“That's just a rumor, I don't know of anyone who’s met her. But really that's inevitable too.”
I sighed and considered doing a reset and dismissing the hangover. It had served its purpose, whatever deep psychological need for self-flagellation was involved, but now my curiosity was up. “This feels pretty real. Verisimilitude in VR - er, ‘virt’ - has really been improving.”
“Part of that's the Mannys, of course,” Will said from across the room, where he was nursing a soft drink. “Once we started experiencing things in real again, we realized how granular and synthetic the virt experience actually was.”
It helped that humanity was back on its feet by then. We had actual experts to ask about some of the finer points.
Bill waived his cup and a vague out-there gesture. “Like Bridget, for instance. She's ferociously competent in the biological sciences and naturally highly motivated now, to help with the improvements. And with SUDDAR scans, we can accurately map how the human body and brain respond to various stimuli like taste and other senses.”
“And hangovers,” I grinned, then winced again. “She and Howard live almost full-time in real, right?”
“Yep, and raising kids as well. I’ve lost count of how many they've adopted over the years.”
“Well, here’s something to chew on,” Garfield said. He'd been silent up to this point, so we all turned to him. “It’s important if you want to maintain perspective on your place in the cosmos.” He paused for dramatic effect. “As replicants, we never get tired. We have near-perfect memory. We can process hundreds of times faster than humans. And we have instant access all the information available in our archives. But we aren't any smarter than original Bob was. And reading about something isn't the same as being trained in it. You can't become a doctor by reading Grey's Anatomy, for instance. Or watching it.”
I frowned. “Okay, I get that in principle but how is it important?”
“We can't do everything ourselves. For instance, without Bridget, the androids wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced as they are. We've improved our weapons by talking to military types…”
“Or stealing from them,” I interjected.
Garfield glared at me for the interruption. “We’ve become a sort of society unto ourselves, but for the most part we’re still doing the things original Bob was interested in. We’re a monoculture - specialists. And that's not healthy.”
“So you're saying…” Bill raised an eyebrow at him.
“That I'm not sure replicative drift is a bad thing. Necessarily.”
“Gah. I don't trust some of the new replicants,” Bill said.
“Nor should you. They’re different people. But the Bobiverse needs to be robust enough to handle a society where not everyone's priorities align. Sure, we need to be more worried about security and such. How is that different from locking your house or your car though?”
“That does it,” I said. “This conversation is incompatible with a hangover.” I did a reset and felt better immediately. “Does this mean we’d accept other humans as well?”
Bill shrugged. “We've always been willing to do that, but we’ve got no takers. At least none have decided to deal directly with us. Those that have chosen to go with replication signed with companies that offer shared processing in a large computer facility. The bigger the monthly fee, the more processing power and extras you get. There are options, like Manny connection ability, and even premium Manny models available only to the highest-paying clients. Most of them though are just spending thereafter lives engaged in full-time virt.”
“That doesn't make sense. This is… freedom. The best kind of freedom, where you can do what you want with no reliance on anyone else.”
“Not really, Bob. That sounds good to a loner like original Bob, but to a lot of people it would be the opposite of attractive. Among other things, self-reliance means having to be responsible for everything yourself. Much easier to just pay someone to take care of the details, if you have the money. And remember, this is immortality for a copy of you, at the expense of permanently destroying original you.” Bill paused, then shrugged in dismissal. “On the other hand, there has been a lot of interest in postmortem corpsicle storage in real, and in fact, companies have been springing up all over the colonies offering to warehouse people after death, just like with original Bob. Except now, they use stasis pods, so there's nothing irreversible about it. And they’re doing a booming business.”
“Because when you come back, it'll be original you.”
“Yeah much more attractive option.” Will sighed. “Except for people like Justin, who have a religious objection.”
We commiserated in silence for a mil. As the face of Bob, Will had been especially close with our relatives for decades. Julia's death, and her son Justin's, had hit him every bit as hard as Homer’s.
Bill continued. “And it doesn't help that for years we were rushing all over the galaxy saving humanity’s butt, dying in space wars, and generally acting as dragon fodder. The idea of being a replicant never really recovered from the negative perception of ending up as a disposable servant.”
Garfield pointed a finger at me by way of emphasis. “Don't forget too, that the governments of the day were characterizing replicants as non-human copies. Automata. No rights and so forth. A lot of that stuck.”
I nodded. “And are they bringing any back? The corpsicles, I mean.”
“Yes. A significant number have been revived when their condition became curable, thanks in large part to Howard and Bridget's cancer foundation. Most of the remaining corpsicles are up against the limits of gerontology. They still haven't conquered aging. At some point, replacing cloned organs becomes a game of whack-a-mole. And when the brain starts going, well, there is no longer any point.
“Then there are the other Bobiverse projects. The Skippies’ singularity project makes a certain amount of sense, but some of the others?” I paused. “Silkies? Like Van Vogt’s Silkies? Jaegers? Space dragons?”
Garfield laughed. “Remember when Marvin was trying to replicate the setting for every book he’d ever read in VR? Turns out he was thinking too small. The groups you're talking about are trying to replace our standard spaceship holes was something more, eh, imaginative. We've been making glib comments about being homo-siberia now. I guess some Bobs have taken the concept and run with it.”
Bill grinned. “I've subscribed to their blogs. It's harmless stuff. The singularity project may be slightly less. Starfleet a LOT less so, especially if they decide to do more than just talk.”
This last comment cast a pall on what had been a very interesting conversation, and an uneasy silence reigned for several mils.
I finished my coffee with a final gulp. Time to get down to business. “Very interesting, but speaking of interesting, there's the small matter of a megastructure or something to look at, shall we?”
“Here here,” Bill said, and I transferred us all to the control room. In virt it was nothing but a change of visuals, but original Bob had always been obsessive about detail, and we early generation replicants share that attitude. The control room had wall screens and consoles with a very science-fiction spaceship-ish tone. The only proper venue for exploring a new stellar system.
“So, what do we have?” Bill said, stepping up to the holotank.
“The ballistic scouts will have completed their sweep through the inner system, and we should have a complete picture,” I said. “System plants first, Guppy.”
Bill, Will, and Garfield all glared at me in tandem. I was stalling. They knew it, I knew they knew it, and so on, but my VR, my rules.
The holotank showed six planets, consisting of three gas giants farther out and three rocky planets considerably farther in, with one in the habitable zone. The large gap between planets two and three was glaringly obvious.
“That spacing doesn't look natural,” Bill said.
I nodded. Way too asymmetrical. Either planets had been moved to make room for the
megastructure, or planets are missing.
“The Boogen-makers will most likely have originated from the second planet,” Will said. “What do we have?”
“No chlorophyll lines. Minimal oxygen lines. No radio traffic. No indication of organics at all.”
We turned to stare at Guppy. The last time we've seen a planet with those characteristics, it'd been Pav. Afterward.
“The Others? Isn’t this outside their range?”
“Others attack is unlikely. SUDDAR readings indicate significant metal concentrations.”
“Good. If the Others had hit this system, the metals would've been mined out. Let’s finish looking at what we've got. Then, unless there's a good reason otherwise, I'll send some scouts in, under-powered, to get a close-up look.”
I turned to Guppy. “Smaller bodies?”
“None. This system has been swept clean.”
“What, not even moons?”
“No moons.”
“Wow,” Bill said. “Someone has been busy.”
“Let’s set that question aside as well,” Will said. “Right now, we have two options. One: we can look at the megastructure data, or tow: we can beat the crap out of Bob.”
“Can we do both?” Bill asked.
I grinned at them. “My money's on a Dyson swarm.”
“Pretty thin one,” Bill said. “No solar shading at all.”
“Beat. The. Crap.” Will growled.
I laughed. “And now, the moment we've all been waiting for.” I nodded to Guppy, and he updated the holoimage.
We stared for what might have been entire seconds.
Finally, Will said “What the actual fuck?”
Bill flickered for a moment as a frame-jacked probably checking the archives. He was back before I could react. “Topopolis.”
“It looks like… spaghetti,” Will said. “Or a wire sculpture.”
I checked the schematic on the monitor. “That is one continuous cylinder, 56 miles in radius, stretching three times around the star, wound around itself in a sort of helical shape.”
“Torus knot,” Bill interjected.
“How is that even possible,” Will asked, ignoring Bill’s correction.
Bill shrugged. “It was discussed back on Earth, in original Bob's time. There’s relatively little information on the concept. Apparently, it wasn't as popular as O'Neil cylinders, Stanford tori, and Bishop rings, but it doesn't require particularly advanced technology. Just large-scale effort and brute force engineering.”
“What about gravity?”
“It's essentially an O'Neil cylinder, millions of miles long. It spins around the minor radius to generate artificial gravity.”
“But it's CURVED.”
Bill smiled at Will’s outraged complaint. “Think about the scale, bud. if the strand has a mile of bend for every million miles of length, you wouldn't even have to put in expansion joints. That's less than a 10th of an inch flex over each mile of length. The structure would flex less than the Golden gate Bridge when a single pedestrian walks across it.”
“But where would they get the material - ohhhhh.” Will nodded. “Missing planets.”
“On the grand scale of things,” Bill mused, “this is less impressive than what the Others were trying to do. Except the Boogen makers didn't invade other systems to get materials.”
“We don't think,” I said, glancing at Bill. “I haven’t exactly done a survey.”
“If they don't have subspace and SURGE drives, it seems unlikely,” he replied. “But that's another question in abeyance until we have more information. So what's our next step?”
“Good question,” I said. “This shoots down my earlier plan to just scan the Boogen’s home base for Bender’s matrix. We can't scan over a billion miles of complex structure looking for one individual cube of optoelectronics while dodging Boogen attacks. Especially if the Boogen makers use optoelectronics for their own stuff. It'd be like looking for a specific needle in a haystack, where the haystack is all needles.”
“Yep. Okay, we’ll have to be a little more deliberate with our approach. First, we need to gather information.” I ticked off items on my fingers. “We want a close-up look at the planet. We want a close-up look at the megastructure overall. And we want a scan of the interior detail. And we want to not get blown up.”
“That too,” Bill snapped his fingers. “Speaking of military technology…”
“Which we weren't.”
Bill glared at me. “I've been working on a variant of something I got from the USC. It's a fractal surface that absorbs 99% of radiation that hits it and re-radiates it as infrared.”
“Great for radar, not so good for infrared.”
“But we have your heatsink idea. Get rid of the heat that way instead.”
“Hmm,” I nodded. “Under power, we'd have a limited time before the heatsink failed, we’d have to choreograph this very tightly. Yep, so, dress up a cargo drone in this fractal surface, complete with heatsink. Fly to planet Boogen, drop off some planetary exploration drones, accelerate for the outer system, and hope to make it out before the heatsink is saturated. Do the same with some high-res drones and drop them off near the structure.”
I glanced around the room. No argument was forthcoming.
“One last thing. We need more information on topopolises. Uh, topopoli? Topopoleise? Maybe there’s a human expert on the subject of megastructures, can someone look into that?”
“I can do that,” said Will, and he popped out.
Bill stood. “I'll get the fractal surface details to you.” He popped out.
“I’ll work out the drone design,” said Garfield, and he popped out as well.
“I'll have another coffee,” I said to the empty room.
The autofactory drones have been locating and retrieving raw materials from the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud for a couple of years now, so logistics were no longer quite as much of a limiting factor. Bill and Garfield had their info to me within hours, and soon I had my auto factory churning out modified drones at full speed. Still, there were some significant mods, and the fractal camouflage was a pain to get right, but a week later I had all my spy devices ready. I double checked the calculations, sacrificed a coffee and let fly.
“Now we wait,” said Bill.
“Like we haven't been doing that for the last forever or so,” Garfield grumbled.
7. Looking Forward
Will
June 2333
Virt
The search for information on topopolees turned out to be one of those good-news bad-news things. Good news: I’d found an expert. Bad news: he was dead. Good news: he’d arranged to be replicated. Bad news: he’d gone right back to work and was really hard to get hold of.
The whole Keystone Cops act would be giving me a headache if I were still subject to such things, so I decided to take a break and do some work on the personal side project I had going. I pinged Conan and popped over as soon as I received a response. Conan was the current Bob rep in the Omicron2 Eridani system. It hadn't been a heavy labor position for a long time - Vulcan and Romulus having long ago become independent of our help. But we always maintained a physical presence, for our family’s sake if nothing else.
I looked around as I settled in. Conan appeared to have replicated the Vulcan jungle with his home in a tree house. I smiled to myself. I knew enough about Vulcan's wildlife to realize this was completely unworkable in real life. Even without the now extinct Cupid bugs, there was still more than enough variety of the bad kind in the wild to kill any human dumb enough to be out without an exosuit.
Conan saluted me with a can of Coke. I sat in the nearest chair and, there being no Jeeves in view, invoked my own can.
“What can I do for you, oh great ancestor?” Conan said.
“Are you one of mine?” I replied, and he nodded. Ancestry had never been a big deal in the Bobiverse, but with all the fragmenting lately, people were starting to pay more attention to chains of instan
tiation, with an eye to cataloging behavioral DNA. As with a lot of Bob projects, it was ad hoc and casual.
“I’m concerned about the family, Conan. FAITH has been getting more influential on Romulus the last couple of decades, and that can't be anything but bad news.”
“I get it, Will, but a lot of people like the sense of certainty that religion gives them, and faith is all about nice easily packaged black and white answers, even if they're factually wrong.”
I waved a hand in dismissal. “I frankly don't care what the justification is. I want our family out from under. We’ve seen the rise of the far right too many times in the last half millennium to not recognize the signs.”
“Okay. And?”
“I the small side project going on. I want to set up a society with an innocuous name like Outward Bound or something, for people who want to emigrate from this system. If you have the time, I'm hoping you'll take care the set up and admin.”
Conan grinned. “This hasn't exactly been a pressure cooker job. Howard started divesting us of responsibility as soon as he could, and we’ve continued with that tradition. I'm more like a local ambassador than anything.”
“How’s that working out lately?”
“Yeeeaahh, I'm curtailing my appearances these days.” Conan made a deprecating gesture. “Bobs are not their favorite people, even on Vulcan. Never mind Romulus. So as it happens, I have lots of free time. Any specifics?”
“Nothing complex. We just need a legally incorporated society, no special requirements, board of directors, etc. I'll email my family contacts once you have it set up, then we'll go from there.
Conan nodded. “So, you're forming a prospective colonial group composed exclusively of Johansson descendants?”
“Not exclusively, not even predominantly if we get enough interest. But I want as many of ours out of here as we can manage.”
“FAITH might step in. They don’t have the clout right now, but by the time you're ready to shove off…”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that, too. The constitutional guarantees, plus the original documents of agreement they signed with me back on Earth, will establish the legal requirement to let the colonists go. We need to be ready though, if they decide to go for brinkmanship. Let’s talk about in-system assets that are still Bob-controlled.”
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