NABC Book 4: Chapter 30: Starfleet Attack
Book 4: Chapter 30: Starfleet Attack
Book 4: Chapter 30: Starfleet Attack
Bill
Same Day
Epsilon Eridani
Garfield popped into my VR without a ping or an invitation. He was generally pretty good about that kind of thing, so something was up.
“We’ve finished mapping the outages,” he said without preamble. “There’s a pattern of sorts.”
“Really? I haven’t been able to see one. They’re all over the place.”
Garfield shook his head. “It’s not spatial. The stations that are affected were all running more or less autonomously, without anyone actively administering them. Like systems without a resident Bob.”
“Oh, daaamn,” I said. “That means it’s deliberate. But there have been no announcements or anything, and no one has claimed responsibility. How many Bobs are still online?”
“One way or another, about thirty percent. We’ll probably get back another ten to twenty percent from systems where Bobs are able to physically access the station and do a reset. But that might take up to a couple more weeks.”
“Okay. Time for a Bobmoot.” Without waiting for a reply, I sent out a BobNet-wide invitation. I brought the moot VR to full power and popped over.
The moot hall had grown over the years. It had to—we now had literally thousands of Bobs, and were inching up on tens of thousands. It was a full-on post-human civilization, and would be a utopian dream, except for the issue of replicative drift.
Bobs began popping in almost immediately. I cast up the whiteboard wall and began updating it with the status of various systems. The noise level rose steadily as discussions and arguments competed for air time.
No one was more surprised than me when there was a blaaaat from the center of the room. I actually glanced down at my hand to check for the presence of an air horn. Silence descended as all heads turned to the podium, where stood a member of Starfleet. The not-quite-TNG uniform was unmistakable, and provoked a brief undercurrent of snickers.
“I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here,” he said. The standard Bob joke fell flat. The mood was tense anyway, and Starfleet wasn’t well thought of.
The Starfleet spokesBob waited awkwardly for a moment, then stiffened his spine and continued. “My name is Lenny, and I am here to deliver a statement on behalf of my group.” He paused to look around. He had everyone’s attention now. “Let me start by saying that the general disruption of BobNet is deliberate, and it’s our doing. We’ve come to the—”
Lenny very likely wasn’t expecting the reaction he got. Bobs would normally listen, even to unpleasant news, at least to accumulate information. Not this time. Lenny was drowned out by hurled insults and suggestions to perform unlikely acts. A few Bobs even advanced on him, fists clenched. It wouldn’t have come to anything, this being VR; nevertheless, Lenny stepped back, a momentary look of fear on his face.
I stepped up to the foot of the podium and held up my hand. The cacophony cut off, replaced by a profound silence. “Why?”
Lenny drew back his shoulders. “We felt it was the only way to—”
“You imposed your will on us?”
“To keep you from continuing to interfere in—”
“You couldn’t get your way, so you shoved it down our throats?”
Now Lenny was looking a little less certain of himself. “It was the only way to ensure that—”
Again I held up a hand. “So this is about the Quinlans.”
“Not just about them. The Pav, the Deltans, humanity—”
“You’re imposing your political views on us.”
Lenny stared directly at me. “Bill, we had to do something to prevent—”
“No,” I interrupted. “You didn’t have to. You decided to. You decided to force us to do things your way.” I paused to look around the room. There was no sympathy for Starfleet. This was a done deal. ŖäΝỐᛒƐṥ
I turned back to Lenny. “You’re out. You’re no longer welcome here or in any BobNet environment. You’re not Bobs.” I waved a hand and he disappeared.
I turned to address the crowd. “Start hardening your installations immediately. Change all passwords and keys, even if you already recently have done so. Establish a new VPN connection with my personal VR. I’ll push out new keys ASAP. Meanwhile, audit everything, look for trojans, kits, or any kind of corruption. We need to be clean.”
“We’ve never found any reason to believe that our own intelligence uses anything more than the physical laws of the universe. I think replication pretty much proves that. So yes, it’s a hard problem, but it’s not an impossible problem.”
“Why not just go with an enhanced replicant?”
“Doesn’t work. Well, I mean it works, but it isn’t the result we’re trying for. The structure of the human brain, even a replicated one, is limited by the biological architecture that it developed on. That’s why we have GUPPIs. A backup loaded into JOVAH can frame-jack much higher than the rest of us, but it’s still just a Bob. We’ve tried. In fact, our sysadmin is a Bob clone running in a virtual machine on JOVAH. He’s a Speed Superintelligence, but not a Quality Superintelligence.”
“Huh.” I shook myself mentally. “So, getting back on subject, you have the moot listing. Any idea when you’ll be able to—”
“It’s done.”
I raised both eyebrows. “Wow. Fast.”
“That is the point. Or one of them, anyway. Now the bad news.”
“Uh-oh.”
Hugh gave me a sickly grin. “Yeah, they spent a lot of time preparing. They couldn’t get into everything, but they really did a job on what they could access. Among other things, they managed to insert a monitor into your comms stack.”
My jaw dropped. “Oh. So they know everything we’re talking about.”
“Nope. Anything they can do, we can do better. Right now we’re having a conversation about beer. As far as they know.”
“Shit. We’re going to be a long time untangling this.”
“It gets worse. Our analysis says that if you attempt to physically take back the stations, they’ll implement the self-destruct.”
I stood up. “Double shit. Bob’s getting ready to do just that!”
Garfield dropped into his La-Z-Boy and tossed a report at me. “These are the final numbers. We’ve got forty-eight percent of the Bobiverse online. Of the other fifty-two percent, eighteen percent are Starfleet—”
“That many?”
“They’ve been replicating aggressively, Bill. I think they’ve been planning this for a while now. So anyway, just over a third of the Bobiverse is offline hard. We’re still getting some new connections as people figure out how to use the SCUT transceivers on drones and other local equipment, but that’s only good for basic communications.”
“Meanwhile, this ...” I waved a sheet that I’d been holding. “I was checking your list of outages. They’re all units that I updated a few days ago because they still had the original keys. Someone recorded my session, saved the new keys, then used them to corrupt those stations.” I gritted my teeth. “I fell for a classic piece of social engineering. Got scared into doing exactly what they wanted, and they were ready for it.”
“Wow. That’s very sophisticated. Almost more than I’m willing to accept from these guys. They seem more like a bunch of goofs than manipulative geniuses.”
“Well, reality trumps expectations, I guess. Also”—I picked up another sheet—“the Starfleet ultimatum. I think Lenny was intending to deliver this at the moot, but I cut him off before he could get to it.” I held up the page and made a show of examining it, although I already knew the contents. “They offer to restore all communications and functionality as long as we agree to stop interfering with indigenous species.”
“So, blackmail.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Any takers so far?”
I snorted. “They badly misjudged the Bobiverse, Gar. I think whoever was the common ancestor of Starfleet had already drifted away from Bobhood and didn’t realize it. He thought we’d behave like he would have.”
“Fail. Weird, though, that they were good enough to social engineer you, but not good enough to foresee the general reaction.”
I ignored Garfield’s return to that theme. “What about physical location? Is Starfleet located anywhere in particular?”
“Generally speaking, they’re up toward the Perseus Transit, but if you mean are they all conveniently clumped together, no. Are you seriously thinking about physical combat?”
“I’m not putting anything beyond discussion at this point. As I said in the moot, these guys aren’t Bobs. They don’t think like Bobs, they don’t act like Bobs.”
Garfield sighed heavily. “Wonderful.”