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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  Olga however demurred and selected one of the junior officer’s quarters. “It’s more like what I’ve been sleeping in for the last few centuries, I feel more comfortable with a tight efficient layout. You two can decide between Admiral or Captain; I’m off to bed.”

  Well, neither Fanboy nor my android body needed sleep – we cybertanks process our dreams simultaneously with our conscious state, although the technical term is ”information garbage collection.” Fanboy decided to go off with Zippo to visit something called “The Museum of Jurassic Technology,” that Moby swore had pieces of the original from 22nd century Earth. I decided to pass. I wandered through the Admiral’s quarters and examined the books, all reproductions from that era of old earth, and thus almost uniformly dull in that stuffy formal 19th century style that passed for erudition back then.

  On a whim I decided to take a nap. Just because my android body doesn’t need to sleep doesn’t mean that it can’t when I feel like it. I just need to switch to full-on dreaming instead of partial in-the-background dreaming. Sometimes it’s fun to sleep totally and all at once, just like the old humans used to.

  I curled up in a large overstuffed armchair in the Admiral’s quarters and promptly fell asleep. As I cycled though the various stages of psychological house-cleaning of the human sleep stages, I eventually started dreaming. When I had been newly-constructed my dreams and been fantastic, almost adventures in themselves, involving exotic aliens or weird landscapes, people fused with giant clams, whatever. As I age I find that my dreams have become more pedestrian – nowadays they mostly involve me forgetting to bring along enough spare parts during a battle, or missing an appointment, or reliving some past mistake. A hazard of aging I expect.

  This time my dream has a little more style. I am a cybertank parked on a giant pizza that is floating in the air over the old English countryside near Stonehenge. I start to drive in a circle around the edge of the pizza, and my treads leave tracks in the cheese and tomato sauce, occasionally crushing an olive or mushroom. I find this oddly enjoyable.

  Jesus Christ is floating next to me, but he’s not a cybertank. He’s in his old android body, jeans and tennis shoes and t-shirt and all, except this time he has a full beard, and the t-shirt is from the Vision Sciences Society meeting which had been held in St. Pete’s Beach, Florida, in 2014 AD.

  “Hello,” says Christ. “How’s the driving on a giant pizza going?”

  Well, fine. Just fine. How’s the floating in the air next to a cybertank that is driving around on a giant pizza going?

  “Very well,” said Christ. He dipped down and snagged a green pepper, then he floated back up next to me. Every now and then he would munch thoughtfully on the pepper.

  You’re not really here. You were killed by Roboneuron. You’re just a part of my memories.

  “Obviously,” said Christ. “But remember, God is not a physical thing, God is an idea. So if you have the idea of me, then I am here.”

  Ideas aren’t real.

  Christ looked sad when I said that. “Of course they are. Your mind is just an idea that believes in itself. This entire universe is an idea in the mind of God. It’s the spirit that counts, and that can be instantiated by anything. At one level I’m just a part of you talking to yourself in your sleep. But I am still the Son of God and a conduit to the eternal. There is no contradiction.”

  If you say so. Then why are you here?

  “Why to talk to you, of course. This seemed like as good a time as any. I’m worried about you. Have you thought about what we talked about last time?”

  Love thy neighbor – yes, I remember. But what if your neighbor kills your friends? What if your neighbor kills an entire planet full of people right in front of your own optics: just makes them melt into pus? What if loving your neighbor means that evil triumphs and all that is left is pain and death?

  “I never said it would be easy,” replied Jesus. “As you have surmised, God does not require that everyone be a saint. You do have the right to defend yourselves and those you hold dear. But it takes more than not being evil to get into heaven. There must be a sacrifice.”

  A sacrifice? Like I need to burn sheep intestines on an altar, or maybe blow off one of my tread-units?

  Jesus makes a face. “Don’t be deliberately dense. You don’t get to heaven just by offering God some sausages, and mere masochism is pointless. You need to give up something for a higher purpose. To reach out to others that you have no reason to trust. To take that leap of faith, to make the offer of peace even when your computations say that it is tactically unsound. Or give up a worldview that allows you to rationalize behavior that is good for you, but bad for everyone else – humans have especial trouble with that one.”

  I am going to reply, but Jesus is no longer there. The pizza is becoming thinner and is no longer able to bear my weight. My treads rip through the crust and I am falling covered in dough and anchovies. My suspensors are offline and the ground is coming up and it’s covered from horizon to horizon with an unbroken squirming mass of Amok happy leeches. Then I wake up.

  I startle awake out of the Admiral’s chair. That will teach me to indulge bad habits – at least, this particular bad habit. From now on I will stick to parallel processing. I upload the dream experience in a compressed data burst back to my main self in Moby’s central bay. I absorb it and the entirety of myself is as disturbed as my submind was. Yes, no more full-on dreaming for me.

  --------------------

  The remaining days of Moby’s voyage across the Great Equatorial Ocean passed uneventfully. We could have gone faster, but there was no need and Moby claimed that too much speed would scare the fish. Moby is very possessive of this ocean. “There is more life and interest in a cubic kilometer of this ocean than there is in a cubic light-year of outer space,” he would say. Of course, space has a lot more cubic light years than the ocean has cubic kilometers, but I see no need to quibble. It's a matter of taste.

  We took some guided tours this time, and were duly impressed at the collection of antiques and artworks that Moby had acquired or constructed over time. There were other passengers on Moby, some in humanoid form, most in different shapes. We had some interesting conversations and made new friends. After two days Olga, Zippo the space monkey, and the Fanboy android took off in their shuttle; they didn’t want to miss their launch window back to Fanboy’s main hull. I stood on the deck and watched the plume of fire streak into the sky until it was a dot and then gone.

  We reached our destination port, and I drove my main hull out to the spaceport for its own launch preparations. I decide to leave my humanoid android on Moby. It’s a small fraction of myself, I can easily make more like it, and it might be interesting for a part of me to experience life on a megaship for a time. Moby is happy to oblige me. I determine that, rather than refusing to use it again, I am going to seduce that slippery little tiger-striped golf ball into liking me. I sense a kindred spirit, and I love a challenge.

  --------------------

  We start the long voyage from Alpha Centauri Prime to the system where the vampire planet is located. Fanboy, all 1.5 kilometers of him, is completely covered in disposable fuel containers, with an enormous disk of raw materials attached to his prow serving double-duty as a dust shield. There is no point in trying to hide something as physically large and with such a huge thermal signature as Fanboy, so we make no effort to stealth him. The rest of us travel more discretely, arranged in loose formation around Fanboy, about a light-minute across. A cybertank is effectively a spaceship in its own right, just add on some drive systems and fuel pods and we’re good to go. This time we wear black radar-absorbent stealth pods, and we have clouds of nearly invisible scouts lining the entire route ahead of us, but we encounter nothing of interest during the journey.

  Olga spends most of the time in hibernation, Zippo goes into shutdown, and the rest of us tinker with simulations, or work on sending and receiving messages from back home. Other than our defensive sys
tems we slow down our main processors and while away the years.

  Our little armada consists of Fanboy, myself, the Horizon- Class Frisbee, the Bear- Class Roughcut” the Raptor-Class Pokey, and the new Penumbra-Class Goat. Frisbee is my oldest and best friend. In his previous incarnation as a Thor-Class he was known as “Whifflebat” and we go back to the very beginnings. Roughcut and Pokey I’ve known for a while, we’re not close, but we’ve always worked well together. Goat is a new model just a few years out of his probationary period. He’s advanced and sophisticated and knows it, and is kind of an asshole. Well he’s young; maybe he’ll mellow out someday.

  We enter the vampire system and, as per the plan, split up. I’m going to take Olga down to the vampire planet itself and let her visit some friends that she hasn’t seen in centuries. It was also judged a good idea to have at least some military presence there (limited though I may be in that regards). The rest of the cybertanks are going to land on a cold dead rocky planet - some ways out from the central star - and set up a preliminary base-camp. Fanboy is so huge that he’s going to have to do multiple loops around some gas giants to shed enough velocity. Eventually he will insert into orbit around the barren planet and use the megatons of materials that he is carrying to start an entire mainline industrial infrastructure. Other cybertanks are scheduled to arrive over the next few years. Before too long we will have a major civilizational hub out here, hopefully enough to deter the Yllg or Spinlozenges or Meta-Slines from messing around with the vampires.

  My main hull aerobrakes into the atmosphere of the vampire planet of New York. There has been a long biochemical war between the native ecology and the transplanted Terran one. The spots of the planet that are non-Terran are clearly declining in number. Probably in just a few millennia more they will all be gone, and the planet will be completely Earth-like.

  To avoid causing any more damage than I have to, I land in one of the few remaining non-Terran zones. There are lichens and mosses that are different shades of brown, green, and yellow, but not much else. When the native ecology finally dies out it will be small loss. I drive out to the edge of the transition zone and park. I could drive through the forest to the main area of vampire habitation, but I would leave a compacted eight-lane highway in my wake, so I stay put. Instead I take one of my own humanoid androids, Olga Razon, Zippo the space monkey, and a Fanboy android, have them all jump onto a heavy combat remote, and we fly over to the main castle.

  The vampire planet has a single small moon. It’s only about 200 kilometers in diameter, but it has a low orbit so it looks almost as big from the surface as Earth’s moon, and it really zips along. The vampires call it “Phobos,” which is Greek for fear. The name had already been taken by one of the moons of Mars back in the Terran system, but the vampires must have been in a “we are vampires and need to be cool!” phase when they named it.

  The last time that I was here the castle was more-or-less dilapidated. Vampires, for all their strength and speed, aren’t capable of sustained heavy work, and the robotic systems that they had taken with them from Earth were slow and inefficient. They could barely make repairs fast enough to avoid falling behind entropy.

  However, this time the castle was pristine, with perfectly fitted stone walls, manicured lawns and gardens, and brightly colored pennants flying from the tops of tall conical towers. We descended into the courtyard. Fanboy nudged Olga, “It looks a lot spiffier than you described it.”

  “Yes it does,” said Olga. “I wonder how they managed that. Old Guy, did any of your kind help out?”

  Not to my knowledge. Perhaps your kindred have developed a more efficient variety of robotic servant on their own. That would not be impossible, but it would be impressive, given what they had to work with.

  The heavy remote extended stubby landing skids and gently came to rest in the middle of the courtyard. We climbed down off of it and walked toward the main set of entrance doors. Unlike the crude oak that was here last time, these were polished bronze embellished with bas-relief skulls. They swung inwards on perfectly-balanced silent hinges, and we entered the castle.

  The entrance hall was glorious – fifty meters long, a polished white marble floor with intricate geometric arabesques of inlaid quartz and lapis lazuli. The walls were covered with mirrors that had complex gilt frames, and the ceiling glowed with the soft light of a thousand simulated candles in dozens of silver chandeliers. Zippo was entranced by the reflections of reflections of himself in the mirrors that faced each other.

  There was nobody to greet us so we continued on past the entrance hall into the throne room. This was done in a style similar to that that of the entrance hall, but on a much grander scale. At the far end of the room was a massive throne constructed of golden skulls all fused together, and sitting on the throne was the vampire known as “King Peter.”

  The last time I had been here, King Peter had worn a simple grey suit. This time he had gone all stage-vampire with a long black cape lined with red and a golden crown covered with tiny skulls. He wore small golden earrings, both skull-shaped, and in his left hand was a cane topped with a shining silver skull. King Peter had clearly developed something of a skull fetish.

  There were two dozen other vampires also in the throneroom. They were all dressed in full-on vampire Goth regalia: lots of black capes and black lace dresses, with black silver-trimmed corsets, and black shoes with silver skull buckles. Lots, and lots, of things with skulls on them.

  The skulls are cool, but you might consider adding a few spiders or stars or serpents for variety. Also, while it’s hard to go wrong with black, adding a few accents to your color palette could really help. Certainly some dark reds, grays, perhaps a dash of yellow here and there as an accent. Maybe a leopard-skin print.

  “Do you really think that leopard-skin could work?” asked one of the female vampires.

  “Silence!” said King Peter, and the offending vampiress backed away and looked abashed. “I have been expecting you. Old Guy, you are as irreverent and insulting as ever. Olga Razon, it’s been a long time. You are looking well, although your current taste in clothes is atrocious.” He turned to regard the Fanboy android, still dressed as a captain in the Royal Cybertank Space Navy. “And you I have not met, but I am told that you are a representative of the Space Battleship known as Fanboy. I can tell that you are the source of Olga’s current lack of fashion sense.”

  You are well informed, King Peter. You know why we are here? And how have you managed to rebuild this castle on such a grand scale?

  “Well, I suppose that at this point it would not hurt to explain it to you. Tell me, what is a vampire?”

  A vampire is a biological human that has been infected with a highly evolved virus that grants them increased physical speed and strength at the expense of no longer being able to have children, or to consume any sustenance other than human blood. The true biological humans have, we believe, evolved beyond you and you are left behind as living fossils.

  “Wrong. I used to believe that as well. That we were condemned to a shallow existence while you cybertanks went off to found an interstellar empire. But we vampires are not the simple victims of a virus that you would have us believe. We are the undead, the holy servants of the great dark god Nyarl-Yakub. I have prayed and my prayers have been answered. Nyarl-Yakub is coming, and as his foremost priest and servant I shall rule over all of you.”

  Words fail me.

  “Peter,” said Olga, “Aren’t you letting this play acting get a little out of hand? There is no Nyarl-Yakub, that was just something we made up a long time ago for fun. It’s not real and this is stupid.”

  “Stupid?” asked King Peter. “Let me demonstrate just how wrong you are.” King Peter pointed his right hand at Zippo, black lighting shot out of it and Zippo exploded into a thousand fragments. I didn’t see that one coming.

  “Zippo!” cried Olga. (An unimaginative response, but what else would one say when your favorite space monkey has just been blast
ed into chunks by a sociopathic vampire just to make a point?).

  Fanboy strode forward and tried to slap King Peter, but was effortlessly swatted aside. Now, vampires are stronger than regular humans, but so are the most up-to-date humanoid androids. These two should have been an even match, but King Peter was clearly far stronger. On the other hand he was not invincible like Superbeing – I noticed his skin deflecting when he struck Fanboy. He was just a lot stronger – I estimate by a factor of five. But how could that have happened?

  Some of King Peter’s gothic minions grabbed us and it was instantly obvious that resistance was pointless, so I just relaxed and let them continue to grab me. After a while they got tired of grabbing us and we were allowed to stand freely.

  I am saddened by the loss of Zippo. That was both mean-spirited and pointless of you. But other than that, what do we have to fight about? You have somehow stumbled onto or created a new source of power. Congratulations. But surely further conflict is pointless?

  “Pointless?” said King Peter. He seemed confused for a time. I guess he figured that when we realized how powerful the vampires had become that we would have to fight. It must have thrown off his prepared speeches. He would likely have enjoyed nothing more than for me to swear revenge or boast of being even more powerful, and when I did nothing he was at a loss. “But you have always looked down on us! You have mocked us!”

  A little gentle ribbing between close cousins on the human branch of the tree of sentience. So what?