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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  As further extenuating evidence, I note that I was really pissed off at the time.

  “Oh, you were pissed off,” said Wiffle-Bat. “Well that’s all right then. Never mind that we may never get an opportunity like this for a decamillenia. At least your reputation for thoughtless action and blind stupid good luck is intact.”

  I’d rather be lucky than good.

  “Your wish is granted. You are lucky. ”

  We chatted like this for a while, with Wiffle-Bat enthusing over this and that new finding. I don’t share his passion for exobiology but I had to admit that the ongoing explorations were really interesting. Thus it was that I was paying minimal attention to what I was doing, mostly using subminds and non-sentient code to handle the drudgery. Which is why I didn’t notice the odd black cloud until it was almost on top of me.

  With all the destruction that this planet had witnessed, there were any number of clouds in the sky. Smoke, dust, fumes from destroyed combat systems, and so on. This cloud, however, had an internal cohesion that the other clouds lacked. It seemed to be boiling around a central core, and it was not moving with the local wind.

  Wiffle-Bat, do you see that black cloud over there?

  Most of his external sensors were fried, but he had a few left. He panned a small camera lens around; it jerked visibly but still moved.

  “Black cloud you say? I see a lot of clouds out here, mostly gray but all colors. Sorry, but this camera is not giving me a good picture. What are you talking about?”

  The cloud was definitely moving right at me. It was a very dark black, boiling as if it were alive, and I did not like the look of it.

  I think this might be an Amok variant we haven’t heard about. It doesn’t show up on radar but it seems to be tracking me. I’m going to try and dodge.

  I move to one side but the cloud alters its course. It is definitely targeting me. I try hailing it (“Hello little black cloud! Want to be friends?”), jamming it, and hitting it with an EMP pulse, to no effect. I shoot at it with a small plasma cannon, a railgun, and chaff. Other than looking like a little black cloud, it doesn’t act like there is anything there at all.

  Time’s up. The cloud hits me dead center. All my external sensors go dead. Video, audio, radio, radar, sonar, gravimetric, seismic, tactile, thermal, radiological, olfactory, wind speed and barometric pressure, gone. It’s just black out there.

  Then the blackness goes away. I am hanging nose-down about 200 meters up from the floor of a thickly wooded forest. This is not a usual situation for a cybertank. I posses no visible supports. I start to fall. Status update: this is not a promising situation for a cybertank. I move about one millimeter closer to the ground. That takes 14 milliseconds. So gravity is about Earth standard. I’m tough but a fall of 200 meters under this gravity onto my nose could do me serious damage. I note that the ground is rocky. Correction: this fall could do me in.

  I try to activate my anti-gravity suspensors. Of course they are offline. Suspensors are finicky beasts. I start the process of warming them up. I calculate that they will reach full power three seconds after I have crashed. I need a better plan.

  First things first: I need to level out. I cycle my treads and motive units in complex motions. I don’t have the flexibility of a terrestrial cat but I can change my orientation using a similar process, just not as quickly. I calculate that I will be mostly level by the time that I hit the ground, but still moving too fast. I extend my suspension to maximum, to give me more shock-absorbing capacity. Still not enough.

  Some of my remotes made it through the black cloud with me, and I have a few stowed internally, which I launch. I could have them all fly under me and push up on my hull, but the thrust would be pathetic compared to my mass.

  I fall another millimeter. It takes less time than it took me to fall the last millimeter. I am running out of time, and millimeters.

  If I could set off an explosion under me at just the right moment the pressure could provide me with the extra cushion I need. I run some simulations: iffy but possible. A baby nuke might do it, but I don’t have any baby nukes. A big nuke would probably kill me, and I don’t have any of them either.

  I’ve got it, maybe. I have my remotes target my underside with missiles set to detonate just before impact. The explosions provide significant thrust. I am like the old human project Orion idea of using nuclear bombs to push on a starship. About 20 meters before I hit the ground I trigger all my remotes to self destruct beneath me. The blast produces a zone of extremely high pressure: more cushioning. My anti-gravity units are warming up, they are at 20% capacity, not enough to stop me falling but enough to slow me down.

  Impact. My extended suspension touches down, compresses for five meters, and then bottoms out. I sink into the ground. The stress on my hull and internal systems is immense. Bits of me tear loose inside and hit other bits of me that also tear loose. The ground is rocky, but even rocks give way under these forces. Good, the spongier the ground is the less shock that I take. I suffer more internal structural damage. This is going to be close.

  I stop falling. I start to move upwards, as the ground recoils and my suspension bounces back. I seem to have survived, more-or-less intact. The damage is bad but nothing that I can’t fix in an hour or two. This whole fiasco has taken about nine seconds (it would have taken six if I hadn’t managed to slow myself down). Time to figure out what the hell is going on.

  I am in a forest. There is a scorched clearing extending about 100 meters out from me but otherwise it’s pristine. It is pretty, with big oak trees and various small forest creatures chittering in the branches. I hear birds singing to each other, and the buzz of innumerable insects. This could be ancient Terra.

  In fact, it is ancient Terra. Every plant and animal here is an exact match for the old Earth. The air composition, surface gravity, it all matches. I scan the sky with my sensors: there is Earth’s moon, and though too faint to see in daylight with human eyes, my optical sensors clearly image the planet Saturn. I take a soil sample and do a biochemical and genetic analysis of the microbes: it’s a perfect match for Earth as it was projected to have been around 1100 AD. There are no industrial pollutants, minimal background radiation, no evidence of genetically engineered organisms or nanotech detritus.

  Of course this can’t be Earth. Earth hasn’t been like this for millennia, and constructing a facsimile of this scale and detail is impossible. I run the usual “has my mind been screwed with?” diagnostics, but it’s just a formality. At least in my experience, when you encounter something so unexpected that you refuse to believe it, it probably is real. Always trust your raw data.

  There no longer appears to be any urgency, so I content myself with observing. It really is beautiful here. A shame that the real Earth isn’t like this anymore. Perhaps if I survive whatever it is that is happening to me, I could recreate something like this for my friends.

  I am fresh out of big remotes, but I do have some micro ones left that I send out to scout. I finish the major repairs to my damaged internal structure, and I set about making some replacements. I have limited raw materials in my internal stores. If I want a full escort screen I will have to start refining metals from the soil. Fuss and bother but that’s a boring job.

  About 500 meters away I detect motion: a band of 20 men are travelling through the forest on foot. They are armed with primitive weapons: swords, bows, and one of them has a flail. They wear partial chainmail armor over brown leather jerkins. They are tired and dirty, and six of them are injured.

  From farther off I detect another party. This one is mounted on horses and moving swiftly to intercept the men on foot. They come into view: there are 34 of them, heavily armed and armored, with lances, partial plate armor and chainmail skirts, and double-recurved bows. They are all dressed in black. At first I took them to be humans but on closer inspection I am not so sure. They are stronger and coarser than the typical human of this era, with protruding jaws, a sloping brow line, and only fou
r digits on each hand.

  The second party catches up with the first. It’s a slaughter. The humans try and put up a fight but they are tired and on foot. The armored horsemen are fresh and have the charge. One human gets a lucky blow in, unhorses a black-garbed rider and cuts his throat, but the final score is humans: 1, black-dressed horse-rider things: 20.

  The riders dismount and proceed to loot the dead humans, and then proceed to eat them. I suppose there is no accounting for taste, but I find the idea of eating another sentient being repulsive. Plus, eating another member of your own species – or even a closely related species – is a good way to acquire parasites. Still, the table manners of these beings are no concern of mine.

  Sometime later an older human male comes into my clearing. He looks around at the broken trees and the shallow crater in the soil, and then he looks at me. He is tall for this era, nearly two meters, I would estimate about 60 years old with the medical care of the day but still spry and with a sharp look to his eyes. He is wearing a rough beige cloak and an extremely broad-brimmed hat with a conical peak, also beige. He carries a small knapsack, and a simple wooden staff.

  At first he walks around the edge of the clearing, cautious but not furtive. Then he comes closer, and inspects my hull. He puzzles at my treads and bogies, and stares up at my main turret and the projecting weapons and sensor clusters high above. He starts and looks to one side: he has spied one of my micro-remotes over in the trees. Sharp eyes for an old man.

  He taps on my hull with his staff. I do nothing. Hopefully he will get bored and leave if I wait long enough. He scratches one ear, and acts lost in thought for a time. Eventually he speaks.

  “I say, you there. May I have your name?”

  Standard English, Earth circa 2016 or thereabouts. This is the first thing that doesn’t fit with the Earth of 1100. I am tempted to remain silent. This man means nothing to me. But I do need intelligence. What the heck. I activate my hull speakers.

  Hello there. My name is “Old Guy.” May I have your name?

  The man bowed low. “I am called ‘The Wizard,” he said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Old Guy.”

  The Wizard? As in, there is only one wizard, or as in, you are the coolest wizard of all?

  “That’s just what they call me,” he answered. “I don’t know why, the name just seemed to stick. But ‘Old Guy’? Do you have any idea how old I am?”

  I do a quick check. Watching the stars go I determine that the planet has a sidereal day of 23 hours, 56 minutes. I take more astronomical observations: my full sensor array is very precise, I can calculate the year. Yup, 365 days, give or take, just like an Earth year.

  I am 2,452 years old.

  The Wizard was nonplussed. “Well then, you win, ‘Old Guy’. Where are you from?”

  I don’t know. Well, I do know where I come from, I just don’t know where it is relative to here. Another world, at least. One moment I was minding my own business talking to an old friend, then I encountered this strange black cloud, and the next thing I knew I fell out of the sky into this clearing.”

  “Do you often fall out of the sky without warning?”

  No.

  The Wizard nodded. “I did not think so, but it is always best to ask and make sure.”

  Do things often fall out of the sky without warning here?

  “No, not generally. I am also unaware of anything like a small black cloud that might have done something like this. Did you offend an especially powerful sorcerer, or were you dabbling in some occult ritual?”

  No, nothing like that at all. I had just finished participating in a war, but I am fairly certain that our enemy can’t do things like this.

  “Then it is a mystery,” said The Wizard. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  Not at all.

  This Wizard person seems determined to have a long conversation with me. That’s OK, he is engaging, and perhaps I can learn something useful about this place. However, this is no way to have a human-level conversation. I start to warm up my trusty Amelia Earhart android.

  The Wizard removes a large pipe with a long thin stem from his knapsack, packs it with tobacco, and lights it. He puffs contemplatively, and I get a sample of the smoke from my hull-sensors. It’s a complex mixture that includes carbon monoxide, tar, formaldehyde, nicotine, delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, and cinnamon. Nice blend.

  I have the Earhart android drop out of a hatch and walk over to him. He is startled, and executes an even lower bow than before.

  “Dear lady, forgive me, I did not hear you approach. I don’t believe that we have met. I am The Wizard, at your service.”

  I’m sorry, this is just me, “Old Guy.” When I have a human conversation, I prefer to do it using a human form, if possible. I hope this doesn’t bother you?

  The Wizard squints at my remote. “You are a familiar of this Old Guy?”

  Not quite. More of a kind of puppet, my people call it a “remote.” It’s a tool, like your walking staff, that we use when our main bodies are inappropriate. It appears human, but underneath it is just a machine.

  “Amazing. But tool or not, I cannot address such a lovely creature as ‘Old Guy.’ Does your – remote, did you call it? – have its own name?”

  This remote is patterned after a famous explorer of my people called Amelia Earhart. You may refer to it by that name, if you wish, but please don’t get carried away into thinking that it is in any sense a person in its own right.”

  The Wizard bowed again. “Very well, Lady Earhart, and puppet or not, it is a pleasure to have made your acquaintance.”

  We settled into talking, first about myself and my civilization. For someone living in a nearly pre-technological society, The Wizard had a surprisingly broad knowledge: he was aware that his world was a sphere, and though interested to learn of other planets he was not discomfited by the idea.

  The conversation continued, and I had my repair drones construct a table and two chairs from the remains of an oak that my landing had knocked over. I used a classic pattern from 23rd century Japan: elegant curves, no nails or screws but everything held together with cunningly fashioned joints. The Wizard clapped his hands with delight at the sight of the drones shaping the wood with blurring machine speed. It really is magic, when you think about it.

  Then we got around to talking about this world. Much was as I expected. It was a feudal society, hereditary lords running smallish fiefdoms, simple metallurgy, written books but most people are illiterate, algebra but not calculus, swords and arrows but some artisans are rumored to be working on something called “fire-arms.”

  The big news was the rise of someone called “The Dark Hierophant,” an (allegedly) evil sorcerer-king who was going to conquer the world and plunge it into an unending pit of darkness and despair. It was minions of this Dark Hierophant that had slaughtered the humans I saw earlier, who (according to The Wizard) were the noble survivors of the noble defenders of the oh-so-noble walled city of Eutect that had recently been sacked, and all of its men, women, children, domestic animals and servants put to the sword, or worse.

  “You say that you witnessed the massacre this morning, yet you did nothing?”

  Your pardon, I do not mean to belittle your cause. But I had no way of knowing what was going on. Perhaps, as you say, the forces of evil were killing the forces of good. Or perhaps the local constabulary was hunting down an escaped group of mass-murdering pederast neo-liberal economists. In the vast experience of my people, entering war for “noble” causes – honor, or justice, or one side wears black and the other white – leads only to further misery all around. We fight when we must. We do not fight wars that are not our business.

  The Wizard did not like this answer. “That seems to me a selfish point of view. You truly have no concern for others? No sense of fighting for what is right?”

  If I were to tell you of all the times that fighting for ‘justice’ had created still greater horrors, we would sit here talking and the years
would turn into centuries. We have learned the lesson. War is reserved for your own vital interests, and anything more is the kind of self-indulgent sentimentality that pulls a thorn from the foot of a rabid dog only to have it turn around and kill a child. We don’t fight other people’s wars.

  “That is wisdom, I suppose,” said The Wizard, somewhat sadly. “Narrow, heartless, unimaginative. Possibly leading to a defeat-in-detail of isolated good by a more unified evil. But wisdom nonetheless.”

  We chatted a bit more, but the conversation was starting to flag. Then I noticed a large group of soldiers approaching from about a kilometer off. There are 40 armored riders, the same coarse four-fingered humanoids dressed in black that I had seen earlier in the morning. There are 63 foot-soldiers, of the same physical appearance as the riders but more lightly armed, with leather armor studded with iron discs and crude single-edged swords that lacked a guard. At the head of the group was another rider that stood out. He was at least half a head taller than any of the others, was wearing full plate armor and riding a monstrous destrier of a horse. The armor was black, but so polished and glossy it seemed that clouds drifted over it. He had two long-handled plain steel maces holstered by his side.

  Your pardon, but a large group of black-dressed soldiers is approaching this location. Given that you seem to be in conflict with them, you might want to head off in the opposite direction.

  “I thank you for your concern, but these old bones cannot outpace much more than a snail, and that on a good day. I shall stay here. Besides, even the minions of the Dark Hierophant are not yet so bold as to interfere with a wizard of the White Council.”

  The White Council? But you are wearing beige.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep a white robe clean in the forest? Beige is close enough. Besides, it’s more of an off-white, and it’s not meant to be literal. Anyhow, here they are.”