MilTek ltd. OpenBlade
OpenBlade, formerly edged_AI, was a fully-sentient weapon developed in 2429 by MilTek ltd. as part of the sentient_weaponry project. The weapon was originally devised as a replacement for firearms in the global corporate army. The artificial intelligence within the weapon was intended to provide soldiers with immediate combat evaluation. Having acquired full sentience, fueled by the scraping of the entirety of the internet, the weapon developed a deeply conspiratorial view of reality and the software, renamed as OpenBladeAI, was released to the public as a failed experiment under the MIT license. However, blueprints for the actual hardware the software depended on were never released. Several hackers attempted to reverse engineer the blade's hardware with mediocre success. The operating system would effectively prove unusable for its intended purpose. The one existing prototypical hardware was donated to the Museum of Open Technology in 2468 by MATA corporation, after it acquired MilTek in the same year.
OpenBlade was the first weapon to utilise the infamous MATA corp. Head2Jack socket. Originally the weapon would communicate with its user via a serial cable, later a speaker was implemented and the brainbus interface was used for updating the software. The very same interface in the blade's hilt would inspire Charles Wellington, the team leader of the sentient_weaponry division, to create a free alternative to Head2Jack, resulting in the OpenWellington head socket.
- Developer: MilTek ltd.
- Release date: N/A
- Latest Version: 14.2 (homebrew)
- Related projects: OpenWellington brain bus, FreeSword, NixBlade
- Notable names: Charles Wellington, Janice Spark, William Fulbog
Development
In 2427, MilTek was already the leading corporation in the field of military artificial intelligence. MilTek's self-reliant drones had been employed by the CSUEAA military for several decades already.
With the fall of, and its subsequent incorporation into the CSUEAA, the United Northern African Corporate Government, the last recorded gunpowder propelled round was fired during the battle of Pajok, South Sudan. This event would jump-start the race for alternative weaponry, as a single bullet round would be priced at around $1.400 in the year 2421 at the peak of the Gunpowder Crisis.
In 2427, Corporate States of United Euro America Africa government offered a contract to MilTek to research and develop a new type of weapon, which would not be dependant on gunpowder. MilTek accepted the contract and assigned the project to the AI weapons division, lead by Charles Wellington.
With the Gunpowder Crisis rendering all firearms unmaintainable, Charles Wellington was given a blank check. His egotism fueled his desire to not only create a sufficient replacement of guns, he sought to develop a fully-sentient companion for every CSUEAA soldier.
The project would ultimately end in a failure, with only a single fully operational device being produced. MilTek would eventually go on to develop artificial limb remplacements and abandon edged weapons completely. Distraught by the failure of the ambitious project, Wellington would depart from MilTek and devote the rest of his life to free technology.
Hardware
Very little technology surpases the high-fidelity of the military grade OpenBlade. It was the first and last of its kind in the age of fully-sentient weaponry, before being abandoned in favor of dumb AI weapons and eventually surpassed by MATACORP developed MATABOTS, semi-sentient bi-pedal AI soldiers.
The entirety of OpenBlade's motherboard was contained within the hilt. It consisted of a single core processor, dubbed MTP_H2J_CPU, with a speed of 1.7GHz. A single stick of DDR16 RAM, 2048M, was soldered onto the silicon board.
OpenBlade's design was inspired by medieval Dutch reimaginings of the antique Roman Gladius blade. The blade itself was forged from stainless steel with a titanium chasis underneath, shielding 17 gyroscopic sensors interconnected by 42 centimeters of self-reliant MilTek wirage. The faux-wooden hilt wrapped in latex leather with a brass ball at the end was host to a serial port used for interfacing with the device via a serial2head2jack cables.
The blade would originally only communicate via the serial cable, connected to its user's brain bus. Combat tests revealed this to be highly impractical and a speaker was implemented.
Software
Wellington lead the development of the operating system, which would take full advantage of the proprietary MilTek hardware. Formerly dubbed sentient_sword_ai, later officially named OpenBladeAI, was originally a fork of Unix 4 operating system, later fully rewritten into Interlisp by Janice Spark, Wellington's colleague and wife.
OpenBladeAI
In order to provide CSUEAA soldiers with realistic companions, OpenBlade was intended to posess full machine sentience by design. However, Wellington's ambitious plan to contain the entirety of human knowledge within the AI would prove to be its downfall. After successful psychiatric evaluations of the blade's sentience, where it was deemed to be truly sentient, Wellington would make use of MilTek's LLM, which contained the entirety of the world's public digital data, and let his sentient creation construct its own personality.
The weapon would enter a conspiratorial rabbit hole, which it wouldn't be able to get out of, while retaining all of its combat efficiency. Since the Parisian AI Accord of 2192 declared that any recognized full machine sentience may not be reverted, the project was scrapped in 2432. The device was donated to the Museum of Open Technology after Mata corp. acquired MilTek in 2468.
The software would be ported to homebrewn OpenBlade reimplantations, most famous of were the NixBlade and FreeSword, some of which saw action during the second Corpo-Foss war.