|-> UNIT MISSION
|-> MISSION UPDATE
|-> SCOUT
|-> REPORT
|-> BODYGUARD
I seem to have acquired a new recruit. I’m not sure what the “bodyguard” part means though. Does it expect me to guard it? Or is it offering to guard me? The little cube doesn’t look very formidable, but perhaps I could use it as a blunt instrument and bludgeon the enemy. That would fit the definition, though perhaps not the spirit, of the term “bodyguard.” I don’t want to waste the time finding out so I head off down the tunnel.
My drones trot stiffly alongside me, and the little Office Copier cube follows behind on its small rubber wheels. I notice that it has a tiny sticker on its lower left rear corner that says “Lower Left Rear Corner.” Why not?
The tunnel is featureless and doesn’t seem to have been used in a long time. There are no side doors or other entrances that I can detect, nor any active power systems. The tunnel curves gently so that I can’t see more than about 100 meters ahead. We travel another 10 kilometers or so, and I am thinking of heading back to my main self. There’s no point in scouting ahead if you don’t report your findings. If I were a real combat system I would have micro-remotes that I could send messages on, but it’s just me and the two drones, and they don’t have the brains to make it back on their own.
Just as I am about to give up the tunnel ends in a cave-in. From the pattern of dust and debris I conclude that it’s probably recent: possibly a consequence of a large fusion bomb going off up above on the surface. A fissure has opened off to the side: I can see light on the other side, and bits of machinery.
I am tempted to investigate, but realize that I have no way of leaving a message or report. If only I had a recording or signals device. I realize that I am a moron: of course I have a way of leaving a message! I take control of one of the repair drones and have it quietly burn a message in the tunnel wall:
***** ATTENTION CRL345BY-44 “OLD GUY” *****
Hi there! It’s me, your trusty Amelia Earhart remote. I made it this far (obviously). I encountered the wreckage of Office Copier Military Observer a while back. It had this little cube version of itself inside that is currently tagging along with me. Otherwise nothing of note in the tunnel, except for this fissure that I am going to investigate. Thought I’d leave a note in case I don’t make it back. Bye. O.G. (A.E.)
Duty attended to, I work to traverse the fissure. The floor is angled and rough, and I have to carry the little Office Copier cube through. On the other side is a hemispherical chamber about 50 meters across and 25 high. The walls are smooth and curved, and glow with a soft pearly light. Here and there are bumpy protuberances like shiny barnacles. There is a pile of something nasty that looks like gristle over on one side. This place doesn’t look like anything else that I have seen on this planet. It’s less functional, with a weird aesthetic that grates on the mind as only the truly alien can.
There is a large blast door inset into the floor. Unlike the rest of the room it is plain and utilitarian: a polished metal slab six meters square. It’s closed. I walk over to it; the echoes in the room are strange and disorienting. I know something of Amok control systems, although this remote does not have space for the full database. At first the slab seems featureless, but on closer inspection, there is a slightly raised panel to one side. It has access ports that resemble what I have on file about the Amok, but it’s not an exact match. I summon one of the drones over and we try and puzzle it out. It sticks electrical and optical probes into oddly-shaped sockets. I get some promising responses, but the door remains closed.
The little Office Copier cube rolls over and watches for a while, motionless. I continue my efforts to work the control systems of the blast door, but past my initial successes I keep hitting one dead end after another. If my main self were here I would likely have better luck, but it’s just me and I’m getting nowhere. The little cube opens a tiny hatch in its side, and sticks out a standard data port connector. We both hail from the same root civilization; it’s not surprising that we should still use similar connectors. I plug it into the drone, and give the cube access to its sensor probes. For a while nothing happens, then the door starts to slide off to one side. The door moves slowly, silently, and with no vibration, uncovering a circular hole.
The cube retracts its data port connector and closes its hatch. I lean over the edge of the hole and peer down. The passage falls away farther than I can see. The walls are an organic-looking lattice-work, like the trabeculae on the inside of a bone. I have a drone extrude some cables, and rig a harness so that I can carry the little cube. Before I go I leave another message burned in the floor:
***** ATTENTION O.G. *****
Went down the rabbit hole with two drones and a little cube. Wish us luck.
O.G. (A.E.)
We climb down the lattice-work on the sides of the vertical hole. It offers a decent grip. The repair drones are spider-like and good at climbing. I’m doing alright as well but I hope this tunnel doesn’t go down too far. This chassis was not made for heavy use and eventually I’m going to wear out the joints.
Time passes, and we continue our descent. The temperature starts to cool off, which is strange, it should get hotter the deeper we get. There must be some pretty impressive heat-transfer technology going on here. There are no obvious side-tunnels or ledges, just the one vertical tunnel. But after a while I see something at the bottom, at first it’s just a difference of the light, but as we continue our downwards progress I being to resolve details. Eventually we reach the bottom, and there is another chamber like the one above with a large metal blast door. Unlike the one at the top of the shaft, this one is half open and covered with dust.
Probably this shaft has been abandoned, or forgotten. Or perhaps the aliens just like their blast doors half-open, and they sprinkle it with ritual dust every day. You can go crazy trying to think like an alien, but my guess is still that this is a forgotten entrance.
Below the door are some cramped spaces, which remind me of the backstage of a theater. I unharness the little cube and it rolls away on its own wheels. The floor is dusty, and random bits of unidentifiable machinery are scattered here and there. The wall on one side is translucent, there appears to be something on the other side but I can’t find any doors. I have a drone cut a small circular hole for us, and we crawl through.
It’s like a garden. Things like trees and bushes sprout in ordered ranks, odd shapes that could have been sculptures – or machinery, or data archives, or monuments, or anything else – are positioned in ordered rows. The light is soft and tends to shift with a slow rhythm.
It is a truism that the closer you get to the heart of an alien civilization, the weirder things get. Consider a city on old Earth. In the middle of nowhere one encounters a road, a pipeline, and some electrical transmission towers. These are simple structures whose function is plainly evident to any sentience. Now you move into the city, and what is an alien sentience evolved from slime molds to make of a cemetery, a plaza bordered by flags, or a crystal chandelier in an Italian restaurant? Things become more tied to the inner desires and esthetics of the culture, and these do not readily translate between species. I am definitely getting close to the center of something.
There is a motion in the distance: something is coming. It’s coming fast. It’s on us. Now this is something I can recognize: it’s a heavy combat unit. It smashes one of my drones with a cannon shot. I try to run but it’s too fast: it catches me in a tangle of sticky rods that it extruded from one side. I tell my remaining remote to hide, but it’s too slow: the enemy unit blasts it apart. It pivots 180 degrees and then races back the way it came: I estimate its speed at 200 kilometers per hour, impressive in such close quarters.
At this speed the surroundings are little better than a blur. We flash past arches and doors so fast that I barely have time to see them. The combat unit decelerates, and I see that we are in a chamber whose floor is divided up into reg
ular hexagonal wells. Each well contains a pulsing yellow mass that reminds me of a fungus. Fine wires descend from the ceiling and enter each mass. The combat unit fastens me to a wall with some heavy cables, and then makes its sticky rods unsticky, and retracts them into its body. It then pivots and races off and is gone.
Captured by aliens. That’s not a good thing to be. Time to self-destruct. I activate my self-destruct. It does not operate. Uh oh. I try again. Nothing. Next option: self-erasure. I set up a command to erase my data-space, leaving nothing behind but random bits. Here goes. Wait, I’m still here? That’s not the plan.
I run diagnostics, but this unit has only a limited ability in that regards. I think that the Amok combat unit has somehow blocked my self destruct/self erasure abilities. I didn’t know that they could do that. I can, however, erase some data of importance, which I do. But my core thought routines I can’t touch.
One of the yellow masses starts to extrude something from an orifice. It has the shape of a human being, but too thin, like a Giacometti sculpture, and jointed wrong. It’s covered in yellow slime. It has lidless yellow eyes rimmed with thick mucus. It looks at me. It walks over and attaches various tendrils that sprout from the wall onto my head and chest. I can feel them worming their way into my circuits. It’s not a good feeling.
Then it gets worse. I feel pain. I feel joy. I feel nausea. Nausea? I have never felt nausea before. I’m a cybertank. Why would I feel nausea? How can I feel nausea? I don’t like it.
Somehow this thing is mapping my mental space. Even though I am not a human being, my core psyche is human, and in principle any subjective feeling that a human can have I can as well. Now I itch. This is another novel experience that I could well have done without. This goes on for what seems like forever, but is probably only 20 minutes. I envy the human beings the ability to lose their minds.
The tendrils connecting me to the wall are cut away, and I am no longer under the mental control of the Amok thought probes. Then the heavy cables fastening me down are sliced off, and I am free. It’s the little Office Copier cube. It must have followed me here. From an inconspicuous little bump on its surface it can project a thin but surprisingly powerful cutting beam. Well, well. “Bodyguard,” indeed.
The heavy Amok combat unit barrels into the chamber. The little cube probes for weak points with its cutting beam, and is then blown apart by the Amok units’ cannon. Damn, all for nothing. The Amok unit turns, pauses, and then falls over and partially explodes. Hmm. Not for nothing after all.
The slimy yellowish humanoid stares at me. There is a heavy metal rod that fell off the dead Amok combat unit. I pick it up, and methodically bash the creature into pulp. I don’t think that it suffered as much as I did, but I enjoy myself just the same. Then I turn to the vats of yellow fungus. Maybe they are just raw materials, and maybe they are something more. Don’t know, but right now I just want to destroy something. So I move from vat to vat, ripping the silver wires out and stirring them up with the metal rod. They have some sort of spongey internal structure which my stirring destroys. They spasm and ripple when I do this. I get them all.
My power cells are nearly exhausted, and my joints are starting to wobble. On top of this I am having trouble thinking clearly: the Amok mind probes must have damaged me more than I had realized. I sit down next to the corpse of the little Office Copier cube and wait for whatever happens next. I notice a small sheet of white material near the remains of the cube. It has writing on it, in English, of all things:
-> UNIT FINAL STATUS
|-> UNIT MISSION
|-> MISSION STATUS
|-> SCOUT: COMPLETED
|-> REPORT: PENDING
|-> BODYGUARD: COMPLETED
-> MISC: PLEASURE IS TO SERVE
It must have printed it out just as it was being destroyed. I’m not sure about that last part. Office Copiers are not mindless computers, they have their own hopes and dreams, but they don’t translate into our way of thinking. Maybe it just printed it out for my benefit based on an abstract understanding of my psychology. But if it did something for my benefit, that makes it real. Maybe this one time our two orders of sentience did share a connection other than brute pragmatism. Or maybe it was a random glitch from a dying mind, or was intended to mean something else entirely. I’ll never know.
I learned later that the Amok forces on the main planet all lost central control at the same time. The subsidiary units were still functional and capable of autonomous operations, but without an overall strategy it was fairly easy to defeat them. I work on freeing myself from the collapsed tunnel. I enlarge the hole that I sent the Earhart remote through and send some newly-constructed medium combat remotes through, this time trailing a fiber-optic cable so we can stay in touch. I read the messages that I left for myself written on the tunnel wall, and follow the hole down to the weird alien garden.
I encounter my damaged Earhart remote on the floor of a chamber where hexagonal vats of dying yellow fungus are slowly putrefying. There is a destroyed heavy Amok combat unit, and some other wreckage that appears to have come from an Office Copier. I pick up my damaged remote in the arms of the medium combat unit, and link to its mind. I recoil in shock: this part of me has been seriously traumatized. Fortunately I have far more computational resources than this little humanoid remote: I cleanse it of damage, and take it back into myself. I am whole again, and sane, and I understand.
Bob was killed in the chaos of the battle with the Amok tank-killers. Wiffle-Bat survived but his chassis was a total loss, and he elected to be rebuilt into a new Spirit class. Skew was faster than the rest of us and made it into a side tunnel well before Double-Wide fired his main weapon. Running loose behind enemy lines, dodging from tunnel to tunnel, he did enormous damage to the enemy. Double-Wide also survived, even the shock of firing his main gun underground couldn’t get through his armor. He plowed though the molten wreckage of the Amok tank killers, and then burned his way though several more chambers, and then tunneled his way back to the surface where he rejoined our forces.
And it only took six months to figure out how to get him up off the planet this time. He won the bet, but I still claim a moral victory.
4. Don’t Touch that Dwarf, Hand me the Plasma Cannon!
“Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” J.B.S. Haldane, 1927-1964.
Some theorists tell us that our own universe is just a tiny part of existence. That some place else, are realities with rules so different that even abstract contemplation of them requires a transcendent intelligence. Other realities have the same core logic as ours, but a different number of dimensions, or time that flows differently. We can only consider such potentialities second-hand through the intellectual crutch of higher mathematics.
Moving closer to us are realities with the same three gross spatial dimensions and time, but the physical constants are different: there is no stable matter, or everything is crushed in heat and light. Closer still are realities that are exactly like ours but some chance quantum effect changed history: the dinosaurs evolved intelligence, Adolph Hitler conquered the world, Milton Friedman was not an asshole. But now back up a bit to realities that are close enough that we could survive there, but the rules are a just a tiny bit different.
We have no way of accessing these alternate realities, if in fact they do exist. Science, as we understand it, yields no traction here. However, science is not guaranteed to answer all questions. In particular: science can only study phenomena that are repeatable. I drop this rock, it falls. I drop it again, it falls: a third time: it falls. Conclusion: if I drop a rock, it falls. But what if some parts of nature are not repeatable? If there are phenomena that only happen now and then, with no predictable pattern? The universe comes with no guarantees that such things could not occur. Many scholars have expressed amazement that so much of the universe is predictable. But not all of it has to be. If there are alien species that have deve
loped the logic to handle non-repeatable phenomena, they are not sharing their insights with us.
I have been around for a long time. I have seen quite a bit. I have never experienced anything that did not fit our view of reality. There are still a few details to figure out, but what we see is basically all that there is. I thought in my arrogance that no big surprises awaited.
In the 19th century many eminent humans concluded that they understood all the basic laws of nature, that everything worth inventing had been invented, and that the great goal of science to understand the world was completed. Yeah, right.
It started out with me on the main Amok planet that we had so recently conquered. I was helping with the cleanup, sorting out all the wreckage, recycling broken bits of Amok machinery into raw materials that we can use, blowing up unexploded ordinance and sleeper mines, things like that.
Wiffle-Bat is up on the surface with me. His body is wrecked and he’s waiting for a rebuild, but his mind is still active and he is participating remotely in the investigation of the lower reaches of the Amok tunnel system that I had uncovered.
“This is amazing,” said Wiffle-Bat. He sends me a link to an explorer team deep below us. “It’s an entire culture. Organic, like I thought.”
Indeed. You certainly called it.
“If only someone hadn’t pureed the controlling intelligences. Can you imagine what we could have learned from them?”
I think I deserve some credit for saving the collective shiny metal posteriors of several hundred cybertanks. Also, I plead temporary insanity by reason of being in a remote that had limited intellectual capacity and was brain damaged to boot.
“But capturing them would have been the intelligence coup of the millennia! Both in terms of pure research, and in figuring out how to fight them. Understanding the core psychology and motivations of your enemy is the single greatest weapon you can have: it’s why all the aliens we meet guard their privacy with such neurotic vigor. “
The Chronicles of Old Guy (Volume 1) (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 10