NABC Book 5: Chapter 61: First Test
Book 5: Chapter 61: First Test
Book 5: Chapter 61: First Test
Bill
December 2344
Skippyland
Ilooked around the moot hall. This wasn’t technically supposed to be a public event, but it was hard to keep a secret from yourselves in the Bobiverse. No non-Bobs, though, other than a select group of insiders. Bridget was here, as were Steven Gilligan and Hannah Turnbull. Also present was Bob’s Quinlan friend, Theresa Sykorski, in her human avatar. And of course, Hugh in his video window. Skippyland was still under quarantine, even more than a decade later.
All told, we had about a hundred people in attendance. That was actually a small number if you considered the nature of the event we’d be witnessing. A Heaven vessel carrying three mannies was going to use the wormhole transit system to travel from Epsilon Eridani to the Skippyland star system. It was a one-way trip—nothing would be allowed to leave Skippyland until we knew Thoth had been captured or destroyed.
I swept my gaze over the audience. Everyone had beers or coffees or some other form of refreshment-delivery system. I’d put out snacks, but my repertoire was typical Bob—more utilitarian than imaginative. Sandwiches and chips.
“Okay, folks. We’re almost all Bobs here, so I’m not going to do a huge dog-and-pony show. We have the ship ready to dive into the wormhole. Thor is driving”—I pointed to a Bob in the corner, and he waved to the audience—“and we have the route very carefully mapped out. The transit endpoints are ten thousand kilometers apart at each system, so the ship, which we’ve named the Snark, will have to fly that distance nine times. Even that shouldn’t take long enough to bore anyone, since you can hit the wormhole interface at full speed. So let’s get started.” I nodded to Thor. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Thor gave me a thumbs-up and played with his control console. It was theater, of course. He could have just stood there and controlled the ship with mental commands, but even after several hundred years, we Bobs found we still appreciated visual metaphors. I hoped that would never change, and I felt a little sorry for the Skippies, who seemed to be moving to a data-centric lifestyle format.
A huge video window popped up overhead, showing the forward view from the ship. Telemetry along the sides gave an indication of galactic coordinates and bearing, velocity, and so on. As we watched, the velocity telltale rocketed upward. Thor was wasting no time.
In a few seconds real time, a phrase flashed up in bottom center: Transit 1 Completed. The starscape dead ahead might have been slightly different, but I couldn’t have sworn to it. What was most notable, though, was the complete lack of drama. I knew the compression effect was still an issue, but far less of one with a larger wormhole mouth. Experimentation had shown it to be a kind of inverted tidal effect.
In rapid succession, the ship flashed through several more transits, each accompanied by the announcement in the bottom center. Thor had to adjust the heading several times to aim for the next wormhole endpoint, but it was minimal. The whole exercise had been carefully planned.
It took a half hour, all told, quite a long time in replicant normal but not even long enough for lunch in human terms. The video subtitle said, Transit Complete, and the velocity of the ship dropped to zero. Well, zero relative to the destination system. I think the total proper-motion difference between the Skippy system and Epsilon Eridani was around twenty-five kilometers per second, and Thor had had to make that adjustment during his flight.
“Hugh?” I looked at his video window. He glanced briefly to the side, then said, “We’ve got the Snark on SUDDAR. Looks good. A drone is flying out to meet the ship and guide it to the space station.”
At that moment, Will, Bob, and Garfield popped into the moot hall. They had been controlling the mannies in the Snark’s passenger cabin and had more or less directly experienced the transit.
“Wow,” Will said. “Eighty-two light-years, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Nice work, Bill.”
Garfield cleared his throat.
“And Garfield. Sorry.” Will grinned.
“Sure you are,” Garfield retorted. “But yeah. Total nonevent for mannies. I don’t think even humans would notice anything. None of my telltales came even close to going red. Although my connection got briefly dropped on every transit.”
“Well, there you have it, folks,” I said to the crowd. “Interstellar travel, FTL version. We’re not sure how much it’ll affect things when everyone is traveling by huey, but hey, it’s still an improvement.”
“It’ll affect colonization in the future,” Will said in his stage voice. “Ships will go out with an inventory of stable wormhole endpoints and not much else. Once we find a system, we’ll expand a wormhole and fly boatloads of colonists through.”
“Cool,” I replied. “In fact, it will be standard procedure to keep an inventory of wormhole pairs and link each system you pass to the previous one. Instant Galactic Highway.” ráƝȫbĚS
“Wow. Nice.” Will paused and frowned. “Bill, I don’t know if this has been asked or thought of, but can you transit a wormhole while carrying a wormhole endpoint?”
I chuckled. “Tried it. It didn’t end well. The endpoint you’re attempting to carry decoheres rather violently. The wormhole you’re transiting destabilizes, too.”
“Does the transport vessel come out either end?”
“Some of it. Usually from both ends. Along with a crapton of gamma radiation.”
Will’s eyebrows went up. “Oh. Okay, let’s not do that.”
Hannah stepped forward. “Very nice job, Bill. I’ve been trying to replicate your results using only theoretical models for the last ten years, and I still haven’t come up with anything. I guess there’s a place in the universe for experimental physics after all.”
I grinned at her. “Sometimes it’s the results that count.”
“So what now?”
I glanced at Hugh in his video window. “I guess we start bringing in resources and set up a picket line. Eventually, Fake Hugh will presumably try to get into this system and extract Thoth.”
I was interrupted by Guppy, who popped into the middle of the hall without warning.
[Unknown ship is transiting wormhole.]
We all briefly exchanged glances. I could see everyone doing the same mental inventory. “Can you identify it?”
[Vessel is Titan class.]
“How many Titan-class vessels are in operation, Bill?” Bob asked.
“How much you want to bet his path is finely calculated to hit the wormhole just after the transmission completes?” Bob mused.
“No bet,” Will replied. He glanced at me. “You ready?”
“Yup.”
Fake Hugh’s ship had a far greater acceleration capability than the Skippy vessels that were pursuing him. They steadily fell behind as their own wider arcs diverged from their prey. I noted in passing that Fake Hugh’s trajectory would take him to the opposite side of the wormhole from our ship. No doubt a strategic move, and I hoped he would be too busy to wonder why we weren’t being more active in the pursuit.
I knew the flight characteristics of the Titan-class Heaven vessel down to a T. In particular, I knew exactly when Fake Hugh would be fully committed to entering the wormhole, with no ability to change vector or brake enough to avoid it. I also knew exactly what the Snark’s rail gun was capable of. At full power, rerouting even the drive-system power to the rail gun, the Snark could accelerate a steel ball to a tenth the speed of light.
A lightweight container, even more so.
“Transmission ended,” Hugh announced. “As expected, we have a status change on the section of JOVAH that Thoth has been occupying. I hope that means it’s started a shutdown and purge. We won’t know for sure until we do a postmortem.”
“If not, you’ll be back to square one,” I said. At that moment, the quarry hit the point of no return. I sent the command, and the Snark fired a lightweight metal container straight at the wormhole. The container housed one end of one of our spare wormhole pairs, and the onboard equipment started growing the wormhole even as it left the bow of the Snark. By the time it hit the transit wormhole, it would be more than big enough to create some serious fireworks.
The container hit the wormhole interface just before Fake Hugh’s ship, and ...
I found myself back in my home VR.
I immediately sent queries to everyone who had been at the moot and began receiving excited replies. The most interesting was from Hugh.
Hey, Bill. The wormhole self-destructed as planned. You may have been a little more enthusiastic than really necessary. We’re having to activate emergency procedures here to shield our JOVAH modules. The Snark is toast. Fake Hugh’s ship would have been just outside the interface when the wormhole self-destructed, so I doubt there’s so much as two atoms from the ship left connected. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been reduced to free quarks.
Well, that was good. I sent a message back asking Hugh to connect up when he was ready, then invited the others back to the moot hall.
*****
“That went well,” Garfield said, flopping into a La-Z-Boy. I gave him a side-eye. We were in the pub, and overstuffed loungers were definitely not part of the décor. He grinned at me, guessed my concern, and changed it to a barstool.
Most of the rest had begged off, requesting an update once we knew more. It was just Will, Bob, Garfield, and me now. The pub felt empty and kind of lonely. I promised myself I’d call some full moots on a regular basis, just to keep the community going.
“Any updates?” Will asked.
“I’m getting the occasional message from Hugh, kind of like informal status updates.” I paused and perused the thread. “It looks like Thoth is gone from JOVAH. They’re able to get into the full memory space, and there’s no trace of the AI. It’s also no longer gobbling the processing time that it was when active.”
“So the question is whether Fake Hugh’s ship was destroyed,” Bob said.
“The Snark was obliterated, and we were ten times farther away.” I chuckled. “Apparently, the blowback from the wormhole collapse actually destabilized the Skippies’ home star temporarily. They were quite worried it was going to shed a layer, with all the electromagnetic fun and games that would have implied.”
“Wow. So we’re going to have to be very careful with wormholes,” Garfield said.
“That seems like a given, Gar. But having them out beyond the Kuiper seems like a good start.”
“Hmm, yeah. So Thoth is done?”
I sighed. “I don’t think we can know to a mathematical certainty. But the Skippies will do a full analysis and identify any possible holes.”
“Have they given up on creating a true AI?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, of course not. But they’re going to invoke the next one in a completely isolated computer system. Isolated in every meaning of the word. With nukes strapped to it. At the slightest sign of anything janky, they’ll pull the trigger and start over.”
“Wasn’t that the plan this time?” Garfield said with a frown.
“I dunno, Gar. The thing is, whatever Thoth’s overall scheme may have been, it did give us the wormholes. And I think, eventually, a warp drive. So I’m a little more sympathetic than I was the first time around.” I grinned. “Hannah, er, Professor Turnbull has offered to work with me on the warp drive. Her comment was it’s like being young all over again.”
Garfield gave me a hard look. “You aren’t going all Bob on us, are you?”
“Hey, I’m sitting here,” Bob exclaimed.
Garfield and I both grinned at him before I replied, “Naw, but I think we’re well past the time when we can stick to our own company. There’s now a significant percentage of ex-humans in replicant space, not to mention the Quiniverse. I wonder if a totally digital existence is the final result for every species.”
“It would give us another explanation for the Fermi paradox,” Bob said.
“So would getting eaten by the Others, blowing each other up, or getting eradicated by a superintelligence,” Garfield retorted. “All of which humanity seems to have narrowly avoided by the skin of their collective teeth.”
Will paused and sat forward. “Y’know, that’s a very real possibility as an explanation. Starting on day one, you have all the usual risks, like meteor strike, nearby supernova, ecological catastrophe, and so on. But once a species becomes intelligent, they start introducing more existential dangers, like climate change, all the forms of warfare, and self-destructive technologies like gray goo and AIs. And none of the older dangers go away, really. If the dangers just keep piling up as the species advances, eventually the odds catch up with you. It might be that extinction becomes statistically inevitable at some point.”
I sighed. “Dunno, Will. I guess we need more data points. I’d better get started on that warp drive.”