The Chronicles of Old Guy (Volume 1) (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  So what took you so long? I had almost given up on you.

  “Sorry about that,” said the Ghost class. “I can’t explain it well. I was aware of all that was going on around me, but just could not respond. I wanted to, but didn’t know how. I thought that I was going to be destroyed along with you during the Amok attack. Then somehow I just made the connection, and everything was easy. I think, it was not enough for me to want to, I needed a situation where I had to.

  Nobody has ever been able to hack a Doll Swarm before. How did you manage that?

  “That? Oh that was easy. There is a trick. I mean, I can see missing it, but once you see the solution it’s obvious. Here, check it out for yourself.”

  The Ghost class transmitted the protocols he used to co-opt the Ghost class. Oh, I get it. Like most difficult things, it’s easy once you know the answer. But I could never have hit upon this by myself in a thousand years. I am impressed.

  We spend the next few weeks patching each other up, and talking. Mostly it’s me telling old war stories, and talking about its other parent Double-Wide. I pretend to be wise and offer advice; the Ghost unit humors me.

  Double-Wide and I are sitting on a park bench in the middle of his Linear Gallery, me as Amelia Earhart, and he for once as a realistic android as well: a middle aged male wearing a rumpled gray suit and sporting a mustache and goatee.

  I appreciate the new remote, but I can’t place it. Is it someone historical?

  “Indeed. This is a simulacrum of Oliver Heaviside, the famous physicist, and a contemporary of your Earhart.”

  Ah, I get it now. He was also stark raving mad and ended up a recluse living alone in an enormous mansion with granite blocks for furniture and with his fingernails painted pink.

  “Yes, I thought he would be an appropriate choice.”

  We watch the light traffic walk by: manikins, a shiny metal spider, replicas of Jon Bon Jovi and Michael Parenti. From several sections down comes the sound of someone playing a slow 26th century light jazz piece on a saxophone.

  Near us is a diorama of my most recent battle against the Amok. Scale models of myself and the Ghost unit are positioned on sand, and squadrons of brightly painted Amok units are arranged in regular arrays around us, like 18th century toy soldiers. It is an accurate rendition except that the distances between units has been compressed so that the display can fit in the case. There are even models of the sandcastle decoys that I constructed. I am flattered.

  Our new Ghost unit has been assigned to another sector. I hear that he has already distinguished himself both in combat and also in reverse engineering alien technology.

  “Indeed, I have heard the same thing,” said Double-Wide. “He is making quite a reputation for himself. Nevertheless, the Ghost design remains retired: just too unstable. So he will remain sui generis the only operational Ghost-class cybertank. Apparently the members of the super-whizzo cybertank design committee have decided to back off the avant-garde for a bit and stick with more conventional designs. Oh, and I am glad that you and that truly delightful simulation program have been reunited.

  I can imagine. Vargas can be hard to take, sometimes. I should have warned you not to let that particular simulation have free rein of the data space. Sometimes you just have to switch him off. Apologies.

  “Accepted. And by the way, have you ever considered doing something about that voice of yours?”

  What’s wrong with my voice?

  Well, nothing, expect that it’s synthesized by an audio codec that was out of date even when you are constructed, which was over three millennia ago, and it sounds a little flat. I know that you can speak as clearly as anyone, if you want to.

  When I was constructed this was the voice synthesis software that I was given. Yes my systems have been updated many times since, and yes I can speak with more fluidity if I really wanted to, but this is how I speak. It has become a part of my identity. I’ll change it if I ever go in for a rebuild. And it’s not flat, it’s husky.

  Double-Wide cocked his head as if listening to something. “I have an incoming message. Our new Ghost unit has passed his probationary period, been given full peer status, and awarded his own name.”

  And what name might that be?

  “Smartass.”

  Double-Wide and I are so proud. Children, you have to enjoy them when you can; they grow up so fast.

  3. The War with the Amok

  The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend was just to be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt” Douglas Adams, 1952-2001.

  When the pre-exodus humans finally realized that the lights in the night sky were other stars, with other worlds in orbit around them, they asked a simple question: “where is everybody?” In other words, with a universe so vast, why was it not humming with life? Why hadn’t some other alien species somewhere in the galaxy developed technology earlier, and colonized everything? Were humans alone in the galaxy? Were they perhaps the first species to develop technology? That seemed unlikely, but then, someone has to be first.

  It was only after the exodus began that they got the answer. The galaxy was brimming with life. Even the local groupings of stars around Sol were home to numerous advanced alien civilizations. It’s just that they had nothing to say to the humans, and better things to do than invade some crummy little planet like Earth.

  There is no galactic library, no pan-civilizational confederation, and all the aliens that we have encountered jealously guard their privacy. We don’t even know the physical form of most of the aliens that we have had contact with. But we have learned this. There are (roughly) two kinds of civilizations. There are the ones that end quickly: perhaps they destroy themselves, or go extinct from lack of interest, or turn into something else. And then there are the ones that hang around a long time. As you might expect, at any given moment nearly all of the civilizations in existence are of the long-lasting kind.

  Civilizations that last hundreds of millions of years are varied but they do have some properties in common. They have achieved an inner harmony, take the long view, and are happy to live and let live. They are also armed to the teeth, paranoid, and can become extremely violent extremely quickly if they feel that they are in any way threatened. How do you think that anything survives that long in this galaxy anyhow?

  Before the exodus humans were bred as needed for cheap labor, and their world was an overpopulated cesspit of filth and misery. As long as the humans kept to their own planet, nobody else cared. An alien civilization could have conquered the Earth quite easily at that time, but that would have upset a balance of power that (we think) had been roughly stable for fifty million years.

  Then the humans started to leave the Earth and build colonies in other systems, and the game changed. Suddenly all sorts of aliens got interested in Homo Sapiens. What was this upstart species? What was their potential? How would this impact the local military equilibrium? The aliens investigated, and were appalled to learn of the Humans’ rapid population growth. They each sent scouts to the Sol system and initiated contact, said hello welcome to the neighborhood in the cool but polite way that aliens almost always use with other species, and laid out terms for co-existence. The humans were told that they needed to control their numbers; were given coordinates where they could and could not settle, and some details on long-range communication protocols (‘don’t call us, we’ll call you, on such and such a frequency’) so that the aliens could stop mucking about in the Sol system and go back home to their own worlds and do whatever it is that aliens do when they are not trying to kill us.

  The humans did not respond to that very well. They broadcast their reply: how dare you tell us how many children we can or can not have, more is always better. You are just decadent effete racist aliens too lazy to breed and we will outgrow and out-compete you yada yada yada. The aliens had heard that too many times to count; yet another malignant species breeding without limit, more ve
rmin to put down, ho hum. The aliens withdrew their scouts and proceeded to make plans to exterminate humanity with the same high drama that is normally reserved for taking out the trash.

  The only thing that saved the humans was that the different aliens did not coordinate with each other, and travel time between the stars is so great that it takes decades if not centuries for a multi-stellar civilization to gather its forces. Also, despite their cultural insanity the humans exhibited a vitality that surprised even those jaded cultures that dated back to before the Terran dinosaurs. The humans created our predecessors, armored terrestrial fighting vehicles that were not sentient per se, but nonetheless smart and powerful. And the humans created other powerful weapons besides. The aliens were momentarily taken aback by the focused destructive power of this new fighting style. But only for a while.

  The humans were battling on two fronts: they were fighting a number of independent alien civilizations of vast age and power, and they were fighting against their own insanity. I am still amazed that the humans managed to pull a victory out of this mess. Every post-hoc simulation shows them being exterminated. But somehow the humans held the aliens back just long enough for them to struggle their way into sanity. We are not sure, but we suspect, that this was something unprecedented in the history of galactic civilization – well, at least in the local stellar group.

  By the time the humans got their act together, and signaled the aliens that they were willing to listen to reason and live within their limits, it was almost too late. The aliens suspected that this was a deception, and anyhow, having spent centuries gathering vast human-destroying armadas it probably seemed a shame not to use them. The attacks on the humans intensified; the humans fought back with a new ferocity and intelligence. The humans improved themselves; they began to moderate their breeding and gained new free resources; they created us, the first truly self-aware cybertanks, and more, such as the non-sentient but vastly intelligent void-rippers. It was brutal, but they – we, at that point - fought the alien armadas to a standstill.

  One might imagine that the aliens would be angered by this turn of events, or frustrated, or pissed off. Perhaps they were: who knows what aliens really think anyhow? I certainly don’t. But in becoming stronger the humans seemed to be gaining respect. There is an old fortune-cookie saying that to truly know someone you have to fight them. Trite but not completely without merit: the nature of the human’s newfound martial success must have been an honest signal that the humans had really changed.

  When mature civilizations deal with each other, they don’t make promises, they don’t call on shared values, or plead for charity. Galactic diplomacy is all in the present tense and promises are for the weak and insane. The aliens started with a simple proposal: if you don’t cross over this boundary we won’t cross over that one. The humans jumped at the offer. The battles reached an even more fevered pitch of carnage: I was created at this time, and fought alongside the human Giuseppe Vargas (amongst others). Despite the conflict the humans held to their agreement, limited though it was, and the aliens held to theirs. The aliens offered another agreement, and it was accepted and honored. With some trepidation, the humans offered up an agreement of their own: it took 35 years for the reply to come back, but when it did, the corner had been turned. Humans had been accepted into the local group of galactic civilizations.

  Oh, it took a long time for the war to wind down. Space is big and communication time is slow. The Battle of New Orleans took place on January 8, 1815. A peace treaty had been signed on December 24, 1814, but without telegraphs or radio, word did not reach the combatants in time. Space battles are like that but the delays are many times worse. Combat eased off, but slowly and erratically. There was also the complication of dealing with several independent alien civilizations, and the inevitable jockeying for position that follows any major conflict.

  Still, things were calming down, and it looked like in another few centuries at most the war would be essentially over. And then the Amok showed up.

  Perhaps it was the carnage of the battle between the humans and the aliens that triggered it. Or perhaps just bad luck. The Amok were yet another species that, like the early humans, were bent on reproducing without limit. They exploded outwards consuming all resources in their path, until they either converted all matter in the universe into copies of themselves, or something else stopped them. We are not sure what the parent species was (is?) like, but their offspring are varied, adaptable, and unrelentingly hostile.

  The Amok destroy all biological life that they encounter. They destroy all machine life as well. If they have nothing else to fight they will destroy anything ordered: we have surveillance records of Amok units smashing delicate crystal formations, presumably because the regular patterns offended them. If all else fails, the Amok will attack and destroy themselves. Normally when an enemy is destroying itself the smart thing is to get out of the way and let them have at it. That doesn’t work with Amok. Ignore them and in fighting amongst each other they will evolve newer and even nastier forms. Then when you finally do encounter them again they will hit you with tricks that you are not ready for. The Amok is that rarest of enemy where the safest place to be is in active combat.

  Imagine that you are a primitive human living in a tribal village. Someone goes crazy and starts running around killing people. At first he is unstoppable: he is big and strong and heavily armed, and attacks old women, children, people who are sleeping or unarmed. But eventually the alarm is raised; soldiers are roused and weapons are unpacked. No matter how tough and strong sooner or later the crazy man will be dealt with. But there could be a lot of nastiness in the meantime.

  The Amok are not going to conquer the galaxy. They are not even going to conquer our local stellar group. Sooner or later the sane alien civilizations will marshal their forces and crush them. We are not fighting the Amok to save the universe. We are fighting to avoid becoming collateral damage before the Amok are inevitably put down.

  We were having a war council. All cybertanks within a light-second communication range were participating directly, and many more had sent intelligent software agents to argue particular points of view and report back. The decision of the council would ultimately have to be approved by all of us, but the debate was still a big deal.

  The war council operated on several levels at the same time. The foundation consisted of vast oceans of data collected from millions of sensors and probes. Above that were intricate simulations and wargaming. At the very top level was the face-to-face meeting of our core sentiences. In terms of amount of data traffic this top level was so small that it could easily be missed, yet it was the most important part, because this is where the real decisions would be made.

  The meeting was held in a virtual space. There were 10,385 cybertanks actually present and 45,657 software agents. We were all meeting around a simple round table. It would have been unwieldy for so many to sit around a single table in the real world, but this was a virtual space, so we were all seated comfortably and everyone was equally close. Many of us chose to appear as human figures, others as their actual hull forms, still others as animals or abstract shapes.

  There was one representative from the Office Copiers present. It chose to manifest itself as a crude 2D icon of an office copier. With all the realistic and fanciful representations, the simple icon stood out as unique. Perhaps, in a funny way, even creative?

  The meeting was called to order by the Spirit class cybertank “Mother,” who appeared in the form of a dignified elderly human male with a resonant baritone voice. “We are gathered here to make a major decision regarding our conflict with the Amok,” he said. “Our intelligence has pinpointed a system that appears to be a center of Amok manufacturing and control. The question is whether we should attack this system, destroying the Amok presence and claiming it for our own, or try to weather their attacks and let some other civilization do the heavy lifting. If we could hear from the major factions?”

  T
he next person to address the council manifested as a series of delicate glowing helices. It was the Golem class “Flame War.” “It appears that the Amok in this system have expended much of their resources attacking other systems. We have several industrialized centers in perfect position to launch a major offensive with a high probability of victory. Success would not only reduce Amok pressure on our other worlds, but gain us a valuable new system. This is a rare opportunity. I say we should attack.”

  The Mountain class “Sharktopus,” appearing in the virtual space as a large teddy-bear, addressed the gathering next. “I must disagree. We have all reviewed the simulations, and we know just how large the margins of uncertainty are. We have no idea what the Amok have in that system. They might have drained it so heavily that it is hardly worth the effort of capturing. Failure would weaken us and leave us vulnerable to counterattack. Major offensives against technologically advanced civilizations on which we have little intelligence are almost always fiascos. I say we sit tight, build up our strength, and see what happens.”

  Mother spoke next. “Those are both legitimate arguments. The best decision is not obvious. What is the report on our efforts at diplomacy?”

  The head of the sub-committee on interstellar relations, the Glacier class “Frostbite,” addressed us. “We have replies from all major local alien civilizations. As usual, they are terse and elliptic. But to the extent that we can ever understand alien thought, it appears that if we destroy the Amok presence in this system then we may claim it for our own. We are still very much small potatoes by galactic standards, and one more system will not greatly change the power balance – and we know that the Amok have been a great pain for many, not just us. An opportunity to grab a choice system like this might not come around again for a very long time.”

  I decide to speak up.

  Nothing is achieved without effort. It’s true, we don’t know what the Amok have waiting for us. We also don’t know what they might get up to if we leave them alone.