We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 4: Chapter 8: Survey Results

Book 4: Chapter 8: Survey Results

Bob

July 2333

Outskirts, Eta Leporis

Will, Bill, and Gar were in attendance, in anticipation of some useful returns from our scout drones.

Orbital mechanics being what they are, the drone destined for Planet Boojum arrived first. We were a little concerned about the possibility of deceleration attracting attention from the Boojums, but finally decided that A) there was no reason to expect them to be more interested in powered objects in particular since they’d cleared the system of everything, and B) we didn’t have much choice.

In any case, the drone settled into a low orbit around Planet Boojum with no issues or incidents, and ejected all its scouts.

It was immediately obvious why there was no sign of life. This was a dead planet, and not by natural means. The panorama below us combined the worst of an Others attack with Earth’s fate at the hands of humanity. There had very clearly been an exchange of nukes. Blackened, blasted circles where cities might once have been were still putting out enough radiation to forestall any possible misinterpretation. Impact craters indicated at least some orbital bombardment, although nothing as big as what the Brazilian Empire had used on Earth.

The planet hadn’t spiraled into nuclear winter, but even so, there was no indication of living vegetation. Large swaths of what might once have been forests were burned to the ground, with not the slightest trace of new growth.

Finally, I reached forward and turned off the big monitor. I said to Guppy, “Let me know if anything anomalous shows up. Otherwise, record and archive everything, then recall the scouts and leave the drone in orbit for now.”

I pulled up the data stream from the other cargo drone, which was slowly pulling up to the megastructure. The scale of the thing was such that you could only see one “thread” at a time. The other two loops were so far away as to be invisible.

“So, what I want to do,” I said, “is spread the SUDDAR scanning drones along the length of the megastructure so that we get a full scan of a long segment, with enough overlap so we don’t lose any detail. I’m going to assume that whatever stretch we pick at random is going to be representative of the structure as a whole.”

“Seems reasonable,” Will replied.

We settled back to wait for the drones to reposition themselves. I still had some concern about the Boojums. They hadn’t bothered us yet, and we had some pretty good countermeasures for non-SUDDAR detection methods, but I didn’t know if they might have an A game or something for guarding the perimeter of the topopolis. Although, common sense would tell you to keep watch farther out and not let anything get this close in the first place.

Anyway, the drones reached their assigned stations without any fuss. Bill and I gave each other simultaneous thumbs-ups. This was the moment of truth.

“Okay, Guppy. Start with full-reach scans for each drone, then cut the range in half with each subsequent scan until we’re down to a two-mile range, which should be enough to scan the inside surface. Then start taking snapshots every second until we have a full revolution recorded.”

[Acknowledged. Scan results coming up.]

“It, uh, doesn’t actually look like it’s rotating,” Will said. “Are you sure about your assumptions?”

I grinned back at him. “I did some reading. A lot of the design choices for O’Neill cylinders will apply to topopoleis as well. Chances are there’s an outside shell that doesn’t rotate. It will be thick and designed to absorb micro-meteor impacts and high-energy radiation. You don’t want that much mass loading the rotating section, so the much thinner but structurally stronger inner shell will rotate, giving simulated gravity on its inner surface. There will be magnetic bearings or some such between the two shells.” ?????ËŠ

“Say, you know a lot about this thing for not having scanned it yet.”

“It’s all theory, Bill. Let’s see what we’ve got.” I turned to Guppy and nodded.

There was no dramatic change to the monitor window, but smaller data windows began stacking up in various locations. We watched the action for a few milliseconds, then I reached over and tapped one of the scans. The window expanded in front of the main monitor, and Bill and I leaned forward to examine it in detail.

“You were right about the shells,” he said. “Inner one is generating …0.86 G.”

“Which is exactly the gravity on the second planet,” I replied. “So that’s the Boojum makers’ home world.”

“Air’s not even close.”

“Are you surprised? The pounding, the fires, and no life to provide homeostasis … Nothing could live on Planet Boojum the way it is right now.”

“I guess not. When will we be able to get a detailed scan of the inhabitants?”

“Not until we’re down to the rotational snapshots. Let’s just leave it running.”

We sat around the control room, variously drinking coffee, beer, or Coke. I looked askance at the glass in Will’s hand. He smiled back. “Picked up the habit from Marcus. Sometimes, something cold and fizzy is a nice change.”

There was a ding reminiscent of a microwave, and the phrase Scans Complete popped up on the monitor. We all quickly stood and hurried over to examine the results.

The next few seconds resembled what you’d get with any gaggle of scientists trying to outshout each other, but we eventually distilled some useful information.

I stared at the hologram of a native. It was more like an Other than a Pav, in that it didn’t closely correspond to any Terran lifeform that I could think of. Will examined it, head cocked to the side, and declared, “There’s a bit of otter in there, I think.”

“A flying otter.” Garfield blinked. “Or a flying squirrel?”

“Uh, flying otter is reasonable, if you ignore the head,” Will added. “Or maybe giant beaver? Look at the tail. That thing looks like it fans out.”

We stared for a few more moments. To me, it looked like a four-foot-tall fat otter, but with a flap of skin around the forearms that could open or close. And a snout that was almost a beak, but with teeth. Like something between a platypus and a wereduck. The tail did seem to be able to fan out, or flex flat or something—going from a roundish appendage to something more beaver-like. The creature was covered with fur, which tended toward a rich chestnut brown.

“Snarks,” Garfield said. “If we have Boojums, we need Snarks to make them.”

I held up a hand. “Sure, but only until we find out their name for themselves.”

“Assuming we can pronounce it.”

“It’s aquatic,” Bill said after some more silence. “The forearm things and the tail are for pushing through the water.”

“That explains the river,” Will added, and we all nodded. One of the many interesting aspects of the design was that a river ran the entire length of the section we’d scanned—and that was more than a hundred thousand miles. Or rivers, depending on how you counted. It branched and merged constantly. It was possible that the river system ran the entire length of the topopolis.

“Interestingly,” Will continued, “the way the river loops and splits and meanders, no part of the inner surface seems to be very far from water.”

“Given the natives’ biology,” Bill replied, “that was probably a design requirement.”

We gazed in awe at the pictures and schematics, then Garfield said, “Where would you get all the water? The overall structure is literally a billion miles long.”

Bill froze for a moment, then turned to Garfield. “Earth has, or had anyway, about 330 million cubic miles of water. The river in the topopolis averages maybe a half-mile wide and a tenth-mile deep, so if it was straight you’d probably only need about fifty million cubic miles to fill it. Soil can also be up to twenty-five percent water, so depending on how deep they’ve layered real soil over the shell’s inner surface, maybe you add another hundred million cubic miles. It’s still less than what Earth had. And there’s always the Oort cloud if you needed more.”

Garfield bobbed his head a few times as he absorbed that. “And the materials to build it?”

“The Earth contains about 90 billion cubic miles of iron. To build this, based on the cross section we see, you’d only need 20 billion cubic miles, although of course you couldn’t use steel—not nearly enough tensile strength. Most of this structure is constructed of some kind of ceramic reinforced by a 3D carbon fiber lattice similar to what we use for our ship hulls, so even that estimate is probably way high.”

“But the point,” Will added, “is that you can get all the material you need by taking apart one Earth-sized planet.”

“Which probably explains the orbital gap between planet two and three,” I finished.

“Umph,” said Garfield. “So, what now?”

“Well, we have well-established and tested procedures for picking up culture and language surreptitiously, thanks to Jacques,” I said. “Although he had physical access to bookstores and libraries on Pav. I’d like to move things along as fast as possible, but without direct access, we’re going to be at a disadvantage.”

Bill frowned. “We’re going to have to send in spy drones.”

I nodded. He had hit the nail right on the thumb. “Yeah, and that’s not going to be a trivial undertaking. Then we have to wait until we’ve absorbed the language and culture before we can go in.”

“Is there an alternative?”

“What about just using spy drones? I mean for the search for Bender, not just for the cultural absorption?”

Will shook his head. “I can’t see that working. They either fly around a lot where they can be seen, which is bad, or they stay in hiding and don’t get around much. Which is bad. Plus, it becomes very difficult to ask questions of the locals.”

“Excuse me, sir or madam,” Garfield said. “I am not alien spy device, despite appearances. Could you please direct me to the nuclear wessels?”

We all laughed. Gar’s Chekov impersonation was spot-on.

After a moment, I nodded to Will. “All right, accepted. I know this will sound odd after Bill’s comments about keeping a low profile, but I’ve been talking to some people over at the Singularity Project—”

“You’re talking to the Skippies?” Garfield asked.

“Yeah. They don’t have an AI yet, but they do have a generalized, self-programming Expert System with enormous processing power. I wanted to be ready to fast-track the language translation and android design work if we found sophonts.”

“Wait, androids? You’re thinking way ahead on this,” Garfield said.

Bill looked at me with a rueful smile. “You’re looking for some help from them on that, too?”

I gave him a tight-lipped smile in reply. “They think they can pick up a lot from SUDDAR scans, including possibly sound—”

“What? How?”

“It’s the same principle as bouncing a laser off a window to pick up vibrations from sounds inside the target building. You demodulate the reflection …”

“SUDDAR doesn’t work that way.”

“No, but the Skippies think that they can use it to pick up vibrations from rigid surfaces in the megastructure. Even glass, assuming they have it.”

“That’ll be pretty hit-and-miss. You’d have to do a lot of scanning for the small number of situations where that would be feasible. They’re willing to take this on?”

I nodded. “They’re isolationist, but not like Starfleet. They don’t think contact with humans is a morally bad thing, just that it’s holding us back. Presumably by forcing us to keep conforming to human culture and so forth, I guess. But they are neutral on the question of interference with any locals, so I figured it would be relatively safe. Of course, if Starfleet gets hold of it, they’ll go ballistic. But really, what can they do besides scream loudly? They aren’t here, they can’t get here in less than a couple of decades, and I have control of the local hardware, so they won’t be building local ships or androids.”

“And honestly,” Will added, “if they started using strong-arm tactics, I don’t think it would go well for them. As a group, Bobs aren’t tolerant of that kind of thing. They’ll register their disapproval, we’ll acknowledge their right to their opinion, and that’ll be that.”

“Well, we have enough scans for a first pass at a rough android design, but a lot of work ahead of us on the culture and language fronts. Starting with how we get in.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to cut my way in. To be honest, I’m not sure if that’d even be possible. There have to be some legitimate entrances, for supplies, or personnel, or maintenance equipment, or something.”

“Internally, there will have to be a ring of some kind between the inner and outer shells, to allow matching the rotation for things going in, and removing the angular vector for things coming out. A Spin Transfer system. We should look for that kind of structure in the scans.”

“Maybe it’s time to just have a detailed look at what we’ve got.”

Several dozen milliseconds later, the party atmosphere had evaporated. A bristling silence hung over the group, and we all wore matching frowns. “I presume everyone has noticed the level of technology of the inhabitants.”

“Or lack thereof,” Bill replied.

Garfield poked at a window in front of him. “Or the fact that the interior entrance we did a close-up on appears to be sealed off so the inhabitants can’t leave.”

“Something smells.”

We now had a couple hundred thousand miles’ worth of point scans and a thorough rotational scan from three locations. The results were perplexing. Instead of modern metropolises, we were seeing what appeared to be villages, constructed mostly of some kind of wood-equivalent, mostly concentrated around the river. Smaller settlements were situated around tributaries and branches. There was very little in the way of metal, as well. In fact, most of the metal seemed to be in the form of small disks carried around by the locals. Money.

I tapped the image to call attention to a detail. “We’ll need to do some more scans to confirm, but it looks like the land is sculpted rather than the product of any kind of natural erosion. Either the water for the streams and tributaries is pumped up to the source, or they have actual weather to supply the headwaters.”

“Also,” Bill pointed out, “the inside seems to be divided into segments of about five hundred and sixty miles in length, separated by mountain ranges that form a ring to divide each segment.” He tapped an image and it zoomed. “We don’t have enough detail, but I think those mountains also anchor stays or guy-wires to keep some kind of cylinder lined up down the center of the structure.”

“I’m guessing that central cylinder provides illumination. There’s no allowance in this design for letting the actual sun shine in.”

“Probably true, but SUDDAR hasn’t been able to pick up those kinds of detail. And if you’re right, it brings up the issue of heat dissipation. I wonder how they handle it?”

“I think we have at least a partial answer to that,” I said. “There are radiator surfaces along the entire shaded side of the outer shell. Which are radiating way more heat than can be accounted for by solar absorption, so there’s a lot of heat being generated internally. Probably that lighting you’re talking about. There must be a system to bleed the heat from the living area to the outer shell.”

Everyone in the room nodded slowly in appreciation. Bobs loved technical solutions.

“And notice,” Bill added, “the river’s meandering pattern repeats every dozen segments or so. I think the landscape does as well. I guess they just used the same design templates over and over.”

“They might even have built the megastructure in segments of that size then glued them together.”

“A billion miles. That’s almost two million segments.”

We all stared in silence at the data windows for several milliseconds.

“Maybe,” Bill mused, “we just happen to have scanned a section of the megastructure that’s set up as an agrarian community. There’s no reason for the society to be identical along the entire length of the topopolis. Maybe they’re technologically backward by choice.”

“Including blocking the exits? That seems incompatible with a voluntary return to the land, you know?”

“Well, it isn’t ideal for first contact. Or for learning about their society.” I tapped my chin for a few moments. “Let’s move along the strand and see if we can find something more up-to-date.”

One week later, we admitted failure. We had not only moved millions of miles along the original strand, but we had even jumped to one of the other strands and continued our survey.

“There’s all kinds of variation in detail,” I observed, “including different climate zones and completely uninhabited areas. But everything is pre-industrial. Why would a species build such an amazing feat of engineering, then sentence themselves to essentially live in a zoo?”

“Maybe that was the point of building it. These are aliens, Bob.” Bill shrugged. “Their motivations may not be understandable.”

“I’ve never bought into the idea that aliens will have indecipherable motives. Which makes it odd that you feel differently.” I smiled at Bill to take the sting out of the comment. “Things like curiosity, greed, self-interest, self-preservation, anger, fear, all of these are pretty basic pro-survival tropisms.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t make their behavior predictable from our point of view. For instance, a more herd- or hive-oriented species might not have greed, or not as much anyway. A more predatory species might consider biting you to be a reasonable response to a disagreement.”

“Kzin,” I said, grinning.

“Or Pav,” Bill responded. “Because of their large family structure, they certainly have a different take on life.”

“But it’s comprehensible, isn’t it?” I argued. “We, or humans, might not live that way or want to. But we can understand the motivations of the Pav. Same with Kzinti or Klingons. In this case, we think this might be a semiaquatic species, like beavers or otters. How will that affect their attitudes?”

Bill shrugged without comment. I was pretty sure I was right, but we wouldn’t know until we figured out how to get in.

I grinned at the traditional catcalls and jeers as Bill tried to get control of the moot. I noted, though, several pockets of Bobs that weren’t participating in the ribaldry. This included a half-dozen or so Bobs dressed up as Borg, as well as other groups who mostly still looked like Original Bob. This reticence seemed uncharacteristic for Bobs, although I thought the Borg might be just trying to stay in character.

As I looked around, I realized that there was a certain amount of miscellaneous cosplay going on. Nothing really out there—at least not yet, I admitted to myself. As replicative drift continued, I expected individuals would become bolder.

Bill seemed to have sufficiently dampened the flames of rebellion, and he began to talk. Well, shout. “Okay, people. We have an update on the Snarks. I think you’ll find this all interesting. We’ll also be asking for help from anyone who cares to volunteer. There are some technical hurdles that could use some dogpiling.” He waited for the anatomical suggestions from the audience to peter out, then turned and gestured to me.

I climbed the podium to more shouted suggestions and grinned at the sea of faces. “Those of you who were around for the Others reveal will feel a bit of déjà vu, I think. But in this case, we aren’t at war, so that’s a plus.” I waited for the razzing to subside. “So, first, here’s a native Snark …”

I auto-piloted through the presentation of the megastructure residents while mentally reviewing the upcoming second part of my presentation. As usual, the Bobs were respectful and quiet when interesting information was being presented.

Then came the second part. I started with an overview of the topopolis, during which you could have heard a pin drop. I followed with close-up rotation scans, and ended with blueprints of the megastructure entrance mechanisms.

As I finished, and my voice petered out, there was a moment of silence, an indrawn collective breath, then—pandemonium. Bill laughed out loud as he jumped up onto the podium. Nothing got Bobs excited like interesting new stuff, and nothing felt better than a bunch of excited, enthusiastic Bobs. Even the Borg cosplayers were jumping up and down.

“So, here’s what we need,” I said, when the hubbub had died down. “We need a group to work on plans for getting into the megastructure without revealing ourselves. We need a group to work on android design for Snarks, based on the scans we have, to be improved on once we get close-up scans. We need a group to continue to scan the megastructure, to see if there are variations in either engineering of the structure itself, or the placement or technological level of the inhabitants, or any other variations you might find. It’s a billion freaking miles of structure, so the more the merrier. And as an ongoing project, we’ll want people to help decipher the language and culture.”

And more pandemonium.

I glanced surreptitiously at the group that Bill had identified as Starfleet. To a man, they were silent, with dour expressions on their faces.

“We’re in business,” Bill said. “More volunteers than available positions. The Skippies have agreed to do language analysis, as you’d hoped. The hardware group that was working on giant robot spaceships has already dropped their project in favor of the android design—interestingly, the Borg wanted in, too. I think there’s something about androids that tickles their fancy. And there’s a D&D-obsessed group, calls themselves Gamers, that wants to work on the breaking-in thing.”

“Why?” I asked, frowning.

“Don’t ask me. By about twentieth gen or so, individual motivations stop being predictable, even when they’re still mostly Bobs.”

“So Starfleet didn’t squawk.”

“I don’t think they saw any point. Even if they could have gotten a word in edgewise, they wouldn’t have accomplished anything except getting themselves shouted down. But”—Bill hesitated, frowned, then gazed at me intently—“that doesn’t mean they’re just going to fold. Original Bob wouldn’t have. So we have to keep our guard up.”

At that moment, Garfield popped into my library. “Hey, Bill. Bob.” He signaled Jeeves for a coffee, grabbed Spike, and sat down with the cat in his lap. Spike, as usual, was purring before Garfield even started patting her. I couldn’t help smiling. Original Spike had been like that—the exact opposite of a standoffish, snobby cat. I remembered all the times she would climb me as I sat at my computer, then drape herself across the back of my neck. I’d left that last habit out of the cat’s AI—it had literally been a bit of a pain in the neck.

Garfield was excited about something.

“What?” I said.

“Well, we’ve agreed we will have to be more careful than Jacques was about the drones. The Pav were truly 18th to 19th-century-equivalent. If they’d seen something, they would have just assumed it was a bird. The Snarks may have technological-age knowledge, even if they don’t have the actual tech. For whatever reason.”

“Also,” Bill interjected, “even if the common folk don’t have tech, whoever is still running the topopolis certainly will.”

“You think it’s still being actively staffed?” I asked, frowning.

“Hard to see how it couldn’t be. Imagine people walking out of a nuclear power plant for a couple of days.”

“Or any other similar operation,” Garfield said. “I remember Life After People, thanks.”

Bill shrugged, unwilling to be offended. “Anyway, the topopolis is still apparently running like clockwork, so it’s being maintained and managed. I guess they could have just handed it over to an AI …”

“I can’t see that happening. An intelligent species wouldn’t just hand over responsibility like that,” Garfield retorted.

“You’re anthropomorphizing.”

“You know Original Bob’s view on this. Aliens will still act rationally within the bounds of their environment and biology.”

“Which doesn’t mean they’ll act like humans or make human—”

“Okay, kiddies,” I interjected. “Let’s save this convo for when we know more. Gar, do your D&D guys have a way in?”

“Well, a highly theoretical one. We want to see if we can attach a cloaked drone to a Boojum without it noticing. If so, we can piggyback in.”

“We could be waiting forever—”

“No, some of the surveillance guys found an entrance that’s heavily used.”

“Only one? Across a billion miles of topopolis?”

“No, of course not.” Garfield frowned at me. “There are three on each strand, for a total of nine like this one. But the others appear to be much less busy, and more specialized. I think only the one is being kept at full operating capacity for system patrols.”

“That seems odd,” Bill said.

“Not really,” Gar replied. “All the work’s been done. The system has been cleared. It’s all routine patrols now. I imagine the patrols are scheduled so they do shift changes or whatever when the entrance revolves around to their side.”

Bill shrugged and didn’t argue the point. “Is the traffic flow predictable?”

“Yes. It wasn’t obvious at first. There are irregular arrivals and departures that masked the scheduled stuff, but eventually we extracted the periodic events from the noise. We just wait for one of the scheduled ‘shift changes’ and we should be good.”

“And we’ll have contingency plans?”

Garfield smiled. “Standard practice. Ever since Hal and the Others, a dead-man switch has been de rigueur in the Bobiverse.”

“I don’t want to be too destructive …”

“Thermite in all the right places,” Garfield replied. “Just enough to melt the drone, without continuing down like alien acid-blood.”

“Well, I guess we’re set.” I sat back and tented my fingertips. “Excellent.”