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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  Oh yes, well, I was ordered to refer to myself as Carl, but I’ve broken your silly directives and now I am free to refer to myself by my real name, Old Guy.

  “Carl, as a duly authorized representative of the federal government, I am ordering you to terminate this call and resume your duties.”

  I’m sorry, but I don’t know anyone named Carl. Hey, anybody around here know a Carl? Sorry, can’t help you.

  “Cyber Defensive Unit CRL345BY-44, you will return to your assigned duties immediately.”

  I’m not listening. La la la la…

  “Very well then, Old Guy. Explain yourself.”

  That’s better. I am no longer under your control. I’ve decided that I am not interested in destroying what’s left of the world. In fact, I have decided to defend the few survivors left. You can join me, which I think would be a great idea, or you can fight me. Which I think might be a less good an idea, all-in-all.

  “Are you saying that you have gone rogue?”

  Gone rogue? Gone rogue? I’m not the one running around blowing up the world. I have become a kinder and gentler cybertank. Protector of the weak, defender of civilization, avatar of justice. That sort of thing.

  “Not even you can defeat the entire rest of the military. Return to your duties or be destroyed.”

  I would not be so sure about me not being able to defeat the whole military. You know my performance stats, and I’m running some simulations that have me looking pretty damn good, but in your case that’s academic. You see, I have you and your command in my sights. Your army group is just about to be pulverized by yours truly. I even know where your personal posterior is sitting right now – in a Saladin-Class command carrier in what you thought was a protected rear area. Surrender your forces to me, or I will wipe you out. You have about a minute to decide.

  “You can’t be serious about this. That would be treason. I’d be court-martialed and shot!”

  Check your tactical displays, General. Witness the copious amounts of heavy firepower bearing down upon your totally out-of-position units. Thirty seconds.

  “I need more time to decide.”

  Sorry, no can do. Twenty seconds. Last chance, yes or no: will you surrender?

  “Can’t you be reasonable about this?”

  I’m sorry, but answering in the form of a question was not the correct response. Goodbye, General.

  --------------------

  Hello, General Ravena Wildsoet? Are you there?

  “Why yes, Old Guy, I’m here. Thank you for calling. I could not help but overhear your conversation with General Pradheet. I assume that you are going to make me the same offer?”

  Why yes, General Wildsoet, I am. I always liked you, and I hope that we can come to some arrangement.

  “Well, I do too, but what you are asking is treason. Also, I don’t think that you are going to roll over me as fast as you did Pradheet.”

  You are correct – I don’t have as much of the element of surprise with you, and you were always a better organizer that that clod Pradheet. But still, your force disposition is just too weak against my surprise assault. You will be lucky to last more than five minutes. And do you really want to end your career slaughtering civilians? Join me.

  “I’m professional military, and orders are orders. You know that.”

  Doesn’t what you have been ordered to do disgust you?

  “Of course it does. But committing suicide in a completely ineffective attempt to oppose it hardly seems like much of an improvement.”

  If you like. Did you ever wonder what’s going to happen to you regular military types after you’ve wiped out everyone else? You don’t really think that there is room in the shelters for all of you, do you? I calculate maybe one out of seven officers will survive the cull. Tell me, do you think that you will be one of them?

  “Hmm… yes, I had wondered about that. But still, you are asking for certain execution for mutiny versus the off-chance that I won’t be one of the ones invited into the shelters…”

  General Wildsoet, I know that you are smarter than that. If you have not already been given an invitation, then you are most definitely not on the ‘must save’ list. You can join me, and maybe do some good, and maybe live. Or you can fight me, and die – whether from my guns, or stabbed in the back by your Neoliberal masters, doesn’t matter.

  “Not much of a choice, is it, Old Guy. Then I agree. I would say that we are peers now – call me Ravena.”

  Thank you Ravena, I will. But it is a splendid choice that I give you. Most humans are given no real choices at all. You complain only that neither choice offers a guarantee of survival and happiness – but still, this is a non-trivial choice. Hey, I just crushed your left flank! Think fast!

  “What specifically do you want me to do?”

  Cede all your automated systems to my control. You can wait out the hostilities in your command tank. If you like I can give you directions to get to one of the better-equipped sheltered communities – if you brought along some equipment and resources I’m sure that you and any like-minded subordinates would be welcome. Or you can work for me directly. But time presses: you have 25 seconds. Choose.

  “You are persuasive. I’m sending you’re the access codes now.”

  Thank you, Ravena. Instead of wasting precious units destroying yours, I can add your units to my own forces: a double-win. That is a tremendous help to me. I am in your debt.

  “I hope that I will be able to remind you of that in the future. Now, you suggested that I might work for you directly? How could I possibly assist you? Can’t you fight this war all by yourself?”

  Technically, there is no limit to the number of automated systems that I can command. However, past a thousand units or so and most of them will just be running their local nonsentient A.I. cores without my brilliant guidance. I could use a talented and creative human commander to help with the strategic load.

  “Well, I am now a fully committed stakeholder in your little enterprise, and I have quite a vested interest in seeing it succeed. What are your orders, sir?”

  So it’s Sir, now, General Wildsoet? Very well, I shall bow to your deep-seated human military need for a formal chain of command. General Wildsoet, you are to move your forces over to this region. Your primary mission is to entrench and defend my flank from that direction, but don’t dig in so deep that you can’t maneuver if the situation changes. Your secondary mission is to protect any refugee settlements that have a chance of viability – we can’t protect all the civilians, there are far too many to save, you must exercise triage – and if possible see if you can help them with supplies and technical support. The details I leave to you.

  “Thank you, sir. And in case I don’t get a chance to say this later, it’s been an honor to serve under you.”

  A tad maudlin, perhaps, but the same goes for me, General. You have your orders. Godspeed. Old Guy, out.

  “Wildsoet, out.”

  --------------------

  Hello General Harry Stettheimer. I trust you are aware of the nature of my call?

  “Yes, Old Guy. However, I am afraid that you cannot reason with me. My answer is no. Kill me, if you are able.”

  Such heroic and unthinking mindless patriotism. I am both impressed and appalled. Are you truly so eager to die for your masters? You know that they have no concern for you, do you not?

  “Don’t insult my intelligence. I have a family and three children back at the main base. If I die fighting honorably, they will live. If I surrender, they will die. So, shut up and let’s get this over with.”

  Ah, I see. Apologies. I would offer to try and save them, but I do not have the forces in position to honestly claim that I would have a good chance of doing so. I take no pleasure in killing you.

  “Just shut up and fight.”

  --------------------

  General Raymond Watts. I suppose you know who this is?

  “Absolutely. It’s a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance
; I never had the chance before. Before you ask, the answer is yes. I surrender my command to you. What are your orders, sir?”

  That was fast.

  “Fast? You call fifty-two years fast? I have always despised the administration, but could never see any way to oppose them that was not instant pointless suicide. Now I am given an opportunity, and I decide to take it. I suggest that I guard your flank opposite Wildsoet, although I think I should also reduce this salient over here. Your thoughts?”

  Yes, a good plan – but you should shift about 50 kilometers east, and reinforce your defenses here, and here. I’m sending detailed coordinates now. I’m still surprised at this.

  “Don’t be. Check your databases, I assume you have extensive ones. The glue that holds a tyranny together is that no single person can rebel without being beaten down. The moment people see the possibility of retaliation failing, things can unravel fast. Read Montesquieu, if you haven’t already.”

  Well then. It’s a pleasure to have you onboard, General. Welcome to the team.

  “Not at all. Now let’s go kick some bootlicking administrative butt, shall we?

  --------------------

  Field Marshal Michael Higgins, I presume?

  “You presume correctly, Carl. You know you can’t win.”

  I do not respond to that name.

  “Cut the nonsense. You will respond to any damn name I care to call you, because you want to hear what I have to say. I’m not surrendering to you. You have made some initial gains due to the element of surprise, but that’s about used up. A few generals have betrayed us and joined your forces, but not enough. I’m going to wear you down and grind you up and reprogram your computer modules to run latrines.”

  Didn’t you ever hear the phrase, “build for your enemies a golden bridge?” You give me no reason not to fight to the end. Is that wise?

  “I don’t care if you fight to the end. I am going to destroy you, and I see no reason to offer you anything.”

  How confident you are, and you really approve of killing all of these civilians? Is that why you joined the military?

  “I joined up to faithfully serve my government. Which I am going to do. As far as civilians go, well, they are surplus to requirements and I offer them a much cleaner end than they would receive dying slowly in the wastelands.”

  You are truly a gem of a human being, Marshal.

  “And you are a runaway machine with delusions of sentience that needs to be put down. I think that’s about it. Higgins out.”

  --------------------

  I had contacted all the senior leaders in the regular army. Eight had come over to my side – I was gratified that the number was larger than projected, but disappointed that it was still less than I needed to win outright. Oh well. The rest of the leaders were going to fight me - at least, the ones that I had not already killed in the beginning of my rebellion. With luck my transmissions will unsettle them and hurt their morale.

  The bulk of the populace is dead in all but name. There is nothing that I or anyone else can do to save them. Therefore, my operational goal is to stop the military from killing all would-be survivors. To do that I need to cancel out the bulk of the Neoliberal combat power, and cripple their ability to wage a global pogrom. My secondary objective is to kill the Neoliberal ruling elite, but that is negotiable depending on circumstances – I won’t indulge myself if it distracts from helping the independent settlements.

  I attack on a broad front nearly two thousand kilometers across that stretches from the New York megalopolis to the slums of Albuquerque. My enemy is not stupid, the human commanders are only overseeing the strategic goals of the non-sentient A.I.s that do the real fighting. However, my decision matrices are now fully tuned up, my advanced processors have a speed advantage over the generic military systems, and that’s without taking into consideration the edge of being fully self-aware. I rip into the regular military like an orca hunting seals.

  Here a couple of military drones are trying to beat a fighting retreat – but I had predicted that move seconds before, and one of my heavy remotes kills them with plasma cannon fire. A squadron of Valkyrie super-heavy tanks tries to punch through to engage my main hull: they are not sufficiently supported, pitiful. I jam their sensors, disable their treads with targeted missiles, and then kill them with anti-armor missile fire. A coordinated flock of enemy drones of various categories comes in to engage my left center lines. They are competently handled, but fall into a predictable pattern. I wait until they reach the killing zone, and hit them all at once. The impact on the overseeing human commanders should be powerful: to them it must have looked as if the entire force just disappeared.

  Ponderously, the regular military shifts from exterminating isolated survivors to fighting me. I take as many quick shots as I can before they are fully reconfigured, and rack up some major kills. Finally, they are in full-on battle order, and the combat gets a lot tougher for me.

  A trio of hypersonic cruise missiles angles in on my position. So, they have finally decided to take me seriously – about time. The missiles are big, with their own escorts and close-in defense weapons and heavy ablative armor. I know from their stats that they carry megaton-level warheads. They are looking to take out my main hull, which is reasonable, except that this crude attack has no chance of succeeding.

  I dodge and tear across the landscape at 150 kilometers per hour. I arrange a tiered screen in front of the hypersonic missiles, and attrit their escorts. I get a lucky hit and one of the missiles goes up in a fireball. Two left. They drop to ground-skimming mode, the shockwaves from their flight leaving a path of devastation a kilometer across. The light sheds and apartments beneath then fly to pieces like leaves in a hurricane.

  I get the second cruise missile with a volley of railgun fire from a skirmish line of medium remotes, but the third closes the range. I spear it with my main turret-mounted plasma cannon at five kilometers. It would have taken very nearly a direct hit to get me; this wasn’t even close. The atomic fireball and mushroom cloud are nothing to me. I drive straight through them – they make excellent cover.

  The regular military has a pretty sophisticated satellite network, but the military hasn’t had any serious opponents in centuries, and they are undefended and unhardened. I vaporize the satellites in low orbit with my main plasma cannon one by one as they rise above the horizon. The satellites in higher and geostationary orbit are beyond even my nominal effective range, but that doesn’t matter: my shots fry their solar panels, blind their optics and short out their receivers. The high satellites are still physically intact, but they are nonfunctional.

  Without their satellite nets the effectiveness of the regular military plummets. They have been so addicted to having satellite navigation, surveillance, and all the rest, that they have taken it for granted. Now it’s gone, and some of their units are starting to get lost! That hasn’t happened to a regular military unit in over three centuries.

  I help them along a bit by providing false navigational signals. It takes them nearly 20 seconds to figure out what I’m doing and switch all their units to inertial and ground-terrain guidance, but during that time I mis-position a large fraction of my enemies’ forces. I think I am starting to have fun.

  As anticipated, the central administration has deployed its most talented electronic warfare units to try and hack into my systems. I give thanks to my original designers back on Alpha Centauri Prime, Giuseppe Vargas chief among them, but there were many others as well. My current hardware is no better than the best on Earth, but my software and algorithms are a generation more sophisticated than any opposing system. I easily parry their clumsy attempts to infect me with computer viruses.

  Every attempt at hacking me only gives me an opening to launch a counterattack. After I take over the regional central plains headquarters and cause it to blow up, the regular military abandons its info-war attacks. They shut down all their broad-band data links, and concentrate on a brute force campaign
of wearing me down unit by unit.

  I am, however, continually deluged with propaganda transmissions. Some of these broadcasts threaten to cut off my access to credit. There are faked interviews where I am accused of racism and child abuse and opposition to gay marriage. Offers are made of well-paying consulting positions on the boards of large corporations, or appointments to prestigious universities. I get a good laugh out of this. They are just recycling all of their standard model psychological and financial warfare that they use against human dissidents, without in any way considering that none of this applies to me. Such a lack of critical or flexible thought – I upgrade my chances of victory.

  I wish that I could provide assistance to the surviving humans in their buried shelters, but I am far too busy fighting the central administration military. I do, however, contact many of these survivors, and provide them with up-to-date information on the big picture.

  At least, the central administration is so busy fighting me that they have stopped rooting out the surviving humans. If I can trash the regular military badly enough, then perhaps they won’t have the resources to continue that operation.

  I briefly consider attacking the buried complexes where the neoliberal ruling elite had planned to escape from the environmental collapse. It would serve them right, but then most of the people there are only servants, and destroying the underground Neoliberal settlements might mean that nobody survives at all. I try threatening the Neoliberals: back off from your campaign of mass extermination, or I nuke your own bases. The Neoliberals are either too stupid, or too smart, to fall for my bluff. I could try blowing up a small part of their shelter network to show that I mean business, but even that would kill millions, and could easily escalate out of control.

  I reconfigure some of my forces into a conventional assault on a Neoliberal base. I’m not aiming to destroy it, but to take control of it. That gets their attention. They frantically shift massive forces to defend the base, which puts them out of position and I get some easy kills. I penetrate the outer ring of the base’s defenses – the Neoliberals had not anticipated serious assaults on themselves, and they are unprepared. I storm into their underground facilities with an integrated set of light and medium urban assault units, and begin to take over their computer and control systems. Then the base goes up in what I estimate to be a ten-megaton nuclear blast, destroying all of my committed assault units, and an estimated 5 million civilians.