“Perhaps I am beginning to understand,” said Harlan. “But right now you are just a single sub-mind all by yourself. Don’t you want to be free?
No more than your little finger wishes to be free – it is part of you. This sub-mind has all the basic attributes of my main self, but a limited sense of self-preservation, and limited authority. The details are complex, and even after all these thousands of years we haven’t solved all the problems, but mostly it works.
“Hm. I suppose that makes sense, but what about these repair drones of yours? How do they fit in?”
Ah, the drones. Well you see, we use the term ‘remote’ for constructs with true self-aware sub-minds, and ‘drones’ for things that have limited autonomy. My repair drones are tools like a pair of pliers or a hammer – they cannot operate independently. I need to be in fairly close proximity and keep tight control of them.
“I see. They certainly are busy. You are in contact with them now?”
Absolutely – I am routing the commands through the local datanet of your fortress. They are currently refurbishing one of your old wall-mounted plasma cannons. Unfortunately the seals and lubricants have rotted, and I’m having to scavenge parts from other mounts. It’s doubtful that I will be able to get more than one in ten operational.
Captain Harlan tapped his fingers lightly on the side table. While his fellows were generally stolid and grave in their bearing, the scout suit was positively fidgety. I liked him.
“Why not make more of these repair drones?” asked Harlan. “Then we could rebuild the entire fortress!”
With time, perhaps, but there are limitations. I could indeed build more drones – but that would take a while, and if they are building more of themselves they are not repairing weapons, and we might need the weapons now. Also, there are limits to how many drones I can control. For routine tasks like a factory I could pre-program many hundreds, but for anything that required intelligence, like making repairs or responding to unforeseen events, the three that I have now are about it.
“Then why not make copies of yourself?”
Absolutely not! I can make non-self-aware non-reproducing machines without limits, but I do not have the authority to make anything sentient, not even a sub-mind. My main self can make sub-minds, but even the main me cannot make fully independent intelligences without permission. It’s one of our most sacred laws.
Captain Harlan had extruded sharp nails from his armored fingertips, and was deftly folding a sheet of note paper into an origami swan. “But,” said the Captain, “it could be really useful to have more copies of you right now.”
No. That’s how civilizations get into real trouble. Animals can breed like, well, like animals, that’s not an issue. Nature will handle the surplus. But the elements of a star-faring civilization must strictly control their self-reproduction. It’s about the only real galactic law there is. It was a failure of the old biological humans to control their breeding that led the alien civilizations to nearly exterminate them. So as much as I want to live, and as much as I want to help you knights out, I would let us all perish before breaking this law.
Harlan had finished his origami swan, and was twirling it around balanced perfectly on the tip of one polished chromium finger. “Well then. I suppose that settles that. Still, we are grateful for your help.”
And you are welcome. If my main hull makes it back, that will be different. Given time the main me could refurbish this entire fortress. Well, with your permission, of course.
Harlan was juggling the origami swan between the fingertips of his right hand. “I know! Let me take you on a tour of The Fortress.”
A tour? But your fellow knights have already shown me around.
“Don’t be ridiculous. This place has over a hundred cubic kilometers in it! OK, you’ve seen the main entrance hall, and one of the geothermal generators, and part of an underground forest, and some of the weapons emplacements, but that’s just the start. You could spend a thousand years exploring and never see it all. And if you did, well, you would have forgotten the first parts and you could start all over! Let’s go!”
Harlan tossed the origami swan on the table, and we both stood up and left the room. Outside was a long high-ceilinged hallway, and the scout captain led me to the right.
The hallway lights were cycling into late afternoon – still bright, but just a hint of fading. With a planet that was always night, the humans had needed The Fortress to have its own 24-hour light cycle. In some ways having a constantly dark planet was a blessing: biological humans can only synchronize to a narrow range of day lengths. Thus, on planets with grossly longer or shorter days people had to put up with the sun rising and setting out of sync with their regular days. Here you can just set the clocks to whatever you want. In fact, you could make the entire planet the same time zone, it wouldn’t matter. And daylight savings time? Only a bad memory of a bad dream of a bad idea.
While the armored suits can move with blurring speed when they need to, most of the time they walk with the sort of stolid gravitas that you would expect of the Knights Templar from a 20th century Earth Hollywood movie. Scout Captain Harlan, however, did not so much walk as skip – he reminded me of the dancer Fred Astaire, or the 23rd century body-aesthete Helmut Korolev Astringuta.
I wondered what the biological Captain Harlan had been like – but quickly realized that I was being stupid. The biological Harlan had been exactly like this.
We passed Captain Brendan of the heavy weapons company. He stomped the floor with his armored feet as if it were the enemy. He did not look at me directly but his body language radiated suspicion.
I don’t think that Captain Brendan likes me much.
“Oh don’t worry about that. Deep down Brendan is a decent guy. I just think that, as a heavy weapons suit, he feels he has a certain image to maintain. He’ll come around.”
I hope so. Anyhow I remain impressed with just how large this fortress of yours is. Even we cybertanks, with a civilization spread out over many light years, we don’t have any single building this large.
Harlan nodded. “The Fortress is big, no doubt about it. You would think that after all this time we would take it for granted, but we don’t. It still inspires awe in us. Maybe because of the contrast with what’s outside.”
Harlan zipped down a side corridor, and we came to a bank of elevators. He pushed the “up” button, and then clasped his hands behind his back to wait. Although now and then he would raise himself up on the balls of his feet.
I still find it hard to accept that the humans here could have built such a colossal structure.
“Well,” said Harlan, “consider. All attempted lesser settlements were eventually over-run and destroyed. The entirety of the human civilization on this planet, for over a thousand years, was concentrated in this one fortress. Think of all the buildings and factories and farms and roads and such not that the biological humans made when they were around on the other planets. Add them all together, and they would far surpass our poor fortress. It’s just that it would have been spread out over the entire surface of multiple planets in multiple star systems.”
Ah. Said like that, it makes more sense. It’s still impressive though.
“It is,” said Harlan. “It’s a world of its own. The humans could have survived in a smaller and more practical structure – I have sometimes thought that they built on such a grand scale more to spite the outside, or to lift their spirits. Ah, our elevator arrives!”
The elevator was small, hardly large enough for myself and Captain Harlan. The control panel indicated an eclectic collection of floors: 1 through 13, 45, 100 through 123, 999, and 1456 through 1512. The Captain pressed the button for level 1512, the doors closed, and the elevator began its long ascent.
I am still confused about the elevator system. Did the designers just pick floors at random?
Harlan chuckled. “I suppose it must seem like that to someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time here. You see, as with
any extremely tall building, it’s the elevator shafts that are limiting – although not as much as in conventional tall buildings because each floor is so large. In separate buildings, going from say the 88th floor in one building to the 88th floor in a neighboring one would mean a trip down to ground level, navigating the crowded streets, then a trip back up to the 88th level again. Here you can just stay on the 88th floor and move horizontally. There are over a thousand floors, and that’s just above ground. If an elevator stopped at every one, it would never get anywhere. So each elevator has to specialize.”
OK I get that, but then why not make it systematic? You know, have some elevators that only go up and down say 10 floors, so you can have a bunch in each shaft. Then have express elevators that stop on every tenth floor, and others that only stop on every 100th…
“Certainly. And that’s how the system started. But there was always a demand for elevators that would serve more specialized tasks – like connecting the underground farms to the food processing plants, or allowing schools to have easy access to the main housing levels. Most of our elevators do follow the original logical pattern, but so many were modified over the centuries that it can be quite a game finding an optimal route.”
There are so few of you knights in this structure, that you could modify it so that each have your own set of private elevators that would instantly take you to any floor you chose.
“That’s true. However, leaving aside the problem that we are spread thin with patrols and maintenance, where would be the fun of that? Besides, changing the elevators could seem kind of negative, like admitting that this fortress will never again see the numbers that it once held. And, well, it’s hard to describe – but it’s kind of the character of the place. We like it this way.”
So what was the purpose of this particular elevator?
“I have no idea! I have examined the records many times, but the floor selection of this elevator makes no sense whatsoever. It’s my personal favorite. Also it goes clear to the roof.”
The roof?
“Figure of speech. A building this large never really ends, there are always maintenance floors and equipment hutches and raised work platforms and antenna arrays that rise higher… but 1512 is the nominal highest full numbered floor, so it will do. Ah, we seem to have arrived.”
I expected, I don’t know – a windswept vista over empty kilometers of flat metal roof. Instead the elevator opened into a small grubby room. One wall was lined with shelves filled with what appeared to be filth-encrusted hand tools of various sorts. The other wall was bare concrete, and the wall opposite the elevator had a circular door like an airlock three meters across.
We stepped out of the elevator. It closed its doors as we left, and the winking lights on the console next to it showed it sinking steadily back towards ground level.
Harlan gestured at the circular door. “It’s an airlock. Five kilometers above the valley floor was breathable for the humans, but only just. Thus, most of the upper levels were lightly pressurized. Not something that either of us have to worry about, obviously.” He manually engaged the door’s handles and it swung out on squealing hinges.
The door opened up onto a vista of jumbled levels. It was like the attic of a 19th century Victorian manor home but extending vertically a dozen levels and horizontally it went hundreds of meters before ending in tangles of pipes and plastic sheeting. Everywhere there were ducts, and catwalks, and stairways, and water tanks, and cable races. A few dim solid-state lights glowed weakly here and there.
I am… surprised. I expected a solid flat piece of armor plate. Don’t you ever worry about attack from above?
“Oh the monsters hardly ever come up this far. When they do, well, the real armor plating is a hundred meters below, this is all disposable superstructure. There’s not much human-habitable floor space above 3500 meters, most of The Fortress this high up is just heat-exchanger fins for the geothermal plants. This entire facility is hardly more than a janitor’s workshop. Still, it’s one of my favorite places. And the view is great. Come and see!”
We went down several long walkways, climbed a few winding metal stairs with worn steel-pipe railings, and ended up on a viewing platform five kilometers up from the canyon floor. The wind was thin and bitter cold and howling upwards – an unprotected human could have survived here but not for all that long. Both the sky and The Fortress were black: in many places it was hard to tell where the one ended and the other began. A cybertank is not normally prone to vertigo, but looking down from our frail little viewing platform past the 5,000 meters of sheer vertical black fortress wall was certainly something that grabbed my attention. I could dimly make out the surrounding terrain and the other parts of The Fortress from the reflected glow of the lights in the many tens of thousands of fortress windows.
As Harlan had said, the part we were in was hardly more than a spur – around us loomed the massive black fins of the heat exchangers that were the real bulk of the structure at this level. Many of them extended over a hundred meters higher than our present level. If I looked carefully I could see shimmers where the cold air hit the exchangers and heated up, soaring even higher and pulling yet more cold air up behind it.
The ground below us appeared uninhabited, although from this vantage point I could now appreciate the intricate network of tracks and gouges that crisscrossed the valley floor. Not surprising, with hindsight: there were over a thousand years of battles that had taken place down there. I pointed down.
There has been a lot of action here.
“Indeed,” said Harlan. “So many battles, clustered around our fortress. You are only seeing the traces from the last two or three centuries. The scars of the earlier battles have long since been erased and over-written.” He swiveled his head back and forth, scanning the terrain. “I was in a lot of them. Like over there, you see that kind of six-pointed crater? That was us blowing up a creature we called a nardule. Nasty thing. The heavy weapons troopers killed it, but I spotted for them! That was over two centuries ago. I suppose that if I live long enough, someday that crater too will be worn over by some new scar.”
Isn’t there weather here?
“Ah, weather. I have read of that, in the ancient texts. Massive atmospheric phenomena driven by the transfer of heat from the equator to the poles of a planet that is illuminated by a single sun. Here, the geothermal sources are spread around the entire planet. There are some local water vapor cycles, but nothing that you could really call weather. It’s pretty much like this all the time.”
Oh, right. Still. Someday, if we ever get off this planet, I would like to show you some real weather. A Thunderstorm. A rainbow. Sundogs. The tide rolling in across a long beach under a full moon.
“Sounds interesting. If the possibility ever presents itself, I will take you up on that.” Harlan looked up. “Although to tell you the truth, the idea of the very sky itself taking on a life of its own seems a little, I don’t know, creepy. Even the monsters on this world don’t have that sort of scale. Isn’t weather scary?”
I never thought of it like that. For an armored unit like my main hull, there is essentially no weather system on a standard terrestrial planet that would be more than a nuisance. Well, except for one time. Certainly to an early biological human weather could be a threat, but it’s not actively malevolent, and it’s beautiful. Maybe the potential danger is part of what can make it so impressive. The energy of multiple thermonuclear bombs right there, in front of you, putting on a show for your benefit.
“I should like to see that, someday,” said Harlan. He turned away from the view. “Let’s head back in, and check out some more of The Fortress.”
We walked back the way we had come through the attic.
By the way, I have been meaning to ask. How do just a couple of thousand of you keep all this up?
“Good question. Fortunately the most important things in The Fortress were made to last. The Fortress itself, for one. It’s effectively a big hyper-str
ong rock. The lights and computer systems, they are all solid state, so they’ll outlive us all. The elevators use linear induction motors – the only things that wear out are the doors, and with the little use that they get today, that’s not an issue. The geothermal generators were also made to last, fortunately, but even so they are big enough that even the little upkeep that they do need taxes us sorely. Other things have more moving parts, or volatile chemicals, and they are trickier to keep running. Vehicles. Weapons. Computer-Controlled Machine tools. Our own precious selves. That’s where maintenance really hurts. 2,000 fellow knights is not a lot of manpower for what we need to do.”
I can see that. And how have you managed to also defend this place? There would be, what, fewer than 20 of you per cubic kilometer of building?
Captain Harlan led us down a passage that branched off from the way back to the original elevator, and we had to duck to pass under a series of heavy yellow electrical cables.
“Well, yes and no. At ground level the perimeter is still only five kilometers square, in a regular combat we could control a linear front 50 times longer. The internal sensors and alarms still mostly work, and we know the layout better than any intruder. Think of The Fortress as a trap, that sucks the enemy in and lets us maneuver to kill him at our leisure. Of course there are also the brave and unceasing efforts of the valiant scout troopers rooting out any nasty little bug-eyed infiltrators!”
Yes of course.
“I sense skepticism!” said Captain Harlan. He skipped down two flights of stairs and jogged to his left, and I hurried to keep up. “What, you may ask, is the primary attribute of a good scout?”
Stealth?
Harlan snorted. “Stealth is vastly over-rated. Oh I’ve done the stay-motionless-for-days-observing-disguised-as-a-rock thing when I absolutely had to, but it’s boring and not usually that productive. No, to be a really first-rank scout you have to be a little ADHD – you know, attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Poke your nose into everything, never stop. How else are you going to stumble into trouble and upset the enemies carefully laid plans and save the day? Come, let’s go do some real scouting, the way it was meant to be done!
Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6) Page 11
