We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 11: Frustrations

Book 5: Chapter 11: Frustrations

Bill

September 2336

In Virt

Garfield was visiting, and since I was currently upgrading the spare manny, we were in VR. These days, I was keeping my virt and real lab spaces synced as much as possible to avoid confusion. I told myself it was for efficiency, but I wondered at the back of my mind if I was just becoming cantankerous and inflexible. Wow, wouldn’t that be a downer—a senile, immortal replicant.

I shook my head in irritation, earning a bemused look from Garfield. He regrouped and continued with what he’d been saying.

“I’ve talked to Hugh a couple of times and tried to pump him for more information, but he claims to be as in the dark as anyone. And I can’t really accuse him of anything because it’s a perfectly reasonable scenario. Trouble is … ”

“Either way, we got squat,” I finished for him.

I paused and rubbed my eyes, gathering my thoughts. In the science-fiction stories from when Original Bob was alive, there were wormholes, subspace, hyperspace (and what’s the difference between those two, anyway?), probability drives, warp drives, folding space, null space, and so on and so on. Of course, other than wormholes, they were mostly just word salad, with no real definition. And there was no immediate indication which of these, if any, might actually produce an FTL drive. We knew that SCUT worked, obviously, so the speed of light was not a universal speed limit. Or a source of time-travel paradoxes. Very likely, a lot of twenty-first-century pundits would have had fits.

But the process that allowed information to flow instantaneously across interstellar distances had no obvious corresponding feature for moving matter. So other than the bare knowledge that you could do an end run around Einstein, I had nothing.

I continued the thought out loud. “I’m almost at the point of cloning myself a bunch of times and getting each clone to work on a different possibility. But that would be a huge waste of time and resources … ”

Garfield was used to my jumping into a thought stream partway through and knew all my favorite subjects. He had no problem picking up the thread. “And might not work anyway. If Hugh is right that we just aren’t intelligent enough to crack the problem, then you’d be no better than a million monkeys hammering on keyboards.”

“Yep. Thought of that, too.” I sighed and called up a coffee. “I’m not going to give up, Gar, but it’s getting frustrating.”

“So it would be great if we could get something to point us in the right direction,” Garfield finished for me. I smiled at him and was reminded again of how well we used to work together. These days, Garfield had his own Skunk Works, but he’d branched off into a more biological end of the science spectrum. At the moment, he was trying to figure out abiogenesis, the process by which life had originated from non-life. A worthy effort, I thought, but probably far too dependent on chance.

But Garfield was here right now, and I wasn’t going to ignore the opportunity to bounce some things off him.

“I’ve been concentrating on wormholes and some variation on the Alcubierre drive, if only because they’re the only things that have some specific theories to work from. But both require negative energy or negative mass to work, and I haven’t been able to order any.”

Garfield chuckled. “Yeah, supply-chain issues. They’ll get you every time.” He turned serious. “The Casimir power source uses negative vacuum energy to operate, but it’s orders of magnitude too weak for what you need.”

“Yup. I’d need a bank of Casimir plates the size of Jupiter to generate the required power levels, and there’s no way to bring all that negative energy together in one spot. So fail.”

“Do you have any advances to show for your time?”

“Yes, actually. I can isolate and capture microscopic wormhole pairs from the cosmic foam and keep them from collapsing back into each other. I can even keep the individual endpoints around for entire seconds. I’ve been able to separate them by a few kilometers. But the moment I try to push anything through them, even a photon, they collapse.”

“As expected,” Garfield replied, looking thoughtful. “What about the other one—the Alcubierre drive?”

I laughed out loud. “We’ve had designs for an Alcubierre-based spaceship since the early twenty-first century. Amazingly detailed and complete, except for the gray box that says warp drive goes here. There’s nothing to work on until that negative-energy order gets delivered.”

Garfield smiled back at me. “So I’ll keep working on Hugh. If he gives us anything. Even the smallest hint … ”

“I know, Gar. We can only hope.”