We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 4: Chapter 2: Working the Options

Book 4: Chapter 2: Working the Options

Bob

January 2296

Above Eden

Space is big.

I know that sounds like a duh statement, and Douglas Adams already made it anyway, but when you’re looking for a single spaceship over literally interstellar distances, space gets right in your face with its bigness.

Bender had been missing now for more than a hundred years. Despite Bill transmitting the SCUT plans for FTL communication to every system that Bender could possibly have reached, despite searches along his probable path by Victor and later by his clone-mates Marvin and Luke, we hadn’t found hide nor hair of Bender. Or bolt or deck plate, what with him actually being a sentient spaceship and all.

I should explain that, I guess. Bender is a computer who thinks he’s one Robert Johansson, an engineer slash nerd who died in the early 21st century. As are all the Bobs, including me. I was the first replicant, launched from Earth in 2133. Every single Bob is my descendent, because that’s what Von Neumann probes do. We make copies. We’re up to thousands of Bobs now, spread over an almost one-hundred-light-year radius centered around the Sol System.

Bender was from my second batch of clones, constructed in Delta Eridani. He took off in the direction of Gamma Leporis A, and he’s never been heard from again. Lots of Bobs have died over the years in battles, and some without the benefit of a backup. But Bender just disappeared without a trace and without a reason.

I knew Bender’s original destination, but then so did Victor, Marvin, and Luke, and they hadn’t found diddly. Specifically, they couldn’t find any sign that he’d ever reached Gamma Leporis A. No autofactory setup, no mining activity, no communications relay station, and no Bussard trail in or out of the system.

I had just returned to Delta Eridani after my big pilgrimage back to Earth. It had been an emotionally loaded trip for me—the Earth would probably be drastically altered once it came out of this ice age, so in a way it was my last visit to my home in any recognizable form. It was ironic that humanity had solved the global warming problem by implementing a nuclear winter. And killed off 99.9% of themselves in the process, but who’s keeping score anymore? Stupid humans.

The Delta Eridani system was pretty much as I’d left it. Autofactory support systems continued to collect raw materials from the asteroids, ferrying them back to be formed into ingots against any future need. In the absence of any specific orders, the autofactories slowly produced more autofactories and spare parts for all my various mechanical servants.

Satisfied with the status quo, I invoked my virtual reality system and settled into my La-Z-Boy recliner, surrounded by my library. Shelves full of books, floor to ceiling, never failed to relax me. Spike immediately jumped up and settled herself on my lap, purring contentedly, and Jeeves brought a fresh coffee.

The VR environment was an essential part of my existence. Without it, I was just a disembodied mind. In VR, I had a body, and pets, and a home. And before the addition of the personal VR, four out of five replicants went insane. I’m pretty sure there’s a connection.

“Sorry, bud, but I need to concentrate right now,” I said to the cat. I turned to Guppy, who was standing at parade rest as usual. “Suspend Spike’s program and bring up a representation of the stellar neighborhood, centered on us, radius forty light-years.”

Huge fishy eyes blinked.

[Acknowledged]

Spike disappeared in a scatter of pixellation. A moment later, a sphere appeared before me, filled with numerous points of light, all conveniently labelled. All the star systems within forty light-years of Delta Eridani, categorized by stellar type.

I drew a line with my finger from Delta Eridani to Gamma Leporis A, Bender’s presumed flight path. He’d taken off in the right direction, back in 2165, but had never reached the destination. The options were foul play, misadventure, or deliberate decision.

The first two explanations might leave some kind of trace—debris, cross-trail of some theoretical attacking force, radioactivity, whatever. The third would at least show up as a redirected Bussard trail. But to detect any of those alternatives, I’d have to be crawling along at 5% of C. That would require 320 years to completely scan Bender’s projected path. Of course, if I found something, I wouldn’t do the whole route, but it would still be a whole lot of not very much for a long time.

We’re immortal, being computers. But we also operate at millisecond resolutions, so several hundred years would be an eternity to me.

Now, back to the third option—deliberate decision. If Bender had noticed something and turned to investigate it, perhaps someone following his path would see the same thing. Luke and the others hadn’t noticed anything, but they had probably been closely scrutinizing their own course rather than looking around. Bender, facing a long interstellar jump in pre-SCUT days, would have been looking for something to cut the tedium.

I tapped my chin for a few milliseconds, working through the options, then turned to Guppy again. “I think I need to attack this from all angles. Have the autofactories build a hundred or so of those long-range scouts we used in the battle of 82 Eridani. Make sure their SURGE drives are powerful enough for interstellar travel.” ŔâΝo????ƐⱾ

[Acknowledged]

Once the drones were ready, I would send them along Bender’s projected path at 5% C, looking for anything unusual. Meanwhile, there was no reason for me to wait around. I treated myself to one last long look at the planet Eden, rotating below me, then left orbit, heading for Gamma Leporis A at 5 G.

Travel between stellar systems is uneventful—thank God. It’s hard to think of something eventful out between the stars that wouldn’t leave me as a cloud of free-floating atoms.

I considered limiting myself to 0.75 C so that I could continue to interact with the Bobiverse in general. SCUT allowed instantaneous communications over BobNet, but if my tau got too high (or too low—there was some argument about how we should be expressing tau), I wouldn’t be able to interact in real time, even frame-jacked. But I was just too impatient to test my theory, and anyway the Bobiverse was starting to get weird and cliquish these days. Bobs were getting less Bob-like, and going off in directions that I think would have left Original Bob baffled. Well, if they hit the singularity or something while I was out of touch, hopefully Bill would leave a note with instructions.

I passed the time by reviewing my archived surveillance vids of the Deltans. A primitive race of humanoids, the Deltans resembled a sort of bipedal pig/bat mashup. I’d more or less adopted them and become the great sky god for a generation or two, before joining the tribe in android form. It had been 63 years since I’d walked out of Camelot for the last time, after Archimedes’s funeral. I desperately missed my friends and the feeling of family that I got from living among them. Bill had scolded me on more than one occasion about the dangers of transferring my affections to a bunch of alien primitives. Well, tough.

As it turned out, things got interesting before I even got up enough tau to drop out of touch. About two months subjective time into the voyage, something triggered one of the monitoring scripts that I’d set up.

We were playing baseball in the Bobmoot VR when a Guppy popped in unannounced. Every Bob on the field stopped dead. Having someone’s Guppy show up in the moot couldn’t be anything but interesting. Metadata indicated that he was mine, so I put down the bat and gave him a raised eyebrow. As usual, he completely ignored it. Facial expressions didn’t mean much to the GUPPI interface. Or sarcasm, metaphor, irony, body language, or social conventions, for that matter. Guppy stared back, waiting for me to say something.

“Well?”

Apparently, that was enough.

I frowned and tilted my head in the direction of the suit, glancing at Marvin. He replied with a baffled smile and a shrug. “Don’t ask me, Bob. Replicative drift seems to be accelerating. I think we’re approaching fifteen to twenty generations, and it’s no longer just a matter of enhanced or suppressed attributes of Original Bob. The differences are accumulating, and some clones are going in completely new directions.”

“Uh-huh. And the almost-cosplay outfits?”

Marvin’s bemused expression didn’t change. “Some of those are probably just for fun. Or making an ironic commentary. But the rest, well, I’m not sure if the clothes are influencing the attitudes or the other way around. The TNG guys are talking about forming an actual organization in the vein of Starfleet to monitor—that’s the word they’re using—the Bobiverse’s effect on biologicals.”

“Oh good grief. And how are they going to do that? Pass laws? Create a police force?”

“I think it’s just discussion, Bob. No one is actually pushing for organizational changes. At least not yet.”

“Is this anything to do with Thor and his lobby group, after the war with the Others?”

“Not really, no. Thor and his group were stating their preferences, not trying to impose anything on the rest of us. This”—Marvin made a small gesture toward the TNG guys—“has a more intrusive feel about it, if you get my drift.”

I shook my head, refusing to give the matter any more psychic energy. I raised a hand and Jeeves appeared with another beer.

I popped into my personal VR, sporting a pleasant beer buzz and a not-so-pleasant feeling of foreboding. I dismissed the beer buzz, but couldn’t do the same for the foreboding. Bill was right that I didn’t go to moots often enough, but today’s revelations hadn’t been the kind of thing that would encourage me to do so.

I had recently added an outside patio to my library, complete with deck furniture. The weather was perpetually late summer/early fall, with warm sun and a cool breeze. Loons called across the lake, competing with geese and other waterfowl. Sighing with contentment, I settled into a lounge chair, then invoked Guppy. “Fire up Spike and Jeeves, please. Then update me on the course change.”

Jeeves appeared at my elbow with a pot of coffee and some small sandwiches with no crusts. Spike appeared on my lap, right where she’d been when I suspended her program. I scratched the cat’s ear and she began purring.

Finally, sandwich in one hand and coffee in the other, I was ready for business. “Status?”

[En route to Eta Leporis. Travel time approximately 35 years, including time required to change direction.]

“Wow, that’s a hike. Will we be in SCUT range when we get there?”

[Negative. It will be necessary to construct and deploy an intersystem relay station.]

Crap. More wasted time. Well, it couldn’t be helped. I wasn’t about to do a side-hop to some nothing system just to build a communication station so I could still access BobNet. Of course, if Eta Leporis had no suitable raw materials when I got there, I was going to look pretty foolish.

“All right, Guppy. Send orders to the trailing drones to adopt a minimum-time flight plan to get to where we changed course. I want the whole area mapped in detail, looking for Bussard-trail spoor.”

[Acknowledged. They will require approximately 24 months.]

“Noted. Let me know when they arrive and start mapping, and give me the completed report as soon as it’s received.”

Guppy blinked huge fish eyes and disappeared. I settled back into my La-Z-Boy and put my hands behind my head.

First problem: communications. I could—maybe—build a communications relay station when I reached Eta Leporis and send it back along my route to the halfway point. That was suboptimal, though. Beside the uncertainty of materials availability at my destination, I’d be out of touch for years. More years, I mean.

Instead, I could direct the Delta Eridani autofactory to build a full-sized relay station with a SURGE drive and send it out. That would be faster, since I could get it started immediately, but this option would still leave at least some gap during which I’d be incommunicado.

To handle that gap, I could take one of the drones in my hold, modify it to act as a SCUT relay station, and drop it off en route with orders to decelerate to zero velocity. It wouldn’t be ideal; no repair or upgrade capability, for starters. And not a lot of bandwidth, with the size limitation. Well, I wouldn’t be running any moots from Eta Leporis anyway. I could live with that. And I could stock it with some spare roamers in case of breakdowns.

Anyway, it only had to operate for a couple of years, until the much larger and more powerful station from Delta Eridani was in position. And investment of equipment was minimal. I had enough spare drones and roamers in my hold for basic necessities.

Okay, one problem solved. I queued up the required tasks on my TODO. Next, the Bender problem ...

Item: There was a good chance that Bender had veered off and headed for Eta Leporis. But if that turned out to be wrong, I’d receive the report from my trailing drones long before I got there. I’d let Marvin know, and be able to swing around to pick up the trail again. So for the sake of argument, consider that a given.

Item: Eta Leporis displayed characteristics suggesting a spacefaring intelligence lived there. One that had built or was building a megastructure. That thought brought back memories of the Others. I shuddered at the possibility of another protracted interstellar war.

Item: If you accepted that a spacefaring civilization had built some kind of megastructure and Bender had changed course to investigate it, then it was highly probable that something had happened to Bender in Eta Leporis. Otherwise, he’d have built a space station, which would be transmitting his logs back toward human space via radio by now. He’d also have long since received the SCUT plans and already be on BobNet thanks to instantaneous communications.

Conclusion: Caution is highly indicated.

I chuckled at the dry bureaucratese in that statement. Still, it was true. We normally approached a system at a tangent rather than diving straight for the star. But we retained enough velocity to turn in-system in minimal time. Maybe a parking orbit in the Oort would be a better first step this time. And heavy use of exploration scouts. Not cloaked, though—cloaking interfered with SUDDAR, our subspace version of radar.

I rubbed my eyes with thumb and forefinger—an action that had no real point in VR except that it felt good—and started an inventory of onboard assets. I would have to do some in-flight manufacturing. Wouldn’t that be fun!