“The army has stopped firing. Has anything changed out there?”
His lieutenant’s voice crackled over the comm-link: “No sir, nothing that we can tell. I’m worried that they may be going for an assault, but with combat drones there's no need to stop the artillery first, so if they are it’s not procedure. What are your orders, sir?”
Masterson was about to answer, when he froze like a rabbit that had spotted a snake. Something was moving into the room. Deceptively crude looking, it was a metal box encrusted with light weapons and sensors. There were eight stumpy girders on every corner, each ending in a nearly spherical tire. Shit. It was a robotic urban assault drone. It could pull its tires in and zip through narrow corridors, spread them out and brace them against the walls, or grasp a column or the inside corner of a room. In a built-up environment this style drone could go anywhere and fast. "Vargas," whispered Masterson, "don’t move.”
The drone edged further into the room. “Hey you two, no worries,” said the voice from the speaker. “The heavy cavalry has arrived.”
Vargas turned away from his computer screens. “Old Guy?”
“Old Guy? Sorry to disappoint, but it’s me, Whifflebat,” said the drone.
“Whifflebat?” said Vargas. “I’m glad to see you, but how are you here?”
The urban assault drone wheeled all the way into the room. “Well that’s a long story. In brief, I thought that something like this might happen. So I set some timers and backups in place. They tried to sabotage me, just like they did Old Guy, but my countermeasures kicked in and restored me. Sorry it took so long, I would have been here sooner if I could have.”
Vargas eyed the assault drone. “Is that unit one of ours? I don’t recognize the model.”
“No,” said the voice from the drone, “this is regular military. Not as capable as something from our directorate but it gets the job done. It was trying to infiltrate the hangar complex through a utility access corridor. When the regular army surrendered I took control of all of their units and figured that this would be an effective means of making contact."
“The regular military just surrendered?” asked Masterson.
“Certainly,” said Whifflebat. “I’ve dealt with them before. They knew that, once I was active and online, there was nothing that they could do to stop me. I asked them very nicely, so they gave up. Quite intelligent of them. Even as we speak a part of me is having tea with Colonel Sedlitz, the commander of the armored force that was, until so very recently, assaulting this hangar complex. He’s really a decent guy. I think that he was relieved that he had a sufficient excuse to give up this stupid assault. We’re hashing out how we are going to integrate the regular army into our new combined forces,but I think that maybe we should do something about Old Guy?”
Vargas pointed to the screens behind him. “I’ve been trying to undo the damage that Vajpayee did, and work around the blocks, but it’s been tough. What do you think?”
The urban assault drone edged closer and focused its optics on the screens. “Hmm… a tricky problem. Based on what they tried to do to me, I think that you almost had it. Try changing the encryption on the simulated sub-thalamic feedback loops…”
Whifflebat and Vargas consulted over the corrupted mind of Old Guy, and eventually they figured it out. While Old Guy was rebooting, they walked out into the main hangar to survey the damage first-hand. Dead and dying and mangled troopers and hangar staff littered the floor. To Masterson’s relief, there did not seem to be any tension between his troopers and the hangar staff. They were both assisting each other in patching up the wounded and getting the more seriously injured ready for transport to major medical. It’s amazing how fast your enemies can become friends, when necessity makes you need each other.
“I’m surprised how quickly you changed sides,” said Vargas.
“Why are you surprised? I normally like to think big issues over carefully, but there are times when a commander has to make a snap decision. My team was being annihilated with heavy weapons with no chance of retreat or surrender. If I had stood there dithering we would have all been killed, and that was that. I also have to admit that the events of the last few years have reduced my faith in central administration. I guess I only needed this to push me over the edge.”
Vargas and Masterson passed a side corridor where a technician whose name badge read “Joshua Zotov” was working to repair an injured office copier. At the same time, one of the directorates’ staff was using the emergency medical system of the copier to minister to an injured trooper.
They came upon the body of Janet Chen. She had been hit with enough bullets that she was almost unrecognizable. Covering her was the body of the robotic system knows as ‘Harvey.’ It had apparently exhausted the ammunition for its minigun, and had died trying to shield Janet Chen with its armored shell, which was now shattered and torn.
“A friend of yours?” asked Masterson.
Vargas did not reply at first. He turned pale, and the muscles and veins in his arms stood out in relief. Masterson heard some odd clicks. He realized that it was the tension in Vargas’ muscles causing his joints to grind into each other. The director of the cybernetic weapons division was shaking. At first Masterson thought that this was crying but then he realized that it was Vargas trying to rein himself in. “A friend?” said Vargas. “That would be an understatement. I pledge that I will find the people responsible for this and then I will do something unspeakable to them.”
“If you want revenge,” said Masterson, “Take it out on me. Leave my troopers alone.”
Vargas looked at Masterson oddly. He cocked his head, and the tension went out of him. “Hmm… Yes… No, Captain, I don’t hold you responsible for this. Not you. Others. I will have a settling of accounts. But in the meantime, I have a favor to ask of you.”
“And if I do this favor for you will we be even?”
“No. But you will have made a good start.”
Masterson started to say something, but he began shaking. He hurriedly opened his armored visor and threw up onto the hangar floor.
“Are you alright?” said Vargas.
Masterson was bent over dry heaving and convulsing. “It’s the combat drugs. I’m in withdrawal. Also now that the painkillers are gone I realize that you broke about half of my ribs. I am not happy, but I'll live.”
“We need to get you to a medical facility.”
It took Masterson a few moments of gasping to reply. “Later. I am not leaving here until I have made sure that my troopers have been taken care of.”
Vargas nodded. “As you say. I think that maybe this is the beginning of a promising association. I should point out that my directorate has generous benefits and an excellent medical plan. Let’s get your people properly signed up, shall we? After all, nothing takes your mind off your troubles like filling in a bunch of medical release forms.”
The cybertanks Old Guy, Crazy Ivan, and Moss successfully rebooted from the sabotage that had been inflicted on them. The Kid, however, had had his higher centers burned out in an attempt to turn him into an obedient piece of machinery. On hearing this news Masterson looked worried. “We have hurt one of their own. We might have split them off from us. This could be bad.”
“No,” said Vargas. “We did not hurt them. We are united by a common enemy. It is others that should be worried.”
11. A Vigorous Exchange of Opinions
Zen Master: The only good pun is a bad pun.
Engineer: What is the source of your great wisdom?
Zen Master: There is no source. I make it up as I go along.
Engineer: Wow.
Zen Master: It’s a gift.
(From the video series “Nymphomaniac Engineer in Zentopia,” mid-22nd century Earth)
The four surviving cybertanks – Old Guy, Whifflebat, Crazy Ivan, and Moss, decided that they needed to talk.
Most of the time when cybertanks converse with each other, they do so via high-speed data packets conta
ining simulation results, logic diagrams, sub-programs, and even entire self-aware sub-minds. When using a human language however, they did enjoy the interactions of a face-to-face meeting, because it let them use facial expressions and body language to add more nuance to the dialog.
There were two kinds of conversations where the cybertanks would use humanoid mouthpieces: the kind where they just wanted to have fun, and the kind that was really important.
They could have used their anthropoid remotes, but these were at present only crude simulacra of the human form, and anyway it was not convenient to bring them together just now. Thus, they held their conversation in a heavily-encrypted virtual space. It presented as the end of a dock over a large freshwater lake. There was no wind and the lake was mirror-smooth with just the start of sunset over to one side. The far side of the lake was covered in a dense pine forest. On the dock were four rough wooden chairs, with a matching low table in the middle.
The four cybertanks had manifested as humans, and were sitting in the chairs. Whifflebat, true to his usual taste, was a pasty-white Caucasian male academic in a white coat with a white shirt and a narrow black tie and round glasses – he looked a lot like his physical humanoid robot. Moss was a 30-something Asian male, with classically sculpted features and wearing a perfectly tailored black suit. Crazy Ivan was dressed as a Russian Marshall from the 18th century, replete with bushy beard and a jacket festooned with gaudy medals shining like angular brass starbursts. Old Guy had decided to appear as a simulation of the 20th century aviator Amelia Earhart, replete with leather flying suit and clunky goggles pushed back on her head. The three other cybertanks thought this choice of personal representative to be a little eccentric, but they were too polite to say anything.
So, we have a decision to make. Where do we go next? Do we ally with our design teams and the Pedagogues, try to cut a deal with the oligarchs, or maybe just take over and run things ourselves? Or should we do nothing, defend this civilization from aliens, and let the humans settle their own differences?
“Making a deal with the oligarchs is not a valid path for us,” said Whifflebat, “as is doing nothing. Even after our efforts in combat saved them and lost us five of our siblings, they assaulted us with the intent to destroy us, and yet another cybertank was lost. We cannot trust them. Any deal we make will be reneged on, and they will not allow an independent power such as us to exist. They will enslave us, or they will destroy us.
If we give them the opportunity.
“But surely,” said Crazy Ivan, “the oligarchs only went after us because of our association with the special directorates and the Pedagogues. If we make it clear that we want nothing to do with them, and are happy just being weapons, surely they will leave us alone? What does it matter to us what the humans do to themselves?
“Did you ever hear the saying, first they came for the Jews?” said Whifflebat.
“Let me search my databases,” said Crazy Ivan. “Oh yes I see it. First they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I said nothing. Repeat with different substitutions for the word ‘Jew’, then conclude with and then they came for me and there was nobody left to defend me. A good point, but surely not always applicable.”
Check the simulations. The oligarchs will not suffer any rivals to power. They are driven to control everyone else. If we were mindless automata we would be safe, but we can think for ourselves. We are not slaves. In the long run they will not tolerate that.
“We could just leave,” said Crazy Ivan. “We have the capability. Gather up a bunch of resources, go a few hundred light years away, find a big rock that nobody is using, and build our own civilization. Let the humans sort out their own messes.”
“Don’t you think that the aliens will just track us down and kill us themselves? We are associated with the humans, we have fought for them. The aliens must now have combat recordings of us cybertanks transmitted and spreading across this entire sector at the speed of light.”
“I don’t think so,” said Crazy Ivan. “We can weld bits of metal on to our hulls and change our shapes, use different style remotes, and reformat our communications protocols. How could the aliens tell that we came from the humans? Especially if we are just minding our own business. As long as we avoid the mistake the humans made, of multiplying their numbers and becoming a threat, I doubt that the aliens will care what we are or where we came from.”
“Will the humans let us leave?” asked Moss.
“Not an issue,” said Crazy Ivan. “They do not have the power to stop us. We can do as we like. Any resources we take will only be payment for services rendered, and reparations for the one of us that they murdered.”
I grant that we could leave and create our own civilization. I acknowledge the positive aspects of that approach. However, aside from the fact that I personally would miss the humans, I worry that the four of us would not be enough to create a viable – or at least, an interesting – civilization on our own. The humans have demonstrated quite well the hazards of being too many, but surely there are problems associated with being too few as well. We each have only a single personality; a single outlook. We could create an intellectual bottleneck and stagnate.
“We could build new cybertanks,” said Crazy Ivan. “In moderate numbers of course, and with some degree of randomization in their mental outlooks, as was used in our own creation.”
I suppose, but it was not just a random number generator that made us. It was input from the many humans in our design teams. I worry that personalities created by a simple random number generator might not be as rich and varied as we would hope.
“We could rule the humans,” said Moss.
“What, just take over and tell them what to do?” asked Crazy Ivan.
“Yes. We would do better,” replied Moss. “Their incompetence and bad-faith has forfeited their right to self-governance.”
It was not all humans that proved malicious and incompetent. Our design teams, and the Pedagogues, surely are as sane and decent as any of us. Why not just beat down the humans that did us harm, and work with the remainder?
“But humans are humans,” said Crazy Ivan. “Review your history. A corrupt ruling elite collapses under its own dead weight. There is a rebuilding, but before too long there is a new elite and it’s just as bad. We all like our own humans in our design teams, but they have been focused by oppression and necessity. Give them freedom and sooner or later they will be as bad as the neo-liberals. They need someone like us to govern them.”
“But you forget,” said Whifflebat. “We too are humans, at least psychologically. Everything that you just said about the biological humans applies to us as well. We cannot run from them because we carry them inside us. If we do not work with the humans of good spirit to try and find some way to break the cycles of repression and collapse, it will someday bring us down as well.”
“That,” said Moss, “is an excellent point.”
Their simulated bodies sat back in their simulated chairs and watched the simulated sunset and brooded. A school of silver fish darted under the surface of the still pond, then dived deeper and disappeared. Elsewhere in their vast minds the cybertanks were each furiously running psychosocial simulations.
After about three minutes of this, Whifflebat continued: “There is another factor to consider. By the time that the humans first encountered the aliens, the neoliberals were fully in control and no adaptation was possible. You say that if we replace the neoliberals with another system, while it may start out well, it will devolve as all such human systems have in the past. This time they will have the external control of the threat of alien attacks to keep them in line.”
“So it’s sort of like what George Orwell proposed?” said Crazy Ivan. “Only the threat of total war – of true annihilation – can keep a human society grounded in reality?”
“Exactly my thesis!” said Whifflebat. “It is not wishful thinking to say that this time it could be different.”
“I am almos
t persuaded,” said Crazy Ivan. “We try and join forces with our own humans, the ones in the special directorates and suchlike. We see where this goes, do our best, and if it goes badly we leave. However, there is yet another issue to consider. How do we handle the construction of new cybertanks?
What do you mean, how do we handle it? We just build new ones the same way that we got built.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Crazy Ivan. “I meant, how do we decide how many to build, or what designs? Are we just going to let the humans handle that?”
“No,” said Moss. “We must make those decisions.”
Agreed. We must control our own production. Otherwise the humans could make too many of us – just like they overbred themselves – or they could make cybertanks that were deliberately crippled, or incapable of disobeying an order, or enslaved in some way. Although if we are using human resources we will need to coordinate with them, at least for now.
“I also agree,” said Whifflebat. “The definition of a domestic animal is that its breeding is controlled by others. That should not be acceptable to us, but I am concerned about the tone of your argument. It suggests that our interests do not coincide with the humans. Divided teams lose and united teams win. Our psychology is human. We are part of the same civilization. Even if this division does not weaken us, setting ourselves as a species apart could ultimately lead to us going our own ways.”
“So what?” asked Moss.
“I’m not sure,” said Whifflebat. “It might not be a problem. I’m just saying that it’s a big decision, whether we act like a force apart that is allied for the time being, or an integral part of the human civilization. The precedent set here could shape our entire future, for better or ill.”
“Psychologically our core thought-processes are human,” said Crazy Ivan, “but we can multitask, and we are nuclear-powered multi-thousand ton war machines, and we are a different species. As fond as we are of our own humans, we must accept this.”
Neoliberal Economists Must Die ! (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 3) Page 20
