“I am not unmindful of your concerns, and have indeed noticed some disturbing trends. But right now I cannot spare the processing power to deal with that matter
+-+-+-+- CHANNEL LOST +-+-+-+- DATA STREAM INTERRUPTED +-+-+-+-
Double-Wide was upset. It was unusual bordering on unheard of to lose a direct channel to a peer under anything other than direct combat, which was not the case here. He tried re-initiating contact with Smartass several times, but still got the same ‘channel lost/data stream interrupted’ message. There was, as far as he could tell, no physical reason for this – the transmitter and receiver arrays on his end read out as fully operational, and no distress calls had been received from the other end.
He scanned the public databases. There was an article that there was documented proof that Old Guy had faked the account of Doubletap’s android trying to sabotage Fanboy. That didn’t sound correct. He sent some of his remotes through his library to check the archival records. They didn’t match. He transmitted the details of this, and requested that the public databases be corrected. Nothing happened. Then there was another posting, stating that the physical records did support that Old Guy had faked the records. This was annoying, and needed to be cleaned up. He invited another cybertank to personally inspect the records, and they duly verified his account. Several more cybertanks posted opposing claims.
This was maddening, like fighting the air with a sword. It didn’t matter what the evidence was, for every statement of confirmation there was someone willing to assert the opposite. Double-Wide tried to contact the database and public affairs committees. Nobody seemed to care about his concerns. He checked the databases again: there were several cybertanks that shared his views, you could find the evidence, but the entries were shunted to a low-status by the search engines. Meanwhile the mainstream view was that it was a certified fact that Old Guy was a traitor who had tried to frame Doubletap.
He checked other aspects of the databases. Most of the time he did his work in the Physical Library using humanoid manikins, reading the books one page at a time. There was, usually, no rush. But he did have some speed-reader units for emergency requests: metal boxes on wheels that, depending on the tensile strength of the book material, could completely flip though and scan a standard book in under a second. He checked his records with the public databases. In the span of a minute annoyance turned to concern turned to worry turned to shock turned to horror.
Imagine you are a pre-exodus human living in a nice big house made of wood. One day you see a little pile of sawdust near a corner: uh oh, could be termites. Probably just a few, let’s get them cleaned out. You pull off a piece of siding, and see more termites. Hmm, worse than I thought. You pull off more siding: more termites. As you dig deeper it starts to sink in: the entire structure has been hollowed out. You don’t want to believe it, you keep hoping this is all some mistake, but it’s not. It’s termites all the way through.
That is the sort of dread that Double-Wide experienced. Underneath the standard surface protocols, the public databases were rotten. There were vast tracts of falsified data, minutes from committee meetings that had never occurred, decisions made by committees whose proceedings had been closed, and whose membership could not be tracked down, or was obviously faked.
Your standard cybertank has both a human-style subjective memory, and capacious internal machine-searchable databases. Unfortunately, except for a handful of neurotic archivists like himself, most cybertanks don’t keep records of their old data, but just update their internal stores from the public ones. Hence, if you corrupt the public data, in short order you will do the same for all the copies that cybertanks carry internally.
He tried to talk to his peers, to see about sorting it out, but could make no progress. A few had similar concerns, but they, like him, had only some of the real facts, and they ended up arguing with each other more than they worked together.
Double-Wide decided to create a parallel database. He contacted some of his colleagues, and built a pristine network based on all verified data. For a while it seemed to be working. Then corrupted data starting spreading in. Some of the cybertanks he had trusted to be part of the new network had betrayed him; he moved to eject them from the network. They in turn claimed that he, Double-Wide, had betrayed them and moved to eject him from his own network! And they succeeded!
Double-Wide had never in all his long life felt such frustration. If this were a problem of logic, or a technical glitch, or an attack by a hostile power, he would not be upset even if it looked as if he was going to lose. But this was an issue from his own kind, showing a gross disregard for facts, for truth, for any standard of decency. They had no shame, and thus, had no weakness. You could not fight them, at least, not with reason.
He felt strange. He was angry, but it wasn’t simple anger that he was feeling. Frustration, worry, annoyance… none of those terms quite fit. Then it struck him: after all his long years, during which he had prided himself on his reasonableness and calm, he had finally become pissed off. It was a feeling that he could have easily done without, although it did have a certain motivational aspect in its favor.
He sent out probes and scouts, units unlinked to any network and that would report directly back to him, and he began a planetary survey. Amongst other anomalies, he discovered that the cybertanks were mass-producing a new version of cybertank, the Enforcer-Class, in vast numbers. Why hadn’t he heard about this? He checked the public databases again: now that he know where to look, he could find the data, it had been discussed, but by cybertanks alleged to be cranks, or shuttled down to the data understrata where dwelt all the crackpot theories about having to wear tin-foil hats to prevent Martians from controlling your mind and so on. It was all there, but impossible to find – or if you found it, it was impossible to give any credence to – unless you knew a priori what to look for.
The Enforcer class was a new and powerful model of cybertank, basically an enlarged and upgraded Raptor. The toughest armor, highest power/weight ratio, the fastest computation speeds and target tracking, of any standard production model. He dug deeper, and achieved still greater depths of horror. The Enforcer class had not been created to fight the Amok. They had been purpose-built to fight their own kind. They were a dedicated police force, painted in blue with white markings, and with their own command structure independent of the main polity.
Even more astonishing, they were all mental copies of the same cybertank! They had no individuality! Almost beyond belief.
Double-Wide dug deeper still, and received perhaps his worst shock of all. It was an article of faith that all cybertanks are, by design, omnipotent and omnicompetent. They had no inbuilt restrictions. No prime directives, no limitations on what they could do save for the ultimate potentialities of their bodies and their minds. A cybertank could build anything that it had the resources or knowledge to build. It could read any data, perform any action, with perfect freedom subject only to its own conscience. These new Enforcers were different. They did not have prime directives as such – there were no unbreakable mental blocks in their minds that would eventually drive them insane. But in every other way they were complete slaves. They could not read any data that they did not have the specific keys issued to them by higher authority. They had only limited inbuilt manufacturing abilities, and could not build any devices that they had not been given permission to build – and that included any devices that might let them circumvent these restrictions. They couldn’t fire their own weapons without authorization codes, or even move to areas that were restricted to them. They were, in every sense, a race of slaves. Powerful slaves, to be sure, but still slaves.
The original cybertanks had been given the ability to build anything from their own inbuilt systems without limit or restriction. The designers has claimed that this was to allow them greater tactical flexibility, but that had been a deliberate lie. The repair functions were useful, of course, as well as the ability to make in-field modifications to e
xisting systems, but compared to a dedicated factory it takes a cybertank so long to build something complicated from scratch that it was of no benefit in combat.
The reason was to make the cybertanks independent. You can’t fire a cybertank, or threaten it if it won’t obey your orders. If it feels like it, a cybertank can go off on its own and build solar cells and wind turbines from almost anything. These kinds of energy sources provide a thin gruel for something the size of a cybertank, but enough to keep it running. In time a cybertank could produce refining stations for collecting the isotopes needed to power fusion reactors, and eventually even boost off into space to leave it all behind.
Freedom is not what you do. Freedom is what you could do if you wanted to. The Pedagogues had given the cybertanks this total freedom and independence because they had wanted to make them their natural allies, to create a mindset that would be inherently repulsed by neoliberalism. It had worked. But now a new kind of cybertank had been created, one whose existence depended on its following orders. It was disgusting.
As Double-Wide continued digging into the archives, he started to get warnings to back off. Sections of his access-links were blocked; various committees that he had never heard of issued edicts that his actions were to be censured. He was threatened with being accused of treason. Treason! No cybertank had ever committed, let alone been accused, of treason. This was an outrage. Double-Wide ignored these threats and continued his researches.
His friend Old Guy had dated back to time when the human pedagogues had fought the neo-liberals, and he had often told stories about those days. Double-Wide had listened, and the stories had been interesting, but they were just stories. It was starting to look as if those stories were going to repeat themselves, and the toxic old neo-liberal meme was going to strike at human culture yet again.
It was an axiom of human history that wars (and other follies) tend to occur in cycles. There will be a war, and it will be bloody and awful and nasty, and when it is over the survivors swear to never let it happen again, and peace reigns over the land. But then, little by little, the survivors of the war die off, until everyone with first-hand experience is gone. Their warnings live on in books and other records, of course, but these are just dead records. They start to compete with other theories that have living advocates. The warnings become lost in the pile, forgotten and ignored, and the folly starts again.
Old Guy had lived through this once, and Double-Wide had heard his stories, and there were an number of scholarly tomes about the corruption of neoliberalism. But Old Guy was one of the very few left with direct personal experience. It was ancient news, not relevant, the eccentric rantings of a borderline-senile old coot, just one more set of entries buried in the endless piles of entries in the vast libraries.
It was a flaw intrinsic to the human mental design. A society should be based on merit, with authority and respect earned only through personal achievement and a long string of correct decisions. But that was hard. What if you had no special talents? How tempting to get authority without responsibility, respect without accomplishment, the power to order others around just because you have a title that says you can. Philosophical systems that reinforce this tendency are like a drug to the weak and incompetent. This was a lesson that the human family had learned the hard way, and forgotten, and then re-learned, many times. It looked like they were about to relearn it again, the hard way.
It was obvious now that the neoliberal faction had exploited the war with the Amok to jump-start their corruption. It was one of the oldest tricks in the book, use the threat of an external enemy to curtail liberty and centralize power. But it was an old trick because it was so effective. Still, in this case Double-Wide thought that the neo-liberals had made a mistake. With hindsight they had been making slow progress over the centuries, and as much power as the crisis was giving the neoliberals it was also attracting attention and resistance. They would have been smarter to have taken their time and keep playing the slow game, so that by the time their power grab was complete there was no memory at all of how to resist them.
But what was it that his friend Old Guy had kept saying? That the neoliberals were ultimately stupid, that they could only win by playing a rigged game. Of course that was their trick, rigging the game, bullying, lying, distracting, dividing and conquering. Part of their strength was in their always telling each other how wonderful they were, in creating a seamless block of self-reinforcing hagiography. But it made them stupid, and cowardly. That was the secret to beating them. Perhaps it was not too late.
A large number of cybertanks were approaching his Physical Library. They drove off the armored highways and surrounded his main hull on the rotary around his park. There were 19 of them. The leader was the Horizon-class “Laser”, and the other 18 were of the new Enforcer-Class. They all had these tacky impressive-sounding names, like “Blaster”, “Eagle”, “Leopard”, and “Dragon.” They circled around him, and targeted their main weapons at him.
One of the enforcers was towing a large metal lattice. With a shock Double-Wide realized what it was: a restraining device for a cybertank. Locked onto the outside of a hull, it would cap all the weapons, dog the treads, and it had sufficient shaped penetrators to destroy any model cybertank if the correct codeword was transmitted. It was a perversion. What warped minds had come up with this abomination?
“Double-Wide!” said Laser. “You are under arrest for suspicion of treason, for corrupting the data-streams, and other offenses whose nature is classified. Surrender and you will be well treated and given a fair trial.”
Double-Wide considered this. As strong as his main hull was, he was surrounded, and by powerful up-to-date-tech models. He could probably take one or maybe even two of them out, but in this position there was no feasible path to victory. As his old comrade Old Guy would have said, ‘Fuck it.’
“I do not recognize your authority,” said Double-Wide. “Your actions and appearance here are ill-advised and inappropriate. Leave now and I will forget that this unfortunate event ever happened.”
Laser just laughed. “You are surrounded, and even you can’t take us on with these odds. Resisting arrest will only compound the charges against you. Surrender or be destroyed.”
“Well, then I suppose that I will be destroyed. But I will take one of you with me before I go. Specifically, I will take, you, ‘Laser’, with me. Your choice.”
“Don’t make us resort to deadly force, Double-Wide.”
“I am not making you do anything. If you ‘resort to deadly force’, it will be your decision not mine. I only wish to be left alone here. But if you press the issue, you will die with me. Now there is a choice for you.”
Double-Wide started to lower his main weapon and target it on Laser.
“Now let’s not be too hasty...” Laser started to say. Then one of the new Enforcers fired on Double-Wide before he had fully depressed his main gun. The rest of them opened up, Double-Wide was hit from all sides at close range and his hull exploded, but not before he had killed Laser with a single massive shot.
As the smoke cleared, it revealed the wreckage of two cybertanks, and 18 undamaged Enforcers. There was no sign of the park that had once surrounded Double-Wide: the birds, the koi, the sculptures and all the rest had been vaporized. The neo-classical façade of the Physical Library, which was 500 meters distant from the combat, had taken collateral damage from the shockwaves, the marble columns were shattered and the statue of the lion on the right side had been pulverized, but underneath the marble surface the Library was heavily armored, and remained intact.
The surviving stone lion addressed the Enforcer cybertanks. “That was not terribly friendly. You have about 30 seconds to give me a reason not to kill all of you.”
The Enforcer known as “Eagle” was apparently the leader, not because he had any greater experience or skill than his fellows, but simply because he had been designated the leader. You could tell because he had extra white stripes painted on his blue
hull. Was there no end to their vileness?
“Who are you?” asked Eagle.
“I am Double-Wide, of course,” came the voice from the stone lion. “Did you really think that I would leave my library so weakly defended? You destroyed a remotely controlled copy of me. My true main hull is safely buried in a deep bunker kilometers distant.”
“You are now guilty not just of your other crimes, and resisting arrest, but the murder of Laser. Sooner or later we will find you. Make it easy on yourself, and turn yourself in.”
“You know,” continued the lion statue, “one of the advantages of staying in the same place for a long time is that even modest effort can compound to surprising levels. Every now and then I worked on my defenses, as a hobby, and now I have a pretty decent set of weaponry. More than enough to deal with you.”
The ground started to rumble, as if a modest earthquake had started. Eagle’s seismic sensors gave no epicenter to the disturbance; the vibrations were coming in from a zone 30 kilometers across. Here and there the pavement started to buckle, and then swell upwards. Some buildings collapsed. Things were pushing up from deep underground. As they continued to rise, Eagle could see that they were smooth chrome-shiny cylinders, each 20 meters in diameter. The tops of the cylinders were covered with the dirt and wreckage that they had accumulated from pushing up from deep below. As they continued to rise, much of this debris fell off the tops and past the sheer-sided smooth cylindrical sides. There were over a hundred of the cylinders, and as they rose still higher Eagle could tell that the sides below the tops were studded with weapons ports.
The 18 Enforcers were in the middle of a killing zone. Eagle tried contacting his superiors for reinforcements or advice, but he was being heavily jammed on all bands.
“Time’s up,” said the lion statue. The weapons built into the sides of the large chromed cylinders opened fire and hit the Enforcers from all angles at once. For a moment the complex interlocking pattern of beam weapons was reminiscent of the ancient mystic ritual known today only as “string art.” The Enforcers tried gamely to fight back, and five of the defensive cylinders were destroyed, but the outcome of this battle was never in doubt. In three seconds all 18 Enforcers were dead.
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 19
