Manus Celer Dei - A Logical World Short

[Ford Prefect]

This concerns one of my favourite subjects - shipboard AIs. They're possibly my favourite thing to right about, so, I wrote about one. Consider.

Manus Celer Dei

Yoric considered God.

He wondered, for an ageless second whether he could be construed as God. They said God was almighty and all-knowing, but Yoric knew that people could the same of him. He was intelligent enough to predict the future with a more than fair degree of accuracy, and he certainly had enough power to be called almighty and omnipotent. Would a primitive civilisation look upon him and worship him? Perhaps, though probably not. Even the humans before they took to the stars would have seen him for what he really was; science fiction literature took care of that.

And what was Yoric, pray tell? You can answer it simply enough with the words Pluto class planetoid, though it does not do him justice. Even calling him one of two thousand of the mightiest ships in the galaxy doesn’t really cover it. Moon sized, at three thousand kilometres in diameter, RINS Yoric was a total symbol of the Imperial Commonwealth of Earth. He had existed for a millennia and a half now, though his class of ship had been running for twice that. Age had no real meaning to Yoric.

His bridge was a hive of activity, while his molecular circuitry was alive with the thoughts, voices and input commands of the crew. Billions of them, each a microscopic cog in Yoric’s running, though he knew he could all their jobs better than they could. He considered this strange human action, crewing a ship that could function autonomously. He looked over the recorded history of warfare, tens of thousands of years of combat across the stars of their galaxy. He noted that it happened everywhere, and the phrase ‘Zeroeth Law’ flashed through his Sub-meson brain.

But while one miniscule part of his computerised intelligence considered this for a nanosecond or two, another part looked back the bridge. There was the captain, though he was really an admiral. His executive officer stood nearby, a clipboard of sorts under her arm. He considered them both, old Admiral Valswellan and young (Yoric only thought of her as young because she looked like that, though she was more likely to be over a hundred. Yoric liked to speculate on the ages of people, so he made sure to keep parts of himself free from such information) Captain Alidandri. They were impeccably dressed in their black buckynylon uniforms.

A minor section of Yoric’s AI devoted to air-conditioning maintenance was playing chess with a large group of crew members. They took an hour or two considering their moves, though the subsection of Yoric’s AI had already predicted their move and planned his own long before they had. He moved his piece the very moment that they were done. He heard groans and disappointed sighs.

One of Yoric’s higher functions, this one devoted to Slipspace navigation, received another reference from the human Navigator linked into his systems. He adjusted a variety of interesting and complex functions based on the information, and he considered what life would be like without a Navigator. He knew it was impossible to navigate the strange and bizarre tachyonic expanses of the Slipstream without the reference point to Einsteinian Reality that the Navigator provided through innate talents. No amount of intelligence could change that.

Yoric watched the universe through his supralight sensors, and again considered the Slipstream. Even though he could see the galaxy for thousands of lightyears around in real-time, he knew that he would be lost without the greedy person in the astrogation crèche. Despite knowing more or less everything there was to know, the universe still came across to Yoric as bizarre.

They exited Slipspace in close orbit with the planet Magdelona. Yoric heralded destruction simply by being there, his huge gravitational mass, altering tides and causing intense seismic disturbances. Magdelona had only a single moon a third of the size of them mighty warship, and was unprepared for its arrival.

The planet might not have been ready, but its people were. Yoric reported to the captain the presence of a small battlefleet on the dark-side of the planet, as well as the presence of multiple stellar power levels on the planet’s surface, along with huge cannons, fifty kilometres long.

“Raring for a fight, eh?” Admiral Valswellan grinned “Let’s negotiate then. Yoric, broadcast on all frequencies, in all trade dialects the following: I am Lord Admiral Hapas Valswellan of the Royal Imperial Navy, captain of the planetoid Yoric, and decider of your fate.”

Yoric did as he was ordered; not really paying attention to Admiral’s egotistical grandstanding. He was a man in charge of an obscene amount of firepower, and that was going to effect any man, even a member of the Imperial Navy. The message was not sent in the three million or so trade dialects known, just the one – that used by the Harganthis Trading Hegemony. He knew for a fact that they traded here.

They waited for a good half an hour before the rulers of the world replied, a hologrammatic alien popping into existence before them. He she or it a humanoid shape, but beyond that bared little resemblance to the humans aboard.

“Admiral Valsss-vellan,” said the alien in perfect True, as translated by Yoric. The alien’s voice had a pleasant rasp to it, or so Yoric thought “I, I welcome you to our system. I am Dak Hemay d’Rxtic.” He she or it was obviously nervous. The Admiral smiled.

“Well Dak, I’m sure this will end happily. All you have to do is unconditionally surrender to the Imperial Commonwealth of Earth.” Yoric, and the majority of the bridge crew, knew this could have been put more tactfully. “We don’t all want a small war on our hands, do we?” It was an interesting use of rhetoric, though Yoric knew that the Dak would reply with defiance.

“Well I’m afraid Admiral that you have made a grave mistake if you think we will simply lie down like dogs, Admiral Valsss-vellan. We have had our independence for thirty thousand years, and we will retain it!” he snapped, mouthparts flapping. His hologram flicked off. The Admiral sighed. Yoric sighed as well, though for different reasons.

“Well, let’s make an example of them for the rest of the system.” He said.

Yoric zoomed in on the huge cannons, the size of an EGM cannon you might find in orbit around an Imperial world. They were seemingly built into the very crust of the planet, sprawling metal bowls that spread out for miles around and miles deep. Yoric frowned electronically – the Magdelons were a technically advanced and wealthy people, but it would have been practically impossible for a single system power to build these cannons.

A lot was riding on them.

He watched the massive cannons track slowly towards them, three were in proper arc. The power began to build up within each cannon, approaching truly massive levels. He made sure to record it from as many angles as possible. He might get onto one of those propaganda pieces that said “Peace Through Superior Firepower” if the picts were good enough.

The Magdelon Continental Cannons fired, shuddering back on their rails and halted by the vast forcefields employed to keep them in place. Though the yield was interesting – he calculated that each blast could fragment a planet, he was more intrigued by the interesting purple colour of the energy blast itself. The great waves of energy washed across his shields like a tidal surge of incomprehensible force, granting him a great glowing halo of power, a crackling corona of light. His dockmates would be jealous.

The blasts faded away and a shield loss of forty eight point eight percent was announced by one of the bridge crew. Captain Alidandri remarked that they would have been better off investing in a planetary shield if they could pull together that sort of power. Yoric knew that right at this moment, those people still on Magdelon would be weeping even as they screamed and toiled to get the cannons up to power again. All that hard work, the millenia of preparations, meaningless in the face of the metal monster in orbit. He could see the battlefleet opening up their engines, and knew that they would take seconds at most to get into firing arc. Not enough time, not enough firepower, but still they powered on. The Admiral ordered that support craft be launched, hundreds of multi-kilometre cruisers and destroyers, millions of fighters and bombers.

“Well, they put up a good fight, but we should end it now. Yoric, open fire on the planet. Show the other worlds of this star what the Imperial Commonwealth can do.” Yoric did not like the tone of the captain’s voice, though he understood what he meant; give them a fireworks show they’ll never forget. Undoubtedly it would make marvellous entertainment for sentients around the Milky Way.

Yoric knew for a fact that he could have caused the extinction of all life on Magdelon with a single capital-classed torpedo, and he could have done it lightyears away. Even with his directed energy weapons he could have easily done it light hours distant. This grandstanding as he came to call it, whereby he came into close orbit and bombarded the world till it was nothing but a memory, was as much political as it was a waste of time. None the less he aimed his countless grasers, tachyon cannons, hyper missiles, implosion devices, singularity projectors, EGM weapons, quantum compression weapons and every other weapon he had at his disposal that could face the planet. He took a moment to cycle them to full power, then fired.

Yoric knew that a single corvette, probably less than a kilometre in length, could kill a world, reduce its crust to slag in a matter of hours. That sort of firepower would be sobering to anyone who considered resisting the ICE. At times Yoric would reset parts of himself so that they did not know this, and watch himself in awe of such power.

But other parts of him knew that this was insignificant in comparison to his firepower. He might have been afraid of himself as unleashed a multihued storm of light that outshone the sun, but that would be silly. He noted the atmosphere being burnt away, made another move against the crew members in one of his refectories, saw that the planet was dead, told a curious crewmember that no, there would not be vegetable soup in her section that evening, then finished off with Magdelona. He counted meaningless seconds, and realised that before him that there was nothing at all. He felt concern, but a cheer went up from the bridge crew, the gunners and the crews of him support craft, who had finished with the smaller, weaker Magdelon battlefleet. Yoric didn’t particularly feel like cheering at that moment.

“Well that’s, as they say, that.” The Admiral clapped his hands together and turned to his executive. “Captain, I’ll leave you to deal with the clean-up.”

“Aye sir.” She said, snapping off a salute. The Admiral nodded and left the bridge.

Alidandri began shouting orders, for messages to be sent to the other inhabited worlds of this system, for the support fleet to return to dock. She paused to congratulate Yoric on a job well done, and Yoric thanked her for the compliment, filing it away as another bizarre human habit. As Yoric went about executing input commands, he once again settled back into a more passive state, feeling thoughts and voices flow through his molecular circuitry. He replayed the minute or so of combat, then sent it off as a series of Sub-etha packets to dockmates, correspondences, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Admiralty. Maybe he’d get a poster with him on it after all.

Yoric considered death.

[darthdavid]

I love it. It reminds me vaguely of a culture-verse story.

[Ford Prefect]

Oddly, Yoric is reading (which is the wrong word, I suppose) some of the Culture books in another short. Et tu, Tycho? is the name of it, but it is only a brief draft.

[darthdavid]

What does he think of minds?

[Ford Prefect]

What does he think of minds?

He would most probably be somewhat jealous of them, as the Minds aren't exactly built to follow orders. Even if anything else changes, that will still be there.