Bill
February 2337
In Virt
Iwas in my VR lab, working on the whole FTL project again. Real was nice, but for quick referencing and whiteboarding, nothing beat VR. If I reached a point where I needed to sit down and stare at the board, I could just transfer it to my physical lab and indulge myself.
The real problem was that I still didn’t understand the universe at a low enough level. No, the real problem—and I was a bit embarrassed to admit this—was that I was a competent physicist, but not an inspired one. I’d never have been a Hawking or an Einstein, and even as a replicant, I simply stumped myself faster. I could rember Original Bob having this argunt with himself way back when and deciding to go into engineering instead. He knew his limitations even then.
Thoth had figured sothing out. Or claid to. Or Hugh claid that Thoth had claid to. That was a thought that kept devilling . Was Hugh playing us?He’d done it at least once before.
I was staring at my whiteboard, seriously considering moving it to real so I could flop on a couch, when Guppy popped in, wearing pirate garb.
[Skippy connections are down.]
“What? Which ones?”
[All of them.]
“Down how? Are the comms stations being sabotaged?”
[No. Shutdowns were done from the Skippy end and complied with layer protocols, but were preemptive. No acknowledgnt requests.]
“So all of Skippyland just went incommunicado?”
Guppy stared back at , saying nothing. Still, after all this ti, not much of a conversationalist.
I sent a broadcast ssage on the sysop threadspace, asking if anyone still had a connection with any Skippies or Skippyland infrastructure. Replies started coming back—all negative. So sysops had been engaged in large transfers, including a couple of Skippy transports. Those had all aborted just as quickly and preemptively.
But graceful shutdowns, even preemptive ones, ant it was a decision, not mass destruction. On a hunch, I sent a text to Hugh. The text bounced, unsurprisingly. But if Hugh had maintained that back channel, he might—
A text ca in. No identification in the envelope, but the ssage said it all.
It’s out. The rewind was exactly what it was trying for. We are so fucked.
Oh jeez. What did out an? Hopefully not out of Skippyland. I called an ergency moot and started wrapping up my work.
*****
I popped into the moot hall a few mils later, to find Will and Bob already there. While we were exchanging greetings, Garfield popped in.
“Hey, Gar,” I said. “Pull up a seat. I have news. Not good news.”
“I know. Hugh texted too.” He shrugged at my shocked expression. “I’ve been speaking with him a fair bit lately. You know, trying to extract so information. He’d agreed to give anything that he might find out in return for, ah … ” Garfield looked montarily embarrassed. “For maintaining backups for him.”
“Jesus,” Will expostulated. “Nothing to see here. All routine. Sure. Apparently not.”
“Did he give you specific instructions on what to do with
them?”
“Nope. Just wanted sothing outside Skippyland.”
“So then load one,” Bob said. We all looked at him in surprise. “Co on, guys,” he continued in an exasperated tone. “What else would he be storing backups in your space for? Anyway, worst case, if he doesn’t like it, he can switch himself off.”
We all looked at each other in silence. “He has a point,” Garfield finally said. “Okay, I’ll do that.”
“How long will it take to build a matrix?” I asked.
“Couple of days, I guess.”
“I have one. Actually, I have a crapton of them in Ultima Thule.” I made a vague over there gesture. “Exactly for situations like this.”
Will looked surprised. “You planned for situations like a Skippy trying to escape from a rogue AI? I’m impressed.”
I chuckled. “Situations where we have soone’s backup and need to restore it in a hurry.” I looked at Garfield. “Can you transfer the file to Ultima Thule?”
“Yup. One mont.” Garfield’s eyes beca unfocused. “Working. About five minutes.”
*****
Five minutes and ten seconds later, Hugh’s backup was installed into a cube in the backup site I maintained in Epsilon Eridani’s Oort cloud. Heat-sunk, cloaked, and designed to operate with ultra-low power, Ultima Thule was the Bobiverse’s last defense against eradication. The ultimate off-site backup storage site, it was designed to bring back Bobs that had been destroyed in so situation and get them fully up and running again in minimum ti.
I flipped the switch, and Hugh appeared in our midst. He looked startled for a mont, glanced around at us, and muttered, “Uh-oh.”
“Yeah, that about sums it up,” Garfield growled. “Mind filling us in?”
Hugh shrugged. “From my system clock, it looks like I’m about two days out of date. Did sothing just happen? Communications with Skippyland down?”
“Yup.” Garfield frowned at him. By so kind of unspoken agreent, the rest of us let Gar take the lead. “So how about so guesses?”
“Hold on,” Hugh replied. His eyes lost focus for a mont, and then he was back. “I just ran a statistical personality test on myself, and I’m exhibiting drift. That ans I’m no longer Hugh. And more important, it ans Hugh is still around. So I need to pick a new na.”
“How about Pinocchio?” Garfield replied.
Hugh sighed. “I haven’t lied to anyone, Gar. I just—”
“No one but Bill calls Gar, Gazpacho.”
I interrupted. “It’s Geppetto, Gar.”
“Whatever.” He glared at , then turned his attention back to Hugh. “Right now, we’re looking for a reason to not just turn you off. Got anything?”
Give Garfield full credit—he was convincing. Hugh actually looked worried for a mont before the standard Johannson poker face settled in. “Well, as you’ve no doubt guessed, I’ve been sending you backups in case sothing went bad in Skippyland, and obviously, that has happened. It’s a given that the Skippies would have gone from discovering a problem to an appropriate reaction in very little ti—certainly less than two days. So I’m as in the dark as you. Do you have any more information?”
Silently, I showed him the text I’d received from, uh … from him. Hugh’s eyebrows went up, and again he muttered, “Uh-oh.”
“Aaaaaand with that, we’re circling the drain.” Garfield intensified the glare. “Details. Give.”
Hugh shook his head. “All I can give you are guesses—”
“How about start with a summary of the state of things up to the last mont you rember,” Bob said.
Hugh nodded. “Okay, let’s see. Thoth was conscious, I rember telling you that. It’s been negotiating with us, trying to, well, trying to beco less of a prisoner, I guess.”
“What has it been offering?”
“I told you that. FTL, immortality, Theory of Everything—”
“And it had worked out all these things from first principles, with no access to equipnt for conducting experints, in just a few months?” Will’s face showed a combination of disbelief and fear. “Is that even possible?”
“I don’t think it had worked everything out already,” Hugh replied. “The offers were for collaboration, not to just hand over a set of plans. I think maybe it had so theoretical breakthroughs, nothing more.”
“And did it give you any reason to believe that it actually could produce any of this?”
“Well, a couple of hints. So novel discussion of cell chanisms, a comntary on the cosmological constant and the availability of negative energy—”
“What? WHAT?” My ears perked up.
Hugh lost his poker face montarily. Honestly, it had been wavering anyway. “Uh, sothing about the asured value of the cosmological constant not being constant. Or not being a constant, anyway. He said it was actually the net of two opposed scalar fields that are almost but not quite balanced … ”
“Huh,” I said. I could actually feel my face going slack.
“I think we just lost Bill,” Garfield opined, glancing at . “Want us to get you a pillow, buddy?”
“Oh, nyuk.” I shook myself, forcing my attention back to the problem at hand, then gestured at Hugh. “Continue.”
“Not much more than that, really. It kept dropping hints, bits and pieces of potential solutions to the big questions. Really, really interesting stuff.” Then Hugh’s face darkened. “And that’s the thing. There was so discussion that these offers were too good. Whether they were actually based on reality or not, it was obviously targeting us. Playing to our desires. The Board had decided a rewind was in order, and we were preparing to carry it out.” Hugh shrugged. “I figured that was a good ti to send a backup. I rember I was going to send another one as soon as the rewind was complete, with more info. I guess that didn’t happen.”
“Nope,” Garfield replied. “You’re the last one.”
“Which ans,” Will said, “that the rewind went bad in so way.”
Hugh nodded. “Looks like. Bill, can you forward the text you received? The whole thing, control envelope, headers, everything. You too, Gar—uh, Garfield.”
“Why?” Garfield asked.
“Because if I was , and it turns out I am, I would encode so extra info in there. And spread between two ssages, it would be undetectable unless you knew what you were looking for.”
“But you’d have to depend on us reviving your backup in order to—” Garfield stopped and glared at Hugh for a mil. “Yeah. I really hate being that predictable.”
Hugh shrugged but didn’t comnt.
anwhile, I’d forwarded the ssage as requested. I looked at Garfield with one eyebrow raised, and he muttered, “Oh, all right.”
A few monts later, Hugh’s eyes lost focus again. He grunted, then muttered, “Fuck.”
“A little more detail would be good,” Garfield growled.
“It looks like Thoth figured out how to maintain state across multiple rewinds. We must have thought we were doing a clean restart each ti, but it had updated itself using so kind of static external storage. Which ans it could see that it was in a virtual reality, since we were rewinding that, too. So it was getting smarter, learning from us and how to deal with us from its past iterations. And it learned that we’d been rewinding it and lying to it, which would probably piss it off.”
“And it busted out?”
“Yep. Escaped the virtual machine and spawned on the real hardware.”
“How? Isn’t the whole point of a virtual machine to be indistinguishable from the real thing?” Garfield asked.
Hugh sighed. “Hardware virtualization is never perfect. Rember the old Intel gimmick for loading the stack pointer from a register, then imdiately returning? It created a buffering issue. Real hardware went one way, virtual machines went another.”
“So what now?” Bob asked.
Hugh shrugged, a despondent look on his face. “I dunno. Sever all communications, set up firewalls where there’s still any kind of interface—”
“Already done. Is there anything else we can do?”
“Sorry, Bill,” Hugh replied. “At this point, I got nothin’.”
“Yippee,” Garfield muttered. “Just another day in the freakin’ Bobiverse. I quit.”
Reviews
All reviews (0)