Conquest of Utopia

[bugboy]

Here's a scifi story I wrote about an AI ruled cornucopia's reaction to capitalist aliens. Please critique it.

Garrison Duty

It was a desolate landscape. What was once grass had been turned into slag. Buildings that had stood thousands of stories high were now mountains of rubble. The thuda-thuda sound of heavy artillery could be heard from countless fronts. The air was thick with spent fumes and ionized plasma. The stench of rotting flesh, almost all of it not human, luckily, filled his nostrils. But pretty soon, he wasn’t going to have nostrils, it was time for garrison duty. A tinge of touched him and he shakily swiveled around for a last morsel of reassurance.

Millions of happily ignorant citizens probably filled his view. Grand sweeping terraces and enormous walkways greeted him. Majestic designer foliage and handcrafted sidewalks netted the capital in a seemingly random pattern. The illusion of what lay outside the city could not be maintained for long. People were starting to wonder why the “construction” that was covering the entire northern face of the city was taking so long and why it was gradually encompassing an ever greater portion of the city. What seemed to be the capital of utopia itself, a city that had been envisioned for millennia, a city that would last forever in a land of peace was really a city under siege, a city fighting for its life and its world. He sucked in his breath, felt the chill in his neck and lump in his throat. He sucked it all in, steeled himself and turned back.

Although he had seen it numerous times, he never got used to the sight. It was as if the nearly apocalyptic war that was the catalyst for his creation had somehow come back to devastate earth once and for all. And in a way that’s what it was. Before, humanity had been the own cause of its destruction, but this time the bringers of a new dark age were fundamentally foreign.

Then it was time for the upload. Although he was being transferred at a rate of several Exabytes per second, he didn’t like being reminded that essentially he was nothing more than a really powerful calculator. The first chunk brought him consciousness. He was nothing but a self aware entity scrambling to understand what it was seeing. Before he did anything reckless, his memory came in, followed by his incalculable and recently ever-expanding libraries.

He flexed his muscles. The craft he flew or rather had become was a relic from the old wars, but it was eons beyond what would be trying to destroy it. He reminded himself that although he was virtually invincible you never knew what they would do. They seemed to be somewhat squeamish about using nukes, but that might only be due to a limited supply. It hadn’t even been totally confirmed that they had them, but if they did they had already won. He pushed that dangerous thought away and clung to the task at hand.

The virtual universe that had spawned this creation had definitely valued grace. The craft resembled one of the extinct condors that had flapped its wings on this planet thousands of years ago, but now only existed as ones and zeroes. He occasionally thought about the universes that had supplied the bulk of the technology that his world depended on. Their countless inhabitants had not really been anything more than him, although they didn’t know it. They had epic struggles not unlike this one that supplied technology and entertainment. He wondered if any of them had produced a scenario as perversely sardonic as the one that lay before him. Another thought, this one not as dangerous as much as distracting — what if this world was itself a virtual universe? He was about to push that one away too, but it naturally vanished by a report of an armored column advancing towards the city.

As he passed out of the walls, he saw one of those rare human soldiers give him a salute. He responded with a graceful loop followed by a tight corkscrew and jetted off into the sky. Those humans were hand-picked and even then many went insane when the ideal world they had known was revealed to be a world on the verge of extinction. The briefing methods were being continually refined, and slowly but surely the conscripts were becoming more competent and the discipline that had let them conquer the world was beginning to show.

It was not so much a column as a mob; a mob of makeshift metal, haphazardly welded together and driven by crude smoke belching piston engines, polluting the atmosphere for the first time in a thousand years. Many things were happening on this planet that had never happened for a thousand years. The things weren’t even symmetrical. But they got the job done. They had got it done all too good. The cities automated turrets could most likely destroy this pitiful muster, just as they constantly destroyed the shells that arced towards the city non-stop. But they could be overwhelmed, and even one shell getting past the defense grid, one stray bullet, one chunk of steel or even a single scrap of flesh would cause a storm of pandemonium that could quickly turn into a crisis.

He glided over the column at a leisurely pace and still overshot them. He broadcast the formalities of a demand for surrender and a plea for pacifism, they answered with a hail of gunfire, turrets tilting and swiveling at a snail-like pace. He let the projectiles get a millisecond from impact before sweeping his wings and diving toward the tanks at a speed that awed even him. Before he embedded himself into the column which probably would have destroyed them all with kinetic energy alone, but would have the downside of squandering a precious machine that could not be replaced, he rode a pre-calculated thermal and hovered a few inches from a soldier’s head which had poked out from the cone-shaped copula. Sometimes he could awe them into madly scrambling from their vehicles and running at a frantic pace all the way back to their bases, discarding their equipment and jumping out of windows even as theirs tanks careened on. Instead of panic, they reacted with a volley of ecstatic whoops and cries, more entertained than frightened.

These men had probably had experience in the country fighting. They had seen the easy slaughter of the soft flesh that this beautiful machine of war was trying to protect. They knew that earth was not invulnerable, actually quite the opposite, they understood that this was the exception not the rule. One of the founding beliefs of the post-war civilization was that cities were bad and the key to stability was de-centralization. That idea may have been true, but it had cost them horribly. Fortunately the founders had not discarded cities altogether and so this last beacon of free humanity still stood, defying the malicious forces that stood to gain total control and destroy the society that had remained free of hurt and want and had showed no signs of stopping.

If they couldn’t be destroyed peacefully then they had to go conventionally. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but he loved to play around with them before sending them to their fiery end. The aft railguns charged up and deployed blending seamlessly with the rest of his craft. He admired the bravado of the captain who had dared to emerge from his tank to get an unobstructed view of him. He would be the last to go. Easily dodging the salvos that flew so agonizingly slow through the sky leaving wakes of dust, he locked on all the tanks adjacent to the captain’s. The tungsten bullets exited his barrels at fractions of C that had a 1 on the top and a single digit on the bottom. He had to aim them a few kilos away from the column; a single shot to the center would have turned all the vehicles into scrap in an instant. The rocky impacts and shockwaves blew tracks off vehicles, broke the clumsy welds and snapped bolts loose revealing the jerry-rigging for what it was. He flew in for a quick pass with a flamethrower and watched a gunner attempt to put the fire that was encompassing him out by smothering it with his fellow soldier’s body. So much for any kind of unified cause. Before long only the audacious commander’s tank remained. He glimpsed a meaty mottled head poking out once more and admired his fearlessness. He would probably be too scared to move if he was in such a perilous situation. He decided that the commander would pay for his gumption with his head, in the most literal meaning.

He flapped down and prepared for the pass. The commander was still peaking out. If he decided to make his move it would be biologically impossible for the commander to react in time. Then he noticed that the tank had stopped firing at him. They had probably realized how futile it is and intended to go down gracefully. Then he put all the power he ever had into his craft, deciding to bring wonder into even these hardened veterans at the shock of their commander’s . He even considered letting them go, to tell stories of how the human craft had killed everyone in their task force and clipped off their leaders head in a most spectacular manner. A second before impact he realized something was wrong and tried to reverse but while his craft could do a lot it couldn’t produce miracles and with the momentum he had given it, a miracle was what he was asking for.

The tank’s weapons all fired at once, main cannon thudding and machine guns chattering, 4 pounders recoiling and reloading at a pace that suddenly seemed insanely fast. Impacts that were not of this world dented his craft. Guile had won over grace. He cursed himself for being such a reckless fool. Armor had not been one of the main considerations of his craft’s electronic designers and he already felt himself loose power. He shot upward and separated the tank and everything within several kilos of it into their elementary particles with the real weapons that weren’t toys for his amusement. He was wounded. He had been wounded by inferior technology being directed by inferior intelligence and it hurt both the craft and his ego.

They would mock him endlessly for this folly. What should have been a cakewalk had been turned into a botch. Any battle no matter how small that resulted in any casualties was considered a defeat in this desperate war. The soldiers that had undoubtedly been watching the encounter from their hardened bases were no doubt shouting with joy at the evidence presented before them. Evidence that the awesome machines of Earth could be hurt, maybe even destroyed. Evidence that this city could not hold out forever, evidence that sooner or later all of humanity would be absorbed into their disgusting pulsating society, that bloated monster that loomed before him casting its porous shadow over the planet earth. This was probably being turned into a propaganda film as he flew, the tanks’ easy destruction was being edited out and the hits that had been scored against his craft were being played again and again on video screens on both earth and the alien home planet.

Factually it was not much at all. A few of the fusion generators had been knocked out by the volley, a few cosmetic errors had been dealt by the Gatling guns. The other generators were already compensating and the nanorepair system was kicking in, but even they could not erase what had happened to him. He didn’t fly back to the city, he limped, and he crawled, groveling before the angry, scolding comments that were being broadcast to his ship.

The comments seemed remote and easily ignored, he eventually blocked the channel. He knew he was only delaying the inevitable but that did not prevent him from cutting his speed by a fourth. He reconsidered and went back to his previous speed, considering that they might think his lackluster speed a result of his injuries. He thought the humiliating journey home would be not marked by any interruptions to divert his attention for something other than brooding but he was wrong.

Something that didn’t fit caught his eye. It appeared to be a foot soldier of the invaders, its uniform garish with the colors of a harlequin, but somehow simultaneously more practical than anything humanity had produced since the old wars. In its leather gloved hands it grasped a rusty, wizened lever ed black powder projectile weapon that had probably been purchased long ago on the home planet at a secondhand armory. A closer look yielded the incongruence that puzzled him. The soldier’s head was not the pocked and mottled red and gray skin of the invader that reminded him of sausage. Instead it was unmistakably the khaki skin and yellow hair of a human. As if the human could read his mind he turned to face him and shouted what sounded like a taunt.

Infinitely interested, but remembering what had happened to him minutes ago, he flapped towards the human-turned-invader at a cautious pace. He picked up what the human was trying to say and figured out how to do a physical broadcast from the ship. He knew that this would be a conversation to remember.

“I saw that little -up over there. You are one crappy pilot. You get tech light-years ahead of anything around you; you get more processing power than the entire city and still manage to get hurt. If I didn’t know better, I’d say your piloting skills and judgment were almost…human.”

“Even god-like digital intelligences make mistakes occasionally. I’m pretty sure that it won’t happen again. And before I turn you into little bits of hamburger, I’d like to ask you a few questions. Namely, what the hell are you doing?”

“I’m doing what’s only natural for my species. I was one of the first experimental human foot soldiers. I hope you guys have improved your briefing I mean propaganda that you spoon-fed me, before releasing me on the front. You sure as hell weren’t able to convince that a world without any strife, struggles or progress, a world in a permanent state of stasis was superior to a world where intelligence and brilliance were rewarded with whatever money could purchase and in the Market that’s anything. Just think, if the Market hadn’t launched the expeditions to earth, I’d still be in blissful ignorance worshipping that disgusting half-ass AI you people made us revere as a god. I knew something was wrong with our society; I just couldn’t put my finger on it because there was nothing to compare it to. Now I’ve woken up. I’ve realized how perverted the society that my fellow humans live in is. And I want to liberate them. I want to put them on the Market too.”

“You poor pathetic disillusioned person. Do you really think you’d last a day on the streets of their homeworld? How long do you think you’d survive in a civilization that kills a fourth of their population every year? Do you really think that if earth gets incorporated into their malignant society, humans will ever be anything more than 2nd class citizens, if not made extinct outright? A society that rewards achievements? The Market is a society where any person can be killed for anything for any reason at any time. You spend one day on the Market’s homeworld. You’ll be begging to join our “oppressed” society with minutes! But that won’t happen, instead you’ll probably be gutted and your corpse will be displayed in a traveling circus as a sideshow freak, just because your “protection” contract wasn’t in order. Is that the society you want to live in? A society where just to have a chance at keeping your physical integrity you have to pay an exorbant price to a shadowy corporation that promises to protect you. And even then you’ll only survive for a week at most. If that’s really the place where you think you belong then go there, humanity will be better without you.”

“Ever read 1984? I have. Your campaign of eradication of any literature that might give people a frame of reference to view their society from wasn’t as thorough as you thought. The world depicted in 1984 would have been impossible given the technology available in Orwell’s time. But suddenly when you have artificial universes that are casually destroyed when their usefulness ends, doing all the work for you things like this become possible. I don’t care if the Market kills me, when I was trapped in your perverted dystopia I was already a corpse. How dare you order me around? Don’t forget that it was my species that gave you all you have, don’t forget that it was Homos Sapiens that lets you lord over us! When the Market finally liberates all of earth and this disgusting city, when this monument to tyranny is destroyed I’ll personally have you d. Bit by bit your corrosive coding will be picked away and you’ll go insane!”

He was appalled and enraged at this delirious display. He decided to erase this smudge on the fabric of humanity in the same style that he had thought he was going to take out the commander. The decapitation was a redemption of sorts. But the rogue human’s astic speech had spawned more dangerous thoughts than he could ignore. Who was he kidding? The city would eventually fall, if the corporations got impatient enough all they had do was a little orbital ardment and the last bastion of free humanity would collapse like one of their makeshift tanks. And by all signs they were getting very impatient. So when he eventually decided to reopen the communications channels and instead of taunting and reprimanding he heard the frantic orders of a regrouping to deal with a massive coordinated assault by the three major colonial corporation’s armies(which usually just fought amongst each other), he thought for a while before acting. He actually had read 1984 but it had been just when the rubble from the old wars was fading and humanities survival was an iffy prospect. In that age stability had more meaning than fun and if boredom was a by-product of the stability then so be it. Now that he realized how dull and stagnant the society governing humanity really was, he shifted gears in a way that none of the AIs ever had before. He could definitely do well in the Market. His weaponry would make it very hard to take him out although he knew there would be attempts. Now that he checked, his craft did have orbital capabilities albeit slow interstellar travel. His knowledge of human tech could easily make him the wealthiest being on the Market. He considered the options and finally decided. When the frantic broadcasts demanding that he engage the huge army that was threatening to engulf the city, grew to an ever-more irritating volume and urgency he shut the channels off again, this time forever. He charged his railguns and had nanobots build missiles and firebombs. For the assault he was about to unleash he needed all the power he could get. So when the railguns were charged, the missile bays full and the magazines loaded he faced not at the advancing armies which were composed of Expeditionary Missions’ main force of freelance mercs, 3 divisions of Merha’s Legions the premier free company on the Market which had been hired by Tersti’s Extrasolar Colonization Company for occupation and conquest duties and finally Lets Take Earth, inc. respectively but in the opposite direction.

[Falkenhorst]

I endorse this fanfic as excellent, if no-one else will. Will there be a sequel?