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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  While I am the chief executive officer of myself, and can legally perform weddings and bar-mitzvahs, medals and other formal honors are still supposed to be peer-reviewed in order to be made official. As a lark I submit the necessary protocols to my peers. To my shock/amusement/consternation the award is accepted as valid, and the order of the lobster is now on the registry as an official award to be given to simulations and fully autonomous sub-minds in reward for meritorious service in any info-war combat. Vargas will be insufferable when he finds out.

  The recordings of my recent combat have vastly increased my status. We are a post-scarcity society, and therefore reputation is our only real coinage. I am for a time what passes for famous amongst us. The recordings of my combat against Megazillus and the Amok are widely distributed, and mostly favorably commented on, though of course there are always some critics who nitpick that I should have done this differently or that some other way, but I say, they weren’t there, let them take on a giant radioactive lizard and a pack of Amok assassin clones with only light weaponry and no backup and I’ll grant them the right to criticize. I think they’re just jealous.

  Perhaps best of all, my old friend and comrade the magma class cybertank “Double-Wide” got in touch, with a proposition that I could not refuse. I head off to Alpha Centauri prime, to rejoin civilization, meet up with old friends, and engage in what the humans used to call a “hot date.”

  2. Bringing up Baby

  “There is no such thing as ‘overkill’. No weapon can be too large.” John Von Neumann, 1903-1957 (attributed).

  I am travelling down a highway on Alpha Centauri Prime, cruising along at 100 kph feeling the wind blowing around my hull sensors, tracks making a steady clatter, and I remembered how good it feels to travel a long distance under your own power on a straight and flat road.

  Cybertanks are nothing if not mobile: our treads have the ground pressure of a human foot, and most of us can handle 45% grades or better – and for steeper hills, we can often plow through them. The problem is that we smash everything we travel on. In combat this is cool. However, if we used use our treads to move around whenever we felt like it, the planet we were on would shortly resemble a garbage dump. Cybertanks are not delicate creatures. Thus it is that most of the time we tend to stay in one place. This is not a big deal - we have many kinds of remotes through which we can explore and experience the world through a variety of points of view. But cruising down a long straight road with your main hull is still a pleasure.

  Alpha Centauri Prime is one of our civilizations’ core worlds, a center of industrial and intellectual activity. Connecting the major metropolitan centers is a network of armored highways 100 meters wide, and the planet is one of the few where a cybertank can just cut loose and drive without leaving a swath of destruction in its wake.

  The humans terraformed the planet, mostly because it was so close to Earth and because they could, but the planet was not well suited for a terrestrial biosphere. Since the humans went away we have stopped maintaining it. For a while it looked like the biosphere would die out, but lately it has stabilized. All the big showy organisms – the elephants, tigers, sequoias – have gone. Instead the land is mostly covered with a sage-scrub of low tough plants. It doesn’t look like much from a distance but it is surprisingly vital. Ground squirrels and alert long-eared hares are hunted by compact and efficient predators like foxes and coyotes. Overhead the occasional hawk wheels in the thermals spotting for lizards, and any number of different species of wildflowers bloom at random. I notice that there is almost no road-kill; good, the fauna are evolving.

  A biosphere is irrelevant to a cybertank, but we do enjoy the esthetic richness that it gives to a planet. Our attitude towards nature is similar to our attitude towards sunsets: we enjoy looking at them but feel no need to force the issue. Sometimes we will introduce life to an otherwise dead planet, to spruce the place up a bit and just to see how it turns out. Mostly we just let life go its own way.

  I share the road with a variety of automated bulk cargo-haulers and transports. One vehicle in particular catches my attention. Its electronic tag identifies it as a diplomatic representative of the civilization of the Office Copiers. We don’t see many of them any more, so it’s a rare sight. It is the cybertanks that have inherited the human civilization, but we are not quite the only sentient things they left behind. A small specialist subgroup of their computers, descended originally from office paper copying machines, also developed true sentience. At one time they were referred to as ‘immobots:’ robots that don’t move. They are self-aware, but their minds don’t work like ours, or like the humans for that matter. Our shared origin in the human civilization has given us a connection, but we have drifted apart over the millennia. Still, our relations remain cordial. They are the only non-human civilization we maintain regular contacts with. At times our different ways of thinking has led to fruitful collaborations, though their odd thought-patterns can make dealing with them frustrating.

  The Office Copier diplomat is a blocky machine about four meters on a side, and covered with all manner of complex indentations and protrusions. It has no wheels or suspensors or motive systems of any kind, but rides on a simple flat platform running on a dozen large rubber wheels. I hail it with a standard greeting; it replies with a gestalt data burst that might be translated as something like:

  -> QUERY RECEIVED

  |-> UNIT STATUS

  |-> STATUS NOMINAL

  Despite the robotic tone to the Office Copiers’ reply, they are not mere machines. It’s just that their thoughts don’t translate into our language. We can converse perfectly well about practical matters – that 2+2=4, or that the ambient temperature is 231 degrees Kelvin – but something like “how are you feeling” cannot bridge the intellectual chasm.

  I see one of the new Horizon class cybertanks in the distance. It’s going in the opposite direction and will pass me shortly. The Horizon has achieved the best combat record of any class in the last decade, and many have become leaders in the fields of art, applied technology, and politics. Nearly three times my mass, its hull glistens with a flawless chrome anti-radiation coating and its actively-tuned treads don’t clatter, they purr. It’s enough to make me consider a rebuild; soon, but not just yet. I am still enjoying being me. Still, the Horizon class is impressive.

  This particular exemplar is known as “Smoking Hole.” It seems that one moment the cybertank in question was guarding a major industrial facility, and the next moment there was only a large smoking hole in the crust of the planet. Not even a Horizon class wins every battle; and no cybertank is immune to a little needling from its peers.

  As Smoking Hole passes me on the highway, it hails me and we exchange pleasantries.

  “Hey Old Guy, good to see you, how are you doing?”

  I am doing fine, Smoking, how are you?

  “Oh fine, fine. Good job dealing with those Amok back there, and that big lizard thing, that was awesome. And congrats on you and Double-Wide getting permission to have a kid. I voted affirmative, think you’ll do great, and I can’t wait to meet your offspring.”

  Thanks, that means a lot to me. But none of it compares to what you pulled off against the Yllg last year; and your work on composite materials is amazing. Nice stuff.

  “Oh nothing really. Anyhow say hello to Double-Wide for me, and best wishes for the new one.”

  Smoking Hole passes me and heads off into the distance going the other way. The Horizon class would be easier to take if they were arrogant bastards. Instead, they are unfailingly courteous, which makes their superiority even harder to swallow. I think perhaps it is a higher level of arrogance. When the superior act like jerks us lesser souls can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that we are not assholes.

  The scrub alongside the road begins to thin out, and I enter the outskirts of the city of New Malden where Double-Wide lives. Double-Wide is a Magma class cybertank, and you know the saying: if the Magma class won’t g
o to you, you need to go to the Magma class. And the Magma class won’t go to you because it would smash half the planet flat if it tried.

  The Magma is the first class of cybertank that we designed ourselves after the humans left us. We must have been feeling insecure. In terms of raw combat power, they look down on “over-the-top” as if from a great height. They are each about 60 meters wide, and 140 meters long. Most of us have sleek low hulls with sloping armor, but the Magma are brutally angular, jutting up from the landscape like a block of armored office buildings. Instead of a turreted gun, their main armament is a mind-bogglingly huge plasma cannon mounted in the front in a giant ball-joint. Thus, it can’t fire to the side or behind without first turning its own massive body, but its secondary armament of turreted plasma cannons are each larger than my primary weapon, and the main gun is something else entirely.

  The Magma class design was ultimately judged a qualified mistake, but if you positively absolutely must blow something up, a Magma will get the job done. I can cut the top off of a mountain. A Magma at full power can simply ignore mountains and shoot through them, that is, if a terrain feature were to be so rude as to come between a Magma class and an enemy.

  A typical cybertank can use its suspensors to rise up and fire its main weapon over the curve of a planet. A Magma can’t do that: suspensors were sacrificed for more firepower, armor and shielding. What a Magma can do is fire directly through the crust of a planet to hit enemies out of the line of sight. Just make sure that you don’t plan on building anything on the destabilized ground for the next thousand years. The Magma main weapon is so powerful that the backlash can cause more damage to friends than to enemies.

  Towards the end of their active combat life, Magmas were primarily used as decoys. When battling alien civilizations the first lesson is that aliens are alien, and their psychological weaknesses (if any) likely have no referents to your own. Still, it is amazing just how many different kinds of aliens routinely make the mistake of freaking out at the one big unit, ignoring all the lesser units that, en masse, constitute the real threat. Not all of the aliens fall for this, mind you, but a surprising number do.

  The last time that Double-Wide and I fought in the same engagement the enemy was throwing everything they had at him in a desperate attempt to stop this massive killing machine. A stupid amateur mistake, they should have bypassed Double-Wide and dealt with him after the rest of the cybertanks had been defeated. Instead they committed the bulk of their combat power in a massed attack. Double-Wide powered though ground fused into glass from nearby fusion strikes, shields sparking with prismatic coronas, secondary weapons lashing out in all directions and main gun vaporizing foolishly concentrated multiple enemy units in single shots; a distraction. The rest of us outflanked the enemy and cut them to ribbons. And when the battle was over, it only took about a year to figure out how to get Double-Wide up off the planet again.

  Because there is the little matter of strategic mobility. Or more specifically, the almost total lack of strategic mobility of the Magma class. A standard cybertank can make planetfall from orbit using its own suspensors. A Magma needs an expensive specialized landing module to make it down in one piece, and inevitably, it’s the first thing to get blown up when hostilities commence. As far as getting a Magma off the surface of a planet, well, there is the old joke that the easiest way to get a Magma into space is to blow up the planet it’s on and let it drift free. Or the even older joke about why bother with the landing module in the first place: just drop the Magma on the enemy from orbit: end of enemy, end of problem figuring out how to get the Magma back up again.

  A conventional cybertank can cause a fair amount of terrain damage moving around on un-reinforced roadways. A Magma class can trigger earthquakes. Thus it is that, of the Magmas that have not gone in for a rebuild, most have settled down into a completely sessile lifestyle, doing all their work via remotes.

  The only exception is the Magma known as “Rock Dancer.” It has taken up residence in an asteroid belt, where its armored bulk serves admirably as its own spaceship. It touches down on the various small asteroids using modest thrusters, and delicately wanders the surface, like a terrestrial hippopotamus whose bloated frame is suddenly rendered graceful when it walks the bottom of a river.

  There are planetoids whose escape velocity is 100 kph or less. In theory a cybertank could just drive off of them into free space. The problem is one of traction. In such low gravity, at anything less than the slowest of dead slow a cybertank will bounce off the ground long before reaching the required speed. On some of the planetoids where mining or research facilities have allowed Rock Dancer the luxury of repeat visits, he has solved this problem by constructing large upwards-curving ramps. As he starts to move onto the ramp the centripetal force pushes him down onto the ramp, thus giving him more traction, which gives him more speed, and more centripetal force, allowing more power to be applied to the treads, and so on.

  As Rock Dancer flies off a ramp into space, he always broadcasts on a clear radio channel: “Wheeeee!!!!!” Most of us find such behavior childish and we are embarrassed to be associated with him. On the other hand, I wish that I had though if it.

  New Malden was originally founded by the humans. Over the millennia we have largely rebuilt it, but we still keep some of the original human structures as monuments and museums. The overall plan is a grid of armored roadways, but the total population of cybertanks for this city is only a few hundred. Most of the traffic consists of remotes and automated cargo haulers. There are numerous anonymous rectangular sheds each covering square kilometers, and enclosing all manner of construction and maintenance facilities. Power stations and chemical processing plants stick up higher, most just complex assemblages of pipes and tanks, bare metal or painted in primary colors now faded and stained, that would have looked familiar to a pre-exodus human. A few industrial facilities have been made into minor artworks of marble and brass by those of us who felt like it at the time. Some structures are purely non-functional works of art: beautiful or just weird. Here and there are ruins, unused city blocks filled with rusting girders and weeds as tough as steel wool and waiting for the time when one of us decides to do something useful there.

  I drive onto a kilometer-wide plaza where my old friend Double-Wide has sat immobile for the last two centuries. His main gun is angled up at a respectful 45 degrees, because even cybertanks can get the creeps staring down the bore of a Magma class’ main armament. I notice that since my last visit he has made himself into a small park. His sides are covered with Ivy, and the top of his hull sprouts dwarf pines. An extended family of crows briefly squawk as I come into view. Down one flank there is a narrow waterfall that tumbles into a small pond stocked with carp. Underneath it all he is as fit and well-maintained as ever: if called into action he could shed the dirt and trees as easily as a human brushes lint from a jacket.

  At the far side of the plaza is the main entrance to Double-Wide’s pride and joy, his Physical Library, where human-style books are created, stored, catalogued, and read.

  Data storage is easy for us. Too easy. My own internal data banks contain many times more information than all the material books ever created by anyone anywhere. High-capacity high-speed data banks are great, but they are a double-edged sword. You can access them rapidly – but they can be erased, corrupted, and counterfeited just as fast. One moment you have the sum total of all knowledge at your fingertips, and the next moment, nothing but random numbers, or worse, subtle lies. And even though we can store vast amounts of data, usefully searching and looking for connections between separate entries can take nearly forever even at the speeds we think at.

  Double-Wide founded his Physical Library centuries ago as a control. It contains only printed physical books, with all the information encoded in patterns of light and dark on thin pages of various durable substances. Many are in human-language words, some contain pictures and diagrams, others are visual encodings of gestalt data structures. T
he library occupies a space of about one-tenth of a cubic kilometer, packed with physical books. The data contained in the library is tiny, not even a percent of what my own nearly-obsolete systems hold. But the information contained in the library is precious: enough to recreate our entire civilization from scratch, if need be.

  The physical library cannot be hacked, or bulk-erased, or accidentally destroyed by a minor glitch in a software algorithm or an unlucky hit by some stray cosmic rays. The discipline needed to compress our knowledge to this level has resulted in a parallel electronic database that is small, easy to upload, and easy to search.

  The physical library is also resistant to tampering in a way that no electronic library could ever be. Imagine that a piece of data is stored as the pattern of bits in a circuit:

  00111001111

  Those bits could have been set a thousand years ago. Or they could have been altered in the last second. Electrons have no hair; one looks just like another. But now imagine that this data is encoded as a pattern of ink on paper. It cannot be remotely altered. A physical agent would have to change the physical arrangement of the ink molecules. But the ink and the paper have complex patterns of trace elements and isotope ratios. The weave of the paper fibers, the structure of the cell walls of the trees used to make it, the remains of micro-organisms embedded in the book from the time of its construction; matching this perfectly in altered and original sections is difficult if not impossible.

  So far as we know the universe does not care what we do, but it can be fun to anthropomorphize. The Universe acts as if it hates order, and whenever order arises it sends its invincible attack dog Entropy out to tear it down. As technology develops the ability to store petabyes and more in compact high-speed devices, the Universe seems to take it personally. It gets pissed off, and Entropy attacks in a thousand different ways. We make multiple copies of our data, we use the most sophisticated error-detection and correction algorithms, but that just seems to make the Universe even angrier, and bit-rot and data corruption continues to plague us.