Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  “I suppose,” said Olga. “Except that it didn’t work for Jimmy. His biological brain was never able to train up the neural net, and he remained crippled, with only a single functioning hemisphere. I’ve read the accounts. His friends growing up and leaving him behind, taunts of “Little Jimmy Half-Brain,” the desperation of his parents… “

  Fanboy nodded. “I know. Finally his family froze him, hoping that someday technology would advance enough to restore him…”

  “And then the Amok invaded the system and exterminated everyone. Except for Little Jimmy, buried in his cryo-chamber deep underground until one day we found him and woke him up. Has anyone come up with a solution?”

  “Not yet,” said Fanboy. “We have some of our better minds working on it, but the problem is subtle and harder than we first expected. His organic mental structures are just slightly out-of-band for the original process. We can certainly turn him into a functioning human with two intact cerebral cortical hemispheres, but it’s not clear that the resulting person would still be Jimmy. And the place for human-level intelligences in our society continues to shrink. We could end up making him a normal biological human, only just in time to be all alone.”

  “Like the problem that I am facing,” said Olga.

  “Not quite,“ said Fanboy. “You have options open that we don’t extend to just any human-level intelligence. If you want them.”

  “True,” said Olga. “And I am grateful for them. I suppose just freezing little Jimmy again would be out of the question.”

  Fanboy nodded. “Absolutely. There will be no succeeding human-level society for him to ever wake up to, in that case we might as well just kill him. Which, of course, we won’t.”

  “There’s always the bicameral society,” said Olga.

  “Yes, indeed, the bicameral society,” said Fanboy. “That’s one possibility that we are considering, among others. In the meantime little Jimmy is asleep. Care to watch an old movie with me?”

  “Sure,” said Olga. “What sounds good?”

  “Vlad the Impaler Beachfront Memories?”

  “Nah, seen it. It’s over-rated, in my opinion.”

  “SuperArgo and Diabolicus vs. Margaret Thatcher?”

  “Not doing it for me.”

  Nymphomaniac Engineer in Zentopia: the Movie.”

  “Yeah, I could give that one a try. Let’s watch it. Just keep the volume down. We don’t want to wake Jimmy.”

  8. Fashion Victim

  “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Mark Twain, Author, 19th-20th century Earth.

  It all started when I was on a routine survey mission on a nothing planet with three of my friends: the 20,000 ton Penumbra-Class Schadenfreude, the 3,500 ton Wasp-Class Spandex, and the 8,000 ton Horizon-Class that we called Fashion Victim (although that’s kind of a long name, and neither “Fashion” nor “Victim” really work by themselves, so we generally just refer to him as “FV” for short).

  Now all of us cybertanks have our own little interests and hobbies. We use sub-minds to animate humanoid robots, sometimes in the form of famous historical figures (for a long time I was partial to Amelia Earhart). We design bioengineered trees that sing operas, or collect old postage stamps, or go glacier surfing at the poles. With almost unlimited time and resources, we can afford to indulge ourselves.

  Still, most of us leave our main hulls unadorned. Depending on the class our surfaces might be a dull gray ablative coating, a radiation-reflective silver, or a stealthy black (although for a multi-thousand ton fusion-powered surface weapons system, stealth is more hope than tactic).

  Oh sure, sometimes we’ll use bumper stickers – “I Don’t Brake for Aliens,” “Caution Wide Turns,” or “Hillary 2016,” but those are more for comic effect than decoration.

  Except for Fashion Victim. He was forever tinkering with the surface of his main hull, painting it different colors, adding trim packages, or extra lights. Currently he had remade himself in the style of a pink mid-20th century Terran Cadillac surface transport, with chrome trim strips, eight-meter tall rear tail fins with multiple red lights, and a large chrome grill on the front. My main hull was several hundred kilometers away, so I had sent a sub-mind in an anthropoid body with the form of Joan of Arc (the 1948 film version), although I decided to dress the android in a tailored white suit instead of the more traditional plate armor. My only concession was the fleur-de-lis design I had stitched into the android’s lapels with golden threads.

  “Hey Old Guy, how do I look?” asked FV.

  Like a giant pink 1959 Cadillac that has been armed to the teeth. But it’s not bad. I like the tail fins, especially.

  “Do you? I’m especially proud of them myself. I think the ancient humans abandoned that style too quickly. Tail fins for terrestrial vehicles had a lot more potential than was ever realized.”

  I suppose. I’m also liking those little chrome pieces around your secondary armaments, but in my opinion putting white sidewalls on your road wheels seems a bit much.

  FV swiveled back and forth in place on his treads, letting me look at his main hull from different angles. “You know, you might be right about the white sidewalls. I guess they’ll get pretty dirty in use. I could just go back to black.”

  Hmm. I’m not sure about that either. How about hubcaps?

  “Hubcaps? That’s brilliant! Although I have so many roadwheels it might be a bit gauche. Perhaps if I use more of a satin finish, you know, tone it down…”

  That might work. But really, you know that in combat all this finery will be scorched off a in a second. Why do you keep bothering with decorating your main hull like this?

  “Well, why not? This is all superficial. It doesn’t affect my combat efficiency at all. If it gets trashed in a battle it doesn’t matter, as I can just rebuild my surface into something new. I notice that you’re not here in a utilitarian remote, but all gussied up like the savior of ancient France getting ready for a corporate board meeting. Surely that’s indulgent as well?”

  True, but it’s just a sub-mind, a minor folly, for fun. Shouldn’t a main hull be practical and serious?

  “And when did that become a required tradition for us? Our human progenitors wore clothes over their primary bodies, why not us?”

  The humans were vulnerable, they needed clothes. We have heavy armor, external covering is superfluous.

  “I don’t think that’s right. The humans frequently wore clothes when they didn’t need the protection – even when their clothes got in the way, or made them hot. It was part of their civilization. Did you ever realize, that all this time you have been going around naked?”

  Naked? With armor tough enough to withstand a near hit from a fusion bomb, I’d hardly call my main self ‘naked’.

  “No, you don’t get it. Being naked is not about being unprotected. It’s about being undressed. The later model humans had skin that could turn a mild steel knife, but they still wore silk shirts and linen pants. Clothing is fashion, not defense.”

  Naked. I never thought of it like that. So, technically, my main hull is naked. I think I like the idea of that. The wind blowing through my open suspension, the feel of the ground under my bare treads, the sun shining on my upper glacis. It makes me feel free, and slightly naughty.

  “Now you’re being flip,” said FV.

  Perhaps I could pose provocatively? You know, full frontal cybertank! Although the humans often thought that being partially clothed could be even more erotic. Perhaps I could drape some heavy tarpaulins around me, and leave some seductive glimpses of running gear and idler wheels…

  “All right, all right, enough. Anyhow, you know we don’t have a gender like the old humans.”

  I don’t agree with you there. The early humans always had this thing where they felt that a healthy human mind had to be either male or female. We’re neither, so they tended to think of us as neuter. However, I think we do have a gender, just that it’s cybertank, not male or
female.

  “Are you going to restart that old argument about whether we constitute a unique third gender, or are simply the baseline human psyche without overt male and female psychological traits? That flame war has been going on for millennia and in my opinion is one of the more pointless debates of all time.”

  Pointless debates can be fun. At least, in moderation.

  “I am tempted to manufacture a humanoid robot myself so I can roll my eyes. Now, what do you think of my sensor masts? Is the nickel plating too subtle, do you think?”

  The day progressed. My humanoid robot continued to chat with FV’s main hull, giving advice as he tweaked his latest attempt at cutting-edge cybertank fashion. Our many remotes were busy poking around the planet, cataloging mineral deposits and taking temperature readings and doing all the boring but essential work that a planetary survey requires. We played an immersive strategy game, Schadenfreude against the rest of us combined. He won, of course, but we made him work for it. Spandex created a virtual artwork based on the history of mayonnaise (better than it sounds, but as with so many ‘high concept’ projects, still not that great). We caught up on our emails. Distant peers would transmit sub-minds to us on narrow-beam interstellar laser links, who would have conversations with us, then be transmitted back to their primary selves to report back. Sometimes we would send sub-minds of our own out to accompany them.

  Our laconic reverie was sadly cut short when Schadenfreude announced that he had detected the presence of hostile aliens in the system. They were an unknown species, but present in force. They were systematically mopping up our space-based units, and headed towards the planet we were on.

  Schadenfreude attempted to negotiate but was rebuffed. Apparently the hostile aliens had decided that we were unconscious automata and they were going to snuff us out as a sort of cosmic housecleaning.

  Negotiating with aliens is always tricky. First, there is the issue of alien minds being so different from ours. We can transmit “2+2=4” to any sane species and be understood, but that’s about as pointless as having a conversation with a pocket calculator. Try to express the sadness at the loss of a child to a colony intelligence based on slime-molds that has no conception of self, that doesn’t work. We have nothing to say to aliens, nor they to us, except on matters of brute practicality. “Stay off of my lawn” is perhaps the single most common phrase in inter-stellar diplomacy.

  Similarly the question of whether an alien species is truly self-aware, or an unthinking zombie-like machine race, is typically moot. First, there are so many different kinds of advanced mental structures that determining what is or is not ‘truly’ self-aware is meaningless. And even if it could be shown that a given alien civilization really was completely un-self aware, that they had no ‘soul’ by our definition, so what? If a civilization is successful, and plays by the rules, it’s nobody else’s business whether it is or is not self aware.

  However, there are exceptions to this state of affairs. Often civilizations will leave behind various automated probes and defense systems – it is generally agreed that such isolated and limited things are fair game for trash collection. Otherwise the galaxy would by now have been over-run by a billion years’ accumulation of Von Neumann machines and autonomous weapons and such.

  If the aliens had come upon one of our main worlds, bustling with factories and general civilizational complexity, there would likely have been no problem. But just us four cybertanks, sitting here alone on a rock with only limited remote systems and no infrastructure? For the civilizations that we have already encountered we have codes to avoid this uncertainty, but we didn’t know these aliens. We had no way to prove that we were not just random weapons systems abandoned here by some now-extinct or moved-on race.

  We were heavily outmatched, but as cybertanks we will fight to the last, on principle and because there is always a chance. We used our own integral machining systems to modify survey remotes into (limited) weapons, we planted mines and jammers, and did everything we could to prepare.

  The aliens decided against a direct assault – we have pretty good local anti-air weaponry built into our main selves – so after achieving space superiority the aliens landed terrestrial combat units on the far side of the planet, and commenced a ground assault on us.

  Their primary units were similar to our main hulls, slightly smaller but very much more numerous. They were, however, of a quite intricate physical design, seemingly made of brass and silver, with complex engraved arabesques here and there dotted with objects like polished gemstones.

  “Oh my god,” said FV. “They are beautiful! Look at the integration of the surface patterns with the weapons ports! And the articulation of the suspensions! And how the secondary armaments are complemented by the patterns of the jewels! Lovely!”

  You realize they are coming to kill us all.

  “I know that,” said FV. “And I’ll fight them as ferociously as you will. But I can still admire the style.”

  The alien ground forces made steady progress across the curve of the planet, and we arrayed our own limited forces to meet them. Our distant skirmish units met the comparable units of the enemy, and these killed each other in ones and twos, mostly to probe our respective technologies. We concluded that we were on rough qualitative parity with the aliens, so we had no answer to their numbers. Other than, of course, fighting well, and, most likely, dying well.

  I noticed that FV had deployed a single maintenance drone on his external surface, and it was busy repainting himself.

  FV. In case you had not noticed, we are in a fight for our lives. Could you please leave the redecoration for later?

  “Old Guy. This is just one maintenance drone, and right now I don’t need it for anything else. If I’m going to die I want to enjoy something of my last few moments.”

  I should have had a snappy retort handy, but I was instead stupefied. Here we are all going to be killed by hostile aliens, and FV was worried about making a deathbed fashion statement. I maneuvered my main self and my few remote combat units to take account of our constantly updated battle plans and the shifting formations of the enemy, but I did keep an eye on FV. He was remaking not his entire hull, but just his main turret, into the style of the enemy. But as the work progressed, I realized that it was not a simple copy. FV had taken the style of the aliens and modified it into something of his own. Despite the utter lunacy of the endeavor, I did have to admit that it was quite lovely. Pity we were all going to die here and none of our peers will ever find out. It could have gone down in the record books as an esthetic achievement of note.

  The aliens were starting to encounter our hastily modified survey units, and destroying them easily as expected. We were about ten minutes away from the aliens getting into firing range of our main hulls, and then the real fight would begin.

  Suddenly the alien units retreated, and we were left untouched, relieved, and puzzled.

  Schadenfreude announced that the aliens had decided that we were not left over robotic systems after all, but parts of a more complex civilization. They apologized for the inconvenience, exchanged codes so that this sort of thing would not happen again, and left.

  The aliens never told us their reasons, but to me it seemed obvious. They initially saw us as a bunch of utilitarian robotic weapons systems. If FV had merely copied the style of the invading aliens, that would have been the mark of a simple automaton and of no consequence. But FV had modified and built upon their style using his own idiosyncratic esthetics – the aliens, in whatever unfathomable course their thoughts took, must have appreciated the style and taken it as a sign of something more than machine-like.

  Maybe that, ultimately, is what separates a real intelligence from the purely mechanical: that sometimes it engages in tasks that have no utilitarian function, like fashion.

  FV was ecstatic. Schadenfreude refused to speak directly to anyone for a month.

  Aliens never tell us their real names, and even if they did, they would probably
be something like a series of tailored pheromones that could not be translated into a human language. Thus, we assign our own code names to the aliens: Amok, Fructoids, Yllg, Demi-Iguanas, Gearheads, whatever. The consensus of the peerage was that FV should be allowed the honor of naming the new alien civilization. He decided that they should be referred to as “The Fashionistas.” Most of us thought this was a stupid name, but we had decided to grant him the honor so we’ll live with it.

  Now FV remains the only cybertank to consistently decorate his entire hull, but I have noticed that since the encounter with the Fashionistas (ugh, I still hate that code-name) more and more of us have taken to adding a few ornaments to our main selves. Usually it’s something simple, like a racing stripe, or some minor trim. I decided to join in, and welded emblems of the Cybernetic Weapons Directorate (where I had been constructed many thousands of years ago by my creator, the brilliant polymath Giuseppe Vargas) to the sides of my main turret.

  But I don’t want to overdo. I mean, I am a 2,000 ton Odin-Class cybertank, with a main plasma cannon that can knock small moons out of orbit, enough secondary and point-defense weaponry to single-handedly defeat the entire armed forces of 21st century Earth, and a hull that can take a near miss from a megaton nuke.