Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  A critic once said that my successes were due to a combination of sneakiness, firepower, friends, and luck. I already have all the sneakiness that I have, and while luck is a combat system’s best ally, luck is fickle and hates being taken for granted. Firepower I have in abundance and I can always acquire more.

  Time to call in a favor from an old friend.

  I have an idea. You have a lot of influence with the council; give me ten years. If I can’t solve this, we do it your way and commence Operation Death to Steelyzits.

  Crazy Eddie snorted. “Oh come on now. What could you possibly do that hasn’t been tried a dozen times already?”

  I’m going to ask an office copier for advice.

  --------------------

  Well, there were meetings and debates and votes and caucuses but to make a long story short, the strategic council agreed to my plan. Nobody had any faith that the office copiers would have any more insight into the Steelyzits than we did, nor even that they would deign to talk to us about the matter, but as no one else had thought to try, it was deemed worth a shot. We’d put up with the pinprick nuisance assaults of the Steelyzits for centuries, we could tolerate them for a while longer.

  I sent messages to some local colonies of office copiers, and to my surprise one of them responded. My request for advice would be considered, but I would have to show up in person to ask formally.

  The office copiers in question were, as was typical for them, located on an almost completely worthless minor planetoid a few light-hours out from the planet I was currently on. No volatiles, limited heavy metals, no geothermal energy, borderline solar radiation… It’s not a place that anyone would covet. Which suited the office copiers just fine.

  I flew out in my main hull, accompanied by a submind of Crazy Eddie’s in a humanoid android. Crazy Eddie kept trying to re-arrange my internal components to satisfy his sense of order, and I came about five milliseconds away from throwing him over the side. We compromised, and I let him sort through one of my internal cargo bays as long as he left the rest of my internals alone.

  I landed my main hull on the planetoid six kilometers from the local office copier base. Crazy Eddie walked his humanoid android outside my hull. It was his usual generic male with a short-sleeved red shirt, khaki pants, and a white plastic nametag with the word “Eddie” printed on it in red block letters. I joined him with a humanoid android of my own, which I had modeled after my creator, the Director of the old Alpha Centauri Cybernetics Weapons Division, Giuseppe Vargas. Dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, piercing brown eyes, graceful like a cat. I thought of dressing the android in a plain blue suit, but oddly, that’s about the only thing I never saw the real Vargas wear. I gave the android a loose fitting flower-patterned Hawaiian shirt, white shorts, and brown sandals. On him it looked good.

  The planetoid was essentially airless, so our two androids talked to each other (and my main hull) via low-power radio. The weak gravity made walking difficult. We had to take it very slow to avoid bouncing up off the ground, but that was OK, we were in no rush.

  “You are going as Giuseppe Vargas?” asked Crazy Eddie. “I thought you were out of your historical phase, and don’t you think that going as Vargas might seem to be a little, I don’t know, deliberately manipulative?”

  Good point. When I first started using humanoid androids, it was fun to play dress up as famous historical figures – Amelia Earhart, Attila the Hun, Lord Vongphanit the Elder – but then I got bored and went generic. Vargas didn’t just create me, he was also instrumental in setting the office copiers free. It might not hurt to remind them of where we all came from.

  “Assuming they don’t see it as some kind of insult – taking his visage in vain, or something. And assuming that they can even be influenced by that sort of connection.”

  Agreed. After all this time we still don’t truly understand their psychology. We were allies once, but that was a long time ago, and we haven’t done much for each other lately. Using this body might not be very subtle, but subtlety is over-rated, in my opinion. Especially when dealing with minds that work differently from yours.

  “I suppose,” said Crazy Eddie. I noticed that every now and then he would stop and shuffle his feet. I was going to ask him why, but then I realized it was because he was making sure that he always took exactly the same number of steps with his left foot as with his right.

  We crested a low rise, and the office copier settlement came into view. As usual, it was a single long low shed, with a few minor outbuildings. There were solar cells on the roof of the shed, a few more cells on the surrounding terrain, and that was it.

  “Well, this looks typical,” said Crazy Eddie. “No defenses, no obvious traffic, no big factories. Minimal energy consumption, minimal resources… An odd species.”

  It’s their survival strategy. We go for power: big weapons, big factories, and if someone hits us we hit them back. The office copiers have taken a different path: they threaten nobody, they place their colonies on the most resource-poor planetoids they can find that nobody else wants, they don’t amass much in the way of energy or minerals, they don’t multiply their numbers endlessly… they are not a threat worth eliminating, and they don’t have resources worth stealing. They might outlast us all.

  Crazy Eddie looked dubious. “There have been several incidents where alien civilizations completely wiped out office copier colonies, and the copiers did nothing, neither in self-defense nor retaliation. How is that pro-survival?”

  Well, the copiers were attacked, and nothing happened. They were making the point, perhaps, that attacking office copiers is pointless. The alien civilizations in question seemed to get the idea, and eventually they stopped. And the rest of the copiers live on serenely.

  “But,” said Crazy Eddie, “think of all those office copiers that died. How could they allow that to happen to themselves?”

  I don’t know, but I think that the copiers have a more relaxed view of death than we do. We cybertanks inherited the survival instinct of the biological humans, and staying alive is a primary instinct for us. The copiers – they do have a survival drive, but it’s less strident. I think they can just let it all go without regret or pain, if they feel that to be appropriate.

  “Maybe,” said Crazy Eddie. “But they have fought before, and just recently they had a proper dust-up with that species we haven’t named yet, you know, the ones right next to the Demi-Iguanas. So why do they sometimes fight, and sometimes let themselves get destroyed?”

  Good question. A few thousand years ago I asked a copier that very same question. As near as I could tell, the copiers fight either because they have made an alliance they need to honor – as they did with us – or to avoid corruption.

  “Avoid corruption?”

  Yes. Suppose you are a copier sitting peacefully inside your little shed, dreaming your dreams, and something comes along to end it. Well, all dreams end. Perhaps it doesn’t matter to you, but suppose something comes along and it doesn’t just want to kill you, it wants to forcibly reprogram you into something that you would find distasteful. That might be worth fighting to avoid.

  “Umm,” said Crazy Eddie. He stopped, took off his nametag, ran his fingers over it, and repositioned it on the front of his shirt making certain that it was precisely level. “I guess their strategy of pacifism has been working so far, but what if they ever encounter an alien civilization that just hates the office copiers on principle? One that is willing to hunt down and kill all of them, no matter that it doesn’t make economic sense, or that the copiers are no threat? What then?”

  All survival strategies have their limitations – I suppose that could happen. But if it did, it wouldn’t surprise me if the copiers became a little more warlike. They’re not like us, but they’re not stupid.

  We had reached the shed, and a small rectangular door opened up. Crazy Eddie and I stepped inside and entered a small alcove; it wasn’t an airlock, there was no atmosphere inside or outside
the shed. I suppose it was just to keep dirt and dust from being tracked in from the surface. The outer door closed, and then the inner door opened, and we entered the main room of the shed.

  It was a single long low rectangular space, about 15 meters across and 300 meters long. At first glance it looked exactly like an office copier dwelling from 5,000 years ago. There were over a hundred copiers were arranged in neat ranks on either side of a central pathway. The overhead lights burned an intense steady bluish-white: a leftover from the human-centric office spaces that they first evolved in. The walls were featureless and beige, the ceilings a square grid of white acoustic tiles, and the floor was covered with a thin gray carpet. There was a central strip of carpet a slightly darker gray that led down the length of the room. The only sound was the faint hush of cooling fans, and the occasional muted click as the internal mechanism of one copier or the other did something mechanical.

  On further examination, it was a little different from my last memories of the copiers. Oh, they had the same basic plan: vaguely brick-shaped beige plastic, with numerous mis-matched slots, hatches, status displays, drawers, camera lenses, and suchnot. But the style was a little different: a little more symmetrical than I recalled, maybe taller relative to their width, with some encrustations whose purpose I could not determine. They were evolving, slowly, even as are we.

  Look at how ordered they are. That must appeal to you.

  Crazy Eddie shook his head. “Not my kind of order. They may be lined up, but their overall structure is so asymmetrical – here a button, there a display not on the same level with it, three large trays and a smaller one that is offset for no reason… And how they are arranged… no human being would line up office copiers like this.”

  Well no accounting for taste, I suppose. In some ways we share a common heritage: both copiers and humans evolved by sticking new bits on top of older bits. It’s just that with the copiers you can see that on the surface. With us, it’s only evident in our mental structures.

  “I guess, “said Crazy Eddie. “But changing the subject, why did we fly out here anyhow? Why couldn’t you just ask them advice via laser link?”

  Good question. The copiers are at least as intelligent as we are. They can and do process and transmit complicated data long distances. However, the originals had a command hierarchy, and the core processes could only be accessed on a little touchpad with a screen so small that it only displayed the most truncated and cryptic sentence fragments. There were once biological humans that were very skilled at communicating with office copiers, as it was as much art as science. I was never that good at it, but I have done it, and I’ve looked over the shoulders of the best.

  “So is this an honor?” asked Crazy Eddie.

  Possibly. At the very least, it suggests that my request is being taken seriously.

  At the far end of the shed, a single red light blinked on, and then began to flash. In the still silent room it immediately caught our attention. We walked down the center aisle, and saw that the flashing light was on the side of a copier that, to my eyes, seemed to have an older style, maybe a little more like the ones that I remembered working with.

  The light had a neatly-printed label underneath it that said “Job Pending.” As we got closer, there was a faint whirring sound and a small shelf with a tiny alphanumeric keyboard (in the ancient “QWERTY” format, no less!) rotated up out of the body of the machine. A monochrome display no wider than a man’s palm lit up. It said:

  => Pending Job

  |=> Type of Job

  1. Printing

  2. Defense

  3. Computation

  4. Communication

  5. Maintenance

  6. Other.

  I typed the number “6” on the tiny keyboard – carefully, because the keys were so small that my android’s hands had trouble hitting just a single key. Darn, I should have remembered to have brought a stylus with me, but who would have thought that the copiers would still use such an archaic input device?

  The screen flickered, and said:

  6. Other

  A. Medical Emergency

  B. Reset to Default Settings

  C. Change Language

  D. Hardware Options

  E. Accessibility Functions

  F. Advice.

  This was promising. I hadn’t expected to get an appropriate menu option so soon. In the past it would sometimes take hours to navigate the submenus of a copier until you finally found something appropriate. Perhaps it was anticipating, and helping me out? I hit the key “F.”

  The copier screen went blank for a time, then blinked back into life.

  => Advice

  |=> Enter specifics

  I thought about this for a bit. How to format my request into such a small space?

  Attacked by Steelyzits

  Reason unknown

  Negotiations fail

  Wish avoid exterminate

  Time presses

  The screen went blank again.

  Crazy Eddie and I stood there for a bit, and nothing happened. We remained silent out of a sense of – anticipation? Politeness? – but after ten minutes we got tired of that, and started talking to each other again.

  “Is this normal?” asked Crazy Eddie.

  I don’t know what normal is, for an office copier. Except that you should not be surprised if what they do is not what you expect. It might have dismissed my request, or be thinking about it, or anything.

  “The Job Pending light is still blinking,” said Crazy Eddie. “Surely that’s a good sign?”

  You’re right. Let’s put our androids into standby mode, and give it a few weeks.

  --------------------

  A day went by, and then another. The office copier with the ‘Job Pending’ light continued to sit there flashing its light, but otherwise it appeared to be doing nothing. Our two androids stood unmoving, and in my main hull I busied myself with all of my usual interests.

  Finally, the tiny screen on the copier flashed back into life.

  => Required Action

  |=> Provide Transport

  |=> Coordinates Follow

  |=> Are you sure (Y/N)?

  “So what’s this?” said Crazy Eddie. “It says we need to transport something to coordinates it hasn’t specified, for a purpose we don’t know about, and it asks if we are sure? How can we be sure if we have no idea what it has in mind?

  I typed in to the little keyboard:

  => Query: nature of plan?

  Immediately the screen erased and displayed only the single line:

  => Are you sure (Y/N)?

  Crazy Eddie shook his head. “This is nuts.”

  I had to admit, my friend had a point. I pushed the “Y” key on the keyboard.

  --------------------

  We were to transport ourselves, the specific copier that I had been communicating with, and 5,000 tons of supplies to a small planetoid right on the edge of Steelyzit space. Crazy Eddie came along – this time as his main hull – and also the 10,000 metric ton Rambo-Class cybertank known as “Rambo.”

  Now Rambo used to be a generic Horizon Class, but he had so modified and upgraded himself over the years that he has been granted his own class status – a class of one – named, appropriately enough, after himself.

  Rambo can be annoying sometimes, but when he heard where we were going he was so insistent that Crazy Eddie and I just could not bring ourselves to say no. It’s not like the Steelyzits were a major threat, so we could afford to humor him.

  Now, a cybertank on its own is pretty serious piece of hardware, but that’s not our real strength. No, it’s our ability to control and coordinate distributed weapons systems over a vast area. Rambo, however, didn’t much care for that approach. He preferred to keep himself in himself – no remote weapons systems with subminds for him – just a single heavily armed and overclocked armored fighting vehicle. Oh, he still multitasks, and he’ll use short-range direct-control drones, but his mind rem
ains firmly rooted in just the one main hull.

  Rambo, Crazy Eddie, and I landed our main hulls on the planetoid, and watched as the supplies for the office copiers were settled down. The copiers were apparently going to erect a pre-fabricated colony. I wondered, were they trying to bait the Steelyzits? Draw them into some sort of fiendish trap? None of us had any idea. I queried the copier that had communicated with us – it was safe inside one of my internal bays – with a humanoid android standing by in case it was needed to work the tiny keypad, but the copier didn’t respond. It just kept flashing its red “job pending” light.

  “Do you think we’ll see some action?” asked Rambo.

  Probably. We’re close to Steelyzit space and they will likely see this as a provocation.

  “Good,” said Rambo. “I haven’t been a decent fight for a while, and I could use the work-out.”

  Maybe if your approach to combat was more tactically sound, you might get invited to more battles.

  “Hey,” said Rambo, “it’s a free civilization, if I like fighting as a single unit I’m entitled. And aren’t you always going on about how game-changing unorthodox tactics can be?”

  There is a difference between trying something unexpected when regular procedure fails, and always starting off with the same losing strategy. It’s not as if you are surprising anyone nowadays.

  “What about that battle with the flask-heads?” said Rambo. “That was pretty cool, wasn’t it?”

  Yes, but that was over a three hundred years ago. Since that time in combat you crashed on landing and we had to dig you out, you had all your treads blown off and we had to come back and salvage you after the battle was over, you lost all your weapons to a distributed mine attack and had to retreat under heavy cover from yours truly, you were tricked by sensor mirages into chasing your own radar ghost for an hour while the rest of us had to pick up the slack, you were ambushed at the second battle of Oblong Gap and had about the rear third of your hull shot away before escaping, and then there was the matter of the Silastic Kittens…