Johnny Reb (2) He also usually liked to do a walk-through of the two big hallways through the trucker's rooms just to make sure that nothing really ridiculous was going on, but tonight he didn't feel up to that. Instead he went directly upstairs to the hall that had Melanie's room at one end, and his and Anne's at the other. And naturally, it was up there that he found the trouble. Mel's door was open an inch, and he knew what that meant. He knocked lightly, then pushed it open to find her sitting on the edge of the bed looking out the room's tall window. He had put that window in for her the year they came to the battered old rest-stop that they built into the Wolverine. He and Anne had been scared all the time then, but she was seventeen years old and excited by the adventure of survival. They had fought through that winter and the next, building the house and rooms, installing the pumps, hunting for food, and getting their first wry customers. They had made a place where a young woman could hope to grow to adulthood, and where her worn-out parents could hope to spend the remainder of their lives. Now the room's only light was a big patch of moonlight that the window admitted, and when Mick's daughter looked at him her eyes held all the desolation he had ever seen. She looked out the window again, and he sat in the room's only chair. "You did great tonight," Mick attempted, deciding that there would definitely be a better time to discuss her mistakes. She gave a little snort that might have been a laugh, but didn't turn her head. "I'm sorry about the thing with the gun," he tried again. She lowered her gaze to the floor and breathed deeply once, but still didn't speak. So that hadn't been it either. His third try was to sit silently, and wait. "That," she said finally, "was the first time I've touched a man in more than a year. Since the dance the Schwarz's had. And I guess there won't be any more of those." The Schwarzs had made a valiant effort to put together some kind of social life in the remnants of Chelsea, but it hadn't come to much. There weren't enough people left in the whole area who felt secure enough to come to a party. And they had quickly found out why. Not many months after the dance, an attack by bandits from out of Detroit had convinced them to move West like so many others, heading for Grand Rapids on the Lake Michigan coast. "Daddy," she said, looking at him directly. "I'm twenty-four years old! Will I ever go to another dance? Will I ever see another man who's not a drunken truck driver? Am I going to spend my whole life waiting tables and kicking punching-bags?" Now it was Mick's turn to look away from her and out the window. He knew what the talk was about now; they'd had it many times before and with increasing frequency in the last year. The fight had only lent it more urgency. It was about school, and there was only one school left in Michigan. In fact, it was the only one in the Midwest as far as anyone could tell. It was the new University at Interlochen. And it was far to the northwest: by road at least two hundred and fifty miles from Ann Arbor and the Wolverine Truck Stop. Once the school there had been a little academy for the arts, but the disappearance of the state's other schools had forced Interlochen to branch out into all kinds of disciplines that the new world demanded: small-scale agriculture, land reclamation, domestic and wild animal husbandry, veterinary medicine, military microbiology, eugenics, civil defense, general medicine, mechanics, ecology. It had grown quickly, absorbing most of the surviving faculty of the state's more well-known institutions of higher learning. They had been located in more densely populated areas and had suffered more from the biological weapons of the First War. And then the Second War came, and the nuke in Detroit hadn't helped Ann Arbor much. But the state's northwest corner had been relatively untouched by both wars, and Interlochen and nearby Traverse City had grown rapidly. And now they had the added advantage of being far enough away from the nightmare war zone that the old Detroit suburbs had become to be relatively safe. Or at least arguably so. And they had certainly argued about it. "You know what I think about it," he said quietly. "It may be OK now, but it's just not going to last. The same kind of thugs that found the Schwarz's are going to get up around there sooner or later, and then what will those people do?" "Dad, we're ten times closer to the gangs than Interlochen is." "And," Mick replied immediately, "we're a thousand times smaller target, and we have an average of a dozen very well-armed men sleeping here every night who are usually about the best people you could ask for! And why can't you study –" Mick stopped when he saw his daughter set her jaw and look out the window again. They had both heard this line too many times, hadn't they? Why can't you study what you want right here? He had rescued hundreds of books, lugging them everywhere on their journeys during the Troubles. Now they were a treasure trove of information, perhaps the largest private library remaining in the state. And absolutely irrelevant for Melanie's education. What she needed was to study with others of her own age. To meet people and talk with them about classes and take walks to parties at night. Like he had in the beautiful years before the murder of the world. She needed beautiful years of her own, end of the world or no goddamn end of the world. She didn't need to sit in her room and read books. "I know you can't study the same way here," he admitted quietly. This was a first, and she looked at him sharply. "And I know you can take care of yourself very well. Against a drunken trucker or two. Or three! But not against what I'm afraid is coming up there. And I can't –" I can't sleep at night without knowing every minute that you're safe. But he couldn't very well say that. "I can't promise anything," he said at last, feeling the pressure of her gaze on him. "Maybe we can figure out something. OK? We'll talk about it." But he had also said that before, hadn't he? "Maybe we could move the Wolverine. I don't know." But in fact they both did know that moving the Wolverine was not an option. It had to stay where the traffic was, and that meant staying on I-94. There wouldn't be much point in a truck stop where no trucks would ever go. And how could he raise the cash they wanted for four years of school without the Wolverine? Eighty ounces of gold per year! So far, in two years of trying, he had saved up enough for all of six months. Melanie knew that just as well as he did. But the only other possibility would be to sell the Wolverine itself, if a buyer could even be found. And then – how would he and Anne live? Or could its sale possibly bring enough to set them up with a livelihood somewhere in the Interlochen area, and pay for Melanie's school? It didn't seem very likely. Mick left his daughter as he had found her, silently staring at the moonlit wilderness and wondering where in all the wide world she could find her own place, and her own life. He and Anne had fought their way through the end of the world, through famine, genocide, pestilence, and lawlessness. They had succeeded, and made a place where she could live and grow up. Now Mick greatly feared that all their work would be undone in the end by a ghost, by the final enemy of all parents in the ancient world. Only the few survivors of that lost world could remember the monster's name, and even then they would not speak the word aloud. It was "Tuition". He closed her door quietly behind him, and continued down the darkened hall. The trucker came bursting through the swinging door just as Mick was finishing getting the kitchen stove's morning fire started. "Mick," he said breathlessly, "you gotta see this. You remember Red? He's just pullin' in. You gotta see this." They jogged together out to the edge of the parking lot, but when Mick saw what the commotion was about he just stopped and stared. The size of the load on Red's truck was absurd. Fifteen feet high if it was an inch, twice that in width, and a good yard longer than the bed of his enormous heavy duty lo-boy trailer. The load's width made it overhang the lo-boy bed hugely on each side, and it actually draped down somehow so that the big truck's tires were quite invisible. More ridiculously yet, the load was actually tarped. It was covered with a crazy patchwork of canvases: green, brown, and black, and in all stages of disrepair. Red had apparently sown the tarps together by tying lengths of rope through the grommets at their various edges. It was amazing enough that he had even been able to find that many tarps, since nobody much used them anymore. Worse yet, how could one man alone drag such a Frankenstein's quilt over top of such a mountainous load? Big Red would be doing well to wrestle just one tarp into place, and there were at least half a dozen up there. The great width of the load, while making it look ridiculous, was actually not such a big problem. There was hardly any traffic on the highways anymore, so you wouldn't have a lot of traffic backed up behind you. You certainly wouldn't need a little car with a flasher following along behind you to warn sleepy motorists that there was a Wide Load ahead. Instead, it was the load's great height that made it totally impossible. Any overpass in the country would clip three feet right off the top of it. There was no way Red should even have been able to get past the Baker Road interchange just a short ways west, at the site of the original Wolverine. Mick could not imagine him stopping at every overpass and inching his way overland with his enormous truck. Although it hadn't been too rainy lately. Could he do it without getting stuck? But a load that size would have to be made of lightweight aluminum for even his truck to be able to carry it at all. And what would be that size, and made of lightweight aluminum? "Red," Mick held out his hands, begging. "What the hell are you hauling?" The others had come, gathering around him. They didn't want to come too much closer since Red did have something of a reputation as a maniac, but they weren't shy about venturing guesses about the nature of the ridiculous load. "I'll tell you what that there is," Bobby shouted over the sound of Red's engine. "That there is Red's lunchbox! He finally got one the right size." Red was well known for overeating, which had become quite a trick in recent years. Yet, as he opened the door Mick thought it was clear that he had noticeably lost weight. Whatever nonsense he had gotten into, it didn't seem to be paying very well. "Well damn if you didn't get something right for once in your life, Bobby," Red yelled from the cab as he shut down. "This is damn right my lunchbox," he announced grandly, climbing down. "In fact, boys, this here is gonna be my meal ticket all over the country for the rest of my life. Somebody step up and buy my rig, boys, because..." As he spoke he stooped down to the edge of the tarp-quilt which was hanging, badly abraded, within an inch of the ground. He took a moment to tie one end of a coiled rope that he had carried from the cab to a free grommet. "your old pal Red..." Throwing the rest of the rope up and over the load, he jogged around to the other side of the truck. "...is going into a new line of work!" Grunting, he heaved down on the rope from the far side and the corner of the tarp lifted a yard or so off the ground. "What the hell?" Mick said quietly. It took him a good couple of seconds to even understand what it was that his eyes were seeing, partially revealed by the ragged canvas. It was metal, and it was big metal. And definitely not lightweight aluminum. Treads? Treads from something big, like some kind of large earth-mover or crane. Except that they were beat all to hell, and the load wasn't really shaped right to be anything with treads like that. It didn't seem to be the right shape to be a crane that had lost its derrick. Had Red salvaged some kind of big bulldozer that had lost its blade? Why would you want it then? Red pulled down on the rope again, lifting the curtain further, finally raising it above the high edge — the very high edge — of the treads. The metal was a dark bluish-gray that made it look supernaturally tough, yet it looked beat up enough to be an old earth-mover. Although the surface wasn't dirty, exactly. It was more like discolored. Oh shit, was it scorched? And dented by — bullets? Large bullets? The metal was definitely not aluminum. Red pulled one more time, and the tarp raised to above the half-way point revealing faded writing on the side of the big machine. Brighter stainless steel letters were still visible inlaid against the darker — flintsteel? "Red," Mick breathed, "you crazy bastard." The words on the side of the monster were 'Dinochrome Brigade'. "It's a Bolo," Mick said quietly. "It's a goddamn Bolo." They weren't hard to recognize. Anyone who'd had a television or read the newspaper before the Wars would have immediately remembered the oversized double treads and hulking faceted body, although this one might have seemed even a little bigger than what they remembered from the newscasts just prior to the beginning of the Wars. Bolos were the Army's AI tanks: their "intelligent" computers could find their own targets in a battle and tell the difference between friend and foe a lot faster than any human tank-driver could. Although a human officer could ride inside a Bolo as though it were an old-style tank, he was mostly there to keep senior officers and civilians from getting too nervous at the idea of an unmanned fighting machine. Mark I Bolos had first been in the news at the start of the Troubles just before the destruction of Washington, and their development had greatly accelerated in the Wars that soon followed. People who retained the means and interest to pay attention to such things might have heard rumors that General Walker had used some Mark IIs in the Chinese war, but that's where the trail would have ended. After the end of the First War there were four billion dead, with much of Europe, Japan, and the western United States devastated, Washington D.C. long gone. Worst of all was China. General Walker's final gift to it, and his legacy to the rest of the planet had been the policy dubbed "Chernobilization." It had reduced the Middle Kingdom to a patchwork of radioactive wastelands, darkening the skies with the poison smoke of burning powerplants. After that War no one had the resources, the will, or the need to build a weapon half as sophisticated as a Bolo. This remained true even after U.S. Foreign Command rose from the ashes of Washington and the terrified determination of a relatively unscathed United States to impose peace by any means necessary. Even Foreign Command in the heyday of its nearly worldwide dictatorship couldn't have done built a Bolo. Their needs had been for long-range strategic weapons, air and ocean transport capacity, and the rehabilitation of the few remaining aircraft carrier battle groups. No one Mick knew had ever heard of Bolos being used anywhere in the Second War: the global civil war between American forces and Foreign Command that dealt the deathblow to the weakened planet. Mick knew a lot more about Bolos than most. About the armor and weaponry he perhaps knew no more than the average man, but he had a much better idea about how the machine's artificial intelligence would work. Most of all he understood what the Bolo's vision system might do. That vision system had been the crowning achievement of decades of work in "machine vision". The cognitive structures developed to solve the enormous difficulties of seeing in the natural world had been used extensively in all other areas of the machine's artificial intelligence. The two visible ClearSteel plates high up on either side of the giant tank's body would conceal high-speed digital cameras with multi-band gigapixel sensors. Those sensors would themselves be performing low-level visual processing to avoid flooding the entire mind with visual data. They were designed to pass on no more than five percent of the original data, while losing no more than five percent of the information that would be useful to higher levels of processing. Only if higher processing specifically requested it would the lowest-level sensing pass on every available pixel. Once higher processing received the edge- and region-information that the low levels produced, it would work to build those simple features into more complex constructions. Are two edge parallel to each other? Then they are probably physically related. Are two such edge-pairs concentric and at right angles to each other? Then the four edges together constitute a rectangle. Consuming billions of operations per second, these mid-levels of processing would be responsible for building up features such as rectangles, ovals, bars, and color iso-contours. These would become the input to the highest levels of visual processing, which would use yet higher-level world-knowledge to create constructs such as "building", "parking lot", and "person". Mick knew about such things, because once upon a time, in a world that now seemed as remote and legendary as Atlantis, he had worked on such things. Before he had learned to hunt deer, purify water, clean a chimney, or put up a windmill he had written software, drafted architecture documents, and argued with managers. He liked to think that he had played an important part in the vision system's development, but when he had left the project there had been no actual Bolos. The development system he had worked with would have filled a small gymnasium, and consisted of scores of computers and their power and cooling systems, strung together with multi-colored cables and festooned with hand-written warnings of the dire consequences that would befall anyone who interrupted whatever test happened to be ongoing on that piece of equipment. Of course people routinely ignored those signs, knowing that they were always outdated since the researchers never bothered to take them down. Could they really have finished it in the few years after he had left, and before the First War? And would it actually function in any useful way in such a complex visual environment without locking up the entire mind for minutes at a time? Mick understood far better than any other man in the Wolverine parking lot what the Bolo might be able to see, if all that effort had actually paid off. He understood enough to know that he should have immediately turned away as soon as he realized what the big machine was. He should have turned his back and walked into the Wolverine and stayed there, and there would be no possibility of a problem. But after so many years he could not resist spending just a few seconds standing there and staring at the big machine, and wondering if it could really see. He had just started taking a step back, following a half-thought-out plan to fade into the crowd of truckers, when a brilliant red light flickered across his face. He quickly glanced aside but it was too late. The Bolo had already gotten a three-D scan of his face. And Mick didn't see any similar flickers happening on the faces of any of the truckers. "Sir," the machine spoke in a booming voice. The Bolos' outdoor voice had been made deliberately to sound artificial, so that soldiers in combat wouldn't be confused about who was talking. As the big tank spoke, a large bundle of what might have appeared to be pipes deployed from a recessed place on the armor and clanged into position, then swiveled so quickly to point at him that Mick could hear the sound of their passage through the air. "Shit!" One of the truckers next to him shouted. The weapon that the Bolo had deployed was a large-caliber gattling gun. Mick remembered reading in some Sunday supplement before the Wars that the firing mechanism that fed those six barrels was the size of a small car, and that, employed at full speed, the weapon could fire one hundred and twenty rounds per second. Depleted uranium armor penetration or active fragmentation anti-personnel rounds. Mick also remembered wondering what exactly was meant by "active" fragmentation. He had no difficulty standing perfectly still. "You appear to be Michael Joseph Goulish, 1st Lieutenant United States Air Force," the machine boomed. "Is this identification correct?" Of course. They would have given it a complete military personnel database. Why not? It would be nice to be able to move it from base to base and have it just recognize everybody without retraining. And what the hell. It would only take a few hundred gigabytes. Mick imagined that the distance between the top and bottom barrels in the gattling gun was precisely the distance between his heart and his head, and that the big tank had deployed the gun already precisely aimed at both of those targets. Would it be able to actually see the location of his heart, from a slight difference in the infra-red image of his chest? "Michael?" he heard his wife's frightened voice from back by the Inn's front door, and the faint sound of her running footsteps. "Is this identification correct?" "No," he replied. "My name is Michael Proffitt." "Johnny!" Red shouted. "What are you doing, buddy? Mick's an old friend." Hands splayed in a calming gesture, Red started to ease forward toward the great, battle scarred machine. "Let's stow them guns, OK?" "All others will please stand fast." As it spoke, the massive-looking machine gun snapped over to target Red, then an instant later to center on Bobby who had also started forward but with less fanfare, then back to its original target. Both men stopped cold. The gun had moved almost too fast to see, and Mick had a strong suspicion that the Bolo had kept it centered on each target longer than it needed to, just so the humans would be able to see that it was pointed at them. Mick had an instant's comic image of Bobby trying to sneak up on the 150-ton monster. He would whip out the cheap Colt he always carried in a shoulder-holster under his big shirts, press the little gun up against the foot thick ferro-crystal reinforced ablative flintsteel armor of the tank's main cannon turret and say "OK, pal, drop it." "Your identification is mistaken," Mick said, a little too loudly. Most likely, the machine could hear his breath if it wanted to. And he could not distract it by raising his voice. He had continued to follow whatever he could of the development of the Mark IIs' computing systems with great professional interest after getting away from the military. He knew that the final models had symmetric multiprocessing banks of dozens of hundred-gigahertz processors, with quite enough computational power to pay attention to every person in the Wolverine parking lot whether one of them raised his voice or not. But he raised his voice anyway. "Please open your mouth as wide as possibly and tilt back your head," the machine commanded. "What the fuck," Bobby cursed. "Look, pal," he shouted up at the Bolo, "why don't you just come out of your damned toy there and you and me have a little chat?" "Bobby," Mick said without looking away from the machine, "it's a Bolo. A robot tank. There's nobody inside but computers." Computers with a damn fine vision system, he thought. Then he opened his mouth as wide as he possible could and tilted back his head. A perfect clear blue sky today, and how often does that happen now? You can't see that the ozone's half gone. It looks just like it used to. Jesus. Annie, Melanie I'm sorry. I didn't know this would come back to get me. But we did OK, didn't we? Didn't we come through awful hard times? Who would have thought we'd ever get this far? I'm sorry I didn't see you go to school, Scout. I'm sorry I won't see you graduate. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, but he didn't want to so much as blink and miss a tenth of a second of seeing that perfect sky.
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |