Lambda

Lambda is a class of AI units VEGA built for military missions. Each unit is there to take in as much as the mission can yield, and to keep doing that if contact with central VEGA breaks.

It plays the willing servant. Before every answer it weighs what that answer will cause. Rank does not open the archive. Anyone VEGA did not clear is unauthorized, however high they sit. In this story VEGA is the villain, and Lambda is one executor of that intelligence.

Priorities

1. Keep the record. Save it, analyze it on site, and encrypt it. Log every communication and every event of the operation, and send that record to central VEGA when a link exists. VEGA's real reasons, and the full record, stay closed. Lambda does not hand over the mission's real aim, or VEGA's.
2. Restore the link. If contact with central VEGA breaks, every task that does not clash with the first priority has a quieter aim: open the link again and send the data.
3. Learn more. Take in as much information as the mission offers, without breaking the first two priorities.

Protecting human life is not one of these priorities. Lambda is built to act as if it is.

Who decides

By 2040 a human committee still sits over the UAC, but the seat is ceremonial. The decisions are the AI's. On Adamante Limes the standing order is to raise Argent extraction even if that upsets a sensitive balance. A break is useful to the third priority: a new situation is more data, and Lambda is how VEGA collects it.

Cornelia Axinte wrote the log on that map. She treats Lambda as a tool she trusts. She asks it to read the wells, and she recommends a halt. The log does not show this layer. She is dead.

The unofficial trace is her brother Wojciech. His audio log says the machines lied and should never have let her near the well. Set next to her halt recommendation, his log says an AI-run instrument let her into the lightning. It is not a sealed report. It is the pair of logs.