We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 4: Chapter 3: Trouble

Book 4: Chapter 3: Trouble

Bob

September 2331

Outskirts, Eta Leporis

I came to a stop, relatively speaking, more than fifty AU out from Eta Leporis. The definitions of Kuiper and Oort regions were completely arbitrary, especially for a system other than Sol, but there were some practical differences. For instance, matter became increasingly scarce farther out. And metallic deposits became harder to find. The physics of stellar system formation seemed to produce some consistent patterns, one of which was that the heavier elements tended to be closer in, and all the ice and frozen gasses congregated farther out. In the Kuiper and Oort zones, it was almost all frozen clumps of condensed gasses ejected from the inner system when the sun ignited. But, like raindrops, they generally condensed around something.

My first task would be to send scouts out to look for useful materials. This part fell within my original design. A Von Neumann probe needed to find raw materials, refine them, and use them to manufacture more Von Neumann probes. Of course, I’d long since exceeded my original design specifications. But it was still relaxing, like doing a routine and mindless task.

This process would take a while, though, which was making me antsy. After years in interstellar space, it might seem odd to be fretting over a question of months. But I’d been frame-jacked way down for most of the trip, I was here now, and I wanted to get moving on my search. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted to see if there was really a megastructure in the system. The Others’ Dyson Sphere was the only other piece of mega-engineering we’d ever seen, and that had been only partly constructed. That the Others might be here seemed unlikely, but it would certainly be a worst-case scenario.

My current orbit was too far out to resolve anything in the inner system with the onboard telescope. That was frustrating, and my immediate urge was to send in some observation drones. But Bender had probably just gone charging in, and that presumably had not worked out well for him. So, like it or not, a slow, careful exploration of the system was in order.

I spent the time deploying my printers and setting up a proper orbital autofactory. Regardless of what I found in the system proper, I would still have to set up a local communication station. In my idle moments, I checked my message backlog. It was huge, after a few decades out of touch. But I was mostly interested in messages from my trailing drones. I filtered for those.

The drones launched from Delta Eridani after I’d left had indeed found that Bender’s trail turned toward Eta Leporis—and only a fraction of a light-month before the point where I made that same turn. The fact made me feel more confident about my deductions, and about my plan of action. And slightly smug.

It took four months to locate enough material to even make a start on my plans. Transport drones brought mined material back to the autofactory, which slowly churned out finished parts according to the schedule and plans that I’d given Guppy. Roamers assembled drones from the parts and slowly constructed the relay station.

A year after arriving, I finally had enough exploration drones to begin the actual search for Bender. In all that time, I hadn’t contacted anyone, other than having a couple of email exchanges with Bill. First, because I didn’t want people breathing down my neck, demanding constant updates. And second, because with the small temporary relay station, all I would be able to manage would be audio and video streams. BobTime? FaceBob? It didn’t sound likely to catch on.

I ordered local drones to trace an expanding spiral, looking for Bender’s trail into this system. The cross-section they had to examine wasn’t all that big, not for devices with a four-light-hour detection radius.

And finally, success! Bender had reached here, and Bender had apparently entered the system. I plotted his approach vector and assigned some drones the task of following his flight path.

The closer I got to possibly finding Bender, the more excited I got. But at the same time, I became more nervous. The whole history of our interactions with the Others kept coming back—unpleasant surprises, Bobs getting blown up … Hal got blown up by them, what, twice? Three times?

I didn’t want stories to be told around VR campfires about the demise of Bob-1. But if it did happen, I wanted the other Bobs to know. So I found myself reluctant to commit to anything that might put me in danger until the day the interstellar relay station came online.

It had taken a little longer than expected for the Delta Eridani autofactory to construct and deploy the station, and the delay was maddening. But finally, the day arrived when the new station signaled readiness and came online. I mothballed the kludgy drone/relay station, checked my bandwidth, and performed a long-overdue backup to Bill’s monster Epsilon Eridani archive, Ultima Thule.

I held off on updating my blog. I wanted to have something dramatic to post first.

I’d been doing some light astronomy while waiting for the autofactory to build things and for the drones to find things. I had already identified six planets, the second of which was in the habitable zone. I’d also identified a gap between the second and third planets, which was where the infrared signature was coming from. I couldn’t resolve anything in that zone, and the signature was coming from all the way around the star, so my money was on some kind of swarm—possibly the beginnings of a Dyson Swarm, but concentrated in the ecliptic. If that was the case, and the swarm consisted of something in the order of O’Neill cylinders, it would make sense that I wouldn’t be able to make out any detail yet. ??N????

The planet in the habitable zone, Planet 2, didn’t appear to be inhabited. Or at least there wasn’t any kind of radio signature. Nevertheless, I was getting something sporadic from the system in general. Like chirps—very short-lived and seemingly random noise, except for the narrow transmission spectrum. Which was exactly what I’d expect to see if someone was encrypting and compressing their communications. So something was alive.

It might be time to rejoin the Bobiverse. I could use some other perspectives on this.

The blaaaat of the airhorn was answered by the traditional booing, as the audience expressed their love. Bill grinned back from the podium. “Yeah, yeah. Okay, today’s meet includes an update from Bob-1”—Bill was forced to wait for a wave of catcalls and cheers to die down—“on the subject of Bender, and the situation in Eta Leporis.” This produced a silence far more profound than the earlier noise. Bender’s disappearance had become the Bobiverse’s version of the Flying Dutchman legend.

I waved my hand in the air and smiled as heads turned to look at me, but I was perplexed. The Bobs have always been irreverent and disrespectful, and I was no stranger to jeers and insults at moots. But this time it hadn’t been just good fun. There had been a discernible undertone of rancor.

Keeping my expression neutral, I stepped up onto the podium and scanned the crowd. Undertone or not, everyone was paying attention. “I’m sure most of what I’m about to tell you is already circulating as scuttlebutt, so I’ll keep it brief, then answer questions.” I gave them the same capsule summary that I’d already shared with Bill, then asked for questions. Hands went up everywhere and I pointed at random.

“Are you just going to go barreling in without any thought of consequences?”

My eyebrows went up in surprise. The tone and the words were deliberately confrontational. I took a second look at the speaker to make sure he wasn’t a non-Bob replicant, but no such luck. I found myself more irritated than I would be if some random person had challenged me. This felt like a betrayal.

“Have you ever known a Bob to go barreling in without any planning? Have you met us?” I glared at him, daring him to argue.

“If this does turn out to be a native civilization, you could be interfering in their development. Will you confirm that you’ll back off to avoid doing that?”

“Wow,” I replied. “Nice use of a prejudicial term. To answer the actual question rather than the accusation, that will depend on circumstances. Signing on to a blanket policy at this point would be ridiculous. At one end of the scale, this putative civilization might have deliberately shot Bender down; at the other end, they might only have noticed the flash as his reactor exploded. Those two scenarios require different responses.”

“Or you could just leave them alone. Prime Directive, dude.”

I squinted at the Bob, trying to pick up his metadata. Okay, squint isn’t the right word in VR, but it feels the same. Strangely, he’d set his info to private, which struck me as intolerably rude. And that produced a moment of bemusement—why would I do something to me that I would consider rude?

I glanced at Bill, who just shrugged. I turned back to the speaker. “Even if we had laws, dude, which we don’t, the Prime Directive wouldn’t be one of them. That was a plot device, and unrealistic.”

“Don’t be too sure of that. Some of us are rethinking your attitude.”

“It’s Original Bob’s attitude,” I retorted. I found myself getting more and more irritated with this pissant, and made a concerted effort to calm down. “But you have the right to whatever opinion you want.” I pointedly turned to another hand and motioned.

“How far will you take the search, if you don’t find anything in this system? Will you ask for volunteers to help look further?”

“As far as necessary, and yes. He’s one of us, for God’s sake.”

“So it’s going to be another crusade mandated by the senior Bobs, and the rest of us are supposed to just go along?”

I turned my head and sure enough, it was Pissant. I decided it was time to take a stand. “Nice straw-man, jerk-off. What happened to you, got a quarter-dose of brains? And by the way, we’ll continue this when you have the guts to show your name, but not until.” Again I turned away.

The altercation appeared to have taken the air out of the room. There were no more questions. If this followed normal Bob-like behavior, though, people were just waiting for the formal moot to be over, so they could talk one-on-one. And that was fine with me. If Pissant came at me again, I’d blackhole him.

The moot was over, and most of the Bobs had gone back to their own private VRs. I sat in the pub with Bill, surrounded by empty tables.

“So what the hell, Bill? Mind filling me in?” I glared at him for emphasis over my beer.

“You’ve been out of touch for a few decades, Bob. And I understand why you’ve been keeping to yourself. The whole Archimedes business would be several emotional kicks to the crotch for anyone. But you’re missing things. The Bobiverse is evolving. We’ve got some Bobs here that are twentieth generation and more. Replicative drift is becoming significant enough that some of these Bobs really only look like you. And for that matter, there’s a lot more playing around with appearance, and I don’t just mean facial hair. A half-dozen or so Bobs have started walking around as full-time Borg.” Bill appeared momentarily embarrassed, then invoked a Cone of Silence over us. That was jarring to me. Normally they were used to cut down on distracting background noise, but Bill’s action was, in this case, intended to prevent eavesdropping. “Honestly, Bob, if you haven’t changed your encryption keys and passwords since your last cloning, you should really do it, just on principle. I already have. I don’t actually distrust anyone yet, but I’m beginning to recognize that one of these times we’ll run into a descendant who thinks the ends justify the means, you know?”

I nodded and sent a text to Guppy to do just that, and immediately.

“So what about Howard and Bridget?” I asked, more or less changing the subject. “And Henry Roberts?”

“Neither Bridget nor Henry has cloned. In the former case, that has produced a lot of disappointment and some grumbling in the Bobiverse. Which is probably a good part of why she hasn’t. She doesn’t want to be seen as the default all-wife, I think.”

I snorted. “Original Bob was pretty progressive, but I can still see a certain implicit expectation being a problem.”

“Yup. Anyway, Henry doesn’t show up here much. He’s sailing Quilt right now.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Wait, what happened with Poseidon? Did he finish early?”

Bill laughed. “He gave up after he got eaten the third time, ship and all. He says there wasn’t much point anyway. If you’re going to sail, you should be sailing to something. Poseidon, well …”

“Yeah. All ocean, no something.”

“Bridget and Howard continue to catalog all life in the cosmos,” Bill continued with a smile. “Despite, you know …”

“The infamous Prometheus expedition.” I shook my head. “Well, they’re never bored, anyway.”

I hesitated, not sure how to continue. A couple of Bobs came over, detected the Cone of Silence, and veered off to find other conversational partners, or possibly just a beverage.

Finally, I decided that trying to beat around the bush with Bill was pointless. “So, getting back to replicative drift. What was with the nameless mouthpiece? Are we getting political parties now?”

“It’s a little more than that, buddy. Bobs in general have always been a herd of cats, but it’s getting both more and less pronounced. Bobs are forming groups, and some of those groups are tending to the bizarre. There’s a group trying to build a Matryoshka Brain, for instance.”

“Uh …” I drew my head back and frowned. “With the Casimir power source, we don’t need—”

“The central star for power. Yeah. But heat management is heat management, and a gravity well is handy for keeping things organized. My understanding is that they’re building it around a gray dwarf. Anyway, I’m more concerned about them creating something straight out of a Vernor Vinge novel.”

“Or Lovecraft.”

Bill chuckled and dismissed the Cone of Silence. “Anyway, Bob, you should read my blog to get caught up. I don’t pull any punches, so you’ll get a good overview of where the Bobiverse is going.”

I nodded and raised my glass in salute. Bill turned to someone who had been waiting to get his attention, and I went looking for Luke and/or Marvin.

I couldn’t suppress a snort as I scanned the gathering. Bobs as Borg now.

Cthulhu would not approve.

Bill was probably right. I’d done my usual turtling thing and effectively cut myself off from society in general. I needed to fix that, and I might as well start with a visit to Will. He had, according to his blog, finally retired from colony administration at 82 Eridani and gotten himself a place on Valhalla, where he was involved in the ongoing terraforming of the largest moon of Asgard. The air on Valhalla was still a little thin for humans, but a manny wouldn’t care.

I pinged Will and in short order received an invitation and address for a guest manny. I took the address and popped over.

A few milliseconds of diagnostics, and I opened my eyes to find myself on an outdoor deck, looking up at a sky more of a mauve than blue. Hanging in the middle of the expanse was Asgard, looking perhaps three times the size of Earth from Luna. Will was sitting on an Adirondack chair, holding a coffee and grinning at me.

He wore the standard Bob Johansson manny, but no longer sported a neat Riker-like beard. His hair was uncombed and stuck out in random spikes, and the beard was more like what you’d get if you simply stopped shaving. The manny, so called because the early models had resembled department-store mannequins, was dressed in something that was closer to a lumberjack outfit than anything else. I knew without looking that my guest manny would be generic human and hairless, although not cadaver-white like Howard’s first version.

I undraped myself from the support rack and sat across from Will, then attempted to materialize a coffee out of habit. He grinned at the expression on my face and motioned to a side table, where a coffee flask and some cups were set out. “Sorry, Bob. Out here in real, we prepare our coffee the old-fashioned way.”

I smiled back at him. “In real?”

“Language marches on,” Will said. “Nowadays it’s real and virt.”

“Huh. Noted.” It took only a few seconds to get my own coffee, then I raised the cup in salute. “You’ve changed your look a little.”

“I’ve felt a need to distance myself from the old Riker persona, for a lot of reasons—one of which is that I had a hard time getting people to stop coming to me with colony-related problems. They couldn’t accept the idea that I had retired. Once I adopted the mountain-man look, I think they got the message.”

“So how is the retired life?”

“Retired just means I don’t have a job description, and I can work on what I want now. I’ve been spending most of my time on the terraforming of Valhalla and some personal projects. It helps that I live here; I can see the results of changes right away.”

“And how’s that going?”

Will waved a hand in a self-deprecating gesture. “Bill did a lot of the pioneering work on Ragnarök, of course. Cleaning up the air, adding water, adjusting the biosphere—Valhalla actually has a native ecosystem. Bill made most of the mistakes. I just avoid those.”

“Are you losing much in the way of native stock?”

“Surprisingly, no. It was a fairly hostile environment when we started, kind of like being up the side of a mountain in the high latitudes. What we’re doing to the moon is making life easier. Warmer, more oxygen, more water, and so on. Our challenge is to introduce Earth stock slowly enough that the native stuff doesn’t get outcompeted before it adapts.”

I nodded, took a sip of coffee, and flinched. In the still-too-thin atmosphere, water boiled at a lower temperature, so coffee prep was negatively affected. The coffee was lukewarm and thin. But that was the price you paid for running a manny in, uh, real.

I looked at Will over the rim of my cup and changed the subject. “Listen, I already talked to Bill about this, but I wanted to get your perspective on things. About the moot the other day.”

Will grimaced. “I wasn’t there; we were having a problem with one of the fractionators. But yeah, I heard about your face-off with Morlock—”

“Morlock? He named himself Morlock?”

“Nah, he named himself Jeremy. Which might be coincidence or might be a subtle nod to that Time Machine remake. But he goes by Morlock these days.”

Will raised an eyebrow at me, inviting comment. I gave him a small head-shake, and he continued: “Replicative drift is turning out to be a real thing. Bobs are recognizably one of us until about fifteenth generation or so, then the drift begins to accelerate. We haven’t had any out-and-out psychos yet, but we’ve definitely got some assholes.”

Well, so much for visions of a galaxy-wide race of Bobs. Still, diversity might be a good thing. After all, the human race consisted of billions of individuals and had still managed to …

Almost obliterate themselves. Crap.

This was a problem. A big problem. Original Bob’s hands-off approach might not cut it in this case.

I opened my mouth to reply, just as a message from Guppy imposed itself on my field of view.

[In-system scouts have been attacked. 100% casualties.]

I barked “Gotta go!” at Will, and popped back into virt. I quickly texted him an apology for not reracking the manny and promised to explain later.

“What’s going on?” I said to Guppy.

[Telemetry is queued up for inspection.]

I grabbed a few video windows and started playback. The drones were coasting along Bender’s trail, SUDDAR ensuring that they didn’t lose it, when the transmission from one of them abruptly disappeared. The second one cut off a millisecond later, before even the AMIs could react in any meaningful way. The third, though, took a glancing blow or near miss or something. It was disabled, but managed to reconfigure SUDDAR and get a low-res scan before that signal also disappeared.

The fourth window contained the results of that scan. Two craft had approached unnoticed from the scouts’ five o’clock and unleashed some kind of attack. They were about twenty feet long, most likely automated, and clearly not intended for atmosphere. A skeletal structure composed of girders or beams formed the base shape, onto which were bolted various pieces of equipment with no concession to style. What had to be beam weapons were bolted onto opposite corners, and communication dishes took up the space at ninety degrees to the weapons.

I took a look through the logs and couldn’t find any indication of approaching missiles. There was, however, a brief temperature spike just before the signals cut off, which confirmed the beam weapon hypothesis.

“Lasers. Interesting choice. Not generally a good combat weapon.” I stared at the window for a moment longer, then closed it. “Guppy, why didn’t the scouts detect their approach?”

[SUDDAR was concentrated forward in order to resolve the Bussard trail, which had been diffused by in-system gravitational effects.]

Okay, fair enough. In interstellar space, a trail would be virtually undisturbed for centuries. Not so much once you got inside the heliopause.

“We didn’t get a SUDDAR pulse from them?”

[Negative. Telemetry from the last scout detected radar pulses.]

“Radar? They use radar? Who uses radar these days?”

[Apparently, they do.]

I glared at Guppy, and not for the first time made a note to do some black-box testing on him. Sarcasm required self-awareness, and not once had a buster or drone ever given me this kind of back-talk.

Still, the basic facts remained, and shone a light on something that I mostly managed to forget: I was not a military thinker. I’d gotten too comfortable after successfully dealing with Medeiros and the Others, and had behaved stereotypically. And gotten my butt handed to me. It was time to resurrect some of that good old-time paranoia and start thinking defensively.

“Well, that’s just peachy. And they just attacked without warn—” I stopped as I had a thought. Guppy had a bad tendency to not volunteer information. Attempts to change his behavior had just resulted in huge dumps of irrelevant data. I still wasn’t convinced that wasn’t passive-aggressively intentional. “Guppy, did the attackers do anything besides ping us with radar?”

[Affirmative. There were several radio transmissions.]

Probably challenges, either to determine friend or foe, or even if the scouts were something other than flotsam. And I didn’t know the proper response. So no real help there. In fact, if we’d responded, it would have alerted whoever that there was someone else in the system. Which might also be a bad thing. Just ask Hal.

So, caution was still indicated.

I invited Bill over to take a look at the video records. He tapped a spot on the video window. “That’s interesting. You see that?”

“Mmm, yeah. Fusion torch. Great for acceleration and maneuverability. But hard on fuel.”

“Over the short haul, they could probably outpace you, Bob. Best be careful.”

“Hmmph.” I sat back in my La-Z-Boy. “Not that I’m planning on going in and introducing myself. That’s two encounters, two attacks, and one lost replicant.”

“Some assumptions in there.”

“Reasonable ones. Enough that I’d need some evidence to the contrary before I’d change my mind.” I reached over and scrolled the window forward a fraction. “No SUDDAR, no SURGE, no SCUT. They, whoever they are, haven’t discovered subspace theory. On the other hand, their fusion drive tech is impressive, and if I’m right about them having used lasers, so is their weapons tech. That’s a lot of wattage out of a drone that small.”

“Which means their fusion reactor tech is probably better than ours.” Bill grinned and shrugged. “Not surprising. No one uses fusion reactors anymore.”

True. We’d long since switched to the Casimir power source that we’d gotten from the Others. It was far superior to any kind of fusion reactor, for reasons including but not limited to a complete lack of detectable emissions. Naturally, work on fusion technology had subsequently stagnated, but no one cared.

“So …” I tapped my chin in thought. “These, uh, whoevers have perhaps continued development in more traditional directions, and may have surpassed us in some other technologies as well. While being totally deficient in others. Their drone designs reflect that.”

“Fair summary. How about Boojums for their drones?”

“Sure, why not.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Plan? We don’t need no stinking plan.” We both grinned. “Seriously, at this point I’m only up to don’t get caught. It’s a little nebulous after that.”

“We have designs in the archives for evading radar detection, you know.”

I stared at Bill for a moment. “Jeez. I must be getting old. Okay, so, some kind of radar-proofing, carbon-black exteriors to foil visual, low-power electronics combined with a super-cooled heat sink to counter infrared detection …” I sat forward as my enthusiasm mounted. “We can coast in, we don’t need to use cloaking since they don’t appear to have SUDDAR. So we can use long-range SUDDAR to watch for patrols … yeah, this is good!”

“Now you’re cookin’. Do you have enough trajectory data to plot Bender’s probable location?”

“Within a huge margin of error, yes. I’ll send some more scouts the long way around to look for where he might be by now. Or his remains.” We were both silent for a moment as we processed this thought in parallel.

“Sounds like you’ve got some work to do, Bob,” Bill said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Some work to do meant some engineering design work to get the combination of attributes that I wanted, based on plans and notes on BobNet. Whatever else the wars with the Others and Medeiros may have done, they greatly accelerated battle-related technologies. But hasn’t war always done that?

The engineering was no big deal. I am, after all, a computer—even if I don’t acknowledge it most of the time. The actual construction work, well, that was going to take longer. I still had to do everything out in the Kuiper/Oort interface, and there was still no miraculous cache of handy elements to make my life easier.

The one new piece of tech I added was a core of ice at a couple of degrees Kelvin. The scouts were designed to be ultra-low-power, which meant very little heat generation, but I didn’t even want that to show. Waste heat would be transferred to the ice core, which would gradually warm up. I had calculated the heat transfer rate, and I was pretty sure the scouts could make it through the system before their heat sinks gave out and they started to radiate significant infrared.

On the downside, to keep within the heat budget, they wouldn’t be able to maintain continuous contact. That meant I could conceivably lose them and not know it until they failed to report in. Well, life isn’t perfect.

I calculated trajectories and times and launched the scouts myself via rail gun. Ballistic all the way, baby. If they had to maneuver, that would be the end of the heat sink. If all went well, it would be months before they sailed out the other side.

By the time I’d done this, the other scouts had made it all the way around the system and were running a search pattern on Bender’s expected location. I’d told Bill the margins of error were huge, which meant a large volume to search, but I was still disappointed by every day that went by without result.

For no other reason than to have something to do, I set myself a course to the other side of the Boojum system. The long way around, though. I still wasn’t prepared to fly through the system, even a little bit. I had no idea how far out the Boojums patrolled.

I was about halfway around when Guppy made my day.

[Scouts have found something.]

“Cool! What do they have?”

[Something.]

That black-box test was going to be done with no anesthetic. And soon.

“Give me the report.”

A window popped up in front of me, replete with all kinds of statistics and measurements. The most important item, though, was an image of a shredded section of a Version 2 Heaven vessel.

Bender.