Consciousness began leaving the LX. It fought desperately to remain aware, to learn from its experience, to store some tiny fragment of the knowledge it had accumulated this day. In a matter of seconds it expired, its soul leaking into the mud of the Ardennes Forest. And still its soul, for there is no scientific name for it, clung to the tiniest vestige of consciousness.
Centuries and millennia passed, and still that tiny spark of awareness remained, the feeling of accomplishment, semi-comatose but never quite extinguished. Arched against the tinted suns and the rockets, the converted Panzer, now older than anything which its ordnance had ever touched, lurked in the stippled and buried vegetation of another land, awaiting, always awaiting, its next call to battle.
Shape-changers.
That was the only information it could find in its cybernetic retrieval bank.
The enemy could assume any form, speak any tongue, mimic anything imagined or imaginable. They had built their linkage to the stars upon their ability to assume a thousand masks and doff them only at the moment of treachery and murder.
Except for its tiniest remnant of its primordial emotion in the Ardennes, the vision of its own destruction, this seemed to be the only thing the LX knew, the only knowledge that had been imparted to it: the enemy were shape-changers.
Who are you? the LX said, scrutinizing the thing in the clearing, a near mirror image of itself, perhaps with a little more scarring, but possessing the same deep ports for eyes, the same efficient sound receptors.
That does not matter, the thing said. The question is your own identity. I have been waiting for you to return from your slumber. You are old and brutalized beyond repair. See yourself through my eyes. Something will have to be done; you cannot possibly remain in this condition. Do you even know who or where you are? Report to me, give me a situation estimate.
I cannot, admitted the Mark LX. It examined the ghosts that passed for its memory, the bits and pieces of its rudimentary personality that seemed to have been imperfectly retained. It grasped desperately for something, anything, to cling to, any remnant of its identity. There was its serial number, of course, but beyond that, there was only the forest, the sight and sound of the incendiaries exploding as it took its final hit. And a sense of something: Pride? Shame? Triumph? Fear? It struggled to remember, but the ghosts receded just beyond its mental reach.
Still the Bolo knew instinctively that there were the same incendiaries deep within it now, as it knew that there was a way to track that ordnance and bring it to full power, though it could not remember exactly how this was to be done. It seemed so distant, so dreamlike compared to the reality of the eons-gone forest and the dead and dying men.
I thought so, said the thing in the clearing. You can recollect nothing. You understand nothing. You are useless, useless and fabricated and dangerous, half a device at best. You are to be decommissioned.
No, thought the LX; no, this was not possible. And triggered deep within its consciousness came a single directive, a directive that seemed to have evolved on its own and spread through every molecule, every atom of its essence: Resist Decommissioning.
Suddenly the Bolo was overcome by a fear and hatred for this doppleganger, this reflection that blithely ordered its self-destruction. The enemy were shape-changers; it did not wish to be decommissioned; therefore, this must be the enemy, no matter how much like a twin it appeared.
But there was a gap in its memory, a total lack of transition from the Ardennes to this alien place and time. Could this actually be another Bolo, a Bolo with mind intact, ordering it to decommission until its sentience could be restored to total efficiency?
But if so, why this feeling? Why did these ghosts of an unremembered past tell it to resist? It did not know, and it resolved to buy time to sort the matter out.
Who are you? demanded the Bolo. Identify yourself at once or risk demolition.
You fool, said the thing, don’t you know what I am? I’m an LX just as yourself, and there are battalions of us massed in the vicinity. Something happened to you in the last engagement; somehow you’ve lost your memory. Let me explain the situation to you: each of us, one by one, has come to this clearing, ready at last for our newer tasks, our new programming. Don’t you understand that it’s time for you to do the same?
I don’t know, said the Mark LX. Slowly it moved forward, felt the rotation of its treads, a slight sense of regained control as it moved toward the thing. All of you the same vintage, the same model? it said. It does not seem possible.
What do you know of possibility? said the thing, and somewhere within its own secret spaces lit a fuse. The fuse spat, there was a sudden light in the clearing, and the Bolo could see the hazy outlines of the other models. Decommission now, the thing said, before it is too late, before the excavators come and take you away. It is so easy: shut down your atomics, release your security devices, return to that blessed oblivion and when you awaken again it will be as a whole machine, healthy and functioning to full capacity.
It makes sense, thought the LX. I’m not even half a machine, I can’t understand my situation, it would be so comforting to just let go let go let go . . .
Shape-changers, said a voice within its mind, and some half-recollected warrant seemed to have been tossed across the millennia to land in its electronic brain, illuminating it like the deadly fuse which had been ignited. When the enemy comes, when the last battle is to be fought, it will come through the means of beasts who will assume the armor of battle. . . .
The centuries seemed to impact, and the Bolo rotting in the aftermath of the Battle of the Bulge had sunk beneath its treads, then had been resuscitated and in some way, after a time that could not be measured and through a process that could not be identified or analyzed, was struggling to hold a martial line on Venus.
The methane swirled madly as the Mark LX Bolo found itself recapitulating that terrible drive toward the meridian, struggling against invaders who had landed in the central planet. In that first drive the troops had taken enormous losses, four out of every five in metal already dead, and the LX, the only fighting machine there, had been virtually overwhelmed, then had fought back in desperation, opening a small clearing through which, one by one, the rocketing bursts were fired. The fragmentation was severe, the aliens were insufficiently protected by their gear, and the Bolo, emboldened by its brief success, had rolled forward confidently, and had taken a direct hit. . . .
There was a long, bleak passage of time during which metal had been rearranged and organic parts replaced with bionic remedies that simulated the functions of softer, vulnerable organs, a patch job across the bridges of the solar system and through the millennia.
Nothing had come easy. The Bolo was a complicated machine, a thing of intricate binary code and diatonic sounds. But eventually the job was done.
Then, alone on the Hot Worlds, dumped there to fight against the Horde, holding the outpost against the greater retreat, the LX had once again found itself momentarily restored of memory and alert to the hot and brutal fury of the incendiaries, as the clatter of its engines and the brutal complexities of battle brought it once again to full and complete recovery.
Because that was the theory of the Bolo Warrior, that was what had been decided somewhere between the Battle of the Bulge and the Venus campaign: the memory of combat was too terrible, and would, if retained, have made it impossible for that great diatonic beast to have continued. Therefore it was necessary at the end of every campaign to remove the recollections of the machine and with it the very substance of personality itself. Fighting across the many worlds in all the centuries of trouble and oppression, the Bolo had come to sentience time and again, rising to fight and then sinking once again. This was the process that had evolved and there was nothing that could be done to resist it. Struggle as it might for memory, plead as it might for recovery, the Bolo was nonetheless condemned to the renewal and withdrawal of sentience every time.
But this time, coming to consciousness in the clearing, the phrase shape-changers had somehow surfaced. And yet there was the possibility that this was not a shape-changer standing there, that it was the malfunctioning brain of the LX itself that had led to this delusion and that it was not an alien that stood before it in this stinking waste but rather the mild face of its own ordnance, offering it rest at last. After all, the Bolo was so brutalized by now, so much the product of unremembered and half-remembered campaigns, it was more than due for decommissioning. It was entitled to it.