Mal Goes to War

Mal Goes to War is an interesting and darkly comedic look at artificial intelligence (AI), war, and what it means to be human. Told from the perspective of a mostly dispassionate “free AI” called Mal (short for Malware), we’re thrust into the middle of a war between two factions: the hyper-modified Federals and the Humanists, who reject cybernetic enhancements.

Not caring much for either side of the “monkeys” fighting each other, Mal looks on with a kind of detached amusement until, while inhabiting the body of a recently deceased human cyborg mercenary, he is cut off from “infospace” (basically the next generation internet) so he can no longer easily reach safety. The merc was protecting a girl, Kayleigh, who looks around five but is reality around eighteen thanks to gene modifications designed to prolong her lifespan.

Mal isn’t entirely cut off – he can jump between any machine capable of holding and running his software, including the hardware inside augmented human heads. Depending on the level of augmentation, Mal can puppet an entire person or just jack into their senses and communicate with them. He can also take over non-human hardware as well, like drones and smart weapons and the like.

With no allegiance to either side of the battle, Mal does whatever he needs to do at first to find his way back to safety of the infospace, but along the way grows a bit of a conscience and an attachment to Kayleigh and to a lesser extent, the host body he is riding.

The viewpoint of an AI with no particular dog in the fight, so to speak, gives the whole thing an interesting perspective. As an AI, everything he knows he has learned in the three years he’s been operational, so mostly from TV shows and movies and whatever else he can pick up, which makes for some humorous interactions when he tries to pass himself off as human.

The future the story paints for humankind is rather bleak, with atrocities being committed in the name of winning and survival. The humanists, for example, will burn anyone with an augmentation “just in case” to stop the spread which involves chucking them into “burn pits”. Dead or alive, children or adults, so pretty grim stuff.

Nothing too tech-heavy either, considering the subject matter. While there’s a little on ramping up clock-speeds to essentially slow down subjective time, electronic handshakes when establishing connections and the like, for the most part that’s about as heavy as a lot of the story gets, so you don’t need to worry about needing to be a geek to understand what is going on.

Even some of the parts where Mal is fighting off hacking attempts (or indeed engaging in them) is often told with a simulated environment, so when he is under attack, for example, his mind creates a scenario of a medieval castle that’s under attack and he’s fighting off hordes of monsters.

The pacing of the overall story was good, with no particular area dragging or getting bogged down. I did find the ending rather abrupt though. Given how much lead up and detail we had got to get us to that point, it felt incongruous to the rest of the story. I felt a little cheated out of details I thought we deserved to get. The story wraps up though, it’s just more how the author went about it that bothered me.

The narration by John Pirhalla was excellent and engaging, and the production too was excellent. Some not-overused effects are used when Mal is talking electronically to others, like when talking to the mind of his host or to other AIs, like phone-quality audio which I think helped keep things straight.

So overall, Mal Goes to War is a thought-provoking sci-fi with a heavy dose of dark humour. An entertaining, if at times unsettling, exploration of war through the eyes of an AI who never wanted to be part of it.

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