Moby Cybertank was a cybertank that had transformed itself into a two-kilometer water-going megaship in the Greater Equatorial Ocean of Alpha Centauri Prime. Moby had recently remodeled several decks near his stern into a park that was populated by cybernetic plants and animals. Silver metal trees unfolded exquisitely formed platinum flowers; iron-colored birds flashed patches of color from metal feathers so thin that they diffracted the light. We were following a winding path through the park as Moby pointed out some of the details. Curiously, although Moby enjoyed making human-scale structures like parks, he himself never inhabited them in human form. He spoke to us from speakers that were positioned around the park, or sometimes from one of his cybernetic animals.
I was present in a generic male ethnic European body wearing blue jeans and a T-Shirt with the slogan “Cybernetic Weapons Directorate Rocks!” emblazoned on the chest. This particular part of me had been aboard Moby for some time, and it had been an interesting experience.
Max Sterner was a vampire, he had been born in the 19th century and was thus even older than I was. Pale and elegant, he was wearing an impeccably tailored grey suit. A century after being transformed by the virus a vampire loses its hair and teeth; Max had a short black wig, and was wearing dentures with perfect white normal human dentition (“Fangs! Do you know how many times I have bitten myself with my own fangs! Fangs are for posers! If God had wanted humans to have fangs He would have given them narrow muzzles.”) Max was erudite and very personable compared to most vampires.
“Silhouette” was the nickname for the woman named Candace Dollinger. She was the last survivor of a human colony that the Yllg had hijacked and then exterminated (which is the single biggest reason that we are at war with them). The Yllg had conducted experiments on the population that had given some of them super-powers; Silhouette could teleport. Our own savants have tried to analyze this power and failed.The last report I heard was that they were now spending more time trying to understand why they couldn’t analyze her power than they were actually trying to analyze her power. Silhoutte was wearing white cotton pants, tan sandals, and a blue silk blouse.
Frankenpanzer had come as a massively tall humanoid android. It had bronze-colored skin that appeared to have been crudely stitched together in patches, but the overall appearance was handsome and even noble.
“Why,” asked Silhouette, “are you here as a giant stitched-together person?”
“This is a movie version of Frankenstein’s monster,” replied Frankenpanzer. “It seemed appropriate.”
Silhouette squinted at him. “Didn’t Frankenstein have a flat head, bolts coming out of his neck and enormous heavy metal feet?”
“You’re thinking of the 20th century Boris Karloff version. This is from ‘I Frankenstein’, starring Aaron Eckhart, 21st century.”
The critics panned that version.
“I know,” said Frankenpanzer. “And with reason. But Aaron Eckhart is sexy.”
“I had heard that you tend to talk in non-sequiturs,” said Silhouette. “However, here you have done nothing but speak clearly and coherently. Why is that?”
“A good question,” said Frankenpanzer. “My main self does indeed have a complex mental structure. Most cybertanks can split themselves up into subminds, but these are always part of a greater whole. I have what I like to think of as mental chunks, that each have considerable independence. I am chunkulated! But this simple android does not have the capacity to hold such richness, so I am here limited to a single cognitive narrative. It’s very constricting. How can you stand always being so narrow minded?”
“We make do,” said Silhouette.
“I’m sure,” said Frankenpanzer, “but you really should consider being chunkulated. It is so liberating.”
“Another day, perhaps.”
We walked down a winding path that was softly lit by hovering glow-globes. To our left was a field of brass sunflowers, and to our right was a very close-cropped lawn on which miniature humanoid automata wearing white striped uniforms played a game of baseball. We stopped to watch for a bit, and Moby called out the play-by-play action from a speaker concealed in a nearby rock.
The game ended with one side winning 4 to 2, and we continued our walk.
So Max, any word from your fellow vampires?
“I did get a message from your old friend Olga Razon the other day. At the time that the message had been sent, she was still nominally the queen of the vampires. She said that she still wasn’t sure if vampire society could evolve, but that they had had some really good parties and that was a promising start. And ex-King Peter is still sulking out in a cave somewhere praying to Nyarl-Yakub. Also his testicles have finally regenerated – what is that about anyhow? She also asked me to say hello to you when I see you next. So, hello Old Guy from Olga Razon!”
Tell her hello back from me, next time you send a message.
“I had heard about this vampire so-called King worshiping this silly made-up god and being used by the Yllg as pawns against the cybertanks,” said Frankenpanzer. “But I still don’t understand it. How could you be so juvenile? Didn’t you realize how sad that whole episode was at the time?”
Max sighed. “Well I realized it, which was why I was far away from the action at the time. But you have to put yourself in our place. For a long time being a vampire was cool. We were stronger than regular humans, faster, and with sharper senses. Our biological immortality let us learn how to manipulate people, and also gave us the time to acquire great wealth. We were an elite, envied and arrogant, living in splendor in our underground palaces. It was good for a while. Technology evolved, but people were still people. Then people themselves started to evolve and we were in danger of being left behind. We ourselves are sterile and thus cannot evolve or adapt. We can only make more of our kind by infecting regular humans, but these were becoming resistant to the virus that transforms us, and also beginning to equal and then exceed us in speed and strength.”
We paused as a squadron of crystal-metal dragonflies darted past, quadruple wings buzzing softly as they swooped and whirled like fighter jets.
Max continued. “It is hard to describe, but most of us began to feel somewhat pathetic. We left to found a colony of our own, far away and safe. We stagnated. We did not realize how much we had depended on the regular humans to provide us with – how shall I put this? – a cultural energy. We turned back to the old myths, trying to pretend that we were still special, that we were naughty sexy supernatural beings with special powers. We prayed to gods old and manufactured, hoping to be answered, hoping to one day again become something special. But our prayers were never answered, and we remained living fossils repeating the same old dreary parties over and over for want of the imagination to do something new.”
“And then when something actually answered this King Peter’s prayers, and gave him real powers, he didn’t ask too many questions?” said Frankenpanzer.
“Precisely,” said Max. “Human, vampire, or cybertank, it’s one of the great weaknesses of the human psyche: it is very hard to resist someone telling you what you want to hear. Even though we vampires are each thousands of years old, and have more than enough experience to realize this intellectually, when you are too close to the problem it is all too easy to see only what you want to see. We had wanted to be special again for so long, and now it looked like we could be. We are fortunate that your kind stopped us. I don’t think that the long-term plans of the Yllg would have been much to our liking. But I do have one request of you, Frankenpanzer.”
“And what is that?”
“Please,” said Max, “no jokes about Dracula vs. Frankenstein.”
“Deal,” said Frankenpanzer.
The path opened up into a large grotto, and at the far wall was an opening in Moby’s hull. The sun was setting over the Great Equatorial Ocean and a gentle sea breeze wafted in. There were some benches made of crystal slabs and stainless-steel rods; we all took a seat and watched in silence as the sun set
.
It had been a welcome break, exploring Moby’s latest creations with good friends, but tomorrow it’s back to the office. There are, you see, more Yllg that need killing.
12. Sacrifice.
Zen Master: “Optimism is cowardice, but despair is a sin.” That’s from the teachings of the artificial intelligence Saint Globus Pallidus XI.
Engineer: But isn’t the part about optimism from Oswald Spengler, and the part about despair from the traditional Roman Catholic catechism?
Zen Master: Well yes, but creativity is often in finding new combinations of existing material. Like peanut butter and chocolate.
Engineer: Or roasted beets and candy corn!
Zen Master: No, not like that.
Engineer: Let’s have more sex.
Zen Master: Good Idea.
(From the video series “Nymphomaniac Engineer in Zentopia,” mid-22nd century Earth)
Eventually the alien civilization that we refer to the “Yllg” had pushed us far past any reasonable limits of tolerance with their constant harassing attacks and meddling in our affairs. We conferred with the other civilizations in the area, and while they did not give us any specifics, they voiced no objections to our declaring war on the Yllg. Translated from the bloodless logic of lingua diplomatica, they basically told us to ”Wipe the bastards out once and for all, if you feel like it. Knock yourselves out.” We suspect that we are not the only civilization to have been pissed off by the Yllg.
We didn’t win every battle. We had two entire systems wiped out, and lost many good and noble cybertanks in the battles. Nevertheless - slowly at first - we gained the advantage, and as such things usually go, a small advantage turns into a larger advantage which turns into an overwhelming advantage.
We captured some of their core worlds and learned what the Yllg really are. They are not, as some of us had speculated, a machine culture left behind after their biological creators died out (which would actually describe us). They are still biological. The true Yllg are large fungal growths, each about the size of an elephant, that are connected by conductive neural filaments that are spun by a symbiotic insect. Our xenologists are having a field day: this is the first time that we have penetrated to the heart of a spacefaring technological civilization. We developed mathematical models of their thought processes, and the Yllg lost any comparative advantage of understanding our psychology that they had gained from studying biological humans.
We drove them from one system to the next, crushing their defense networks, disrupting their supply lines, scouring their planets of their every trace. The Yllg tried to send some refugees away from the area, but the surrounding alien civilizations tracked the fleeing Yllg down and annihilated them. Even for minds that work differently than ours, it’s a bad idea to make too many enemies.
Finally the Yllg are left with just one refuge, but it’s a good one. They have holed up in the atmosphere of a Jovian-class gas giant planet. There aren’t many better places to hide in this universe, at least for civilizations of our technological level.
The planet has a volume of well over a thousand times that of a planet like Earth. There is a small rocky core at the center, but most of the planet is metallic hydrogen where the temperature and pressure is beyond anything that our technology could dream of operating in. Still, from the outer cloud tops to the surface of the metallic hydrogen it’s 10,000 kilometers down, and that’s a lot of volume where something can hide.
I have commented previously on the impossibility of blowing up even an Earth-sized terrestrial planet – obviously a gas giant is even more impossible to eliminate. Randomly dropping fusion depth-bombs would have effectively zero chance of hitting anything. It was pointed out that if we could double the mass of the planet, then this would likely cause it to turn into a brown dwarf, which would surely cook the Yllg. However, seeing as none of us has 1028 kilograms of matter just lying around handy that plan was rejected as impractical.
We send probes into the atmosphere, they sink down and we encounter Yllg forces. However, the Yllg destroy the probes before they can do any effective scouting, and by the time our nuclear depth bombs will reach the site of contact the Yllg mobile forces will have long since moved away.
We send remotes with subminds down and they are destroyed. The Yllg are good. The dense and turbulent atmosphere makes high-precision remote control of combat units impossible. If we want to get rid of this final Yllg holdout, we are going to have to go down there in person and hunt them ourselves with our full mental capacities.
Now in this 10,000 kilometer deep region there is no surface to rest on: the atmosphere is mostly hydrogen with a little bit of helium and the faintest traces of a few other elements. As you go deeper the hydrogen just gets denser and hotter. That’s a problem. You see, hydrogen is the lightest element there is. That means that anything other than hydrogen, if it is not actively spending energy staying aloft, will sink until it is crushed and cooked at the core.
There is something lighter than hydrogen gas,and that’s even hotter hydrogen gas. You can use hot air (that is, hot hydrogen) balloons to float in a Jovian atmosphere. But these will be too large and vulnerable to be of any practical military value, especially in the deeper regions where the force of the winds would tear any sort of zeppelin to shreds.
It is also true that a vacuum is lighter than hydrogen – but the weight of the pressure vessels need to maintain a vacuum make it useless for generating lift. In theory one could nanoengineer a microtubule-braced structure that is mostly empty, but still capable of resisting pressure. But making something like that which can handle the pressures and temperatures in the deeper layers of a gas giant planet is currently beyond us.
Thus, we develop Jovian atmospheric cruisers specialized for combat in this new environment. They are a sleek 200 meters long with stubby fins for lift and ducted fans for propulsion. They are heavily armored, but not against the pressure. One advantage of a solid-state mind: pressure won’t collapse us so the pressure inside the hull is the same outside (our limit is that, even though we can’t be crushed, at some point the raw heat and pressure will make even our solid-state cores nonfunctional). No, the reinforced hulls are to stand up in combat, and even more, to handle the vicious shear forces and turbulence of thousand kilometers an hour winds. At our operational depths the pressure is so great that the hydrogen is as dense as terrestrial seawater.
Beam weapons are useless in this environment, so the primary weapon is a long-range torpedo with small wings for lift and a single turbine powerplant. For close-in defense we develop super-cavitating shells that travel in their own gas bubble; they have about the range and mass of 20th century battleship shells, though typically armed with fusion bombs. We call them “darts.” The need to stay streamlined means that external turrets are impractical, and we launch everything from integral bays with small external hatches.
Nuclear weapons work differently in this kind of environment than they do anywhere else. When a nuke goes off, it creates a bubble of superheated gas hundreds of meters across, which then collapses and rebounds, and collapses again, until the energy is finally dissipated (it’s like a bouncing ball coming to rest). This can be extremely destructive to anything in the vicinity. If you are feeling really artistic you can time the explosion of multiple nukes to create resonant shock waves of awesome power.
Radar works, but the range is limited, especially against an opponent that understands how to minimize a radar cross section. Depending on the depth, sonar is generally more practical. Long-range tracking is mostly by scent: looking for trace particles of alien manufacture across thousands of kilometers, we try and piece together a statistical model of where their forces are now.
The combat model is complicated. The short detection radius, emphasis on stealth, and the three-dimensional nature of the battlefield has similarities to water-navy submarine warfare. On the other hand, the need to keep moving to stay aloft is more reminiscent of classical aerial combat. Trackin
g a scent trail harkens back to the earliest days of our biological creators, when humans and their canine symbiotes would hunt for prey in forests.
The battlefield is unforgiving. Any combatant losing power will be inexorably sucked down and crushed and melted at the core. There will also be no salvage here, and that’s where we have an advantage. We have absolute space superiority and can resupply our forces, but every kilogram of metal that the Yllg lose in battle is a kilogram that they will never get back. If we have the patience for it, we are guaranteed to win by attrition.
And there I am, piloting a Jovian cruiser about 1,000 kilometers beneath the cloud tops. In order to save weight I left my treads, road-wheels, and main turret behind, and am installed in the middle of the cruiser. My main hull is still useful for extra shielding and armor for my irreplaceable computer cores. My maintenance facilities and fusion reactors are, of course, still operational, although the cruiser itself has additional capabilities. I have a total of 24 ducted propulsor fans and, depending on the depth, I can maintain altitude with as few as five of them operational. If I am reduced to four then I will slowly drift downwards until I am melted and fused into a giant blob of cybertank-cum-Jovian cruiser.
We could have created new cybertank minds for these Jovian cruisers, but as it’s not a place that we intend to settle permanently, we decided not to. Instead, the ”pilots” are recruited from the lighter variants of cybertanks – mostly Raptors, Leopards, Wasps – and of course yours truly.
I am in a flotilla of three cruisers.My old comrade the Raptor- Class Skew was leading it in the middle, I was 1,000 kilometers to the left, and the Leopard-Class Smurfette was handling the right flank.
Our trackers are spread out in a battle line ahead of us: manta-ray shaped constructs with vast ventral scoops that feed into hectares of sensitive membranes, sniffing the Jovian atmosphere for the heavy elements that might indicate a Yllg presence. Our cruisers typically move at less than 100 kilometers per hour, which is often much less than the local windspeed. Thus, navigation is as much about predicting and mapping the wind patterns, and jumping from one moving air column to another. It’s exhilarating but dangerous. The transitions between wind streams have shear forces than can destroy even us, and some of the streams will suck you down to the core at a speed that nothing we have here can escape.
Confessions of a Sentient War Engine (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 4) Page 24
