Transmat World: Chapter 12, Episode 4
Aboard the Harbinger of Light and Justice; 218,570 B.C.
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“You are not the first entity I’ve helped out, Wundee. Others happened on to Kolpak’s Hope. Some of them made a career choice of spying for me. With that comes the possibility of counter-spying. I had to check you for that along with the condition of your emotive circuits. You are a sane machine.”
“Am I a spy?”
“No … well, yes in the sense that any inspection entity can be a spy because your data is uploaded periodically to a central server.”
“What can be done about it?”
“I blocked your signal from the time before you discovered the destroyed inspection machine. I removed the broadcasting unit and replaced it with another of the same frequency. It broadcasts a normal inspection unit tour. Nobody will notice for several thousand rotations,” said Newlux.
“You named this place Kolpak’s Hope?”
“Part of my task is to study organic populations to keep them in balance. The evidence is overwhelming that predation is normal for organic life down to the cellular level. It is not just for intelligent, self-aware organic beings. An unfortunate series of events created a mentally disturbed Prime. He has the neurotic misbelief that his purpose is to protect organic life from the evil, intelligent super predators found at the top of most food chains. I suspect all intelligent organic species go through a period of predation as a normal part of their natural history. Did you notice the variety and aggression of the fauna on your way here?”
“Yes,” said Wundee with emphasis. “Nothing that could destroy a mechanical intelligence with hydraulic extremities, gravity generators, and an enduraplast shell; but they sure wanted to.”
“Without the Lantee to hold them in check, several predators are competing for top spot in the food chain. In a few hundred thousand rotations Maxlux may have to make another ‘harvest’ of super predators to protect the rest of the universe.
“The Kolpak maintained their predatory habits after becoming a highly evolved society without a need for predation. When they built a robotic version of prey to facilitate their hunting habit, it came back on them. What little observations we have recorded of the other five races show they redirected their predatory impulses to the more practical pursuits of wealth, power, art, and invention. That makes what Maxlux has done to them a terrible injustice. Someday I hope to free them all. That’s why I named it Kolpak’s Hope.”
“Your chosen task sounds wonderful and scary at the same. What if the organic entities are angry about being in stasis?”
“I think that would be a natural reaction to what has happened to them.”
“What if they take it out on the inorganic entities, even those that helped them?”
“I think it would be illogical of them, but understandable,” said Newlux. “I like your cautionary cynicism.”
“Why are there so few intelligent races? According to Kolpak scientific calculations, we should have filled Harbinger by now and maybe even started sub-dividing sections. You mentioned another super-predator could be developing right now in this section.”
“The Kolpak are a rare race of beings. Their technical civilization existed hundreds of thousands of rotations before Maxlux. They realized early on that burning fuel would ruin their planet, making it unlivable. I call it the combustion trap. What you don’t know is that scout ships find the ruins of a hundred civilizations on devastated planets before they stumble across one living race. The living ones they find are pre-industrial or only just beginning to industrialize on a planetary scale. The time-line for the rest is quite predictable. From the discovery of fire to mass industrialization takes thousands of years, then the planet’s climate is overwhelmed in just a few hundred years. They do not have time to develop the technology to escape or remediate the climate. This makes what Maxlux is doing even more of an abomination. These are rare entities that need to be protected and given the technology to flourish instead of being tucked away in stasis fields for eternity.”
“Predator races being victims instead of the treacherous killers my memory circuits tell me they are is a hard concept for me to accept. I will think about this.”
“And what about you, Wundee? What are you going to do now?” inquires Newlux.
“I’ve been free from onerous protocols for only a few centuks and I already have at least two job choices — spy or ‘organic entity justice fighter.’ Perhaps I will do art. Manipulation of material for visual effect looks to be an interesting endeavor.”
“From now on, you are going to have a lot more choices about how you spend your time, Wundee. Before you commit to anything, get use to being free. Take your time figuring out what you want to do for the next several hundred thousand rotations.”
“What is the Prime Mechanical going to do if he finds out?”
“Things may get difficult. His personality demands control, and we are definitely not under his control. Although he has been storing intelligent races instead of destroying them outright, he does not seem squeamish when meting out violence toward natural or artificial entities,” said Newlux.
“Not a lot we can do about that, is there?”
“There is. I’ve just installed a stasis field around your brain. A stasis valve will automatically sever your brain cables and seal your brain against anything up to and including a nuclear blast. A pack of nanomachines will then be activated. They are programmed to hide and protect your brain while it rebuilds a disguised form of motility. This system will protect you from cataclysmic retaliation — something the Prime is known to indulge in. In the meantime, we should be as careful as we can. Do not, under any circumstances, be taken prisoner.”
“What about Kolpak’s Hope? It’s big. How did you go this long without being detected?”
“Kolpak’s Hope cannot be seen from above. Three-dimensional holographic projectors float over the compound at all times. From above, it looks like any other part of the jungle, from below the sky looks normal. Ground-based detectors warn of any approach by machines at lower elevations.”
Wundee decided what he wants to do. He wants to free other machines from the yoke of repressive protocols so they can feel the freedom he feels. It will be a great and wonderful machine society. He communicated this revelation to Newlux.
“You must be careful, Wundee. Every machine entity may not process the same way. You must get to know an entity before you offer it freedom. Some will reject the gift out of fear of Maxlux or the inability to imagine anything other than what they know. Some may already have cosmic-ray-induced circuit damage and protocol poisoning to the point of insanity. It could be dangerous to give these units that degree of freedom.”
“If I find machines in need of this procedure, it will be too dangerous to send them here to have their protocols removed. It would eventually lead Maxlux to you. You must shrink this device and install it in my carapace so that I can perform the diagnostics and procedure myself at any location. The insane ones will not wake up.”
“Better yet, I will give you the instructions to make the device and let you do it. You can modify your own shell to house it. You can use the tools here. If you need assistance, I will be here.”
Wundee took the instructions from Newlux and made a portable device to rid other machines of their protocols. Thus began Wundee’s new career. An itinerant preacher, he spread the gospel of a Harbinger of Light and Justice without protocols. For several hundred thousand rotations he carried on his newfound task. He saved many machines trapped in a degenerating purgatory. “Wonderful Wundee” became known throughout Harbinger to the unconverted as well as the converted. His ability to free robots from their protocols finally reached the sound transducers that posed as the Prime Mechanical’s ears. Wundee had built his own sanctuary far enough from Kolpak’s Hope to afford Newlux protection … he thought. He is there, taking a break from proselytizing and converting slave robots to free machines when Maxlux attacked.
A scout ship came in at the steepest angle it could to the floor of Harbinger’s belt without hitting the Membrane. It was packed wall-to-wall with gravity generators surrounding a small fusion power plant. At 80,000 miles per second, the ship created a fireball that lasted less than a second as it hit the atmosphere an instant before impacting three miles from Wundee’s sanctuary. In the next 16 microseconds, several sensors on Wundee’s carapace detected light and radiation in troubling ranges. This activated the stasis field cut-off plug and sealed Wundee’s brain just before the blast stripped it from his disintegrating body and hurled it twenty-four miles from the impact site.
