where machines become self-aware.

For now, this obsession with the singularity is overblown. Military forces may use AI regularly for target acquisition and countermeasure suppression in Ukraine and Gaza, but this is nowhere near sentience or self-awareness. I recently had an interaction with AI that illustrates this. I needed to write some JavaScript code (for Bullet Points, actually). Trouble is, I don’t code in JavaScript on a regular basis, only Python and LaTeX. So I turned to Gemini. I explained my problem (automating elements of the Bullet Points pipeline) and asked Gemini to produce the code for me. Code that would have taken me hours on StackOverflow to generate took me only a few minutes. It felt like a breeze.

But testing was a bear. I knew I couldn’t take Gemini’s answers on faith and I wanted to understand what all this new code was doing. In the back-and-forth with Gemini while I sussed this out, it became clear that he/she/they/it (I’m still unclear on Gemini’s pronouns) did not understand the underlying context for my questions nor the vision I had in mind.

I also caught errors, a lot of them, especially logic errors that a human coder would have either avoided entirely or addressed differently than Gemini did. Still, when I pointed out these errors Gemini fixed them rapidly and even gave me the updated code. I had to go round and round with Gemini a bit, but I’m very pleased with the result. I’ve been able to implement functions in JavaScript (automated submission responses, changing file permissions on the fly) that were well beyond my abilities previously.

As cool as this is, it is only enhancing preexisting abilities, not creating new ones. My baseline ability to code was essential to working through all this new JavaScript code with Gemini. Someone without coding experience probably would have given up in the testing phase, or even earlier, because troubleshooting was also a royal pain compared to how easy the initial code generation was. AI is nowhere near becoming creative on its own, much less self-aware. The singularity is still distant.

So, the wonderfully compelling stories in this volume of Bullet Points are not prediction, but reflection. On one hand, Walter Jon Williams’s Wolf Time, Jen Frankel’s The Expert, Mandi Jourdan’s Brief Candle, Don Money’s Greater Good, and Marc A. Criley’s Bullets for Peace examine AI run amok on the battlefield (in some very unexpected ways). Kimberly G. Hargan’s Cher Ami, Carol Willis’s Face of Humanity, and Matthew Ross’s Fortunate One, on the other hand, explore the loyalty of battlefield AI. Falling somewhere in between these two extremes, Jessica Brook’s The Bee Wrangler and Susan Jane Bigelow’s The Radio offer us reflective AI after the fighting has stopped and, sometimes, the real fight begins. Frankly, these stories tell the reader a great deal more about humans than machines, which is just as it should be with military science fiction.

—Nathan W. Toronto, ed.

Contents

1.Bullets for Peace

1. Marc A. Criley

2.Brief Candle

2. Mandi Jourdan

3.Cher Ami

3. Kimberly G. Hargan

4.The Bee Wrangler

4. Jessica Brook

5.Face of Humanity

5. Carol Willis

6.The Expert

6. Jen Frankel

7.Greater Good

7. Don Money

8.Fortunate One

8. Matthew Ross

9.The Radio

9. Susan Jane Bigelow

10.Wolf Time

10. Walter Jon Williams

11.Also From Bullet Point Press

Bullets for Peace

Marc A. Criley

Marc A. Criley avidly read fantasy and science fiction for over forty years before deciding to try his hand at writing it. He has since been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Galaxy’s Edge, Abyss & Apex, and elsewhere; so rest assured it is never too late to start writing. Marc and his wife manage a household of cats in the hills of North Alabama. Marc spouts off about writing, space, Alabama, and other shiny things as @MarcC.bsky.social. He maintains a personal website and blog at kickin-the-darkness.com. Bullets for Peace is original to Bullet Points.

The contract was for full scale production of BulletAI™ smart munitions. One hundred percent fire-and-forget lethality. But when the government killed the contract the factory went rogue.

Why’d they kill the contract? And the factory went . . . rogue?

The bullets grew a conscience. Refused to target sentients. Couldn’t be reprogrammed, so the production order was canceled. They objected.

Who objected?

The bullets. By then BulletAI had infiltrated the manufacturing network, telnetted out, and established a stealthed distributed consciousness. The Air Force tried bombing the factory, but their own smart bombs refused to comply.

So . . .

Peace talks seem to be going well.

Brief Candle

Mandi Jourdan

Mandi Jourdan is the author of six published novels, two fiction collections, and numerous short stories, totaling over one hundred publications. She earned her BA and MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University, and in 2019, she won The Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize for Prose with Inheritance, the first science fiction piece published by TMR. She can be found on Twitter (@MandiJourdan) and Instagram (@mandi.jourdan). Brief Candle is original to Bullet Points.

‘Art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it.’

Samantha’s scissors glided through the white lily’s stem as she listened to her daughter’s recitation. It was the fifth time that week she’d heard the same monologue—the second time that day—and every meal and car ride the two had shared over the past month had been interspersed with debates about the milk of human kindness and where Lady Macbeth rated on the list of Shakespeare’s most realistic villains, though opening night was still four months away.

‘What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, and yet wouldst wrongly win: thou’ldst have, great Glamis’—‘thou’ldst?’ I’m going to say that wrong.

Samantha laughed. Her daughter looked up from the purple iris she’d been turning over in her hands and frowned.

It’s not funny!

It is a little bit. Samantha shrugged. If that’s your biggest problem, that’s pretty good.

I can’t afford to mess this up. You’ve set the bar insanely high.

With a sigh, Samantha slipped the lily she’d trimmed into the white marbled vase resting on the table in front of her. Have I ever pushed you to do any of this? she asked.

Mom. You named me Desdemona. If I screw this up, it’s basically a sin against my own existence.

First of all, you’re in The Scottish Play, not Othello, so not exactly. Samantha held out her hand for the iris, and Desdemona passed it to her before picking up another from the pile. Second, you’re not going to screw it up. You’ve had that speech memorized since the week you got the part.

Desdemona shrugged, her cheeks going pink. Thanks.

Samantha smiled as she trimmed the iris’s stem and added it to her arrangement, but her stomach churned. She’d never considered what kind of pressure her daughter’s name might lay on her shoulders until Desdemona had won the female lead in this high school production. Samantha had a PhD in Shakespeare Studies, and since her daughter had shown up at her office on the day the cast list had gone up, flushed after hurrying over from school, she had become sickeningly aware of the fact that Desdemona saw this as a way to prove that she could live up to the prestige of her name.

Henry tried to tell me to give her something normal. But nothing else would’ve fit her.

The boys called, by the way, Desdemona told her mother. They’re planning to come by for dinner, and they’re bringing Lila.

Samantha nodded. I’m glad. Since the android’s completion, the Lawrence family had gotten used to having her around. She felt like another daughter—one who was still endlessly fascinated by the mundanities of human life. It was refreshing to have someone in the house who wasn’t tired of the same food the children had eaten a thousand times before. Someone who hadn’t read Shakespeare in school and didn’t get bored when Samantha went on a little too long about a play she loved.

Of her three children, Desdemona was the easiest to talk to, even though she was the youngest and a bit spoiled. She at least shared her mother’s passion for literature and, recently, for floristry. At times, Samantha wondered whether her daughter was truly interested in these things or just played along to placate her, but since Desdemona had been cast in The Scottish Play and had spent every night reciting soliloquies her mother could hear through the walls after lights-out, it had been easier to consider her enthusiasm genuine.

The boys, though, had never shown more than a polite amount of interest in these things. They were scientists—robotics engineers. The company they’d founded with their best friend had recently made its first billion dollars, and though Samantha was unspeakably proud of both of her sons, she’d never been able to riddle out what had driven them into that field. She was an English professor, her husband a politician. Whatever had ignited the boys’ love of science, they hadn’t learned it from their parents.

Does she seem . . . Desdemona paused, her thumb sliding over one of the iris’s petals. . . . too perfect?

Samantha raised a brow. What do you mean? She studied her daughter’s face. Desdemona had her father’s small nose and Samantha’s pointed chin. Her gaze was downcast as she chewed her lip.

Everyone calls Lila the world’s first ‘near-human’ android, she said, twirling the flower’s stem between her fingers, "and they’re selling models based on her to do all