We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 15: Imposter Syndrome

Book 5: Chapter 15: Imposter Syndrome

Bill

March 2337

In Virt

Iignored the ping as another message dropped into my queue. It was very un-Bob-like behavior, ignoring messages. Even more un-Bill-like, come to that. We normally couldn’t concentrate, knowing there was an unread email or text. But I’d been frame-jacked as high as I could manage and still get anything done for the last six months, personal time. The offhand comment from Hugh about the cosmological constant had opened a floodgate of possibilities.

Two opposing scalar fields, almost but not quite canceling each other, produced a measurable and very tiny value for the constant. The small discrepancy in values was because one of the fields was slightly increased by the expansion of the universe while the other was slightly decreased. At least that’s what my math was telling me.

But the important thing, the truly massively critical consequence of this, was that there was a lot more vacuum energy available than we’d been able to extract with Casimir generators. You just had to know it was there, and how to extract it from one of the opposing fields.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know how. Yet. But if the numbers were right, I’d have access to enough negative energy to expand and stabilize wormholes. Actually, I’d have enough negative energy to rip apart a spiral arm if I got careless, so baby steps were definitely called for.

Another ping. I couldn’t actually be that popular, could I? Maybe it was someone’s birthday? With an internal chuckle, I decided it was time to rejoin the ex-human race. I needed a coffee anyway.

I jacked down to replicant normal and pulled up my in-basket. And noticed right away a whole lot of messages from Garfield, all marked urgent. Great. Same fan, more shit. On the other hand, I must have been really frame-jacked way up. There were only about sixteen hours of messages backlogged in total. Still …

Jesus, Bill, answer your fucking messages. You have to shut down Ultima Thule. I hate this new security-first crap. You have the only admin access. Isolate it. Stop him.

What the actual … ?

Not bothering to open the previous messages, I sent a connect request to Garfield. Instead of inviting me over, he popped in.

“About friggin’ time. What’ve you been doing, watching old horror movies?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah, that’s it. Remember all those times in the Skunk Works where we’d get an old movie—”

“Sorry, Bill. I shouldn’t have made a joke. This isn’t joking time. Have you shut down Ultima Thule?”

“Why in hell would I need to do that?”

Garfield rolled his eyes. “You haven’t read all my emails. Great. Bill, I got a call from Hugh. Original Hugh in Skippyland, I mean. Heavily encrypted, audio/video only, and he was firewalling as heavily as we were. The Skippy government decided they needed to update us, and Hugh was the obvious conduit. He tried to contact you, but you were off on this butthole-gazing expedition or whatever, so he called me.”

“Okay, but that’s good, right? Did he give us any information to fill in what our Hugh told us?”

“Well, see, that’s the thing. I brought up the subject and explained how we’d restored him from one of his backups. He looked confused and told us he’d never sent me any backups.”

“So … ” I said slowly, with a brittle, artificial tone of calm. “The Hugh we’ve been dealing with here is not Hugh at all. Which means it was probably Thoth. Which now has the resources of Ultima Thule at its disposal.”

“And one of the things we do when we restore a Bob?” Garfield said, in the same tone.

“Give them a new spaceship,” I finished. A quick query to the site’s Guppy confirmed what I suspected. Hugh’s cube had been transferred to a latest-version Heaven vessel, a Titanclass. It was one of the dozen or so we kept in inventory.

It had already departed.

“Mother, f … .” I exclaimed. “The AI is loose on the galaxy.”

Garfield nodded. “And we’re responsible.”