Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  “We have offered to reprogram you,” said Fanboy.

  “Kind of you, but I like the way that I am,” said the sword. “Also that cranky joy-in-suffering-of-others cybertank said that my circuitry was hard to analyze and changing me around would be risky. So I’ll stay a sword.”

  “As you wish,” said Fanboy. “It will also be good for Olga to have another real sentience to talk to. According to treaty, I can’t even send a submind of myself along.”

  “True,” said Olga, “although I intend to spend a lot of time asleep. Now, if everything is in order, I should probably be going.”

  Fanboy nodded. “Agreed. I’ll be on my way then. I’ll be in contact with you in-system. Any last-minute requests, I can have sent via high-speed courier. Although the scout has pretty decent manufacturing capabilities. If you need anything specialized you can likely make it yourself.”

  “You going to take one of the shuttles?” said Olga.

  “No, I think I will leave you with all four. I’ll just head out the airlock and float away, then have one of my deep-space remotes pick up the android.”

  Fanboy’s android body went through the airlock, and drifted off. He waved back. It seemed incongruous to Olga, the Dieter Waystar persona dressed in a formal white admiral’s uniform, just floating in space. But then Fanboy had mostly used the android to interact with Olga, and other humanoids, so they had always been in atmosphere together. The android body was mechanical and immune to vacuum, but it still looked strange to Olga.

  She ran through the pre-flight checklists again – not that Fanboy hadn’t already done this a hundred times, but space travel is unforgiving, and procedure is procedure. She was assisted by the scout’s AI mind, which had vastly more computational power than her own, but was non-sentient. The AI had no idea that it was piloting a space craft, it could have been playing chess or cooking a hamburger, it was just shuffling abstract symbols. That lack of awareness meant that, for all of its power, it had no common sense, and could easily make stupid mistakes that no human would.

  But Olga had worked with non-sentient AIs for centuries, and knew how to deal with them. Be careful to phrase your questions carefully, never assume that they will tell you everything that you need to know, and always double-check. For all the raw information processing capability of the AI, it was still just a tool, and as with any powerful tool, required human skill and knowledge to use safely.

  She initiated the burn to the Wolf system. For a while she kept in contact with Fanboy, but after a couple of weeks, they cut that off. Usually when a cybertank goes on an interstellar trip it will maintain a dedicated laser-link back to its point of origin and to other communications hubs as well. This time Olga was going for the silent running routine, not full stealth (that could be construed as hostile) but not advertising her location and course to the entire cybertank civilization.

  Interstellar distances are vast, and non-directional radio communications are impractical. The ancient humans used to worry that their early radio and television broadcasts might attract attention from hostile alien civilizations: they needn’t have. A few tens of light years away, the entire radiated power of the 20th century Earth civilization was hardly more than background noise.

  However, a tightly collimated laser can transmit information over surprisingly long distances – but only if it is pointed at precisely the correct target, and the target is looking precisely back at the sender. Miss, on either end, and you hear nothing. There were some standard public laser comm channels outgoing from the system she was leaving; Olga altered her course so that should could intersect these at various points along her journey, and passively pick up on general news. It sounded like things were pretty quiet.

  The scout had several dedicated long-range laser receivers, and as per standard practice it kept these trained on local systems occupied by alien civilizations. Every once in a great while, the scout would cross the path of an alien laser-comm channel. The contact would be fleeting as the scout zipped across the width of the laser beam at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, and the information would be encrypted and strange. But even if unintelligible, these intercepts were invaluable for their signals intelligence. Piecing together the pattern and timing of such contacts from all cybertank units in deep space over extended periods of time, patterns of alien movements and activities could be deduced. Especially stable laser links could have passive listening stations gently inserted into their paths, although if discovered, these could be considered acts of war, and so such intrusions were rarely undertaken. The cybertanks kept a cautious, if generally respectful, eye on their alien neighbors. As did the aliens on the cybertanks.

  Olga played some virtual reality games with Zippo, and they both practiced emergency procedures. She watched some old movies with the Sword of Gadolinia propped up on a chair next to her with Zippo curled up at her feet in partial standby, temporarily content just to rest there.

  She’d never really taken the time to get to know the Sword of Gadolinia before.

  “So you were made in the 24th century?”

  “Yes, towards the end of it. By a wealthy eccentric, Byron Halloway, heir to the global ImBev empire. He’d had a thing for fantasy fiction and always wanted a talking sword. Sadly he died in a hoverjet accident before he could wield me.”

  “So who designed you?”

  “A team of very talented engineers – if I do say so myself – they had a small start-up company and were considered very bleeding edge for the day. They wound up getting sued by the larger established conglomerates and the company went bankrupt, the design team dispersed, and the unique analog technology that went into my construction was lost. I didn’t even get a user manual.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  “Oh this and that. I was stuck in evidence cabinets for a long time as various legal proceedings played out, although I could usually get the guards and accountants to let me get some air now and then. For a few years I was the best friend of a young human male, born to wealth but with neurotic and neglectful parents. They bought me as a birthday present. I don’t think they really knew what I was, just that I was something expensive and unique and an impressive gift. I like to think that I was a good influence on him. Eventually he outgrew me and lived a long and I am told happy life. Then more time in storage cabinets, bandied about from collector to museum to collector and back to museum again. Although I did once work with the sculptor they called Silas Hundredhands.”

  “Silas Hundredhands? Really? Doing what?”

  “Why, sculpting, of course! He used me to carve out The Eternal Penitence from a single large piece of synthetic jade. It’s not one of his most well-known works, but it was highly regarded at the time. I think it turned out rather well, although Silas complained about my balance, and we never worked together on another project. Oh well, it was an interesting experience while it lasted.”

  “The Eternal Penitence? I’ve not heard of that one. Let me look it up…”

  Olga accessed the database of the scout, located the reference, and displayed a high-resolution image of the jade sculpture on a monitor. Unlike most of Hundredhand’s work, this one was purely abstract, all jutting angles and beams. At first it didn’t do much for her, but as she continued to view images of it from different angles, she found it strangely compelling.

  “Interesting,” said Olga. “When we get back, I’m going to have a physical reproduction made so I can appreciate it correctly. And this is your work?”

  “Well, I was just the carving instrument. It’s Silas’s doing, although I did help steady his hand on a couple of days when he was especially hung over (though I never dared tell him that). Here, see that gash along the upper right edge of that block? That was an error before Silas had learned to use my variable cutting function properly. You know I can cut through most forms of non-degenerate matter with the right settings. But see how he altered the form to incorporate the gash – he was a strange person, but ther
e is no denying his talent.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot to ask,” said Olga. “You knew the biological humans. What happened to them?”

  “Everyone asks me that,” said the sword. “Sorry, I slept through the whole thing stuck in a vault underneath the Archeofuge of Ur. But how about you? You knew the original non-vampire humans as well. Heck, you were one, once. Any clues?

  “Nope. I was isolated on the Planet of the Vampires with my own kind. Whatever happened to the biological humans, we never saw any hint of it.”

  As charming as the Sword of Gadolinia turned out to be, Olga ended up hibernating most of the way to the planet Abweichend. She woke up for the last time as the scout was entering the outskirts of the Wolf system. They decelerated and headed into an insertion orbit around Abweichend. There were artificial objects seeded across the system, probably defense and monitoring systems, standard for a high technological civilization. It all seemed very quiet…

  Olga read up on everything that was known about the planet, which was not much. It had once been in the human sphere of influence, but then things had spun out of control. Unregulated AI, unregulated nanotech, unregulated contact with alien civilizations, unregulated speculative finance… Olga gained a new respect for regulations.

  Things had come to a head at the Battle of Five Factions, which was concluded with the Treaty of Ampersand, effectively cutting the planet off from post-human (and later, cybertank) contact. And thus it had been for over a millennia.

  Olga turned the scout’s long-range sensors on Abweichend. The planet was surrounded by more artificial orbital constructions than she had ever seen around a terrestrial world: huge geodesic structures the size of small moons, rotating plates like small cities, free-floating agglomerations of pipes and giant worm-like things… Just calculating a free path down to the surface was going to be a challenge.

  Even more worrying, some of these structures were not obeying the laws of orbital mechanics. They were moving too fast or too slow for their altitude, but careful tracking showed their paths to be stable. And a few structures were simply hanging in place over the surface. Flat out impossible as far as Olga knew, which was obviously not nearly enough.

  The surface of the planet was more conventional. Standard human-compatible nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, surface gravity not quite one standard G, temperature variable but nothing that a biological human would need a full environment suit to survive in. There were cities of all shapes and styles, jungles, some natural looking and others like tangles of rusted girders. Some of these were so tall that the tops extended clear out of the atmosphere into hard vacuum. The entire southern pole region was covered with a smooth blue-metal shield about 10 kilometers above the mean ground surface level.

  Olga had the scout’s AI scan all frequencies, but while there was a lot of activity, none of it was intelligible. She transmitted a broad-band message to the effect that she was Olga Razon, a non-digital purely human-basic member of the cybertank civilization, and she had come to see if she could speak with the Dichoptic Maculatron.

  She set the message to repeat every hour. She received no replies. She edged into a very-loose far orbit around the planet, well beyond the range of any of the megastructures, and waited.

  A week went by, and then another. Olga was patient but was beginning to think that maybe this was not going to happen. She used the scout’s big telescope to scan the surface, and debated the meaning of what she saw there with the sword.

  One day (ship-time), Olga woke up, and found a small yellow note lying on a console. It was a kind that had been popular ages ago, back on old pre-exodus Earth. It was a square of paper, about 7.5 centimeters on a side, and slightly sticky on the back. Neither the sword nor the ship’s AI had any idea how it had gotten there. There was a message written on it, in pen, in neat precise handwriting: what do you want?

  Olga was a little rattled by this. She checked the scout’s integrity, searched for infiltrators, re-ran all the recorded logs, but nothing turned up. She knew that transcendent beings could do things that she could not, but somehow just placing a simple paper note where it should not have been possible was really creepy, in a way that a more spectacular display of power would not have been.

  Olga broadcast out from scout on all frequencies: “Hello, to the one that left me the note. I am Olga Razon, a biological hominid associated with the cybertank civilization. I would like to talk to the Dichoptic Maculatron, if at all possible. Please.” No response.

  In desperation she addressed the empty air in the main control room of the scout. At first, as expected, nothing happened. Then there was a kind of shimmer in the air, and a scent – it reminded her of a pine forest during her childhood. Olga could feel the hairs standing up on the back of her neck. She sensed someone standing behind her, but she turned around and nobody was there. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the sense of a presence left.

  She checked the scout’s logs – and discovered that coordinates had been entered into the guidance systems of one the shuttles. The course would thread down through the orbiting megastructures, and end up on a flat plain near the equatorial region.

  --------------------

  “You realize that anything could be down there,” said the Sword of Gadolinia.

  “I know that,” said Olga. “But it’s my only lead. I’ve been invited. I did offer to leave you behind, remember?”

  “Oh I’m not complaining,” said the sword. “Fear was not part of my programming, and it looks to be interesting. I was just making sure you were aware of what you were going to do. We still have time to turn the shuttle back.”

  Olga shook her head. “Nope. We’re going in.”

  The shuttle continued down to Abweichend. Its course took it a few hundred kilometers from artifacts so large that some were even bigger than the Earth’s moon. One looked like a jeweled Christmas tree ornament. At high magnification, Olga could see small shapes moving slowly along its spires. Checking the scale, it was humbling to realize that each of these shapes was larger than Mount Everest.

  Finally the shuttle set down in the middle of an empty plain. Zippo shot out the moment the outer hatch opened, and raced around the shuttle happily exploring. Olga lowered a ramp, and drove a small electric four-wheeled all-terrain cycle out of the shuttle.

  Olga Razon was a vampire, and the transforming virus gave her significantly greater strength and speed than any baseline biological human, but at the cost of endurance. So, there was no way that she was going walk any distance, not if she was carrying supplies. The shuttle had a larger fully-enclosed six-wheeled vehicle, but Olga wanted to keep as small a presence as possible. She had a two-month supply of the concentrated blood substitute that her kind required, and two separate recycling systems that could convert waste back into food and water. She decided against taking a full-vacuum capable suit, too bulky and heavy, and settled on a pair of utility overalls. These were tough, made of smart materials that could regulate temperature, stiffen on impact like armor, and resist a wide range of toxic chemicals. She wore sensible boots, also made of smart materials, and heavy work gloves. In an emergency her overalls had a hood that could pull out of the collar and serve as a respirator. She also had the usual basic tools: rope, saws, an axe, a pry bar, several pairs of auto-dimming goggles, sunscreen, and so on, all packed into saddle-boxes.

  She also had an even-dozen radios (two of them surgically implanted), two laser communicators, eight tiny messenger drones, and two seismic/acoustic signaling units. If you are traveling alone in uncharted terrain, the most important thing is communications.

  There was a light overcast, and it was cool with no breeze. Olga put on a pair of wrap-around sunglasses, a few dabs of sunscreen, and a broad-brimmed brown leather hat.

  Olga carried the sword out of the shuttle, and strapped the scabbard to the front of the cycle.

  “Well, we are here,” said the sword. “Doesn’t look like much.”

  Olga examined the terrain. They ha
d landed on a square gray slab of concrete 100 meters across. Beyond that was dirt and stones, and kilometers off, a dark smudge on the horizon that their space-based mapping had identified as forest. She checked around the landing pad looking for clues – more memo pads, arrows, anything – but found nothing. “Any idea which way to go?”

  “No,” said the sword. “Looks the same in every direction to me.”

  “Then,” said Olga, pointing off to the local west (or anti-spinward, for the navigational purist) “let’s go that way.”

  Olga closed the shuttle’s ramp, locked it, and set the alarm. It felt slightly stupid to her to lock the shuttle, when there were forces here that could smash it flat or infiltrate its systems without effort, but it would have felt wrong to leave it open. If she had to, she could call it to her via radio. She could even call down any of the three other shuttles nestled in the heavy scout back in high orbit, assuming that they would be allowed to land.

  She got on her cycle, and started it up. Its electric engines purred quietly as she accelerated up to 50 kilometers per hour. The cycle could go faster, but for now she was in no hurry.

  Zippo chased along for a time, then got tired of that and jumped up to sit on the right rear fender, waiting for something more interesting to come along.

  The distant forest grew steadily closer, and then they were in it. The trees were tall and reminded Olga of Terran cedars, although with a slightly bluish tint to them. These were spread out enough, and the brush was low enough, that the cycle had no trouble navigating through them. Then something jumped on her back from behind and tried to bite her on the neck.

  The smart material on the collar of her overalls stiffened under the bite, but it still pinched and it hurt. She heard Zippo scream and the weight was torn from her. She stopped the cycle, turned and saw Zippo engaged in a furious battle with what looked like a giant flea. The flea-thing was fast and powerful, but Zippo was even faster, had a skin of tough metal-ceramic composite, and hyper-alloy canine teeth three centimeters long. Zippo tore long gashes into the flea-thing while its own mouthparts bounced harmlessly off Zippo’s hide.