“But didn’t they miss the sun and the sky and the wind?”
You forget that everyone then on Earth had never known anything different; I might as well ask you if you miss living in a cave. In truth their habitats were quite comfortable. It was never too cold, never too hot, never rained or snowed when you didn’t want it, and there were no tornadoes or hurricanes. They had constructed vast caverns in which there were lovely parks and lakes stocked with fish and birds – only there were no mosquitoes or ticks or sunburn.
“Wouldn’t that have been boring?”
In my experience biological humans are rarely bored by comfort. However, there was one cavern that they kept especially cold. They even had an ice-skating rink in it. Industrial and agricultural caverns tended to be on the warm side to save on cooling. Even the habitation zones varied a little in temperature and humidity, partly to accommodate different tastes and partly for engineering expedience.
“An interesting point of view. And what was their culture like?”
It was fascinating. It had a monastic, almost Spartan discipline to it: a consequence of their Librarian heritage and the effort needed to maintain life in an artificial environment. On the other hand, they also enjoyed relaxing and partying, and wine and other mild intoxicants were in common use. The core of their society was a respect for the truth, and the accurate maintenance of records and catalogs. It seemed to be serving them well.
“So how long did you stay on Earth?”
Not quite two years. There was a lot to see and many interesting people to meet. We could have stayed longer, but Vargas was getting antsy and wanted to go home. Well, except for the matter of the Dichoptic Maculatron.”
“The Dichoptic Maculatron?”
Yes, a nearly mythical device that allegedly would give the owner vast powers. We searched for it in the dark caverns underneath the Labyrinthia Chaotica, but I am sworn to secrecy about any other aspect of that matter.
“So what was this ‘Dichoptic Maculatron’ thing, anyhow?”
What part of “sworn to secrecy” did you not understand?
“Did you just make this part up?”
Possibly. Anyhow, once Masterson met the Grand Archivist Ludmilla Gehrts, he was instantly smitten and spent nearly a year courting her.
“Ludmilla Gehrts?”
Indeed. She was two meters tall, had green eyes and blond hair, the figure of a goddess from Greek mythology, and a mind that would put a cybertank to shame. When Masterson first met her she was wearing a long foam-green gown with small white flowers worked into a necklace. She also had a deceptively delicate-looking gold exoskeleton over her left arm which carried a variety of surprisingly potent weapons (they had this thing about personal weapons, you see).
“And how did that go?”
At first Ludmilla Gehrts would hardly deign to notice Masterson – which, as a healthy male, only inflamed his attraction. But gradually Masterson wore her resistance away, and they were married in a grand celebration before we left. Masterson ended up staying with Gehrts on old Earth. I think that the self-discipline and commitment to order of the inhabitants appealed to him. We corresponded long after I and Vargas had left the system. Masterson and Gehrts had several children and were devoted to each other for the remaining four centuries of their lives. A happy ending, I think.
“I like happy endings. So what happened to Earth itself?”
Effectively, nothing much. With the interstellar communications restored, Old Earth became the major center of scholarship of the entire human civilization, right up until the humans all mysteriously left us. To this day it remains a major archive, and many of the old human-inhabited caverns and libraries are still preserved there. Perhaps we should go visit someday, although it’s a long trip. Otherwise I could give you a guided tour in a very high-quality simulation.
“And so you returned to Alpha Centauri Prime? But wait a moment, what about that other cybertank called ‘Moss’, you never mentioned him.”
Ah, Moss. Yes, Moss was what you might call taciturn. When Vargas and I decided to return to Alpha Centauri Prime, Moss decided to stay. “These are remarkably rational and sane people, for biological humans. Still, they need a cybertank to keep them grounded.”
“But wasn’t there an alien quarantine against Earth?”
True. Moss had to spend two centuries in far orbit, until the aliens lifted the blockade and withdrew their forces, but cybertanks are nothing if not patient and Moss was the most patient of all. Still, he was only a few light-hours out so he could easily communicate with Earth itself. Eventually he settled on the surface – it was hostile for a human, but not so bad for one of us, especially on the high plateaus – and he had a long and notable career as both a scholar and a soldier.
“And when you and Vargas returned to Alpha Centauri Prime?”
Ah, more long stories. And ones that would break my promise to avoid talking about things blowing up. Another time.
“Fair enough.” Silhouette consulted her wrist-calc. “In any event, I see that I am nearly late for my next experiment.” She stood up and bowed. “Thank you for the story, Old Guy. It was exactly the kind that I wanted to hear.”
With that Silhouette vanished. I confirmed that, several seconds later, she had appeared safely in the laboratory with my old friend Frisbee. An amazing talent, teleportation. We still don’t understand it – a hidden potential in the seemingly simple human genome. How can a paltry few billion nucleotide base pairs possibly remain opaque to our analysis? A current theory is that the Yllg conducted biological experiments on the humans not so much to get at us, as to develop new abilities for themselves.
Silhoutte seems content, for the time being, but her presence has re-opened an old debate. Should we clone new biological humans to act as companions for her? Yet that would involve restarting human evolution all over again: do we have that right? Do we want to deal with the hassle? The proposal to reboot her psyche as a cybertank is, I think, not just intended for Silhouette’s benefit. Aside from the intrinsic intellectual challenge of the exercise, if Silhouette could be turned into one of us – or perhaps died in the attempt – that would make this entire debate moot.
I sit on top of my hill in my main hull and continue to enjoy the scenery. We’ll get around to doing something about the Yllg, one of these days.
11. Frankenpanzer
“I like tautologies, because you see they are always true. Lemons are yellow. Do I know you? GRAAAAH!” – Frankenpanzer, contemporary.
I have long relished my reputation for eccentricity and the ability to get into trouble. This reputation is perhaps a little embellished – if you look objectively at my service record I come off as reliable and trustworthy – but I am still proud of it (and do nothing to discourage it). It was thus a bit of a letdown when I finally encountered a cybertank that took my record for eccentricity, smashed it into pieces, ground the pieces into powder, and dropped the powder into a sun.
That’s life for you. Nobody stays on top forever.
I was part of a force invading a Yllg planet. The Yllg were putting up a stiff fight, and the assault group that I was a part of had suffered heavy losses during a counterattack. I found myself alone and hard-pressed. I was not in too great a danger, but I was going to have to engage in a tough fighting retreat if I was going to survive to fight another time.
That was when an allied force came to my aid. I sensed a wave of remotes off to one flank. They registered as friendly on the IFF, and there were an awful lot of them. They swept the skies and the ground clear of the Yllg forces in my immediate vicinity. I was grateful for the respite, but a little surprised; I didn’t know that that we had so many surviving forces in this sector.
I try to hail my saviors, but get only garbled transmissions in return. It sounded like something about a sale at Ikea where everybody shops. Perhaps their communications gear has been damaged, or there are still heavy-duty Yllg signal-jamming units in the vicinity? I send some scouts ov
er to check and that’s when I get my first visual contact.
It is a giant cybertank that has been made up of the bits and pieces of several other cybertanks. On the front right side, sticking out at an odd angle, is the massive ball-joint mounted plasma cannon from a Mountain- Class. On the left is the turret from a Horizon, it’s not level but tilted slightly forwards. I recognize bits and pieces of other classes: a Leopard, a Bear, and a Raptor. There are also pieces of heavy combat remotes, and even bulk transporters and portable generators. The upper carapace is like a big misshapen mountain covered in an erratic pattern of warts and blisters that are the salvaged secondary and tertiary weapons from multiple classes of cybertanks and other combat systems. Sensor masts sprout seemingly at random. Some had been blocking the firing arcs of the main guns and had been blasted down to stumps.
The whole monstrosity is mounted on numerous different sized track units; they don’t match up so when it turns it shudders and the treads slip and work against each other, chewing up the ground and raising massive dust clouds. Still, for all the sloppiness of its construction the thing is moving along at a decent clip.
It appears to be more cybertank than Yllg, and it did come to my aid, so I try and hail it via one of my scouts.
Hello giant cybertank! I am Old Guy. I don’t think that we’ve met. What are you?
“What am I?” replied the giant cybertank. “That’s a little impersonal. Don’t you mean who am I?”
Apologies. Who are you?
“I’m Algae. No, I’m Bubbles. I can almost remember, but somehow it escapes me. Oh, hey Old Guy, long time no see! Bremsstrahlung. Do I know you?”
Well this is proving to be an interesting day.
There is no record of a cybertank class such as yours anywhere in my databases, and certainly not on this planet during this time. Can you explain your existence?
“Explain my existence? That’s a rather deep philosophical request to make during an active combat. Oh, no, I get it, you mean explain MY existence HERE? What was the question again?”
Let’s try another approach. What are your last memories?
“Well let’s see. I was fighting the Yllg. I was winning. I was losing. I was retreating. I was advancing to my left flank. Then things got hazy. And I detected a colleague in trouble and gave the Yllg a decent thrashing! Lawn Gnomes, definitely.”
Hmm. I have my scouts circle around the giant and I run some simulations.
I think I can provide an answer. You register as being made of the parts of multiple cybertanks that were recently operating in this theater. They must have all been destroyed in close proximity. Though there was not enough left of any one of you to self-repair, so the drones must have automatically tried to fix things and welded your bits and pieces together. I do not believe that anything like this has happened before.
“You may be right. Your theory does account for the available facts. Table legs wobble if they are not braced correctly. So what does that make me? A sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a cybertank: a Frankentank?”
Frankentank sounds like a gas station that also sells hotdogs. How about Frankenpanzer?
“That could work – Von Frankenstein was German (or German-Swiss) so using ‘panzer’ is consistent. But I see from my surviving databases that ’Frankenpanzer’ is far from novel. There were several comic books so named, for starters.”
Well, then how about ‘aggregate tank’ - aggregiertenpanzer? (or ’Aggi’ for short).
“Sorry, doesn’t do it for me. Of course the Germans do love their big words, they would probably call me Atomaggregatangetriebenmobilenwaffensystem.”
I suppose. Or we could just go old-school military and come up with an acronym for you. Like Colossal Atomic Powered Aggregated Weapons System: "CAPAWS."
“Ugh. That’s worse than aggregate tank. I think that I will stick with Frankenpanzer, for now, even if it’s not original. Is that celery over there?”
Whatever. In any event, we are in a combat zone. Do you feel capable of action, or shall we simply try and withdraw?
“Withdraw? Possibly. Never! Let’s give these Yllg a taste of pain, shall we, Old Guy? GRAAAAH!”
GRAAAAH?
“That’s what the Frankenstein monster always said in the movies, wasn’t it? What were we talking about again?”
We were going to fight the Yllg.
“Of course we were. Let’s go, shall we?”
The giant agglomeration of cybertank parts and I thus moved off to do battle with the Yllg. For all the sloppiness of its assemblage, the massive compound cybertank was effectively controlling ten times as many combat remotes as I possibly could – perhaps this will work. If nothing else it will be something for the record books.
As we headed off to meet the Yllg forces, Frankenpanzer began singing the theme song to the 20th century Japanese action show “Ultraman.” That seemed silly, even for me, but it was such a cheery song that I could not help but join in.
In a super-jet he comes, from a billion miles away.
From a distant planet land, comes our hero Ultraman!”
We began combat operations and, at first, it went pretty well. Frankenpanzer had a decent grasp of tactics, but he did shift strategies erratically, and sometimes one of his sectors would work at subtle cross-purposes with another of his sectors.
Not too shabby, but against a first-tier opponent like the Yllg that could be an issue. Amateurs sometimes think that acting randomly will confuse the enemy; not if the enemy is really good. If a sophisticated enemy realizes that you are behaving randomly they will pick you apart with a more focused technique. We cybertanks use strategy that is hard for the enemy to predict, but it is a calculated randomness that meshes in with the big picture. Frankenpanzer was good, but still just erratic enough that the Yllg would be able to take advantage.
I decided that my role would be to fill in the gaps. I held back and watched as Frankenpanzer engaged the Yllg with his more powerful forces, and when I detected a glitch in his strategy I would rush in my own units to prevent the Yllg from exploiting the lapse. It worked out pretty well, for a while.
A Yllg heavy ground unit engaged us at long range. Frankenpanzer was hit and over a thousand tons of him was sheared off. It didn’t slow him down at all, he targeted the offending enemy unit with the main weapons from a Mountain and a Leopard and blew it away. His repair units were swarming over his damaged section, and were busily welding new random bits and pieces of salvaged cybertank in place even as he continued fighting.
One of his secondary turrets suffered an internal short and exploded – again, Frankenpanzer didn’t even appear to notice. The gap where the old turret had been was rapidly filled in with multiple armored telescope clusters. Amazing.
I was starting to feel pretty confident about the way that the battle was going, when all of a sudden Frankenpanzer came to a dead halt. His remotes all went to default mode: they continued to defend themselves and even take the tactical-level initiative, but without the strategy of a central controlling mind they were vulnerable and would not last long against the Yllg.
Frankenpanzer! What’s wrong? Are you damaged? Do you require assistance?
Frankenpanzer just sat there. Then he activated all of the motive units on his left side. There was no attempt to make a decent coordinated turn, and the outer units were going at the same speed as the inner ones, so they churned and rumbled and Frankenpanzer clumsily slewed to the right.
“I’m moving my left treads,” he said.
Frankenpanzer. This is a bad time for this (whatever ‘this’ is). We have a battle going on.
The big cybertank ignored me. After a time it shut down its left motive units and powered up its right ones.
“Now I’m moving my right treads.”
You dweeb will you snap out of it! Darn it I need you!
Unfortunately my shambling comrade remained unresponsive, and continued his alternating “I’m moving my left treads,” and “I’m moving my rig
ht treads” obsession. The Yllg can sense that our forces are no longer fighting with the same coordination as before and they press the attack. I take over control of some of Frankenpanzer’s remotes, but there are far too many for me to use them effectively. I decide to employ his mostly passive weapons systems as a barrier and use my own forces to mount a mobile defense behind them. It works, but the Yllg are continuing to press hard and I’m likely going to be overrun before too long.
Then he came to his senses, rallied his systems, and we beat the enemy back.
“Sponges! Sponges for all of you! Let’s rush them in the center, I think they are weak there. GRAAAAH!”
I will say that fighting alongside Frankenpanzer may not have been the most efficient means of waging war that we cybertanks have ever devised, but it was always full of interest.
--------------------
To make a long story short Frankenpanzer and I survived combat with the Yllg – although barely -- and we were fortunate to be reinforced the next day. Upon examination it was determined that the cybertanks out of which he had been constructed were truly dead. There was no question of disassembling him back into his components, as there was not enough left of any single one of them to be viable. Also, Frankenpanzer was clearly self-aware and, despite his erratic behavior, was capable of adhering to our body of law. Thus, he had full citizenship rights and nobody could ”fix” him, unless he agreed to it – which he did not.
His fragmented mental structure would sometimes lead to unique insights, and he became a valued member of our society. Nevertheless, the overall consensus was that one Frankenpanzer was more than sufficient for all pragmatic purposes. Thus, the programming of the repair drones was subtly altered to ensure that nothing like this would ever occur again.
It was some time later that I was walking in a park inside Moby Cybertank with the vampire Max Sterner, the human nicknamed Silhouette, and an android remote that belonged to Frankenpanzer.
Confessions of a Sentient War Engine (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 4) Page 23