“But… salt water?”
Yes, salt water is pretty nasty stuff. In many ways a salt-water ocean is more hostile than deep space. But we have lots of old databases from the humans about corrosion and such, I am sure we can handle the maintenance without much trouble. Eventually you would want to replace your outer hull with something like naval bronze. That could be sort of pretty, really.
“That is the most unusual proposition that I have had in a long time. It just beats out the proposal by the office copiers that I defect to their civilization and become a kilometer-long office copier. I suppose that there would be some coolness in being the largest office copier that had ever existed. Or it might just be lame. In theory it all makes sense, but dammit Old Guy, I’m a starship. If I wanted to become something else I’d just turn myself into a cybertank. This is what I am.”
I understand. I just thought that I would make the offer. And you know that, starship or not, you are one of us. We all consider you not an honorary cybertank, but a real cybertank, that for some peculiar fluke of history has been instantiated into the body of a starship. I am saddened that we cannot find a better place for you in our society.
“I don’t mean to whine – I am basically happy – I just wish I could be more of a part of our culture. I suppose that before too long I will reboot as a cybertank, but right now I am happy being only slightly frustrated as what I am.”
Join the club. I am so many years out of date that I have stopped counting. I should have moved on centuries ago. Someday I will. It does rankle being older and stupider and slower than everyone else. But right now I am just having too much fun.
“By the way, I was looking up some of your old combat footage, and I noticed that the recordings of your action against those buried sleeper Amok units were not in the archives. You know, the ones from 13 years ago? Whatever happened to them?
I’m sorry. No such combat has ever existed.
“No, your service records quite clearly show that you were in combat with the Amok 13 years ago, but the real-time recordings and after-action reports are missing. So where are they?”
Oh look, what was that over there?
“Stop trying to distract me. Where are the recordings?”
ssrreek krkkk communications channel breaking dffda up ssskkkrrr adada…
“Stop clowning around. The channel is fine. What is it about these recordings?”
I don’t want to talk about it.
“Why on Earth not?
I’m not on Earth. And it’s embarrassing
“You know that I am not going to stop pestering you until you tell me what this is all about. I can keep this up all day. Tell me!”
“OK, surely that happens to everyone from time to time, but aren’t you supposed to file all combat recordings with the central archives?”
Yes, but only after I finish writing my after-combat report. Which I have not done yet.
“And when were you thinking of getting around to writing your report? 13 years is a long time.”
I was thinking of waiting until around the time of the heat-death of the universe. Although that does seem a bit hasty. I might want to put if off even longer. Perhaps I shall wait until all of the protons decay. Or does that occur first? I can never remember.
“If you give me the recordings, I’ll write your report for you.”
“I am aware of my failings, but I like combat recordings. You know that I have never been in battle myself, right? I realize that for a non-combatant to obsess over the exploits of real soldiers is, well, obsessional, and I know that war is stupid and not to be glorified yada yada yada and if I never see battle myself I should just count myself lucky blah blah blah but I still like watching combat recordings. A starship has gotta have its hobbies, right?”
I leave this field defeated. Transmitting copies now. If you ever make fun of them I will never speak to you again. But if you file reports and cross-references that are so boring and pedantic that nobody every accesses these wretched things, I shall be in your debt.
“The very stars themselves would perish of ennui were they to ever be exposed to this report. You may rely on me. And are you going to make my party next month?”
Wouldn’t miss it. See you there. Old Guy out.
The starship known as “Fanboy” hung above Alpha Centauri Prime in geostationary orbit about 40,000 kilometers out from the planet. It would take a little while for Old Guy’s recordings to be transmitted, because there is a lot of raw data in a true real-time high-definition multi-viewpoint combat recording, so it had a few minutes to think.
Fanboy was officially an Asgard-Class interstellar battlecruiser. Because only one dedicated sentient starship had ever been constructed by the humans, he was often just referred to as “the ship.” However, such a pedestrian name would never do for a full member of cybertank society. The naming of a cybertank is a subtle and nuanced thing. A simple practical name, like “Unit HHJ-435-8888432” would be too insulting to ever be used. An overtly honorific name, such as “mighty tank,” was widely understood to be a deadly insult and any cybertank so named would work tirelessly to achieve a better nickname. That is because, by unwritten consent, no cybertank could ever name itself. The name had to be bestowed upon it by a consensus decision of its peers. The name had to be just the right level of insult to be cool, but not over the line. It was a delicate balance. “Shithead” or “Asshole” were not cool. “Belly-Flop,” “Wiffle-Bat,” “Space-Cadet,” and “Fluffy” were cool. “Old Guy” and “lowercase” were totally cool. Especially when the name was associated with millennia of meritorious service.
There had never been a cybertank known as “Bozo the Clown.” But if there had been, and if he had won major victories and been generally recognized as being effective and competent, then “Bozo the Clown” would become a cool name. Because to a great extent it is the cybertank itself that makes the name, not the other way around.
“Fanboy” was so named because of his constant pestering of his fellow cybertanks for copies of their combat recordings, and his numerous comments and analyses of the records of the more martially-renowned cybertanks. It wasn’t a bad nickname. It poked fun at a personal failing, but in a light-hearted way, which was cool, more-or-less.
Fanboy was an ellipsoid 1500 meters long, and 150 meters across around the middle. His outer hull was made up of alternating layers of ablative and energy-reflective armor, spaced meters apart and filled with vacuum. Fanboy could easily handle direct hits by megaton-level nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are devastating in water or an atmosphere that can transmit shockwaves, but surprisingly less effective in a vacuum, where only direct radiation effects are possible. His hull was studded with enough weaponry to outclass a regiment of cybertanks, a sensor suite to shame many entire industrial worlds, and integrated computational and manufacturing resources that could classify him as a minor city in his own right. And it was all useless.
Because starships have no place in modern combat, or any other place for that matter. It was never clear who or what authorized the construction of humanity’s one-and-only sentient interstellar battlecruiser. Either the relevant parties had ma
naged to hide their responsibility, or it had been yet another emergent clusterfuck resulting from too many committee meetings and the perils of “matrix management” techniques.
Space is big, and in the vast tracts of nothing between the stars you could easily hide entire planets. But as you get near the inner terrestrial planets of a star system there is no way to hide something that is 1500 meters long. In combat it would be the target of however many nuclear missiles that it took to destroy it.
As a transport system a starship is even more useless. There are no economies of scale here. Suppose that you want to send 1,000 tons of cargo to another stellar system? You strap on some modular drive units, some fuel tanks, and a navigational system that need not be any more capable than a late 20th century domestic dishwasher, and off you go. Want to send it via starship? Do the same, but now you need a lot more fuel to also accelerate and decelerate the one-million metric ton structure of the starship itself. There is no point to a dedicated starship.
On the surface of a planet something twice the size can move from A to B at less than twice the energy cost. That doesn’t work in space. It’s all about the mass. For the fuel cost of sending Fanboy to another star system, you could send an entire armada of a hundred cybertanks, thousands of stealthed nuclear missiles and tens of thousands of micro-remotes, with at least two orders of magnitude more combat effectiveness than any single equivalent-mass starship. Perhaps someday a clever person would invent an efficient stardrive that only worked on a large scale, and big ponderous starships would suddenly come into fashion. But that had not happened yet.
In the mid 20th century humans first started sending out space probes. They used computers that operated at only a few thousand instructions per second, and memory cores with only a few tens of thousands of bits. These had been woven by hand from ferrite rings using unskilled human labor. Computer technology has advanced since those days, but orbital mechanics has remained the same since the creation of the universe, and there is just no need for something that travels between the stars to be smart.
A thousand kilometers over from Fanboy was a ship getting ready to boost to the next system. It was an agglomeration of cargo pods lashed together with cables and polymer sheeting, fuel containers and ion drives stuck onto one end, and a control mechanism that just might have been able to out-think an early 19th century Jacquard loom. Calling it a ‘starship’ was like calling a metal trash receptacle a ‘cybertank.’ There wasn’t anything in this ‘ship’ to talk to; Fanboy had no peers, at least not that were fully sentient purpose-built starships.
It’s not that Fanboy was unhappy. At any given time he had dozens of fully sentient subminds roaming on the planet below, engaging in deep conversations and then reporting back, uploading the memories and it was as if Fanboy had been there himself – which, in a real sense, he had been. He was in intimate datalink with the planet, and engaged in all manner of analyses, debates, committee meetings, strategy games, and whatever complex and exotic intellectual pursuits a society with several quintillion times more computational power than all the human and computer minds that had existed in the 25th century combined. He also had software agents sent to distant stars, that might report back decades or centuries later. He constructed numerous probes, remotes, useful machines and useless works of art in his capable manufactory complexes. He was moderately well regarded in several fields, although he had not yet achieved anything that could be considered exceptional. Life could be worse.
Fanboy considered traveling to another star. He was, after all, a starship. It would only be fitting and proper if at least once he actually traveled to another star. Moving his million-plus metric tons of mass across interstellar space would be wildly inefficient, but what’s the point of living in a post-scarcity society if you can’t do something inefficient? Still, even post-scarcity societies have their limits, and it would take a LOT of energy. He could probably organize the trip but it would take a considerable time to collect the needed fuel. Someday he’d get around to it.
It was not that long ago that Fanboy had organized the first cylindrical ice hockey match. Fanboy could rotate along his long axis at a fairly good rate, which would have allowed humans to experience simulated gravity (should they ever have decided to reside within him, which none of them ever did). It would also spread out the effect of any enemy directed energy weapons and complicate attempts at targeting specific parts of his hull. Fanboy got himself to rotating, cleared out a large central bay, flooded it with water, and then let it freeze over. Humanoid remotes could skate on the inner surface of this frozen cylinder of ice, and a hockey game was played with the two goals at either end of the cylinder. Thus, if you passed the puck to the right it would eventually come back to you from your left. Between that and the curved geometry and coriolis forces created by the spin, the participating cybertanks had had an amusing time devising new hockey strategies to deal with the unusual venue, and a great time was had by all.
Still, it is always that 1% of what you don’t have that is what you want. Obviously: there is no point in wanting what you already have, because you already have it. Fanboy wanted most of all to be accepted as a true peer, as someone who had accomplished something great - combat would be nice, but anything significant would do – but the gross inefficiency of his construction had so far prevented him from doing that.
Fanboy eagerly awaited the download of Old Guy’s combat recording. Cybertanks are intellectually flexible. They can be amused by watching something like an old single-viewpoint low-resolution 2D visual 1D audio recording of “I love Lucy” (with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, mid 20th century), but that only takes a single human-class sub-mind to appreciate. To fully engage the intellectual capacity of a cybertank you need recordings taken of the same event from thousands of different viewpoints and across all of the energy bands accessible to their various distributed sensors. This was something that, for now, was near impossible to accurately synthesize but had to be recorded live.
The recording started with Old Guy driving across a relatively barren landscape engaged in combat with some of the older and least effective Amok units. Doll Swarm, Battle-Spam, and a few Blade Fetish. He was destroying them with admirable efficiency, using only his own hull-mounted weaponry. The Amok units tried to form a workable strategy and half-succeeded, but it was too little too late. Old Guy had only to stand his ground and pound away at them and he would eventually win, although it did look to be a long boring process.
Then Old Guy tried to be cute. He created a perimeter with his remotes, shifted to high speed and moved to outflank the Amok formation by jumping over a small canyon. If he succeeded he would destroy the Amok in one tenth-the time. However, he misjudged the softness of the soil, and when he landed on the far side the canyon lip collapsed under his weight and he slid backwards into the canyon smashing into the rocky floor end-first. The impact disabled his motive systems and put most of his hull-mounted armament offline. Suddenly Old Guy was in very serious trouble.
What followed was messy, but impressive in a negative sort of way. The Amok saw their opportunity and tried to swarm Old Guy while he was disabled. Old Guy rallied his remotes and used every trick and misdirection to survive just long enough to let him repair enough of his systems that he could survive just that much more longer so that he could get even a bit more of himself working…
He pulled it off, barely, and eventually the last Amok combat unit was destroyed. Fanboy actually thought that Old Guy was brilliant in the way that he used such limited resources to squeeze out a victory, and he thought of writing a qualified positive review. But of course, the necessity of achieving victory against heavy odds had only come about because of Old Guys’ own impatience and grandstanding in the first place. Besides, Fanboy had promised to keep the report boring and to-the-point.
Thus it was that, true to his word, Fanboy wrote one of the most perfunctory and uninteresting combat reports ever filed. He got back to the rest of his activities, but
with one part of his vastly capable mind, he fantasized about storming into a space battle with all guns blazing in a desperate attempt to save the known universe from destruction. Surely we all need our dreams, thought Fanboy.
4. Still Yet More Amok
“Ask someone a question. If they answer, listen to them. If they are outraged that you would dare to question, despise them. If they charge you with a crime, kill them. History has shown that no other strategy is effective.” Ur-skeptic Tantalus IV, Middle Pedagogic Period.
The quiet spaces between rocks in the asteroid belt are about the only places that a 30,000 ton weapon of mass destruction can float along gracefully without bothering the neighbors.
The Magma-Class cybertank known as “Rock Dancer” was drifting between planetoids in the asteroid belt, doing about a hundred different things at once, and just generally relaxing and having a good time. The Magma-Class was, to date, the most powerful cybertank design ever constructed. A vast assemblage of armor, treads, weapons and fusion reactors, it was the most powerful single terrestrial weapons system that had ever been constructed by the human civilization. Rock Dancer had armor so tough, it wasn’t just proof against near-misses by nuclear weapons, it had a decent chance of surviving a direct hit, even in atmosphere. He had a main weapon mounted in a ball-joint in front that absolutely nothing known in this universe could stand up to. His various other assorted armaments would shame entire minor technological civilizations. Most cybertanks have integrated repair and manufacturing systems to rival that of an old-time industrial corporation. A Magma was on par for an entire city.
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 5