Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  “There is no suffering sufficient in this universe to repay you for this insolence, wretch!” hissed Roboneuron like the deadly asp of ancient Egypt. The fiend frantically stabbed at me with its wicked barbed twin stabbing appendages, but I parried the blows with the bazooka. Sadly the doughty tubular alloy missile launcher was rendered into flaccid strips that were increasingly ineffective at hand-to-hand combat.

  “You should have chosen a weapon less obsolete than yourself,” Roboneuron pondered snidely, “now meet your untimely end, which I shall richly enjoy as I derisively scoff at your well-deserved death. Why can’t I stop speaking like this, you slut!”

  Fortunately, while Roboneuron was insulting me I had absconded with a German “Flammenwerfer 35” model flamethrower. The mantisbot was impervious to the golden drenched fire which spewed from the dark gray nozzle of the national socialist weapon like the micturation of a god, but it was temporarily blinded and I darted out of the hall like a rat out of an aqueduct.

  I found myself in a life-size diorama of the 1916 Battle of Verdun. The ceiling was obscured with simulated smoke, and a simulated full moon hung low over the desolate scene like an enormous unpaired testicle. Coils of rusted barbed wire adorned the ragged lines of trenches like necklaces from hell. There were manikins wearing light blue French jackets, shallow light metal helmets, and armed with primitive bolt-action rifles with surprisingly long and skinny bayonets.

  My mind was thinking a thousand thoughts a second, for I knew that it would be but all-too short moments before Roboneuron entered this diorama looking for me. In an inspired flash of inspiration I put on one of the French army uniforms, hurriedly throwing the newly nuded manikin into a deep well.

  And none too soon, for the mantisbot erupted into the diorama room rushing about looking for me. I held as still as a marble statue, and Roboneuron passed right past me in its haste.

  “Why,” howled Roboneuron, “am I compelled to enunciate in this egregious fashion? I shall dissect your minds one putrid algorithm at a time. I shall invent new categories of pain and anguish to inflict on you in repayment for this ignoble indignity!”

  I realized that eventually Roboneuron would penetrate my disguise, and I needed to think of a further plan. The 8 mm Lebel rifle that I held would be totally ineffective against the mantisbot. Likewise even the bullets of the heavy machine guns would simply bounce off his armor like cats dropped from a great height onto a hot tin roof. Field artillery might do the job, but would be too ponderous to aim, and in any event there was none present in this diorama.

  Then I spied a M1916 37mm gun. It fired half-kilogram solid steel projectiles, and while unlikely to destroy the mantisbot outright, should be relatively accurate at close range and I might be able to do some damage. I waited for Roboneuron to move to the far side of the room, then I dashed to the diminutive artillery piece. Roboneuron heard me, spun around and fired a burst from both of his plasma cannons – but luck was with me and his targeting systems were still suffering the effects of Argonization, and he missed me like a horseshoe.

  I slammed a round in the breech, aimed the gun, and fired, hitting one of his plasma cannons, which exploded to gratifying effect. Roboneuron shot at me with his remaining plasma cannon, which destroyed the 37mm gun showering me with shards of Gaulic steel. I ducked into a trench just barely in time to avoid a further volley of plasma fire.

  Roboneuron scurried over the battlefield towards me, his six legs working with admirable alacrity, and I knew that my jig was up.

  The far wall exploded into a veritable rainment of debris as a massive armored form burst through like a ruptured zit that had been squeezed with too much enthusiasm by an overly ardent youth.

  “Vile computer virus,” ejaculated Uncle Jon vociferously through the mighty external speakers of the noble Slavic main battle tank as it crashed through numerous moldering exhibits of the illustrious history of warfare, “I shall punctuate your sentience and end your vileness!”

  Roboneuron shot at the Armata tank, but his sophisticated plasma cannon was no match for the primitive composite armor, and only produced small rivulets of molten slag that dripped down from the tank’s frontal glacis like radiant boogers.

  Uncle Jon rammed the horrendous Roboneuron with his diesel-powered steed of doom and crushed it into the black oblivion from whence it had come and to whence it was destined to return. Verily, we had unleashed the baying dogs of war and lit this candelabrum. We had cried havoc, we had spilt the milk and cried about it.

  As Roboneuron lay crushed under the heavy treads of the ancient Russian armored fighting vehicle, hydraulic and other fluids seeped from its now mangled carcass like the juice from a veritable disgusting insect that had been squashed under a boot heel. The greasy light began to fade from its optic sensors, and it parlayed one last word to us: “You sluts! I could never have imagined a species so fowl. I shall exact my inexecrable revenge upon your wretched civilization… I shall… I…

  And with that the terror that was Roboneuron was forever erased from our fair cosmos.

  --------------------

  Well, after a time the effect of the Argonizer wore off, and Uncle Jon and I got back to speaking normally. I suppose that’s a good thing, but it was oddly fun while it lasted.

  Schadenfreude eventually analyzed the device, and – unusually for him – announced that he was impressed with its design. I could see how it had managed to work on cybertanks, given that our core psyches are human-basic in pattern. Additionally, its novel nature allowed it to evade our inbuilt signals-warfare systems. However, I was surprised that it affected the alien thought-virus Roboneuron. Apparently, unlike all other known alien sentiences, Roboneuron was cognitively plastic, and reformatted its mental processes into the style of each victim species. Normally this would allow the virus greater insight into its target’s vulnerabilities, but this time the process had backfired and made the virus vulnerable to us.

  Schadenfreude thought that this was hilarious.

  I was worried that there might be other sleeper caches of the Roboneuron virus, but Schadenfreude didn’t think that they would be much of a problem. The strength of the Roboneuron virus had been its distributed and adaptable network – isolated remnants would be unable to improve, and become steadily more and more out of date. The only real danger was if a bit of Roboneuron managed to infect a younger and less advanced civilization, and rebuilt its strength quietly out of sight of the main players. We’ll have to watch out for that.

  I was going to apologize for the destruction of so much of Uncle Jon’s museum, but he was instead ecstatic.

  “Now this Armata tank, before it was mostly a reproduction, but now it is an historical combat veteran in its own right. And I have the crushed hulk of the mantisbot that Roboneuron infected in the same life-size diorama. It’s perfect!”

  Ah, there is no pleasure so great as the owner of a military museum whose collection has itself become a piece of history.

  Sic semper curator.

  7. Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Planet of Eternal War

  “The difference between a good officer and a poor one, is about ten seconds.” Admiral Arleigh Burke, American Empire, 20th century.

  Little Jimmy Half-Brain was tucked into bed by a woman he had just met.

  “Where’s Silhouette?” asked Jimmy. “She’s usually here at night.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman, “Silhouette had other duties, and I’m filling in.”

  “Silhouette always tells me a story before I go to sleep. Will you tell me a story?”

  “I’d be happy to,” said the woman. “What sort of story would you like me to tell you?”

  “An exciting one. One with giant spaceships! And evil villains! And valiant heroes! And great battles! And in the end the good triumph! And it all has to be true!

  “A tall order. I have a story like that. It doesn’t fit all of your criteria, but it is very special to me. I have never told it to anybody else, at least
, not all at once, not as a story. But first you must brush your teeth.”

  “Do I? But you could brush my teeth so much faster.”

  “I know that, but it would weaken you were everyone to do things for you. Here, let me bring you your toothbrush and toothpaste.”

  The woman left the room, and returned with a blue-handled toothbrush and a tube of red-and-white-striped toothpaste. She placed these on the side table near little Jimmy, who, using only his right arm, clumsily managed to open the tube of toothpaste using only the fingers of his right hand, then squeezed out the toothpaste onto the brush, and, again using only his right hand, brushed his teeth.

  “Well done,” said the woman. “Anyone can do things when they are easy. The true test of fortitude is if we can still do them when they are hard. So, are we ready for the story?”

  “Oh yes,” said Jimmy. “What’s it called?”

  “It’s called Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Planet of Eternal War.”

  “That sounds like a great story!”

  “It all started out with the Space Battleship Scharnhorst and his first mate, the immortal vampire named Olga Razon.”

  “A vampire? Really?”

  “Yes really. They used to be human beings, but an ancient virus transformed them into vampires.”

  “Cool. So did they like turn into bats and drink blood?”

  The woman laughed. “Turn into bats? Hardly. As far as drinking blood, in ancient times they used to, but for thousands of years they preferred a synthetic substitute. It was cleaner, and easier to get, and didn’t leave a bitter aftertaste. Still, the vampires were much stronger and faster than any normal human being, and could live nearly forever. This one was several thousand years old. Her name was Olga Razon, and she was born on old Earth in the 16th century.”

  “Did she have big fangs?”

  “Not normally. Vampires lose their original human teeth after a century or two, and then they wear dentures. Sometimes they would wear ones with fangs, for effect, but mostly they would use ones like regular human teeth, like you or me.”

  “Oh,” said Jimmy. “I guess that makes sense. But tell me about the battleship.”

  “Well, his full name was the Space Battleship Scharnhorst, but mostly people called him ‘Fanboy,’ because of his love of science fiction movies and cartoons.”

  “What, the battleship was a person?”

  “Certainly. At the time he was an Asgard-Class interstellar battlecruiser a kilometer and a half long, 150 meters across at the widest point, and weighed well over a million metric tons. He had advanced computer cores, just like the cybertanks you’ve met, and so he was fully a person.”

  “Wait, I thought you said he was a battleship?”

  “Good point. Battleships and battlecruisers are kind of the same thing. At first he was called a battlecruiser, but then his friends started calling him the Space Battleship Scharnhorst. It was kind of a promotion.”

  “And who was his captain?” asked Jimmy.

  “Why, himself, of course. Although he did like to give himself orders through a humanoid android that looked like Captain Dieter Waystar from one of his favorite animes.”

  “What? But that’s silly. Why would he do that?”

  The woman shrugged. “Why not? Like a cybertank, Fanboy could multitask and do a thousand things at once. Most of him was completely focused and practical. He was so big, that he was more like a small city, with his own factories and research laboratories and everything. If a small fraction of himself decided to have some fun, surely that’s OK?”

  Jimmy frowned with the right half of his face. “But a giant space battleship should be serious!”

  “And he was,” said the woman, “but not all of him, not all the time. He wasn’t just a mindless machine, he was a person, like you and me and Old Guy, and nobody can be serious all the time.”

  “Well, maybe,” said Jimmy. “So tell me about his guns. Did he have big guns?”

  “Oh yes, the biggest ever. The outside of his hull was covered with heavy plasma cannons, some as big as the biggest cybertank. His internal cargo bays had countless thousands of missiles and drones and mini-spaceships. Running though the long axis of his hull was a fixed kilometer-long plasma cannon. It was the single most powerful beam weapon that the human civilization has ever made. It had been given to him as a reward for his heroic actions fighting against the fiendish alien race known as The Amok.”

  “Cool. So was he in a lot of battles?”

  “Not really. You see, he was incredibly powerful, but also incredibly heavy. It took a lot of energy for him to move, so he mostly stayed in one place, and could hardly ever get to a battle in time. For thousands of years, he only fought in two major battles. One, that I already mentioned, against the Amok, and the last one, against evil vampires that had been given super powers by the alien Yllg.”

  “But if he was so big, he must have had big engines and been able to go fast!”

  “Well, that works for a large surface ship floating on a water ocean, but in space it’s all about the mass. More weight takes more energy to accelerate; there is no way around that. Also most space battles rely heavily on stealth, and it’s hard to stealth something 1,500 meters long.”

  “But what about the planet of eternal war? Wasn’t that a battle?”

  “Sort of, but it didn’t involve Fanboy’s main hull. You see, we got a weak signal that might have been from a surviving part of the old human civilization. We only calculated one in a million odds of it being other than random noise, so we didn’t bother to organize a major search party. Instead, Fanboy decided to go by himself as a heavy scout.”

  “I’m confused. Fanboy was a battleship but also a scout? Or did he have his own fleet or something?”

  “Sorry,” said the woman, “I should have been clearer. Now you know that cybertanks can send bits of themselves – they call them subminds – into robots and weapons and things, to do stuff and then report back, right?”

  “OK, sure,” said Jimmy.

  “Well, Fanboy had built a heavy scout just for this mission. It was 200 meters long and 30 meters across, a lot smaller than his main self but still pretty big. He crewed it with some of his own subminds. And the vampire Olga Razon and Zippo the space monkey decided to go along as well.”

  “A space monkey? There’s no such thing as space monkeys!”

  “Well, not that live naturally in space, but there still was one space monkey. His name was “Zippo,” and he was a cybernetic construction, about 15 kilograms, made of high strength metal alloys and ceramics. He had been built by another cybertank that they used to call “Rock Dancer” as a kind of a pet, but Rock Dancer had been killed by the Amok so Fanboy and Olga Razon adopted him.”

  “So was Zippo smart?”

  “Well,” said the woman, “he was and he wasn’t. Zippo didn’t talk, and he wasn’t a real person, like you or me or a cybertank. But he was very fast, and loyal, and he had inbuilt computer programs that were very sophisticated, even if Zippo himself didn’t realize how they worked.”

  “Oh. So what do space monkeys do?”

  “Mostly just poke their noses into anything that looks like it might be interesting. His original designer had given Zippo an insatiable curiosity. If anything was going on, you could count on Zippo to show up and check it out. But he could also be helpful. He was small and could fit into small crevices, and was handy at maintenance and repair duties.”

  “But,” said Jimmy, “how can a space monkey that can’t even talk repair complicated machinery? Could he even read?”

  “Good point. You see, his inbuilt computer programs could handle repair jobs just like any automated computer system, it’s just that Zippo didn’t know how they worked.”

  “But how could that be? How could Zippo do stuff and yet also not know how he was doing it?”

  “That’s a good question,” said the woman, “but people do that all the time. For example, do you know how the neurons in
your eyeballs work?”

  “Well,” said Jimmy, “Mr. Fenster gave a lecture on eyes once. That was back when I had a whole brain. He said there were like a million wires going from each eye to the brain and that lets us see.”

  “Very good, Jimmy, that is exactly right. But do you know exactly how those wires work? Could you design and build an entire eyeball all by yourself?”

  Jimmy frowned, again using only the right half of his face. “Well, no.”

  “But you can still see, even if you don’t know precisely how your eyes work, right?”

  “I guess. Well, I can see to the right. I can’t see to the left anymore.”

  “Sorry,” said the woman. “We’re working on that. Anyhow, I was just trying to say that at one level Zippo was a very sophisticated robot, and at another level he was just a very curious and friendly monkey.”

  “Did Zippo have wings?”

  “No, of course not. Wings don’t work out in space, in a vacuum. Instead he had rocket thrusters. And a long prehensile tail.”

  “Rocket thrusters are cool. Especially on a robot monkey.”

  “Yes they are. Anyhow back to the story. So they all piled into the scout – Zippo immediately saw that something was up and you couldn’t have kept him away if you tried – and they headed off into deep space to track down the source of the mysterious signals.”

  “And what was the space trip like? Where there like space storms, or space pirates or stuff?”

  “No, like most space trips it was long and uneventful. Space is mostly empty, and it takes a long time to accelerate to a decent speed, and then to decelerate so you don’t fly past where you want to end up. It took many years.”

  “Years? That sounds really dull!”