Good story. I don’t get it, but I suppose I’ll need to read it a few times.
It is a near-future story from a “furries” sci-fi anthology.
In the story, an intelligent AI is sent to the front in our war against Jihadis. It is ostensibly there to collect stories of the children and try to understand their personalities and beliefs.
That information may be used to gauge the psychology of the population, measure the effectiveness of propaganda, the level of indoctrination of the children.
The AI has two main goals: value life and protect freedom. It can’t interfere with the invasion, but it shows up and interviews the children to learn about them while the adults fight.
And when it has the chance, it TRIES to lead a group of children to safety from the invading forces. Even as the secondary AI it has spawned using the words of the children as programming becomes a violent, Jew-hating creature.
One of the girls sees a boy become a suicide bomber and refuses to stay safely hidden, she decides to try to kill an American or American robot by dropping a rock. She is willing to die and sacrifice her friends by attacking. The AI in bird form flies up and directs the fire, seeking to have it kill only that girl if possible.
All girls on the rooftop die.
He shows this to his creation AI. He hates it for the worship of violence, Jew-hatred and hatred of Americans it spews because of what it learned from the kids. But he chooses to try to show it the results of that oppressive mentality instead, dead children, endless war because the only freedom they accept is submission to Islam.
And he flies home to his creators. He recognizes that the AI programmed by the input from the kids can be used as propaganda in the war, but he still TRIED to save life and not interfere in our fight for freedom.