Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger, unless it doesn’t.”

  How are the odds?

  “Hard to figure, exactly, when we have done this so rarely,” said Frisbee. “Our current success rate is 9 out of 24, but I think we’re getting better at it. The last five all went well.”

  “If you call Brussels Sprout a success,” said Fanboy.

  “Now, now,” said Frisbee, “no accounting for temperament. And Sprout has a pretty decent combat record.”

  “I suppose,” said Fanboy. He turned to me. “And what about you, Old Guy? Still going to keep hanging around as a base-model human psyche? We can’t even hardly talk to you any more, except at this dumbed-down level.”

  I know. I’m thinking of getting reseeded as a Shadow-Class. Sparkle Pony thinks it could be ready next month.

  Fanboy let out a low whistle. “The Shadow-Class. From eccentric elder to the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge of advanced tech. You don’t do things by halves, do you?”

  Not if I can help it. I’ve had fun holding to the old pattern but I think I’ve milked that long enough. Time to move on.

  Through the remote feeds I watched as the sleeping body of Olga Razon was prepped in an ante-room. Multi-jointed metal arms removed her wig. Dentures, and clothes, then shaved off her eyebrows and eyelashes. Her skin was scrubbed, vital sign monitors applied to her chest, and she was transported into the operating room proper.

  It was probably just as well that Olga hadn’t been awake when she was wheeled in. At the center of the room was a massive steel chair, looking more like an execution device than a piece of medical equipment. There were heavy metal clamps and bolts, and an elaborate collar and halo system of restraints for the head. Around it loomed an alarming array of saws, drills, and hypodermic needles attached to long plastic tubes and tanks of chemicals, robot arms, microscopes, and other things that I didn’t recognize, but that looked scary.

  Perhaps creepiest of all was that directly under the chair was a large metal-grilled floor drain. Like what you’d see in an abattoir.

  Robot arms lifted a sleeping Olga and fitted her into the chair, locking down the clamps. Her head in particular was securely bolted into place. Needles were slid efficiently into veins in her arms and legs, and fluid began to flow. Myriad contacts of electrodes descended onto her shaven scalp, and other probes were drilled into her skull from a variety of angles. There were so many cables leading away from her head that you could hardly see any of her skin.

  You are using recording electrodes? I thought you couldn’t read out a human brain that way?

  Frisbee shook his head. “No, not all of it, but you can get a lot of surface thoughts and basic brain rhythms. Enough for a first-order mental link, but not nearly enough to get the memories and core personality loops. We don’t absolutely need it, we think, but the extra data could help if we encounter any glitches down the way.”

  “More data is better,” announced Schadenfreude.

  I read a few more aphorisms from his sticks. This is becoming a guilty pleasure.

  “Never tell the same lie twice.”

  “Never believe your own propaganda. It will be your downfall.”

  “Never say maybe.”

  They spent about an hour taking recordings of brain activity, and then the wire probes were withdrawn.

  “Recording completed,” said Schadenfreude. “All systems pass final checks.”

  “This is the really tricky part,” said Frisbee. “We need to get the cryopreservatives at just the right concentration uniform throughout the brain before it sets.”

  The anesthetic was increased to the maximum level consistent with life. More needles snaked into position, and stabbed into her chest, neck, and head. Her heart was stopped. Clear fluid began to flow into her head from some tubes, and red blood flowed out through others. Eventually, the fluid leaving her head began to run clear as well. Olga’s normally pale skin blanched to an almost pure white. The fluid entering her changed colors, first yellow, then orange, then pale blue.

  Blasts of cooling dry gas whooshed out of nozzles, and the temperature in the operating theater started to drop. The atmosphere had been purged of all water vapor, so there was no frost, but things just look different when they get cold enough.

  “Olga Razon is now technically dead,” said Schadenfreude.

  “Only technically?” asked Fanboy.

  “Yes,” said Schadenfreude.

  I read another three of Schadenfreude’s sticks. Going by three is working for me.

  “Conquest is expensive but extermination is cheap.”

  “It’s not what you know, it’s what you have.”

  “He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless still dead.”

  We waited some more for the temperature to stabilize, then Olga’s head was cut off at the neck, and her body was hauled out of the room. The now severed head, still securely held upright in the clamps, was coated with a heavy layer of polymer to prevent contamination of the stage by what was left of the vampire’s body. Then all of the remaining atmosphere was sucked out of the room, and replaced with a high vacuum.

  “Cryopreservation is optimal,” said Frisbee. “Now we start the scanning.”

  Robotic burrs precisely carved away the top of Olga’s head, and fine micro-tools deftly peeled off the meninges covering the brain. The massive blockface of the scanner descended from the ceiling to stop just over her, and a heavy horizontal microtome removed a single nanometer-thick layer of tissue. The scanner pulsed, and a trillion bytes of data was fed into the local data networks. The microtome took another slice, the scanner pulsed, more data, another few million sections to go…

  “This will require some time,” said Frisbee. “You don’t need to stay here.”

  Not a problem. I may just poke around, or go on standby for a bit.

  “Same here,” said Fanboy. “The prototype hull of that Shadow-Class you were lusting after is two bays over. Shall we go check it out?”

  The humanoid androids of Fanboy and myself walked out of the bay and down an access corridor. The androids of Frisbee and Schadenfreude, with nothing useful to do and nobody humanoid left to talk with, shut down and froze in place.

  “Serious about the Shadow-Class?” asked Fanboy.

  Very much so. All my old friends have reseeded to the latest tech, I’m tired of being condescended to, and I want to see what I’ve been missing. What’s it like being you?

  Fanboy chuckled. “I think a biological human once asked you that. It’s really cool. Not to be – condescending – but this level of conversation is like petting a dog and telling him he’s a good boy. It’s fun and not without merit, but there is so much that you are missing…

  So I gather. Besides, I suspect that our next battles may be at a higher level. I’d hate to miss the party.

  “Agreed,” said Fanboy. “Right now you might not even be able to draw fire effectively.”

  And that would be a shame. I was always so good at drawing fire.

  “You were the best,” said Fanboy.

  A group of material conveyers were coming at us from the other end of the corridor, and we stepped aside to let them pass, then continued on.

  We arrived at the bay with the prototype Shadow-Class chassis. The hull wasn’t even fully enclosed, and only one of the liquid-metal tread assemblies had been constructed and put in place. Still, even in its unfinished state it radiated power and style. And then there were the projected specifications…

  “A month you say?” asked Fanboy.

  That’s what Sparkle Pony says, give or take.

  “It will definitely be a game changer, if it works,” said Fanboy. “You may have to start calling me Old Guy.”

  Being a venerable and quasi-obsolescent font of wisdom is not as easy as it looks, but if it comes to that, I’ll be glad to give you a few pointers.

  “Always good to learn from a master,” said Fanboy.

  In the meantime there is Olga Razon to upgrade.
Bootstrapping humans into cybertanks is not without precedent, but it has a spotty record. And it’s never been done into such an advanced design.

  “We all know that,” said Fanboy. “But it was upgrade or be left behind. There are not even a hundred people left in our sphere of influence – biological or cyber – with only the baseline singleton human psyche. Our civilization is moving on.”

  You know it won’t be the same with her, don’t you?

  “Of course,” said Fanboy. “It changed when I reseeded as a Sundog-Class. But that doesn’t cancel out loyalty, or old debts, or mean that we still aren’t good friends. If this works out, we might go back to being as close as we used to be – although in a different way. Or we might be OK friends, or we might so irritate each other that we move to opposite sides of our civilization’s sphere of influence to get away from each other. I’d prefer the former, but however Olga evolves, I will have done what I had to do. And we will go on with our lives.”

  You’re more philosophical about these sorts of things than you used to be.

  “Philosophical is not the word I’d pick, but yes, that’s true,” said Fanboy. “Remember that as a mind evolves, it does not replace what went before, but builds on top of it. At least, that’s how human minds evolve.” He straightened up and grinned broadly, giving me a snappy salute. “There will always be a part of me that is Captain Dieter Waystar, commanding officer of his own self, the Space Battleship Scharnhorst. Guardian of justice, defender of the weak, nemesis of evil.”

  Wasn’t that the slogan from Voltron?

  Fanboy shook his head. “No, that’s a mighty robot, loved by good, feared by evil. And it’s not a slogan, it’s an epigraph.”

  Oh. Right. I think I prefer the motto “age and guile beat youth and a bad haircut.”

  “O’Rourke? That’s not even a motto, just a snide aphorism.”

  Point taken. I’ll have to work on one.

  “Old, slow, and out of control?”

  Nah, someone else is using that.

  “Pity. That would have been a good one.”

  Yes. How about: He is, the world’s most interesting cybertank.

  “Not working for me.”

  Your robotic armored fighting vehicle that’s fun to be with!

  “Borderline plagiarism.”

  When danger rears its fearsome head

  There comes along the clank of tread

  The cybertank to outlast them all,

  The one that won’t ever let you fall,

  Old Guy! Eat his dust and die, evil ones!

  “Oh where to begin,” said Fanboy. “The second line is awkward, and the last is just silly. But at least you are getting into the spirit. Keep working on it.”

  --------------------

  After a while Fanboy wandered off to attend to some other business, and I continued to explore the complex. Some of my other old friends were there as well, but none in humanoid form so there was nothing for my android to converse with, not directly, anyhow.

  I noodled around the complex but nothing caught my eye. I walked back to the bay with the Corona chassis near the operating theater, and put my android into standby.

  Time passed, and Olga’s brain had been sliced and scanned. The next step was to reconstruct the entire set of neural pathways and synapses – not an easy task, not even for us. The connections of the human brain are not nice straight wires and fiber-optics, they are squishy bags of water that twist around each other like gnarled tree roots. On one slice an axon will be large, on another slice it will be small, and big again on the next… lining up the slices, figuring out what goes with what, is challenging.

  Eventually Frisbee had every last synapse traced and categorized, and we moved on to the next stage, which was using Olga’s primary pattern – you could call it her personality, or essence, or even her soul if you were feeling mystical – and map it onto the more complex structure of the Corona-Class’s processing cores. Frisbee and Schadenfreude were the leads, but many other cybertanks participated. It’s not as simple as putting a bigger engine into a car, much new had to be constructed from scratch. As much art and philosophy as science: how to make something fundamentally more advanced that is yet true to the essence of Olga Razon? To the extent that such a thing is even possible.

  You would think that, with Olga’s original brain structure completely digitized and stored, that there would now be no risk. Try using it to seed a new mind, and if it doesn’t work out, go back to the original data and try again. However, that’s not our law. We have a firm commandment that nobody’s primary mentality can be copied willy-nilly. Olga’s biological body is dead, when a new mind is created from it that will be her, to make endless copies is to make endless people and that is forbidden. To a great extent this is part of our worrying about multiplying our numbers too fast – no plague of out-of-control self-replicating Von Neumann machines for us. And partly it’s because a human mind is, or should be, unique.

  I tried to follow the process – looking over their shoulders in mental space, so to speak - but the details were far beyond me, so I gave up and simply waited.

  Eventually Frisbee and Schadenfreude announced that the process was completed, and that so far all indications were good.

  We all reactivated our humanoid androids, and stood around the body of Olga Razon sitting in the tall-backed leather chair. Schadenfreude snapped his stick-fingers, and Olga startled and woke up.

  She looked around in puzzlement. “Did something go wrong? Have I not fallen asleep yet?”

  Fanboy smiled. “No, Olga, everything went fine. Welcome back.”

  “All processes are nominal to optimal,” said Schadenfreude.

  “Agreed,” said Frisbee. “But there is still a lot of real-time mental pruning and adjusting to do. So take it slow.”

  “I don’t feel any different,” said Olga.

  “Of course not,” said Frisbee. “The human baseline state is to feel normal. Normal is the same no matter what you are. You have changed, but you don’t notice that because you feel… normal.”

  Olga looked at her two hands. “But I was supposed to be a cybertank? Why am I still human?”

  “The human form can assist as an anchor in the transitional period,” said Schadenfreude. “At least for one that has never known better.”

  Fanboy held up his right hand, and spread his fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Five,” said Olga.

  “And what is two plus two?” said Fanboy.

  “Four,” said Olga.

  “Count from one to a billion,” said Fanboy.

  “OK,” said Olga. “Wait, I just counted to a billion. How did I do that?”

  “How many satellites are in the sky above us?” asked Fanboy.

  “Um, 35 in direct line of sight to a ceiling of 1,000 kilometers,” said Olga. “Total around the entire planet within 100,000 kilometers is 1,244. That doesn’t include the 45 transiting probes and cargo haulers…” Olga looked around. “I can see them all, but I’m just sitting in this bay…”

  “Fifty kilometers due west of this place,” said Fanboy, “is an abandoned concrete structure, it’s the one with the yellow bulls-eye helpfully painted on the side. Blow it up.”

  The twin booms of the Corona-Class hull whirled around, even as a glow began to form between them. Exotic forces built and projected – or perhaps I should say, tunneled – through the walls of the complex. Using external video feeds I confirmed that the building in question had been completely destroyed.

  “Nicely done,” said Fanboy.

  Olga looked around in puzzlement. “But… I…” She held her hands out in front of her and wiggled her fingers. “These are mechanical… I am an android…” She dropped her hands and her eyes went wide. “No, I’m not just here… I’m…” She turned and looked at the looming hull of the Corona-Class cybertank. “I’m there as well… and I’m not just talking to you in English, I’m also talking in another language, more
complicated…” She burst into a smile. “I can see it all! It’s so beautiful!”

  “First-stage real-time integration complete,” said Schadenfreude. “Coherence within bounds.”

  Frisbee nodded. “I concur. The process is on track.”

  Fanboy hugged the Olga Razon android, and Olga hugged him back.

  Let me be the first to officially congratulate Olga Razon as our newest and coolest brother cybertank.

  “Thanks, Old Guy,” said Olga. “I can’t believe just how amazing this all is!”

  “Do not celebrate just yet,” said Schadenfreude. “There is still much that could potentially go wrong.”

  “True, but unlikely at this stage,” said Frisbee. He turned to Olga. “Just don’t try to do too many things at once just yet, and let us guide you.”

  “The human mind suddenly given such power can have delusions of godhood,” said Schadenfreude. “You must learn your abilities and limits in stages.”

  “OK,” said Olga. “But still. How did I live like I used to? I was so limited, so narrow…”

  “Old Guy,” said Frisbee, “you would be next on the list. Or you will be rapidly running out of fellow baseline human psyches to converse with.”

  Agreed. When the Shadow is ready, I am.

  “I wonder what sort of nickname I’ll get?” said Olga.

  “The use of humorous and moderately deprecatory nicknames has fallen out of fashion,” said Schadenfreude. “They are only used out of habit, when conversing at this level.”

  No silly nicknames? But I had such a good one picked out for Olga!

  Schadenfreude turned to me. “You will have to live with the disappointment.” He shifted the sticks on his manikin's head in a way that came across as a thin smile. “It will build character.”

  --------------------

  You can keep up to date on all the Old Guy news and fun tidbits at the Facebook Ballacourage Books page

  The Thrilling Old Guy Universe

  1. The Chronicles of Old Guy

  2. Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom