“I love it. But please don’t tell me that you are getting a percentage as well?”
Perish the thought. I donated my likeness pro bono. Although, certainly the publicity will help boost my other enterprises.
Vargas took another sip of the whiskey. “It grows on me. Very, very good. But, changing the subject. You don’t need to call me ‘Dr. Vargas’ any more. After all we have been through, I would say that we are peers. Call me Giuseppe.”
Thank you. I will, Giuseppe.
“And how goes the construction of the new cybertanks?”
Proceeding apace. We are using the support teams and hangars of the recently deceased cybertanks to start building six new Thor-class. Plans for additional hangars and construction facilities are nearing completion. We should have 50 of us within the next five years.
“There was some surprise at your demand that no new cybertanks could be constructed without your approval.”
Surely this is only reasonable? Suppose that we cybertanks decided to start producing millions of human clones just like that, without any discussions with anyone? How would that go down?
“Stated that way it makes perfect sense. I always thought that was a good idea. It’s just that it reinforced to others that you are not just tools, but independent people with your own ideas and interests.”
That was your original plan, I believe.
“Of course.”
Over in the corner of the hangar the two technicians were joined by the small white plastic form of Roboto-helfer. The little robot helped them fiddle with some equipment, and its appearance and body language were so earnest that the technicians could not help but smile. Eventually the matter was solved and the technicians put their tools away, and moved to leave. One of them picked up Robot-helfer and carried it out piggy-back. As they left the hangar, the pool of light auto-dimmed and the entire hangar descended into twilight.
There was an office-copier off on one wall. It sat there patiently, colored status lights shining steadily.
“I really need to see if any of the Roboto-helfer’s original designers are still around. It’s a limited system but an absolutely brilliant design. They created a human-level sentience that is completely positive, with no internal conflicts or guilt. Not a path that we can all follow, not if we want to survive, but still impressive.”
Indeed. It appears to be impossible for any human to remain in Robot-helfer’s presence without smiling. I have noticed the effect myself.
“Roboto-helfer may be the ultimate stoic.”
Roboto-helfer? A stoic?
“Don’t act so surprised. Commonly a stoic is assumed to be a humorless drudge that endures suffering without complaint. The original definition is one who accepts the universe as it is and takes pleasure from what exists.”
Put that way, I suppose.
Vargas took another sip of the whiskey. “Do we have final numbers on the death toll from the replicoid infestation?”
Almost final, though there may still be an isolated pocket or two of them remaining. Currently the estimate of the number of human deaths caused by the alien bio-weapons referred to as ‘replicoids’ is approximately 1.77 billion. There were few casualties in the more developed parts of the planet, almost none in the special directorates, or amongst the walled fortresses of the Pedagogues or the underground archive-bunkers of the Librarians Temporal. However, the close-packed dormitories and workshops of the wage-slave class made for a perfect breeding ground for the replicoids, especially with the fraying of security after the war.
“You know, as ugly as this sounds, the aliens did us a favor there. After the main battle the aliens had killed a lot of humans, but they had destroyed even more infrastructure. We were headed for a collapse. These replicoids, however, killed people but did not damage our productive capacity. We now have a sizeable productive surplus.”
An analogy would be on Old Earth, when the Black Death culled about a third of the human population for over a century. That took a stagnant overpopulated society and turned it into a prosperous one, and jump-started the European renaissance. I wonder: do you think that the aliens did this on purpose?
“To help us? I doubt it. I think the replicoids were exactly what they appeared to be: a biological weapon designed to kill as many humans as possible, and to spread fear and chaos amongst the survivors.”
That would be the simple explanation, but as you are fond of saying, aliens are alien. Perhaps from their point of view they were doing us a favor. Or sending us a message: limit your populations or else.
“Speculating about the motives of aliens is as entertaining as it is pointless. Perhaps someday we will be able to ask them, for now we have what we have and I intend to take full advantage of it.” Vargas downed the last of the whiskey from his glass. “Well I am tired, and I suppose that I should wander off to bed. We both have a busy day tomorrow, and I at least need some sleep.”
You could camp out here, if you like. There is nothing noisy scheduled in the hangar before breakfast, and certainly there is no place on this planet that you would be safer than here under my guns.
“Truth. There are still a lot of forces on this planet that would like to see me dead. That Friedmanite assassin last week was a close call.”
A regular drone brought Vargas a pillow, and he lay down on the top of Old Guy’s hull and stretched out luxuriously like a cat.
And do you have any other plans for the future?
“Of course I do,” said Vargas, who curled up with his head on the pillow and promptly fell asleep.
Old Guy listened to the steady rhythm of Vargas’ breathing and heartbeat. He accessed the hangar’s controls, and dimmed the lights to near-blackness. Old Guy reviewed his sensorium: he saw everything in the hangar, for hundreds of kilometers around, in all spectral bands. No threats registered.
Old Guy scanned the skies with hundreds of sensors. He culled data from the planetary networks, viewed people throughout the entirety of the cybernetic weapons directorate through security cameras, played wargames and engaged in philosophical debates with his siblings, ran simulations on the likely course of human (and now, cybertank) civilization, and watched the latest episode of ‘Special Weapons Team Epsilon.’ Recent events had been exciting, but there was so much else to do that it was hard to take it too seriously. Life stretched out before him, and it was good.
15. The Book and the Sword
“Always cautious, never afraid”- Whifflebat, cybertank, contemporary.
A hot steaming acid rain fell amongst the ruined skyscrapers of old Chicago. The streets were deserted save for the corroded hulks of dead cars and abandoned bulk transporters. The sheer sides of the buildings, which once had shimmered with the electric glow of advertisements and the lights of luxury apartments within, were now just a rain-slicked gray stretching hundreds of meters to the dark clouds above. Even rats and cockroaches, the sturdiest of all the camp followers of the humans, had been exterminated beneath the heat and acidity of this heavy leaden sky.
There was a single, furtive figure. Clad in black plastic sheeting, hunched and moving in fits and spurts amongst the rain. It stopped behind the ruined remains of a city bus, and held motionless for a time. It blended in with the surroundings and was nearly invisible. Nothing else stirred. The temperature was 51 degrees Celsius, too hot for a normal biological organism to survive in, but humans had always been able to handle surprising extremes of temperature, if only for a while. The toxic rain fell on the black plastic, collected in rivulets and fell down the sides of the figure to splash on the pitted asphalt.
Forty minutes passed, and nothing moved. The figure slowly stood up and slid around the remains of the city bus, and carefully picked its way into a side-alley. Here and there were the husks of old dumpsters, their steel rusted to dust and leaving only the rectangular outlines of the garbage that they had once contained.
The figure came to a nondescript doorway in the middle of a loading dock set somewhat in from
the rain. It knocked cautiously on the door. “Hello, it’s me, Ludwig.”
For a time there was only the sound of the rain. Then a speaker to the left of the door crackled into life. “Ludwig who?” came a voice.
“Ludwig Adenour,” said the figure. “Back from scavenging, and with a boon of old books, some dried rice, and Hostess Twinkies tm.”
The speaker crackled again. “Very well then, but prepare yourself for purification. You have been too long amongst the heathen Neoliberals.”
The door opened, and the figure stepped inside. There was nobody else there, just a long corridor with concrete walls and tiny bare lights set into the ceiling. The figure walked down the corridor until it came to a small room. One wall was covered with plastic and rubber clothing of various sorts, all hanging on hooks. There were several buckets filled with water on the floor, and a small table.
The figure took off its coverings of black plastic, and hung them on a steel hook set into one wall. The figure was revealed to be male, Caucasian, probably 40 years old, robustly muscled, with a scraggly beard and acid-scarred skin. He took off his green knee-high rubber boots and set them against the wall. He placed a sack on the small table, along with several empty water bottles and a heavy machine-pistol whose blocky lines indicated local manufacture. He then stripped off all of his clothes, and rinsed himself with some of the fresh water from one of the buckets. Retrieving only his sack and his machine-pistol, he walked naked out of the small room and down a long staircase.
The staircase descended hundreds of meters from the surface level. There were several remote gun systems mounted on the ceiling of the staircase, but they remained inactive. The temperature steadily dropped as the man walked deeper, until at the bottom it was a temperate 20 degrees Celsius.
He was met by an older man, tall and silver-haired with a clean-shaven face. He was stooped with age, but there was still muscle on his arms. The older man wore a red velvet robe of the order the Librarians Temporal. In keeping with his rank as a senior archivist, he wore a thin steel chain around his neck from which hung a small medallion bearing the symbol of his order: a book and a sword. He also had a bulky eight-chambered revolver holstered on his right hip. As with the younger man’s weapon, the machine pistol had that angular unfinished look that came, not from a dedicated factory, but from an individual machinist building it from scratch. It had no serial number, no inbuilt tracking devices, and no remotely-coded safety locks. In the past simply being in the same room with such a device was a major felony, but times had changed.
One might have thought that with the fall of civilization there would be abundant firearms to be had for the picking, but it was not that simple. Modern weapons had been tightly regulated and controlled, with in-built tracking and security-control systems. To avoid these limitations, when they had been a secret society the Librarians Temporal had developed the habit of using simpler, locally built weapons. In any event, the commercially-manufactured weapons were now inoperable – or even worse, unreliable – without connection to centralized data servers that no longer existed. Frontline military weapons were less dependent on external connections, but even in collapse the regular army had been particular about keeping its weapons secure.
In addition, many of the brothers (and some of the sisters) of the Librarians Temporal enjoyed gunsmithing. Thus the Librarians’ tradition of using custom-machined firearms continued.
The Librarians Temporal was a heretical order of archivists who valued truth and integrity in all things pertaining to data. They believed that only through physical power could such an ideal be realized. As such, all members of the Librarians Temporal were heavily armed. The Librarians Spiritual were less involved in worldly matters, preferring the ascetic pursuit of knowledge for its’ own sake. However, the members of the Librarians Spiritual were also heavily armed, so it could be difficult to tell members of the two orders apart unless you had been personally introduced.
“Brother Adenour, welcome back,” said the older man. He offered Adenour a robe, which the latter accepted and put on. “No trouble on your mission, I take it?”
“No, Brother Mahalanobis,” said the younger man. “The streets were deserted. There was only the heat and the rain. But, ‘too long amongst the heathen?’ Really?”
“Sorry about that, it’s just something that I’ve always wanted to say. Surely being a member of a cryptic society dedicated to the worship of library science must allow one a few guilty pleasures. Anyway, I doubt that the city is quite as deserted as you say. I expect that there are still pockets of survivors out there, only they are the wary and discrete, like us. But here, let me offer you some fresh water before I suck your brains out of your ears. Come, join me in my sanctum.”
The two walked through some short hallways whose gloom was only occasionally punctured by dim, sparsely spaced point lights. The walls were concrete, and covered with all manner of wires and cables that gave the appearance of having grown on the walls like vines. Here and there the cables were affixed with small paper labels carrying technical details written in a precise hand. The ceiling was home to long corrugated flexible plastic air ducts.
They reached the older man’s office, which was a rough cube about three meters on a side. The walls were covered with shelves that were packed with books. The two bookshelves near the door had a wooden plank stretching between them just over the top of the door, which was itself packed with books. Despite the ramshackle nature of the office, the books were neatly organized with clear labels on their spines, and there was a small card-catalog near the doorway. There was also a desk that was just a heavy sheet of plywood set on two folding saw-horses, and two beige metal chairs. The desk held two crude-looking computer terminals, a variety of scattered papers and folders, a small statue of S.R. Ranganathan, and a large jug of water and some cups.
“Sit,” said the older man as he gestured at one of the chairs. “You have been so busy organizing your scouting expeditions and seeing to local security, and I have spent almost every waking minute in council. It’s been a long time since we have had the time to talk.”
“I know. I have been looking forward to getting caught up.”
The younger man sat down, and the older man joined him in the other chair, pouring a glass of water and offering it to the younger, who began to sip it slowly.
“Ah, that is very agreeable. You can have your martinis and fine wines, but nothing is as refreshing as a nice glass of clean cool water after you have been baking in the heat all day.”
“Indeed. Although you do not need to cook yourself half to death to enjoy a good Martini.”
The younger man laughed. “Score one for the martini.” He sipped more of his water. “This is still a pleasure. Conditions on the surface are tough. It won’t be long before we will only be able to go up there with a full environment suit.”
“Truth. Projections show no break in the thermal runaway. Within two years surface temperatures will be over the boiling point of water. Within twenty years the Earth will likely be similar to Venus, perhaps even hot enough to melt lead, or at least bismuth. If the weather gets as violent as some think, even an environment suit won’t be enough: only heavy armored crawlers will be able to survive.”
“Do you think that the heat will reach down here?”
“Not for a while; there is a lot of rock to warm up. But someday it will., and we can’t dig much deeper or the temperature will start rising in that direction as well. Still, our buried shelters will give us some time, probably a couple of decades. Enough to think of something else.”
The younger man took another drink of water, then put his glass down on the table and opened up his sack. “Here, I found a sack of rice that is still edible, some Hostess Twinkiestm, and some trail mix. Also some old books and magazines, including a 1933 edition of National Geographic.”
The older man examined the books. “Less than your usual take, but still a boon. We must salvage what we can before the heat and th
e rain destroy it forever. We are still hard-pressed setting up our buried hydroponics, and every scavenged calorie gives us that much more slack. As far as the books go, even limited physical records are invaluable in spot-checking the electronic archives. Unlike the Stalinists, the Neoliberals mostly didn’t bother to corrupt the primary records, but concentrated on manipulating the indexes and search engines. Still, there was quite a lot of data corruption towards the end, and even more plain sloppiness in record keeping. It will be an age before we are able to assemble a true proper archive.”
“Holy work.”
“Yes, it is. Those outside our order don’t really understand. They think us neurotic pedants with a fetish for archaic data media and heavy weapons.”
“That is an accurate description of us.”
“Well, yes. As individuals. But our work goes beyond that. If the data are corrupted, then thought is corrupted, and if thought is corrupted, the spirit is corrupted. It is the essence of the human soul which it is our sacred duty to protect. What could be holier?”
“Don’t you mean if the data is corrupted?”
“Sorry – I’m old school, where “data” is plural and “datum” is singular. Modern usage is that “data” refers to the entire collection of information and is thus singular. Mea Culpa.”
“You are lecturing again.”
“I know,” said the older man. “A failing, but one that I have engaged in for so long that I fear that there is little hope. Indulge me.”
“I was not complaining, just stating the obvious.”
“You are too generous, as usual, but I shall nonetheless continue to abuse you with my incessant pedagogy.”
The younger man poured himself another glass of water. “Being audience to your lecturing is a pleasure that I can readily endure. Talk to me of the other human colonies.”
“Ah, I thought you would be asking about that. As you know, communication between star systems is via long-range lasers and sensitive telescopes mounted on high-orbit satellites. The satellites still exist, but the ground stations that let us contact them are currently out of commission. However, before we got cut off the last of the incoming transmissions were intriguing. It seems that there has been a revolution on Alpha Centauri. The Neoliberals have been overthrown and the aliens soundly defeated.”
Neoliberal Economists Must Die ! (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 3) Page 25
