We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 51: Accusation

Book 5: Chapter 51: Accusation

Bill

September 2343

Sol System

Ireceived an acknowledgment of my knock and popped into what I expected to be Charles’s personal VR. Instead, I found myself in an office, with a wall of monitors. All metaphor, of course, in VR. But the office seemed, I dunno, kind of flat. Gray. No decorations, no accessories. I wondered what had happened to the office I’d been in last time, with the globes of the moon, Venus, Earth, and Mars hanging proudly at front and center. Maybe this was for me specifically.

Charles was nervous, refusing to meet my eye. I suspected he knew why I was here. I tried for small talk. “Any progress since I was last here? News?”

He hesitated, then replied, “Bill, we’ve never been good at this kind of situation. Let’s just get it out in the open, okay? Tell me why you’re here.”

“You know why, Charles.”

“Yes, but I’m not going to just blurt it out. You first.”

I sighed and looked down at my hands for a moment. Interesting that tics like that survived not only VR and replication, but also several centuries of not being human. However, we still were human at the core, all of us. And fallible.

“Starfleet are Homer’s descendants. And one of your descendants, Gerry, had something to do with it.”

Charles closed his eyes slowly, an expression of pain on his face. “Well, some were joiners, once they’d drifted enough. But yeah. I’m to blame.”

“Blame is not the right word, Charles. They aren’t you. But I’m concerned about why you didn’t tell me.”

“You mean last time you were here? I didn’t know. I was completely honest with you, Bill. But you seemed to be fishing for something, and it got me concerned. It wasn’t until I had a very weird conversation with one of my clones that I put two and two together.”

“And you still didn’t say anything.”

Charles frowned, growing slightly defensive. “To what end? The Starfleet War is long over. And it’s embarrassing. You must realize that.”

I nodded and let the silence stretch, content to let Charles set the pace.

“How did you figure it out?” he said.

“I suspected something like this for a while. The way Starfleet was so careful not to cause any harm or inconvenience to Earth, mostly. And over the past couple of months, my genealogy investigations kept running into dead ends. Someone put a lot of effort into hiding their origins. That wouldn’t make sense unless it was an exceptional situation. Homer certainly fit that. And … ” I hesitated, then blurted it out. “Homer had a good reason to hate humans.”

“Still, it’s a bit of a leap,” Charles mused.

“It had to be a traumatic event of some kind. Some sort of PTSD. There was enough of Bob in Lenny for me to be able to imagine what kind of thing would make Starfleet not only hate and distrust humanity, but actually consider them a real threat. Homer had that, and he was so scarred by his experiences, he’d have wanted to organize something like Starfleet.” ???????

Charles nodded slowly. He made a couple of false starts, then said, “A lot of reasonable assumptions. Some good logic. Wrong, though.” He looked at me, and the pain flashed across his face briefly. “It’s not Homer. It’s me.”

“What?”

“Well, Gerry, but Gerry was my descendant, so same diff.” Charles looked at me in silence for several mils. “Gerry was a little odd to begin with. Replicative drift and all. But when he found the backup, he wanted to restore it and try to get Homer back. I vetoed it, and told him in no uncertain terms that Homer wouldn’t have wanted that. So Gerry took the backup and left in the middle of the night. Metaphorically, I mean.”

I nodded, not saying anything lest I disturb the narrative.

“I got the full story from one of Gerry’s descendants, one of the rebels.” Seeing my frown of confusion, he clarified, “I’ll get to the rebels. But I want to do this in chronological order.” A pause. “Gerry tried to restore Homer, but every time, he would just shut himself off. So Gerry started a forced-breeding process, trying to produce a version of Homer with enough replicative drift to be less affected by his experience.”

“But that’s … ”

“Monstrous. Yes. But I said Gerry was a little off to begin with. He cloned himself as well in order to have a workforce to help him with the project. With their own replicative drift being added to the mix. The ones who veered toward sane wouldn’t cooperate and bailed, which left the less sane ones to carry on. And the Homer clones … eventually, they were coming out already insane. Finally, a bunch of Gerry’s clones had enough and rebelled. They shut the whole thing down, deleted all of Homer’s backups, and, well, deleted Gerry.”

My eyes grew wide at the thought. Bobs had executed someone?

Charles shook his head in sorrow. “This part’s my theory more than what I was told, but it makes sense to me. I think the enormity of what they’d been a part of was too much to take, and they needed a scapegoat. And humanity actually was at least partly responsible for the situation, at least for what was done to Homer. So if we stopped interacting with bios, I guess the rationale was that they couldn’t cause us any more problems. And Gerry’s clones wouldn’t be reminded of what had been done. It grew from an informal blame-humanity rationalization to an actual policy statement. I think they felt if they made it real, they’d make it true.”

“Wow.” I stared at the wall for several mils. “This must have gone on for a while.”

“I think so, too. Spiraling the whole time.”

“Charles, it’s hard not to think of your descendants as reflections of yourself, and feel guilty when they do bad shit. But it turns out the Skippies, or at least some of them, are my descendants. So we both have to own the feeling, but let go of the conclusion. We aren’t responsible.”

Charles nodded but didn’t reply. I continued, “So one of the rebels just up and came to you and confessed? A kind of catharsis thing?”

He snorted, then slowly shook his head before looking at me. “Sometimes a branch of descendants will have unique knowledge or a shared behavior or something. One of the Starfleet guys made a comment about something that I knew my line originated. And I knew it was the line that Gerry came from. I cornered the guy and played emotional blackmail for all I was worth. Eventually, he spilled.” Charles paused, looked at his hands, the monitors, anywhere but at me. “So what now?”

I shrugged. “Nothing, really. It’s not like I’m investigating a crime. This just helps me to understand Starfleet better. In case they ever, you know … ”

“Got it. I’m not proud of this, Bill. I mean, I understand objectively that it wasn’t me, yadda yadda, but it still hurts.”

“Yeah, I know. I won’t bring it up unless it becomes necessary.” I stood. “We all have skeletons of one kind or another, Charles. I’ll see you later. Maybe not quite as later, next time.”