by Johan Kalsi
“Then two it will have to be.”
For weeks, the killbots had gathered around the Canon Archive defenses. The sniper nests and autoguns could only do so much. A good day had been when four enemy humans had been destroyed by a clusterbomb, and the robots they had in tow went feral. Another day, a sniper got a lucky ping off a killbot and its lifeless shell lay on the hill ever since.
But the siege would not be broken with the occasional casualty. Colonel Mauk had held the discipline of the Archive, but morale eroded everyday, and civilians could crack without warning. He consulted the military archivists morning, noon and night. Their very best advice was to sit tight. Hope the killbots ran low on power. Wait for another militia to break through the lines.
The problem was that the Archive supplies were limited, especially with the uncalculated overage of civilians. Had it been a purely military base, with a full battalion of 3000 men, Mauk would have felt invincible. He had half that, and more than ninety-thousand survivors from the fall of Ouffland City. Pressure built on the strained Canon Archive by the minute. They were already on starvation rations.
Occasionally, the enemy would send a messenger bot to parley with the huddled humans. It had become an act of psychological warfare. On day one, there wasn't a citizen alive who conceived of surrender. They had seen the whirring, relentless sprays of blood. As soon as they left the sun splashed pristine confines of the enclosed Canon Archive campus, they believed they were choosing instant death.
Day one seemed a faint memory. The Archive was cluttered with makeshift campsites. White marble surfaces had darkened, and the once-vibrant splashes of color were dingy. The mob of citizens clotting every area of the building could not be easily navigated. Worst of all was the smell. The stench worsened every day and it was not the sort that eventually numbed the senses. Instead, it tortured them.
So, when the Archive monitors picked up distant motion in the lower hills, and the sniper held fire for the bright white, flowing sheet of steel that had become the familiar flag of truce, the Colonel's heart sank. His morning's council had shown the first signs of breaking. The citizen grumbling had risen to more than a few loud complaints, and even the council of wisdom had not been immune to despair and flights of fancy.
“Perhaps...” one had said.
“Just maybe...” said another.
The Colonel, two of his advisors, and the stalwart elders on the council argued well against the consideration of surrender, but another of Mauk's advisors held his tongue. The doubts were indeed spreading. A party had begun to gather in the common square: the Trapped Rats. Consisting mostly of young men of fighting age and older amateur home guard militia, they had begun to foment for a counterattack outside the Canon Archive. Mauk knew it was suicide, but even he had to fight off a mad passion to take it to the bastards.
The flag caught daylight and blinded the camera momentarily. It was a much bigger one than usual. It looked like a panel from a big industrial mirror. The carrier was unfamiliar, too. Mauk examined the monitor closely. The machine was no low lying black box with a flag atop and little more than a vocal transmitter. It was tall and rounded, with familiar, archaic chest-plates. When he had first seen it, it was covered in dust and made an awful creaking noise when it fled the cave where he had found it. Now, it shone like gold. Its rust had been buffed out. Dents, cracks, and rotten greaves had been restored.
In its bulky arms it held a deactivated killbot. At the communications rendezvous, it planted the flag and dumped the killbot unceremoniously on the ground. Only then did Mauk notice an old man with Oufflandic features step out from behind the gleaming robot. He was missing an arm. He must have been riding on the machine’s back.
“Greetings to the people of Ouffland, Ouffland City and the Canon Archive,” the robot said, in a voice that sounded like it was from a bygone era, like in an old-time motion xograph. “I come in peace; I offer the surrender of the entire invasion force of the Holocronian United Forces. I have already given the surrender to this man, a villager of the outskirts. He rescued me from Holocronian captivity, and I, in turn have fulfilled my original purpose – to eliminate the existential threat of machine warfare against the people of Ouffland. My name is Servo.”
Chapter 11: Peace in No Time
Universal 282
Hypnotic Recall Transcription is an interrogation method used on semi-conscious subjects whereby, through a combination of drugs and hypnotic suggestion, they are enabled to recite recent traumatic events as if they are occurring in real-time. First developed by the Ouffland Secrets Academy of the Canon Archive during the First Canon War, the controversial technique has been employed by police, paramilitary, psychomilitary and conventional military units throughout the galaxy.
—Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: Medical Technology
Hypnotic Recall – Hospital Critical Unit – Pilot One of One Classified
In fifteen minutes the Holocronian space train will disintegrate on its maiden voyage. Eighty people will die. Including me.
We are corkscrewing through the upper, upper atmosphere of Olyrand, the Abandoned Planet sister to Holocrone, but don’t have the speed to pull out. We’re going to drop and speed up, drop and speed up until we fall apart. If lucky, they’ll blast us with noegenetic subroutines that save the ship and give us a cure for the Shakes. We'll land in Ouffland, pour out, refugees to the Canon Archive and send the cure back home. Maybe we’ll all die instead.
Algorithmic failure.
By now, our well-to-do passengers are probably catching on. They are the closest to royalty that I will ever be, and bluebloods and moneymen can smell trouble better than regular folks like me. This is almost certain suicide. Their faces show it.
I’m a millionaire now. If this works, my boys won’t ever have to worry about the Shakes – that Archive vaccine works on kids, if you can afford it, and now I can – and now Rita owns the house. We’re in good shape. Good enough shape.
I’m flicking controls back and forth in case anyone might be put at ease by such useless activity.
I page the Doctor again, but he’s inside the cockpit before I get him.
“Hold your horses, chief,” he says, live, behind me. “I came as fast as I could!”
A cocktail is in his hand.
“Uh-huh,” I say, “Maybe you could have been thirty seconds slower and brought one for me. Drink up. It looks like it is going to be our last.”
“What do you mean? The extra torque? Is that what this is about?”
I don’t have time for his glib, drunken approach to everything, especially now. I gesture toward my CritMonitor, and flip some more useless switches. Back in the day, I could have occupied myself with useless couplers and power storage tanks. I could have donned a personal crawler and slid through the ductwork to adjust things. Not anymore. Everything’s streamlined, straight-up digitized, and shot through with algodecay. So I flip switches and sweat.
“Oh, no,” he says, too calmly for my tastes. “We are spinning down. Try opening the vents.”
“We can’t,” I say. “You know that primary exhaust port that I told you was too big to be safe?”
“Yes.”
“It’s too big to be safe. We open it and all that is going to do is start a firestorm out our blow hole. We die lots quicker that way.”
He’s defensive now. “We needed the aperture to be that size to expel the amount of vapor so we could get to proper speed.”
“Well, mission completed. We exceeded proper speed and now don’t have enough vent redundancies to pack it in.”
The Doctor quaffs half his booze. He runs his thumb down the CritMonitor, and then starts studying the higher detail readings. I find a few more levers to snap back and forth. One of them causes the Deuce Ten to lurch, but doesn’t slow the spin. The climate conditioners squeal, and then blow apart.
“Please! You’ll alarm the Investors,” he cries out, gripping the back of my chair for stability. I think about collapsing
it into its recess, just to toss him to the ground.
The Investors are probably the number two reason, second only to the overbearing impulses of the addled, grey-skulled Doctor why we are shaking apart right now. A little alarm in an otherwise risk-free lifetime might be novel.
Their money pushed and pushed and pushed the project. Now it is pushing back. Flying to another planet like this. Civilian. It's crazy! International, unified military alliance was barely enough to invade Ouffland back in the day.
Deuce Ten is only the sixth in the series. Deuce I and I-A were aborted, and Deuce V put everyone involved in financial freefall. All of the spectacular screw-ups had been unmanned missions, thank God, but they quickly became unfundable.
The Doctor plugged away, relaunched the program, and this time, duped actual humans (awash in actual cash) into touring the outer reaches of Olyrand for a mystical cure.
If I hadn’t already started showing the Shakes, I would have never signed on, but since his money was so ripe and golden and I’m under a painful death sentence anyway, I thought I’d take the chance.
I regret that now. Hospice sounds okay to me right now. Beats burning flesh and screaming humans in outer space. But my boys are going to be okay.
And Rita finally got a real house out of the deal. I remember that time that I built her craft room. The wall panels didn’t match and drafts blew through the northeast corner all the time, but she laughed and squeezed my neck and loved it anyway. AlgoDecay hit the termite repellant waves, of course, and that dingy shack collapsed, unfit for a lone zuvembi.
It is getting hot in here. I close my eyes and pretend Rita is laughing, her arms draped around me.
The Doctor is fidgeting about, calling up spec screens that I never even knew about, and I’ve been married to the Deuce Ten for almost a year.
“Torque down, torque down,” he says, trickling the fingers on his free hand across pale blue lines on the screen.
“That won’t work,” I'm barking at him, like a dog. “You are just building up vapor. We have to reverse our spin entirely, and let the gas out slowly. Unfortunately, your design expressly disallows that.”
“We never would have made it this far without my design.”
“Small comfort,” I say. One corner of the cockpit window has begun to glow. Not good. “Tell me exactly, how many variables didn’t you factor for this trip?”
“You can’t factor variables. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be variables. You can only plan contingencies. It’s AlgoDecay, man. Stop being such a worrier.”
I grunt. “So what’s the contingency plan for this variable?”
“Listen, Chief, chaos engine physics depend on a massive amount of trust. You’ve got to trust that the breaking point is also the healing point, that shown weaknesses are the first to be strengths, that hunches always lead somewhere of value.”
“Mm-hm,” I say. “I’m sure those are tasty horseapples you are choking out but don’t mind me if I don’t partake. My job is to fly vessels, not run them into a planet because I trust that they’ll turn into a magic fairy upon impact. We are dead men. It is your fault.”
I think I got to him, for once. He’s quivering. The glass tumbles from his hand and shatters against the console.
“Hey, hey. I’m sorry,” I say, hating myself for apologizing to this arrogant old bat. “Are you all right?”
He sags and leans against the console. “Claymore,” he says, calling me, for the first time, by real name, “don’t you know? I’ve got the Shakes, too. Just like you.”
I think “Me?” and then I say “Me?” as if I’ve split in two, and each is judging the other. “I don’t have…I’m not…”
“Relax. I know. Everybody knows. Do you really think my pre-flight review is less thorough than your old commercial job? Don’t worry,” he says. In a panel above me, rubber begins to burn. The Doctor wrinkles his nose and says, “Everyone on the flight has the Shakes. We’re a flying quarantine.”
My head is processing very slowly, but my mouth is moving and words keep coming out.
“You just brought us all out here to die?” Now I hammer away at the buttons, nearly wrenching some knobs irreversibly in one direction. My blastshield is glowing.
“Heavens, no. This truly was a pleasure cruise, with an outside shot of a cure.”
Screams pierce the cabin. We’re tumbling now, and everybody knows it. I’m able to stabilize it for another minute or two, but the ship is oscillating at an untenable frequency.
I smell a candle burning. A salty candle. No not a candle. Me. It’s sweat – it isn’t boiling yet, but it is thinking about it.
The Doctor clings to an e-bar on the wall. “You wouldn’t have come if you knew the sort of slim chance, from your point of view, I was grasping for, and you certainly wouldn’t have taken the risk if you weren’t already contagious.”
“From my point of view? What are you talking about? You’ve cobbled together a giant, spinning gas bag in hopes of what? Curing the Shakes?”
“I know, you never would have piloted the ship if you had known all the, uh, - your word -variables.”
“Well, you are right about that.”
He looks at the fatal numbers, completely resigned to the fact that we'll be dead before we hit Olyrand in T-minus-I-don't-want to-know.
I see Death’s head hurtling at us. No, it is another space train; no, a mirror image of the Deuce Ten. We're playing chicken with ourselves.
No, wait. It is a wave of fire. The Ouffland Militia is shooting us down, burning us up.
A violent series of roars rattles the cabin. A putrid, moldy smoke billows through the vents. My breath becomes short, but the stuff isn’t acrid like smoke. I cough a bit, but can breathe. The stench turns the Doctor green. My flesh tingles and warmth radiates from the center of my back, washing over every inch of my body. One last roar, a low rumble…
Then silence. We are slowing, slowing, slowing in the descent. If we can pull up, our chances of limping home in one piece are good.
“We will live,” whispers an ashen Designer as he slowly rises from the floor with cuts on his face. He smiles, weak from hazard but heartened by victory and holds out his hand to me.
It is as steady as a rock.
So is mine.
Servo rolled through the open critical wing of the new hospital. Under the strictures of the old peace agreement, he had ordered Holocronian casualties not to be mixed with any Oufflander patients, and that included the three rescue workers who had been injured in the recovery of the Holocronian pleasure vessel that had crashed about six looks south of the Canon Archive, and now the survivors had filled all the temporary beds, and then some. It was a bygone segregation, of course, but protocol was protocol for a reason.
The majority of the patients were under hypnotic anesthesia, moaning and babbling.
From the Oufflandic perspective, Holocrone was irreparably diseased. AlgoDecay had destroyed its culture, corrupted its BlackBox, and turned the land to wastes dryer than the land outside the forest. Its people were psychologically damaged, its prospects dim.
Servo, however, had made promises to Holocrone in securing the peace years ago. And the Canon Archive ancillary hospitalists were acutely aware of this when he arrived at their offices.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Servo, “you know very well why I have come here. My illness has progressed every day since my reactivation, after more than one hundred years of dormancy. My originals had no cure for himselves, but they stored me here, at the founding of this nation, knowing that one of your key areas of study would be to provide an alternative to the infected algorithms, and thus a possible cure to algodecay.”
“So? What say you?”
Hospitalist Corinna Petri spoke. “Unfortunately, developments we once thought promising have not proven satisfactory, and you have seen the results. We tested the Arbitrary Noegenetic Waveform Generator on the pleasure cruiser, just as you ordered. Blasted it full of subroutines. It clear
ly affected the ship. Instead of reconfiguring its guidance system and its wild flight pattern, it crashed. Without the Air Command deploying physical restraints, everyone on board would have died. I’m sorry, Servo. We can’t risk using the noegenetic update on you. Not yet. It could accelerate your algodecay for all we know. Or it could simply crash you permanently.”
“I will take that risk,” said Servo. “Begin the update on me immediately. What you don’t understand is that the ship wasn’t sick, the people were. Those who survived the crash? They no longer have any symptoms of the algodecay that had penetrated their biogenetic structures. My personal case of algodecay is not biogenetic. It only affects my pseudo-circuits. And now that you have a cure? You’ll start with me. We’ll then move to restoring all of Holocrone. This Canon Archive may someday become what my originals dreamed, the very center of the Galactic revival!”
Chapter 12: The Chrysolite
Universal 295? or Before
The Chrysolite (Literature): The Chrysolite is the first known mythopoetic narrative to be attributed to a machine intelligence. Discovered in 295 (Universal) on The Continent of Accam under disputed conditions, its original date of writing is unknown. While the literary nature of the document continues to be disputed in the Academy of Recorded Arts and Intelligences, its origins in Algorythmic processing has been confirmed by extensive data testing.
Of the various theories concerning the Chrysolite, the most popular one is that the Chrysolite is an early example of the [Projected Memoir], a form of computer storytelling designed to provide an embellished back-story to a unique robot or other intelligent machine. The motivations for such literary forms are speculative, but what is evident in such literature is that the narrator’s origin tale is likely far more fantastic and fanciful than the author’s likely start in life as a standard production model rolling off a line of exact copies.
