The Chronicles of Old Guy (Volume 1) (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  I review my historical records. Yes, there it is, the primitive 2D vid-audio stories of Megazillus, dating from just pre-exodus earth. They were quite popular for a while. I especially like the episode where Megazillus killed all the Venusian spiders with his laser eyes and then stir-fried them in the volcano before eating them impaled on electrical transmission towers. Charming.

  But BAL1 is green, shoots plasma breath, and has a rocky hide. Megazillus was grey, shot laser beams from his eyes, had a classical reptile-scaled hide, and dorsal spikes. Hardly similar.

  “Details. How many other giant nuclear-powered lizards are there in the known galaxy? You have to look at the gestalt.”

  Very well, I concede the point. “Megazillus” is the new target designate.

  Maneuvering to attack Megazillus from long range was a good plan. There is an old saying that “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” I have long thought that the saying should instead be “No plan survives contact with the universe.” It was at this time that the universe decided to provide further evidence in favor of my version.

  My sensor networks detected strong and unambiguous telemetry indicating the presence of the Amok. Oh bloody frapping neo-liberal hell. I do not need this. Hey universe, the giant radioactive lizard thing was really fun. Yes, I had a whole bunch of laughs being nearly gutted by giant radioactive lizard plasma breath, and I was really looking forward to maybe being torn apart by giant radioactive lizard talons. Was it really, really, necessary to throw the Amok into the equation as well? Don’t you think that maybe that’s a trifle, well, gaudy? A bit lacking in taste and subtlety?

  The universe, as usual, is silent in the face of my sarcasm. Smug bastard, the universe. There should not have been any Amok within a dozen light years of this place, but there are, so that’s that. They must have seeded the planet with a sleeper cell years ago, and now my little tussle with Megazillus has woken them up. I can just hardly flipping wait.

  There is an emergence of activity near the location of Megazillus. My remotes relay the image: Megazillus is under attack by a variant of Amok that we have code-named Assassin Clone. The Assassin Clones are roughly cubical, each unit about a half-meter on a side. They are individually weak, but morphologically adaptable and capable of joining with other units into larger structures. In this case the Assassin Clones have formed a thing with a spherical body about 120 meters in diameter. It rests on 20 stout column-like legs, and three massive tentacles sprout from the upper surface. It has the shining blue-grey metal color of the individual modules, and is covered in a regular grid of lines that indicate the boundaries where the separate units had temporarily fused. The Amok construct has got Megazillus wrapped up in the tentacles, and is holding him fast. As strong as the big lizard is, the Amok is far more massive and powerful. A thing like a tunnel-boring machine extrudes from the side of the Amok: a flat disk tipped with wicked-looking cutting teeth. The disk starts to spin, and the Amok pushes it into the side of Megazillus, shearing into his hide. Megazillus screams so loudly that the surface of a distant lake is suddenly covered with resonant Chladni patterns from the raw acoustic power. Megazillus tries to twist around to bring his plasma breath to bear, but the Amok have lifted him off his feet and Megazillus doesn’t have any leverage.

  “Well,” said Vargas, “The Amok are going to kill Megazillus, and then they are going to kill you. If you can detect them, it is certain that they will detect you, and in your present state you can’t possibly match this mass of Assassin Clone.”

  Thank you Captain Obvious.

  Vargas scowled. “That’s Planetary Force Commander ‘Obvious’, thank you very much. You know the old saying about the enemy of my enemy?”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Yes I am aware of the saying. It often does not work out that well. Consulting all historical archives I determine that, on average, 56.3% of the time the enemy of my enemy is also an enemy.

  Vargas arched an eyebrow. “Yes, well there is another saying that goes: There Is No Alternative.”

  Sigh. You are correct. We will attempt to save Megazillus We hope that in whatever chaos ensues, some path to survival shall manifest itself. Try not to enjoy yourself too much.

  I reverse course back to the giant lizard. I am very likely going to die. It is sad, but I have had a long life with many high points. I transfer my logs to some remotes and instruct them to evade and hide: some may survive to contact our forces and the data may prove useful. It takes little time to cover the distance back to Megazillus. I power up my weapon to full continuous burn, and trace the outline of Megazillus, shearing off the strangling tentacles of the Assassin Clone construct. Megazillus is cut free and falls to the ground with a whump and an explosion of dust. The Amok have cut quite a hole in his side, I can see what look like oddly-shaped glowing internal organs sticking out, and Megazillus isn’t moving. Well, it appears that this time the enemy of my enemy is dead. Or is that the other way around?

  The Assassin Clone units rapidly reform into a new structure: a vast curving wall 100 meters tall and 500 meters wide. The units on the surface of the wall grow a layer of black fuzz. I analyze the attack pattern but I’m too slow – damn I’m old, one of the new Horizons or Spirits would have had this attack figured out and neutralized in milliseconds. The units just under the outer layer explode, and propel the surface units out towards me. 200,000 Assassin Clone units fly at me in an almost solid wall, and I realize too late that I’m screwed. They cover the distance to me in about three seconds. In this time, my secondary batteries on full rapid fire take out thousands of units, and my slaved remote gun and missile platforms thousands more, and even more units miss me completely, but it’s not enough. My hull is covered with assassin clone units preconfigured for invasive infowar attack. What looked like black fuzz was impossibly tough nanotube tendrils, they penetrate my armor and hull – especially the recently patched areas that are only covered with alloy steel – interface with my systems, and inject a witches brew of computer viruses.

  I try to rally, to wall off infected systems and mount a counter-attack, but I’m like a fencer on the back foot, always on the defensive and never able to regain the initiative. For every info attack vector I defeat, two more make progress. I could beat any single attack if I had time, but time is what I don’t have, and with every millisecond my resources dwindle.

  The simulation of Giuseppe Vargas has become cartoonish, almost a caricature, and he is using his flechette pistol to fight off an attack of giant cartoon lobsters. They menace him with their claws: he dodges and concentrates on taking out their eyes and the vulnerable joints of their legs. Of course Vargas is not really fighting giant cartoon lobsters: it’s just the simulation program trying to put a visual interpretation on the Amok thought-viruses invading that part of my mind-space. I consider shutting down the simulation to save computational resources, but that branch of the Amok viruses seems confused and distracted by the simulation, and is draining significant resources from the main info attack. I leave Vargas to deal with his lobsters.

  I am losing. I have about 3.2 seconds left before I blow my reactors to avoid capture and thought-rape by the Amok. Oh well, I had a pretty good few millennia, would have liked a few more but sometimes that’s how it works out. I upload as much of my databanks as possible into my surviving remotes and instruct them to evade and hide. They don’t have the capacity to store my full persona, but still, I manage to upload a lot of my most treasured memories, heuristics, and personality modules. If my remotes survive to make contact with my fellow cybertanks, there might be enough left to form the seed of a new personality and install it into a new cybertank body. The personality won’t be me – there is too much data in my logic cores to transfer all of it to my remotes, and anyhow a lot of my core personality routines are hard-wired into connectivity matrices that can’t be uploaded – but it will have a lot of the best of me. It will not be immortality, but at least continuity.

  I am just about to rele
ase the safeties on my reactors, when the Amok attack suddenly falters. It is a truism in military tactics that if, during a close-fought engagement, your enemy slips, you must attack directly and at all costs avoid losing momentum. I throw all my computational resources into an aggressive counterattack and am encouraged when the Amok thought-viruses fall back. Data feeds from the real world show that Megazillus had – surprisingly – recovered from his wounds, and had used his plasma breath at a low power setting to burn the Amok units off my hull. I update my databases: the enemy of my enemy is my enemy only 56.29999999 % of the time.

  The Amok are in disarray: I purge the last of the invading viruses from my own systems, and initiate my own info attack on the main body of the Amok proper. The Amok are forced to suicide thousands of units to isolate themselves from my attack. The Amok retreat and reform. They split into two major units: one that looks like a giant lizard, and one that looks like a cybertank, although with the blue-metal sheen and regular gridlines typical of Assassin clone composite structures.

  OK. I would almost think that the Amok had a sense of humor. For a moment we had real Megazillus and real cybertank facing off against Assassin Clone Megazillus and assassin clone cybertank. So, is this going to be a lizard/lizard cybertank/cybertank battle, or lizard/cybertank and cybertank/lizard? The Amok seem content to wait for us to decide.

  With a scream the real Megazillus charges into the Assassin Clone version of himself. Maybe he’s just being a stupid lizard and feels that something lizard-shaped is more of an affront to his lizardhood than a box on treads, maybe he’s thinking something else, I don’t know. That leaves me to face off against the Amok version of a cybertank.

  It masses double what I do, and has a main gun with a bore of nearly 2.0 meters. That’s a big gun. My magnetic sensors tell me that it has configured the power feeds on enough units to generate the energy necessary to generate a plasma cannon similar to mine. Except mine is one-quarter the power, and offline. Oh no you don’t. I hit the Amok cybertank with an electromagnetic pulse attack, and disorient it. I will only get one chance at this. The enemy units will automatically reconfigure to cancel out a second attack. I use this time to charge and ram it at a closing sprint velocity of 200 kph.

  Most modern combat is done either with stealth weaponry, or with ranged weaponry. The number of times that a cybertank has successfully engaged an enemy by ramming it can be counted on the bogies of one tread. But, I am close, and while tough, the links between the assassin clone units are not as strong as an integrated single hull design like mine. At the last second I slew my central turret to point backwards to protect my main weapon. I plow into the mock cybertank and it shatters into a spray of individual component modules and ragged agglomerations of modules. The simulation of Giuseppe Vargas is pumping his fists into the air and cheering. Separated, the modules are vulnerable and I fry tens of thousands of them with my secondaries and remotes. I note that Megazillus is not doing too badly either: he has completely thrown himself into attacking an Amok giant lizard more than twice his mass, and through sheer ferocity is overwhelming his opponent.

  I grind isolated assassin clone modules under my treads. You can nuke a target from orbit, you can vaporize an enemy at 200 km with a plasma beam, you can hide in an asteroid field for years hunting enemies with stealth missiles and probes, you can feed subtle corruption into a data network until your opponent has a mind like raw mush, but nothing quite matches the sensation of grinding your enemies under your treads. The modules make a satisfying crunch as I run over them, and then cute little pops as their power modules explode.

  Megazillus and I have the momentum. Assassin Clones are nasty and adaptable, but violently separated they tend to lose focus and are transiently vulnerable. We engage the Assassin Clones in a wild close-combat melee. The trick is to keep up the pressure and prevent the modules from combining into a larger structure or developing a coherent plan. My secondaries and remotes blast a hundred modules a second; Megazillus stomps them flat under his enormous feet, swats them with his massive tail, or fries them with his plasma breath set on wide dispersal. The air is so filled with dust and glare from the combat that sight is useless and I need to navigate using radar: I note that Megazillus is similarly able to cope.

  The assassin clone units often, though not always, form shapes reminiscent of what they are fighting. Off-balance, these Amok assemble into various versions of small tanks and lizards. Energy beams from tiny armored fighting vehicles lance into Megazillus, little bitey lizard things snap at my treads and bogies, but they lack any coordinated power and are unable to inflict significant damage on us. We maintain the attack, prevent the Amok from regaining the initiative, and grind them down.

  The Amok become further disoriented. They form little lizards with wheels for legs, or tank-like bodies with lizard heads where the main turret should be, or, increasingly bizarre shapes that I can’t identify and which might be only the results of random glitches in their programming. They lose the ability to coordinate attacks between units; a tipping point. We have the battle all but won.

  Eventually the Amok start to realize that they are losing, and the individual modules try and run and hide, but they aren’t very good at it. I can track the fleeing units easily and pick them off as they flee; some Amok try and burrow underground but I can find them with my deep radar, and Megazillus seems to be able to either smell them or sense the vibration through his feet, and he roots them out and shatters them in his jaws.

  The assassin clones seem endless, but eventually they run out of modules. They are all gone. I scan for survivors, but this variant of Amok is not known for solo expertise in stealth and I do think that we have got them all.

  Which means that I am back to my original problem. Megazillus appears to be completely healthy – really the most astonishing instance of regeneration that I have seen – and I am well below optimal. Given that even when I was undamaged, Megazillus trashed me with appalling ease, if he decides to turn on me I am well and truly screwed.

  For a moment neither of us moves. The dust cloud that was raised by our combat starts to disperse, and sight becomes possible again. My hull is scorched and smoking, and makes random pinging noises as parts of it start to cool off from the thermal stress. War is tough on an older weapon of mass destruction. Megazillus looks at me, looks at the wrecked remains of the assassin clone modules, and seems to consider. He snorts, turns around, and strides off. He walks more slowly than when he chased after me, his head down, forelimbs clasped behind his back, and for a moment from behind he almost looks like an old human going out for a stroll.

  And that’s that.

  Eventually I self-repaired, stayed out of trouble, and rescue units reached me. From orbit my colleagues and I began a study of the planet. Now that we know what to look for, we see that it was not uninhabited at all. There are a large number of strange beings living there, all powered with the same exotic hybrid biological-radiological metabolism of Megazillus, but they are rarely active. Some remind us of lizards, or dinosaurs; some are like giant crustaceans, or snakes, or snails, or stranger forms for which we have no ready analogies. At any given time they are mostly dormant, buried under ground, resting at the bottom of lakes or oceans, or simply lying in plain sight and with their odd chemical composition easily mistaken for bizarre rock formations. At long intervals they wake up and pace the land. Rarely some of them will meet: sometimes they will fight, or ignore each other, or go off and walk together. They seem to have loose social groupings, with complex networks of friends, allies, and enemies.

  Those of us who are particularly interested in exobiology and exotic chemistry are entranced. There are no records in any database of creatures with this sort of metabolism. It seems impossible that they could have evolved naturally, but there are none of the telltale stigmata of deliberate bio-engineering. The planet is of little use to us, certainly not enough to annoy these creatures over. So we abandon our mines, leave a network of orbital sensors
in place so that we may continue to study the strange inhabitants of this world in peace – and make sure that the Amok never show up unannounced again - and make preparations to leave.

  The Vargas simulation is still active. I am especially fond of this program and often indulge its idiosyncrasies. Eventually it will get bored and put itself back into archive storage, but for now it’s still pumped up from the combat. It spends a lot of time looking at the sensor feeds of the giant radioactive beings on the planet below, and proposes fanciful names for the different classes which really annoys the more professionally-minded exobiologists. Vargas is still sporting scars from his combat against the virtual lobsters: an affectation, he can erase them from his data structure whenever he wants but he seems inordinately proud of his efforts. In truth he really did divert a large chunk of the Amok data attack. They just didn’t know what to do with him and he tied up a surprising amount of their resources.

  “I really think I should get a medal for my efforts, don’t you think?”

  But you are just a simulation.

  “Then give me a simulated medal, do I have to do all the reasoning around here?”

  By the authority vested in my by the human governing structures, and as commander and supreme executive of this commissioned battle unit, which is myself, I hereby confer upon you, beta-class simulation Giuseppe Vargas, planetary force commander (retired), the order of the lobster with star clusters for service above and beyond the call of duty for a simulation in repelling an invasive data virus attack. You are a credit to simulations everywhere.

  I cause a medal to be formed on the simulated surface of his jacket. It features a rampant lobster with lightning bolts streaking out of it, fighting an old-style pre-exodus armored human knight wielding a two-handed broadsword, and has a ring of gilded stars around the edge. I meant it as a bit of a joke, but Vargas seems quite pleased with it and he continues to manifest it on his simulated person to this day.