Jacques
September 2212
Delta Pavonis
Guppy popped into VR. [New mory core is online]
“Good. It was getting a little tight. Have the drones resu the full program.”
Guppy nodded and disappeared.
I had implented a plan to record as much of the planet as I could before the Others got here. Not just Pav civilization, either. Plants, animals, scenery, geology, anything and everything I could think of. I built a standalone set of stasis chambers well in advance of the colony ships, and now I was slowly stocking it with genetic material from every species that I could get a needle into. A very informal and ad hoc genetic diversity vault, in essence. I had no overall organization, as I’d had no ti to catalog and categorize the life on Delta Pavonis 4 into any kind of system. I was, in effect, stealing a strategy from Noah and treating everything as a “kind”. The recordings would help with identifying species and such later. If there was a later.
I was also recording Pav societies, cultures, and languages. Between all the spying and recording, my data storage requirents were massive. Guppy had just done the third upgrade since I’d started the project. I estimated there was at least one more upgrade coming.
I had played with the idea of contacting so Pav on the sly, perhaps to get a personal account of life. But Bill had convinced that it would be cruel at best, and at worst, ghoulish.
Instead, I operated as a passive observer. Our technology was much better than the Victorian-era Pav sciences, but even so, things didn’t always go perfectly. There’d been a couple of sightings, and Pav society now had their own version of conspiracy theorists and flying-saucer nuts.
It made wonder if the human equivalents had been based on so kind of reality. I tried to imagine so alien version of replicants hanging around Earth and kidnapping people. Mmm, nope. Especially with the anal probe thing. Just, no.
* * *
Since the plan involved kidnapping twenty thousand Pav, I wanted to have a pre-selected target group. Running around, grabbing people until I hit my quota, just didn’t strike as efficient. I spent so ti doing a census of small towns until I had found two that ca in just under ten thousand souls each. I could, if necessary, top up the numbers from what appeared to be nearby military bases. The two towns, Mheijrkvaand Aizzilkva, were like small-town USA—rural, residential, stable population, family-oriented.
I wanted to docunt and understand Pav society at the grass-roots level. On the other hand, I didn’t want to go down the road of Bob-1 and end up getting attached to individuals. I had a bad feeling, though, that we Bobs had a shared weakness of so kind—so need for attachnt. It would require a delicate balancing act.
I picked a house at random in the town of Mheijrkva and set up surveillance. Gnat-sized roars installed caras and microphones in the house. I felt dirty, like so kind of voyeur, but reminded myself that I was preserving the record of a culture that would likely not exist in another decade.
* * *
The Los family group seed fairly average, as Pav families went. Six adults, split evenly between the genders, plus nine children at various ages. The Pav didn’t have a large need for privacy, so bedroom organization was based mostly on available space. Furniture tended to move around on a daily basis, depending on mood.
als were held at specific tis, simply because of the logistics of preparing food for that many people. But there was no organization that I could see. My best taphor was a birthday party attended by two-year-olds—a total free-for-all.
The adults held an assortnt of jobs. The Pav didn’t seem to care about stratification of social classes. The matriarch of the house, Da Hazjiar Los, was on Mheirkva’s town council. She seed intelligent and, for a Pav, very level-headed. I made a point of tagging her for special handling, if and when.
I settled in for so long-term spying on people’s lives.
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