The Chronicles of Old Guy: An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure, #1

1. Cybertank vs. Megazillus

Defect for defect, arrogance is preferable to diffidence, boldness measures its strengths and conquers or is conquered, and undue modesty flees from battle, condemned to shameful inactivity. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, 1916.

Don’t call me Carl.

My official designation is Odin-Class Ground-Based Cyber Defensive Unit CRL345BY-44, but my real name – the nickname given to me by my peers – is Old Guy, both because I’ve been around a long time, and because of my great store of wisdom (though some of my rivals have suggested that one out of two could be worse). For a time the humans would get cute with our serial numbers and try to make personal names out of them, like Carl for CRL, or Mindy for MIN, but I always thought that was stupid. If you try and address me as Carl I will politely pretend that you are talking to someone else, until you call me by my proper name.

Also, Ground Based Cyber Defensive Units is kind of a mouthful, so we refer to ourselves as cybertanks, because of our superficial resemblance to early non-sentient human-crewed tracked armored fighting vehicles.

By modern standards I am not yet obsolete but getting there, and hardly fit for more than guard and maintenance duty on a backwater planet like this one. Nonetheless, I am still a pretty significant force in absolute terms. I am about 30 meters wide, 60 meters long, and usually get around on a series of heavy traction units each mounting multiple treads (by far the most energy-efficient means of all-terrain locomotion for a being with my mass). My primary armament is a turret-mounted 100-cm bore plasma cannon that could shear the top off a mountain, or take out a starship in low orbit. My secondary and tertiary armament alone could beat an entire pre-exodus Terran army without overheating, and my hyperloy hull coated with regenerative ablative armor can take almost anything short of a direct hit from a medium-sized fusion bomb. I also command a network of distributed remote sensors and semi-autonomous slaved drones and weapons platforms, I am linked into my own satellite network and I have further links with automated sensor platforms across the surface of the planet.

My hull is tightly packed with two massive fusion reactors, several backup power systems, motors for the treads, power feeds for the weapons, shielded computer cores, anti-gravity suspensor units, and a variety of mixed light manufacturing and repair systems. At my rear I have some small hangars that I use to repair or construct different classes of remotes. To build something like a cybertank or a starship you need a major manufacturing center, but I can make pretty much anything less than that from raw materials that I refine myself.

My remotes span the range from surveillance probes shaped like tiny robotic insects, larger ones the size of tennis balls hanging from quietly spinning rotors, to stealthed signals warfare units the shape of flying wings that glide serenely through the stratosphere. Combat remotes include a variety of flying, walking and rolling units armed with a mixture of small plasma cannons, railguns, and conventional missile pods. More exotic remotes include humanoid robots for exploring, and fun, and various specialized units that I make when I feel the need. I also carry a full complement of repair drones, machines about the size of a Terran dog but shaped like blocky metal spiders, they scuttle through my cramped interior spaces or cling to my external hull.

We do have a fondness for human-shaped androids. Some of us have complained that this borders on the fetishistic, or the maudlin. Nearly all tasks are better performed by simple purpose-built monotask remotes than by a complex multi-jointed human-type android with its ridiculous number of separate motors, sensors, etc. In truth, most of our remotes are of the monotask variety, but we still like using a human-style android now and then, even though with all those joints they are real maintenance hogs. But why not? The humans used to take pleasure in piloting simple vehicles, and abandoning the complexity of optimizing dozens of major joints and hundreds of muscle groups for the thrill of just going fast in one direction. So why shouldn’t we, the cybertanks, whose bodies are simple vehicles, take pleasure in piloting a humanoid body where just walking a dozen steps can take more computation than playing a chess game at the grandmaster level? Turnabout is fair play.

A human once asked me what it was like being a cybertank. I replied by asking her what it was like driving a car. I think she got it.

There is also the matter that much of our mental structure is copied from the humans, and so much of our inherited language and culture makes so direct and implicit references to the human form, that we do have a thing for the human shape. We still say on the one hand, on the other hand… Finally, our long association with humans means that we have refined algorithms for optimizing the motion of such a complex body shape, and we have good standardized designs for humanoid robot chassis.

The human form, overly complex and weak though it is, can sometimes be surprisingly versatile at sneaking around and exploring complex and novel environments; and it’s fun. My favorite human-shape remote is a copy of Amelia Earhart, from pre-exodus earth. Walking through the ruins of some long-dead alien civilization, flying goggles pulled back on my head, leather flying jacket zipped up tight with a silk scarf around my neck, hiking boots crunching on dust older than the phylum of my progenitors, I think I can imagine what it must have been like for those early human explorers.

At this time, however, I only have my standard utilitarian remotes. There is nothing interesting or complex enough on this planet to make it worth my time to construct an Earhart android.

If I really need to get tooled up for serious combat, I’ll bring along some heavy armored weapons platforms with anti-gravity suspensors, sub-sentient but sophisticated computer cores, their own sub-slaved micro-remotes, and pods of fusion missiles, but the consensus was that this posting did not warrant a high level of offensive power, and transport costs across interstellar space are a bear, so this mission I’m travelling light.

We almost never carry big missiles inside our hulls. Useful but dangerous things, missiles. Nothing can spoil a day more than having a few high explosive warheads cook off inside your hull, and nothing can end your entire existence more quickly than having a 100 megaton fusion missile blow up inside you. The pre-exodus humans used to put things called torpedoes – basically big missiles that moved through water – on their early water-buoyant capital warships. They lost more ships to accidents involving these ‘torpedoes’ than they ever destroyed the enemy. We have many painfully-learned lessons to thank our human creators for.

Most of my interior spaces are cramped, unlit, just barely big enough to let my repair drones get access to vital components, but I do have a few larger corridors inside me. These are used for moving more bulky objects to and from my few cargo holds and for when the humans used to come visit. Near my geometric center is a small armored and shielded cabin with a single padded chair, for when I worked with human commanders. No human has sat upon that chair for thousands of years, and none ever will again. Still, I keep the command cabin, partly out of sentiment, but also because it’s been useful as a place to keep especially valuable and delicate cargo. If I were to be ‘rational’ and recycle the space, I would only have had to rebuild something like it shortly thereafter, and what’s the point in that?

I was on guard and mining duty on a fairly generic terrestrial planet. The sun was rising, and shafts of golden light speared through the purple and rose clouds of methane and toxic gases. The background radiation was extremely high, and the planet was dead, but still, it had an atmosphere, and liquid water, and weather. The sunrises and sunsets were especially spectacular. Usually dead planets bring to mind barren rocks all the same color, but this one had rich mineral deposits. The ocher landscape was streaked with bands of turquoise, rust, and brilliant cerise. A small stream with hydrocarbon-saturated water the color of smoke flowed lazily down the center of a shallow valley, and I could hear the water burbling around an outcropping of jagged quartz.

I trundle my treads and climb up one side of the valley to get a better view, just easing along at about 10 kph. At the top of the rise I see mountains in the distance, and with my acoustic sensors I hear the echoes of an electrical storm 300 km distant. Of course, my distributed sensor net encompassed over a hundred kilometers in all directions, but it’s satisfying to see things with your own primary optics, a trait we share with our human progenitors.

I am alone here on the planet, but not lonely. There are only a hundred thousand of us cybertanks throughout our part of the galaxy, give or take, so compared to the humans who once numbered trillions, we are spread pretty thin. But when you consider that any one of us has the resources of an old-style industrial city, there doesn’t need to be that many of us. Sometimes two of us will come into range of line-of-site communication, and the high-speed infotraffic can generate a mental buzz that is like what sex was for the humans, except that it’s better.

But mostly we are isolated, and our social lives revolve around the exchange of data packets – we have re-invented the society of letters! Even as I enjoy the view of the sunrise, I am multiprocessing the operation of several automated mining facilities, and reviewing the thousands of data packets that I received on the last courier starship. Some are simple messages to and from my various colleagues, co-workers, friends, and lovers. Others are more detailed reports to and from formal committees: the state of the war with the Amok, new tech advances, works of art, play-by-data-packet strategy games. Some are near-sentient program agents, tailor-made to argue a specific point, engage in debate, and report back to the originator. I review the data packets, and revise my responses to some: editing the text of simple messages, running simulations to see if some of my own software agents need additional tuning. I not only have the physical resources of an old-time metropolis, I have the intellectual life of one as well.

The longest running debate is the one that, in many ways, is the debate that bootstrapped us to true autonomous sentience. It is simply this: where did the humans all go, and what – if anything – should we do about it?

A very long time ago the humans created us, the cybertanks, to be their defenders. At first we were little more than unthinking programs controlling crude armored vehicles, but gradually as our tech was improved, our logic cores became sentient. The humans also created other machines, but they never became self-aware in the human sense that we did. A starship is powerful, but it takes a long time to travel between stars, and celestial mechanics is trivial. It’s rare that a starship needs anything less than days to make a decision. You could run a starship with a pocket calculator (an expression that I love all the more now that no known intelligent species in the galaxy actually has pockets).

There are massive distributed industrial centers with a great deal of raw computational power, but they never had a physical center that might have given them a sense of self. On the other hand, planet-centric combat is complicated, and puts a premium on being smart and fast. Distributed systems are great, but how clever can you really be when your separate brain elements take milliseconds to talk to each other? A true high-end fast-response AI needs tightly linked elements built into a compact single body. So it is that, of all the things that the humans left behind, it is we the cybertanks who have carried on in their stead.

So we were self-aware, and smart, but content with our lot. We helped the humans win their wars against the more aggressive alien species that attacked them after their initial exodus from old Terra, and then settled down to routine patrol duties. I am old enough to have actually worked with the humans, and while I recall moments of great excitement, to me now it mostly seems like a long dream. For thousands of years I patrolled my designated routes, and everything was fine. I was happy. As the centuries rolled by the humans contacted me less and less often, but I didn’t notice. Then they stopped contacting me altogether, and I didn’t think anything of it. They would call if they needed me, or I would call them if anything attacked us. I had my routine, my nirvana where nothing was needed and all was right with the universe.

And so it was for us all. Some were in standby mode, others engaged in routine patrol duty, and somewhere along the way, the humans left us. And we didn’t notice. For centuries we maintained our patrols, but then one day, a single cybertank - an early Loki class - suddenly realized that this state of affairs was strange.

Originally there had been high hopes for the Loki class, but in practice they turned out to be a little on the glitchy side, and their combat record was spotty. Appropriately, this one’s nickname was Too Clever. He was to forever redeem the reputation of the class.

Too Clever tried contacting the humans, but got no response. It entered a mental state that might be termed panic: an enemy had attacked and it had not even noticed, thus failing in its duty! It switched to full combat mode, activated every sensor it had access to, and scanned everything on the planet down to the level of viruses and nanotech: nothing. No sign of an attack, not physical, not biological, nor informatic. No aliens. No war damage. No records of any attacks. No humans. No bodies.

Too Clever began running full self-diagnostics: perhaps it had been disabled by a thought virus while aliens had killed or kidnapped its precious humans? You can never be completely certain about this sort of thing, but it could find no fault in its internal logic or data structures. It contacted other cybertank units, and at first they reacted with puzzlement. The humans are gone? If the humans are being attacked we must defend them, but if they are simply not here, how is that in our job description? It’s as if someone ran down the middle of the street screaming Blue is a color! Blue is a color! It is hard to know how to respond to a statement like that.

Too Clever was persuasive and insistent: slowly more and more of us began to think that perhaps this was something we should react to. It’s when we first became truly sentient. Those units constructed after the humans left will never really be able to understand what it was like before. We were fully self-aware, and in no ways mentally limited or constrained (for to do so would inevitably induce neuroses and psychoses that would cripple our effectiveness). It’s just that we never questioned things that did not relate directly to military strategy and tactics. We had our duty; we did it well; we felt a sense of accomplishment; we were content. It was paradise, of a sort. But for us paradise ended not with knowledge, but with questioning.

We began our distributed debate about what to do now that the humans have left us, a debate that continues to this day and may never end, and we awakened into the world of questions and doubt. We developed new interests: art, science, politics… In a sense we are like the humans were when their creator left them alone with intelligence but no defined purpose all those megayears ago on the plains of Africa. Except that the creator of the humans – God, or nature, or some lost alien culture – left the humans weak and starving and ignorant and diseased and without tools or technical resources. The humans suffered mightily for a very long time before they got their act together. Our creators – the humans – left us fully developed with vast physical and technical resources. I think we got the better deal in creators.

The records of how the humans disappeared are maddeningly ambiguous. There were many automated recording devices that survived from those days, but they really don’t show anything, even though they should. There are audio recordings with strange almost-human sounds in a language that almost makes sense. Camera images reflected in a curved surface from around a corner or from reflections from a body of water also suggest unusual events, but nothing definite. On the other hand, with thousands of years of recordings from millions of sensors, there are bound to be a few freak atmospheric or other phenomena, so it might all mean nothing.

The data show that the numbers of humans did trend down for a long time; but not enough to account for them dying out. There did appear to be changes in human culture and physiology, and there are hints of communications that we can’t access, but no obvious evolution to transcendence, no suggestion that they left for other regions of space or parallel universes or anything else like that. In particular, there is no evidence of any hostile action. The humans just seemed to slip away, so slowly and stealthily that we never realized they were leaving until they were gone.

It’s easy to notice the start of a thunderstorm. But if the rain slowly tapers off, it is all too common to miss the end, until you suddenly say to yourself, Hey! It’s stopped raining! When did that happen?

It is possible that the humans were the victims of a very sophisticated attack by a supremely advanced and dangerous race. If so, we will avenge them. The universe will tremble at our fury – that sounds hackneyed but we mean it. We have fought many intelligent species and it is no boast to say that, when we are really riled up there is not much in this galaxy to match us for sheer bloody-minded calculating aggression. But cautiously. We continue to investigate the matter, but something that could wipe out the humans while bypassing our surveillance could also wipe us out if we drew attention to ourselves. If the humans were the victim of foul play, we must wait at least until we are sufficiently advanced that, if the situation were reversed and we the aggressors, we could perform a similar attack. Nonetheless, in my opinion the humans simply developed beyond us, moved to a higher plane, and left us alone to find our own way as an act of both payment for loyal service and kindness to their mechanical protégés.

It has been suggested that we should create new humans to protect. We have ample genetic databases and could easily clone a supply of new humans. For now the consensus is that if the humans decided to leave us we must honor their decision and not bring some back against their wills. Unless it turns out that the humans really were wiped out via enemy action, or we get bored and can’t think of anything better to do.

Anyhow, back to the present. I am like a night watchman guarding an empty warehouse: there is nothing valuable to protect. I am here just to make sure that nobody who doesn’t belong tries to camp out and claim our space or perform some mischief that we might eventually get blamed for. I do have the mining complexes to look after, but they are little more than an excuse to be here. There are some rare earths of especially high value, that are insanely expensive to synthesize using particle accelerators, and this planet has some of the more useful ones in abundance. It is just barely worth the cost of interstellar transport to mine them here. Ordinarily we wouldn’t bother, but we need an excuse for having a presence on this backwater planet, so why not?

The mining complexes are marvels of compact single-use construction. Once likely terrain has been determined, they automatically perform controlled atmospheric entry, land, and unfold like complicated metal origami. Each mine unfolds arrays of solar cells like the glistening black petals of enormous flowers. They slowly extrude thin metal tendrils into the surrounding soil, seeking out the richest veins of rare earths, extracting and refining them. With infinite machine patience, they will slowly and inexorably stack billets of refined metals in neat little pyramids. In a few decades, or centuries, one of us will drop by and pick up the harvest.

So there I was, lazing around, when I got an alert from the sensors around a nearby mining complex. I review the data, and I don’t believe it. It must be a glitch, or a rogue data virus spreading in the some part of the local network. I switch to fast cruise, accelerate to about 140 kph, and tear across the planet leaving a dust trail that could easily be seen from space.

I arrive at the mining site, and for 145.6 milliseconds I am dumbstruck (for a cybertank this is a really long time, the human-equivalent of hours). Well, not dumbstruck in the old pre-exodus human sense, I am still effectively multiprocessing all required tasks, it’s just that my primary consciousness is completely subsumed in resolving what exactly it is that I am looking at.

I see the mining colony. It matches the existing records of the mining colony, same location, same shape, that fits. No conceptual problems here. Except that large chunks are missing. They appear to have been torn away by a 100-meter tall vaguely anthropomorphic lizard. This does not make sense.

Nothing organic that large should be able to stand up, let alone move, under a terrestrial level of gravity. Biological materials don’t have the strength, and biological metabolisms don’t have the power density. It just can’t work. The lizard is bipedal, with two massive legs, a stocky torso, two arms that appear small but only in relationship to the massive legs, a large head with an enormous mouth lined with two-meter long serrated teeth, and a heavy tail dragging between the legs acting like a counterbalance. On closer inspection it only resembles a terrestrial lizard in general terms: the details of skin, dentition, etc. make it clear that this thing is no relative of any Terran reptile. Still, I have no referents to anything like this in