The attack came in broad daylight. Dozens out of the millions of Martians protectively circling the PIST offices were wounded during the landing of attack helicopters. Hundreds were trampled. One pilot, who at his trial was declared legally insane, seemed to delight in chasing after protestors with the chopper blades and continued doing so long after a landing area had been cleared. Only a bike rack prevented him from killing a family of four.
Three hundred men exited the aircraft, dressed all alike in black from head to toe, launching tear gas canisters and firing rubber bullets into the crowd. Six Martians later lost eyes. In a matter of seconds, the crowd dispersed. Before they could enter the building, Scott Gibbeck emerged with his hands held over his head.
“Let everyone go! I surrender!” he said.
Three hundred men turned their rifles on him and perhaps they would have shot except for their confusion as to what happened next.
A teenager with an improbably lustrous moustache, wearing a flowing white robe -ordered from a custom costume shop only a few days ago- sprinted from the PIST offices and stood in front of Scott Gibbeck holding a driftwood staff high overhead.
Ruthless assassins had been prepared to kill a President, yet it took them precious seconds to decide if their orders included teenage wizards. With the smoke of the tear gas canisters and the light of the sun striking him heroically, fully two-third of the witnesses heard him say something about people not being allowed to pass.
Recordings show him saying only a single word. Albeit with an incredibly rich British accent.
“Minerva!”
WakeWords were a relatively new concept to the Pre-Forum world. However, by the time of the assault on the PIST offices they had been used commercially for over a decade. The technology was well-developed and quite practical by the time it was incorporated into Minerva. As mentioned previously, these WakeWords were usually tied to Digital Assistants who fulfilled such mundane tasks as giving the time of the day or the weather forecast. Later, WakeWords would be tied to all manner of emergency response services. Here, the full power of such WakeWords was realized when Alberto Ramirez summoned Minerva as if casting a spell.
Awakened by the sound of her name, Minerva searched for targets. Specifically, targets that the PIST team had spent frantic weeks training Minerva to recognize: images of people pointing guns at other people. Minerva identified two-hundred and eighty four such targets.
Deep in the belly of the PIST offices, a few developers traced additional targets that had been missed with a simple stylus. An interface that remains to this day, whose power is given to those elected to maintain vigil of the Minerva system.
Thus having identified targets, Minerva turned her powers of recognition to their faces. Specifically, Minerva created a map of where their eyes were located in three-dimensional space.
Several hundred cheap, commercially available drones, launched from the roof of the PIST building. A relatively inexpensive turret made out of remote control car motors had been rigged to the bottom of each drone. Each was armed with a Class IV blue light laser.
Later, at the Congressional Hearings, Alberto Ramirez was asked by a surprisingly laser-aware politician why he had not used green instead of blue lasers. The effects of a green laser would likely have only been temporary. Indeed, only green lasers were ever used in subsequent versions of Minerva.
“Anyone attacking PIST didn’t deserve anything temporary,” replied Alberto Ramirez.
Given the mood of the nation, and that he was only fifteen by that time, his violation of the Geneva convention -for having intentionally made a weapon to cause blindness- was quietly overlooked.
In less than five seconds from the time of Alberto Ramirez’s spoken command, blue lasers flashed from the drones and gently strobed across the eyes of the assault team. Those that had failed the first pass took note of the proximity beam to the eyes and quickly adjusted to strike on the second pass. The light was illuminated in places by tear gas.
In six seconds, three-hundred of the world’s deadliest killers were struck permanently blind.
When the crowd slowly understood that the men who had come to attack them could no longer see, they were quickly and sometimes violently apprehended.
A small cabal of generals pushed for an airstrike. Their orders were refused only moments before they were arrested. Everyone with a Forum account, which by that time was almost everyone, saw an email with instructions on how to build their own version of Minerva and integrate it with software built by the PIST team.
In five years after the attack on the PIST offices, the nation was blanketed in a protective suit of violence that could be summoned with a simple word.
Additional note: this is not how I think Minerva would realistically work on first implementation. Specifically drones and aiming would come later. You’d start with what I call wake word 9-11. Then you’d have someone manually aim the green laser remotely. Green lasers are used in non lethal self defense today. You’d also add pepper spray and a taser. Machine learning bit would come later as well.
of note: I will do one more breakout after this one, then onto essays and will do a major revision of this in a few months. Felt I owed the original draft to anyone who had been reading along already. Do see some of the simplistic good/evil narrative bit and definitely drifted a bit far into my own personal gripes/amusement. Going to refocus this on the ideas as I really need a normal person to be able to read it and not bounce off.