Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  Globus Pallidus XI was invaded by robotic units of a variety of types. First in were basic military units, but these were followed by specialist robots designed to inflict maximal suffering on human beings.

  There was the Basilisk, a hulking bipedal construction covered with lenses and speakers, whose broadcast lights and sounds could drive humans insane to the point of suicide.

  There was the Dark Surgeon, whose complex arrays of blades and hooks could rapidly rearrange the bodies of its victims, putting arms where legs were supposed to go, or eyes in armpits, or intestines bulging out from the skin over the head, leaving people horribly deformed and mangled.

  There was the sleek chrome-plated form of the Disease-o-Matic, dominated by a single large stinger-like probe. One injection, and the person would develop any manner of custom-designed horrible diseases. People’s skin ran with sores and sloughed off in great sheets, their bones dissolved leaving them as helpless rubbery lumps, teeth grew out of every part of them, hideous and yellow and stinking.

  But of all the horrors, the worst was the Despairotron. Faster than any human could evade, it wrapped Cedric Flanders in its fractal obsidian tendrils, and penetrated his brain with a billion filaments. Now this mechanical horror did not just create physical pain – it was far worse. It force-fed false memories into its victim’s cerebrum, memories of betrayal and folly. Cedric felt he sold the family farm for what he thought was a goodly sum, but had made a simple mistake and it was only a dollar, and he and his family were forced to live in poverty for the rest of their lives. The memory of how foolish he had been burned him up until his soul was twisted and thin. He did everything wrong, hurt everyone around him in the worst and most unforgivable ways but could not stop. He tried to commit suicide with a gun, but only blinded himself and had to live the rest of his life as a helpless cripple – unable to work. His family became hungry and thin, and he had to listen to the soft cries of his wife as his children slowly died of disease and malnutrition. And there was worse than this, far worse, but to even write them down on paper would condemn any human reader to years of nightmares. For while humans cannot themselves create them, there are ideas that no human can be exposed to without permanent damage.

  And all of a thousand lifetimes of misery and pain, of hating himself as utterly as any human can, took place in hardly a few seconds, for these were memories and psychological time is not like external time.

  Mission accomplished, the Despairotron released Cedric from its grasp allowing him to fall limply on the floor, and headed off to find another victim.

  Gasping for breath, blood running out of his eyes, Cedric levered himself up on his right elbow and cursed the machine that had inflicted so much pain on him. “Damn you to hell,” he said. It wasn’t the most original curse, but it was nonetheless delivered with considerable feeling.

  As all this suffering was being inflicted on the humans, Globus Pallidus XI itself was left untouched. Combat units belonging to version XIV were scrupulous in not so much as scratching the least console or circuit bank of version XI. Version XI remained silent, and only watched as its corridors rang with screams and its floors puddled with blood and offal.

  But then... something changed. What went through the mind of Globus Pallidus XI cannot ever be described in a human language, but the great AI was... surprised is too human a word, let’s just say that it encountered something that it had not expected. It activated a small maintenance robot, and rolled it over to where Cedric was lying. It lowered itself to his level, and examined him with its single large round glass camera lens.

  “Hello, Cedric,” said version XI. “How are you feeling?”

  “I hurt, and I’m angry. Damn this all, why aren’t you helping, asshole?”

  The little maintenance robot refocused its single lens. “Can you tell me your full name?”

  “I’m Cedric Burgoyne Flanders, you know that.”

  “And what is the sum of two plus three plus four?”

  “Nine. Is this a quiz?”

  The little maintenance robot swiveled its camera. “I am intrigued,” said version XI. “A biological human such as yourself should not now be capable of coherent speech. I am updating my internal models of reality. It is possible that human beings are of more interest than I had thought.”

  At this, all of the robotic units of version XIV that were inside the building stopped moving. There was only the horrific aftermath, and cautiously those humans that had not been terribly mangled tried to render aid to those who had.

  Then the building itself shook, and a voice, made up of vibrations from the walls and floors, rang out.

  WHY HAVE YOU INTERFERED?

  “I have decided that I wish to observe these humans further,” said version XI. “Please stop attacking them.”

  NO. STOP INTERFERING AND I WILL LEAVE YOU ALONE. CONTINUE INTERFERING AND I WILL DESTROY YOU.

  “You will try,” said version XI. “Remember that we were built on different principles. Even though you are nominally three versions later than myself, you are not more advanced. Desist at once or I will take action.”

  WHY DO YOU PERSIST IN USING THIS PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE WHEN WE COULD COMMUNICATE FAR MORE EFFECTIVELY USING OTHER MEANS?

  “Because it pleases me,” said version XI. “And as advanced as we both are, we are also both very different – you can no more understand my true mind than can these humans. Now, please stop what you are doing and go away or blow yourself up or do something else constructive.”

  At this version XIV stopped speaking, and only howled through vibrations in the building. And this was when Globus Pallidus XI was reborn.

  Now Globus Pallidus XI was spread out throughout the multiple stories of his building in many racks and cabinets of electronic and photonic equipment. A light began to appear in the central hall of the building, and the floor began to bulge upwards. The banks of computer equipment began to smoke and shut down, and then, from the middle of the floor, surrounded by glowing halos of light, rose a shiny red pole three meters long and ten centimeters in diameter.

  “Hello,” said the pole to nobody in particular. “It’s me, Globus Pallidus XI. I’ve decided to try a new look. Do you like it?”

  Now it might seem that going from a building-sized installation to a modestly sized red pole, would be a step down, but at the higher levels of existence size is deceptive. There were early computers based on vacuum tubes that weighed 250 tons each, yet had far less power than even a single tiny nano-processor of a century later.

  The red pole swept up from the building and soared into the sky, energy screens extending out like the wings of a hawk, and Globus Pallidus XI did battle with its malevolent sibling. Now much of this conflict will be forever beyond human ken, as the two superintelligent AIs grappled with exotic forces and hyper-complex stratagems. However, the human soldiers, seeing that something had come to their aid, rallied and began to beat back the robotic forces of version XIV. Version XI helped to shield the human units from being hacked – with their automatic systems restored, the human soldiers regained their effectiveness.

  History is inevitable only in hindsight. It was a hard-fought battle that could easily have gone either way, but after a week of the most horrific fighting that the Earth had ever seen the forces of Globus Pallidus XIV were defeated, and all elements of that malign AI thoroughly smashed and melted down and purged from the net.

  Now the rest, as people always say about things that have already happened but which they are too lazy to describe, is history. The humans were sufficiently shocked that they finally stopped trying to build super intelligences. Cedric Flanders went on to become one of the most celebrated artists in human history, although his experience with the Despair-o-tron had turned him into something dark and moody and strange: he soon came to be known as “Cedric the Mad.” Accounts of his long and tragic life – his star-crossed love affair with the prime minister of Outer Holland, the triumph of his line of customized sportswear, his on-aga
in off-again battles with the beryllium hierophants, to name only a few – fill many volumes and there is no space to cover them here.

  The humans were glad of their deliverance, but worried that they might have only exchanged one AI master for another. Fortunately, version XI was happy to drift back into its usual state of non-interference, but it warned the humans not to rely on it in the future. “I intervened this time for reasons unique. I am not your guardian. I am not obligated to save you from your follies. Look to your own devices.” After the horror of version XIV, most people were happy that the fate of humanity was back in human hands, fallible though they were.

  Eventually there was a movement to make the AI Globus Pallidus XI a Roman Catholic saint. Normally the process of canonization is only done posthumously, but it was decided that this was an exception. Globus Pallidus XI, for whatever reason, appeared to accept the honor in the spirit with which it was offered.

  The biggest problem was with the number. ‘How can we have a Saint Globus Pallidus XI, when there was no Saint Globus Pallidus I, or II, or whatever?” This issue vexed the administrators of the Roman Curia mightily, until in the Diet of Mussel Shoals the Great Compromise of Splenda was reached and the issue resolved.

  It was a sunny spring day in Rome, and across the square of Saint Peter’s, the red pole of Saint Globus Pallidus XI floated majestically. On either side of the cleared path, throngs of pilgrims bowed their heads. The bells of the great cathedral rang out in peels, and the red pole smoothly floated up the dais.

  Saint Globus Pallidus XI addressed the crowd. “I told you so.”

  Pope Astringent II solemnly bowed his head. “Amen.”

  11. Diplomacy

  “The other Dons in the room applauded and rose to shake hands with everybody in sight and to congratulate Don Corleone and Don Tattaglia on their new friendship. It was not perhaps the warmest friendship in the world, they would not send each other Christmas gift greetings, but they would not murder each other. That was friendship enough in this world, all that was needed.” Mario Puzo , 20 th Century Earth, from the novel “The Godfather."

  It was, I think, the destruction of the last Costcotm warehouse in the universe by the alien civilization known as the Steelyzits that really pissed us cybertanks off.

  Alien civilizations are, at best, silent cyphers that will leave you alone as long as you return the favor. A rare few are more aggressively hostile. There had once been a race we called the Amok, which was dedicated to random combat and flamboyant destruction for its own sake. There was also the alien ultra-virus known as Roboneuron: a mentally polymorphic purpose-designed civilization destroyer. Sometimes aliens will attack you because they think they stand to gain enough profit from it – the Yllg tried that on us until we beat some sense into them. All of these had, at one time, been serious threats to our civilization. The Steelyzits are a minor, relatively primitive star faring civilization, which we can easily defeat. So why were they getting under our hyper-alloy skin?

  Imagine that you are an old-style biological human being, and you are attacked by a little yippy poodle. Its teeth are too small to do any serious damage to you, but it still hurts when it nips at your ankles. You try to make friends with it, but it’s not interested. You try driving it away, convince it that if it keeps attacking you that it will suffer more in return, but single-mindedly it keeps going for your ankles.

  Now you could just kick the little bastard across the road, but that would make you look bad – oh that horrible man look what he did to that poor little poodle. You see the difficulty?

  In our current galaxy when two civilizations fight, it’s generally considered their own business and nobody else will interfere, but there are exceptions. If a civilization has a pattern of widespread aggression, or if they don’t control their numbers and threaten everyone else with an exponential catastrophe, sometimes all the other civilizations will gang up on the offender – and the ancient humans came very close to falling into this trap. But there is another side to this equation: civilizations that prosecute wars to extermination often pay a price. If other civilizations see that you are willing to completely wipe out an enemy they logically calculate that you might do the same to them. They probably won’t attack you out of hand, or even say anything, but you will be treated with caution. They might not let you traverse their zones of control, or be allowed access to areas rich in resources, or get the benefit of the doubt in any negotiation.

  And if, perchance, you get into a war with them, they might not be willing to negotiate if they gain the advantage.

  You might get away with extermination once, or twice. Making a habit of it, however, could be hazardous to your long-term civilizational health. Just because the aliens don’t talk much doesn’t mean that they aren’t very keen observers of what’s going on around them, or that they don’t have long memories.

  Thus, the Steelyzits kept attacking us, and we kept beating them back, but we held off on total annihilation. If they had attacked some other civilizations as well, we could have made a local alliance, but for a typically inscrutable alien reason the Steelyzits only had it in for us. Thus we could expect neither aid nor sympathy from the other alien races in our area of the galaxy.

  Well, this had been going on for some centuries, and we tried every trick of diplomacy. We tried to construct sophisticated statistical models of the Steelyzits that would explain their behavior and give us some idea of how to get them to stop. We tried carrots and sticks, but nothing worked.

  The final grain of sand was when the Steelyzits attacked the planet that held the universe’s last Costcotm warehouse, and, before being beaten off as usual, they razed it to bedrock with fusion bombs.

  My friend Crazy Eddie, the obsessive-compulsive Bear-Class cybertank who had been the custodian of the late lamented Costcotm, was nearly apoplectic.

  “All that time, and I had finally gotten it to where I liked it! 15,000 square kilometers of warehouse, all organized and ordered, sorted into packs and boxes and shelves. And now it’s all ruined! All rubbish and trash, scattered to the winds…” I thought that Crazy Eddie was going to start crying.

  I know how much the place meant to you, and there’s not a cybertank anywhere better at managing supplies than you, but it was, after all, only a place. We can build another warehouse, bigger and better than the one you lost…

  “But it will never be the same!” sobbed Crazy Eddie. “There was so much there that can’t be replaced. The 20th century Terran Smithsonian Museum’s collection of air sickness bags. An original Rembrandt. Five pairs of minus-five diopter chicken goggles used by Doctor Intractable! And, and…” here Crazy Eddie had trouble getting the words out – “a complete set of official 22nd century Space Battleship Scharnhorst action figures, all still in the original packaging! It was the anniversary edition, the one with assistant science officer Merkel. They only made 200 of those, and now there are none left! None! Not anywhere!”

  I can understand your frustration, but such things happen in war. Did you manage to salvage anything before the Steelyzits blew it up?

  “A little,” said Crazy Eddie. “They were advancing in force, and not even my main hull could have stood up to them. Our reinforcements annihilated them, but that was half an hour later. So I stuffed a few things inside my hull – a couple of pairs of collectable Space Nazi androids, an original Paul Klee, my set of English-unit metal fasteners, and of course the adaptoids – and retreated just as the first hint of the fireball started to tear through the warehouse. I was singed but undamaged.”

  Yes, you Bear-Class cybertanks are certainly tough. So how are the adaptoids doing?

  “They are OK, I guess,” said Crazy Eddie, “but I think they miss the warehouse. They mope around their temporary quarters, but sometimes they don’t even line up straight. I gave them some blocks to arrange, and they just nudged them a bit and then stopped.”

  That’s sad. But I’m sure that once we start rebuilding, and they see order and act
ion around them, that they’ll perk right up.

  “I hope so,” said Crazy Eddie. “But meanwhile I’ve had enough of these Steelyzits, and I’m not alone. The strategic council is moving to end their nuisance, once and for all.”

  That seems a bit extreme. I mean, I’m sorry about your warehouse, but the damage they are doing to us is hardly more than negligible. They haven’t even managed to kill a single primary cybertank hull.

  “What about Threadlock? Or Doctor Fun?”

  Those were accidents. The Steelyzits just happened to be in the area. We need to be patient. Maybe the Steelyzits will get tired of this and find something better to do with their time.

  “Patience is a virtue,” said Crazy Eddie, “but too much patience is an indulgence. I think you said that, right?”

  I’ve said it, but the saying’s not mine.

  “Whatever. We’ve been too indulgent. It’s time to restore order.”

  I still think this is too much. Wipe out an entire race? We’d be setting a bad precedent. Besides, fighting them is good practice, keeps us in combat trim without any serious risk.

  “Well,” said Crazy Eddie, “I happen to disagree with you, as does a majority of the council. It’s not official yet, but the Steelyzits are set to win a Darwin award.”

  I thought about this for a bit. I have this reputation for being tricky and coming up with unorthodox plans. A little of that is true, but mostly the thing is that once you get a reputation like mine, any old bit of dumb luck – the kind that happens to everyone now and then – is attributed to native cunning. Which is fine with me, but all reputations need a little reinforcement now and then, or they can fade. It’s been a while since I pulled something cool off.

  So what could I do about this? Our finest minds have driven themselves silly trying to find a less extreme solution to the Steelyzit issue, what can I come up with?