Lt. Cork and the Natural Language Drone (fiction)

In the silent sky just after 2 pm. when the only sound was that of minimalist hum from the approaching city and  barely discernible whoosh of the stealth drone's passage through nimbus clouds Lt. Cork went over a checklist in his mind of tasks to be executed in the nearing future. The lights of Yongbyong would be a change of the darkness of the tight cabin's dim green status display. Lt. Cork hadn't given any natural language pilot instruction to the drone's artificial intelligence persona since ordering it to circle around from a programmed flight path to ground zero to check out a light upon the darkened China Sea.

The stealth drone was a smart combat infiltrator fighter craft with easy ejection for a rider that could also pilot the drone with simple natural language orders to the A.I. The A.I. understood ordinary ideas about flying that any human might give it very well, and would execute the orders safely-within combat margins of safety presently- with self-determination and creativity allowances ample to prevent it from crashing into the earth.

Lt. Cork thought about the possibility of discovery by North Korean air defense radar and the inevitable MIG that would fly out to intercept it, or even a surface to air missile. He was confident enough in the drones capacity to win a dogfight or spoof a missile that he was able to concentrate again on execution of mission parameters COMPAQ thought necessary for East Asian security.

The drone would pop Cork out at very low altitude and egress to a wait on station location hovering a couple of miles away. It would return when Cork signaled for the exfiltration phase of the planning sequence.