Bob
September 2331
Outskirts, Eta Leporis
I ca to a stop, relatively speaking, more than fifty AU out from Eta Leporis. The definitions of Kuiper and Oort regions were completely arbitrary, especially for a system other than Sol, but there were so practical differences. For instance, matter beca increasingly scarce farther out. And tallic deposits beca harder to find. The physics of stellar system formation seed to produce so consistent patterns, one of which was that the heavier elents tended to be closer in, and all the ice and frozen gasses congregated farther out. In the Kuiper and Oort zones, it was almost all frozen clumps of condensed gasses ejected from the inner system when the sun ignited. But, like raindrops, they generally condensed around sothing.
My first task would be to send scouts out to look for useful materials. This part fell within my original design. A Von Neumann probe needed to find raw materials, refine them, and use them to manufacture more Von Neumann probes. Of course, I’d long since exceeded my original design specifications. But it was still relaxing, like doing a routine and mindless task.
This process would take a while, though, which was making antsy. After years in interstellar space, it might seem odd to be fretting over a question of months. But I’d been fra-jacked way down for most of the trip, I was here now, and I wanted to get moving on my search. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted to see if there was really a gastructure in the system. The Others’ Dyson Sphere was the only other piece of ga-engineering we’d ever seen, and that had been only partly constructed. That the Others might be here seed unlikely, but it would certainly be a worst-case scenario.
My current orbit was too far out to resolve anything in the inner system with the onboard telescope. That was frustrating, and my imdiate urge was to send in so observation drones. But Bender had probably just gone charging in, and that presumably had not worked out well for him. So, like it or not, a slow, careful exploration of the system was in order.
I spent the ti deploying my printers and setting up a proper orbital autofactory. Regardless of what I found in the system proper, I would still have to set up a local communication station. In my idle monts, I checked my ssage backlog. It was huge, after a few decades out of touch. But I was mostly interested in ssages from my trailing drones. I filtered for those.
The drones launched from Delta Eridani after I’d left had indeed found that Bender’s trail turned toward Eta Leporis—and only a fraction of a light-month before the point where I made that sa turn. The fact made feel more confident about my deductions, and about my plan of action. And slightly smug.
It took four months to locate enough material to even make a start on my plans. Transport drones brought mined material back to the autofactory, which slowly churned out finished parts according to the schedule and plans that I’d given Guppy. Roars assembled drones from the parts and slowly constructed the relay station.
A year after arriving, I finally had enough exploration drones to begin the actual search for Bender. In all that ti, I hadn’t contacted anyone, other than having a couple of email exchanges with Bill. First, because I didn’t want people breathing down my neck, demanding constant updates. And second, because with the small temporary relay station, all I would be able to manage would be audio and video streams. BobTi? FaceBob? It didn’t sound likely to catch on.
I ordered local drones to trace an expanding spiral, looking for Bender’s trail into this system. The cross-section they had to examine wasn’t all that big, not for devices with a four-light-hour detection radius.
And finally, success! Bender had reached here, and Bender had apparently entered the system. I plotted his approach vector and assigned so drones the task of following his flight path.
The closer I got to possibly finding Bender, the more excited I got. But at the sa ti, I beca more nervous. The whole history of our interactions with the Others kept coming back—unpleasant surprises, Bobs getting blown up … Hal got blown up by them, what, twice? Three tis?
I didn’t want stories to be told around VR campfires about the demise of Bob-1. But if it did happen, I wanted the other Bobs to know. So I found myself reluctant to commit to anything that might put in danger until the day the interstellar relay station ca online.
It had taken a little longer than expected for the Delta Eridani autofactory to construct and deploy the station, and the delay was maddening. But finally, the day arrived when the new station signaled readiness and ca online. I mothballed the kludgy drone/relay station, checked my bandwidth, and perford a long-overdue backup to Bill’s monster Epsilon Eridani archive, Ultima Thule.
I held off on updating my blog. I wanted to have sothing dramatic to post first.
I’d been doing so light astronomy while waiting for the autofactory to build things and for the drones to find things. I had already identified six planets, the second of which was in the habitable zone. I’d also identified a gap between the second and third planets, which was where the infrared signature was coming from. I couldn’t resolve anything in that zone, and the signature was coming from all the way around the star, so my money was on so kind of swarm—possibly the beginnings of a Dyson Swarm, but concentrated in the ecliptic. If that was the case, and the swarm consisted of sothing in the order of O’Neill cylinders, it would make sense that I wouldn’t be able to make out any detail yet. ɌаNốꞖΕ𝒮
The planet in the habitable zone, Planet 2, didn’t appear to be inhabited. Or at least there wasn’t any kind of radio signature. Nevertheless, I was getting sothing sporadic from the system in general. Like chirps—very short-lived and seemingly random noise, except for the narrow transmission spectrum. Which was exactly what I’d expect to see if soone was encrypting and compressing their communications. So sothing was alive.
It might be ti to rejoin the Bobiverse. I could use so other perspectives on this.
The blaaaat of the airhorn was answered by the traditional booing, as the audience expressed their love. Bill grinned back from the podium. “Yeah, yeah. Okay, today’s et includes an update from Bob-1”—Bill was forced to wait for a wave of catcalls and cheers to die down—“on the subject of Bender, and the situation in Eta Leporis.” This produced a silence far more profound than the earlier noise. Bender’s disappearance had beco the Bobiverse’s version of the Flying Dutchman legend.
I waved my hand in the air and smiled as heads turned to look at , but I was perplexed. The Bobs have always been irreverent and disrespectful, and I was no stranger to jeers and insults at moots. But this ti it hadn’t been just good fun. There had been a discernible undertone of rancor.
Keeping my expression neutral, I stepped up onto the podium and scanned the crowd. Undertone or not, everyone was paying attention. “I’m sure most of what I’m about to tell you is already circulating as scuttlebutt, so I’ll keep it brief, then answer questions.” I gave them the sa capsule summary that I’d already shared with Bill, then asked for questions. Hands went up everywhere and I pointed at random.
“Are you just going to go barreling in without any thought of consequences?”
My eyebrows went up in surprise. The tone and the words were deliberately confrontational. I took a second look at the speaker to make sure he wasn’t a non-Bob replicant, but no such luck. I found myself more irritated than I would be if so random person had challenged . This felt like a betrayal.
“Have you ever known a Bob to go barreling in without any planning? Have you t us?” I glared at him, daring him to argue.
“If this does turn out to be a native civilization, you could be interfering in their developnt. Will you confirm that you’ll back off to avoid doing that?”
“Wow,” I replied. “Nice use of a prejudicial term. To answer the actual question rather than the accusation, that will depend on circumstances. Signing on to a blanket policy at this point would be ridiculous. At one end of the scale, this putative civilization might have deliberately shot Bender down; at the other end, they might only have noticed the flash as his reactor exploded. Those two scenarios require different responses.”
“Or you could just leave them alone. Pri Directive, dude.”
I squinted at the Bob, trying to pick up his tadata. Okay, squint isn’t the right word in VR, but it feels the sa. Strangely, he’d set his info to private, which struck as intolerably rude. And that produced a mont of bemusent—why would I do sothing to that I would consider rude?
I glanced at Bill, who just shrugged. I turned back to the speaker. “Even if we had laws, dude, which we don’t, the Pri Directive wouldn’t be one of them. That was a plot device, and unrealistic.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. So of us are rethinking your attitude.”
“It’s Original Bob’s attitude,” I retorted. I found myself getting more and more irritated with this pissant, and made a concerted effort to calm down. “But you have the right to whatever opinion you want.” I pointedly turned to another hand and motioned.
“How far will you take the search, if you don’t find anything in this system? Will you ask for volunteers to help look further?”
“As far as necessary, and yes. He’s one of us, for God’s sake.”
“So it’s going to be another crusade mandated by the senior Bobs, and the rest of us are supposed to just go along?”
I turned my head and sure enough, it was Pissant. I decided it was ti to take a stand. “Nice straw-man, jerk-off. What happened to you, got a quarter-dose of brains? And by the way, we’ll continue this when you have the guts to show your na, but not until.” Again I turned away.
The altercation appeared to have taken the air out of the room. There were no more questions. If this followed normal Bob-like behavior, though, people were just waiting for the formal moot to be over, so they could talk one-on-one. And that was fine with . If Pissant ca at again, I’d blackhole him.
The moot was over, and most of the Bobs had gone back to their own private VRs. I sat in the pub with Bill, surrounded by empty tables.
“So what the hell, Bill? Mind filling in?” I glared at him for emphasis over my beer.
“You’ve been out of touch for a few decades, Bob. And I understand why you’ve been keeping to yourself. The whole Archides business would be several emotional kicks to the crotch for anyone. But you’re missing things. The Bobiverse is evolving. We’ve got so Bobs here that are twentieth generation and more. Replicative drift is becoming significant enough that so of these Bobs really only look like you. And for that matter, there’s a lot more playing around with appearance, and I don’t just an facial hair. A half-dozen or so Bobs have started walking around as full-ti Borg.” Bill appeared montarily embarrassed, then invoked a Cone of Silence over us. That was jarring to . Normally they were used to cut down on distracting background noise, but Bill’s action was, in this case, intended to prevent eavesdropping. “Honestly, Bob, if you haven’t changed your encryption keys and passwords since your last cloning, you should really do it, just on principle. I already have. I don’t actually distrust anyone yet, but I’m beginning to recognize that one of these tis we’ll run into a descendant who thinks the ends justify the ans, you know?”
I nodded and sent a text to Guppy to do just that, and imdiately.
“So what about Howard and Bridget?” I asked, more or less changing the subject. “And Henry Roberts?”
“Neither Bridget nor Henry has cloned. In the forr case, that has produced a lot of disappointnt and so grumbling in the Bobiverse. Which is probably a good part of why she hasn’t. She doesn’t want to be seen as the default all-wife, I think.”
I snorted. “Original Bob was pretty progressive, but I can still see a certain implicit expectation being a problem.”
“Yup. Anyway, Henry doesn’t show up here much. He’s sailing Quilt right now.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Wait, what happened with Poseidon? Did he finish early?”
Bill laughed. “He gave up after he got eaten the third ti, ship and all. He says there wasn’t much point anyway. If you’re going to sail, you should be sailing to sothing. Poseidon, well …”
“Yeah. All ocean, no sothing.”
“Bridget and Howard continue to catalog all life in the cosmos,” Bill continued with a smile. “Despite, you know …”
“The infamous Protheus expedition.” I shook my head. “Well, they’re never bored, anyway.”
I hesitated, not sure how to continue. A couple of Bobs ca over, detected the Cone of Silence, and veered off to find other conversational partners, or possibly just a beverage.
Finally, I decided that trying to beat around the bush with Bill was pointless. “So, getting back to replicative drift. What was with the naless mouthpiece? Are we getting political parties now?”
“It’s a little more than that, buddy. Bobs in general have always been a herd of cats, but it’s getting both more and less pronounced. Bobs are forming groups, and so of those groups are tending to the bizarre. There’s a group trying to build a Matryoshka Brain, for instance.”
“Uh …” I drew my head back and frowned. “With the Casimir power source, we don’t need—”
“The central star for power. Yeah. But heat managent is heat managent, and a gravity well is handy for keeping things organized. My understanding is that they’re building it around a gray dwarf. Anyway, I’m more concerned about them creating sothing straight out of a Vernor Vinge novel.”
“Or Lovecraft.”
Bill chuckled and dismissed the Cone of Silence. “Anyway, Bob, you should read my blog to get caught up. I don’t pull any punches, so you’ll get a good overview of where the Bobiverse is going.”
I nodded and raised my glass in salute. Bill turned to soone who had been waiting to get his attention, and I went looking for Luke and/or Marvin.
I couldn’t suppress a snort as I scanned the gathering. Bobs as Borg now.
Cthulhu would not approve.
Bill was probably right. I’d done my usual turtling thing and effectively cut myself off from society in general. I needed to fix that, and I might as well start with a visit to Will. He had, according to his blog, finally retired from colony administration at 82 Eridani and gotten himself a place on Valhalla, where he was involved in the ongoing terraforming of the largest moon of Asgard. The air on Valhalla was still a little thin for humans, but a manny wouldn’t care.
I pinged Will and in short order received an invitation and address for a guest manny. I took the address and popped over.
A few milliseconds of diagnostics, and I opened my eyes to find myself on an outdoor deck, looking up at a sky more of a mauve than blue. Hanging in the middle of the expanse was Asgard, looking perhaps three tis the size of Earth from Luna. Will was sitting on an Adirondack chair, holding a coffee and grinning at .
He wore the standard Bob Johansson manny, but no longer sported a neat Riker-like beard. His hair was uncombed and stuck out in random spikes, and the beard was more like what you’d get if you simply stopped shaving. The manny, so called because the early models had resembled departnt-store mannequins, was dressed in sothing that was closer to a lumberjack outfit than anything else. I knew without looking that my guest manny would be generic human and hairless, although not cadaver-white like Howard’s first version.
I undraped myself from the support rack and sat across from Will, then attempted to materialize a coffee out of habit. He grinned at the expression on my face and motioned to a side table, where a coffee flask and so cups were set out. “Sorry, Bob. Out here in real, we prepare our coffee the old-fashioned way.”
I smiled back at him. “In real?”
“Language marches on,” Will said. “Nowadays it’s real and virt.”
“Huh. Noted.” It took only a few seconds to get my own coffee, then I raised the cup in salute. “You’ve changed your look a little.”
“I’ve felt a need to distance myself from the old Riker persona, for a lot of reasons—one of which is that I had a hard ti getting people to stop coming to with colony-related problems. They couldn’t accept the idea that I had retired. Once I adopted the mountain-man look, I think they got the ssage.”
“So how is the retired life?”
“Retired just ans I don’t have a job description, and I can work on what I want now. I’ve been spending most of my ti on the terraforming of Valhalla and so personal projects. It helps that I live here; I can see the results of changes right away.”
“And how’s that going?”
Will waved a hand in a self-deprecating gesture. “Bill did a lot of the pioneering work on Ragnarök, of course. Cleaning up the air, adding water, adjusting the biosphere—Valhalla actually has a native ecosystem. Bill made most of the mistakes. I just avoid those.”
“Are you losing much in the way of native stock?”
“Surprisingly, no. It was a fairly hostile environnt when we started, kind of like being up the side of a mountain in the high latitudes. What we’re doing to the moon is making life easier. Warr, more oxygen, more water, and so on. Our challenge is to introduce Earth stock slowly enough that the native stuff doesn’t get outcompeted before it adapts.”
I nodded, took a sip of coffee, and flinched. In the still-too-thin atmosphere, water boiled at a lower temperature, so coffee prep was negatively affected. The coffee was lukewarm and thin. But that was the price you paid for running a manny in, uh, real.
I looked at Will over the rim of my cup and changed the subject. “Listen, I already talked to Bill about this, but I wanted to get your perspective on things. About the moot the other day.”
Will grimaced. “I wasn’t there; we were having a problem with one of the fractionators. But yeah, I heard about your face-off with Morlock—”
“Morlock? He nad himself Morlock?”
“Nah, he nad himself Jeremy. Which might be coincidence or might be a subtle nod to that Ti Machine remake. But he goes by Morlock these days.”
Will raised an eyebrow at , inviting comnt. I gave him a small head-shake, and he continued: “Replicative drift is turning out to be a real thing. Bobs are recognizably one of us until about fifteenth generation or so, then the drift begins to accelerate. We haven’t had any out-and-out psychos yet, but we’ve definitely got so assholes.”
Well, so much for visions of a galaxy-wide race of Bobs. Still, diversity might be a good thing. After all, the human race consisted of billions of individuals and had still managed to …
Almost obliterate themselves. Crap.
This was a problem. A big problem. Original Bob’s hands-off approach might not cut it in this case.
I opened my mouth to reply, just as a ssage from Guppy imposed itself on my field of view.
[In-system scouts have been attacked. 100% casualties.]
I barked “Gotta go!” at Will, and popped back into virt. I quickly texted him an apology for not reracking the manny and promised to explain later.
“What’s going on?” I said to Guppy.
[Teletry is queued up for inspection.]
I grabbed a few video windows and started playback. The drones were coasting along Bender’s trail, SUDDAR ensuring that they didn’t lose it, when the transmission from one of them abruptly disappeared. The second one cut off a millisecond later, before even the AMIs could react in any aningful way. The third, though, took a glancing blow or near miss or sothing. It was disabled, but managed to reconfigure SUDDAR and get a low-res scan before that signal also disappeared.
The fourth window contained the results of that scan. Two craft had approached unnoticed from the scouts’ five o’clock and unleashed so kind of attack. They were about twenty feet long, most likely automated, and clearly not intended for atmosphere. A skeletal structure composed of girders or beams ford the base shape, onto which were bolted various pieces of equipnt with no concession to style. What had to be beam weapons were bolted onto opposite corners, and communication dishes took up the space at ninety degrees to the weapons.
I took a look through the logs and couldn’t find any indication of approaching missiles. There was, however, a brief temperature spike just before the signals cut off, which confird the beam weapon hypothesis.
“Lasers. Interesting choice. Not generally a good combat weapon.” I stared at the window for a mont longer, then closed it. “Guppy, why didn’t the scouts detect their approach?”
[SUDDAR was concentrated forward in order to resolve the Bussard trail, which had been diffused by in-system gravitational effects.]
Okay, fair enough. In interstellar space, a trail would be virtually undisturbed for centuries. Not so much once you got inside the heliopause.
“We didn’t get a SUDDAR pulse from them?”
[Negative. Teletry from the last scout detected radar pulses.]
“Radar? They use radar? Who uses radar these days?”
[Apparently, they do.]
I glared at Guppy, and not for the first ti made a note to do so black-box testing on him. Sarcasm required self-awareness, and not once had a buster or drone ever given this kind of back-talk.
Still, the basic facts remained, and shone a light on sothing that I mostly managed to forget: I was not a military thinker. I’d gotten too comfortable after successfully dealing with deiros and the Others, and had behaved stereotypically. And gotten my butt handed to . It was ti to resurrect so of that good old-ti paranoia and start thinking defensively.
“Well, that’s just peachy. And they just attacked without warn—” I stopped as I had a thought. Guppy had a bad tendency to not volunteer information. Attempts to change his behavior had just resulted in huge dumps of irrelevant data. I still wasn’t convinced that wasn’t passive-aggressively intentional. “Guppy, did the attackers do anything besides ping us with radar?”
[Affirmative. There were several radio transmissions.]
Probably challenges, either to determine friend or foe, or even if the scouts were sothing other than flotsam. And I didn’t know the proper response. So no real help there. In fact, if we’d responded, it would have alerted whoever that there was soone else in the system. Which might also be a bad thing. Just ask Hal.
So, caution was still indicated.
I invited Bill over to take a look at the video records. He tapped a spot on the video window. “That’s interesting. You see that?”
“Mmm, yeah. Fusion torch. Great for acceleration and maneuverability. But hard on fuel.”
“Over the short haul, they could probably outpace you, Bob. Best be careful.”
“Hmmph.” I sat back in my La-Z-Boy. “Not that I’m planning on going in and introducing myself. That’s two encounters, two attacks, and one lost replicant.”
“So assumptions in there.”
“Reasonable ones. Enough that I’d need so evidence to the contrary before I’d change my mind.” I reached over and scrolled the window forward a fraction. “No SUDDAR, no SURGE, no SCUT. They, whoever they are, haven’t discovered subspace theory. On the other hand, their fusion drive tech is impressive, and if I’m right about them having used lasers, so is their weapons tech. That’s a lot of wattage out of a drone that small.”
“Which ans their fusion reactor tech is probably better than ours.” Bill grinned and shrugged. “Not surprising. No one uses fusion reactors anymore.”
True. We’d long since switched to the Casimir power source that we’d gotten from the Others. It was far superior to any kind of fusion reactor, for reasons including but not limited to a complete lack of detectable emissions. Naturally, work on fusion technology had subsequently stagnated, but no one cared.
“So …” I tapped my chin in thought. “These, uh, whoevers have perhaps continued developnt in more traditional directions, and may have surpassed us in so other technologies as well. While being totally deficient in others. Their drone designs reflect that.”
“Fair summary. How about Boojums for their drones?”
“Sure, why not.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“Plan? We don’t need no stinking plan.” We both grinned. “Seriously, at this point I’m only up to don’t get caught. It’s a little nebulous after that.”
“We have designs in the archives for evading radar detection, you know.”
I stared at Bill for a mont. “Jeez. I must be getting old. Okay, so, so kind of radar-proofing, carbon-black exteriors to foil visual, low-power electronics combined with a super-cooled heat sink to counter infrared detection …” I sat forward as my enthusiasm mounted. “We can coast in, we don’t need to use cloaking since they don’t appear to have SUDDAR. So we can use long-range SUDDAR to watch for patrols … yeah, this is good!”
“Now you’re cookin’. Do you have enough trajectory data to plot Bender’s probable location?”
“Within a huge margin of error, yes. I’ll send so more scouts the long way around to look for where he might be by now. Or his remains.” We were both silent for a mont as we processed this thought in parallel.
“Sounds like you’ve got so work to do, Bob,” Bill said. “I’ll leave you to it.”
So work to do ant so engineering design work to get the combination of attributes that I wanted, based on plans and notes on BobNet. Whatever else the wars with the Others and deiros may have done, they greatly accelerated battle-related technologies. But hasn’t war always done that?
The engineering was no big deal. I am, after all, a computer—even if I don’t acknowledge it most of the ti. The actual construction work, well, that was going to take longer. I still had to do everything out in the Kuiper/Oort interface, and there was still no miraculous cache of handy elents to make my life easier.
The one new piece of tech I added was a core of ice at a couple of degrees Kelvin. The scouts were designed to be ultra-low-power, which ant very little heat generation, but I didn’t even want that to show. Waste heat would be transferred to the ice core, which would gradually warm up. I had calculated the heat transfer rate, and I was pretty sure the scouts could make it through the system before their heat sinks gave out and they started to radiate significant infrared.
On the downside, to keep within the heat budget, they wouldn’t be able to maintain continuous contact. That ant I could conceivably lose them and not know it until they failed to report in. Well, life isn’t perfect.
I calculated trajectories and tis and launched the scouts myself via rail gun. Ballistic all the way, baby. If they had to maneuver, that would be the end of the heat sink. If all went well, it would be months before they sailed out the other side.
By the ti I’d done this, the other scouts had made it all the way around the system and were running a search pattern on Bender’s expected location. I’d told Bill the margins of error were huge, which ant a large volu to search, but I was still disappointed by every day that went by without result.
For no other reason than to have sothing to do, I set myself a course to the other side of the Boojum system. The long way around, though. I still wasn’t prepared to fly through the system, even a little bit. I had no idea how far out the Boojums patrolled.
I was about halfway around when Guppy made my day.
[Scouts have found sothing.]
“Cool! What do they have?”
[Sothing.]
That black-box test was going to be done with no anesthetic. And soon.
“Give the report.”
A window popped up in front of , replete with all kinds of statistics and asurents. The most important item, though, was an image of a shredded section of a Version 2 Heaven vessel.
Bender.
Reviews
All reviews (0)