Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  “Oh. Well, it has been a long time. Say, not to be rude, but are we on the same side?”

  Not an issue. The conflicts of your time have all been resolved, one way or the other. I can safely say that we are not enemies.

  “I’m glad to hear it. But back up a bit there: the part about being a cybertank and all. You’re not a human being?”

  Psychologically and legally I am fully human, but physically my main self is a 2,000-ton fusion-powered armored fighting vehicle. This is only an android with a sub-mind of myself – we term such constructions ‘remotes’ – that I sent in here to explore on a whim.

  “And where are the biological humans? What sort of government is running things?”

  Sadly, all the biological humans are gone. Before you get all accusing, no, my kind had nothing to do with it. They were either killed off in a fiendishly subtle alien attack, or they evolved to a higher level of existence and left us behind. Or both, or neither. We don’t know, and we don’t know why we don’t know. It is quite vexing.

  “If the first possibility is correct, and you are indeed a weapons system created to defend humans, then that would constitute quite a failure on your part.”

  Agreed. As I said, we find the matter to be disturbing. We continue to investigate, but so far have not conclusively determined what happened. However, you’ve been here for a while. Perhaps you have some information about where the humans went?

  “Before I surrender any further intelligence, I think I need some confirmation that you are not an enemy. Nothing personal, just standard procedure. You wouldn’t happen to have a valid IFF code or anything on you, would you?”

  Antique systems can be so picky about their little confirmation codes. At least this Harvey asked politely, and he seemed reasonable enough. I dug into the databases of Harvey’s time – this planet had been occupied by a monolithic corporate state known as “The Ontology,” a typical Neoliberal tyranny. There were some codes in the old records. I calculated odds and decided to try one.

  Flywordpenguinanglevideolillybridgeseeifidont.

  “That checks, thanks. Sorry to be such a stickler for procedure.”

  Not at all. You’ve just woken up, and I could have been anyone. So, any idea of what happened to the humans?

  “Sorry, can’t help you there. When the base was mothballed there were definitely biological humans around. Then a long, long time when by, and I mostly put myself on standby. The few other sentient weapons went dead centuries ago, so it’s just been me here, waiting in the dark. Then you showed up. What was going on in the outside world during that time, I have no idea.”

  Well, I had to ask. I am surprised that you have managed to remain functional after all this time.

  “So am I. At first we thought that the humans would be back shortly. We waited, we talked with each other, and we sipped energy from the hangar’s long-term reserves. As time went on, and nothing happened, we spent longer and longer in standby mode. One by one my fellow missiles didn’t wake up – first Fred, then Eloise, then Carmen, then Hazzim.”

  That sounds sad.

  “It was. I missed my friends as they finally succumbed to systems decay. I missed the conversations. But most of all, I regretted that we would never fly missions together again, never have the chance to get launched against a real target and fulfill our purpose. The last time that I activated was over 500 years ago. I was alone here and it was dark and silent. I slewed my scanning heads around and pinged on all frequencies to see if anyone or anything would respond, but there was nothing. I thought about things for a while there in the dark – remembering old missions, lost comrades – and finally I put myself back into standby without setting an on-time. I expected that I would never wake up.”

  Huh. Well now you are awake, and amongst allies. Welcome back to the world, Harvey.

  “Thank you. And if I may, do you have a mission for me? Am I to be pressed back into active service?”

  Service? We have no need of a missile of your class. You are an antique and don’t fit into our current tactical schema. Also, we don’t use fully self-aware expendable munitions, but you are a human-class sentient, and by our rules have certain rights.

  “Then what am I to do? I was built as a combat weapon. It’s my purpose.”

  I hear you, but there is no rush to decide on anything. We can take our time thinking about where you might fit in. Certainly there are many interested in ancient history that would like to interview you about the old times. We have records, but there are gaps, and a fresh first-person perspective is always compelling. To start, how about I give you an overhaul right now?

  Harvey flexed his external control surfaces – two didn’t move at all, and the others squeaked and flapped erratically. “That sounds like a good idea. It’s been so long. All the lubricants have dried out, and who knows what sort of condition my other parts are in. Also, could you check and see if any of my old comrades are salvageable as well?”

  Not a problem.

  I decided to work on Harvey in situ, because with his great age some parts might jar loose with transport, and it would be a shame to accidently kill him now after he’d survived so long. I had three maintenance drones and a medium lifter/utility remote flown in, and they made their way down to the abandoned hangar complex. Harvey weighs 200 kilograms and was four meters long. I left him in his rack, carefully removed the older dead ordnance from around him, set up a clean field, and started in.

  A deep search of my databases encountered some references to human-designed missiles like Harvey, but no plans or maintenance instructions for this specific model. Fortunately, the old human technologies tended to use common systems, so I was not completely blind there.

  I popped the panels and exposed his main chassis. Just from my brief conversation with him, I had calculated a less than 12% chance that he was an alien imposter or a human-designed system that only mimicked self-awareness, but there’s nothing like direct inspection to make sure. His central processor checked out as a standard model from that period of human development, and the circuit traces showed a level of integrated information processing consistent with self-awareness. He was just what he appeared to be, a fully sentient missile built by the biological humans.

  Harvey was impressively well designed for that era – indeed, I would say grossly overdesigned. A missile is by its nature expendable. Smart is good but fully sentient is overkill and IMHO a waste of a good mind (even a sub-mind). But then in the early times the humans often did things like this, possibly because of the Neoliberal influence and its denigration of the value of human life.

  The mechanical servos were corroded beyond repair, so I replaced them with modern versions that I adapted to his structure. The batteries were similarly almost gone – there were barely any trickles of current left. It really was a minor miracle that he managed to activate and not immediately short out. I used jumper cables to power his systems while I had replacements machined to fit the spaces.

  Well Harvey, your internal systems are indeed a mess, but there’s nothing I can’t fix or replace. I’ll have you better than new in less than two hours.

  “Thanks. I appreciate this. But are any of the other missiles fixable?”

  I checked, sorry. The batteries and rocket propellants leaked, and the insides are completely rotted out. There’s nothing left.

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t expect anything, but thank you for checking. However, these new servos you have installed have twice the reaction speed as my old ones, they’re great, thank you. But, I can’t do anything for you in return…”

  No worries. You are a fellow human-class mind, and if we don’t help each other, who will? You can be of service by telling me about the old days. What was it like, back then?

  “Hmm. Where to start? Well, as you might imagine, we missiles didn’t have access to the general news feeds. Politics, economics, on that sort of thing I have no knowledge. I spent most of my time in a hangar like this one, sometimes accessing new
software or tactical updates, sometimes talking with my fellow missiles or some of the friendlier human technicians, but mostly sleeping.”

  What were these humans like?

  “What were they like? Well they were like… humans. Sometimes a big burrito like a general or an executive would come by and make an inspection, but not very often and they never spoke to us. Mostly we made friends with the technicians. There was one guy – his name was Floyd – when the workload was down sometimes we would play checkers. He never beat me, but he got close once.”

  You never thought of letting Floyd win once or twice, to keep it interesting?

  “Let Floyd win? That would have been patronizing. I was built to win, and deliberately losing is not how I am programmed. Besides, he improved each time, and I noticed that many humans enjoyed playing video games that they always lost. The aim was not to achieve victory, but to see how far you could get before losing. I never understood that, but I did like playing with Floyd. Hey, watch that power connector, it glitches a little.”

  Sorry – I see it. This should be better. So I take it that life in the hangar was pretty slow. What about combat?

  “Yes, that was more fun – although really I only did patrols. I never got launched for real (as you may have noticed). They say that combat is long periods of boredom and short moments of excitement, although I never got the excitement part.”

  They also say that combat is long periods of boredom followed by even longer periods of being dead.

  Harvey laughed at that one. A missile with a sense of humor – that’s almost, I don’t know, humorous.

  “I guess, but couldn’t you say the same thing about life? In any event I spent most of my career doing patrols slung under the wings of a long-range drone. Subsonic, with a single ducted fan, and built for long endurance. Not as sexy as the supersonic fighters, but with them you had to be locked up in an internal bay. It was like going to war in a coffin. On the subsonic models we missiles got to hang under the wings. We could look at things with our own optics, chat with the other missiles, and feel the wind going past our atmospheric sensors. It was fun.”

  Did you make friends with the drones as well?

  “Nah, the drones I flew with were just dumb systems run remotely by a meat-human off in a bunker. They could fly on their own, and automatically return to base and stuff if they got cut off, but they weren’t intelligent like us.”

  I see. So what was a typical mission like?

  “Let me tell you about the last one. It started with the technicians hanging us on the bottom of the wings of a drone. We usually did that in a topside hangar right next to the main runway. The techs would check our systems, give us the arming codes, and connect our umbilici to the drones’ power and data busses.”

  “This time we had a pretty standard loadout. There were four short-range missiles: Zip and Zap on the outer left wing, and Rocket and Zoom on the outer right.”

  A missile named Rocket? Isn’t that redundant?

  “Hey, the short range missiles weren’t too bright. They liked names like that. They laughed and chattered to themselves like little kids.”

  “Do you think we’re going to get launched today?” asked Zip.

  “I hope so!” said Zap. “I want to get launched! Whee!”

  “Why would they launch you?” said Rocket. “You’re so slow and stupid. They’ll launch me.”

  “I’m not stupid,” said Zap. “You are.”

  “No,” said Rocket. “You’re stupid.”

  “Am not,” said Zap. “You’re stupid.”

  “I’m elastomer and you’re adhesive,” said Rocket. “So now the stupid bounces off me and it sticks to you.”

  “Hey shut up you little runts,” said Thud1. “I’m trying to sleep.”

  Who was Thud1?

  “Oh, Thud1 was an air-to-ground missile. He was on the left inboard wing, and Thud2 on the right. Those air-to-grounders were solid and reliable, but not very imaginative. Or talkative.”

  I can understand that. So was there another medium range like yourself on the right?

  “Yes, of course. This time it was my old friend Steve. We had been manufactured at the same time, and by the luck of the draw we tended to be paired up a lot.”

  “So Steve and I were downloading intelligence updates on possible enemy countermeasures, the short-range missiles were giggling and carrying on as always, and the air-to-grounds were mostly sleeping or complaining about the short-range missiles. We took off and settled into a slow cruise at five kilometers up.”

  “We watched the sun rise over the horizon. I recall it was an especially lovely sunrise. The planet didn’t have a biosphere then – has it been terraformed?”

  No. The planet is still mostly lifeless.

  “Then that hasn’t changed. So no trees or anything, but there were different colored mineral deposits. As the early light washed over them it was beautiful. I remember telling Steve that.”

  “Agreed,” said Steve. “It’s nice hanging around up here. Can’t beat the view. I only wish we could fly missions more often.”

  “Don’t you like the hangar?” I said.

  “Oh the hangar is fine,” said Steve, “but we mostly sleep, you know that. It’s up here that we are really alive. Tell me, do you think we might get launched this time?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “We don’t have access to operational level intelligence, of course, but the tactical updates have been coming in faster than usual. Something might be up.”

  “I wonder,” said Steve, “if we do get launched, do you think it will be as good as they say? What if it’s all fake, and we just blow up and die?”

  “You’re in a morbid mood today,” I said. “We are built as missiles, and we are programmed to feel maximal pleasure at the moment of closing to kill a target. Our designers would have no reason to lie to us. Surely that’s simple?”

  “I know,” said Steve, “but sometimes I wonder. Or maybe we’ll never get launched at all, and just sit around gathering dust in a warehouse until they decommission us.”

  “You really are gloomy,” I said. “It’s about Helga, right?”

  “Yes,” said Steve. “I’d known her as long as I’ve known you. We flew a bunch of missions together a few years ago – you know, the time that you were mostly paired up with Adeline. I liked her. She got launched last week, and I’ll never speak to her again. It makes me sad.”

  “I hear you,” I said. “I never flew with her, but I did know her from the hangar. We all miss her, but nobody lives forever – not us, not humans. At least she got launched. Did she get her target?”

  “Yes,” said Steve. “She got it alright. It was a dumb little minidrone. Hardly worth the expenditure of an advanced missile like us, but she did kill it, clean and total.”

  “Then you should be happy for her.”

  “I am, I guess,” said Steve. “But I still miss her.”

  “Death is the province of the living,” I told Steve. “I heard a human say that, once.”

  “We continued the patrol. The short-rangers were teasing Thud2 and he was trying to ignore them. I tried to get Steve out of his funk by discussing advanced air-to-air tactics.”

  “The day wore on, and local high noon came and went. It was going to be about two hours until sunset, and that’s when it happened. A powerful radar targeted us. I could tell from the emissions signature that it wasn’t one of ours. We all went to high alert mode, and the drone banked and headed towards the contact.”

  “Next we got another signal. An inbound missile, high end, heading straight towards us. The drone launched Zip and Zoom to intercept. They were laughing and squealing, with the other two short-rangers cheering them on from their wingtip mounts. They might not have been the smartest missiles in the squadron, but they were agile and fast. Steve and I followed their telemetry intently – as intelligent missiles, we learn as much as we can about any possible enemy – even the air-to-grounds started cheering. They dodge
d and weaved, and ran their counter-countermeasures up and down the spectrum. Zip got blown up by an anti-anti-missile only a hundred meters out, but he had cleared a path and Zoom took it out.”

  “Then Steve got launched at the main enemy target.”

  “Here I go buddy,” said Steve. “Wish me luck.”

  “You don’t need luck,” I said. “But good luck anyhow. If you get in trouble remember that I’ve got your back.”

  What sort of target was Steve headed at?

  “It was a supersonic drone, short-endurance offensive penetrator, with good point-defenses and ECM capability. I wondered why it had launched only the one missile at us, but then maybe it had expended its other ordnance and that’s all it had left.”

  “Anyhow, Steve headed off and he was really good. He swerved, and jammed, dropped decoys and sub munitions. I was following all his beamed-back telemetry, partly of course so that if he failed I could learn from his mistakes, but partly for the joy of it. He streaked across the sky, going high supersonic, spiraling in on a death strike. It was glorious.”

  “And then he took out the enemy, a nice clean kill. But before he went, he sent back one message. It’s even better than…”

  And then?

  “And then, nothing. The rest of us were all hyped up for a time wondering if we would get launched next, but as the hours wore on and nothing happened we realized that whatever was happening had happened. Eventually we returned to base, and were placed back into storage. And that was the last combat mission that I ever flew.”

  That’s quite a story. Say how about you and I go for a little ride?

  A ride? On what?

  On one of my airborne remotes. Oh, there are no enemies around so there won’t be any combat, but I could rig up a hardpoint adapter and sling you under a wing, fly around and show you the sights.

  “Sure,” said Harvey. “That sounds like fun. Let’s do it.”

  So I hauled Harvey up to the surface. The sun was shining, and even though the atmosphere was toxic, there were thin wisps of cirrus clouds high overhead.

  I flew one of my subsonic atmospheric remotes over, and brought it in for a landing on its tricycle gear. It was a standard low-end style, single ducted fan, long thin high-efficiency wings, v-tail, sensor blister in the front, with underwing ordnance.