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Book 5: Chapter 35: Travel Plans
Book 5: Chapter 35: Travel Plans
Book 5: Chapter 35: Travel Plans
Will
December 2342
Interstellar space
“Well, frig,” I muttered. Bill’s news about wormholes really put a twist on what had, up until now, been a pretty simple life.
I was heading outward, away from the core, at a good fraction of the speed of light, although keeping it down enough that I could continue to interact with the Bobiverse through SCUT. Bob might like being cut off from the rest of the universe for years, but I was way too much of a control freak for that kind of vacation. But if this project of Bill’s delivered on its promise, there was no longer any issue of being cut off. I could create a chain of wormholes all the way back to UFS space and visit whenever I wanted. On the other hand, I was moving along at 70% C, and that would make it difficult to deploy a wormhole in the first place—assuming Bill’s research reached that point.
Hmm. Okay, all I really needed to worry about was creating a wormhole transit to some point in WormNet. I’d need to create a wormhole pair and send one endpoint back to the nearest seeded system, which was BSC-804. Meanwhile, I could order that system’s AMI to create a wormhole endpoint and send it back to the next system closer to UFS space. Rinse, repeat, until I was connected to the rest of the Bobiverse.
Come to think of it, a wormhole endpoint in Omicron2 Eridani would be ideal for getting our descendants out of FAITH’s reach quickly, but only if the government had no warning about either the escape plan or the existence of WormNet. It bothered me that I had become so used to playing everything close to the vest that I now kept things from other Bobs unless they needed to know. It was a habit that could end up alienating me from everyone else.
Of course, there was no reason for me to physically travel back there. The Fargo would be fine for picking up our descendants. Preferable, in fact, since it had the rotating section, so we wouldn’t have to put everyone in stasis. And once the wormhole network was connected, Bob could use it to catch up with me. I didn’t even have to make a decision until things were in place.
No sooner was the plan worked out than I was setting up one of my inventory of Bob seeds for the trip back. It would have to decelerate from my velocity to zero relative, then accelerate back to BSC-804. But I had plenty of time.
I checked the status board. The Nostromo was a somewhat smaller version of the Bellerophon, without a lot of the weird tech that the Others had built into their cargo ships—also without the mover plates. That was a kludge forced on Herschel and Neil, which, thank the universe, they’d finally corrected. I shook my head in amusement. It was a Bob thing—if it ain’t broke, and we’ve got a workaround, screw it.Then I sighed. Talking to myself again. I hadn’t said anything to Bob-1, but I really had been looking forward to him joining up on this voyage. SCUT and VR were great, but there was still some psychological issue with being physically isolated. Maybe that was why Herschel and Neil, Howard and Bridget, Bill and Garfield all hung together so well.