Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***Affirmative, General…steer right one five three degrees, go to half propulsor…target is estimated at five hundred microns…locally high thermals and acoustics…could be a main processor…***

  “That’s good enough for me, Doc. Steering onto vector. Give me the count at one hundred microns.”

  He closed the distance, shoving and punching and slashing and hacking and slicing and dicing his way through debris and dead bots and a train wreck of packets that looked a cotton ball mountain, and then he was there…he could feel the heat and almost see the thing, dead ahead.

  The enemy master bot.

  Valerie Patrice, I don’t know if that’s you but I have to do this. Nothing personal….

  The enemy master resembled all the other bots, but with more effectors. Closing in, he counted off pyridine probes, an electron lens, things that looked like bond disrupters, carbene grabbers…and the hell of it was she had everything deployed at once. That was nuts. It was just asking to become entangled in a furball and lose a few arms and legs. Rule Number One in nanoscale combat: don’t grapple until you have to and when you do, squeeze the bejeezus out of your enemy. Better to make drive-by passes, slashing and stabbing as you went by.

  So that’s what he did. It was like taking candy from a really ugly baby.

  When he was through, the enemy master bot was a spinning carcass of shattered casing and leaking processor head, with bits and pieces of effectors cartwheeling off into the ether and propulsors sputtering like a rundown jalopy. Winger made a few more slashing passes to be sure, burning holes in its main casing with his disrupters. He made sure all his replicant buddies performed the same maneuver.

  Soon, the packet stream smelled of death and beat-up bots.

  Winger circled his handiwork for a time, studying the results. He wasn’t impressed with what Cyber Corps had come up with…it was an ANAD clone, to be sure, but it was missing the latest gadgets and gizmos the Corps took into battle.

  Sorry, Valerie Patrice, if that is you. I had to do it. I just wish the eggheads back at Cyber had given you a better horse to ride into battle.

  The remnants of the bot drifted lifelessly through floating wreckage, being bumped and thumped by cotton balls as the packet stream seemed to be starting up again. The traffic jam downstream must have been cleared. Through the blur of the packets, he could just make out a small cylindrical vehicle on the other side of the freeway…maybe that had been Patrice’s ride through the Net. Some sort of packet cruiser, but he didn’t have time to investigate.

  There was something else he needed to do. A ticklish something, and he would need Doc III’s help.

  With the Cyber Sweep force now dispersed and largely destroyed, Winger made sure the nodes of Server Bank Eight were secure. The packet stream seemed to be flowing without problem. It was time to exit the Net.

  Johnny Winger set his propulsors for the nearest node. Doc III had given him a vector and he made up the distance in a few minutes. From a tactical map in memory, he knew this node, Node 3371, was inside the Server Bank Eight room. He closed on the node and pushed through the connector grid, flowing out of the lines and into a smoking, wreckage-filled space crammed with toppled server racks, smashed cabinets, and loose pieces of cable and ceiling tile.

  Johnny Winger toggled configuration C-2 and began slamming atoms to gather himself into something more closely resembling a human being, what the bots had long called a Normal. You had to laugh at that. What was normal and what wasn’t now? Everything in existence was made up of atoms. Some configurations just had more atoms than others.

  The process took about five minutes. When it was done, there stood alongside the rack containing server node 3371 an angel being that closely resembled General Johnny Winger. In fact, it was Johnny Winger in all the ways that mattered…memory, identity, habits and thoughts. Doc III had seen to that.

  Now it was time to see to his real mission…what he had come here for.

  He sensed a dense form nearby…likely a Normal…and configged his photon lens to bring the form into clarity, probing ahead for thermal, electromagnetic and acoustic signatures.

  It was a human.

  It was Captain Zhao Zhiyang, hoisting a HERF carbine into firing position….

  “Captain…Captain Zhao…wait…this isn’t what you think—“

  Zhao aimed his carbine right at Winger. The angel wasn’t fully formed yet…you could see right through parts of his shoulders and arms…but the texture was forming, filling in details even as he watched…something made Zhao hesitate….

  “Who are you?” Zhao seethed. “What are you--?”

  Winger tried a smile, then figured that made him look even creepier. “It’s me, Zhao…you know me. John Winger…General Winger—

  Zhao had almost stopped breathing. “Winger died on Europa…everybody knows that…you’re…one of them--.

  “Look, this is hard to explain—“

  But in that moment, Zhao had seen all he wanted to see. He fired and the HERF wave boomed across the room, sending racks and cabinets toppling from one end to the other.

  Johnny Winger had been on the firing end of a HERF weapon many times. He knew that it sounded like being inside of a thunderclap. Deafening, reverberating, teeth-rattling, didn’t begin to describe it…when you were the one doing the firing.

  Until now, he had never been on the receiving end.

  The whole purpose of the High-Energy Radio Frequency gun was to fry bots…lots of bots. The radio wave blast scattered bots and incinerated their casings, turning their processors and effectors into just so much atomic mush.

  For Johnny Winger, Zhao’s blast felt like a herd of buffalos had kicked him in the stomach. Like a monster wave at Daytona had upended him and driven him face first into the seabed. Like the Cyclone had suddenly slipped its moorings and gone off spinning into space, cartwheeling down the Boardwalk.

  All at the same time.

  The physical effect of the rf blasts was to rip apart the angel formation that resembled Johnny Winger and smash the bots that formed it. Most of them would wind up atom fluff. The master bot was blown half apart and knocked spinning off into some netherworld that atoms went into when they were HERF’ed.

  For what seemed like forever, Johnny Winger was in a daze. Everything was spinning and nothing worked. But gradually, he regained some semblance of control and found that he was alive, he did have some structure and he could send and receive commands to things that, in a previous life, he would have called arms and legs. Now they were called effectors.

  Through some mysterious embedded algorithm, he went through a series of diagnostics automatically, without even thinking about it: propulsors, sensors, actuators, config translator, buffers, main memory, bond disrupters. He couldn’t explain how he did this; it was programmed in.

  “Doc, I’m glad something’s working…I’m beginning to get some feeling back….”

  ***Autonomic functions are continuing, General…running diagnostics now…there is some damage to outer casing and carbene effectors…attempting to repair now…***

  “Guess I’d better get my teeth ready, huh?”