Confessions of a Sentient War Engine (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 4)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  Scharnhorst had started out as a 1.5 kilometer long Asgard-Class interstellar battle cruiser. Unfortunately, moving a mass that big takes so much energy that he was largely useless in battle, so for a long time he only orbited around the main planet, and entertained himself with the vicarious enjoyment of other people’s combat recordings. Hence his nickname, “Fanboy.”

  Then the system had come under attack by the fiendish alien race known as The Amok, and through a bizarre set of circumstances Fanboy’s unique characteristics had proven to be vital in defeating them. Thus, it was the consensus of his peers that he be promoted to the designation of Battleship, and given the name from one of his favorite fictional video series “Space Battleship Scharnhorst.” That was a pretty long name though, so we generally still call him Fanboy.

  The android that he was using this time was a tall ethnic Japanese male who wore a formal red uniform with a short white mantle covering his shoulders, and a peaked cap with a complex emblem involving a cybertank, dragon wings, stars, and the letters “RCSN” embroidered in silver. His jacket had large lapels which each sported four square emerald studs. The android faced the honor guard of maintenance drones and saluted. “As a representative of the Space Battleship Scharnhorst, permission to come aboard, Moby Cybertank.”

  One of the maintenance drones waved a limb in a vaguely salute-like manner, and from a speaker crackled the voice of Moby, ”Permission granted, Space Battleship Scharnhorst. Welcome aboard.”

  “RCSN?”

  “Yes,” said Fanboy. “The Royal Cybertank Space Navy! This is a recreation of Space Captain Genji Yamashita, one of the lead players in the series.”

  But we don’t have any royalty. And we don’t have a space navy. And I’ve never heard of this series.

  “I know,” said Fanboy, “but ‘Royal’ sounds cool. And we do too have a space navy, even if I am its only commissioned vessel. And I’m still working on it so it hasn’t been released to the general public yet. Soon, though.”

  Fanboy’s android walked down the staircase. He was followed by a very pale ethnic European female with mostly short blond hair, some of which hung in long narrow braids down the right side of her face. She wore a uniform similar to Fanboys’, although better tailored to her figure. Her cap had a less complicated insignia and her lapels each sported only a single smaller square emerald. She also wore a pair of wrap-around dark sunglasses, the kind that completely cover the sides as well as the front.

  “And let me introduce Ensign Olga Razon,” said Fanboy, “also of the Royal Cybertank Space Navy.”

  Don’t you have a character name for this new Royal Cybertank Navy thing that Fanboy is working on?

  “No, the credits will read ‘and co-starring Ensign Olga Razon as herself’. I insisted.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Ensign Razon,” said Moby.

  “Same here,” said Olga. “I’ve never been on a megaship before and I wanted the chance before we leave the system.” Then she turned and looked at me. “Old Guy?” she asked.

  Olga Razon was a vampire and thousands of years old. Vampires are ageless, but they don’t breed, so they are an evolutionary cul-de-sac. When the biological humans left us (or whatever it is that happened to the biological humans), the vampires remained behind. The majority hang around on their own planet, where they feed on a strain of pigs that are bioengineered to produce human blood, and throw tacky parties in mock-medieval castles.

  However, some of the vampires have been invited to visit our worlds, and Olga Razon had been onboard Fanboy when the Amok had attacked. Badly injured helping to defend Fanboy from an Amok boarding party, she had decided to stay and had been a sort-of crew-member of Fanboy, on and off, for several centuries.

  Yes Olga, it’s me, Old Guy. Good to see you again, you are looking well. But, still an ensign after all this time?

  Olga laughed. “Of course, why not? There are just the two of us officers, and Fanboy has to be the captain of himself, so who could I outrank?”

  “Olga has been helping me with my new fiction series,” said Fanboy. “Behind every great writer is a great editor.”

  “Or perhaps,” said Olga, “behind every good writer is a great editor.”

  “Perhaps,” said Fanboy.

  At this point a moving blur sped out of the shuttle hatch, tore down the ramp, wove between the lined up maintenance drones, ran around me three times, then stopped and jumped up and down hooting. It was Zippo the space monkey, the most hyperkinetic and irrepressibly curious agglomeration of 15 kilograms of metal and ceramic in the known universe. He had been with me, and Fanboy and Olga, when we fought the Amok robot spiders, so I guess that made him an old comrade-in-arms.

  Hello Zippo. Good to see you! How are you?

  Zippo hooted some more and bounced up and down, which I guess is space monkey for ”Glad to see you too.” Then he sped off across the deck to examine a complicated set of telescopes.

  I see that Zippo hasn’t changed. Does he have an official rank in your Royal Cybertank Space Navy?

  Fanboy looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Of course he does. He’s a Space Monkey, First Class!”

  Oh. Right. Anyhow, Olga, after Moby crosses the ocean, are you coming along on this journey to your home planet? What is it that you call it, the planet of New York?

  “Yes, I’m coming,” said Olga. “We call it New York. Many of us used to live in the real old New York, so it had a familiar sound. But maybe we should call it New New York.”

  The Terran city of New York was destroyed a long time ago: I think that the name New York is available.

  “Actually,” says Fanboy, “York was destroyed as well. So you could just call it the Planet York as well.”

  “York may have worked for a city,” said Moby, “but the Planet York sounds incredibly, well, dorky. Stick with New York.”

  “Thank you for the advice,” said Olga, “I think that we will.”

  The Fanboy android leaned on a railing and looked across the ocean. “I can’t believe that I’m finally getting to go to another star system. I have long dreamed of this day.”

  The energy cost of sending you out-system is indeed high, but given that we were planning on jump-starting a new colony, and we were going to be shipping a few megatons of stuff in that direction anyhow, it seemed like a good time for you to finally go interstellar. How are the preparations going?

  “Preparations are almost done,” said Fanboy. “My main hull is stuffed with industrial equipment, and my outside is positively encrusted with fuel containers and other consumables for the journey. We are still on schedule for leaving in ten days. There was a window of opportunity for Olga to come down in person and see some final sights in person before we go, so I thought that I would send a piece of me along as well.”

  “Developing a new planet in the vampire system,” said Moby. “What do our undead relatives think about that?”

  “Most of my kind could care less,” said Olga. “The plan is to industrialize a barren world in the outer part of the system and leave the vampire planet of New York itself alone. I’m told that some of the alien civilizations have been getting a little close to that part of space and, therefore, a heavy cybertank presence was thought to be a good deterrent to any bug-eyed monsters getting ideas about playing with your vampire cousins – especially after what happened with you and the Yllg and that lost human colony, Old Guy.”

  Yes. That was an unfortunate turn of events.It motivated us to pay a little more attention to watching out for our last surviving biological relatives. We’ll be able to keep an eye on you without being in the way, and have enough local weaponry that the aliens won’t get any ideas about trying to get to us by messing with you. At least, that’s the idea.

  “Indeed,” said Moby. “ Olga, would you like to freshen up, or would you like the grand tour now?”

  “I’m fine,” said Olga. “Now would be good. Lead on.”

  “I have an idea,” said Fanboy. “Let’s not
take the tour, let’s go exploring!”

  “What on Alpha Centauri Prime are you blathering about?” asked Moby.

  “What I mean,” said Fanboy, “is that instead of you leading us around or giving us directions, we just wander about and try and find the interesting pieces of you by ourselves!”

  “But,” said Moby, “that’s idiotic. I don’t need exploring – I know where all my bits are and can download you a perfect map. What’s the point of exploring something that’s already known?”

  Whenever I find a new alien civilization, the aliens surely knew where they were beforehand, but I didn’t. I still discovered them, and it was still exploring. When Columbus discovered North America back on old Terra there had been people living there for millennia – but Columbus and the Europeans didn’t know that. I vote we go exploring!

  “You have to remember,” said Olga, “all of the rest of us have had multiple adventures and been to new places. Fanboy has only had that one combat, and he’s never been anywhere that wasn’t mapped out beforehand – well, at least that wasn’t in a simulation. I also vote that we go exploring!”

  “I’m still a little skeptical,” said Moby. “I mean, I’m pretty big inside and most of me is sort of boring. You would likely spend a lot of time getting lost in some of my twisty little passages that all look alike, and the odds are that you will miss most of the better parts. Still, all my critical systems are all locked down behind secure bulkheads, so you can’t damage anything. I’ll follow your progress and if it looks like you are headed someplace dangerous I’ll warn you off. Also, if you do change your mind just speak up and I can switch to guided tour mode.” A hatch popped open in the deck revealing a set of stairs leading down. “Explore away.”

  We head down the stairs. Zippo spots us leaving and scampers over from the telescope array and dives down the hatch, bouncing off the walls so that he can pass us and take the lead. Out of the sunlight Olga takes off her dark glasses and puts them in a side pocket. Sunlight doesn’t make vampires burst into flames, but they do sunburn easily and their eyes are sensitive.

  Have you ever considered getting nanobot-controlled chromatophores installed? You could do without the glasses and the UV cream.

  Olga shook her head. “I thought about that, but then I’d have to worry about nanobot maintenance schedules and suchlike. Dark glasses and ultraviolet-absorbing cream are goof-proof. Keep it simple.”

  Now most conventional water-ocean ships have flat decks, because when you are in a gravity well it is energy-efficient and convenient to move things along a flat level surface. As such, Moby’s decks were indeed mostly level.

  It is also typical for ships to have a regular plan that is symmetrical and where the different levels are organized in roughly the same way. This makes it easier for any passengers and crew to find their way around. That’s not how Moby was laid out. Every deck was completely different; he was a true three-dimensional puzzle. It makes sense, I suppose. Moby has a perfect map of himself, and he has sophisticated path-optimization algorithms for moving things around. He has also had a lot of spare time to remodel parts of himself. Thus it was that every deck had a unqiue arrangement, and there was no overall coherent design. I was starting to realize just how much volume a megaship had.

  Many regions of Moby were solid packed machinery with only tiny access ports for micro-maintenance robots. Others regions were more like small highways. Heavy robotic haulers would politely move to the side and let us pass when we came near. Most of the visible machinery I recognized as standard cybertank technology, but there was some weird stuff that must have been Moby’s own creations. There was a long hall filled with a tangle of clear tubes, each about the width of a human leg, through which a glowing multi-colored viscous liquid was being pumped. Was this a non-standard chemical engineering facility, or some sort of artwork? I could have queried the local datanet, but that would have been cheating. We marveled at the weirdness of it, speculated as to what it was all for, and then moved on.

  There was, as we had been warned, a whole lot of nothing much special inside Moby. But that’s what exploring is all about! If you can’t handle 30 minutes walking down empty corridors before you find something cool, well, stay at home and watch videos. The real explorers know and relish boredom. The price of discovery is patience.

  Zippo was invaluable. He would tear off down a corridor, and if there was nothing at the other end he would rapidly scamper back to us. However, something intriguing would cause him to hoot, and we would head off in his direction.

  Eventually we came to a door that exited out the port side of Moby onto a wide terrace that contained an 18-hole miniature golf course. The sun was still out so Olga put her dark glasses back on. The theme of the golf course was the 1950’s North American Empire. For one hole there was a miniature highway and you would have to time your shot with the opening and closing of the tollgates. For another, you would need to bounce your ball off a series of police barricades near the scene of a (simulated) crime, avoiding the cop cars with their flashing blue lights.

  Zippo raced over and picked up one of the golf balls, which let out a high-pitched squeak. Zippo dropped the ball and jumped into Olga’s arms. He stared at the offending ball and chittered angrily.

  “Oh, I should have warned you,” came Moby’s voice from a speaker, “the golf balls are alive. They have a visco-elastic shell, and they gain energy each time they are struck with a putter or they bump into something. The bouncing that they experience when they fall into the cup at the end of each hole is their greatest pleasure. They also have an ability to influence their course, but it’s limited, and they each have their own personalities.”

  How do they gain energy when nobody is playing?

  “In that case, “said Moby, “I just let them roll around on the greens and the slow pitch of my own hull is usually enough to keep them charged. If they start to look a little peeked I’ll have a drone come out and whack them back and forth a bit, but that’s usually not necessary, and I don’t think that they enjoy it as much when it doesn’t count as a real game. Care to play a round?”

  Well of course we couldn’t say no to that. Moby extended and activated his stabilizer fins and his normally small side-to-side roll was effectively nulled out, giving us a nice flat stable playing surface. I picked a large-ish tiger-striped ball. Olga selected one that was a medium ochre and Fanboy took one that was bright yellow. I took an early lead, but I think that my ball started to take a dislike to me. It must have objected to my style of play or something? It couldn’t talk so of course I had no idea, but I swear that it deliberately took some bad bounces. Fanboy’s yellow ball was apparently of a more traditionalist nature, and focused on rolling in as straight a manner as possible. Olga’s ochre ball, however, was subtle and sly, and always seemed to be able to change the angle of a bounce just that tiny smidgen that made the difference.

  Zippo was, as usual, spellbound by our play, but still didn’t trust the balls. He had climbed up on top of a miniature reproduction of the Empire State Building where he could watch the proceedings from a safe vantage point. The balls would twitter at each bounce, and chirp happily when they ended up falling into a cup.

  In one hole you had to shoot your ball past a drive-through window in a miniature burger joint, whereupon the ball would be lifted up a ramp via a chain drive, and then roll down a miniature roller-coaster. All the balls would cheer when this happened.

  The last hole required that you shoot your ball up a ramp, over a series of miniature school buses parked side-by-side, and then touch down on a ramp on the other side. Olga ended up winning by three strokes, while I was in last place, two strokes behind Fanboy. Fanboy cheered Olga’s win and they ”high fived” in celebration. I glared at my tiger-striped ball for letting me down, but it showed no signs of contrition for its lackluster performance.

  I could not help but notice how Olga and Fanboy acted together. They would hold doors open for each other without a tho
ught, or hand the other something without even needing to be asked, or point out things of interest to each other, and they were always happy at the other’s accomplishments. I know that their relationship was platonic – cybertanks don’t have a human sense of gender. And Olga had taken several male vampire lovers over the centuries that I had known her. But they reminded me of what they used to call ”old marrieds.” I suppose that centuries of working together can create a bond even between such different orders of being as a cybertank and a vampire.

  Now the vampire virus is supposed to have burned out the parts of a human brain that are responsible for empathy, leaving the vampires as sociopaths. Normally you can’t do anything that you don’t have the neural circuits for – a biological human with a bisected spinal cord will not be able to walk no matter how much they want to. Still, unlike the spinal cord, the cerebral cortex is plastic and adaptable, and Olga had been alive for thousands of years. Could all that time pretending to be charming have created the real thing? Perhaps, or perhaps that was just wishful thinking. Regardless, Olga certainly acted like she had a genuine fondness for Fanboy and in return she made him happy. You can overthink these matters.

  Olga announced that she was getting tired and had had enough for the day, so we ended our exploring and had Moby direct us to some human-scale apartments. These were reproduction officers’ quarters from the 19th century North American Protected Cruiser “Olympia.” Most of the cabins were tiny, but with exquisitely done wood paneling. Moby offered Olga a choice of the Captain’s or Admiral’s quarters. Both were relatively large rooms with glass-fronted walnut bookshelves, working fireplaces, and large bay windows overlooking the ocean. In each of these two spacious rooms was an antique five-inch howitzer, large and black and incongruous amongst the delicate furnishings. Moby explained that in the real cruiser Olympia, when the howitzers had been needed, crewmen would first have placed canvas tarpaulins over the book-cases and fine woodwork to protect them from the smoke and powder. I wondered if these reproduction guns were functional and if Moby had ever fired them? I wondered if he would let us try some target practice?