Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  “Yes,” said Olga.

  “A typical concern, for a human,” said the pole. “That has always been a major problem for your order of life. ‘Does he/she feel the same about me?’ How you torture yourself on this matter, when you should just accept things as they are. Remember, the space battleship Fanboy had enormous raw computational power, many thousands of times more than you, but his core psychology was still baseline human. I do admit that your relationship was unusual. You were not physical lovers, obviously, but you were more than good friends. Your personalities were simply in sync with each other.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” said Olga. “But what about now? Sometimes I think he’s the same as he used to be, and sometimes... sometimes I see someone else standing there…”

  “Tell me,” said the pole, “what do you know about the process of a deceased cybertank reseeding ?”

  “I know that when the main hull of a cybertank is destroyed, then all of the surviving subminds and remotes and data caches and so on can come together and pool their data and help to create a new cybertank.”

  “Indeed,” said the pole. “And of all the cybertanks that have died, what fraction ‘reseed’?”

  “I don’t know,” said Olga. “Maybe, I guess, 90 percent?”

  “No,” said the pole. “It’s about 10 percent. Do you know why?”

  Olga frowned. “That small? Only one in ten opt to come back? Why so few?”

  “Ah,” said the pole. “Let’s try a tautology. Why would a deceased cybertank not want to come back to life?”

  “Because they are dead, and want nothing,” said Olga. “But now I am confused – then why do any of them opt to come back at all?”

  “Well,” said the pole, ”as you know by now, all those subminds and data stores and whatnot have no true sense of self. When the main mind goes, they don’t have any reason to continue. They did their part, served their purpose, had fun, and now it’s time to pass the baton on to others and fade away. Unless something calls to them. Friends, acquaintances, loves… the cybertanks that come back are the ones that have others who care for them, that persuade them that they still have purpose…”

  Olga started to cry. “Fanboy. After he sacrificed himself to blow up the Yllg base on the moon over the vampire planet, I thought that the rest of him would be all raring to go and turn himself into an even larger space battleship. But he acted like he didn’t care. It took me, and Old Guy and Frisbee and Space Chief and Moby Cybertank and Dead Cat Bounce, and others, to convince him.”

  “Exactly,” said the pole. “He came because of you.”

  “But then,” said Olga, “why does he often act so distant? It’s as if he is trying to be like the old days, but it’s an effort for him, a chore. I still don’t understand that.”

  “Indeed,” said the pole. “You know that the process of reseeding is to some extent unpredictable. The newly created personality is usually similar to the old one, but it’s also different, to a greater or lesser extent. You also have to realize that Fanboy came back as a cutting edge Sundog Class cybertank. His mentality is bordering on qualitatively greater than baseline human. He has to dial himself down to interact with you.”

  Olga was silent for a time. “Should I join him?”

  “You mean,” said the pole, “should you accept the offer to have your brain scanned, and use yourself as a seed for a new, state-of-the art cybertank? You know that I never presume to tell other orders of life what they should do. I cannot judge. I can only present the alternatives, and their potential consequences.”

  “Then, please do so,” said Olga.

  “Well,” said the pole, “you could become a stronghold master on the Planet of Eternal War. I believe they have several openings. I could put in a good word for you.”

  Olga wrinkled her nose. “Not to my taste, I am afraid.”

  “Ah, thought so,” said the pole. “In that case the default alternative is to do nothing. You will slowly become estranged from the cybertanks as they ascend, and also run out of fellow human-level sentiences as they pass away. You will most likely live between 5,000 and 50,000 years before you either die of an accident, or commit suicide. However, it will be a pleasant existence – the cybertanks will leave behind abundant tools and libraries, you will have no pressures, no conflicts. And you can have pets, and hobbies and go hiking or surfing or whatever you want.”

  “Huh,” said Olga. “You almost make it sound attractive.”

  “As I said, I cannot judge that for you. The second alternative, as you have alluded, is to become a new-model cybertank. It’s a riskier path. The seeding might not work. You might not like your new mode of existence. But potentially you would not be a dead end. You could rejoin the human race (at least, one branch of it) and continue to have peers. Which is certainly important for a social organism such as yourself.”

  “I know,” said Olga. “But the process is a gamble, and once started there is no going back.”

  “Indeed,” said the pole. “Unlike a digital computer, the human mind cannot be easily read out and stored. You would have to be frozen, and your brain sliced into a sections a few nanometers at a time, scanned, and the data used to construct a mathematical model of your brain which would then be used to grow the mind of a new cybertank. At the end of the process your biological self would be destroyed.”

  “You would think a human brain could be scanned without destroying it. I mean, you could anesthetize me, read out the data, see if it works, and if it does then destroy the original. If not, I get to wake up again.”

  “I am surprised at your resistance to being dead,” said the pole. “I mean, you’ve been dead before. It’s not so bad. I often spend time dead, for variety.”

  “That was a long time ago,” said Olga. “It doesn’t bother me anymore, really, but I don’t want to do it again.”

  “You humans and your insistence on continuity,” said the pole. “It was charming when you were primitives, but now it is limiting your advancement. The only existence is the moment.”

  “I suppose,” said Olga. “Anyhow, I still don’t understand why a human brain can’t be read out without destroying it.”

  “There are a lot of technical details,” said the pole, “but it really is quite hard to get at the data in a human brain. It was designed to maximize computational power using hybrid analog/digital techniques in the smallest possible package, and having random external access to every synapse was something that could not fit. Even today the human brain, limited though it is in total ability, remains surprisingly efficient in terms of how much energy it takes to perform certain kinds of tasks. The central decision matrices of the cybertanks have similar tradeoffs. I also think that the humans never really tried all that hard to develop these techniques. It would trample on your primate sense of uniqueness. Silly, if you ask me, but you humans are what you are.”

  "And what would be the odds of success?”

  “I never give numerical odds,” said the pole. “Odds give you humans too much the appearance of certainty to what is ultimately incalculable, even for me. The possibility of the process going wrong is significant, but so is the chance of it going right.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s fair,” said Olga. “It’s my decision, but talking with you has been… helpful. And if I do become a cybertank, will Fanboy and I still be special to each other?”

  “A difficult question, even for me. You will not be the same Olga Razon. You will be more. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that you and Fanboy should remain close, but it would be in a different way. Or you might just be good friends. It’s even possible that you might not like each other, although I assign that a low likelihood.”

  “That makes sense,” said Olga. “By the way, would you mind if I asked you to keep this conversation, private?”

  “Not at all, dear lady, not at all. This is just between you and me. And now I predict that you have a question on a different topic for me.”


  “Yes,” said Olga. “But I imagine you have heard it too many times, and in any event cannot answer it…”

  “What’s it like being me? Despite the often-unbridgeable gaps between our mental structures, this time I think I have an analogy that does pretty well. Imagine that you are sitting on the edge of a beautiful pond. You are not hungry or thirsty or tired, you need nothing, you want nothing. You only enjoy watching the pond. Dragonflies dart over the surface; schools of silver minnows drift in the shallows. But now and then it is fun to intervene. Maybe a turtle flips over onto its back and you flip it right-side up again. Or maybe sometimes you throw a small pebble out into the pond, and watch as the ripples spread out, interacting with the shoreline and the reeds and the small insects that float on the surface…”

  “And is that what our conversation here is to you? A pebble in a pond?”

  The pole went vertical, and drifted slowly to one side. “Not just a pebble in a pond, no not just, but yes that’s a lot of it. This conversation will have effects that, one way or the other, will ripple out through cybertank society and from there into the universe as a whole. I do not know how it will end, but I will enjoy watching.”

  Olga nodded. “Well then. Thank you again for your advice. I think I will be going now.”

  “As you wish,” said the pole. “For what it’s worth, I wish you luck, Olga Razon.”

  Olga bowed. “Goodbye, Saint Pallidus. Until next time.”

  The pole matched Olga’s bow precisely. “Next time,” it said. “In this reality, or the next.”

  Olga turned and began her trek down the mountain and back to the city of the cybertanks. The red pole floated into the sky until it was hundreds of meters up, as if taking in the view. The colored ribbons fell off and fluttered away, and a thick white line slowly wound around the pole, until it was striped like an old-fashioned barber pole.

  “Much better,” said the pole to itself. It shimmered and was gone.

  20. Blossom

  “For last year's words belong to last year's language

  And next year's words await another voice.

  And to make an end is to make a beginning." - T.S. Eliot, 19th-20th Century Earth.

  A submind of myself was waiting by the side of the road in a generic male humanoid android body, and the vampire Olga Razon drove up in her bright red reproduction 2001 Terran Chrysler Town & Country minivan.

  “Care to catch a ride?” asked Olga.

  Absolutely.

  I climbed on board and Olga headed off down the road. Now my main self is essentially a single enormous vehicle, and I’ve sent a part of myself in human form to be driven in a smaller wheeled vehicle that is piloted by a biological human. There must be a way to make that funny but I can’t quite figure it out.

  Are you quite sure about this?

  "That is about the one-hundredth time you have asked me that question,” said Olga. “And that does not count all the other people who have asked me. Yes I am sure. Let’s get there and get started.”

  Sorry, but it is a big step.

  “Yes,” said Olga. “Nice of you to come and see me off.”

  I’m not here to see you off, but to welcome you to the club. Oh look, there’s Fanboy.

  I pointed off to the right, where the road turned and the bulk of a Sundog-Class cybertank was parked. 20,000 tons of sleek metal resting on over a hundred enormous conformable road wheels, the twin booms of the main turreted vacuum-energy cannon canted off at 20 degrees from the vertical… it’s a sweet design, I must admit. Very tempting.

  “Is Fanboy going to meet us here?” asked Olga.

  No, his submind is already at the site.

  Olga honked the minivan’s horn as she passed Fanboy’s main hull. Fanboy honked back from his external speakers, and we continued on our way.

  As we drove along, the manufacturing complex loomed up ahead of us. Like most such places, it’s not much to look at, just a single vast shed kilometers wide and 30 meters tall. The walls are simple gray corrugated metal. There are no windows, but instead multiple sliding doors ranging in size from just a couple of meters across, to more than 100. I’ve seen records of human factories as far back as the 20th century that could have been mistaken for this.

  “Where do I go?” asked Olga.

  I pointed at a medium-sized door in the side of the facility, and we drove in and parked. The bay we had entered was pretty big, measuring hundreds of meters in both directions. The main hulls of several cybertanks were parked there: The Penumbra-Class Schadenfreude and the Cirrus-Class Frisbee (recently upgraded from Horizon-Class). Fanboy was there but only as a submind in his Captain Dieter Waystar android. Schadenfreude and Frisbee also had androids present: the former as an anthropomorphic collection of thin black sticks, the latter in his typical pasty-white-male nerd with the white lab coat and skinny tie (three incarnations, and Frisbee still has a thing for nerds).

  However, what caught my attention was the hull of the Corona-Class at the other side of the bay. Technically a minor upgrade of the popular Sundog-Class, it’s still one of the most advanced operational classes of cybertank. It is 20,000 tons, with a weird-looking turreted dual-pronged exotic particle generator as a main armament. The secondary and point-defense weapons are copious but mostly conformal, so they don’t break the sleek lines of the main hull. It rests on over a hundred four-meter-diameter knobby tires: on decent ground a Corona can really roll. They’ve been clocked at over 400 kilometers per hour on the flat. On poor ground, of course, they just fly.

  The Corona’s access ports were all open, and cables snaked out of it and led across the bay into various bits of equipment, or through cable trays into other parts of the facility. These were going to be used to help jump-start the development of a new mind. It was surprising, however, to see that the main hulls of Frisbee and Schadenfreude were similarly open and connected to numerous cables.

  What’s with all the extra cabling? I thought that we were here to activate the Corona, not you.

  “Some aspects of the process will require massive data transfer,” said Schadenfreude. “I am taking primary responsibility for the formatting of the Corona mental structures.”

  I noticed that Schadenfreude had decided to engrave aphorisms in tiny white letters onto each of the black chop-stick like rods making up his remote. I zoomed in my android’s optics and read three of them:

  “Measure twice cut once.”

  “Look before you leap.”

  “Old habits die hard, but bad habits die harder.”

  “And I’m mostly going to handle the translation and decoding of the biological brain info,” said Frisbee.

  “Just you two?” asked Olga.

  Frisbee shook his head. “No, we have 12 other cybertanks on the team, but their roles do not require direct cable interfaces, so they are either off-site or in other parts of the facility.”

  I turned to Fanboy’s android.

  You’re not involved in the process?

  Schadenfreude answered for him. “It is unwise for someone with personal attachments to take an active role.” I read three more of his aphorisms:

  “Patience is a virtue, but too much patience is an indulgence.”

  “Never forget that the big picture is made up of a lot of little pictures.”

  “Just because a moron says that the world is round does not make it flat.”

  Fanboy smiled. “Yes, so he tells me. I’m just here to keep Olga company. And of course, to watch some of our finest mental engineers at work.”

  “Everything is in readiness,” said Schadenfreude. “Shall we begin?”

  Typical Schadenfreude, no bedside manner whatsoever. Oh well, he really is the best at this kind of work. I looked at the sticks on Schadenfreude’s left lower leg.

  “Once is a happenstance, twice a coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

  “A foolish politeness is the doom of sheep and other domestic animals.”

  “Call 1-800-AFORISM for
all your aphorism needs!”

  “OK,” said Olga. “What do I do?”

  Frisbee pointed to a high-backed leather armchair that had a small side table on its left, with a single small glass of clear liquid on it. “You sit there, and drink up.”

  Olga looked puzzled. “What? No operating room, no equipment? I just sit on a chair?”

  “Oh don’t worry,” said Frisbee, “we have a really fancy operating theater with all sorts of high-tech gadgets. But you don’t have to be in it to fall asleep. Fanboy thought that this would be more relaxing.”

  “Ah,” said Olga. “That makes sense.” She sat in the chair, picked up the glass, and looked into it.

  “If you desire to change your mind this is the time,” said Schadenfreude.

  Olga drained the glass in one gulp. “Nope. Let’s do this.”

  Fanboy held her hand. “See you soon.”

  Olga started to say something, but her eyes closed and she slumped over in the chair. A self-motive gurney trundled over, and Fanboy lifted the unconscious form of Olga Razon out of the chair and laid her onto it. The gurney then smoothly whisked Olga out of the main bay and into the door leading to the surgical suite.

  Of course we didn’t follow her – the remotes in the surgical areas were all specialized, and anyhow our generic android bodies would have been hard to decontaminate. So part of me watched the procedures through the data feeds, but another part of me stayed in the main bay with the androids of Schadenfreude, Frisbee and Fanboy. I decided to read three more of Schadenfreude’s aphorisms.

  “If it is impossible for something to continue, it will stop.”

  “No system can fully understand itself.”