[Daigoro]

Answer 23 [MC]- TIO External Security Division: SegParapet
The security director, Colonel Vieira, has a second option for eliminating certain persons when necessary, but this option is only employed for high-value, hard-to-hit targets where a high degree of deniability is necessary.

23b) The Cooler Box - Esperance
The Cooler Box is a 1m x 1m x 0.5m, 90kg, protected-console case with external cryopumps, containing a non-volitional AI named Esperance. PAC Command Intelligence believe Esperance was stolen by the Argentine Army, or possibly Bolivian militia, but it is actually ensconced in a secure vault in Copa-C to which only Colonel Vieira has access.

Esperance is a deep data mining expert system that applies multivariate analysis to discover unlikely solutions to intractable problems with high dimensionality in the geopolitical sphere. More simply, it generates a kill-strategy for a strongly protected high value target. It can balance parameters from budget, trust levels of employed assets, likelihood of discovery or security response time, to things such as the possible moods of the target and their associates. Favoured MOs are death by apparent accident or orchestrated acts of random violence, but will offer more direct methods if the security profile is too tight.

When needed, The Cooler Box brings the cryopumps down to a working temperature of -173°C and Vieira connects it to the outside world so it can gather data on the target. It may take days or weeks to construct a mission profile, which Esperance then displays with animated flowcharts, step-by-step scenes and personnel cards. Esperance can offer the least likely of assets to employ, such as unknown street operatives, comprimisable insiders or desperately indebted nobodies, as well as professional assassins, and can find the singular weakness in a target's personal defences. A mission profile may contain a huge number of steps and actors, all directing the target into a vulnerable position. This might include traffic blockages, pollutant spills, collision with a jaqqed drone or even staged riots, if necessary.

The only problem is that Esperance may be too good, and too many perfectly executed random deaths may attract the attention of PAC Intel, so Vieira is choosy about which missions she goes to The Cooler Box for. Esperance may have trouble if it has to counter similar expert systems set up for controlling a target's security or analyzing suspicious network traffic, which tends to make the very highest rank of targets difficult or impossible to attack.

There is another problem that Vieira is starting to notice. She suspects that Esperance is beginning to ask more questions and follow-up queries than really necessary when discussing the mission parameters. Is Esperance displaying growing signs of loneliness?

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Question 30 [STG] - NAI Kill-strategists
Who created Esperance? Are there similar systems around? What is the basis of its computational core?