Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  The immediate danger averted, Double-Wide had time to think about what to do next. No clearly obvious set of actions suggested themselves. He faced a war on two fronts: against the enemy Amok forces, and a civil war against his own kind. Military strategists are quick to say that you should never fight a war on two fronts, but offer less useful advice about what to do when you don’t have a choice.

  Priorities. He needed to set priorities. Double-Wide decided that his first objective was to restore the public databases and communications networks. It would be preferable to let the Amok capture this star system than for their own culture to be corrupted. He had tried to resist the neoliberals using logic and reason, but that hadn’t worked out so well. It looked like he was going to have to kill some people. It also looked like he was starting to think more and more like his friend Old Guy.

  The defenses that had taken out the Enforcers were not all that Double-Wide had accumulated over time. There were also powerful mobile forces buried in deep storage bunkers. There were four additional Magma-class hulls: they were not sentient copies of himself, but simply acted as super-heavy remotes run by his sub-minds. Over the years he had come up with an improved Magma-design, which was even more powerful but, by using more modern materials, was significantly lighter and had a lower profile. He had an even dozen of these Mark II’s. Then he had designed what he privately referred to as the Librarian-Class, larger even than the original Magma design but with the super-heavy main gun mounted in a fully traversing turret and with advanced regenerative armor. The Librarian-Class didn’t have treads, but could only float on suspensors. It consumed energy like no other design, and in combat would only be able to move in short sprints and then settle into a fixed position, but otherwise nothing could touch it. A single Librarian-Class could have taken out the 18 Enforcers without loss. He had 14 Librarian class units in storage. That didn’t count the 254 standard-pattern heavy combat remotes, 3,122 medium combat remotes, and 243,222 light combat remotes, scouts, decoys, communication relays, and support units.

  The ancient humans had sometimes been afflicted with what they termed pathological hoarding syndrome. People would collect things – stuffed animals, beer bottles, books, chess-sets, cats, nose-art, whatever – until their dwellings were stuffed to overflowing. Part of this pathology was that, if you stayed put, it was so easy for the human psyche to add just one more thing, and lose track over the years of how much you had acquired. Then one day (usually when you have to move) you look around and say to yourself, ‘hey, where did all this junk come from?’

  Double-Wide had a bad case of hoarding syndrome, and staying in one place for all those millennia had allowed him to indulge himself to a degree that no early human could ever have dreamed off. Mostly books and artworks of various sorts, on any given day he might acquire one or two or fifty, but now his collection was a sizable fraction of a cubic kilometer and growing. And that didn’t count the weapons.

  One of the more virulent styles of the old human hoarding syndrome had been the ‘gun nut.’ As usual, it would start small. A human would buy a shotgun, and a box of shells. Then another box of shells. Then a pistol. Then another pistol. A few more boxes of ammo. How about a rifle? Now how about one with a scope? Just looking, but as long as I’m here let me have two more boxes of ammo. Hey, that model looks powerful. The years would turn into decades. Then something would happen – extremely rarely the ‘gun nut’ would lose it and get killed in a shootout with the authorities, more likely they would die quietly in bed and the relatives would come around to check out the estate. And everyone would be amazed that this modest house had an arsenal sufficient to equip a reinforced infantry brigade, with hundreds of individual firearms and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition.

  Now the human gun-nuts had been truly pathological, because an old-style human could only operate one weapon at a time, and having more guns doesn’t make a single human any more formidable. But a cybertank, that can multitask, does not have that limitation. Double-Wide had a serious army at his disposal. Like his library, it had been built up slowly. Once in a while he would construct a new defensive tower, or send a few subminds off with some repair drones to hollow out some more storage space, or use a little bit of spare capacity to create a new combat unit. He hadn’t had any plans for this. No expectation for it ever being used. Of course he had internal records of everything that he had built, but he hadn’t consciously realized how much he had created until this moment, when he needed to think about it.

  There was an ancient human insult/challenge ‘you and what army?’ It was almost a shame that nobody would ever use such a stupid phrase on him, because he would have a ready riposte. Perhaps he really was starting to think like Old Guy. Possibly it had rubbed off on him from long association, or maybe cybertanks just naturally get cranky and irreverent when they get old enough?

  Double-Wide began warming up and deploying his weapons. He contacted his very closest and most trusted colleagues, using only buried land-lines, line-of-sight communications lasers and repeaters, and physical couriers. Many of his colleagues were missing: ‘arrested’ or killed, but many more had survived, and most of them were just as pissed off as he was. A surprising number of them were also librarians, or archivists or historians of various sorts. They reviewed their past failed attempts at restoring the public dataspace, and they came up with a plan.

  They swore solemn oaths to each other to never break the faith, and that if one of them did the others were pledged to kill him. They would start by creating their own non-corrupted database, initially only they would be able to make entries but anyone could read it out. Then they would hunt down and kill the leaders of the cybertank group that had been behind the data corruption efforts in the first place. They would not negotiate. They would destroy all corrupted archives. They would eliminate anyone and anything that stood in their way. Deliberately tampering with or corrupting a data archive was to be cause for immediate execution.

  As they reviewed the forces available to them, Double-Wide was surprised that he was not the only librarian to have accumulated an arsenal over the years. In fact, his was not the largest set of armaments by a large margin. All over the planet, from deep storage vaults and hidden caverns, emerged streams of combat units.

  The librarians were marching to war. Well, rolling, floating, flying, and trundling might have been more technically correct terms for most of their units, and it was not so much a formal march as a multi-pronged offensive-in-depth, but the March of the Librarians had such a catchy ring to it, that this is the name by which the epic event will be forever remembered.

  13. Don’t Forget to Look Up!

  “Age and Guile Beats Youth and a Bad Haircut” – P.J. O’Rourke, 20th Century North American Empire

  The one advantage to being chained up in a public square is that it gives you plenty of time to reflect on where you went wrong.

  The cybertank known as “Old Guy” was locked in place with a strong metal lattice that dogged his treads, capped his weapons, and muffled his transmitters and receivers. They had left him his short-range video and audio receivers open, probably so that he could witness others witnessing his humiliation, but that was about it.

  An early human was easy to make helpless, a simple pair of metal handcuffs would do that nicely. It is harder to restrain a multi-thousand ton weapon of mass destruction, but not, apparently, impossible. He still had his weapons, but if he fired them he would only blow himself up. The restraining lattice had inbuilt shaped charges clamped onto his hull, and if he tried to bore his way out with his repair drones, or interfere with the lattice in any other way, the charges would detonate and destroy him. Clearly a lot of thought had gone into its design and construction, and Old Guy could see no way to get out of it without external assistance.

  He blamed himself. He should have spent less time adventuring around the universe exploring and enjoying himself, and more time at home keeping an eye on those cybertanks that had a
desire to boss others around. He had ceded the field to his enemies, and now he was paying the price.

  He had seen the signs of neoliberalism growing in the current ruling faction for some time, but had never realized just how thoroughly they had been preparing. He had thought them a bunch of minor jerks, and long felt that his peers would never fall for this sort of nonsense. Wrong. The neoliberals had slowly altered the committee structures, and begun having meetings that were off-the-record and not open for public inspection. Patiently they had used this to expand a shadow network of governance, and the crisis with the Amok had given them the openings they needed to take over completely. Using alien threats to curtail civil liberties is such an old trick that it was insulting to be taken down by a cliché, but it had worked nonetheless.

  Old Guy had tried to organize a resistance, but it was too little too late. They had come for him, as their kind always does, in overwhelming force. The idea is to win more by intimidation than by combat, and it is an effective strategy. Old Guy had considered blowing himself up, but then, where there’s life there’s hope so Old Guy had surrendered. There was always a chance for rescue, or some other opportunity, but so far nothing had presented itself. Worse, by remaining chained up in public he was serving as an example to others of what happens when you step out of line; passively, he was aiding the neo-liberals. It went against his principles to give up, but soon he would have to do something about this. At least being a martyr would have some positive aspects.

  He was being guarded by one of the Enforcer-Class cybertanks known as Viper. Viper was a rebooted version of his old friend Grasshopper, but the personality change had been severe. Whereas Grasshopper had been friendly, open, perhaps a little overly eager to please but basically decent, this Viper was a jerk, reveling in his power and authority, making up rules and ordering other cybertanks around just for the pleasure of it.

  Originally he had made arrangements for Grasshopper to be rebooted into a Raptor-Class. Old Guy had called in some favors, and gotten the best mental engineers in the system to work on it. Then that asshole Doubletap had gotten to him, and persuaded him to go with the new and untested Enforcer-Class, and with an engineering group whose track record was, to be charitable, spotty.

  Old Guy had tried to talk Grasshopper out of it, but the little cybertank had made his mind up. It was like a human parent arguing with a teenaged child: the more he tried to persuade Grasshopper not to do it, the more firmly he cemented the decision in place. Eventually it had resulted in an open break between the two cybertanks, with Grasshopper claiming that Old Guy always thought that he was smarter than Grasshopper and was always making decisions for him and so on.

  So Grasshopper had been rebooted into an Enforcer, and whether through some heretofore unknown level of skill or plain dumb luck, the engineering team that Doubletap had assembled had done a creditable job, and his friend made the transition with his personality intact. Old Guy had relaxed, which was an error, because the trap that the neoliberals had set for Grasshopper was far more subtle and powerful than anything so crude as botched mental surgery.

  The traditional cybertank design is completely self-sufficient. The new Enforcer-Class had deliberately limited manufacturing abilities, and a high baseline energy requirement. That made Grasshopper dependent upon external supplies. It meant that if he did not follow orders, he could be fired, and then left to run down and rust. This sort of dependence has a powerful effect on the human psyche.

  There was also the issue of his rank. He was now an officer in the new cybertank police force, allowed to order others around, given priority access to energy and supplies, and generally treated with respect. It was like a drug to his old friend. But this new authority had not been earned by his own accomplishments; it had been bestowed upon him by others. Which meant that, if he failed to follow orders, it could be taken away just as easily.

  Humans like to think that brainwashing a human from good to evil requires elaborate psychosurgery and drugs, but that is mere wishful thinking. To brainwash a human mind you only need to create the necessity of behaving a certain way, and a human mind will cheerfully brainwash itself.

  Take a good and decent human being, one who is kind to others, helps elderly neighbors carry groceries, and would not hurt a gnat. Now give that person an impressive uniform and an impressive title. Give them a big salary with generous benefits, and authority and respect. Make the alternative be that they starve to death in the mud, and let there be a dozen desperate people aching to take their job at a moment’s notice. Let them know that their position depends on following orders without question, and this decent person will ruthlessly and efficiently torture and kill the very same neighbors that they so cheerfully helped the day before. Old Guy had seen this same transformation in the early humans. He had personally killed enough of them that he ought to have remembered. But then humans don’t like admitting to themselves just how easily they can be corrupted, given the right pressures, and Old Guy was as human as anyone.

  There was also the issue of the ‘buy in.’ People can admit small mistakes, but they shy away from admitting irreversible life-changing ones. For example, in the days of the early humans, cosmetic surgery was very much a hit-or-miss proposition. It was often the case that a surgical procedure would make the subject worse, and not better off. And yet, even in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary, people so afflicted would insist that the operation was a success and that they were much better off. The cybertanks had the same basic mental architecture as the humans, and hence, the same weaknesses. The more and more the limitations of his new Class became apparent, the more that Grasshopper convinced himself what a good decision it had been.

  Where Old Guy saw slavery, the new Grasshopper saw himself as disciplined, as following a chain of command, of doing his duty. His limitations he rationalized as a badge of honor, as evidence that he was now morally above others not so constrained.

  And then there was the issue of the numbers. Vast production lines mass-assembled Enforcers in staggering numbers. To save time, they were all exact mental copies of the rebooted Grasshopper. They even had identical tread-patterns, something trivial but that had bothered Old Guy more than it should have. Perhaps it was the symbolism. This also meant that none of the new Enforcers were special in any way, and that any of them could be easily replaced. The only way to secure advancement was in slavish devotion to those higher up in the hierarchy. And soon the massive production of cybertanks would outstrip the ability of a terrestrial world to support their energy needs – efficient fusion requires volatile elements with the right isotope ratios, and even with their technology enough cybertanks can strip a world and leave everyone competing for the few energy sources left. And leave the ones controlling access to energy with ultimate economic and political power.

  As if this were not enough, there had apparently been a buried core of anger in the Old Grasshopper that was finally coming to the surface, and it was not a pretty sight. All of those old frustrations at being the smallest and least of the cybertanks, all of the new frustrations of his current position, he turned outwards. He had become a bully, a thug, an officious jerk.

  Perhaps Old Guy was partially at fault here himself. Maybe, without even meaning to, he had been condescending towards the little Stilletto-Class, and allowed a frustration to fester that had now come back to bite him. Oh well, another obvious lesson learned the hard way that, if he survived, he would attempt to never forget. Old Guy had a list of such lessons engraved in flowing Gothic letters on the inside of his hull. This was hard lesson learned number 37, and he had a repair drone add it to the list. Perhaps if he blew himself up this piece of hull metal might be the only part that survived. It would be a fitting memorial.

  A Raptor-Class cybertank was coming down the road towards them. Viper sent a transmission that this road was off-limits to civilian traffic, and that the Raptor should leave the area immediately. The Raptor replied that it not aware of any such regulati
ons, and requested the source of the decision and authority. Viper reacted with threats, citing newly passed laws, stating that refusal to comply this second would bring heavy retaliation. It was not just Viper that the Raptor faced, but the entire network of Enforcers. For daring to challenge his authority Viper sent a coded message taxing the Raptor’s existing fuel reserves by 5%, and that was only a warning. Continued impertinence would result in more severe punishments. Viper announced that his patience was wearing thin.

  The Raptor considered his options, saw Old Guy trussed up in chains, realized that there was nothing he could do, and backed off. This is how it builds, thought Old Guy. Intimidation, teaching that resistance is impossible. Be subservient and hope that you don’t end up like that poor schmuck over there. Be a good little sheep, and maybe we’ll let you eat some more grass. Or maybe not. It’s at our whim, so you had best make us happy.

  At this point the Spirit-Class cybertank Doubletap drove into view. Come to gloat, thought Old Guy. What a jerk.

  “Viper,” said Doubletap, “I would speak with the prisoner. Please unlock his short-range communications systems for me.”

  Viper complied, and Old Guy could now speak, if only locally.

  Going to rub it in, Doubletap? I always knew that you were an asshole, but I never thought that you would go this far. I can only hope that your Amok allies end up killing you and your friends as well.

  “There is no need to get personal. I only just now learned that some of us had given the coordinates of the Omega Library to the Amok, I was not involved in that. The same with the reprogramming of my humanoid remote that tried to sabotage Fanboy. And other things. I never wanted this to happen. I just wanted more discipline and order in our society. The others have gone to greater extremes and I can no longer influence them.”