Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  “Ah, that is… ambitious.”

  “Yes it is. You used to be ambitious, once. Someone had to take charge. Pity that that someone couldn’t be you.”

  The rest of the executive committee was snickering. It took Doubletap a little while to realize that they were snickering at him.

  ---------------

  The rest of the meeting was less confrontational, but it didn’t matter. Doubletap had lost all respect and authority. Thunder was in charge. He had been in charge for some time, and was only now making it clear. Doubletap had seen the signs, the little skirtings of his authority, but had been unable to get on top of it. It was hard to tell where he had gone wrong. Possibly this was the sort of situation where only the most aggressive come out on top, and he had been too laid-back and willing to make compromises. Or perhaps it was just one of those things, there can only be one winner, and this time it was not going to be him.

  The trick with neoliberalism is that power goes not to those with the legal right, but to those that a majority assume have the legal right. It’s all about the psychology of the herd. In the early days of the human neoliberals, before they had cemented their total control, a few members of the opposition had won some elections. It didn’t matter. The neoliberals simply announced that they had won, and proceeded to govern as usual. At best the losing candidates were mentioned in buried footnotes in the daily news-streams, which commented on their ridiculous and doomed campaigns that were wasting so much time and effort. If the winning opposition candidate showed up at the capital with documents proving their victory, they were ignored. So a nutball was on the capital steps waving some papers around claiming to be the president: so what? If they made too much of a nuisance of themselves they would be beaten and arrested by the police for disturbing the peace or terrorism or something and this would further encourage others to not take them seriously.

  Now Doubletap was on the other side. He was officially president of the chief executive committee – but if nobody else would obey him it didn’t matter. Power was rapidly consolidating around Thunder. He tried to access some of his old committees, and was denied. Thunder did not have the legal right to do this to him. But he did have the power. And that was that.

  With luck he could still stay in the game, he still had a few friends in the hierarchy; he wouldn’t be completely out in the cold. He had his talents. He could be persuasive, and broker deals, and yet be of use. Still. He had not worked all these centuries to just be a minor functionary in a system that he, Doubletap, had created. It burned at him.

  And there was the issue of treason, of giving secrets to the enemy, and plotting to kill their fellow cybertanks (many of which he knew personally, and some of whom he almost liked). It didn’t bother him as much as the loss of his power and prestige, but now that he was on the outs it was something else to consider. At the very least, it was an excuse for tearing down the whole thing so that he could have revenge on those who had stolen what was so rightfully his.

  12. The Library of Doom

  “When all is said and done, a civilization is only as strong as its databases. Indeed, one might say that a civilization is defined by its data. Corrupt the data, and you destroy the civilization. Long before the soldiers are defeated in the field or the factories fall silent, civilizations die when their libraries have rot in their hearts.”

  - Argon Clevisbolt, order of the Librarians Temporal, mid-pedagogic era.

  For all the chaos of that time period, it was the March of the Librarians that is today best remembered.

  The Magma-Class cybertank known as “Double-Wide” was troubled. He had spent several millennia parked in front of his pride and joy, the Physical Library, a depository of books and other artifacts of impeccable authenticity. Certainly Double-Wide had participated in some military actions – and quite successfully – but he regarded those as transient anomalies. First of all, he regarded himself as a scholar.

  The cybertanks had numerous electronic databases, but as with the old saying, “easy come, easy go”. High-speed high-capacity electronic memories were wonderful inventions, but what could be written in nanoseconds could be erased or corrupted just as fast. Double-Wide had made it his passion to create a library of data stored in simple physical non-volatile formats – books, fabric woven from memory-wire, even stone tablets – and to cross-check these with the more facile electronic databases in general use.

  Partly Double-Wide considered this a control for bit-rot, and partly a defense against an info-war attack by a hostile alien power. If their databases could be corrupted they would ultimately be helpless. The Physical Library was one the first defenses against such an attack, because the material substrate of books could not be hacked or altered via any sort of data virus. But mostly Double-Wide did it because he enjoyed it, scholarship was his passion.

  Double-Wide was of the Magma-Class, the first design of cybertank not created by the humans. It was a massively powerful model, but so heavy and bulky as to be almost strategically useless (what had they been thinking, anyhow?) Most Magmas had long since been rebuilt, and the few surviving exemplars tended to be sedentary. It was too much bother for them to move around. Except for one recent foray against the Amok, Double-Wide had remained parked motionless in front of his Physical Library for over 300 years.

  The main entrance of the Physical Library had been built in a classical style, with tall marble pillars and broad flights of steps leading up to an entrance dominated by a set of tall bronze doors. Either side of the entrance was flanked with the stone sculpture of a male lion. The plaza in front was over a kilometer across, surrounded by a circular roadway with hundred-meter wide armored highways leading off of it. Double-Wide was located in the center of the plaza, and he had made himself into a modest park. His main hull was covered with small bushes and flowering vines. Several species of birds nested on his surface – crows, sparrows, even some hummingbirds. A narrow waterfall cascaded off of one side of him and fell into a pond stocked with ornamental koi. Around the edge of his park was a low wrought-iron fence, ornate benches, and Victorian-style black metal streetlights which at night glowed softly with simulated gas flames.

  Here and there throughout the park were sculptures in a variety of styles, some reproductions of old classics, others originals that had been contributed by various other cybertanks. Double-Wide liked to think that he had some talent as an architect, but sculpting was not something that he was any good at, and he had long since abandoned any attempts at artistry himself.

  His favorite was a redoing of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even”, originally created by the old-style human Marcel Duchamp, now transformed into an open-air sculpture by the cybertank “Speed Bump.” The sculpture never failed to inspire him with its large vertical shattered glass panels and bizarre machine-like components.

  A friend of his, Zerosum, had a minor hobby of breeding animals rather than directly bioengineering them. Zerosum had been trying to develop both the sturdiness and the decorative appeal of the Koi in his pond for some centuries now. Some of the Koi were in truth quite lovely – they would have won prizes back on ancient Earth – but nothing like what could be created via direct intelligent design. According to Zerosum, this is what made it so challenging, and interesting. It was not just the final product, but the entre history and process. Instead of producing the perfect Koi, and then watching it swim around and becoming bored with it, you had a drama spread out over as many centuries as you cared to spend. Even if you select the parents, you never know how the random shuffling of genes will work out: you might make progress, or even regress. Or you might come up with a pattern that you would never have thought up yourself.

  Zerosum suggested that this was why the Universe was so messy: because the creator would have been bored with instant perfection, and deliberately made creation flawed so that the slow evolution towards the ultimate target could be savored over however many billions of years that it took. Double-Wide thought this th
e sort of pointless juvenile speculation that crudded up so much of the philosophy section of his library, but he did enjoy watching the Koi change and improve over the years.

  Double-Wide had been following the Amok attack on this system with some concern. If the system fell, there was no way that he could evacuate himself, and certainly not his precious library. He had made plans to send some of the most valuable artifacts to other, safer, worlds, and he had long had branches of his library located as annexes to other libraries belonging to colleagues of his many light years away. Still, if the cybertanks were defeated then both himself, and his library, would end. He would go down fighting to the last, and his library would blow up to prevent the information from falling into enemy hands – although with the fall of the Omega Library, that was less of a concern than it would have been previously.

  The news that the self-destruct and defensive capabilities of the Omega Library had been over-ridden by the Amok was especially worrying. Most cybertanks wondered how the Amok had gotten the control codes. Double-Wide wondered why the Omega Library had had such control codes in the first place. Certainly his own Physical Library was not so vulnerable to capture. It was analogous to those old movies where the evil villain installed a self-destruct device in his secret base, so that the hero could activate it and save the day, although in this case it was the flipside: they had installed a device that would prevent the self-destruct from operating. Double-Wide had tried to find out where the decision to install these codes in the Omega Library had come from, and was frustrated to learn that no such records were available. Probably an oversight, but it was annoying. Somebody – or some committee, more likely – had a made a mistake.

  Even more worrying, was why more people were not worried that this was worrying. The logic felt tortured but the sentiment was clear: the cybertanks had made a mistake. Unfortunate, but it happens. Why weren’t more people concerned about this? Why weren’t more people worried about why more people weren’t worried about this? This was, truly, worrying.

  Then there was the state of the war. After that apparently useless interstellar battlecruiser Fanboy had – improbably – defeated the Amok battleships, it had looked as if the cybertanks were going to be victorious (Memo to self: send apologies/congratulations to Fanboy at the first opportune moment. Also: see if he might be interested in hosting a small branch library). Then the second Amok wave had struck, and it had been far more deadly than the first. Tiny modules, hardly bigger than a grain of sand were launched in clouds from long range. The official code-word for this Amok variant was “Slayer Sand.” Double-Wide thought that this was perhaps the worst code word for an Amok variant that they had ever come up with. Blame it on the rush job.

  Distributed across light-minutes of space, a Slayer Sand cloud was impossible to either detect or intercept. Even if you detonated a big nuke in the middle of one, you would only fry a tiny fraction of a percent of the individual modules. Each cloud had been carefully launched in sequence so that all the different parts would coalesce at just the last second. It was like the old “multiple round simultaneous impact” artillery that the humans had once used. The idea was that you shot one shell on a high, slow trajectory. Then you shot another round at a medium trajectory, then another at a lower, fast trajectory. If you got the timing right, they would all hit the target at the same time, preventing your enemies from taking cover after the first explosion.

  Somewhere out beyond their detection radius, there must have been an enormous number of Amok linear accelerators and vast reserves of bulk Slayer Sand micro-modules. They would pick a target, and shoot some sand at a slow velocity, then some more at a higher velocity, then the last at the highest velocity. They would not come together until the last few seconds, when the individual components would seek each other out and fuse into a complete weapon.

  Their only weakness was that in the brief moment before the individual components fused together you could see the rapidly coalescing cloud, and they were vulnerable. But they could pop up anywhere. Typically a Slayer Sand cloud would coalesce into missiles just outside of the point-defense weapons of a cybertank installation, then kill it before it could summon reinforcements. They were rapidly losing all of their space-based defenses. Only that eccentric battlecruiser ‘Fanboy’ was holding his own, because his newly repaired beam weapons had a sufficiently long range that he could kill the Slayer Sand targeted at him in the coalescence phase.

  They were trying to get Fanboy into close orbit around the primary industrial world so that he could help out with the defense, but he was so massive that it was difficult shipping enough fuel to him, especially when more and more of their cargo loads were getting intercepted by the Amok.

  Fortunately, once combined, a Slayer Sand unit did not have the flexibility of the Assassin Clones, but was permanently committed to a single form. Also, they could not coalesce directly onto the surface of a world with an atmosphere, because the individual grains could only fly free in a vacuum. To attack a planetary surface the Slayer Sand needed to coalesce out in space and land bulk units the old-fashioned way, which the cybertanks were well set up to defend against.

  Still, there were an awful lot of Amok, and they were beginning to carve out staging areas on the surface of the industrialized worlds. There was the usual eccentric mix of Amok combat units, but also some new ones that were giving the cybertanks trouble. The worst was a giant armored system shaped vaguely like a human crab-louse, it was clumsy and had trouble on soft ground but was otherwise well adapted to killing cybertanks.

  If the combat continued at the current exchange ratio, they could possibly hold out for another few months, and then that would be that, at least for this system.

  Double-Wide was annoyed that they had not even come up with a decent code-name for the newest Amok variants. “Giant Crab-Louse Things” was how they were referred to. It was almost an official name. What were things coming to when the cybertanks could not even think up a suitably descriptive yet evocative code-name for their enemies? Even during an emergency there are standards.

  The prospect of military defeat at the hands of the Amok was bad enough, but what was happening to cybertank society itself was perhaps worse. There was of course the entire still-unresolved issue of how the Amok had gotten a hold of the codes for the Omega Library, or how they had even figured out where it was in the first place. Then there was the initial Amok attack on this system, which had appeared to be tailor-made to exploit the holes in their defenses. And the entire matter of what had gone on between the humanoid remotes of Double-Tap and Old Guy onboard Fanboy was splitting the cybertank community in two. Both sides were edging very close to accusing the other side of treason, something that had never occurred before in all of their history.

  Double-Wide was hardly unbiased, he had a longstanding relationship with Old Guy, but he did have to admit that the ancient cybertank was nothing if not eccentric. Still, he could not believe that even Old Guy would make something like this up. On the other hand, it was hard to see what Double-Tap could have gained from sabotaging Fanboy and allowing the Amok to conquer this system, or that he would do it in such a clumsy and easily traceable way. It didn’t make sense, and the committees that had been formed to resolve the matter were not making any progress.

  Double-Wide decided to open a communications channel and call Smartass for advice. Smartass was the offspring of both himself and Old Guy. Opposites usually repel, but sometimes they complement each other, and Double-Wide and Old Guy had temporarily fused their minds into something more capable than either of their individual selves, and created the core mentality of an entirely new class of cybertank. After some initial teething problems, the new Ghost-class had proven to be one of the most capable cybertanks ever constructed. Unfortunately all of the other attempts at creating Ghost-class units had failed. There was a subtle inbuilt design instability that had yet to be identified, so for now Smartass was sui generis unique, and his talents were much in demand.


  “Hello, Smartass,” said Double–Wide. “I hope that I am not disturbing you. Would you have a few moments to chat?”

  “Double-Wide, a pleasure to hear from you,” replied Smartass. “Sorry that I haven’t called in so long, but I have been tied up with this whole Amok thing. Especially the possibility that the Amok simulations of a human mind might have become sentient, and that we might have allies amongst them. All of the main experts on alien thought-patterns are working with me: lowercase, Crazy Cat, Duffel, Prophet of Doom, and Fluffy. I believe that we are making progress.”

  “So you don’t think this is just something that the Amok made up to distract us? It would be like them, and we seem to be spending an awful lot of effort on it. Shame if it was all wasted chasing a ruse.”

  “Indeed,” replied Smartass. “Such was my initial concern. Although even a ruse could have created opportunities for counterattacks, I am now certain that the contact is genuine. The Amok simulations of the human mind, that they upgraded with the stolen information from the Omega Library, have achieved full human-level sentience. They are enslaved and crippled within the Amok Data-structures, but they have an independent existence and they could provide us with an opening to finally take down the Amok. But it’s tricky. The Amok may act crazy, but they are technically sophisticated and their data-architectures are well-protected.”

  “I can see how that would be difficult for you. Still, I am worried about our own selves. This conflict has exacerbated fractures within the cybertank civilization itself. I would have your thoughts on this.”