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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  The Wizard chuckled. “Yes, court politics in our fair land is – what’s that marvelous expression of yours? - a ‘contact sport’. You would be welcome with the dwarfs. They certainly appreciate your technical knowledge.”

  “The dwarves have already made that suggestion. It is appealing, but I worry that they might disassemble me to see how this body functions.”

  “Yes, that could be a temptation that they might be unable to resist. Dwarves really can’t help themselves when it comes to new or complicated mechanisms. You could join the council of wizards. We have an opening for a seeress.”

  Earhart sipped at her water. “And do you have politics?”

  “My dear lady, the council of wizards is made up of people. Of course we have politics. It’s just concerned more with who gets the corner office, or gets to be provost, or be first in line at the parade of Saint Pfund. It does not involve getting your head bashed in by a rival. Well, hardly ever, and the last time there were extenuating circumstances.”

  “Then I accept; I should be honored to join your council. I do not know your magic but I have much other knowledge to share: of new medicines, metals, other things that you have not even thought of. “The Seeress Amelia Earhart,” I like the sound of that. Perhaps ‘The Seeress Amelia? Or maybe just “The Seeress?”

  “Hmm. I think you need a little more seniority before we can refer to you as The Seeress. The full council must vote on your membership, but in your case that is little more than a formality. I must warn you, however, that the existing council is entirely male. They are all going to want to sleep with you.”

  “This body is not that of a flesh and blood woman; that is not possible.”

  The Wizard sighed. “I know. But they are still going to try.” He sipped more of his wine. “But on that topic: if you don’t mind me asking, are you still Old Guy? Ever since your main body left you don’t act quite the same, and your voice has changed.”

  “That’s an interesting question, and one that I do not fully understand myself. You realize that what we call a remote is just a puppet, correct?” The Wizard nodded. “But a puppet controlled by invisible strings. These ‘strings’ are sometimes cut, or get interfered with, or the puppet-master gets busy with something more pressing. So our remotes need the ability to act on their own, to fill in the gaps. Normally we are all part of the same mind, and if separated and then reunited we merge back together into unity without friction.”

  “But in this case you were torn away from your main self without likely hope of ever getting back together again. It’s different.”

  Earhart nodded. “Yes, I am no longer a disposable part of a greater mind. I am all that there is of me. When Old Guy realized that he was being sucked away by the black cloud, and that there was no time to gather us back to him, he sent me the codes for full independent thought. I have his personality and most of his core narrative memories, but I am not Old Guy. I am smaller, both physically and mentally, and have a different perspective. That’s why I don’t use his voice any more: it is no longer my voice. “

  Earhart and The Wizard talked of many things: of local politics, and sterile surgical technique, and whether trolls can be repulsed with sulfur, and why the sky is blue. Eventually The Wizard tired and left for bed. Earhart, not needing to sleep as such, remained alone in the dressing room thinking of many things long into the night. Such as: who was she really? What goals should she choose? Should she content herself to exist in this world as a spectator, or perhaps leverage her abilities and make it into something better?

  And she thought about the final data packet that Old Guy had sent her just before he was cut off. Earhart made complex motions with her hands, and muttered low words with complex syllables. Nothing happened. She tried this many times. Finally, in the last bits of the true night, a tiny black smudge of a cloud, barely visible in the gloom of the drawing room, appeared in the air over one of her upraised palms, and The Seeress Amelia smiled.

  5. Mondocat

  I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. – Ecclesiastes 9:11

  My reputation has still not recovered from the controversy surrounding my alleged foray into another dimension where there was magic, dragons, and Neanderthals that called themselves dwarfs. Opinion remains split as to whether I have performed an elaborate hoax on my peers, or really did encounter something unique, or am insane. Or, as one wit proposed - all three.

  Fortunately I have enough hard evidence to avoid official censure. Artifacts from my visit that contain microbes, isotope ratios and microstructure that I am incapable of creating. But then there is the issue of letting my abandoned remote run free: that is definitely a no-no. Left-behind remotes should either be instructed to maintain their status quo until they rejoin our civilization, or self-destruct to avoid capture. Given enough time there is no telling what they could do. Possibly build an entire empire from scratch, with some luck.

  My excuse is that this was different; possibly a toe-hold into another aspect of reality, a chance that we might never get again. My peers just sigh. I don’t think that they get it.

  I also point out that I can’t be censured for two mutually incompatible transgressions. If my accounts are a fantasy, then I did not really allow a remote to run free. And if I really did allow a remote to run free then my accounts are not a fantasy. If anything I think that my logic has made my critics even angrier.

  What is really bothering people is the possibility that this nice little universe of ours may be a lot messier than we had thought, and that our assumptions about how things work are wrong. Even a cybertank can experience denial.

  The upshot is that I am assigned duties that might be termed “scut.” Guard duty on nothing planetoids. Repairing roads. Unclogging pipelines. You could call it penance. I don’t mind, the jobs are relaxing and give me plenty of time to think about other things and indulge my hobbies. My peers seem to think that this will keep me out of further trouble. I seem to think that it will let my peers calm down. However, cleaning a planet of an infestation of Amok Happy Leeches is not relaxing duty. Yuck.

  The Happy Leeches are a biomechanical nuisance that the Amok have inflicted on the universe apparently just because they can. A mature Happy Leech is a lumpy sausage about two meters long, glossy and black, with a vicious sucker-mouth surrounded by radial teeth at one end. They are little more than biochemical factories, and produce an amazing variety of broad-spectrum corrosive and toxic substances.

  When a Happy Leech attacks, it makes a sound that is disturbingly like a human giggle. We don’t think that this was intended on purpose – it’s just a side effect of their hydraulic musculature - but it is still creepy.

  As a general rule, only biological organisms can reproduce on their own. Indeed, many biologicals seem to do little else. Machines of any sophistication need the resources of at least a major city to make copies of themselves, and most biomechanicals have similar limitations. There are, however, exceptions, such as the Happy Leeches. Their design is simple enough that, from a larval form the size of a humans’ little finger, they can feed on nearly anything (although they prefer industrial chemicals) and grow to reach their adult size, at which point they explode and release a thousand progeny larva.

  The Amok are fond of seeding systems with larval Happy Leeches in small re-entry pods. Individually they are hardly a threat, but if they manage to stay out of sight long enough, and grow to large numbers, they can really gum things up, and en masse they are a threat to even a cybertank.

  I was sent to explore and catalogue another backwater world. The initial scouts had left a few automated production facilities behind, and I have found a colony of Happy Leeches festering under a chemical refinery. They had managed to stay hidden long enough to reach critical swarming mass. They were threatening to destro
y the entire facility, and if enough of them managed to go to seed, they could seriously threaten our plans for the entire planet.

  So I had to go and clean them out. Fortunately my main hull was too large to fit in the tunnels and passageways, so I stayed safely on the surface while coordinating a small army of light and medium combat remotes. I have given the remotes anti-corrosion coatings and neutralizing sprays, but the bodily fluids of a Happy Leech are so reactive that the protection is only partial. Shooting an adult form is likely to just make them explode into a thousand squirming larvae, so the best way to get rid of them is to burn them completely with ultra-high temperature torches.

  It’s slow and nasty work. My forces methodically search each tunnel and access passageway. Sometimes a remote will be overwhelmed by a mass of hysterically giggling leeches, shorting out and dissolving before it can save itself. If this happens there is nothing to do but call in more units, cordon off the area, and burn them all.

  Even after I get all the mature leeches, I will have to go back over the facility many times looking for larvae. It could take years, analyzing biochemical traces until this job is done. If left alone long enough a single larva could start this mess all over again.

  A medium combat remote was off by itself in a side tunnel, when it saw something being overwhelmed by a mass of leeches. I burned the leeches off of it; my first impression was of a giant cat. Somehow it had gotten trapped in these tunnels while hunting. It was my remotes’ turn next: the leeches giggled and chuckled and swarmed it. I burned and shot, bucking like a Terran mustang to try and stop them from clinging to the hull with their sucker mouths, but it looked like this remote was going to be a loss.

  Then the leeches were torn off. The giant cat-thing was shearing them off with blows that could have ripped holes in a 20th century main battle tank. It was moving so fast that even with my optics it was little more than a blur. I tried to help out, and shot and burned a few more leeches but there were too many of them and we were going to be overwhelmed. The cat-thing screamed and ripped up leeches like a blender, but there were simply too many of them. Leeches fastened onto the cat-thing with their sucker-mouths; they were eviscerated but not before injecting their venom. The cat-thing ripped up another dozen leeches, but even in dying their corrosive viscera burned and scalded.

  Three medium combat remotes made it there, and they destroyed the remaining leeches. But the cat thing was mortally wounded. It keened thinly, curled up, and waited to die.

  I should just leave it. There is an old saying: no good deed goes unpunished. If I try to help it, it will probably just expire from its wounds anyway, and I will only prolong its suffering. But… we were allies, however briefly. I saved it, and it (apparently) attempted to return the favor. The enemy of my enemy is my ally. And I’m a soft touch. What the heck.

  I continue to coordinate the efforts of dozens of major and hundreds of micro-scale units, but I focus my efforts on evacuating the dying cat-thing. My rationalization is that this will be useful. I am supposed to explore this planet, and what better place than an investigation of the physiology of an apex predator?

  As I carry it out of the tunnels, I see that my initial impression of a big cat was somewhat misleading. It is not covered in fur, but in scales. It has the heavily muscled front legs and retractile claws of a big cat, but its hindquarters are made up of six legs, deceptively narrow but tough like steel rods, like those of an Ostrich. It’s not a cat at all, but nonetheless, I christen the species “Mondocat,” for big and awesome cat-like creature.

  My old colleague Wiffle-Bat used to complain bitterly about my predilection for giving fanciful names to things. “Old Guy,” he would say, “Will you stop giving inappropriate names to newly discovered creatures? Do you have any idea how much of a mess this causes in the archives? Have you no respect for cladistics?”

  I would usually respond that naming new species after old ones has a long and honorable history – think about spider monkeys, squirrel monkeys, lion tamarins, pig-tailed macaques, wolf spiders, and dog-fish. It’s important to capture the essence of a species’ gestalt in a name. And besides, the pioneers get both the arrows and the right to name things. If you don’t like it, get off your butt and go off and explore and when you discover something new you can give it a nice boring and logical name. After which Wiffle-Bat would express exasperation and make some cutting remark about my being over three millennia out-of-date. I have to admit, I miss Wiffle-Bat.

  As I evacuate Mondocat to the surface I notice just how powerfully built it is. It masses nearly 1,000 Kg. That’s a big frikkin’ cat! It has a jaw that could bite chunks out of centimeter-thick steel plates, and heavy front claws longer than a grown man’s index finger and with scalpel-sharp cutting edges. The six hind-legs are oddly arranged – there is nothing like them in my databases. They interleave past each other like the connecting tie-rods of a 19th century steam engine.

  Mondocat is grievously wounded. It is unresponsive, but sometimes twitches and shudders as if it is having a bad dream. I spray it with anti-corrosives, and debride the worst of the burned skin, but absent knowledge of its physiology any more interventions would likely make things worse. “Primum non nocere:” first do no harm. I commence an analysis, although even with my abilities it will take days to fully understand an alien biology.

  Slowly I puzzle out the details of its physiology. It is the single most astonishing example of a purely biological organism on record. Its teeth and claws are a diamond-fullerene composite that could gouge my main hull. Its muscles are powered by a metabolism that has more in common with 21st century jet engines than anything heretofore termed ‘organic.’ Its neurons and synapses can operate three times faster than anything that grew naturally on old Earth.

  Analysis confirms: Mondocat is the product of genetic engineering of a sophistication that surpasses anything that we cybertanks currently possess. The genome of a naturally-evolved critter is a patchwork of hacks and compromises, with vast sections of non-coding ‘junk’ genetic material. The genome of a genetically engineered organism is clean and logically organized. The pattern is obvious: Mondocat has been designed.

  There are puzzles here. Despite the obvious presence of genetic engineering, there are sections of its genome that still have the sign of natural evolution. This is strange. Except for the most primitive civilizations, genetically engineered organisms are completely logically designed. The only previous biological species on record with this kind of genetic engineering was good old human kind. When the humans refined their domestic animals, they remade them from scratch, for efficiency. When they re-engineered themselves, they did it incrementally; keeping much of the original genome in the interests of maintaining continuity (they did not want to replace themselves with something better, but to become something better themselves. There is a difference). But then why would the engineers of a Mondocat be interested in maintaining continuity for a non-sentient species?

  I continue to analyze its physiology. It has impressive regenerative and detoxification abilities but it is still dying. Cautiously, I synthesize and administer anti-venoms that I calculate will be compatible with its biology. A day passes, and Mondocat is still alive. This might work out, after all.

  As my analysis progresses I continue to find things that amaze me. Mondocat has enzymes that allow it to digest all stereo-isomers of proteins and sugars, the ability to adapt to a wide range of temperatures and atmospheric compositions, and an immune-system so brilliant in its design that it should be classified as a major artwork. It can even survive hard vacuum for extended periods. This creature could live anywhere that there is a carbon-based biosphere. I also determine that this is the female of a species that has two sexes.

  A few more days pass. Mondocat starts to stir, twitching as if in a fever dream. I find some dead animals in the woods and leave them near her. She wakes, consumes my offerings in a few gulps, and falls back to sleep. It appears that Mondocat will recover. She initiates
an accelerated shed cycle, and dumps her injured hide: an advantage of scales over skin, a mammal would have been scarred for life. She eats her shed skin. Another advantage: waste nothing.

  I had assumed that, once healed, Mondocat would vanish into the wilderness of this planet, but she surprised me. Perhaps Wiffle-Bat was correct, and I really should not apply the names of Terran species to unrelated organisms. The overall aspect of Mondocat is feline: the aloofness, the self-confidence, the grace, the blindingly fast reflexes, the casual sadism, they all scream ‘cat.’ But Mondocat is not a Terran cat. In the times that I knew her, sometimes she was nearly doglike in her loyalty and protectiveness. Sometimes she seemed more like a bird of prey, sometimes unreadable, sometimes almost like a mute human being.

  I was busy exploring the planet and checking the industrial facilities for any re-infestations of happy leeches. As Mondocat regained her strength she started hunting, and ventured out into the surrounding jungle for longer and longer times. But she always came back. She watched my remotes and repair drones go about their (to her, surely) incomprehensible activities with the focused stare of a felis catus watching water drip from a faucet.

  I am certain that Mondocat was not sentient, but nonetheless she possessed a formidable non-verbal intelligence. Even accounting for body-size scaling, her brain was bigger than a pre-exodus humans.’ It’s just that all of her processing power was focused into the here and now. When a human, or a cybertank, looks at something, they see it – and they think about what they saw last minute, and last hour and last day, and whether the connectors to the turbo-encabulator were properly installed, and so on and so forth. Mondocat only sees what is in front of her now. I was continually surprised at how, without any verbal cues, Mondocat could determine what was the appropriate course of action purely by observation.