Confessions of a Sentient War Engine (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 4)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  After about 30 minutes I leave the store, and digest what I have recorded as I continue my aimless wanderings through the city. What I find is remarkable. The public histories claim that this civilization was founded by humans leaving old Earth who were fleeing evil computerized war machines known as”cybertanks” that were bent on slaughtering all biological humans. Most humans hate these cybertanks that drove their ancestors out into deep space, but there are splinter cults that worship them – just as I suppose there were devil worshipers in Christian epochs – and some of them are not above committing terrorist acts in the name of the cybertanks.

  The story is fantastic. First, we cybertanks were not bent on destroying all biological humans. Second, the idea that a human civilization at this level could possibly be stable for thousands of years also makes no sense. Something is wrong here.

  I suppose this could be a splinter human colony founded by the neoliberals, fleeing beyond our reach and who told themselves the lie that we cybertanks and our human allies were evil for so long that eventually they believed it themselves. But neoliberals produce something decent and stable? It is said that there is always a first time, but often there is not.

  There are other problems with the historical data. It’s garbled, and in funny ways. I suppose that refugees might have had limited data, and things can get distorted over the millennia if you are not careful, but this is weird. For example, the records claim that the Ancient Roman Empire was the first to land a man on Earth’s moon, Queen Elizabeth was the first openly homosexual professional soccer player, and that the Panama Canal was built in Egypt. It’s as if someone had bits and pieces of historical data and strung it all together without really understanding it. I suppose it could be the neoliberals corrupting the records, but it’s not quite their style of sleaze.

  I was mulling the data over, and I must have been distracted because I stumbled into a young woman, knocking her off-balance and causing her to drop her attaché case. “Hey, watch it!” she said. She was of medium height, medium brown hair and hazel eyes, probably late twenties, and undeniably attractive for a biological female. She was dressed in what the inhabitants currently referred to as a ”power suit”: white blouse, pencil skirt, modest power heels, a severe gray power jacket with power shoulder pads, and a big red power necktie that would have been more at home on a prizewinning livestock at a country fair.

  I mumbled some apologies using a generic male voice, retrieved her case, and asked if she was all right. “Just look where you’re going,” she said, and she walked off without giving me a backwards glance. That’s city people for you: jammed in with millions of their fellows they build invisible walls around themselves. I expect that she has already forgotten her collision with me the same as if I had caught a toe on a crack in the sidewalk.

  I continued on past a local government office that had overly broad flights of gray stone steps leading up from the sidewalk to an ornate classical façade complete with wrought-iron pillars topped with frosted white light-globes. A smallish figure wearing a long bulky coat had just finished walking up the stairs and turned around to face the street. Odd, it’s too warm out for someone to be wearing a coat like that.

  I had barely registered the incongruous nature of the person’s coat when she threw it off, revealing a slender Asian woman dressed in a costume that could charitably be called ”slutty magician’s assistant:” tight fitting black tuxedo with matching hot pants, fishnet stockings, knee-high glossy black boots with stiletto heels, a top-hat and a cane with a golden carved dragon’s head.

  From all around this figure came pulsing lights. The lights formed into fractal arabesques of intricate color and texture: they were perhaps the most stunningly beautiful things that I had ever seen. Then my defensive systems kicked in, filtered my primary senses, and I all saw were some complicated color patterns that meant nothing to me.

  This person must be one the genetic “plusses” that I had heard about, and her power is the ability to generate sensory light patterns that can dazzle and hypnotize humans. I’m not biological but my psyche is very human, so I would have been vulnerable except that my android body has a compact, but efficient info-defense system that detected the interference and null it out.

  The rest of the humans on the street are not so well equipped as I and they stare at the colored patterns slack-jawed and drooling.

  “I am Syrene!” said the woman. “And I shall rule this city in the name of the cybertanks! Tell me, who do you love?”

  Almost as one the crowd screamed “We love you Syrene! We love the cybertanks! Please let us be near to you!” Grown men were crying tears of joy, women were flushed and tearing off pieces of clothing to throw at her, old men were sobbing and clutching at themselves like mystics in the grip of a religious frenzy.

  “Kneel, all of you!” she cried, and the crowd obediently dropped to their knees. Not wanting to stand out, I followed suite, and twitched and groveled in a way that I hoped was convincing.

  “But,” said the Asian woman,”there is one amongst you who does not love the cybertanks. There is one who has betrayed our rightful mechanical overlords. What shall we do with her?”

  The crowd was whipped into an even greater frenzy. “Who could this be?” they screamed. “Who is she that we might kill her? We shall tear her apart, destroy her, crush her, who is she?”

  I was worried that the crowd might get out of hand. As crazed as they were they were likely to turn on each other as suspected non-lovers of this Syrene person.

  “Calm down, loyal followers of the cybertanks,” she said. “You shall not punish her, for she shall make amends herself. Veronica Bisley, make yourself known!”

  The woman that had bumped into me earlier stood up. She was in tears and cried out “I’m sorry Syrene! I’m sorry! Please forgive me! I love the cybertanks! I love only the cybertanks, only please forgive me!”

  The crowd would have torn this Bisley woman to shreds but Syrene ordered them to leave her alone.– They complied, but you could see how eager they were to kill this young woman whose only crime was to have been accused of not loving the cybertanks.

  “Veronica,” said Syrene, “You betrayed the cybertanks, our natural masters. Are you sorry for what you have done?”

  “Oh yes,” she wailed, “yes. I will do anything. Anything! Just name it!” The woman was in true anguish.

  “Fortunately I am merciful,” said Syrene. “You can earn my forgiveness for your crimes against the cybertanks and their allies. For do not the cybertanks love you all?”

  A shock ran through the crowd and people shuddered as they had all just had an orgasm. Such power – this woman very probably could conquer this entire city.

  “Crawl, Veronica Bisley, crawl on your belly to come in front of me.”

  The Bisley woman commenced crawling up the stairs, and in her zeal she tore her clothes and badly gashed her shins, knees, and elbows. By the time she had gotten to the top of the stairs she was badly bloodied, but didn’t seem to mind, but only lay prostrate and weeping.

  “Kneel before me,” said Syrene, and Bisley complied.

  “Now what should we do with you? How can you make amends? Well, for a starter, how about that you tear your eyes out with your own hands and eat them before me. Will you do that for the cybertanks, Veronica? Please?”

  At this point I had had enough. I stood up and cried “I love the cybertanks, Syrene! Let me kill her for you!” and I started to run up the stairs. Syrene was so confident in her powers that she just assumed that I was overcome with zeal. “Get on your knees, fool, I didn’t tell you to stand.” It took her a couple of seconds to realize that I was not under her control, and by that time I had closed the range. I struck her hard on the forehead with a closed-hand strike before she could order her followers to defend her and she fell backwards onto the stone landing, bashing her head a second time, and then she lay still. I considered making sure that she would never wake up, but from the indentation in her fore
head I did not think that that would be an issue.

  The colored lights faded away, and if anything things became even more chaotic than before. Released from their mental slavery, people screamed, or threw up, or convulsed, or pissed, or shat themselves. Children were crying but their parents were too shocked to comfort them, several people attacked others for reasons unknown, a car in the street slewed out of control and ran over several people before coming to a stop. A couple of others, despondent from the withdrawal of Syrene’s influence, threw themselves out of windows to splat messily on the sidewalk.

  At least nobody seemed to want to take revenge on me for my attacking Syrene. I knelt to help the young woman who had almost been forced to eat her own eyes. She was shaking uncontrollably and crying. I tore my coat into strips and bandaged the worst of her wounds. I was starting on a lesser gash when she unsteadily pushed my hand away, and in a weak voice said, “No, I’ll be fine now. Others are more in need, help them.”

  Well I was certainly impressed with her strength of character. I stood up and looked around, trying to decide where to start in all of the chaos. I pried someone out from under a crashed car, made sure that they were stable, and then moved to stop the bleeding from someone else who had a compound fracture of the upper arm. Slowly things came under control. More of the survivors regained composure and began to help out. Police and rescue teams began to arrive and people were being loaded into ambulances.

  There was one team of policeman that didn’t fit in with the others. They had full-body carapace armor painted shiny blue, and bulky helmets that completely hid their faces. They moved with a ponderous grace that made them stand out, and the regular police were careful to get out of their way. These new police examined the fallen body of Syrene and locked a complicated-looking helmet onto her head. Some sort of energy damper? I couldn’t tell. They strapped her unconscious body onto a litter and loaded her in the back of what appeared to be a military-grade armored personnel carrier and drove off.

  One of these special police approached me. The name-tag on his chest read “Roosevelt.” “I am told that you are the one that attacked Syrene,” he said, his voice muffled and harsh through the grill in his helmet.

  “Yes, officer,” I said. “I could not just stand by and let that poor woman be tortured. It was self-defense – well, something like that, you know what I mean. Is this Syrene going to live? Am I in trouble?”

  “Trouble,” said the policeman, as if the word was just something to say and neither a question nor an answer. “May I see your identification, sir?”

  I handed over my forged ID card. The officer held it in an unwavering hand and looked at it for what seemed an overly long time. Then he handed it back to me.

  “Mr. Bob Olgui. I think that you should come with me, sir. We have some questions to ask you.” At this point the officer produced a set of handcuffs – and these were not your regular civilian handcuffs, these were massively overbuilt. It looked like you could tow a freight train with them.

  Well. I could probably take this single officer on by myself, but I don’t quite like the look of him, and he has a lot of friends. I don’t like the idea of being captured, but this body is disposable so I could just see what happens. If it turns bad I scrub the memories and leave my captors with a dead piece of metal and plastic that will tell them nothing.

  While I am trying to decide what to do, Officer Roosevelt is suddenly crushed nearly flat in front of me. I didn’t see that one coming. The officer appears to have been mechanical: there is only a flattened pile of struts and wires, no blood, no tissue.

  However, it was the person standing next to the crushed remains of Officer Roosevelt that really caught my attention. Tall, with close-cropped blond hair and blue eyes with the staring intensity of a bird of prey. He wore only a pair of golden shorts and sandals. The muscles and tendons bunched under his perfect skin like braided steel cables, yet he moved with a dancer’s grace. His face was that of an angel carved by Michelangelo on one of the sculptor’s better days.

  “Hello,” said the new arrival with deep rich baritone. “I thank you for saving my friend. My name is Ultrius. If I am not mistaken, the constabulary of this city would like to arrest and imprison you. I suggest that that might be bad choice of lifestyle for you. I suggest that you might want to accompany me and, you know, escape.”

  Without waiting for an answer, this ”Ultrius” turns and picks up the damaged body of Veronica Bisley. She had passed out since we had last spoken and had been lying prostrate on the ground. Two of the strange-looking policemen (Officers Roberts and Romanov, from their name badges) move to stop him; they are left as compacted piles of scrap metal just as rapidly as the late officer Roosevelt was.

  At this point I have zero idea what is going on, but this Ultrius person seems much more charming and open-minded than the special police, so I decide to tag along.

  Carrying the Bisley woman in his arms, Ultrius races down the street and darts into a side alley. Even though my current body is significantly faster than that of a regular human, I barely keep pace. We encounter another of the special police forces – an Officer Rieke – who explodes into a thousand metal fragments like mist.

  We duck into a non-descript steel door set into a non-descript concrete wall, and race down a long corridor. We encounter a shaft in the floor 10 meters across that extends into the darkness below; Ultrius simply jumps into it and floats down gracefully. Well, my current body has no anti-gravity suspensors, but it’s still pretty nimble. I scramble down the side of the shaft, hanging onto cable conduits and using beams and flanges as hand-and toe-holds.

  I make it about 200 meters below the surface, when there is a seismic shudder and dirt and garbage pelt past me in the shaft. Had the entire building above been destroyed?

  I continue my descent down the shaft. It is total black but my body can sense infrared and ultrasound and millimeter radar, so I can see just fine. At about 400 meters depth the shaft ends and I am in what appears to be an abandoned railway tunnel. The walls are curved and covered in square white porcelain tiles, many of which have been shattered or cracked. There are two sets of parallel steel tracks – rusty, nothing has run on them for some time – and in the distance I see a dust-covered passenger carriage.

  Ultrius is stooped over the unconscious body of Veronica Bisley. He turns and looks at me. “You,” he says. “So you managed to keep up. Not bad. Do you know anything about medicine?” He gestures at the damaged form in front of him.

  I don’t have the full databases of my main self, but I do have significant medical files even in this simple submind (partly out of old habit from dealing with humans for so long, and partly because the vampires are physiologically mostly human and even in my home civilization it comes in handy from time to time knowing the basics of how a hominid works). I bend over Veronica Bisley and commence an examination. Even without the resources of my main hull, I have significant sensory capacity.

  “She has not suffered any single major wound, but the sum of all of the smaller injuries that she has sustained is worrisome. She is stable at present – for at least hours, if not a day - but eventually she will need supportive care to avoid failing. Ideally she should have perhaps a liter of whole blood or whole blood-replacement equivalent, and her wounds need to be cleaned and debrided, and treated with broad-spectrum antibiotics. Additionally she is probably in psychological shock from being controlled by this Syrene person: a benzodiazepam and then follow-up counseling are called for if you want to avoid post-traumatic stress syndrome. Additionally, while not medically necessary – strictly speaking – for a female human of her age significant body scarring can be psychologically debilitating. If possible, I would advise that an accomplished plastic surgeon tend to her wounds as soon as possible to ensure optimal healing.”

  Ultrius executed a shallow bow. “Thank you for your efforts. You will, I think, be welcome where we are going.”

  Ultrius gently lifts the unconscious body o
f Veronica Bisley and begins walking down one of the train tunnels. I follow behind him. After about five minutes there is a massive blast and a pressure wave races down the tunnel. Ultrius bends over Bisley to shield her; I brace myself behind them to lend what little extra protection I can.

  “The police blew up the tunnels behind us?” I asked.

  “No,” said Ultrius. “I set them to blow. I cannot afford to be followed. Not where we are going.”

  Ultrius picks up Bisley again, and this time he rises into the air and flies on ahead. I run after him at top speed but am left far behind. I wonder why he didn’t fly before? Maybe he needed to conserve the energy. Maybe I’ll get the chance to ask him later.

  Eventually I come to a place that must have been a major underground rail terminus. The tunnel opens out into a cavern hundreds of meters wide; crystal chandeliers covered with grime glow richly with jury-rigged dim light bulbs, faded advertisements for products that had not existed for centuries were plastered on the walls, old storefronts that had been abandoned and then reconditioned as cafes and bars and massage parlors. Women pushed strollers with screaming children in them while younger adults walked hand-in-hand along the edge of the rail platform. One of the sunken rail lines had been closed off at either end - the rails removed and replaced with artificial grass to serve as a playground; children run back and forth chasing each other. Pre-pubescent males lurk in the shadows trying so very, very hard to look cool. This is my kind of place.

  I am greeted by several people whom Ultrius had told I was coming, and they direct me to what seems to be the local equivalent of a hospital. Ultrius is being adamant that Veronica Bisley get the best of care, and the staff is so very attentive. Oh yes we will do our best, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

  Everyone seems to want a piece of this Ultrius. What should we do about the water supply? What about our electrical generators? Should we change the curriculum for the seventh-level high school physics class? Ultrius fends of these questions with a bored but earnest affect.