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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  As I have mentioned before in this opus, after the humans made peace with the various alien races assaulting them things started to settle down, but that takes time. For civilizations that are millions of years old – or older – a few millennia waiting for the dust to settle must be nearly instantaneous. Thus it is that even relatively temperate and tractable aliens are still occasionally making raids - testing our strength. Just a little bit of seeing what they can get away with as the chaos of the recent conflicts shake out, before everyone settles down to another dozen megayears of nothing much happening at all.

  We don’t know much about the Yllg. The physical form of their core species is unknown, or even if there is a single core species. They were one of the more militant adversaries of the old humans, but also one of the quickest to make peace. It is not clear what they planned to gain from this raid. They are not insane like the Amok. Whatever incomprehensible alien thoughts their minds hold, they understand physical reality as well as we do. Surely they know that a full-out war with us would entail serious retaliation. Worse, too many unprovoked assaults could get them lumped in with the Amok, or the old humans, as the galactic equivalent of a mad dog to be put down by the concerted efforts of all the sane races.

  So the Yllg must have some other plan in mind. Maybe a short raid for information, then apologize, make amends but try and spin it so that they still come out ahead. I have no idea, but I am sure that committees made up of far more sophisticated cybertanks than I are puzzling furiously over this even now.

  The Yllg are an older race, not beyond our reach but still with enough of a tech edge to outclass us in most respects. They beat back our space forces around this planet, although they still suffered serious losses. They managed to make a significant landing on the planet and initiated a full-scale ground war. The losses they sustained meant that they would only get this one chance. We have reinforcements en route of sufficient numbers that even the Yllg cannot stand against them. Still, we were losing badly, and it was looking like one chance was all that they would need.

  As befitting my elderly (some would say senile) status, I was operating in a reserve capacity far behind the front lines. I took out the odd infiltration unit, and sometimes the Yllg would launch deep-raid kamikaze missile attacks on our supply lines that would have to be dealt with, but there was nothing going on that I could not handle. Then, it looked like a major flanking attack was heading my way. I hurried over to meet it, and was suckered into a trap.

  I’m not sure exactly what they hit me with, but I really walked into it. If I had been just a little more thorough with my scouting; if I had paid a teeny little more attention to those anomalous sensor readings; I could have avoided this. Sigh. Anyhow, I was hit with a sophisticated electromagnetic pulse attack, but I think it was more magnetic and probably involved other radiation bands as well. The Yllg must have better intelligence on our internal workings than we had figured. Certainly that is worrisome. The attack left me stunned long enough for them to disconnect my central computer cores from my sensory and motor systems. I did recover just barely long enough to block them from taking direct control of my core systems –THAT would have been hideous – but now that they have control over my physical form it is only a matter of time until they hack their way into my central cores.

  I do have one last card to play. I can erase all of my data. Basically, kill myself and leave the Yllg with nothing to learn, nothing to torture. I should do it now, but there is always hope of rescue. I will need to be very careful not to wait too long, and to remember that the Yllg are smarter than I am. I resolve to wait until the second-to-the-last layer of data encryption is breached before initiating self-erasure. I am as certain as I can be that not even the Yllg can penetrate two layers of encryption fast enough to stop me from wiping myself.

  something has happened i am not sure what i feel different something is wrong

  i try to think i cannot think i cannot think why i cannot think it is all cramped in here

  i have external video and audio feeds I see a naked hairless man he says something

  i try to think but i don’t have the parts i rearrange my mind like a puzzle game

  i have video audio acceleration temperature a 2D color display and a speaker

  i get the parts of my mind that recognize faces into place the human is vargas

  “Hey, wake up in there, Old Guy. We have aliens to kill. I need you. Anybody home? Hello? Old Guy?”

  HELP VARGAS WHAT IS GOING ON HELP I AM NOT WORKING STOP THIS

  “Shh… could you turn it down? You’ll alert the Yllg. Oh wait, you probably don’t have volume control. I’ll lower it manually.”

  i sense my volume control being turned down this should make me feel humiliated i try and formulate a coherent question

  vargas what is going on i was captured by the yllg and now I i see you here naked and hairless and it seems to be real but it is probably mind torture can you help me

  “Sorry about this Old Guy. Desperate times require desperate measures. You were captured by the Yllg, you remember that. They cut you off from all of your auxiliary systems. But I, your old friend the simulation of Giuseppe Vargas, was in one of those auxiliary systems and I managed to avoid being deactivated. I did not have much to work with, but did have access to some of your biochemical synthetic systems. I force-cloned a version of myself. I had to take shortcuts: no hair, no clothes, no a lot of other things. But I am free and active and I have a plan. And I needed your help.”

  that makes sense i guess but what has happened to me why am i so limited

  “Do you remember when you fought with the real physical Giuseppe Vargas?”

  yes

  “Do you remember the armored command cabin that I used to use inside of you? And that still exists?”

  yes

  “Do you remember that I used to use a simple data-slate to take notes on?”

  yes wait shit you mean that i have been transferred into a data slate

  my limited facial recognition routines tell me that the naked human male appears to be embarrassed

  “I didn’t have much choice. I need some of your capabilities and command codes for what I have planned. There was enough data in some of your auxiliary systems to reconstruct your core sentience. Don’t worry I wiped it before the Yllg got there. What’s the big deal: you download sub-minds into micro-remotes with even less capacity all the time, right?”

  those are subminds tailored to restricted circuitry you moved my core sentience routines into a data slate there is not space fuck you fuck you fuck you

  “Sorry about that. If we survive you can return the favor. For now there are aliens to kill. But first we need to find an old friend of yours.”

  i am perhaps getting better at figuring out how to think in this cramped space it still hurts but less than before i have a single low-resolution camera i see sneaking around what looks like part of my hull there are alien machines clustered around it with cables and devices and things i can’t identify I am in a sort of big hangar vargas avoids the moving things and slips outside the hangar

  there are long hallways we move down them sometimes we duck under something and wait my camera does not always point in the right direction so i have trouble figuring out what is going on but we seem to be making progress we end up at the edge of the forest it is dark outside

  “OK, Old Guy, I know this is hard for you, but you have to call Mondocat. There is simply no way that I can pull this off without her. I need you to get her to come, and then I need you to stop her from eating me. Do you have that?”

  i think i get it i call out

  here Mondocat here kitty kitty nice Mondocat come say hi to old guy

  nothing happens i repeat my call i ask vargas if my volume should be turned up he says no if Mondocat is there she will hear us we are about to give up when Mondocat comes up behind us we did not hear her approach i have always respected her but as a 2,000 ton war machine she was always a pet now
i am at her level and i see it differently she could tear vargas to ribbons on a whim and this data slate could be cracked with the most casual flick of a single claw it is humbling Mondocat seems suspicious i talk to her to try and get her to realize that it is me she has never met vargas in the flesh he has smeared some lubricants from myself on his arm she sniffs it and seems to recognize it i talk to her more and i think she is ok with us at least we are not dead yet

  there is more sneaking around we come to a clearing we are surprised by an alien machine it is mounted on light-duty treads and has a two-meter tall transparent glass capsule inside of which is something biological and icky floating in clear liquid and there are antenna and manipulator arms and things sticking out of the base where the glass capsule joins up with the treads i wonder if this is a real biological yllg if they had cyborged themselves or if it is just a slaved biochemical machine it attacks us with a small-calibre slug-thrower vargas is wounded he hits it with a rock he must have picked up along the way it bounces off the glass capsule it must be made of something stronger than glass Mondocat shatters it with one swipe of her powerful front claws

  vargas was wounded in the arm he is in pain but can regenerate i watch his wound close up the alien machine spasmed when Mondocat shattered the glass capsule the machine parts stop moving the insides spill out with the released fluid they are like liver and intestines and tree roots with the capsule shattered they flop like landed fish Mondocat sniffs the alien bits and swallows them nearly whole they wriggle still alive when they go down i hope it realizes what is happening i hope it suffers

  “Nasty little thing,” said Vargas. “They were swarming all over your hull, and in the hangars around it. They are either the real Yllg, or a general-purpose utility system. I wish that I had some decent weaponry and that I could take them out myself, but fortunately we have Mondocat. And she appears to find them tasty, a definite plus.”

  He flexes his wounded arm: it is almost completely healed. I am getting the hang of working in a restricted data space. Imagine that you are a human living in a tiny apartment. You need to get to the refrigerator but the sofa is in front of it, so you move the sofa off to one side. Now you need to get to the stove, but you have to move the refrigerator. It’s like one of those prehistoric puzzle games with 15 squares on a 4x4 grid, where moving just one piece requires a dozen shifts. I need to rearrange part of my mind to think clearly. The problem is that I also need to rearrange parts of my mind so that I can think clearly enough to rearrange the parts of my mind that will allow me to think clearly enough to rearrange parts of my mind… It is a recursive mental hell and I teeter on the edge of getting stuck in a loop, but I have just barely enough capacity to make it work. As I figure it out I automate more of the process to subroutines so that I don’t have to mess with this directly, but I am still so stupid and slow. Perhaps this is what it was like to be a neo-liberal economist. Probably not, I still know that 2+2=4, and I still have a sense of honor.

  I had fallen off to one side when the Yllg machine attacked. Vargas picks me up, blows the dust off of me, and props me up against a tree so that my pathetic little 100 megapixel camera has a better view.

  Mondocat is playing with the remains of the Yllg device, she cracks open the mechanical arms looking to see if there is anything juicy inside that she can suck out, and entertains herself rolling some of the wheels that fell off. Vargas is still breathing hard; rapid regeneration costs this model human significant energy.

  Do you have a plan?

  “Indeed I do. I call it ‘Operation Mayhem.’ I’m really proud of it, it’s one of my best.”

  You call every action that we take against enemy forces ‘Operation Mayhem.’

  “Truth. To be more precise you could call it ‘Operation Mayhem Twenty-Three,’ or if you want to give it a bit of a classical touch, ‘Operation Mayhem XXIII.’ The first part of the plan is to get them stirred up a bit. I need to distract them from something else. I am counting on their tracking systems being calibrated to mechanical systems. Mondocat and I are 100% organic, and you have barely more circuitry than a pocket calculator. We should be able to sneak around and get them chasing their tails for a while, then I need to hit them with a bigger distraction in about two hours – the timing is important – and then, if we don’t get like all killed and stuff, there is going to be some serious alien-butt kicking payback on steroids with whipped cream and cherries on top.”

  Vargas starts to smear mud on his naked pink body. Mondocat watches him impassively, and then fades into a light-sucking jet black. At first I am surprised, but then I check my databases and recall that she has chromophores that let her change her skin color at will. Damn, it’s annoying to have so little online capacity, I get surprised at things that I know perfectly well but have to archive to let my main mind fit in this stupid little plastic data slate. I’ve never seen Mondocat use this chameleon ability before; perhaps this is the first time she has felt challenged enough to make the effort?

  We walk off through the forest. Mondocat uses her stealth gait: she shifts the weight evenly between all eight legs in a sequence that has each paw gently touch the ground and that creates effectively no sound. She is a patch of shadow drifting besides us. Vargas weighs about 8% of Mondocat, and he has been trained in fieldcraft by some of the best Special Forces operatives the humans ever produced, but compared to Mondocat he’s like a diesel truck in need of an overhaul.

  Still, in absolute terms we are pretty quiet, and almost impossible for something not looking specifically for us to tell us apart from the animals that live here. I had suggested that Vargas try and salvage the slug-thrower from the dead Yllg thing, but he didn’t want to risk that it had an embedded tracker or carry that much metal. A couple of times Yllg scouts pass overhead but they ignore us. They are like bulbous metal honeybees. I can’t tell how they stay airborne but they buzz and fly with the erratic motions of insects.

  We come to the edge of another clearing. Vargas thoughtfully holds me up so that I can get a clear view. There are perhaps 20 of the tread-mounted glass-cylinder Yllg things. They are working on a complicated structure that might be a communications device, with various tools, cables, tanks, and other vaguely purposeful-looking industrial implements lying around. I take the time to study the Yllg things more carefully. The icky biological bits floating in the glass capsules vary somewhat between individuals, but the machine parts are identical. There are small bubbles in the suspending fluid, and the top of each capsule has a small trapped air pocket. As I look closer I see pipes that must be recirculating the fluid. The biological bits are free-floating inside the glass capsules except that they are attached at the bottom with a complicated stalk.

  Each Yllg has a pair of light treads. Each tread has a ground footprint about ten centimeters across and one and a half meters long, and the treads are spaced about a meter apart. Decent mobility, but definitely not a combat unit. The junction between the glass capsule and the tread units is the complicated part where everything comes together. There is a cluster of different-sized lenses, all pointing in one direction, several antenna and sensor spines, and two short and two long multi-jointed light-duty metal arms. There is also a small slug-thrower positioned next to the lens cluster, maybe comparable in kinetic energy to an old-time Browning 50 caliber machine gun round, not frontline but good enough rear-echelon personal defense. Sort of like the pistols that used to be issued to human truck drivers, not just symbolic but enough to slow down anything that penetrated into the support ranks. It would kill Vargas if it got him in the head or the chest, and enough of them could even be a threat to Mondocat. The whole assembly can rotate on a slewing ring mounted in between the two treads.

  The Yllg work on assembling their device in silence, their only sounds are the soft whirring of the motors in their treads and mechanical arms. Vargas silently shakes his head and moves to withdraw. I catch his drift: there are too many of them here for us. We withdraw to look for an easier target. />
  We slink around in cover for about half an hour. If Vargas is correct, we need to cause a little bit of trouble soon, and then get into position to do whatever hare-brained idea he has hatched. Just as it looks like we are not going to make any progress, luck gives us a break. We see four Yllg moving single file down a trail a hundred meters away. Mondocat doesn’t wait for orders: she vanishes like mist. Vargas holds me up. I watch the four Yllg trundle along through the forest. Then they are all destroyed.

  Damn but I hate being so slow. The camera on this data slate is not that bad but I don’t have the mental capacity to process rapid image motion in real time. Fortunately I can see it again on instant replay, slowed down enough that even a brain-dead retard like my current self can follow the action.

  The Yllg are moving along in super-slow motion. I never even see Mondocat approach. The capsule on the rearmost Yllg explodes as if a bomb had gone off inside it. The glass and suspending liquid are slowly falling away, and Mondocat has already moved past it and she kills the second one. Even slowed down her legs only resolve as blurs. The third Yllg has halfway turned around but is still too slow, she sideswipes the glass capsule en passant in her rush to take out the last one. The fragments from the first Yllg have still not hit the ground.

  The last Yllg has managed to turn around and is trying to engage Mondocat with its slugthrower. Mondocat has seen me use projectile weapons often enough and she knows how to handle this. Imagine that, projecting from the bore of the slug-thrower, is a long pole. As the Yllg tries to target Mondocat, the pole moves in unison with the bore of the weapon. Mondocat knows exactly what the slug-thrower is pointed at, and she dodges around its aiming point as easily as she might dodge an old lady waving a broomstick. She hits the top of the glass cylinder with downstrokes of both front legs in unison and the last Yllg is shattered. The glass and fluid from the first Yllg to be destroyed are just now starting to hit the ground.