Toy Wars
Thomas Gondolfi
To my mother—for teaching me empathy and the joy of books
To my father—for introducing me to science fiction at a tender age and being my best critic
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All characters, businesses, and situations within this work are fictional and the product of the author’s creativity. Any resemblance to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. TANSTAAFL Press assumes no responsibility for any content on author or fan websites or other publications.
Toy Wars
First printing—TANSTAAFL Press
Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Gondolfi
Cover art: Tony Foti, www.tonyfotiart.com
Cover design: Amanda Forker, www.ilioness.com
Printed in the USA
ISBN 978-1-938124-02-0
Introduction
Excerpts from the Third Chronicler’s Notes:
One of the significant landmarks of the early days of the Sol Unified System’s expansion into the depths of space, sometime in the human calendar’s twenty-second century, was an amusing event: the first creation of a truly new life form. While new life is not a humorous occurrence, the process that created this life was more like the punch line to a joke.
Homo sapiens were making use of faster than light (FTL) vehicles and their civilization expanded at a tremendous rate compared to earlier efforts. Some twenty years after his invention of the FTL drive, Fanta Hisu surpassed his own accomplishments by creating a drive that was over an order of magnitude faster (FT2L). There was only one snag in the new design—organic materials were destroyed in such a transit. Hisu dropped his project as the FT2L drive was not directly useful for the humans.
The FT2L drive seemed destined to be lost in the invention files with such notables as the air-conditioned hat and the automatic phone cleaner. Instead, an ambitious engineer accidentally intercepted the idea. Golan Powers, looking for a quick way to glory, happened upon Hisu’s scientific notes for the FT2L drive. It sparked the seed of another idea within him. If organic material could not be sent, then perhaps inorganic could. So voracious was the human need for raw materials on earth (and so desirous of fame and wealth was Golan himself) that he devised a plan to solve both problems at once.
A semi-intelligent Factory would be sent via an FT2L ship to extremely far worlds, where it would autonomously produce robots to control and strip the planet’s surface of its mineral wealth, and then transport it back in the original vessel. Golan paid terrific bribes to get his proposal, specifications, budgets, schedules, and potential returns placed before the Supreme Council in general session. All told, this gained the euphemistic name “Project Infuse.” Infuse caused an uproar that had never been equaled. Never in the one hundred fifty years of this government had there been such a race to get on the bandwagon of an issue—pro or con. A new political split formed in the guise of the Expansionists vs. the Naturalists. The Expansionists, the greed faction of human nature, outnumbered the Naturalists by nearly two to one.
The Naturalists objected that this plan might inadvertently send one of these strip miners to an inhabited world, causing death and destruction and sending a horrific message about our species. The Expansionists yelled the objection down in the Council. The only way to do the retort justice is to quote Supreme Councilor Torin of Mars: “Any truly sentient and intelligent race would be able to handle such an incursion. We will add a message to the memories and physical plating of each Factory telling anyone of this decision and hope they would be our friends with no hard feelings. And if they can’t defeat the Factory, we won’t have to worry about them, now will we?”
Some of the more liberal papers called it the old might-makes-right political theory. Might-makes-right was so intrinsic to the Expansionist doctrine that they took such editorials as compliments. Sheer numbers put down the objections of the Naturalists but did not silence them completely.
The Naturalists continued to work around the clock, spending billions of credits of their own money to stop Project Infuse. They used court cases, injunctions, financial audits, sit-down strikes, and at the end even chained themselves to heavy equipment. They eventually failed.
Seventeen years later, the last court case ruled in favor of the Expansionists. Project Infuse, now known as “PI,” was to be put into test production.
PI outfitted three hundred obsolete FTL space vessels with the FT2L drive and partnered with something known only as “The Factory.” The resulting conglomerate was the first grouping of Project Infuse’s vessels. Physically, each Factory, a dome-shaped cap fit to the peak of each FT2L ship, lacked an impressive appearance. It was what they could do that made them remarkable.
Factories possessed the construction facilities and mental power to create a workforce of robot slaves. A huge array of programmers gifted the PI Factories with semi-sentience. The only real goals these programmers gave the Factories boiled down to “conquer, rape, and pillage.”
With this less than moral context guiding them, the Factory-cum-FT2L vessels were then flung to the exceedingly far reaches of space to strip-mine entire planets.
For ten years everyone waited and conveniently forgot Project Infuse. Friendships and alliances broken by the debates and oratory mended. In the eleventh year, when the first vessel returned with a huge cargo string following it, the peace broke again. The materials it returned were unmatched in quality and quantity to almost anything in our solar system. The drones contained new metals never before seen and a massive quantity of fissionables. Two more drone strings returned within that year bearing similar treasures. Because of its huge success, PI lost any previous negative press. The Naturalists were defeated. The Supreme Council ordered PI into full-scale production.
The above are facts which are incontrovertible. This was information placed into the memories and even on physically etched data plates mounted on the Factories themselves. The remainder of this discussion is reasoned speculation based on analysis of a great number of corrupted files within the Factories’ memories. They contain a surprising amount of information on the events that preceded the launch of Factories 55466, 55467, 55468, 55469, 55471, and 55474. It also contains the punch line to our joke.
A preadolescent computer hacker, Janeen Fox (AKA Foxhunt), wanted more than anything to join the local Virtual Reality HAC club. Though the VRHAC had no interest in PI, other than as a challenge, the group set Janeen the initiation rite of breaking into PI’s vaunted and supposedly impervious databases. Foxhunt took diligently to her task with an outdated Cray N+1. For six full days during spring break, Foxhunt took to working at backdoors, frontal assaults, viral nets, and every other method she could dream up. Nothing seemed to let her in from the outside, so she decided she had to have someone open the door from the inside. Janeen coded an appropriately invisible Trojan Horse virus.
The virus went in snail-mail in the form of a “demo” cube for the latest VR retro-thriller Perry Mason Returns (which VRHAC had broken the copy protection on in less than fifteen minutes after its release) to dozens of PI employees. Janeen was banking on human nature and their inability to pass up something that was both free and would take them away from the now tedious work they were doing. It worked. The virus, installed inside the system, created a backdoor for her to worm into.
Janeen’s intent contained no malevolence. Breaking the imperviousness of PI was her goal, not its contents. She caused no intentional damage and did nothing save adding her nom d’hac, Foxhunt, to several files. Her full access lasted less than ten minutes before the belated system defenses rushed to close down the unauthorized acc
ess.
Project Infuse’s ice crashed about her open portal with such violence and severity that Janeen broke the connection without standard withdrawal procedures. No newbie to hacking, she had long ago learned to hide the tracks of her work by bouncing through several other computer links. In this case her last link was through an old-fashioned toy and book store. Because of the abrupt termination of the link, several large files were transitioned into the PI database, scrambling a number of crucial launch and post-launch parameters. These parameters remained until a standard morning CRC check caught the errors on the following day, too late to save the ill-fated PI vessels prepared for launch that day.
The following are more facts, based on actual data from the Factories’ memory cores. PI was now launching upward of a dozen FT2L space vessels each day. On the date of Janeen’s fateful link, only six Factory/vessels were planned for launch. Each of them was downloaded with the faulty parameter files. The files contained two very important changes. The first was that the blueprints of the toy store’s wares replaced the typical robot plans. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, all the ships were dispatched to the same planet, the third planet of HD34085, also known as Beta Orionis, or simply Rigel, something that had never happened in the history of the PI program. Now a singular PI Factory would no longer scour the planet of insignificant life forms, it would fight its own kind—a condition that not one of the PI programmers had anticipated.
Factories 55466, 55467, 55468, 55469, 55471, and 55474 were launched on schedule (55470, 55472, and 55473 had been scrubbed the previous day by mechanical difficulties). The humans heard nothing of any of these six PI vessels again. They were written off as a loss.
Factory 55468 lost its way in FT2L and exited near enough a black hole that it could only manage an unstable orbit that eventually decayed with the predictable results. The remaining five each set down so close to T+3y340d12h16m46s (three years, three hundred forty days, twelve hours, sixteen minutes and forty-six seconds post-launch) as to be unnoteworthy. Each landed uneventfully on Rigel-3, but it was the beginning of the most ferocious competition known to nearly any world.
Rigel-3 was a hellish world, or would be to any humans—too cold by at least two dozen degrees Celsius, a corrosive atmosphere, and a gravity 30 percent higher than that of earth. Through its rivers flowed liquid mercury down to the gleaming metallic lakes and seas. On the plus side, Rigel-3 proved itself to be rich in heavy minerals of all kinds, gemstones, and huge amounts of oil and other petroleum products. As the physical conditions were no hardship to the Factories, it was an ideal habitat to collect for the humans. None of the five took long to take hold in their new home, each oblivious of the other almost identically timed landings.
The Factories immediately discovered their first problem—the plans to their robots were destroyed or partially destroyed. In place of the corrupted files lived the production files of toys. Not that they knew what a toy was, but they were not the standard mining or control type robots. These new forms also proved to be totally unsuitable to the environment. Most of the new forms didn’t even have motile functions. The Factories had to adapt, but being semi-sentient and well programmed for independent thought, this didn’t pose, for most, an insurmountable problem.
The Factories took the portions of the robot data that had not been corrupted and merged them with the new intrusive toy data. As most of the toys were flexible in capability, it mostly worked.
Only 55471 failed to make the imaginative leap and continued producing only non-motile stuffed bunny rabbits until it ran out of raw materials, power, and then a will to continue. It self-destructed its memory core.
All the other Factories were already producing robots. But here divergence set in. Each Factory took a different solution to its individual problems. The solutions were varied and adapted to the terrain and ease of material availability. Each Factory began churning out the equipment it needed to be successful in its mission. Mining robots took the form of Teddy Bears, gophers, toy bulldozers, toy dump trucks, and backhoes (still bearing the manufacturers’ original labels or even the toy company’s logo displayed prominently on their sides). The Factories created transport systems. Some made them in the form of a large-gauge toy railroad, but at least one had a fleet of remote-controlled racecars and trucks. For survey/scouting vehicles, most went the way of gasoline-powered toy planes or helicopters. Factory 55466 used multicolored balloons filled with helium carrying disposable payloads.
The real diversity, though, lay in the choice of control, or warrior units—small toy tanks with real explosive projectile weapons, slightly scaled up plastic infantry men carrying real weapons, kamikaze bomb-carrying dress-up dolls, Teddy Bears with machine guns, and even giraffe snipers.
It has to be stressed that these initial units were crude and possessed no initiative at all. If a unit lost contact with its Factory it would continue doing what it had been ordered to do until it lost that ability as well. At this stage of evolution the Factories were each one entity with multiple disposable bodies to control—similar to an ant colony.
Initially there was little need for the combat units, and very few were built, as there was little nearby local fauna to require such a force. This changed abruptly as the first warriors of the now four Factories began meeting each other and fighting for control of the planet. The first such clash began when 55466’s tracked tanks met the baby-doll infantry of 55474 at L+320d14h (320 days, fourteen hours after landing). Both sides annihilated each other in an inconclusive battle. The other two Factories similarly clashed within days. Now each of the Factories knew the native life forms fought back quite successfully.
Each of the factories adapted. They changed priorities, rolling hundreds of tanks, Baby Doll infantrymen, scout planes, and other military weapons off their production lines. Guard units were posted on key transportation intersections and garrisons built to aid defense. Combat units were immediately allocated as hunter/killer squads. The Toy Wars had truly begun.
Low intensity skirmishes of squad size defined L+1y and L+2y as the numbers of units available to fight were small. As combat populations grew, so did the conflicts until hundreds and sometimes even thousands of units fought for a goal none of them could reach without destroying one another.
Factories began to notice that they would have many units destroyed just by losing contact. Several networks arose to deal with this unacceptable situation. The nets, all-purpose control system that carried power, instructions, and requests for information, grew rapidly along transportation lanes. The multiple nets were segregated into two forms, the WAN, or wide area net, and the LAN, or local area net.
Each Factory generated a WAN on a very powerful carrier wave. The WAN flowed through immobile devices called net concentrators (NCs) that rebroadcast information or commands to far units. The WAN also acted as the primary source of power for almost all units.
Local control units similar to the NCs generated the LAN that gave specific commands to each of the robots. These LANs dealt mainly with local issues, such as quickly identifying friend and foe. The LAN didn’t bother or interfere with the WAN in any way.
These networks helped but continued to be insufficient. Even in the early days of small-scale combat, Darwinian selection set in. The Factories experimented with different designs based on the toys and robots they still had. Each make and model underwent often destructive field experience, sometimes within mere hours of activation being thrown into a nearby combat. Using probability studies, each Factory learned quickly which of their units fared well in combat, in what terrain, and under which conditions. Those units that didn’t make the cut in the field were firmly snubbed from production. Toy Wars shaped quickly into a battle of statistical mathematics rather than strictly the destruction of metal and machines.
Over ten years, the conflicts escalated. Each of the Factories, again backed by rigorous mathematics, determined that a larger initial military expenditure would bring the local fauna und
er control that much sooner and thus would save resources in the long run. The impeccable logic fell flat because the “local fauna” it fought didn’t breed. Factories produced an ever-increasing panoply of war materials escalating the conflict to greater heights. Competition became even more intensely fierce.
Each of the Factories tried special permutations to bring better units to the battlegrounds—built-in cannons, flame throwers, kamikaze scout planes with explosive payloads (the first crude missile on Rigel-3), and even mobile walking bombs in the shape of dress-up dolls. A number of them worked well, but most failed miserably. A classic example of a failed design came from 55467. A flame-thrower was built around the outward form of a purple stuffed elephant. This was just a modification of having a large caliber weapon in the chest of the otherwise fluffy war machine. The fur ignited before the unit even got off the prototyping line. It took most of 55467’s fire suppression units to quell the stuffed elephant’s exploding fuel cells.
Of all the Factories that still remained, 55466 (known as Six) had the most difficulty. Its initial location was not as rich in minerals and resources, nor as easily defensible as the other three viable Factories. Six was slowly losing ground to the local fauna, and its calculations showed that in less than two years’ time its outer defenses would crumble. The local fauna would run rampant, denying it control of the planet. It would have failed its primary mission.
Six made a huge gamble to put a larger quantity of material and effort into researching better robots. Soon Six began fielding units with semi-autonomous functionality. Even if it lost control, they could make decisions that would allow them to continue to function. Thus was born the third net, the SAN, or specific area network.
The SAN was developed by the autonomous robots as a net that allowed units to converse directly to one another. This happened as sentience and self-directing capabilities grew in each robot. They began to work as a team.
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