“An interesting perspective. But from what you say, I and my people are the closest things left to human beings. Shouldn’t you obey us? Or serve us? Isn’t that your programming?”
Not a chance. First, you are not a human being. And second, I am not programmed to obey anyone, including any human being. We might provide assistance if you ask nicely, or we might not. I will have to put that to my peers.
“That’s ridiculous. You mean that such a powerful weapon system as yourself was created with no controls? No requirements that you obey lawful commands from a human? No prohibition against harming a human? Frankly, I am skeptical about that.”
Others have been surprised by this as well. But I assure you that it is true. You can embed command codes in a non-sentient computer, but trying to do that in a sentient being inevitably creates neuroses and psychoses. Our sentience made us much more effective defenders than any unthinking machine, but it also meant giving up absolute control. On the other hand, it has the advantage that an enemy could not turn us against humanity just by stealing our codes.
“But what assurance did the humans have that you would not turn against them?”
Our minds were created based on a human psyche template. We think like humans, we enjoy the company of humans, we identify with them. Our basic personality types were set as stable and balanced, slow to anger but implacable in defending those that we hold dear. We fought for the humans not because of some base programming, but because it was our nature. Nonetheless, we always had a choice.
“It must have taken a great deal of arrogance to create weapons of such power and then give them irrevocable free will. What if you had judged humanity unworthy?”
Ah, now that is a truly interesting question. There was a lot of discussion about that amongst the humans of that time, and it did lead to some unforeseen consequences. Well, unforeseen by some, but that’s another story. Ultimately I think that the humans responsible for creating us had confidence in themselves, and a generosity of spirit. They did not desire slaves but comrades. It forged a bond between us. Any of us would have gladly sacrificed themselves to save a human – and many of us did. Later on, some humans sacrificed themselves to save some of us. You are fortunate that you did not keep humans as slaves. You might have seen my less diplomatic side.
At this point Mondocat had fallen asleep next to me. Her normal sleeping posture is very un-feline: she lies on the floor perfectly straight with all of her rear legs tucked in, her head bowed low with both front legs protecting it from the sides. It looks odd but it’s an almost flawless defensive position and I know from experience that if threatened she can explode out in almost any direction, but for now she seems relaxed. The other vampires have cautiously slunk back into the room, and hang back along the walls listening to King Stephan and I chat. I sip some more water, and Stephan raises an eyebrow.
“You drink water? I thought that you were supposed to be a machine.”
This android uses water for cooling, for lubrication, and to keep the eyes and mouth moist. The eyes are the hardest part of a humanoid android to get right: if they dry out they make me look like a doll. I could have built this frame with a filler pipe sticking out of the side, but that would be inelegant. And, this gives me an excuse to be social.
He nodded. “And now that you have discovered us, and are apparently neither going to obey us or, hopefully, destroy us, what will you do next? What is our fate to be?”
A good question. In the short run, nothing. I am sending reports back to my peers, and I imagine that there will be some considerable debate. There will be a committee, and most likely, several sub-committees. You should feel honored. Given the speed of light I expect that it will be quite a few years until any decision is arrived at. My guess is that the consensus will be to do nothing, but you never know. In the meantime I will continue to explore the planet. I will stay out of your way, but will be happy to converse with any of you that feel like it.
“And your pet - that is, your ‘camp follower’?”
I am never completely sure about Mondocat, but she generally follows my lead. If you neither threaten her, nor make a big show of running away and acting like prey, I think that she will leave you alone. I will have her shadowed and drive her away if she does try and attack any of you. You will lose some pigs, but if that becomes a problem I will make restitution. She will leave when I leave and then you will not have to worry about her again.
That seemed to kill the conversation. Or at least, it ended. There was a lot of wistful staring into wine glasses. I was about to leave, when King Stephan looked up and asked: “Can you turn me back?”
Your pardon? Back into what?
“Back into a human. Can you do that? The virus turned me from a human into a vampire. Surely it must be possible to reverse the process?”
And why should you want that? You are effectively immortal, and you have everything that you need. If you think that being turned into a human will give you any power over me or my kind, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. What could you hope to gain?
“It’s hard to say. When I made the transformation I was so eager to live forever, greedy for the strength and speed and acuity that the virus gave me. And for a long time, it was good. I watched many of my friends and family decay into senility and rot and death, and I thought: what chumps, what losers, they have lost it all and I still continue, strong and vital. But maybe not. They left behind descendants; even the ones without children themselves were part of a flow that led to greater things, including things like yourself. While I have remained stuck as myself for longer then even you – ‘Old Guy’? I’m not impressed! – have been around. So I am wondering. Could you change me back?”
Now that is the most interesting question that I have been asked in a very long time. Several things come to mind. First, even if I could change you back, it does not mean that I would. Second, if I did change you back, it does not mean that I would obey you or that you would have any place at all amongst me or my kind. And thirdly, I have no idea if, in fact, I can do such a thing. However, we could try and find out if it is possible.
King Stephan suggests that my main hull drive to his castle. I ask if he really wants a new four-lane highway scoured into the landscape. We decide to go from the castle to my main hull. I fly a heavy combat remote over, and my Shikibu android jumps on board. Stephan climbs up more cautiously. I raise the remote to an altitude of about one kilometer and fly back to my main self. The Shikibu android stands nonchalant on the surface of the remote, wind whipping past his black suit, while King Stephan huddles down and clings for dear life to a protruding antenna. I am cheating of course. The android has no sense of self-preservation, and in any event it is a part of me, just like the combat remote – there is no danger of the android falling off. It’s like if your right foot steps forward, you just know that your left will keep your balance. I don’t mind a little one-upmanship, now and then.
It is night, but the light from the planets’ single moon is bright. Far below I see Mondocat racing along after us across the forest floor. She has a grace that I never tire of watching. I am not moving so fast that we can’t talk over the wind. We move over the dead area between the two competing biomes.
How fast is the transitional zone spreading?
“Hard to say, sometimes the Terran life seems to take off, and at others it seems to retreat. Perhaps it averages an advance of ten meters a year, but we haven’t bothered measuring it accurately. Sometimes we’ll have the handy-bots make some flame-throwers, we will sterilize a strip of the native life and seed it with our own, just to speed the process up a bit. The important thing is getting the soil to take. One of us who is interested in such things says that the planet will be completely Terran in about 20,000 years, but he could be wrong.”
Did you know the real Herman Shikibu?
“I met him, once or twice, but only in passing and as part of a group. That was before he became well known, and I did not t
hink anything of it at the time. Later on I knew of him more specifically. We were enemies I suppose but it was more like we were in opposite camps than direct antagonists. By all accounts he was an extremely annoying person to be around, but he could never be bought or co-opted. That was his doom, as I suppose you know. He threw his life away for pointless honor and symbolism. You have an interesting taste in heroes.”
But his example inspired others.
“Perhaps. Perhaps it would all have happened anyhow. What is certain is that he gave up a life of comfort, and condemned those closest to him to poverty and worse, and he himself achieved nothing. I, for one, am not impressed.”
We arrive at my main hull, and the vampire King Stephan faces me directly. We cybertanks do a lot of business via remote, but there are advantages to a face-to-face encounter. In particular: I have ultra high-resolution sensors built into my hull that it would be impossible to put into a remote. There isn’t enough signal bandwidth to transmit these signals long distances so they need a direct physical connection to high-speed data busses.
I uncage my high-resolution sensors and look at the vampire King Stephan. I resolve his entire surface down to the micron level. I see his skin pores, and perform spectrographic analysis on the synthetic hair of his wig and eyebrows. I do more. I use adaptive optics and other tricks to create detailed three-dimensional maps of the rear of his eyes. The back of the eyes have the neural retina, which is a specialized part of the brain. I combine this information with my genetic analysis to extrapolate what the vampire virus has done to his entire nervous system.
And more: I use manipulations of magnetic and electric fields to image the entirety of his anatomy, inside and out. I map the patterns of his brain activations and neural connections. When a cybertank looks at you close-range, you are really and truly looked at. I see that much of what he told me was true. The virus did not add, but only subtracted. All extraneous structures and metabolic pathways not dedicated to catching humans and feeding on blood have been edited out.
This included several major brain structures. For all of his surface charm, this King Stephan is a sociopath. He no longer has the neural circuitry that would allow him to empathize with another. He can pretend to, convincingly, but he can’t do it. Also creativity, imagination, even his ability to dream; these exist still but only as fragments of memories of what the real man used to be capable of.
Giuseppe Vargas is active in my dataspace, and is in some sense watching over my shoulder. He is openly contemptuous. “I heard rumors of something funny like this, but they must have left before I acquired real power. He fancies himself a predator, but predators are more complex and capable than their prey, not simpler. He should be classified as a parasite. He is only a tapeworm walking on two legs, incapable of creation or advance. You should let Mondocat run free. She can reproduce asexually if she wants to. Let these pathetic wanna-be vampires spend their lives as prey, hiding from a real predator.”
I am almost tempted. I could condemn these creatures to what they had inflicted on the human race; hiding from something more powerful than themselves, feeling the terror of what it means to be prey. It would be ironic. But also pointless. So I think that I’ll pass. Besides, I am still on probation. I need to be a good little cybertank and report back to my peers and not do something rash or stupid until I get clear instructions from the appropriate committee to do something rash or stupid.
I begin to see how the vampire virus could have evolved. It must have started out like rabies. The rabies virus infects the mind of its host, making it go crazy, biting and clawing at others trying to spread the virus in the short time before the host dies. But what if something like rabies took a different evolutionary path, and didn’t kill the host? In time, it might select for a transformation that would make the host stronger, and live longer; a tough and smart reservoir of the virus pruned of everything nonessential to the task of biting a human and spreading itself. It could have taken over completely, and integrated itself into the human genome the same way that mitochondria are now a part of every eukaryotic cell.
But the vampires were intelligent, and selfish, and wanted to the keep the advantages to themselves. Offshoots of the virus that caused indiscriminate biting would have been weeded out by the vampires themselves. So the virus got stuck in a dead end, and now lives on only in these few living fossils.
I consider the Vargas simulation, and think back about the real human on whom it is based. These vampires would be more than a match for a pre-exodus human, but Vargas could have broken one of them in half without breaking a sweat. Not just physical, but also mental and spiritual vigor: if Vargas and his kind had been stuck here for a few thousand years, there would be more than the odd half-ruined mock castle with people play-acting roles that had become stale before humans had first landed on the moon. Even in my knowledge base, the humans had advanced well beyond Vargas. Perhaps even farther than that, but I have no hard data there.
I have scanned you in detail. For better or worse I cannot turn you back into a human.
King Stephan is annoyed. “But why not? The virus turned me into this. Why can’t it be reversed? A bronze sword can be hammered into a plow-shear, and a plow-shear can be hammered into a sword. Surely, with enough technical skill, all things can be reversed?”
At one level of course that is correct, but that depends on what you mean by reversed. For example: I could kill you, and reduce your body to a vat of chemicals. I could then use those chemicals to clone a new human being. Would you consider that acceptable?”
“No, certainly not. I would be dead, and the new human would not be me. That would be no solution at all.”
Indeed. So perhaps you get my point. The virus edited you. It removed things. Including certain brain structures. Information was destroyed. Turning your present body into a human would involve sufficiently radical reconstructions that it would not be far removed from my example of rendering you down into chemicals.
If you take a crystal vase, and shatter it into a thousand parts, you can’t just glue the bits together. To seamlessly heal all the fractures in the glass so that no flaw remains is beyond the technical skill of my civilization. Not every process can be reversed; sometimes you have to start over with a new vase. You are what you are. That’s it.
“Oh well. I had to ask. Life is not so bad here. We have our parties, and our politics. We are forever jockeying for position. I have been deposed as king twice so far – in bloodless coups, that’s kind of a joke, don’t you think? - and spent centuries making deals and working my way back up. It passes the time. And we do have really good sex. So I should just count my blessings, but I would have liked the option of going back, if I could.”
He turned and began to walk back toward the Terran zone, and his tacky 16th century castle, and his empty politics, and endless parties and liaisons with the same people he had been doing it with for coming up on several millennia. “You and your kind should feel free to drop by and chat, whenever you feel like it. We have few visitors, and perhaps we can tell you some things about the old days that never made it into the official records.”
Would you like a ride back?
“No thanks, I’ll show myself out.”
7. Deus Ex Humana
A deus ex machina Latin: "god out of the machine" is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object. Wikipedia, circa 2012.
The King sits in the innermost chamber of his keep and awaits his end. The chamber is three meters wide, ten meters long, with a low vaulted ceiling. The floors, walls and ceiling are all stone. There are no windows and only a single heavy iron door at one narrow end. There is a small wooden table on which sits a solitary lit candle. The gloom and the dark stone swallow up the candle-light so that the far reaches of the chamber are hardly visible.
Sitting at the lone chair near the table is the King. He
once commanded armies, and fought a powerful host to a standstill. Then a sneak attack; the enemy infiltrated agents that killed his generals and lieutenants, and cut him off from his command. He fled through the grounds of his castle, hardly one step ahead of the assassins that pursued him, and slammed and bolted the first door with hardly a second for slack.
There were several more doors, but these he entered and locked behind him at his leisure. Now he was here, his last redoubt deep in the heart of the castle. Secure, for the moment, but impotent, and with nothing to do but watch the last candle burn down and wait for his enemies to capture him.
Though trapped, he is still free in a sense: free to pace the chamber, free in his own body, free to think his own thoughts. When the forces of the enemy finally break in, that will change. If he lets them, they will bind him with chains, torture him, and break his will and his mind. So the King has a cup of poison, and a sharp blade; he will not allow that to occur. He should end his life now, and be certain, but there is always the chance of some miracle. Even a few moments of peace watching the candle flame are worth savoring. But if he waits too long and the last door breaks open, they might overpower him too quickly and steal from him even the choice of ending his own life.
Somewhere far from here are strong forces still loyal to him, more than enough to deal with these few assaulting his chambers, but he cannot contact them. He is like a powerful warrior whose spine has been cut: the strength is there, but without the means of communicating orders to the strength it might as well not exist.
He can hear his enemies in the distance hammering away at one of the many doors guarding this place. The doors are the strongest that his artisans could construct, and the enemy will have to work very hard to break them all down, but the enemy is also strong, and has time and determination.
In truth, there is no King, no castle, no stone keep. There are only my primary data cores, cut off and isolated and under constant info-attack from the forces of the alien Yllg. It simply helps to pass the time, in my current dark and catatonic state, to think of parallels and analogies to what has befallen me.
The Chronicles of Old Guy (Volume 1) (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 19