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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  “But why not? Surely you could have done something – maybe even just made suggestions to your fellow officers – some modest pushback?”

  Masterson shook his head. “No. It didn’t work that way. The slightest sign of rebellion – any hint, any phrase that could be misinterpreted – and you’d be gone. Control was total; there was no privacy. The culture was an overwhelming force that permeated all and to defy it was suicide.”

  “I think I see where you are going with this. Only a madman would dare to challenge…”

  “Yes. The real revolutionaries all have to be crazy, unbalanced in at least some way. Martin Luther, Jean-Paul Marat, Teddy Roosevelt, Cedric the Mad…”

  “… Giuseppe Vargas. Yes, I see, I think.”

  “I have always wanted to be a force for good. For order. Before Vargas, I was a monster. I still have nightmares about all the things that I did before I met him. Afterwards, well, I was the High Sheriff! People respected me. They liked me. Did you know, that for the last five years that I held the office, I made no arrests at all?”

  “No arrests at all? That doesn’t sound like much of a record.”

  “You don’t get it. Everything was going fine. People didn’t fear the law – they respected it. I spent most of my time responding to emergency medical calls, or finding lost children, or telling people how to get to the local concert hall. I set an example. And people followed it. It’s what I had always wanted.”

  “Then why did you give it up, and come here?”

  “Well, I had several well-trained subordinates that were more than capable of handling things in my absence. It was mostly because Vargas decided to come here, and I decided to follow him.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps I am beginning to see….”

  “No. You can’t really see unless you had lived it. You have had it so soft – and that’s great, I don’t begrudge you that – but you don’t really know. Vargas saved me. I would follow him into hell. If he is a little arrogant sometimes, well, frankly, I don’t care. He’s Giuseppe Vargas.”

  “I am almost at a loss for words. You know, I heard that you were the only regular human to ever beat Vargas in hand-to-hand combat.”

  “I outweigh him by nearly two-to-one, I was hopped up on chemical stimulants, I had the drop on him, and I was wearing armor. Despite that, he broke half of my ribs and it took me about a month of intensive physical therapy to recover, while Vargas was just as chipper as ever after about five minutes. Other than that, yes, technically, I did beat him. However, it’s not a point of pride for me. I would rather have had the sense to join him beforehand.”

  “Well,” said Gerhts, “you’ve certainly given me a different perspective on the matter, but after last night I’m famished. I think that I am going to go off and get some breakfast.”

  “Breakfast? Then join me. I’ll make you an omelet.”

  “You? Make me an omelet? You never struck me as the domestic type.”

  “Why not? Making an omelet, as with so many other things, is just a matter of attention to detail and careful execution. My mushroom omelet is especially good, if I do say so myself.”

  --------------------

  Vargas and Masterson were alone in a small viewing room overlooking the main hangar. The shuttle was undergoing final preparations, and the ground crews were disconnecting the last few monitoring cables.

  “Still fixed on staying here?” asked Vargas. “Once the shuttle leaves, that will be final.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Masterson. “Alpha Centauri is nice, no doubt about that – I love what you’ve done with the place – but I’m happy here. The Librarians Temporal have developed a society that appeals to me.”

  “And of course, there is the matter of Grand Archivist Ludmilla Gehrts.”

  “Well, yes,” said Masterson. “It would have been nice if you could have stayed for the wedding, but I understand that the launch window is coming up.”

  “True. In any event, the best man won, I think.”

  “It’s not really about winning, you know that?”

  “It’s not? In any event, I shall miss you, my old friend. Whatever shall I do without you?”

  “Whatever you feel like doing, as always. I’m not worried, you’ll still have Old Guy to look after you, and don’t forget: I have a lot of contacts back on Alpha Centauri Prime. If you screw up I’ll hear about it.”

  “Well, we can’t have that, can we. I guess I‘ll have to behave myself after all.”

  “See that you do.”

  “I’m surprised that Moss decided to stay here,” said Vargas. “Especially because until the aliens give him permission, his main hull is going to have to orbit several AU out. What was that about?”

  “As always with Moss, that’s hard to say. He’s not exactly chatty about his motivations. I suspect that he sees what I see in the place – a society that is calm and rational. We may think alike in that regards. Alpha Centauri Prime is also doing well, of course, but it’s more, well…”

  “Lively?” said Vargas. “Interesting? Vibrant?”

  “I was going to say messy, but, yes. Moss and I just like it here better.”

  “Well, I dare say we will never see each other again in person, but the interstellar laser links are all up and running. Stay in touch.”

  “I will,” said Masterson.

  The two men clasped each other’s forearms, and then Masterson gave Vargas a bear hug. Vargas left the viewing chamber, and walked across the hangar floor and up into the shuttle. Just before he entered the hatch, he turned and waved back, giving the people of Earth one last dazzling smile. And then the hatch closed.

  Masterson had remained up in the viewing area, and watched as the air pumps started to evacuate the air and replace it with the heavy toxic gases of the surface. The heavy hangar doors started to roll back, revealing the blasted lifeless surface of the Earth beyond. Ludmilla Gehrts entered the small room, and held Masterson’s hand.

  “So, he’s leaving,” said Gehrts. “It’s funny, but two years went by so quickly.”

  “Agreed,” said Masterson. “It seems like a moment ago that I was getting out of the shuttle, and I saw you for the first time.”

  Outside an armored robot tractor had hooked up to the nose wheel of the shuttle, and was slowly and carefully towing it out to the tarmac.

  “And what,” said Gehrts, “is Vargas going to do without your good influence?”

  “Funny, we just talked about that. I suspect he has great plans, for something or other. He usually does. We’ll find out about them someday, if they work out.”

  “We’ll find out about them if they don’t,” said Gerhts.

  The shuttle had moved far enough away from the hangar that it was no longer visible in the heavy superheated surface clouds. The doors began to rumble shut. The video screen showed the tracking data: after a time the thin curved line of the planned course trajectory appeared, and the position of the shuttle slowly climbed it as it headed away from Earth, and to make the long journey back to the Alpha Centauri system.

  22. Postscript

  “There is no I in team, but there is a U in fuck you”

  – Anonymous.

  It was nearly closing time at the North-Eastern American Museum of Science and Technology. Outside the cavern lights would be dimming to signal the mid-phase of evening. The curator left her office, and walked the halls. Ostensibly so that she could help close things up and make sure that the last visitors left, but in truth she enjoyed the time. The bustle of crowds and school-groups had long since gone, and now there were only the few stragglers remaining. Soon the museum would fall silent, with the halls empty except for the soft whirring of automated cleanerbots. It was a bittersweet feeling – she wondered if this was what it had been like watching the sun set, back when humans still lived on the surface.

  The lights dimmed a notch, and a soft chime sounded. There was an automated announcement on the public address system: “The museum will close for the day in
15 minutes. Please gather your belongings and make your way to an exit. The staff thanks you for your patronage, and we hope that you will visit us again.”

  The curator passed a display with the remains of one of the combat remotes that had actually been used by the cybertank known as Old Guy during his courageous defense of the planet. It was a medium unit with its battered carapace pocked with shrapnel, the misshapen barrels of damaged railguns sticking out at odd angles, and the optics mostly shattered. This was always a favorite exhibit of the visitors, and there were still a few left looking at it.

  There were always some who questioned the value of the museum. ‘We can read all about this in the online library, why bother with physical artifacts?’ The curator would respond, “Well, yes of course we can, and we do, but these are direct physical links to the past! You can get all the information you want on this smashed combat unit in the archives, but this is the real thing. It was actually there when it all happened; when Old Guy took on the Neoliberals and saved us all. We can look at it, and we are reminded at a deep level that the past is not a fiction, but truly existed.”

  Over to one side of the remote was a photograph of a humanoid android belonging to the original Old Guy – the one from Alpha Centauri Prime – when he had come to visit the museum. He had stopped and looked at the wrecked remote of his (twin? brother?) and joked about it. That had been before the curator’s time, though. Also in the picture was the bioengineered human Giuseppe Vargas. As the nominal creator of the cybertanks, in the cult of Old Guy he had been accorded a status somewhat analogous to the Virgin Mary in Christianity. The curator had heard stories about what a wild man Vargas was, but he didn’t look like much in the photograph. She supposed that you had to have been there. Both the original Old Guy and Vargas had long since returned to Alpha Centauri.

  There was a final figure in the old photograph, and that was Vargas’ head of security, Chet Masterson. Now that, she thought, is an impressive-looking guy. Masterson had fallen in love with a Senior Archivist of the Librarians Temporal, and stayed behind. He was still around, and the curator had actually met him once. If anything she thought he looked better in person than in the photograph. In the cult of Old Guy he had been accorded a status analogous to a major angel, like Gabriel. He also had a very good beer named after him.

  She walked through a gallery of ancient culture. One section was given over to a replica of an 18th century ironworks. Another was a reproduction middle-class dwelling from the 22nd century – the main living screen in the common room played all the surviving episodes of Vlad the Impaler Knows Best in an infinite loop.

  The curator turned off into the biomedical section. She passed through a gallery of ancient light microscopes. There were polished brass instruments from the 19th century, enameled black and chrome ones from the early 20th, sleekly molded plastic units with video screens and primitive computer interfaces from the 21st, and solid crystal-block wavefront amplifiers from the 23rd.

  She passed one exhibit and stopped to examine it. It was a replica humanoid male, with the skin removed to exhibit all the surface musculature, nerves, and veins. The replica was sealed inside a glass cloche about two and a half meters tall and one meter wide. The inside was humidified – the curator assumed so that the plastic could take on a more realistic wet sheen. You could push buttons on a console and the major features would light up to identify them.

  In truth, she never much cared for the exhibit – it didn’t show any detail below the surface, and in her opinion was much less informative than some similar displays that used cross-sections and selective organ removal to better illustrate the fundamental principles. It was also somewhat annoying that, for whatever reason, pre-pubescent males always made jokes about the skinned genitals.

  Whenever the curator thought to complain about men, she reminded herself of what they all had to develop out of. In her opinion, that excused a lot.

  She would have pulled the exhibit years ago, but its importance was less what it was, than where it came from. It had been a personal donation from the then-leader of the ribhus, Calibri, to the museum at its founding. Thus, it was an important historical artifact in its own right.

  For the hundredth time, she read the inscription on the base: “Given as a gift from the ribhus, to the humans of the Earth, as a symbol of friendship and of our working together to defeat a common enemy. However far we shall travel, may the different branches of humanity forever be brothers and sisters to each other.”

  The ribhus had left the Earth over a century before the curator had even been born. She regretted that – from all accounts, they had been a talented and insightful species. While most of them didn’t mix with humans much, the few who did were apparently great fun at parties. They still kept in contact via long-range laser links. There was a whole wing on the far side of the library devoted to them, which included live (well, live as regarding the time when the transmissions were received at the Earth) displays of their latest news and a holographic plot of the estimated position of their fleet in space. At last accounting, they were 23 light years away and still moving on. The ribhus had made many interesting remote observations of other civilizations, which were also on display, but had so far encountered nothing hostile. It was always fun to drop by that section; the updates came infrequently, but you never knew when.

  However, despite the historical importance of the medical display, the curator had noticed that parts of it were getting brown stains on it, and other sections were starting to look a little shabby. Doubtless the plastic was aging. She wondered if she should perhaps just freeze it to keep it from deteriorating further, although that could raise its own problems. She would have to discuss the matter with her staff, but there was no rush.

  The overhead lights dimmed another notch, and the chimes sounded. “The museum is now officially closed. Have a pleasant evening.” But of course, at that point the only person there to hear the announcement was the curator.

  She headed off to the nearest exit, passing the sections on Belgian nose art, and exotic lingerie through the ages, and left the museum. The cavern arched away in both directions, the ceiling lit much like a real early-evening sky would have back when Earth had been habitable. Fans spread a light breeze, and over to one side was a small stream, artfully blended into the landscape, that was stocked with trout and ducks. One of the ducks – a male mallard – looked at her, gave a single desultory quack (I know that you’re not going to feed me, but I thought I would give a quack anyhow just for form’s sake), and then slowly paddled off towards the other ducks.

  The curator was going to meet up with some friends for dinner, and she was very much looking forward to that. One of them was an engineer, and she wanted to discuss some ideas that she had about an exhibit on the development of controlled fusion power. If that didn’t pan out she intended to get him drunk and have sex with him. Or maybe both.

  The museum sat deserted. A few interactive displays continued to run; the viewscreen in the reproduction 22nd century dwelling cycled through the episodes of Vlad the Impaler Knows Best, and an animated cartoon of a steam engine illustrated all of the stages of expansion and contraction. The cleanerbots rolled along the floor, and climbed over the glass cases, vacuuming and polishing, and then they were done and they retreated to their alcoves to wait for the next day.

  In the medical section, the display of the skinless man remained silent and unmoving.

  BUT WAIT!

  Old Guy shall return in…

  FULL FRONTAL CYBERTANK

  Appendix A. The Power of Books

  By Brother Protonicus

  Order of the Librarians Temporal

  It has often come to my attention that many refuse to believe in the ability of the brothers and sisters of my order, and indeed of any suitable mind, to quickly acquire practical skills by reading books. We are accused of trickery, or witchcraft, or that we have some secret process involving nanotechnology or psychotropic drugs. But we do not. We
have only the knowledge and wisdom that comes from clear thinking and a properly organized and curated library.

  It is my intention to try and convince people that words have, potentially, far more power than is commonly thought. In part I think that this lack of appreciation of the average person for the power of words comes from the sad state of modern scholarship. The vast majority of the so-called information available today is so corrupted, so garbled and misleading and incomplete, that it is perfectly natural that someone does not see the possibilities. They are like a person standing in a tangled wreckage of concrete and steel that cannot believe in the existence of skyscraper buildings, because they have never seen such a thing. So it must be for a person who is surrounded by words and books and online databases, all mangled and indifferently cataloged, who cannot imagine what properly organized words can achieve.

  A general-purpose digital computer can be instantly changed by giving it different inputs. One set of bits, and it can translate French into English, another, and it can guide a satellite into orbit, another, and it is corrupted by a virus. The human brain, like all biological brains, is more robust than this. It guards its core subroutines jealously, for the sieve of evolution has long sifted away brains that were prone to seize up because they saw or heard the wrong things. And it is true, that many aspects of a human brain can be changed only slowly over years, if at all.

  Thus we have come to believe that to learn anything from books requires years of arduous study. Sometimes this is the case. Yet often, by reading the correct book, the years of arduous study of another may be absorbed in a single reading. Why do people have such trouble accepting this?

  When I was young, I was trying to learn differential calculus using an inferior text. I struggled and sweated and made poor progress. Then I was given a superior text, and in an evening I had cracked it. I was now more advanced in this field than any human being prior to Newton or Leibniz. There is no miracle here, only scholarship.