“But—but—but this is abominable!” Trurl shouted. “We did not invite these parasites onto our world!”
“Yet they are here, and we must do something about them. We cannot take them back into the past with us. The results would be utterly chaotic! As it is, even our circumspect plans risk altering futurity.”
“More importantly,“ said Trurl, wrapping Neu Trina protectively in several extensors, “they might harm our stalwart and gorgeous captain! We never built her with any offensive capabilities. Who could’ve imagined she’d need them?”
Klapaucius gave some thought to the matter before speaking. “We must exterminate these free-riders from the GHC and sterilize the surface, at the same time we protect Neu Trina. But we cannot cease the construction of our trans-chronal engine either. The dark matter and dark energy capacitors will rupture under their loads, if we delay too long past a certain point. And I won’t be thwarted by some insignificant burrs under my saddle!”
“What do you recommend then?”
“One of us will go below and resume construction alone. The other will remain topside, waging war and protecting our captain. We will alternate these roles on a regular basis.”
“Agreed, noble Klapaucius. May I suggest in deference to your superior mechanical utility that I take the more dangerous role first?”
Klapaucius’s emulators expressed disgust. “Oh, go ahead! But you’re not putting anything over on me! Just remember: no actions beyond mild petting are to be taken with this servomechanism.”
Trurl’s manipulators tightened around Neu Trina with delight. “Oh, never!”
Thus began the long campaign to cleanse the GHC of its parasites. Up and down the 317 million planets’ worth of territory, aided by innumerable repairbots-turned-destroyers, each master constructor raced during his shift aboveground. In their cleansing they employed acid, fire, hard radiation, epoxies, EMP, operating system viruses, quantum-bond disruptors, rust, grey goo, gentle persuasion, bribes, double-dealing, proxy warriors, mini-novas, quasar-drenchings, gamma-ray bursts and a thousand, thousand other strategies, tactics and weapons. And inbetween campaigns, the gyro-gearloose generals retreated for emotional and corporeal salving to the pilothouse, where lovely Neu Trina awaited to tend to every wound.
For any other team than the illustrious Klapaucius and Trurl, the task would have been a Sisyphean one. 317 million planets was a lot of territory from which to expunge all positronic life. But finally, after three centuries of constant battle, the end was in sight. And soon they would be making their journey to the past.
Now a century delayed from their original projections, Trurl and Klapaucius were anxious to finish. Had their memory banks not been self-repairing and utterly heuristic and homeostatic, they might have forgotten by now their original purpose: to return to the past to capture a paleface sample for reintroduction into the stolid, staid, static present.
One day during Trurl’s underground stint, he discovered what he suddenly believed was a potentially fatal flaw in their device.
“If,” he mused aloud, “our orrery must mimic all the bodies in this quadrant over a certain size, then the GHC must be represented in the orrery as well. An obvious point, and this we’ve done. But perhaps that miniature GHC must contain a miniature orrery as well. In which case this lower-level model of the orrery would have to contain another GHC and its orrery, and so on in an infinite regress.”
Trurl’s anti-who-shaves-the-barber protection circuits began to overload, and he shunted their impulses into a temporary loop. “I must discuss this with Klapaucius!”
Up to the surface he zoomed. Into the pilothouse, following the location beacon of his friend.
There, he noted that Klapaucius was seemingly alone. Immediately, Trurl forgot the reason for his visit.
“Where is Neu Trina?”
Klapaucius grew nervous. “She—she’s outside, gathering the pitted durasteel armatures of the slain mechanoids. She likes to build trellises with them for her hologram roses.”
“I don’t believe you! Where is she? Come out with it!”
“She’s far away, I tell you. One million, six-hundred-thousand, five-hundred-and-nineteen planetary diameters away from here! Just go look, if you don’t trust me!”
“Oh, I’ll look all right!” And Trurl deployed his X-ray vision on the immediate vicinity.
What he saw caused him to gasp! “You—you’ve let her dock inside you!”
From deep inside Klapaucius emerged a muted feminine giggle.
“This is beyond belief, Klapaucius! You know we pledged never to do such a thing. Oh, a little cyber-canoodling, sure. ‘Mild petting’ were your exact words, as I recall. But this—!”
“Don’t pretend you never thought of it, Trurl! Neu Trina told me how you dangled your USB plugs in front of her!”
“That was simply so she could inspect my pins to see if their gold-plating had begun to flake…”
“Oh, really…”
“Make her come out! Now!”
An enormous door in the front of Klapaucius gaped, a ramp extended, and the petite Neu Trina rolled out, just as she had that long-ago day from the birthing factory. Except today all her antennae were disheveled and hot liquid solder dripped from several ports.
Trurl’s emotional units went angrily asymptotic at this sluttish sight.
“Damn you, Klapaucius!”
Trurl unfurled a bevy of whip-like manipulators and began to flail away at his partner.
Klapaucius responded in kind.
“Now, boys, don’t fight over little old—squee!”
Caught in the middle of the battle, Neu Trina had her main interface pod lopped off by a metal tendril. If the combatants noticed this collateral damage, it served only to further inflame them. They escalated their fight, employing deadlier and deadlier devices—against which, of course, they were both immune.
But not so their surroundings. The pilothouse was soon destroyed, and Neu Trina rendered into scattered shavings and solenoids, tubes and transistors, lenses and levers.
After long struggle, the master constructors ground down to an exhausted halt. They looked about themselves, assessing the destruction they had caused with an air of sheepish bemusement. Trurl kicked half-heartedly at Neu Trina’s dented responsometer, sending that heart-shaped box sailing several miles away. Klapaucius pretended to be very interested in a gyno-gasket.
Neither spoke, until Klapaucius said, “Well, I suppose I did let my lusts get the better of my judgement. I apologize profusely, dear Trurl. What was this servo anyhow, to come between us? Nothing! No hard feelings, I hope? Still friends?”
Klapaucius tentatively extended a manipulator. After a moment’s hesitation, Trurl matched the gesture.
“Always friends, dear Klapaucius! Always! Now, listen to what brought me here.” Trurl narrated his revelation about the orrery.
“You klystron klutz! Have you forgotten so easily the Law of Retrograde Reflexivity!”
“But the Ninth Corollary clearly states—”
And off they went to their labours, arguing all the way.
THE FOURTH SALLY, OR,
THE ABDUCTION OF THE PALEFACES
One trillion AUs out from the planet that had first given birth to the race of palefaces, and millions of years deep into the past, relative to their own era, the pair of master constructors focused their bevy of remote-sensing devices on the blue-green globe. Instantly a large monitor filled with a living scene, complete with haptics and sound: a primitive urban conglomeration swarming with fleshy bipedal creatures, moving about “on foot” and inside enslaved dumb vehicles that emitted wasteful puffs of gas as they zoomed down narrow channels.
Trurl shuddered all along his beryllium spinal nodules. “How disagreeable these ‘humans’ are! So squishy! Like bags of water full of contaminants and debris.”
“Don’t forget—these are our ancestors, after a fashion. The legends hold that they invented the first machine intelligences.
”
“It seems impossible. Our clean, infallible, utilitarian kind emerging from organic slop—”
“Well, stranger things have happened. Recall how those colonies of metal-fixing bacteria on Benthic VII began to exhibit emergent behavioural complexity.”
“Still, I can’t quite credit the legend. Say, these pests can’t reach us here, can they?”
“Although all records are lost, I believe we’ve travelled to an era before the humans had managed to venture further than their own satellite—bodily, that is. I’ve already registered the existence of various crude intrasolar data-gathering probes. Here, taste this captured one.”
Klapaucius offered Trurl a small bonbon of a probe, and Trurl ate it with zest. “Hmmm, yes, the most rudimentary processing power imaginable. Perhaps the legends are true. Well, be that as it may, what’s our next move?”
“We’ll have to reach the planet under our own power. The GHC—which the human astronomers seem not to have noticed yet, by the way—must remain here, due to its immense gravitic influences. Now, once within tractor-beam range, we could simply abduct some palefaces at random. They’re powerless in comparison to our capabilities. Yet I argue otherwise.”
“Why?” Trurl asked.
“How would we determine their fitness for our purposes? What standards apply? What if we got weak or intractable specimens?”
“Awful. They might die off or suicide, and we’d have to do this all over again. I hate repeating myself.”
“Yes, indeed. So instead, I propose that we let our sample be self-determining.”
“How would you arrange that?”
“Simple. We show ourselves and state our needs. Any human who volunteers to come with us will be ipso facto one of the type who would flourish in a novel environment.”
“Brilliant, Klapaucius! But wait. Are we taking a chance by such blatant interference of diverting futurity from the course we know?”
“Not according to the Sixth Postulate of the Varker-Baley Theorems.”
“Perfect! Then let’s be off!”
Leaving the GHC in self-maintenance mode, the master constructors zipped across the intervening one trillion AUs and into low Earth orbit.
“Pick a concentration of humans,” Klapaucius graciously transmitted to his partner.
“How about that one?” Trurl sent forth a low-wattage laser beam to highlight a large city on the edge of one continent. Even at low-wattage, however, the beam raised some flames visible from miles high.
“As good as anyplace else. Wait, one moment—there, I’ve deciphered every paleface language in their radio output. Now we can descend.”
The master constructors were soon hovering above their chosen destination, casting enormous shadows over wildly racing, noisy, accident-prone crowds.
“Let us land in that plot of greenery, to avoid smashing any of these fragile structures.”
Trurl and Klapaucius stood soon amidst crushed trees and shattered boulders and bridges and gazebos, rearing higher than the majority of the buildings around them.
“I will now broadcast our invitation in a range of languages,” said Klapaucius.
From various speakers embedded across his form, words thundered out. Glass shattered throughout the city.
“My mistake.”
The volume moderated, Klapaucius’s call for volunteers went out. “—come with us. The future beckons! Leave this parochial planet behind. Trade your limited lifetimes and perspectives for infinite knowledge. Only enthusiastic and broad-minded individuals need apply….”
Soon the giant cybervisitors were surrounded by a crowd of humans. Trurl and Klapaucius extruded interactive sensors at ground level to question the humans. One stepped boldly forward.
“Do you understand what we are looking for, human?”
“Yeah, sure, of course. It’s Uplift time. Childhood’s End. You’re Optimus Prime, Iron Giant. Rusty and the Big Guy. Good Sentinels. Let’s go! I’ve been ready for this all my life!”
“Are there other humans who share your outlook?”
“Millions! If you can believe the box-office figures.”
On a separate plane of communication, Trurl said, “Do we need millions, Klapaucius?”
“Better to have some redundancy to allow for possible breakage of contents during transit.”
“Very well, human. Assemble those who wish to depart.”
“I’ll post this on my blog, and we’ll be all set,” said the human. “One last question, though.”
“Yes?”
“Can you turn into a car or plane or something else cool?”
“No. We don’t do that kind of thing.”
Dispatched from the GHC by remote signal, a fleet of ten thousand automated shuttles carrying ten thousand human volunteers apiece was sufficient to ferry all the humans who wished to voyage into the future out to their new home. But upon arrival, they did not immediately disembark. Once at the GHC, Trurl and Klapaucius had realized something.
Klapaucius said, “We need to create a suitable environment on the surface of the GHC for our guests. I hadn’t anticipated having so many. I thought we could simply store one or two or a thousand safely inside our mainframes.”
Trurl huffed with some residual ill-feeling. “Just like you kept a certain servomechanism safely inside you?”
Klapaucius ignored the taunt. “We’ll repair the atmosphere generators. But we need a quantity of organics to layer atop the All-Purpose Building Material. I wonder if the humans would mind us disassembling one of their spare planets… ?”
The master constructors approached the first human they had even spoken to, who had become something of a liaison. His name was Gary.
“Gary, might we have one of your gas-giant worlds?”
“Sure, take it. That’s what we’ve been saving it for.”
They actually took two. The planets known as Saturn and Jupiter, once rendered down to elemental constituents, were spread across a fair portion of the GHC, forming a layer deep enough to support an ecology. Plants and animals and microbes were brought from Earth, as well as some primitive tools. Their genomes of the flora and fauna were deciphered, and clones began to issue forth in large quantities from modified birthing factories.
“We are afraid you will have to lead a simple agrarian existence for the time being,” said the constructors to Gary.
“No problemo!”
The humans seemed to settle down quite well. Trurl and Klapaucius were able to turn their attention to gearing up for the trip home.
And that’s when dire trouble reared its hidden head.
One of the parasitical races that had infested the GHC back in the future had been known as the Chronovores of Gilliam XIII. Thought to be extirpated in the last campaign before poor Neu Trina had met her end, they had instead managed to penetrate the skin of the GHC and enter its interior, at some great remove from the time-engine. It had taken them this long to discover the crystals of frozen Planck-seconds, but discover them they had. And consumed every last one.
Now the Chronovores resembled bloated timesinks, too stuffed to flee the justified but useless wrath of the master constructors.
After the mindless slaughter, Trurl and Klapaucius were aghast.
“How can we replace our precious crystals! We didn’t bring spares! We don’t have a source of raw Planck-seconds in this rude era! We’re marooned here!”
“Now, now, good Trurl, have some electrolyte and calm down. True, our time-engine seems permanently defunct. But we are hardly marooned here.”
“How so?”
“You and I will go into stasis and travel at the rate of one-second-per-second back to the future.”
“Is stasis boring?”
“By definition, no.”
“Then let’s do it. But will the humans be all right?”
“Oh, bother them! They’ve been the source of all our troubles so far. Let them fend for themselves.”
So Trurl and Klapaucius enter
ed a stasis chamber deep inside the GHC and shut the door.
When it opened automatically, several million years later, they stretched their limbs just out of habit—for no wear and tear had ensued—swigged some electrolyte, and went to check on the humans.
They found that the entire sphere of 317 million planets acreage was covered with an HPLD: a civilization possessing the Highest Possible Level of Development.
And there wasn’t a robot in sight.
“Well,” said Trurl, “it seems we shan’t be bored, anyhow.”
Klapaucius agreed, but said “Shut up” just for old time’s sake.
iCITY
I lost a whole neighbourhood last night to that bitch Holly Grale. The Floradora Heights. Renamed this morning, after its overnight reformation and subsequent QuikPoll accreditation. Now the district was officially “WesBes,” as in “West of Bester.” I hate those faddish abbreviated portmanteau names. Where’s the dignity? Where’s the sense of tradition? Where’s the romance? Plus, once Bester Street disappears, as it’s bound to do soon, where’s that leave your trendy designation?
But my tastes were obviously in the minority, since 67.9 percent of the residents of the quondam Floradora Heights had voted to accept Grale’s reformation over my established plan which they had been living in for some time.
Still, I shouldn’t have been so down. Floradora Heights had lasted 2063 hours until suffering the diminishment in popularity that had triggered the reformation. The average duration stats for all iCity sensate neighbourhood plans was not quite 1600 hours. So my plan had performed over 20 percent better than average. That result, along with my ten extant accreditations, would certainly allow me to maintain my place in the planner rankings—and maybe even jump up a notch or two.
WikiWorld Page 26