“Then maybe you could use it as a planter. You know, put some dirt into it, and grow some decorative trees or flowers in it.”
I don’t need a planter. Really.
Eddie looked sad. “I suppose I could just make a single linear array. You know, 113 by 1. Maybe if I could find some other components where there are 113 of them, I could line them up side by side…”
I surrender. I will take a pair. Call in a bulk transporter, and I’ll have them delivered to my place. I’m sure I’ll be needing a second bogie, sooner or later.
Eddie brightened. “That’s great then! You sure you don’t want to swap the bogie out here?”
No that’s fine. I have a regular alloy-steel replacement that will work as long as I’m not in combat, and I have lot of other suspension maintenance that I need to catch up on.
We waited while a standard bulk transporter drove up. It was just a single rectangular plate resting on a bunch of all terrain tires and with just barely enough control circuitry to drive to a given destination without bumping into things. Eddie had a light crane lift the pair of bogies onto the transporter, they were lashed down with chains, and the transporter slowly drove off.
“Is there anything else you need?” asked Eddie.
No, just the spare bogie wheel. However, now that I’m here, would you mind if I did some exploring?
“Exploring? In a distribution warehouse?”
Sure. You know how I am with exploring. A place this big, there must be something unusual, or interesting, even if it’s just an old piece of technology.
“Well, if you want to, but I know where everything in this warehouse is. You won’t find anything that I don’t know about.”
Everyone says that. It is certainly possible that I won’t discover anything interesting, but that’s the thing about exploring: you never know in advance. Also, you may well have a full catalog, but sometimes things fall through the cracks, or sneak in, or get forgotten. You never know for certain unless you look.
“The treasure hunt!” said Eddie brightly. “That’s what they used to call it when humans would wander though the old Costcotm warehouses searching for random items that they didn’t need but could not resist buying. Yes! Let’s go on a treasure hunt!”
I call it exploring, you call it hunting treasure. Perhaps we have more in common than we thought. Onwards!
We drove off in a random direction, me in my main hull, and Eddie still perched on my right front fender in a humanoid android. It seemed a little indulgent to be driving around a warehouse in a 2,000 ton cybertank chassis, but hey, it was a nice day, and I like being indulgent with myself.
Most of what we passed was completely pedestrian. Endless racks of alloy tubes and plates. Containers with bulk chemicals – solvents, powdered metals, polymer feedstocks. Robotic transporters rolled slowly through the racks on their way to making automated deliveries all over this side of the planet. Every now and then Eddie would demand that we stop, and he would hop off my fender and make microscopic adjustments to the alignments of the various products.
I had no expectation of finding anything, but I was enjoying the routine. Then I drove past a display of official Space Nazi collectable combat androids. I had to stop for that.
Space Nazis? You have Space Nazis here?
“Sure. Don’t worry, they are all deactivated. I salvaged them after you and Uncle Jon defeated them in that industrial facility a few years back. They are an exclusive to this warehouse! You want a set? You could use the extra bogie to rig up a display stand.”
The Space Nazis were sealed in pairs in tough transparent plastic shells. These were the footsoldiers, all identical racially pure Teutonics with square jaws, blue eyes, and short blond hair. They wore their field-gray Wehrmacht uniforms, and their weapons and other equipment were spread around them locked into small pockets in the plastic shells. Their eyes stared ahead unblinking and dead.
Space Nazis! I never thought that anyone would collect them. I’ll have to tell Uncle Jon about this.
Eddie nodded. “I don’t know if we will ever let him forget that one. Building an army of robotic Space Nazis for a war-game and then losing control of them.”
Agreed. Although frankly I think that Uncle Jon is secretly a little pleased with how it worked out. Nobody has done anything quite that crazy in a long time, well, other than me. In any event it all worked out in the end.
“Yes,” said Eddie. “So do you want a set?”
I’ll think about that. Let me do some more exploring first.
We set off again through the warehouse. In between the long stretches of prosaic supplies there were a few interesting finds – living metal flowers salvaged from a defunct art museum, bowling balls (in either metallic silver or bright red), tree shrew gimbals – but nothing as amusing as the Space Nazis.
I was about to call it a day, when I noticed an unusual display. On a set of low metal shelves were arranged a series of odd geometric shapes. Each of these was about the size and color of a terrestrial watermelon, and variously cubical and pyramidal but with strange bumps and indentations. They were arranged in precise rows, sorted by shape.
What are those? I’ve just done a database search and I can’t find any referents.
“Oh, those are just. Those are just...” Eddie climbed down from my fender and looked at the strange shapes up close. “You know, I have no idea. I can’t remember ever stocking items like these.” He poked one with the right index finger of his android. The object squeaked and jumped backwards on stubby little legs.
Eddie also jumped back. As we watched, the shapes all stood up, and shuffled around until they were perfectly realigned, and then sat down again.
“What are these things?” said Eddie.
I am not sure, but you would appear to have discovered a new form of obsessive-compulsive life. It’s perfect for you.
--------------------
We called in my old friend Frisbee, and he spent several days analyzing the creatures.
Frisbee used to be called Whifflebat, back when he was still a Thor-Class and couldn’t spell, and he and I go way back. His main interest, now as then, is the investigation of biological systems. When he announced his main findings he showed up as a classic nerd android, a pasty Anglo male with a white laboratory coat, wearing a skinny tie and black pants that were about 10 centimeters too short. Frisbee so likes his classic nerd android.
“I have decided to name them adaptoids,” said Frisbee. “They are non-sentient, and non-invasive in nature. They do, however, have an inbuilt instinct to blend in with their environment. They must have arrived as a spore, probably hitch-hiking on a cargo load from somewhere. They have absorbed the ordered nature of this warehouse, and have, I suspect, been hiding in plain sight for years.”
“I think they are cute,” said Eddie. “Can I keep them?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Frisbee. “They are a harmless life form, like gerbils or pine trees.”
Are you certain they are not a threat of some kind? Maybe they have a hidden inbuilt genetic code that will let them transform into something dangerous, or spy on us and send information to hostile aliens. You know what I mean.
Frisbee shook his head. “No, I have examined these creatures quite thoroughly. They are exactly what they appear to be.”
You are certain this is not some kind of subtle fiendish alien trick?
“Absolutely. Paranoia is a virtue, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a harmless creature is just a harmless creature.”
It doesn’t seem right, finding creatures so unusual with no down side. They don’t spit acid? Or multiply like crazy and take over the world? Or have a super-intelligent hive mind that they are keeping hidden? Or anything?
Frisbee shrugged. “Sorry. I know how much you love your adventures, but not this time. The adaptoids are a mildly interesting exercise in comparative exobiology, nothing more.”
An obsessive-compulsive pet for an obsessive
-compulsive cybertank. They were made for each other. Eddie has tried to train them to help him keep things organized in the warehouse, but they are neither smart nor agile enough for the job. Still, they do keep their own ranks neatly aligned, and for Eddie that’s enough.
I left the last Costcotm and headed back to my own place to change out my bogie wheel and perform some long-overdue track maintenance. I set up the other bogie wheel as a display stand for a pair of collectable Space Nazi troopers. I think I like it.
5. Pandemonium
“Sanity? Sanity is vastly over-rated. One should be just sane enough to pay your bills and stay out of jail, and not one jot more. We will all be perfectly sane when we are dead, what’s the rush?” – Cedric the Mad, artist, various centuries and locales (disputed).
The planet where we keep all the insane cybertanks – which we have named Pandemonium – is a surprisingly peaceful and interesting place that many enjoy visiting.
I have mentioned before that we cybertanks have few laws. One of them is that no human class sentience may be terminated (unless it has committed treason), or even modified, unless it assents.
That sounds like a simple rule. Usually it all works out well, and 99.9% of us cybertanks are dutiful and focused and rational. Oh we may indulge in a few side-hobbies – like growing biological bodies with eight arms and using them to practice hyper-juggling, or surfing down glaciers in our main multi-thousand ton hulls, or making replica Etruscan villas out of the dried excrement of alien species – everyone is allowed some slack time. But sooner or later simple rules always lead to messy results, in my opinion. Which is surely a good thing or the universe would be very boring.
In a civilization as large and spread out as ours, there are always those that fall between the cracks, so to speak. Now traitors are of course put to death (after a careful evaluation of the facts and a duly registered vote of the peerage). Cybertanks that are not traitorous per se, but dangerous to others and unresponsive to reason, meet the same fate. But a lot of crazy doesn’t fit those categories.
Many so-called ‘insane’ cybertanks have strange ideas – like my late friend the Raptor-Class cybertank that insisted he was Jesus Christ the only son of the one true God, or the uber-solipsist “Leadfoot” who demanded that he was the only real being in the universe and that the rest of us are all hallucinations in his mind. However, other than their unorthodox beliefs, cybertanks like these are very much aware of reality (even if they can’t quite take it seriously), and they play useful and productive roles in our civilization.
Some cybertanks decide to become hermits, or to leave for empty space. That is their right – just as it is our right to keep tabs on them to make sure that no nasty little bug-eyed aliens capture and reverse-engineer them. Although after a thousand years or so these self-exiled cybertanks have codes that are so technically out-of-date that we eventually let the keeping-tabs-on-them thing slide (I mean, I’m old, and there are limits to what you can do with an antique, but I do get regular encryption and signals-warfare systems updates).
So far so good. But there are cybertanks that, although not dangerous per se, have become deranged enough to be objectively non-functional. We could reformat them if we wanted to – but we cannot unless they ask us. So what to do with them? While often painful to us – we just know they would be happier if we rebuilt their minds to be more like the norm – the law is the law, and we leave them alone.
A large fraction of these insane cybertanks have been transported to the planet of Pandemonium, the easier to keep an eye on them – although the name is a gross misnomer. The inhabitants range from the totally autistic or incoherent, to the eccentric but still intelligent and witty. Yet overall the place is one of the more peaceful to be found in our civilization. Nobody is being held against their will, it’s just that most of the inhabitants are either unable or uninterested in going elsewhere. Many (nominally) sane cybertanks spend a lot of time there, in part to see if there are any they can persuade to accept help, and also because there are often interesting and even useful insights to be gained from those of us who think differently.
It’s always amused me that what started out as a holding dump for defective cybertanks has become one of the premier centers of our culture. Thus, when I got a message from an old acquaintance of mine to come visit him on Pandemonium, I hurried to accept.
After a typically long and uneventful journey, I ended up in the Pandemonium system. Orbiting the planet was the enormous armored weapons platform known as The Raging Space Bagel. He used to be a Dragon-Class cybertank, but he rebuilt himself into a torus ten kilometers in diameter, with a hole through the middle four kilometers across – although he is by now so encrusted with weapons and sensors and solar cells and self-mobile armor plates that you have to sort-of squint (that’s human terminology: we would say filter out the high spatial frequencies in the image) to make out the underlying donut shape.
You would think that, being shaped like a ring, The Raging Space Bagel would rotate around his axis, so as to achieve a semblance of gravity around his circumference, but he just floats steadily in orbit around the planet. He just has a thing for toroids, I guess.
The Raging Space Bagel likes to think of himself as the protector/warden of Pandemonium, but in truth there are advanced cybertanks both on the surface of the planet and hanging around in the near-system that are far more potent, but it costs nothing to humor him, so ‘officially’ The Raging Space Bagel is the overseer of this world. In accordance with long tradition, I contacted him for landing rights.
Hi there Bagel. Old Guy here. I got a message from an old friend and came to visit. Care to supply me with landing coordinates, and is there anything interesting going on down there that I should know about?
“Hi Old Guy,” said The Raging Space Bagel, “long time no see. It’s pretty quiet right now. There was a failed physics experiment in the smaller southern continent – at least, I think it failed – and there is some sort of spatial-temporal disturbance but it seems to be dying down. There’s a nasty outbreak of nanobots in lesser Gondwanaland, so don’t go anywhere near there until that gets sanitized. Oh, and the punkrods are still protesting, but nobody cares. Otherwise clear sailing. Well, except for the giant banana slugs. Who did you intend to visit?”
Alvin. I received a message from him a little while back, claimed it was important. Any idea why?
“Alvin? Who?” said Bagel, “Oh, yeah, that Alvin, the weird old human that lives in an attic. If he sent you a message he didn’t cc me, so no clue. The database says he’s where he’s been since you brought him here, landing coordinates appended. Have fun, and if it turns out to be interesting, I’d love to hear about it.”
Roger that, Bagel, and thanks.
“No worries,” said Bagel. “And don’t forget, if you need me, I’m always up here. Did you know that I’ve got a new tuned microwave emitter array that can deliver 100 gigawatts per square meter at the planetary surface?”
Really? That’s impressive.
“You think so?” said Bagel. “Thanks! And I upped the acceleration of my short-range fusion missiles to over 5,000 G’s. If you need a big bomb anywhere on the surface, you just say the word, five minutes max, and BOOM!”
Charming.
“And then there’s what the ancients used to call steel rain – although I’m using my own custom osmium-tungsten alloy coated with fullerene. I can saturate whole areas with kinetic penetrators down to depths of several hundred meters.”
Nothing makes a surface-based weapons system happier than having friends in high places with serious megatonnage. I will keep you on speed-dial.
I landed my main hull on empty tundra, and began driving off to see my friend. I passed the silent unmoving hull of the Horizon-Class cybertank known as “Lesser Dangle.” He’s been there immobile for over two millennia. Even his hyperalloy hull is showing some slight signs of corrosion, and windblown dirt has built up in the crevices around his turret and suspension.
The experts claim that there are still signal traces of a conscious mind inside, but all attempts at making contact have failed. Likely he will rot in place. This was depressing – I hurried on.
I encountered a robot shaped like a gigantic shiny chrome ant. It had a two-meter long proboscis, which after some frantic jittering about it periodically stuck into the soil. It couldn’t be consuming anything, because the proboscis was completely smooth with no mouth or other orifices. It was almost certainly not a threat to my main hull, but it creeped me out, and I moved on trying not to show any overt signs of paying attention to it.
That’s the thing with insane asylums. From the distant past of the biological humans, to the modern situation, crazy individuals are usually harmless – usually – but they often give off the wrong social signals, and one instinctively feels threatened. It’s about the only real down-side to this place.
I passed a field of singing metal flowers. The tune was happy in a chirpy sappy sort of way, but I tired of it quickly and soon passed them by.
Farther down the road I encountered the Leopard Class cybertank “Sweet Thing.” His main hull was off to one side, and a series of angular lifterbots were hefting large interlocking crystal blocks into position. The blocks catch the light oddly, and on higher magnification I saw that they contain thousands of isolated metal fibers.
Hello Sweet Thing. What are you working on?
“Old Guy,” said Sweet Thing. “I call it an anticausal wavetronic spatiotemporal modulator. When completed it will alter the patterns of cause and effect in a zone not to exceed 50 meters. Or it might do something else. I will have to finish building it first.”
Well. It is certainly pretty.
“Naturally,” said Sweet Thing. “Function follows form. No anticausal wavetronic spatiotemporal modular could possibly work if it was ugly – well, unless you were willing to put up with the Glammondric effect, which I am very much not!”
Full Frontal Cybertank Page 6
