Heaven's River

by Dennis E. Taylor

  So, I found myself reluctant to commit to anything that might put me in danger until the day the interstellar relay station came online. It'd 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 came online. I mothballed the kludgy drone relay station, checked my bandwidth, and perform the long-overdue backup to Bill's monster Epsilon Eridani archive: Ultima Thule.

  I held off on updating my blog. I wanted to have something dramatic to post first. I'd been doing some 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 some kind of swarm - possibly the beginnings of a Dyson swarm, but concentrated in the ecliptic. If I was the case, and the swarm consisted of something in the order of O'Neil cylinders, it would make sense that I wouldn’t be able to make out any detail yet.

  The planet in the habitable zone, planet 2, didn't appear to be inhabited or least there wasn't any kind of radio signature. Nevertheless, I was getting something 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 someone was encrypting and compressing their communications. So, something was alive.

  It might be time to rejoin the Bobiverse… I could use some other perspectives on this.

  The blat of the air horn was answered by the traditional booing as the audience expressed their love. Bill grinned back from the podium. “Yeah yeah okay. Today's meet 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 Leporos.” This produced a silence far more profound than the earlier noise. Bender's disappearance had become the Bobiverse’s version of the Flying Dutchman legend. I waved my hand in the air and smiled as heads turned to look at me, 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 time 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 a scuttlebutt so keep it brief, then answer questions.” I gave them the same 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 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 to 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 of some random person had challenged me. This felt like a betrayal.

  “Have you ever known a Bob to go barreling in without any planning? Have you met 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 development. 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 onto 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. Prime Directive, dude.”

  I squinted at the Bob, trying to pick up his metadata. Okay, ‘squints’ isn't the right word in VR, but it feels the same. Strangely, he'd set his info to private, which struck me as intolerably rude. And that produced a moment of bemusement. Why would I do something to me that I would consider rude? I glanced at Bill who just shrugged.

  I turned back to the speaker. “Even if we have laws, dude - which we don't - the Prime Directive wouldn't be one of them. That was a plot device and unrealistic.”

  “Don't be too sure of that. Some 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. “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 the 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 gonna 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 time to take a stand. “Nice strawman, jerkoff. 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 name, 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 can talk one-on-one, and that was fine with me. If Pissant came at me again, I’d black hole 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 me 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 yourself. The whole Archimedes business would be several emotional kicks to the crotch for anyone. But you’re missing things. The Bobiverse is evolving. We’ve got some Bob's here that are 20th generation, and more. Replicative drift is becoming significant enough that some of these Bob's really only look like you, and for that matter, there’s a lot more playing around with appearance, and I don't just mean facial hair. A half-dozen or so Bobs have started walking around as full-time Borg.”

  Bill appeared momentarily embarrassed, then invoked a Cone of Silence over us. That was jarring to me. 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 times we’ll run into a descendant who thinks the ends justify the means. You know?”

  I nodded and sent a text to Guppy to do just that, and immediately. “So what about Howard and Bridget?” I asked, more or less changing the subject. “And Henry Roberts?”

  Neither Bridget nor Henry is cloned. In the former case, that has produced a lot of disappointment and some 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 your 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 time, ship and all. He says there wasn't much point anyway. If you’re gonna sail, you should be sailing to something.” Poseidon, well, yeah. All ocean, no something. “Bridget and Howard continue to catalog all life in the cosmos,” Bill continu
ed with a smile, “despite you know the infamous Prometheus expedition.”

  I shook my head. “Well, they’re never bored, anyway.” I hesitated, not sure how to continue. A couple Bobs came over, detected the Cone of Silence, and veered off to find other conversational partners, or possibly just a beverage. Finally, I decided to try to beat around the bush with Bill was pointless.

  “So getting back to replicative drift, what was with the nameless 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. Bob are forming groups, and some 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 a Casimir power source, we don't need…”

  “… the central star for power, yeah. But heat management is heat management, and a gravity well is handy for keeping things organized. My understanding is that they’re building it around a grey dwarf. Anyway, I'm more concerned about them creating something straight out of a Vernor Vinge novel.”

  “Or Lovecraft.”

  Bill chuckled and dismiss 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 someone 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. 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 open my eyes to find myself on an outdoor deck looking up at the sky more of a mauve than blue. Hanging in the middle of the expanse was Asgard, looking perhaps three times the size of Earth from Luna. Will was sitting on an Adirondack chair, holding a coffee and grinning at me. 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 get if you simply stop shaving.

  The Manny, so called because the early models had resembled department store mannequins, was dressed in something 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 some 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 felt the need to distance myself from the old Riker persona for a lot of reasons. One of which is that I have a hard time getting people to stop coming to me 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 message.”

  “So how is the retired life?”

  “Retired just means I don’t have a job description. And I can work on what I want now. I’ve been spending most of my time on the terraforming of Valhalla and some 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 environment 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. Warmer, 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 fractionaters, but yeah, I heard about your face off with Morlock.”

  “Morlock? He named himself Morlock?”

  “Nah, he named himself Jeremy, which might be coincidence or might be a subtle nod to that Time Machine remake, but he goes by Morlock these days.”

  Will raised an eyebrow at me, inviting comment. 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 15 generation or so, then the drift begins to accelerate. We haven't had any out-and-out psycho yet, but we've definitely got some 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 message 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 re-racking the Manny, and promised to explain later.

  “What's going on?” I said to Guppy.

  “Telemetry 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 meaningful way. The third though, took a glancing blow or near miss or something - 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 5 o'clock and unleashed some kind of attack. They were about 20 feet long, most likely automated, and clearly not intended for atmosphere. A skeletal structure composed of girders or beams formed the base shape onto which were bolted various pieces of equipment with no concession to style. What had to be beam weapons were bolted onto opposite corners, and communication dishes took up the space at 90° 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 confirmed the beam weapon hypothesis.

  “Lasers. Interesting choice. Not generally a good combat weapon.” I stared at the window for a moment longer, then closed it. “Guppy, why didn’t the scouts detect their appr
oach?”

  “SUDDAR was concentrated forward in order to resolve the Bussard trail which had been defused by in the system gravitational effects.”

  “Okay, fair enough. In interstellar space, the trail would be virtually undisturbed for centuries. Not so much once he got inside the heliopause. We didn't get a SUDDAR pulse from them?”

  “Negative. Telemetry from the last scout detected radar pulses.”

  “Radar? They used radar? Who uses radar these days?”

  “Apparently, they do.”

  I glared at Guppy, and not for the first time made a note to do some black box testing on him. Sarcasm required self-awareness, and not one had a buster drone ever given me this backtalk. Still, the basic facts remained, and shone a light on something that I mostly managed to forget: I was not a military thinker. I’d gotten too comfortable after successfully dealing with Medeiros and the Others, and had behaved stereotypically. And got my butt handed to me. It was time to resurrect some of that good old-time 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 something other than flotsam. And I didn't know the proper response, so no real help there. In fact, if we'd responded, it would've alerted whoever that there was someone else in the system, which might also be a bad thing, just ask Hal.