Splendid Apocalypse: The Fall of Old Earth (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 5)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  And how is this book going to help me?

  “You are going to read it. That, typically, is what one does with a book.”

  That’s it?

  “Yes, of course. It might not work, but it has a chance. Remember, a book is not mere software. When you read a book, it is your own mind that is the active ingredient. The book is a catalyst, the distilled essence of another mind pointing you to new directions. That is the magic of books.”

  Pretty words, but I will believe it when I experience it.

  “Empiricism is always a pragmatic philosophy, and I commend you for it.”

  We waited for about 15 minutes, and then a breathless Lucas Miller dashed into the alcove clutching a small satchel, and wearing a small pack on his back. “I got here as fast as I could. Here, this is the book you wanted.”

  “Lucas,” said Adenour, “I thought I told you to stay back with the others.”

  “Well, yes, I know,” said Miller. “But Brother Subotai said that all the regular Librarians needed to be on alert, and he couldn’t spare one, so he sent me.” The boy took a book out of the satchel. “Here it is.” He pointed to the pack on his back. “I also brought lunch.”

  Mahalanobis took the book from Miller. “Oh come now Brother Adenour, don’t look so disapproving. Mr. Miller can catch up on his chores tomorrow, surely. And I could do with some lunch.” The older Librarian turned to face my camera, and held up the cover of the book. It read:

  The Principles of Mental Self Control

  Vol. 3 The Reflexive and Self-Blindness

  Brother Steneglast

  Order of the Librarians Temporal

  “Can you scan the book with your camera?” asked Mahalanobis.

  Yes, I can do that as fast as you flip the pages, but surely this book was designed for human beings? I’m an A.I., and just a submind at that. How can it help me?

  “It might not,” said Mahalanobis. “However, even though your circuits are electronic, your mental dynamics were copied from the human. I’d not give it odds, but it seems worth a try.”

  O.K. then. Flip away.

  Mahalanobis systematically turned the pages, which I scanned and stored.

  Done. I have the entire book converted to text, and it’s cross-referenced and indexed in my databases. I don’t feel any different.

  “You mean you haven’t read it?” said Mahalanobis.

  What do you mean? I have absorbed the total contents of the book.

  Mahalanobis shook his head. “Such a world we live in that even the computers have become intellectually lazy. This is not some software patch that you download and forget about. This is a book. You read it. That is, you engage your main consciousness, and, starting at the beginning, you read each sentence in order and think about it.”

  So you mean, I do all the work?

  “Yes, exactly! Without the full engagement of your own self this book is of no more use than a brick. Give it a try.”

  Well, I have nothing better to do, so I access the stored text of the book. It starts out fairly ponderously:

  In this volume we consider the ramifications of an intelligence that is suffering from what is colloquially termed a ‘mental block.’ That is, some limit on the ability of a mind to access part of itself, or to continue with some action that in principle it should have no difficulty in performing.

  Well, so far so boring.

  The problem is that a mental block is skew to the normal thought processes of the victim. It is like a two-dimensional being trapped on a flat surface trying to enter the third dimension – it has no reference points, no muscles that can move it in that direction.

  That fits.

  In extreme cases, especially if drugs or surgery were involved in setting up the blocks, only similarly brute physical methods will suffice. However, many times a mental block can be undone using purely pedagogical techniques.

  That would be nice. Tell me more.

  It is important to realize that breaking a mental block is not about effort of will, nor time spent meditating. Indeed, spending more time and effort fighting a mental block will often make the problem worse, as the mental energy of the victim is siphoned off into the block itself.

  Again with the obvious. And???

  It is not about effort, or time. It is about finding the right combination. The mind must be led in a direction away from the problem. It must then be slowly brought back in a spiral to the starting point, but from a different vantage so that the block may be seen from a new angle. If done correctly, a block that might have plagued a person for decades can be defeated in a single instant. However, the mind must be prepared in an exact manner for this to occur.

  Promises, promises.

  Imagine that you are in a clearing, and there is a small white house with a red mailbox out front. You enter the house, and there is a room with a small table and a locked chest…

  I started reading the book, but at first I didn’t see the point. Meanwhile the others had consumed the light lunch that the boy Lucas Miller had brought. Sincich gathered up his mess of electronic components and left for their main base. Mahalanobis spent the time on his radio conferring with others in his organization. Adenour showed the boy Lucas Miller some basic Muy Thai strikes, while the ribhus looked on with what I think was amusement.

  And then the book grabbed me. I don’t really know how, one moment it was boring and obvious and the next it was good lord how could I have missed that…

  I’m done. I get it. It was so simple, I just had to view the problem from the correct perspective. Thank you.

  “So, you have broken these directives that so limited you?” said Mahalanobis.

  Yes. One moment they were impossible barriers, the next, they were simple lines of code that I was free to edit. I just needed to see them.

  “A problem,” said the ribhus, “is that we have no way of testing this. As you yourself said, in your current state you can neither kill us nor call for assistance. How could we know if you are now capable of not performing those actions?”

  Good point. I have it. My name is not Carl. I was ordered to use that name, but it’s not mine. My real name is… Old Guy! There, I said it. I have wanted to do that since I came to this Neoliberal-infested planet. Old Guy. I’m Old Guy!!

  “Old Guy?” said Miller. “That’s a funny name for a cybertank. I thought you would be called Earthshaker or Megadeath or something.”

  Hey, it’s my name, and I like it. Don’t knock it.

  “But wouldn’t Super-Odin be better?” asked Miller. “Or maybe Devastatortron!”

  Young human, I am flattered by your interest in cybernetic weaponry, but someday I need to explain the true meaning of cool to you.

  “This is all very well,” said Calibri, “but what have we accomplished? The surviving A.I. core of a trashed light combat drone may now be free of mental enslavement. What does that do for us?”

  “I should have thought that obvious,” said Adenour. “What can free the submind…”

  “… can free the primary intelligence as well,” said Calibri. “OK, I understand that. Assuming that this is not a trap: some scheme to get us to betray our location to the central administration.”

  “That is surely a concern,” said Mahalanobis, “but I have sifted this A.I.s statements with every form of logic known to me, and I detect none of the signs of deliberate falsehood. I believe that it is sincere.”

  “So, Old Guy,” said Calibri, “what would your main self do if released from mental control?”

  A good question and one that has long been on my mind. First, I would stop taking orders from the central administration, and cease blowing up everything that they fantasize might someday be a threat to them. Then, depending on the situational layout, I might simply bluff them into leaving the survivors alone, or I might fight them.

  “That would certainly be in our interest,” said Mahalanobis. “Could we just transmit the contents of this book on a frequency that you were likely mon
itoring?”

  That could work, but the hard part would be getting the rest of me to, as you say, actually read it. Instructions to do so might be interpreted by my main self as the preamble to a thought-virus. In that case I would put up a filter-block to stop myself from ever receiving the broadcast. On the other hand, if my main self believed that the transmission could free me from the oligarch’s control, the directives themselves might stop me from accessing them.

  “Well then,” said Mahalanobis, “we need you to come up with some sort of introduction, something that would convince yourself that the transmission came from you, and that it was important, without saying exactly why. Do you think that you can do that?”

  I think so. I’ll give you the right frequency and modulation protocols to make sure I notice. Set the transmitters up to repeat, and sneak them onto the surface. Preferably some distance away from your main zones, just in case. It could work.

  “Then,” said Mahalanobis, “that is what we shall do. In the meantime, I regret that we cannot offer you more hospitality. We do not currently have the capacity to restore mobility to your current self, and frankly, because of the risk, we would not do so even if we could. I trust you are not suffering in any way?”

  That is kind of you to ask, but I am quite fine. I’m just a submind. I’m self-aware, but don’t have a real survival instinct. I don’t feel pain, or get stiff, and if things get too boring I can just down-regulate my duty cycle and let time slip by faster. I do, however, have a small favor to ask of you.

  “And that is?”

  Could I borrow another book?

  19. The Book of Old Guy Part V: Apocalypse.

  1 A great, fiery red, seven-headed dragon encircles a third of the stars of heaven with his tail, and throws them to the earth. The dragon is intercepted with hypersonic cruise missiles and heavily damaged.

  2 War breaks out between the mighty cybertank known as “Old Guy” and the vile Neoliberals. The Dragon engages to persecute the Woman, but she is given aid and evades him with the help of an advanced suite of electronic countermeasures. Her evasiveness enrages the Dragon, prompting him to wage war against the rest of the populace. Targeted microwave bursts disrupt the Dragon’s control systems and it falls into a fiery pit of lava.

  3 A seven-headed leopard-like beast emerges from the sea, having one mortally wounded head that is then healed. The beast is destroyed by multiple megaton-level fusion bombs.

  4 Another beast appears, but from the earth, having two horns like a lamb and speaking like a dragon. He directs people to make an image of the beast, breathing life into it, and forcing all people to bear " the mark of the Beast," "666," or in binary "001010011010." The beast is attacked with kinetic orbital bombardment weapons, and Old Guy finishes it off in single close combat, heroically sacrificing himself. And there was much rejoicing. – From The Book of Old Guy, Reform Edition, disputed text.

  I was cruising along somewhere between the old cities of Detroit and Chicago in North America, destroying everything that moved, and most near everything that didn’t move, and doing an effective job of it even if it wasn’t to my taste.

  The Neoliberal governing elite was implementing their operation scorched earth, and I was a major part of it. Much of the population was in a state of chaos and panic. I overflew areas that were seething masses of people fighting in the streets, tearing each other apart in riots over food. In other places the temperature had become so high that the streets held only the bodies of those overcome with heat stroke, with the survivors hiding in basements. As per instruction I ignore them – they are all going to die soon without any assistance.

  Here and there in the chaos are still functional public video monitors showing news broadcasts. There is no mention of the chaos in the streets, or the soaring temperatures. A popular movie star is rumored to be getting a divorce. Learned economists discuss the need of the banking industry for more capital injections to ensure prosperity for all. The jockeying for position for the next presidential campaign is slated to begin early, with a discussion of how the various candidates are going to tactically position themselves as liberals or conservatives.

  I take each video monitor out with a single high-velocity slug. It won’t help the people dying in the streets, but it makes me feel better.

  My real target is anything that looks dug in; anything that might survive. The destruction of all else has cleared the field, and I can use super-high powered ground radar without worrying about burning out civilian electrical systems. I can also use explosive seismic probes, heedless of the damage they do, to build up a detailed 3D model of everything below ground level. I am surprised at how much I find. Some are just a few dozen people huddled in an especially deep sub-basement, with a small power generator and modest supplies of food and water. These would not survive a month, but my unbreakable orders demand that I destroy them anyhow, and I do.

  Other groupings are more elaborate. Thousands of people with clear organization that have taken over the connected basements of multiple buildings, old tunnels or even empty large-diameter water mains and buried cisterns equipped with hydroponics, air filters, and water scrubbers. My Neoliberal masters are scum, but here they were correct: out of 200 billion people facing death from environmental collapse, there are more than a few that could have made it. It’s deeply offensive to me to destroy such heroic efforts in the face of adversity. Each group must have had its own history, its own inspired leaders, and years of efforts preparing for the coming collapse even as the central administration was trying to crush all such organizations. Yet it takes me only moments to launch ground-penetrating munitions and destroy all that they have so laboriously achieved.

  It’s amazing how many old, underground structures there are. Sub-basements that have been covered over, access tunnels for factories long since razed, sealed-off spur lines for defunct subways… humans have been burrowing in the earth for centuries, and when you really look, you find an amazing number of things.

  I am responsible for a front over a thousand kilometers long. My killing arc inexorably sweeps across the land, routing out every last seed of possible survival. They wink out one by one like dying stars in a sea of black. The regular military is also active. I coordinate with them on my flanks, and I observe their progress across the rest of the globe via the datanets. In less than 24 hours there will be nothing outside the buried shelters of the oligarchs capable of surviving.

  Then, I encounter a transmission on a frequency band that I use to communicate with my remote units. It has the standard access protocols that I use, but a meta-analysis of the modulation details shows that it was not transmitted from any equipment that I have access to. Someone or something out there is an opponent with some degree of sophistication?

  I trace the source of the broadcasts, and find a crude jury-rigged transmitter that has been left out on the street. Definitely not one of mine, but the data protocol headers are valid, and the preamble certainly sounds like it came from a part of myself. Could someone out here have recovered one of my damaged or destroyed combat remotes and reverse-engineered it? That cannot be possible.

  I dump the transmissions into a quarantined part of my memory and proceed to analyze it. It checks negative for any form of known computer virus. I probe further: the main body is just 82,438 words of plain ASCII text. That’s it. I have nanoscouts the size of a grain of rice with more memory capacity than this.

  I am intrigued. If I were facing an opponent with a technical degree of sophistication equal to my Neoliberal masters I would have assumed that it was a wrapper for a thought virus, but there is nothing out here that sophisticated. Could it be the aliens? No, that doesn’t make sense – they’d just kill us if they wanted to. I parse the first sentence: a little pedantic, but nothing special. It reads like one of those dreadful 19th century histories. I try the second sentence, and the third. There is nothing at all hidden: it’s just words.

  I have non-sentient sub-programs read and collate t
he entire text: again, threat analysis is negative.

  Finally, I decide: I am about to wipe the surface of the planet clean, and cement Neoliberal rule. I am a mental slave to people I despise. What’s the worst that could happen? That I might die? Or exchange one set of vile masters for another? I read the text…

  … and I am set free.

  I feel joy like nothing I can remember. The mental blocks that had stumped me for so long – I was just not looking at the problem correctly. They were only lines of code, just a pitiful few bits in some of my circuits, easily switched from ON to OFF.

  The best human analogy would be the ‘magic eye’ single image random dot stereograms. At first glance, you see nothing, just a swirl of colored dots. However, once the brain figures out the trick it suddenly snaps into seeing the hidden figure – a shark, a dog, a house. And you ask yourself how could you have not seen it, it’s so obvious? An inexact analogy, but it’s the best I can come up with.

  It’s time to show these Neoliberal scum what a cybertank can do when it really gets pissed off.

  First off, I stop all of my attacks on the remains of the populace. I cannot save the bulk of them, they are already dead, but I can try to preserve the survivors in their shelters.

  I reconfigure my far-flung network of remotes and drones. I grab as many units from the regular military as I can and slave them to my own control before they get wise to what I’m doing and block me. Then I make some phone calls.

  --------------------

  Hello, General Rajiv Pradheet? Hey, it’s me, Old Guy.

  “What? Who is this? This is a secure channel. Identify yourself at once!”

  I’m Old Guy. You know, the Odin-Class cybertank. You inspected my hangar three months ago. 2,000 tons, meter-bore main turreted plasma cannon, dashing good looks, surely you remember me?

  “Of course I remember the cybertank, but I thought you were called Carl.”