Toy Wars

Toy Wars

Thomas Gondolfi

To
my mother—for teaching me empathy and the joy of books

To my father—for introducing me to science fiction at a tender age and being my best critic

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All characters, businesses, and situations within this work are fictional and the product of the author’s creativity
. A
ny resemblance to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.
TANSTAAFL Press assumes no responsibility for any content on author or fan websites or other publications.

Toy Wars

First printing
—
TANSTAAFL Press

Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Gondolfi

Cover
art:
Tony Foti
,
www.tonyfotiart.com

Cover design: Amanda Forker, www.ilioness.com

Printed in the
USA

ISBN
978-1-938124-02-0

Introduction

Excerpts from the
Third
Chronicler’s Notes:

One of the significant landmarks of the early days of the Sol Unified System’s expansion into the depths of space, sometime in the human calendar
’s
twenty-second century, was an amusing event: the first creation of a truly new life form.
While new life is not a humorous occurrence, the process
that
created this life was more like the punch line to a joke.

Homo sapiens were making use of faster than light (FTL) vehicles and their civilization expanded at a tremendous rate compared to earlier efforts.
Some twenty years after his invention of the FTL drive, Fanta Hisu surpassed his own accomplishments by creating a drive
that was
over an order of magnitude faster
(FT
2
L
)
.
There was only one snag in the new design
—
organic materials
were
destroyed in such a transit.
Hisu dropped his project as the
FT
2
L
drive was not directly useful for the humans.

The
FT
2
L
drive seemed destined to be lost in the invention files with such notables as the air-conditioned hat and the automatic phone cleaner.
Instead, an ambitious engineer accidentally intercepted the idea.
Golan Powers
,
looking for a quick way to glory, happened upon Hisu’s scientific notes for the
FT
2
L
drive.
It sparked the seed of another idea within him.
If organic material could not be sent, then perhaps inorganic could.
So voracious w
as
the human need for raw materials on earth (and so desirous of fame and wealth
was Golan
himself) that
he
devised a plan
t
o
solve both problems at once.

A semi-intelligent
F
actory would be sent via a
n
FT
2
L
ship to extremely far worlds, where it would autonomously produce robots to control and strip the planet’s surface of its mineral wealth, and then transport it back in the original vessel.
Golan paid terrific bribes to get his proposal, specifications, budgets, schedules, and potential returns placed before the Supreme Council in general session.
All told
,
this gained the euphemistic name “Project Infuse.”
Infuse caused an uproar that had never been equaled.
Never in the one hundred fifty years of this government had there been such a race to get on the bandwagon of an issue
—
pro or con.
A new political split formed in the guise of the Expansionists vs. the Naturalists.
The Expansionists, the greed faction of human nature, outnumbered the Naturalists by nearly two to one.

The Naturalists objected that this plan might inadvertently send one of these strip miners to an inhabited world, causing death
and
destruction and sending a horrific message about our species.
The Expansionists yelled the objection down in the Council.
The only way to do the retort justice is to quote Supreme Councilor Torin of Mars
:
“Any truly sentient and intelligent race would be able to handle such an incursion.
We will add a message to the memories and physical plating of each
F
actory telling anyone of this decision and hope they would be our friends with no hard feelings.
And if they can’t defeat the
F
actory, we won’t have to worry about them, now will we?”

Some of the more liberal papers called it the old might-makes-right political theory.
Might-makes-right was
so
intrinsic to the Expansionist
d
octrine that they took such editorials as compliments.
Sheer numbers put down the objections of the Naturalists but did not silence them completely.

The Naturalists continued to work
around
the clock
,
spending billions of credits of their own money to stop Project Infuse
. They
us
ed
court cases, injunctions, financial audits, sit-down strikes, and at the end even chain
ed
themselves to heavy equipment.
They eventually failed.

Seventeen years later, the last court case ruled in favor of the Expansionists.
Project Infuse, now known as
“
PI,
”
was to be put into test production.

PI outfitted three hundred obsolete FTL space vessels with the
FT
2
L
drive and partnered with something known only as
“T
he
F
actory.
”
The resulting conglomerate was the first grouping of Project Infuse’s vessels.
Physically
,
each Factory, a dome
-
shaped cap fit to the peak of each
FT
2
L
ship, lacked an impressive appearance.
It was what they could do
that
made them remarkable.

Factories possessed the construction facilities and mental power to create a workforce of robot slaves.
A huge array of programmers gifted the PI Factories with semi-sentience.
The only real goals these programmers gave the Factories boiled down to “conquer, rape
,
and pillage.”

With this less than moral context guiding them, the Factory-cum-
FT
2
L
vessels were then flung to the exceedingly far reaches of space to strip-mine entire planets.

For ten years everyone waited and conveniently forgot
Project Infuse.
Friendships and alliances broken by the debates and oratory mended.
In the eleventh year, when the first vessel returned with a huge cargo string following it, the peace broke again.
The materials it returned were unmatched in quality
and quantity
to almost anything in our solar system.
The drones contained
new
metals never before seen and a massive q
uantity of fissionables.
Two more
drone strings
returned within that year bearing similar treasures.
Because of its huge success, PI lost any
previous
negative press.
The Naturalists were defeated.
The Supreme Council ordered PI into full-scale production.

The above are facts which are incontrovertible.
This was information placed into the memories and even on physically etched data plates mounted on the Factories themselves.
The remainder of this discussion is reasoned speculation based on analysis of a great number of corrupted files within the Factories
’
memories.
They contain a surprising amount of information on the events that preceded the launch of Factories 55466, 55467, 55468, 55469, 55471
,
and 55474.
It also contains the
punch
line to our joke
.

A preadolescent computer hacker, Janeen Fox (AKA Foxhunt), wanted more than anything to join the local Virtual Reality HAC club.
Though the VRHAC had no interest in PI, other than as a challenge, the group set Janeen the initiation rite of breaking into PI’s vaunted and supposedly impervious databases.
Foxhunt took diligently to her task with an outdated Cray N+1.
For six full days during
s
pring
b
reak, Foxhunt took to working at backdoors, frontal assaults, viral nets, and every other method she could dream up.
Nothing seemed to let her in from the outside, so she decided she had to have someone open the door from the inside.
Janeen coded
an
appropriately invisible Trojan Horse virus.

The virus went in snail-mail in the form of a “demo” cube for the latest VR retro-thriller Perry Mason Returns (which VRHAC had broken the copy protection on in less than
fifteen
minutes
after its release
) to dozens of PI employees.
Janeen was banking on human nature and their inability to pass up something that was both free and would take them away from the now tedious work they were doing.
It worked.
The virus, installed inside the system, created a backdoor for her to worm into.

Janeen’s intent contained no malevole
nce.
Breaking the
imperviousness of PI
was her
goal
, not its contents.
She caused no intentional damage and did nothing save adding her nom d’hac, Foxhunt, to several files.
Her full access lasted less than
ten
minutes before the belated system defenses rushed to close down the unauthorized access.

Project Infuse’s ice crashed about her open portal with such violence and severity that Janeen broke the connection without standard withdrawal procedures.
No newbie to hacking, she had long ago learned to hide the tracks of her work by bouncing through several other computer links.
In this case her last link was through an old-fashioned toy and book
store.
Because of the abrupt termination of the link, several large files were transitioned into the PI database, scrambling a number of crucial launch and post
-
launch parameters.
These parameters remained until a standard morning
CRC
check caught the errors on the following day, too late to save the ill-fated PI vessels prepared for launch
that day
.

The following are more facts, based on actual data from
the
Factories’ memory cores.
PI was now launching upward of a dozen
FT
2
L
space vessels each day.
On t
he date of Janeen’s fateful link, only six
F
actory/vessels were planned for launch.
Each of them was downloaded with the faulty parameter files.
The files contained two very important changes.
The first was that the blueprints of the toy store’s wares replaced the typical robot plans.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, all the ships were dispatched to the same planet, the third planet of HD34085, also known as Beta Orionis, or simply Rigel, something that had never happened in the history of the PI program.
Now a singular PI
F
actory would no longer scour the planet of insignificant life forms
, it would fight its own kind
—
a condition that not one of the PI programmers had anticipated.

Factories 55466, 55467, 55468, 55469, 55471
,
and 55474 were launched on schedule (55470, 55472, and 55473
had been
scrubbed
the previous day
by mechanical difficulties).
The humans heard nothing of any of the
se six
PI vessels again.
They were written off as a loss.

Factory
55468 lost its way in
FT
2
L
and exited near enough a black hole that it could only manage an unstable orbit that eventually decayed with the predictable results.
The remaining five each set down so close to T+3y340d12h16m46s (
three
years,
three hundred forty
days,
twelve
hours,
sixteen
minutes and
forty-six
seconds post
-
launch) as to be unnoteworthy.
Each landed uneventfully on Rigel-3, but it was the beginning
of
the most ferocious competition known to nearly any world.

Rigel-3 was a hell
ish
world, or would be to any humans
—
too
cold
by at least two dozen degrees Celsius
,
a corrosive atmosphere
,
and a gravity
30
percent higher than that of earth.
Through its rivers flowed liquid mercury down to the gleaming metallic
lakes and seas.
On the plus side, Rigel-3 proved itself to be rich in heavy minerals of all kinds, gemstones
,
and huge amounts of oil and other petroleum products.
As the physical conditions were no hardship to the Factories, it was an ideal habitat
to collect for the humans
.
None of the five took long to tak
e
hold in their new home, each oblivious of the other almost identically timed landings.