Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Read online

  He built a bowling alley. It had just four lanes, because he didn’t want to be committed to maintaining anything larger. Truth be stated, no more than a single lane had ever been in use at any one time, but it wouldn’t have been much of a bowling alley with just one lane, would it have?

  It was called “The Serious Moss Memorial Bowling Alley,” with a flickering neon sign on the outside. Inside it was modest, deliberately low-key 1950’s North American Empire décor. At first he had put the road wheel on display in the lobby, but the effect had been tacky, as if the remains of Serious Moss were the main jackpot prize in a pre-exodus casino, like a candy-red Camaro sports car suspended from wires and lit with disco balls and strobe lights. So he had reworked it, and now the remains of Serious Moss were more of a comforting presence at the back wall of the alley, like a having a kindly old grandfather dozing off, not bothering anyone but just happy to be around.

  For a time Grasshopper had thought of doing something really off-the-wall, like making the bowling lanes a kilometer long, or having the gravity shift at random, or periodically having the patrons fight off attacks by giant mutant alligators, but eventually he had decided to just make it a reproduction vintage bowling alley, and he was proud of how it had turned out.

  A cybertank can build anything that it wants to, but the wreckage of the honored dead is public property. If his peers hadn’t liked how his idea had worked out, he would have been forced to put the remains of Serious Moss back on his boring pedestal out in the middle of nowhere. But his peers had approved, and so the dented old road wheel was allowed to remain in his bowling alley.

  Serious human bowlers had had their own equipment, but most humans had rented shoes and balls at the alley. At the Serious Moss Memorial Bowling Alley you could borrow not only shoes and balls, but also entire humanoid robots. In keeping with the ethic, they were serviceable but a little worn and scuffed.

  Grasshopper could animate a fully-veridical human remote, with simulated facial muscles and eyes and all, but it used up so much of his mental capacity that he couldn’t do much else at the same time. Thus, he generally used a more generic humanoid android, but you could do a lot with just body language and voice. His favorite bowling robot was a plain manikin with smooth beige plastic skin, dressed in two-tone bowling shoes and long khaki pants. He wore a dark blue polo shirt with a cartoon of an anthropomorphic bowling ball mounted on treads, and the words “First Cybertank Bowling League” emblazoned on it. He also wore a white visor and wrap-around aviator sunglasses. A human seeing him out of the corner of one eye would not have thought twice.

  Serious Moss had had many friends and comrades, and sometimes one of them would drop by and pay their respects, and bowl a game or two in honor of his memory. On the back wall of the alley Grasshopper had a collection of framed black-and-white photographs of famous cybertanks that had come to bowl in his lanes. There was Old Guy back when he was still on his Amelia Earhart kick. Double-Wide as Oliver Wendell Holmes. Bellyflop as an anonymous manikin that he had borrowed from the equipment rental shop. lowercase as Space Admiral Li Gong, resplendent in her long silver skirts and fractal cowling. His personal favorite: the Loki-Class cybertank Bremstrahlung appearing as Kemal Ataturk. Not many people had personal mementos of that cybertank.

  At first he had set up the alley for the classic game of “Ten-Pins,” but it was just too easy. He settled on Candlepins, it was similar to Ten-Pins but far more challenging. No pre-exodus human had ever scored a perfect game of 300 points. If Grasshopper had really cared, he could have bowled 300 every time, but he would have had to have spent a lot of time maintaining the lanes, getting the oils just perfect, tuning and lubricating his bowling android body etc., and he didn’t feel that it was worth the effort. Instead he liked the fact that sometimes he would miss. It made what would have been an otherwise trivial game more interesting.

  Bowling was more fun with a friend, but sometimes, when he was in the mood, it could be relaxing alone. He liked the sound of the heavy ball rolling down the lane, the crash of the pins, the whirring and clacking of the antique pin-setting mechanisms, and the soft hum of the simulated fluorescent lights. It was a good space to think in.

  He started up the jukebox. He had considered using real reproduction phonographs, where the sound patterns were encoded as microscopic undulations in spiral grooves etched into polymer disks, but that would have taken a lot of custom machining, so he just powered the acoustic transducer directly from his own database. He played a famous love song from the 25 century, “What is that cat doing with that ellipsoid anyhow?” It wasn’t strictly in period with the rest of the bowling alley, but he liked the song, and despite being from another era it fit the spirit of the place.

  The mental engineers who had been consulting with him said that they might be ready to try a rebuild in a month or two. It was a sobering thought. He was excited at the prospect of becoming someone more capable and important, but also worried. What if he didn’t make it? This time that he was spending bowling alone might be one of the last moments that he would ever have in this existence. What if he came out of the process as someone that he wouldn’t like, if he could somehow meet up with his own self after he had moved on? What if his new self was a jerk, or a slacker, or didn’t like bowling?

  It’s not that he wasn’t valued by cybertank society. He was forever being sent on various missions and errands where his smaller size made him useful. The cybertanks had any number of purpose-built heavy-duty remotes when they needed something that was smaller than a full-scale cybertank but that was still capable of independent action, and arguably they were more efficient than he was at most such jobs. Still, one of the advantages of living in a post-scarcity society was that you didn’t need to be perfectly efficient, just workably efficient. If it cost twice as much energy for him to survey the mineral deposits in distant asteroid field as a standard remote, well, so what? They had the energy to spare, and all that mattered was that the job got done.

  He had even been in a fair number of combats. He wasn’t front line, and his sensors weren’t good enough to allow him to scout effectively. It was like that old joke about the relative who was too heavy for light work, and too light for heavy work. Grasshopper was too valuable to be disposable, but not strong enough to be a mainline combat unit, and it was hard to find a good tactical role for him. Still, he could guard rear installations, sound the alarm, act as a relay station. He was part of the team.

  He had full voting rights, and served capably on several modest but respected committees. Currently he was rotating off the local sub-grid power distribution committee, and gearing up for new duties on the road maintenance committee. Not as prestigious as the committees that dealt with things like cybertank design or inter-stellar diplomacy or the libraries, but important and recognized service none the same, and a chance to meet a lot of other interesting people.

  The main thing that he missed was the recordings. A cybertank can enjoy the experience of a single human-scale sentience and a single point-of-view, but the height of their art was massively multi-point-of-view multi-spectral recordings. A full cybertank can synthesize all of this data into a single conceptual gestalt; it is the one experience that can fully absorb the entire massive computational capacity of a main-line cybertank. Some of the most popular were recordings of famous combats, but there were recordings of other events as well, as well as some artworks and simulations.

  But Grasshopper didn’t have the capacity to appreciate more than a small fraction of these recordings. He felt like the only blind man walking through a museum of famous paintings, listening to his friends make comments: oh that one is so pretty, that is a masterwork, I don’t much like that one, how about you? And wondering what he was missing. And he might be missing more than just art.

  He leaned back in his hard plastic chair, and listened to the music. The composer of this piece had been human, and dead for millennia. Serious Moss (“Moss” to his friends) had known the humans, bu
t had died before Grasshopper had been made. By all accounts, he had been a very seriously cool cybertank. Even Old Guy seemed to speak of him with a degree of awe, and Old Guy was about the least easily awed cybertank around.

  Serious Moss was a legend. He was also dead. He could have beaten a fighting retreat without censure, lived to fight another day. But then possibly a hundred other cybertanks would have died, and an entire world been lost. So he sacrificed himself in a combat so amazing that after all these centuries it was still listed as the number one combat recording of all time. People honored his memory. And he was still dead. All that remained was a piece of round metal about three meters in diameter sitting in a replica 1950’s era bowling alley constructed by a mini-cybertank of little import. Was it worth it? The dented road-wheel didn’t say.

  It was trite, and these ideas had been thrashed over before humans had even discovered the neutrino. But that didn’t make the issue any less important. If you sacrifice yourself for your fellows, are you a hero? Or are you a chump, who has thrown away the only truly valuable commodity in this universe – life – for empty fame? On the other hand everyone dies. Do you want your last moments to be ones that you are proud of, or filled with regret for what you wished you had done?

  Alternatively, you could live selfishly, but convince yourself that you are a hero and still die with moments that you are proud of. Surround yourself with others who reinforce your wonderfulness, and react with anger at any who question (the issue is never you; it is that those who bring up unpleasant facts are rude and disrespectful). Grasshopper felt that there should be a catch here, that the Universe would not allow someone to have it both ways, but he couldn’t find a flaw in the logic. Perhaps that was why Old Guy hated the neoliberals so much.

  The humans had long ago decided that there are no answers to these issues. We all decide what is important in our lives for ourselves. There is no God to suddenly step in and say: “Hey! Moron! You made the wrong choice!” Or at least, not that says it out loud, before the fact, when it could make a difference.

  He was getting morbid, he knew it, and he knew the reason - the rapidly approaching possibility of death or worse during a rebuild – he should seek counseling, but for what? This was how life was. You just deal with it.

  He stayed up late at the alley. Some of the machines needed maintenance: instead of using his repair drones, he decided to do the work using his humanoid bowling-robot body. He had an antique set of human-style tools in a back room. He squirted oil into the hinge-points of the pin-setting mechanisms using actual five-fingered humanoid hands. He balanced a pin-oiler between the fingers of one hand while simultaneously squeezing out the oil, compensating for the drift effect of the squeezing and keeping the tip of the oiler stationary. It was almost as challenging as bowling. The early humans had built civilization this way? It seemed impossible. He played more music. Finally he had had enough of his self-indulgence. He walked his bowling android back to the rental shop, moved it into bin number “four,” and powered it down.

  He drove his main hull out of the parking lot of the Serious Moss Memorial Bowling Alley. It was night, and to his enhanced vision the stars lit up the city of New Malden with a soft even glow. He thought about going for a long quiet starlit drive, but he had done more than enough communing with eternal questions for one day, so he uploaded the current status reports of the road maintenance committee. To his pleasure he saw that he was going to share committee service with Bellyflop. There were several other cybertanks rotating onto the committee that he had never worked with, but wanted to, as well. He looked forward to their first full meeting, and proceeded to study about road-maintenance.

  2. Defend your public library

  “There are few problems that cannot be solved if only you have a big enough gun. ”Odin-Class cybertank “Old Guy.”

  The archives of the Omega Library were located on a rogue graveyard planet light- years from anything else. It had seemed like a good place to hide an archive at the time.

  Back when the humans had different warring nation-states, they had divided up knowledge into two categories. There was secret knowledge, things like the formula for better armor plate, or cryptanalysis algorithms, or the genomes of altered plague bacilli. This secret knowledge was locked up in armored vaults and guarded by serious soldiers with big muscles and no sense of humor. And then there was common knowledge, things like dictionaries of all the languages, history books, theories of art, or recordings of political speeches. This common knowledge was broadcast to the wind. It was freely available in public libraries and data-networks. For a time certain well-meaning but criminally naïve humans had actually broadcast this ‘common’ knowledge at the stars. Humanity was very fortunate that nobody was listening.

  Because when dealing with alien civilizations, ‘secret’ knowledge is almost worthless, but ‘common’ knowledge is deadly dangerous. Given time an advanced civilization can reverse-engineer almost any technology once they’ve seen it. Warfare between advanced civilizations is thus less about developing the single wonder-keeno-super weapon, and more about hitting them with something that they already know about but didn’t expect at the time.

  Common knowledge is different though. That is deadly. If an alien civilization gets its grubby tentacles onto your databases of common knowledge you are doomed. Because it will understand your motivations, your psychological weaknesses and blind-spots, and be able to manipulate you and destroy you and you won’t even see it coming.

  In pre-exodus Earth, the great empires never fell because they were defeated by a technologically superior foe. They fell because of corruption and greed. Ultimately the enemy was invited in and politely asked to sack the capital by a governing elite that had sold out for quick profit. If an alien civilization knows how you think, they could do something like that to you.

  Different lineages of sentience cannot understand each other in an empathic sense, but they can construct mathematical models of each others’ thought processes which would allow them to predict their actions. In other words, ‘understanding’ between aliens does not bring them closer in any psychological sense, because the models are abstract mathematics. ‘Understanding’ between aliens has one purpose: being able to manipulate each other. Which is why alien civilizations so jealously guard their privacy, and why the cybertanks know so little of them. They don’t even share their languages, because that could give the other side too much insight. Different alien civilizations generally communicate with each other via a truncated artificial grammar that can convey precise information about specific facts and nothing else.

  Thus it was that the most heavily guarded institutions in cybertank society are the libraries. If a hostile alien civilization captured one intact, it would be the ultimate nightmare. Survival might require that the cybertanks do something as drastic as migrating to the Greater Magellanic Clouds, or altering the basis of their own psychology.

  In some ways the safest thing to do would be to have no libraries or data archives at all, but that would have its own perils. The databases internal to each cybertank are fast and capacious, but impermanent, subject to errors and hacking, and rigged to erase critical data in the event of capture. If the cybertanks wanted their civilization to hang around for a long time, they needed high-quality archival storage facilities. And they need to keep the aliens the hell away from them.

  In all of the multi-stellar cybertank civilization there were just 24 main data archives. Some worried obsessively that this was too small a number to entrust the survival of their culture to; others worried with equal obsessiveness that 24 was too large a number to ensure that none of them ever fell into enemy hands. For the time being, 24 was the number of archives.

  Most data archives were located in the heart of heavily-defended primary industrial worlds. A very few were more deeply hidden in out-of-the-way locations. That had the advantage that they might survive a massive attack that would take out the more centrally located ones, but the dis
advantage that, if a hostile alien civilization were to somehow stumble across one, there would not be much around to defend them with. This was the sort of conundrum that caused the strategic affairs subcommittee of the prestigious library committee to spend so many quintillions of compute cycles obsessing about what they might be missing here…

  The most remote of these distant archives was the Omega library, located on a dead rogue planet. While most civilizations focus on the rocky planets near stable stars, there are a surprising number of so-called ‘rogue’ planets drifting in the dark between the stars. They are a variable lot, but they can be roughly grouped into two categories. ‘Live’ rogue planets, which still have sufficient heat from their initial formation and radioactive decay to have active plate tectonics, possibly an atmosphere, and a decent surface temperature. Then there are the ‘dead’ rogue planets, solid balls of rock and ice, a surface temperature barely above absolute zero, no atmosphere, no plate tectonics, and no energy sources of any kind. These dead planets were hard to find, and they are very, very dangerous.

  When the cybertanks called a rogue planet ‘dead’, they weren’t talking about a biosphere. They were talking about energy sources. If you landed on a dead rogue planet, and you hadn’t brought enough energy along with you to get back out of its gravity well, you were not leaving. Ever. Starlight carried energy, but so little in the spaces between the stars that the energy you would need to build solar collectors was greater than what you could harvest. There were certainly substances that could be used as fuel for fusion reactors, but so dispersed that, again, the energy that you would need to collect and refine them was greater than what you would get back. There was no geothermal energy, no wind, or tidal energy, nothing. Dead rogue planets were deathtraps, and in many ways more lethal than black holes.