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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  “No,” said Olga. With super-human speed she snap-kicked King Peter in the groin. It was a really vicious kick. King Peter fell over, and I could see blood seeping through his pants. I wonder how long it takes a male vampire to regenerate ruptured testicles? “That was for Zippo,” said Olga, “Now you have been punished enough.”

  --------------------

  Of course a lot happened after that: routing the rest of the Yllg presence out of the vampire system, getting the support of the other local civilizations to allow us to declare a jihad against the Yllg (who must have been pissing off a lot of other aliens because these other aliens gave us a lot of good usable intelligence and helped us to sniff out some of the hidden Yllg bases), but perhaps what affected me most was what happened to Fanboy and Olga.

  The Fanboy android was still very much alive, but he was only a submind without a sense of self-purpose or a survival instinct. The various other subminds and datastores and sentient software agents that Fanboy had left behind were eventually rounded up, and they voted on whether they wanted to be reseeded into a new form. Mostly when this happens the subminds decide to shut down, but this time – perhaps in part because of Olga’s urging – the surviving bits of Fanboy decided to come back.

  Granted, his peers would have to vote on whether to allow it, and also make the needed resources available. However, Fanboy’s previous actions against the Amok, and his heroic actions wiping out the Yllg base in the vampire system, made the vote hardly more than a formality. There is no telling what sort of mischief the Yllg could have gotten up to if they had been allowed more time here. Perhaps they could have cloned an army of a billion super-powerful indestructible badly-dressed vampires.

  This time he chose to become, not an interstellar battlecruiser, but a cutting-edge 22,000 ton Sundog-Class cybertank. It’s an even sweeter design than the Penumbra-Class. The blank datacores of the new chassis were filled by the surviving bits of Fanboy, and a new prime personality matrix created. Sometimes the process goes wrong, and sometimes the new personality is very different from the original, but in this case Fanboy ended up almost exactly the same as he was before. He even got to keep the same nickname, which almost never happens.

  But not quite exactly the same as he was before. He was just a little more serious, and that childlike enthusiasm that had been his previous trademark was damped down. The easy rapport that the old Fanboy had developed with the vampire Olga Razon was gone. They tried for a while, and it’s not like they didn’t still get along, but the magic wasn’t there anymore. After a couple of years they called it quits and went their separate ways.

  It might have been easier for Olga if Fanboy had been destroyed completely, then she could at least have had the last memories of him. Instead she had to live with knowing that Fanboy was still alive, but that their relationship was dead. I don’t envy her that.

  I heard that Olga went back to the vampire planet, and that she decided to navigate the treacherous shoals of vampire court politics and eventually was crowned Queen Olga. She claimed the dual mandate of trying to see if the vampires could make something of themselves, and of improving the quality of their parties. One of these days I will have to go back and visit and see if she has made progress on either front.

  10. Tell Me a Story

  Engineer: Let’s have sex.

  Zen Master: Good Idea.

  (From the video series “Nymphomaniac Engineer in Zentopia,” mid-22nd century Earth)

  “Tell me a story.”

  But I have told you many stories, and I know that you have read most of my chronicles that have been transcribed into English. What do you want me to tell you?

  “I like your chronicles, but they all tend to the same pattern. You blunder into something weird, stuff happens, there is a giant battle, you win, and live happily ever after. Tell me something different.”

  But those are my most interesting stories! Of course they follow that pattern. If I didn’t find something weird, it wouldn’t be unique. If there wasn’t a conflict, it wouldn’t be exciting. If I didn’t win in the end, I would not have been around to tell about it. And happily ever after? Well, mostly, but far from always.

  “Try.”

  Oh all right. I was once traveling through space between the stars and I came across a rogue planet. It had no motion so I could not tell from what direction it had come. That was odd – perhaps some ancient civilization had put it there – but there was no trace of how that could have occurred. It was just a ball of rock sitting there in the black space between everything minding its own business.

  “And?”

  As I passed by I scanned it to make sure there was no alien outpost hidden inside, or ancient spaceships crashed on the surface. And I found the most amazing thing. It was composed of the most curious mixture of elements. The ratio of zinc to iron was 3.562!

  "And?”

  And I logged it and kept traveling until I reached my destination. Wonderbear the geologist was quite amazed by my find. Imagine 3.562.

  "And the story is…"

  That is the story

  "But nothing really happened!"

  Tell that to Wonderbear. He was quite thrilled to hear it. Besides, there was no shooting or blowing up things. That's what you asked for.

  "What about one with no shooting or blowing things up, but that is still interesting?"

  Ah, well, that's a different thing entirely. I was, of course, just teasing you. No one really cares about the zinc to iron ratio in a rogue planet. Well, other than Wonderbear. He’s still talking about it.

  “Tell me an interesting story where there are no battles and nobody dies. One that you have never told anyone else.”

  A tall order. Let me think about that one. In the meantime, would you care for more lemonade?

  --------------------

  It was a lovely spring day on Alpha Centauri Prime, blue sky with not a trace of cloud. My main hull was parked on top of a low grassy hill where I could enjoy the view with the full resolution of my primary optics. From this vantage point, I could see down the hill to where one of my androids was having lunch in the shade of an oak tree with a middle-aged woman named Candace Dollinger, although everyone calls her by her old nickname “Silhouette.”

  Silhouette was the sole survivor of a lost human colony that had been hijacked by the alien race that we refer to as the Yllg. The Yllg had performed genetic experiments on these humans and given some of them super powers. Probably it was to use as a weapon against us. They tried something similar with the vampires, but that’s yet another tale. Silhouette had the ability to teleport, which was the reason for her survival. She had been in another dimension (or whatever) when the Yllg had transmitted the coded signal that caused all the other humans to biochemically self-destruct.

  Silhouette was a trim 54 years old when we found her, but our medical science is advanced and now she looks hardly 40. Stopping the biological aging process is one thing, but reversing it is hard, even for us. It’s like trying to unpop a balloon, or remove the crease from a folded piece of paper. Still, my old friend and biological systems expert Frisbee keeps trying. He claims that she is one of his greatest challenges, and that he thinks he can get her down to a biological age of 35 without doing anything radical like surgically replacing parts of her with cloned tissue.

  Silhouette had finished her lunch – a chicken salad sandwich with a side of coleslaw (and the chicken salad was really good, if I do say so myself). I set a maintenance drone to clear the picnic table, but she shooshed the drone away and began to clear it herself.

  You don’t have to do that. My drones perform tasks like this with less conscious effort on my part than you expend breathing.

  “I know,” she replied, “but if I let you do everything for me I will become quite shameless and spoiled.”

  I suppose. Still, you have helped us out tremendously by allowing us to study you and your abilities. And of course, there was our – my - - failure to save the rest of yo
ur people. I don’t think that I could have done anything differently, but failure is still failure. We owe you quite a debt already. Anything that we can do for you, you need only ask.

  “You are welcome, but I am simply pleased to be of use. I’ve got another appointment with your colleague Frisbat and those physics experts later on today. They still don’t understand what the Yllg did to me, but they seem very excited every time they do another experiment. Especially Frisbat.”

  That’s Frisbee, and yes, he has a mania for the study of biological systems. You realize, of course, that you don’t have to volunteer for these experiments.

  “So you keep telling me, but again, I’m pleased to help out. Perhaps it will assist you in destroying these alien Yllg that killed all of my friends and family.”

  It might help at that, we shall see. Interstellar diplomacy is limited by the speed of light, but after what the Yllg did to your people – and what they tried to do with the vampires – we are moving towards more aggressive actions. In the meantime, if you don’t mind me asking, how are you holding up? Got any plans?

  “I’m holding up quite well, thank you. I don’t have any suicidal thoughts, if that is what you are referring to, although I do miss my family. There are enough of you cybertanks that like to animate human-looking androids that I don’t lack for company, and I could spend lifetimes in your museums and libraries. Also, some of the vampires are OK as well. Especially that Max Sterner guy.” Silhouette had finished clearing the table, and she sat down again and we continued our conversation.

  Yes, I know Max. I’m glad that you have found some companionship. He’s even older than I am, dating back to pre-exodus Earth. Now there is someone who can tell you stories.

  “Weren’t you going to quarantine the vampires on their planet, or something?”

  We have, but we always make exceptions for the ones we like.

  “And where do I eventually end up? How do I fit in? Eventually you will learn all that there is to learn about me. Do I just hang around sponging off you forever?”

  If you want. There are worse fates than just living one day at a time and enjoying it. Or you could, possibly, become one of us.

  “Frisbee mentioned something like that. You could stick my brain into a cybertank body? That doesn’t especially appeal.”

  Nothing so crude. Your neural matrices would be analyzed, and the information used to seed a new data matrix in a fresh cybertank body. Of course, analyzing a human brain to that resolution would require freezing it and making nanometer slices, a rather irreversible process. And it might not work.

  “What’s it like being a cybertank?”

  Really awesome.

  “I think that, for now, I like your idea of enjoying one day at a time. But I am still waiting for my story!”

  Yes, a story. OK, I have it – a very old one, back when there were still biological people around (I mean other than you), back when I was fresh and new and state-of-the art. All the data are in the archives, but I’ve never arranged it as a story, not as such, so in a sense I have never told anybody else.

  “And nobody dies?”

  Nobody dies, there are no battles. In fact nobody fires a shot.

  “And is it still interesting?”

  Let me tell the story and you can decide about that. Anyhow this was a long time ago. We cybertanks, and our human allies, had defeated the evil neoliberal forces and made peace with the aliens. That was right here, on this very planet of Alpha Centauri Prime.

  “I’ve read about these neoliberals. Where they really that bad? I mean, history is written by the victors, the neoliberals must have had their good points.”

  I was there and I assure you, the neoliberals were every bit as evil as the histories make them out to be. You could think of them as a cultural singularity: all the greed, selfishness, rationalization, lust for power, and self-delusion of the human psyche, all reinforcing each other into a perfect unstoppable tyranny.

  “It sounds like you hated the neoliberals even more than you hated the aliens.”

  Fighting aliens is business. Fighting the neoliberals was personal.

  “Well if this neoliberal tyranny was so perfect how did you defeat it?”

  We almost didn’t. History always looks inevitable after the fact, but at the time it could have gone either way. The neoliberals had achieved total social control of humanity, and their reign could have lasted forever, but then the aliens attacked. The neoliberals no longer had the ability to adapt or innovate; they had to create forces that were less restricted in their thinking and technology if they were to survive. The neoliberals planned to eliminate these free agents after they had served their purpose in fighting the aliens, and they came very close to succeeding.

  “It was you and that Vargas person who did that, right?”

  Oh I played my part, but I was not the only cybertank. There were ten of us originally, although five were killed in the alien attack and another one was murdered by the neoliberals. And yes, Giuseppe Vargas was important as well, but there were many other humans involved. Anyhow, we beat back the initial alien attack, and then started the slow laborious process of making peace with them. This planet was kind of a mess, there was a lot of radiation and there was a biological terror weapon that the aliens left as a parting shot that caused a lot of trouble.

  “Sounds like the revolution made things worse.”

  Revolutions usually do, at least in the short run. At least the survivors had enough to eat, and hope for the future. Eventually we got things under control. The politics were fractured, like the city-states of ancient Venice, the various directorates and universities and religious cults all forming their own little mini-countries, but it seemed to work. Humans were in short supply, so any state that didn’t treat it’s workers right would lose valuable talent to others that did. Giuseppe Vargas was the head of the cybernetic weapons directorate, but after the fall of the neoliberals he used to complain about the workload.

  “But isn’t it good to be the director?”

  You see, under neoliberalism there would be a thousand desperate starving people competing for each job. Being the director of a large enterprise was like being a little king; your word was law, you could order anyone to do anything, people would suck up to you, your pay and benefits were generous, and attractive young members of the opposite sex would offer to have sex with you in the hopes of advancing their lot. Later on being the director was not quite as cool: if you treated your workers badly they would just leave for some other enterprise, and you would have nobody to replace them with. Not that being in charge was a bad thing – it still had status, only it was more of a ”first amongst equals” than ”obey me or else”. Vargas was good at being director, and I know that he enjoyed it, but eventually he stepped down and let someone else have a go. That’s when he got the idea of leading an expedition to old Earth to see what had happened there.

  “You knew Vargas personally, I understand. I’ve read all the histories, but what was he really like?”

  Ah, good question. He was, as you doubtless know, the first generation of biologically engineered humans. He was physically strong and fast, but most of all he was smart. At the time, he was the most intelligent human being to have ever lived. He was certainly smarter than I am, although I didn’t realize just how much smarter until far later.

  “Wait, how can a biological human, however engineered, be more intelligent than someone like you with all those terahertz computer processors?”

  In terms of raw processing power, certainly I had more capacity than Vargas, but intelligence is more than that. If you take the village idiot and speed up his thought processes, he’ll just think idiot thoughts faster. Vargas had the ability to make intuitive leaps and see connections in data beyond what the bioengineers that created him expected.

  “Sounds impressive.”

  He was. But that first generation of bioengineered humans had a lot of rough edges. All those thousands of years of civiliza
tion had taken much of the aggressiveness out of the humans – Vargas was a wild thing, and the oligarchs could not control him. He was one of my greatest friends and comrades, and I miss him still, but even I must admit that he had a mean side. He was normally charming, and I never knew him to hurt an innocent, but when someone crossed him he could be merciless and sadistic.

  “Would I have liked him, if I had met him?”

  It’s hard to explain. He had a presence. He fascinated, but also put people on their guard. You would probably have been hopelessly infatuated with him – most of the female staff of the directorate was at the time – but maybe also have wanted to keep your distance. He had many lovers over the years, but always the relationships burned out and they drifted away. You can look at all the old video records, but you had to be there to understand.

  “Wasn’t there supposed to have been one special woman in his life?”

  You are referring to Janet Chen, a power systems engineer in the directorate. My fusion reactors have been upgraded several times, but their basic design is still hers. Vargas did seem to get along with Chen better than he did with most women, but she was killed by the neoliberals. Some say that she was his one true love and that her death haunted him for the rest of his life. Others say that that’s romantic twaddle, and that if she had lived she would have split from Vargas just like all the other women in his life.

  “I like the romantic twaddle version.”

  Me too.

  “So Vargas and you defeated the aliens, and then you defeated the neoliberals. Then things settle down and Vargas decides to go to old Earth. What was that about?”