We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 3: Chapter 33: Project

Book 3: Chapter 33: Project

Herschel

October 2227

Delta Pavonis

Be careful what you wish for. Uh huh. I was visiting Neil, while we took a break. He’d draped himself across his chair sideways and was doing a good imitation of a boneless corpse. I could remember sitting like that when original Bob was a teenager. Neil had a couple of behaviors that seemed to hearken back to Bob’s adolescence.

“Friggin’ hell,” he finally moaned. “Can we go back to being pondscum? Life was so much easier!”

I laughed, and signaled Jeeves for a beer. Neil had a template for a particularly good ale, and I tried to make a point of having one when I was visiting. I sat down, took a drink, then called up the project plan. “Well, we’re a little ahead of schedule, buddy. You could afford to take a few milliseconds off.”

“Oh, hah hah. You are too funny.” Neil straightened up. “Well, at least we’ve finally finished cutting up Hulk-2. Loading it all into Hulk-1’s cargo bays is routine enough to be left to the AMIs. But building the mover plates…”

“Yeah, I know. We weren’t really anticipating having to deploy our printers when we came out here. It’s a pain…” We grinned at each other and said, in unison, “but it’s a good pain!”

“Anyway,” I continued. “Moot is in a half-hour. You might want to get organized.”

Neil scowled at me, then pulled up his files. He muttered something about slavery, but got to work.

* * *

The moot was crowded, but that was normal, these days. There had been a problem with despondency for a few months after the loss of Delta Pavonis 4, but we’d bounced back. Now the Bobs were more determined than ever to deal out some payback.

Neil and I picked a spot close to the podium. Normally, we’d be at the back, as befitted pondscum, but we were now Project Leaders. Of course, we were also project workers, project gophers, and project janitorial staff, but who’s counting? We would be expected to give a status report on the Derelicts Project.

Bill mounted the podium, held the air-horn above his head, and gave the traditional blaaat. The audience greeted him with the usual catcalls and boos. I stayed silent, and I noticed that Neil was more reticent than usual, as well. It was much harder to be an agitator when we were standing up front.

Bill looked around the audience, waiting for the commentary to die down. When he had quiet, he began to speak.

“I’m going to start off with a bombshell. Starting twenty days ago, a number of our monitoring drones around GL 877 were attacked. Per their standing instructions, they self-destructed immediately. In the last two instances, the drones weren’t attacked, but chased.”

This news was met with gasps from the audience. Neil and I stared at each other, bug-eyed with shock, and he mouthed, “They know.”

Bill waited a moment for the chatter to die down. “We figure the Delta Pavonis harvesting expedition reported back to the Others’ home world, and they correctly concluded that they were under surveillance. Based on the attempt to capture the last two drones, they may have surmised that we have a technological advantage of some kind.”

A hologram of the GL 877 system popped up in the air, showing the location of the surveillance drones around the system. Bill made a gesture with his hand, and one by one, drones were replaced by small explosion graphics. ?????Ëš

“We’re reconfiguring, but as we lose drones, our coverage will get spotty. We’re biasing them toward the near side of GL 877, to catch any expeditions coming our way. We’re also introducing some randomness in their positions, just to make it more difficult for the Others to find the drones. There haven’t been any new attacks in the last week, so that may be working. And Mario will be replacing the drones on a priority basis. But we’ll still be deficient for a few years.”

Neil edged up to me. “Something smells.”

“What?”

“There’s something about this scenario that bothers me. Why’d they stop?”

“Because they realized they couldn’t catch the drones? Because we randomized the locations?”

“Nope. Not sufficient.” Neil opened his mouth to add something, but at that moment, Bill decided to introduce us.

“Now, you’ve all been hearing about the Derelict Project. Herschel and Neil are here today to give you their first official update.” Bill gestured toward us.

I could feel myself blushing furiously as we mounted the podium. I looked around at the sea of Bobs, and my voice locked up.

Neil, familiar with my stage fright, picked up smoothly. “On a recon flight, we found a couple of Others’ cargo vessels drifting out of the Delta Pavonis system. One was pretty much totaled, but the other was almost intact, with damage limited to A.I. and drive systems. We were able to reactivate the power core—there’s a separate report on what we’ve been able to figure out about the technology.”

Neil turned to me and gestured. He’d given me just the right amount of time to get it together. I picked up the thread smoothly. “We’ve broken down the totaled derelict, and have been using the materials to do repairs on the Bellerophon.”

The assembled Bobs picked up on our chosen name, and we received whistles and whoops of approval. When the approbation died down, I continued, “Rather than trying to rebuild the drive, we’re just manufacturing mover plates—Bill figures 24 will be enough—to fly the whole thing to Earth. We’ve loaded the extra material from the other derelict into the hold, and we’ll be manufacturing stasis pods during the voyage.”

I looked around for Riker, but couldn’t see him, so I looked at Bill. “We’re thinking that if Earth would shift some manufacturing capacity into stasis pods, we could move a lot of people in one shot.”

I glanced around at the crowd. Four or five dozen versions of my face looked back at me. Smiles, nods, frowns of concentration predominated. Okay, not so bad. Bobs were not subtle. If our presentation had been less than interesting, we’d know it.

“Questions?” Bill said.

Bedlam erupted. Okay, really not bad.

Neil leaned closer to me. “Isn’t it nice to be important?”

“I’m having second thoughts, thanks.”

Bill pointed to someone, and the chaos quieted.

Thor stepped forward. “How confident are you of the alien power core?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but Neil jumped in. “It works fine. Just as dependable as one of our own. And a lot more powerful.”

I glared at him and whispered, “You lie like a log.”

“Shaddup, you.”

“How many pods do you think you can make?” Thor continued.

“We have enough material to build a pod for every human being alive,” Neil answered. “Just not enough time. In the 3.6 years subjective trip time, we figure we can make just over five million of them.”

Bill turned and spoke to someone. “Will, how many could you put together at your end?”

Riker stepped forward. “No more than a couple of million. We’re working in non-relativistic time, but on the other hand, we don’t have piles of refined metals just sitting there. We have to salvage every kilogram of metal, and the pickings are getting thinner. It’s starting to slow colony ship production, as a matter of fact.”

The conversation descended into comparisons of critical paths, differing ramp-up strategies, result domains, and other, even less interesting things. I eyed Neil, and he nodded. As casually as possible, we sidled away from the debate and toward the bar. No one noticed our departure.

I leaned against a rail with a beer in my hand, and grinned at Neil. “We’re important.”

“Yeah, when they notice we’re gone, I’ll concede. Meanwhile…” He raised his beer in a toast.

Gotta love moots.