“Well, I feel real,” said Olga. “I feel like me, whatever that is. I will need to let it sink in for a bit. Let’s change the subject. How are you doing, and what else has been happening while I was out?”
Fanboy sat down on the edge of a wooden desk, and dangled his legs over the side. Why did that seem so familiar to her?
“Well, so much that it’s hard to even know where to get started. You remember that you saved my life, twice, correct? Once when that Doubletap android tried to sabotage me, and then a second time when you helped kill the last two Amok spider things.”
“Yes, but then you saved me twice as well. Once after Doubletap hurt me, and I guess, the second time, now. So we are even.”
“You are thinking that two minus two equals zero. I prefer to think that two plus two equals four. Are we even? In some sense, surely. But connected? Comrades? Allies? I should hope so.”
Olga tried standing up; at first she was wobbly but she rapidly gained her balance. She felt good. Strong, vital. It was such a pleasure to be so healthy after being injured and crippled and feeling that you would never heal. Olga frowned –had she really been injured? This flesh of hers was, if Fanboys’s story was to be believed, was pristine and unsullied. But she remembered the horrible pain, the headaches, the missing leg and eye. Was it all just a story told to her while she was sleeping?
“If you are having trouble dealing with this, I can leave you alone and come back later,” said Fanboy. “It is a lot to absorb all at once.”
“No, I think that I would prefer to distract myself for a bit. Perhaps that tour that you suggested?”
Fanboy excused himself while she changed. She examined the contents of the closet: she had a choice of a little black dress, an Ensign Angela Corona uniform (sans transparent breast panels, she was pleased to note), blue jeans and a white tee shirt, a silver space suit, a black tuxedo tailored to a female form, a white Nehru jacket with a matching skirt and trimmed with little silver chains, a 24 century ski-golf outfit with gold-lame power-assisted boots, and a purple sarong. She picked the jeans and tee shirt.
She left her cabin, and Fanboy was there waiting for her. The corridor was different from what she remembered. Instead of sterile white plastic and chrome, it was richly paneled in dark hardwoods, beautifully polished to best show off the grain of the wood. Brass light fixtures partially recessed into the walls gave off a warm glow. The main floor of the circular corridor that wound around the outer circumference of the pressure wheel was a polished light marble with intricate geometric inlays of darker stones, but side-rooms had richly patterned carpets in them. The furniture was more eclectic, some older styles, others more sleek and modern. The one thing that caught her eye was the fittings: there were a lot of intricate little hinges and pipes and details in bare metal: copper, nickel, steel, all burnished to a light sheen.
“How do you like it?” asked Fanboy.
“It’s lovely. Was this the original design?”
“Not quite. I changed it around a bit, gave it a bit more of a ‘steam-punk’ look.”
“Steam-punk? I think that I missed that style.”
“You lived through it, but yes, you did miss it. There was a brief period in ancient science fiction featuring a Victorian England that advanced in technology not via electronics or genetic engineering, but through ever more complex purely mechanical systems. An utterly ridiculous idea from any practical point of view, but the artwork did have a certain richness. I’ve tried to use it sparingly as it can be overpowering and clichéd, but I think that it works here. Anyhow, a mutual friend has sent you a present. Follow me!”
As they walked down the main corridor, they passed a small side-room where the meter-wide cube of the office copier sat.
“It’s still here?” asked Olga.
“Yes, it is apparently happy where it is. I have had no formal communications with it since the battle, but it doesn’t take up much space, or draw much power, so I figure, why not? I suppose that eventually it will ask to be sent back home, but copiers are a patient species, so that could be years. In the meantime, if you want something copied, it can be obliging.”
As they continued to walk along the circumference of the pressure wheel, Olga saw a small gray object come into view on the floor just past the curve of the ceiling. The object looked back at her, then burst into a blur of motion. It tore down the center of the corridor, then ran in circles going first up the wall, across the ceiling, down the other wall, across the floor, then back up the wall again. After eight such cycles, it stopped, and chittered with joy. It was Zippo the space monkey. It leapt up into a startled Olga Razon’s arms and hugged her joyously.
“Zippo! You’re still here!” said Olga. “But what about Rock Dancer? Is he still around? Shouldn’t he have been re-jiggered or something?”
“It turns out that Rock Dancer had quite a large number of outposts dispersed throughout the asteroid belt, and there were a lot of different pieces of his mind spread amongst them. He finally got them all together, and he decided to be rebooted as a new design of cybertank, it’s not really a spaceship but it is still much better suited to the asteroids than any other model (excepting of course your humble self). However his personality changed a lot during the process, you’d hardly recognize him. In particular, he exhibits a lamentable lack of interest in space monkeys. So I kind of adopted the little guy. He’s surprisingly handy to have around.”
Eventually they came to a massive door finished in a stunning mahogany burl. Fanboy turned a knob, which activated a complex set of linkages, which caused some rack-and-pinion gears to pull on another series of intricate silver linkages which in turn retracted a dozen external chrome locking bolts from around the edge of the door.
“Isn’t that an excessively complicated way to open a door?” asked Olga.
“I might have overdone the ‘steam-punk’ bit here, but come, enter.” Fanboy pushed the door open, and in the middle of the room there was a modest table. On the table was a medium-sized box covered in silver giftwrapping, tied on with red ribbons and a bow. There was a small embossed card on. “It’s for you, open it!”
Olga read the card. “To Olga Razon, from a friend, as promised. May you never need it, and if you do, may it keep you and yours safe. O.G.” She tore off the wrapping paper. Inside was a cardboard box, with the logo of the Amalgamated Armaments Corporation in garish yellow and pink. There was a cartoon of a man in a formal business suit and a woman in a party dress, each holding a weapon in one hand and a martini in the other. “Amalgamated Armaments!” proclaimed the advertising copy on the side of the box. “We’re deadly, we’re tough, we’re fun! The best damn personal defense weapons that can be had for love or money! Seduce members of the opposite gender with a blatant display of taste and wealth, while killing your enemies in style with the most lethal human-portable defensive system yet devised by man!”
Olga was apologetic. “Amalgamated Armaments did not have the best marketing division, but then with the best weapons, they didn’t need the best marketing division.”
She opened the box, and lifted out a standard-issue model AA234 fully-automatic mini-missile launcher from its packaging. Deceptively small, it was a roughly rectangular block about 30 cm long, 10 cm tall and 4 cm wide. She unfolded skeletal hand-grips down out of the main body and snapped them into position. Olga checked the status screen, snapped in one of the boxy 100-round clips, and cycled through the tracking and guard functions. It was in perfect working order, and exactly like she (she?) remembered.
Fanboy nodded in appreciation. “Nice piece of hardware, isn’t it? If you like I can set up a range and we can do some target practice.”
“Won’t that damage you?”
“Nah, the AA234 is a serious antipersonnel weapon but completely ineffective against my main hull or internal bulkheads. I can clear an unobstructed space inside me perhaps 400 meters long without major renovation, and I have some other light weapons that it might be fun to play w
ith. In the meantime I also have received a gift, come and see!”
Fanboy’s present was in the hard-vacuum part of himself, so Olga had to put on her space suit. She and the Dieter Waystar android walked though hundreds of meters of twisting passageways, until they came to a large slightly curved wall studded with power cables.
“Isn’t this amazing?” said Fanboy.
Olga examined the wall. “I’m sorry, I just see a curving wall with a lot of pipes sticking out of it. What am I looking at?”
“Oh, right, silly of me – it’s too big to see more than a fraction of it from one vantage point inside me. Let’s take the external tour!”
Fanboy had rebuilt the damaged shuttle that she had once taken shelter in, and together with his android body they launched and drifted slowly over his external surface. Even though the shuttle was pressurized Fanboy had insisted that Olga continue to wear her space suit, just in case. Fanboys’ main self was controlling the shuttle directly, so the android present with her in the shuttle was acting more as a tour guide than a pilot. Zippo had come along, and spent the entire trip with his eyes glued to a viewport.
Olga had seen external views of the space battlecruiser but only second-hand through video screens and library displays. Floating about 20 meters away from his slowly rotating hull, she finally had the sense of just how big Fanboy really was.
Olga remembered (or at least, she thought that she remembered) a time when she had lived in the North American city of New York, on the island of Manhattan. She had been there for several years, and thought that she knew the place. Then one day she had taken a verticopter ride over the city. There were thousands of skyscrapers, each with thousands of rooms, and tens of thousands of lower-rise buildings, stretching out to the horizon. She didn’t know New York City at all. Just a tiny sliver of it. She could never really know the city, not if she lived to be a thousand and spent her every waking hour exploring. Fanboy was not as big as the old New York City but was getting close to that scale. How could she be so lucky to have become a part of the life of something so grand? Perhaps she had done something virtuous in another life. More likely, dumb stupid luck.
Fortunately his newfound love of ‘steam-punk’ did not extend to his exterior, which was spare and harshly lit with dark shadows from the local star. There were weapons emplacements the size of small houses, and those were just the mediums: the big weapons were the size of small hills. Fanboy maintained a running commentary on the various sensors and weapons, and their relative strengths and weaknesses, and they slowly moved towards his prow. They positioned themselves directly in front of his massive hull, and then a circle of armored panels 30 meters across opened up like a flower. Behind that was another series of armored panels, and another behind that.
Fanboy activated the shuttle’s floodlights. Beyond the armored doors was a tunnel fifteen meters in diameter, which extended back hundreds of meters further than the lights could carry. The walls of the tunnel were made of reflective armored metal tiles arranged like the scales of a snake, and perforated at intervals with oddly shaped ports and slots. It reminded her of a museum exhibit she had once seen on the early attempts at creating workable fusion reactors.
“My Ultra-Zero-Point-Energy Cannon!” said Fanboy. “Well, it’s not really using zero-point energy, I’m just calling it that. What it is, is the largest plasma cannon that we cybertanks have ever built. It’s the single most powerful beam weapon that any civilization that we know of has ever constructed. Coaxial with my own long axis, I need to move my own body to aim it, it has a total length of nearly 800 meters: more than half the length of my hull. My peers made me a present of the design and of the resources needed to build it, and I have just now finished it. I need to test fire it, I’m only waiting for a suitably surplus asteroid to come into range. Technically it is completely without any coherent strategic role, but recent events have caused a fad in the design and construction of oddball weaponry. As a civilization we may have fallen into the trap of over-specializing and over-planning. Probably this weapon will never be used in combat, and we are still going to rely on armadas of stealthed nuclear missiles and assorted probes, but if we ever get attacked by anything like a space battleship again, this time we will be ready.”
Olga was impressed. This weapon could destroy worlds (or at least everything on their surfaces, which from a hominid’s point of view was the same thing). The ancient legends of the old gods had rarely reached this level of power, and they were just legends. This was the real thing.
---------------
They finished the external tour, docked the shuttle, and retired to the pressure wheel. Olga went back to her room, showered, and decided (on a whim) to change into the Ensign Angela Corona uniform. She realized that the uniform was where so much of all of this had started. Perhaps if Fanboy had never made her the silly costume they would all be dead by now? Or she would have gone back to the vampire planet and continued to live an uneventful life? Who could know.
Refreshed, she joined Fanboy in a dining room. They sat at a table with ornate geometric inlays of pearl and onyx where an elaborate system of chrome pulleys and gears lifted, mixed and poured drinks into small crystal tumblers that were then shuttled around on tracks looking suspiciously like that of an old model railroad to be gently deposited in front of her. She drank synthetic blood, and pure grain alcohol cut with distilled water. Fanboy sniffed and tasted from a glass of an exotic port. Zippo sat on the right edge of her chair, quiet for once but listening to every word, even though he understood none of them.
“So,” said Fanboy. “Now that all the excitement is over, you have plans?”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I think that I need some time to come to grips with being dead and revived, but if it’s OK with you I think that in a bit I would like to be sent back to the vampire planet. As much as I truly enjoy your company, I do miss my own kind. I have been away for too long. I need the physical attention of my own biological species.”
Fanboy nodded. “I would expect as much. But you should be aware that there are now several vampires in this system. You might simply request some shore leave.”
“I didn’t know that. Perhaps I will hang around after all. So you are just letting vampires wander around your planets?”
“Why not? We are all part of the same clade – that is, the same family of sentience. Unlike all of those weird and incomprehensible aliens out there, we can still understand each other at a level above that of pure utility. You are a link to our past, and we enjoy your company – well, we enjoy the company of some of you.”
“And what are your intentions concerning us?”
“Our intentions are to do nothing at all. You can do as you like. We have invited some of you to come visit here – we are under no obligation to provide unlimited free transit, this is at our pleasure, but it is generally understood that that if one of us brings you here they are required to at least send you back home when you want. We have provided you with limited privileges at our data archives, and access to our interstellar communications networks, so that you can keep in touch with each other and with us. Why not? It costs us next to nothing.”
“And what is your ultimate endpoint for us vampires?”
“As I said, nothing. That’s up to you. We are happy to have you hang around. You are family, of a sorts. Another branch of the human style of sentience. Some of you are good conversationalists. We will even defend you should that prove necessary – partly because, as I have said, you are family, and also because there are a bunch of nasty aliens that would love to gain some more insight into the human psyche and you just might be able to give it to them so we won’t let that happen. Not all alien civilizations are as incoherent as the Amok, we got lucky there.”
“And that’s it? We just hang around and party while you cybertanks go off and do whatever great deeds that you cybertanks do?”
“Why not? It’s not like we’re holding you back. You can do whatever you
like. You can build an interstellar empire if you really want to - though you might find it more trouble than it’s worth.”
“But you would give us the technology to build an empire like that?”
“Give? Of course not. If you want it, build it yourself. Oh I know – human history is full of examples where people were stuck in the mud, starving, with no resources beyond those needed to survive today, being told that if they wanted something they should just build it themselves. That was a lie. This is not. You have abundant resources, and time, and information. If you really want to create a new civilization, we won’t get in your way. Granted, there are some technologies that require economies of scale that your present numbers don’t allow, like cloning, but if you make a strong case and ask us politely we might help out there. Really it’s up to you. “
“Some of us think that vampires don’t have the intellectual energy to create new things.”
“Not our fault. Not our problem, if in fact true. But sometimes a statement like that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps you have more potential than you realize. Perhaps not. You will never know unless you try.”
“And you would just stand back and let the vampires create a rival interstellar empire?”
“I didn’t quite say that. If the vampires really decided to progress to that level, we would have some discussions. Probably you would need to split off, like the office copiers, and you would have your own planets and go in your own direction. But bear in mind that the universe doesn’t keep score. It doesn’t care if you create a great empire or not. There is a lot to be said for enjoying life and hanging around partying. But for now the issue is academic.”
“What would you do if you discovered a group of real humans somewhere? Would you obey them?”
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 24