We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 2: Chapter 44: Baseball

Book 2: Chapter 44: Baseball

Bill

March 2189

Epsilon Eridani

“Hey, batter batter, heeeeeeeeeeey, batter.”

Howard grinned at the outfield. “Has that ever worked?”

Bob yelled back, “It’s traditional. Just go with it.”

I sailed a perfect underhand toss across the plate. Howard swung and totally whiffed.

“That’s three. Everyone advance.”

Howard shrugged, materialized a glove, and jogged to the outfield. We were generally able to field a pretty full Scrub game these days, but we couldn’t depend on enough people for two teams. Original Bob had never been much of a team player anyway; we all preferred Scrub. More of a personal goals thing.

I moved to the catcher position, and Loki took over as pitcher. Everyone else shuffled forward into the next position. As soon as we were all ready, Marvin came up to bat. Loki wound up and threw the ball right over the plate.

About ten feet over the plate.

There were boos from the outfield. I stood up. “Yeah, you’ve been practicing, my ass. That’s with practice?”

“At least it’s going in the right direction now.”

“Uh huh. In the interest of not walking every batter for the next half hour, I’m going to allow some Guppy intervention. Put it across at people height, okay?” I nodded to Marvin.

On the next pitch, Marvin knocked it into the outfield, between center and right. Howard and Dopey looked at each other, each waiting for the other to move. Marvin, no dummy, was closing in on second before the two stooges decided who should make an effort. By the time they had the ball into the infield, Marvin was at third. He took a moment to grin and thumb his nose.

We were all fairly evenly matched in sports prowess, for obvious reasons. It came down to who was paying attention and who was letting their mind drift. We played for a subjective half hour, the agreed-upon duration, then retired to the pub.

The pub was hosted in the same matrix that handled Bob-moots, so it had more than enough processor power to handle all the Bobs and all the beer. And Hungry’s coffee, of course.

As always, we ended up talking shop.

I had a group encircling me that wanted to talk about Bullwinkle.

“Bullwinkle? Really?”

“Hey, why not?” I grinned at Thor. “The thing needed an external antenna array because of the required bandwidth. I just played with the aesthetics a bit. You’ve seen the pictures.”

Howard chuckled. “It would be hard not to think of a moose. I think your sense of proportion was a little off when you built that thing.”

There were answering laughs from several people, plus some perplexed expressions from those who hadn’t seen the pictures.

“So what’s the long game, Bill?”

I shrugged. “Nothing dramatic, Mario. It’s an interesting project, and could be useful—”

“—It would give us a physical presence,” Howard interjected. “I remember Riker being frustrated sometimes, working with the enclaves. And it’s even more so for me. We have all this interaction with the ephemerals—” ?à??BÈs

“Please don’t use that word, Howard.” I gave him the stink-eye, and he looked embarrassed for a moment.

“It’s not intended to be derogatory, Bill. It’s just—”

“Then just say humans. Sure, it’s not derogatory, but it is dismissive. And it will eventually shape an attitude that their lives matter less.”

Howard gave me a blank look, then shrugged. “Anyway, the point is that I could be so much more effective if I could, you know, ‘walk among them’. Flying around, looking like a giant pill-bug, and giving orders through a speaker is just incredibly limiting.”

“Politicians did it for centuries,” someone muttered.

I grinned and said, “That’s pill, not pill-bug.”

“There are even better words…”

“Anatomical…”

“Scatological…”

I glared around the group. “If you guys break out into Gilbert and Sullivan, I’m leaving!”

We all laughed and the tension was broken. But I was still left with a weird twinge of foreboding.

Eventually, the moose groupies broke up and joined different conversations. I wandered around the pub, listening in but not engaging. Topics ranged from the impending arrival of the latest colony ships to Omicron² Eridani, the chances of a colony being successful on Klown Kar Planet, wildlife on Vulcan, speculation on the Others, and my asteroid-mover project. I moved in to listen on the last item.

Mario stopped what he was saying and turned to me. “Bill, we were just wondering about the capacity of the mover plates. How big can you go?”

I grinned at him. This was one of my favorite subjects. “Right now, we could probably apply a vector to something about half the size of Ceres. So, about five hundred kilometers in diameter. But it would be a tiny, tiny vector, in the range of a hundredth of a gee.” I thought for a moment. “How big can we go? Well, you keep adding plates to get more push. But that makes control of plate interactions more complex. It’s just an engineering problem, though. We’re learning how to tune the drive so that most of the energy goes into moving the payload instead of keeping the plates in position. There’s no theoretical maximum that I’ve been able to find.”

“So we could eventually move stars?” Mario grinned at me, obviously trolling.

I laughed. “Sure, in a million years or so. Theoretically possible doesn’t mean easy.”

I nodded to the group and moved on. Another group was discussing the expanding bubble of the Bobiverse. In principle, we should be approaching a forty-light-year radius by now. But reproduction tended to be uneven and spotty. It was generally accepted that we Bobs were only marginally enthusiastic about cloning more of ourselves. I shrugged. The Others might change that.

The moot continued for many objective minutes—hours in our time-sense. Eventually, though, Bobs started to pay their respects and pop out. It had been a good game. Okay, not really, but a good post-game wrap-up. I smiled to myself. That was really the point.

* * *

“I have something to show you.” Garfield was trying and mostly failing to keep a huge grin off his face. Well, okay, not bad news, then.

“All right, Gar, I’ll bite. What’cha got?”

“I give you my answer to Bullwinkle.” With a flourish, he popped up a video window. “Rocky!”

“That does not look like Rocky. More like Rodan.”

“Hey, if we’re going to get pedantic,” Garfield said, laughing, “the real Bullwinkle was bipedal.”

“If we’re going to get pedantic, the real Bullwinkle was a cartoon. So, does it fly?”

“In theory.” The android stood in the hold of a cargo drone, still attached to its support cradle. Metadata told me that the drone was parked on the surface of Ragnarök. Garfield opened the cargo bay door, revealing the bare rock of the planet’s surface. His avatar froze as he switched his consciousness to the android. Another window popped up, showing Rocky’s viewpoint.

Rocky detached itself from the cradle and waddled to the door and out into the Ragnarök wilderness. The communications relay drone stayed with it and provided another viewpoint.

The android was not graceful on foot. Not really surprising. The still relatively thin air of Ragnarök would require a lot of wing surface in order to lift off, even with the powerful artificial musculature. But walking wasn’t the point.

Garfield set himself, opened his massive wings, and launched. Several powerful flaps were sufficient to get off the ground, and he steadily gained altitude. The comms drone kept pace, keeping Rocky centered in the frame. The other window showed the view from Rocky’s eyes.

Honestly, it wasn’t impressive from any objective metric. Drones could fly faster, higher, with less energy, and were more maneuverable. But based on my experience with Bullwinkle, Garfield would be experiencing something entirely different from flying a drone.

Things went well for the first two minutes.

Then Garfield ran into some turbulence. Maybe a crosswind, maybe a downdraft, who knew? But Rocky went into a roll that approached ninety degrees. He attempted to correct, and rolled farther in the opposite direction. The motion kept reinforcing itself, and every attempt by Garfield to get it under control either made it worse or introduced pitch and yaw.

Finally, Garfield folded his wings and went into free fall. This stopped the harmonic cycle, but he was now rapidly losing altitude.

“Maybe time to start flying again, buddy.” I blushed as soon as the words left my mouth. Nothing like stating the obvious to help out.

“Thanks, Bill, I might just try that.”

Garfield was taking my foot-in-mouth moment with good grace. I resolved to try shutting the hell up as a strategy.

Garfield stuck out his wings just the smallest amount, trying to establish stability. It seemed to be working for a few moments. Then the rushing air snapped his wings out like a parachute opening up. Every status light went red, and Garfield screamed.

I pulled back to VR, to find Garfield sitting hunched forward, hugging himself, a wild look in his eyes. He took a few deep breaths, then glared at me.

“Um, I guess we did too good of a job of setting up the neural feedback. That hurt!”

I nodded. “In theory, that’s what we want. But maybe we should put a limiter on it.”

“Yeah, let’s do that.” Garfield stood and stretched carefully. “Where’s Rocky?”

“Still on his way down. Wings are snapped, though, as is his keel. I don’t think you want to be in there for the landing.” I pulled up the video feed from the trailing drone, which was still faithfully following the tumbling android. Rocky was definitely junk, and Garfield hadn’t thought to add a parachute.

I looked at Garfield, and he shrugged. “Well, it’s not the fall that kills you…” he said, with a rueful half-smile on his face.

We watched as Rocky hit the ground. Every status indicator went dead, and the trailing drone picked up the loud, hollow thump of impact.

I instructed the cargo drone to head for the impact site and pick up the pieces. I turned to Garfield.

“So, other than the unfortunate ending, how did it feel?”

“Incredible. I was flying. Actually flying, not just working a control panel. I think hang gliding might come close, but nothing else.”

I smiled at him. I could understand the feeling. “It’s a lot more real than VR.”

“Yeah, and what we’ve got here will allow Bobs to interact with the real world. As beings, I mean, not as floating cameras.”

“You’re right, Garfield. In an emergency, I think we could even use them with the comms drone hanging around, although that’s messy.”

Garfield gazed into space for a few moments. “I wonder if we’re missing the big picture. Take this to its logical conclusion and we could replace our HEAVEN hulls with bodies.”

“Like mechanical versions of van Vogt’s Silkies?” That was a mind-boggling thought.

“Yeah, like that. Bill, we may be the beginning of a new species. Homo siderea.”

“Hmm, the TODO just keeps getting longer and longer. Let’s see if we can get rid of the trailing communication drone first, okay?”

Garfield smiled and shrugged. “So, you know what comes now, right?”

“What?”

He grinned and held the beat. “Rocky II.”

“I hate you.”