We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Chapter 52: Riker – January 2168 – Sol

Chapter 52: Riker – January 2168 – Sol

I popped into Homer’s VR. “Hey, number three.”

Homer grinned back at me. “You know that’ll never be as funny as number two, right?”

“Meh.” I shrugged. “Now that you’ve gone all establishment, you need a nickname.” I popped up the list he’d sent me earlier. “You’re really going for this ranch donut, aren’t you?”

“Why not? We way over-engineered Farm-1, to the point of embarrassment, honestly. We’ve learned enough that I think we can give a half-gee at the rim without coming anywhere close to failure. And now that we’ve figured out atmosphere controls…” He raised his eyebrows knowingly at me.

In fact, the first couple of months of Farm-1 had been a nightmare. Every aspect of the environment kept going into positive feedback loops. We’d ended up putting four full-time AMIs on the job until we were able to figure out how to dampen the resonances.

“Okay, General Bullmoose. Just remember the little people, okay?”

Homer laughed, and I called up a coffee. Things were looking up.

The donuts, as we’d taken to calling them, looked like fat bicycle wheels. Carbon-fiber cables ran from the hub to the rim, providing most of the structural support. Three thicker spokes provided elevator access from rim to hub. The donut was oriented perpendicular to the sun, and mirrors between the rim and hub reflected sunlight into the interior through the transparent roof of the rim. Everything was designed as simply as possible, to minimize construction time and material requirements.

I sipped my coffee in silence for a few moments. “What I’m really liking is that VEHEMENT can’t get at these things. Sabotage-proof.”

“Unless they develop ground-to-space capability,” Homer replied in an off-hand tone.

I glanced at him, but I don’t think he was suggesting it as a serious possibility. There had been more attacks on food supplies Earthside, and we’d been shifting supply schedules to compensate. The new farm would hopefully take the pressure off.

Farm-1 was delivering raw kudzu on a regular basis, allocated by population and by need. I had been assured by Julia that no amount of inventive spicing could make kudzu anything other than, well, kudzu. Plus it had digestive consequences similar to beans. Hmm. Good time to be a replicant. Homer had come up with endless variations on the Beans, Beans song, some of which had caught on Earthside.

The second space farm would be going into production in a week, and my calculations indicated that it would bring us into a comfortable food surplus situation for the next three years. After that, falling Earthside production would again become a significant issue.

The third station, which was still about half finished, would be a mix of crops, both for dietary variety and nutritional health. Homer was talking about establishing ranching on the fourth one—cattle, pigs, and chickens. Sheep, if the New Zealanders didn’t eat all the stock first. There was genetic material in the Svalbard vault, but we would have to build the artificial wombs if we wanted to use that.

Homer had turned into an industrial tycoon. He was understandably proud that his idea had worked, and so well, and it had become an all-consuming pet project for him.

I finished my coffee and stood up. “Back to the salt mines, I guess. Try not to blow anything up, okay?”

Homer saluted me with one finger as I popped out.