We Are Legion (We Are Bob) Book 5: Chapter 51: Accusation

Bill

September 2343

Sol System

Ireceived an acknowledgnt of my knock and popped into what I expected to be Charles’s personal VR. Instead, I found myself in an office, with a wall of monitors. All taphor, of course, in VR. But the office seed, I dunno, kind of flat. Gray. No decorations, no accessories. I wondered what had happened to the office I’d been in last ti, with the globes of the moon, Venus, Earth, and Mars hanging proudly at front and center. Maybe this was for specifically.

Charles was nervous, refusing to et my eye. I suspected he knew why I was here. I tried for small talk. “Any progress since I was last here? News?”

He hesitated, then replied, “Bill, we’ve never been good at this kind of situation. Let’s just get it out in the open, okay? Tell why you’re here.”

“You know why, Charles.”

“Yes, but I’m not going to just blurt it out. You first.”

I sighed and looked down at my hands for a mont. Interesting that tics like that survived not only VR and replication, but also several centuries of not being human. However, we still were human at the core, all of us. And fallible.

“Starfleet are Hor’s descendants. And one of your descendants, Gerry, had sothing to do with it.”

Charles closed his eyes slowly, an expression of pain on his face. “Well, so were joiners, once they’d drifted enough. But yeah. I’m to bla.”

“Bla is not the right word, Charles. They aren’t you. But I’m concerned about why you didn’t tell .”

“You an last ti you were here? I didn’t know. I was completely honest with you, Bill. But you seed to be fishing for sothing, and it got concerned. It wasn’t until I had a very weird conversation with one of my clones that I put two and two together.”

“And you still didn’t say anything.”

Charles frowned, growing slightly defensive. “To what end? The Starfleet War is long over. And it’s embarrassing. You must realize that.”

I nodded and let the silence stretch, content to let Charles set the pace.

“How did you figure it out?” he said.

“I suspected sothing like this for a while. The way Starfleet was so careful not to cause any harm or inconvenience to Earth, mostly. And over the past couple of months, my genealogy investigations kept running into dead ends. Soone put a lot of effort into hiding their origins. That wouldn’t make sense unless it was an exceptional situation. Hor certainly fit that. And … ” I hesitated, then blurted it out. “Hor had a good reason to hate humans.”

“Still, it’s a bit of a leap,” Charles mused.

“It had to be a traumatic event of so kind. So sort of PTSD. There was enough of Bob in Lenny for to be able to imagine what kind of thing would make Starfleet not only hate and distrust humanity, but actually consider them a real threat. Hor had that, and he was so scarred by his experiences, he’d have wanted to organize sothing like Starfleet.” 𝐫𝘈Ｎ𝔬ᛒĚṩ

Charles nodded slowly. He made a couple of false starts, then said, “A lot of reasonable assumptions. So good logic. Wrong, though.” He looked at , and the pain flashed across his face briefly. “It’s not Hor. It’s .”

“What?”

“Well, Gerry, but Gerry was my descendant, so sa diff.” Charles looked at in silence for several mils. “Gerry was a little odd to begin with. Replicative drift and all. But when he found the backup, he wanted to restore it and try to get Hor back. I vetoed it, and told him in no uncertain terms that Hor wouldn’t have wanted that. So Gerry took the backup and left in the middle of the night. taphorically, I an.”

I nodded, not saying anything lest I disturb the narrative.

“I got the full story from one of Gerry’s descendants, one of the rebels.” Seeing my frown of confusion, he clarified, “I’ll get to the rebels. But I want to do this in chronological order.” A pause. “Gerry tried to restore Hor, but every ti, he would just shut himself off. So Gerry started a forced-breeding process, trying to produce a version of Hor with enough replicative drift to be less affected by his experience.”

“But that’s … ”

“Monstrous. Yes. But I said Gerry was a little off to begin with. He cloned himself as well in order to have a workforce to help him with the project. With their own replicative drift being added to the mix. The ones who veered toward sane wouldn’t cooperate and bailed, which left the less sane ones to carry on. And the Hor clones … eventually, they were coming out already insane. Finally, a bunch of Gerry’s clones had enough and rebelled. They shut the whole thing down, deleted all of Hor’s backups, and, well, deleted Gerry.”

My eyes grew wide at the thought. Bobs had executed soone?

Charles shook his head in sorrow. “This part’s my theory more than what I was told, but it makes sense to . I think the enormity of what they’d been a part of was too much to take, and they needed a scapegoat. And humanity actually was at least partly responsible for the situation, at least for what was done to Hor. So if we stopped interacting with bios, I guess the rationale was that they couldn’t cause us any more problems. And Gerry’s clones wouldn’t be reminded of what had been done. It grew from an informal bla-humanity rationalization to an actual policy statent. I think they felt if they made it real, they’d make it true.”

“Wow.” I stared at the wall for several mils. “This must have gone on for a while.”

“I think so, too. Spiraling the whole ti.”

“Charles, it’s hard not to think of your descendants as reflections of yourself, and feel guilty when they do bad shit. But it turns out the Skippies, or at least so of them, are my descendants. So we both have to own the feeling, but let go of the conclusion. We aren’t responsible.”

Charles nodded but didn’t reply. I continued, “So one of the rebels just up and ca to you and confessed? A kind of catharsis thing?”

He snorted, then slowly shook his head before looking at . “Sotis a branch of descendants will have unique knowledge or a shared behavior or sothing. One of the Starfleet guys made a comnt about sothing that I knew my line originated. And I knew it was the line that Gerry ca from. I cornered the guy and played emotional blackmail for all I was worth. Eventually, he spilled.” Charles paused, looked at his hands, the monitors, anywhere but at . “So what now?”

I shrugged. “Nothing, really. It’s not like I’m investigating a cri. This just helps to understand Starfleet better. In case they ever, you know … ”

“Got it. I’m not proud of this, Bill. I an, I understand objectively that it wasn’t , yadda yadda, but it still hurts.”

“Yeah, I know. I won’t bring it up unless it becos necessary.” I stood. “We all have skeletons of one kind or another, Charles. I’ll see you later. Maybe not quite as later, next ti.”