“Not important. The point is, we agree the Bobs seem to have turned to various forms of navel-gazing. Gamers, Skippies, even Will with his Valhalla terraforming. They’ve become like old men with their stamp collecting!”
“There are still Bobs heading outward. Phineas, Ferb, Icarus, and Daedalus.”
“They’re running away as much is anything. I tell ya buddy, something is going on that's not healthy.”
“So you’ve changed your mind about this?”
“No. I think I maybe want to expand it some. Do more than just ferry another batch of humans to another planet.”
“Like?”
“We've got this crap ton of refined material from the Pav deal, so we don't have to stop for a long long time. Set up enough manufacturing internally so we can crank out heaven vessels assembly-line style. Populate them with AMIs like they did in the battle for Terra, and squirt them out at every system we pass by.”
“And remote control them?”
“Yeah, Neil it's called delegation.”
“Or laziness. What about the colony? If we’re sending the AMI control vessels ahead of us, we’ll know if a system has a viable candidate planet, and we can stop and set up.”
“Then continue on?”
“At least will be doing something. I'm tired of being a museum piece.”
“It’s not the most terrible idea you've ever had. Let’s talk to the Ever Onward people.”
I nodded to Neil and started composing an email. For the first time in a long long time, I was beginning to feel excited again.
11. Breaking In
Bob
October 2333
Outskirts, Eta Leporos
No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
Okay, the Snorts weren't ‘the enemy’, as such, but they were the opponent in the scenario we were executing, and the viewer count on the remote feed probably included half the Bobiverse currently in range of BobNet.
“There’s a gaggle of Boogens heading for the entrance,” Bill said.
“Should it be ‘gaggle’?” someone asked over the intercom channel. “How about murder?”
“How is that better?”
Crows or geese, either way, the argument went viral, and soon there was an actual discussion channel dedicated to the question of what unit would be used to describe a gathering of Boogens. Or maybe Booga. The question of plurals had a side discussion of its own, going. I shook my head in disbelief and chuckled. Replicative drift or not, original Bob was still very much alive in this gaggle of post-singularity replicants. Or maybe herd. Or pack.
While the name-obsessed discussion spiraled into ever more esoteric suggestions, Bill announced into the intercom, “Ballistic trajectory set. We should be able to drift right in and settle on a couple of them with minimal vector adjustment.”
“Assuming they don't pick today to change things up just for fun.”
“I'm pretty sure those are some equivalent of AMIs,” Bill replied. “They show no variability at all - strictly script-driven.”
There was a moment of silence as the cloaked drones approached within a dozen yards of the Boogens. Even the name discussion session petered out. The drones drifted in the last few yards, made a minute adjustment, and… contact.
The non-streamlined design of the Boogens allowed the much smaller drones to settle inside the Boogens skeletal frames, so that they didn't stick out. If there was some kind of automated security, it was highly likely that silhouette matching would form part of the strategy.
“Well, we appear to have been successful,” Bill said.
“Any traffic?” Will asked.
I turned to the voice. I hadn't sensed Will’s arrival. Then I remembered I was in the Moot VR, and didn't own the monitoring channel. “Just radio.” I pointed at the section of the data window that indicated radio traffic. “Packetized and either compressed or encrypted, or both. We've tentatively identified envelope and control fields, but we don't have enough context yet to spoof them, even assuming we could come up with a legitimate-looking addressing and data payload.”
“But no SCUT?”
“Nada.” I shook my head. “We’ve gotten used to… okay we HAD gotten used to everyone on Earth having the same technology, but who knows how much of that was caused by the fact that everyone was sharing knowledge.”
“Or stealing it.”
I smiled and nodded to acknowledge the point. “Sure, VEHEMENT and all that. But the Others had stuff we didn't, and vice versa.”
“And even with the Brazilians that was true. They had the cloaking thing.”
I shrugged and let the silence hang for a moment. “Yes. And to my point, the Boogens seem to be following the same pattern. More advanced in some ways, less in others. I guess in isolation, the tech tree development path isn't an inevitable march.”
“They’re going in,” Garfield said, interrupting our conversation.
Sure enough, I’d gotten wrapped up in the discussion with Will and lost track of the main event. Wow. Senior moment.
Given that it was a cylinder with a 56 mile radius, from close up the outer shell had the appearance of a flat wall. Directly ahead of the Boogens, a huge space dock stood open. Massive reinforced doors seemed to be there only for emergencies – we’d never seen the move since we began surveillance. The Boogens drifted in, small attitude jets giving occasional puffs as they corrected their individual vectors. Eventually, the crafts drifted into docking bays designed specifically for them. An army of small service bots stood ready to receive the arrivals.
After much discussion and argument, we'd settled on ‘winging it’ as a strategy. Not our finest moment, I felt. The best suggestion had been to bail the moment the Boogens docked, before any detailed examination could start. We had a good idea of what we could expect from SUDDAR scans, but there was still a large amount of risk. In these close quarters, the drones were visible, as in eyeball visible. Even with the camouflaged technology to make them appear to be part of the larger structure of the Boogens. If some kind of maintenance bot decided to take a detailed look, our geese might be cooked.
The space dock was long, but didn't penetrate deeply into the outer shell. It contained a large number of Boogen docking bays, about a third of which appear to be occupied. Other vessels of uncertain function filled differently configured bays. And in the middle of it all, small bots zip along on unknown errands, mounted on some kind of track system attached to all available surfaces. The overall effect was of a kind of organized chaos.
There were indications that this area was originally configured to support Snarks, as well. We can see sealed windowed areas that were probably control centers for some kind of operational staff. And a couple of the unidentified vessel types appeared to have hatches and viewports. Scans, however, had not shown one single trace of life. This whole operation was running on automatic.
The non-rotating outer shell was 100 yards thick, consisting mostly of some kind of friable material. It wasn't structural - it was intended to absorb meteor impacts and block radiation. But it had many embedded design details, like a rigid support frame in the docking bay for the Boogens. And the item we were most interested: the vector-matching system for getting from the non-rotating outer shell to the swiftly rotating inner shell, without being ground up like seeds in a peppermill. Getting access to what we were calling the spin-transfer system was our ultimate goal.
It must have been an interesting engineering challenge for the builders, and the solution, based on our SUDDAR scans, was genius. An elevator shaft ran through the outer shell from the cargo bay to the inner surface. Maybe elevator wasn't the right word, since with no rotation there was no artificial gravity to worry about, but it was as good a label as any.
Embedded in the inner surface of the outer shell was a magnetic rail system circling the gap between the inner and outer shell, with components attached to each shell. A container would run along the transport rail from the cargo bay, then transfer to th
e vector-matching system, and accelerate to match velocity with the rotating inner shell. At that point the container would be handed off from the outer shell to the inner, after which you would dock at one of four stations spaced equidistantly around the circumference of the inner shell.
Well, that was the theory. We haven't seen a single container actually make the trip on any of the entrance assemblies that we've been surveilling. As near as we could tell, the containers were all docked at the base of the transport rail. The Boogens didn't need to go inside, and apparently nothing inside needed to come out.
The Boogens settled onto their assigned racks and maintenance bots moved forward to perform oil changes or whatever they did. Our drones detached from the Boogens, staying as close as possible to avoid becoming free-floating silhouettes, and floated slowly along the length of the vessel. They had orders to transfer to a wall before they got to the nose area, just in case sensors were still active. We thought the Boogens were probably in maintenance mode at this point, but best not to tempt fate. In the end we were depending on the complete lack of curiosity and total single-minded focus on the task at hand that typified every AMI in existence. As far as we knew.
The Gamers, in charge of flying the drones, were frame-jacked high enough to be able to take the time to consider their actions and the possible consequences, but that also meant I'd have to jack if I wanted to communicate with them. Constant disassembly and reassembly of my VR would be too disconcerting. I decided to just remain a spectator. We could compare notes later.
Soon the drones were positioned in a small alcove created by the intersection of an airlock area and two support columns. SUDDAR scans had indicated that this would be out of line-of-sight for most of the bay. There were a number of cameras and sensors in evidence, but without tracing the circuitry, there was no way to know which ones might be surveillance of some kind, and which ones were strictly operational. We had already decided not to worry about it. There was no way to make this op completely safe, so we would learn from our failures and try again if necessary.
The drones waited for a break in activity, then scooted to the next rally point: a dead area between two different types of docking racks. They whipped around the last corner into the alcove… and almost ran right smack into a maintenance bot.
“What the hell!” Bill exclaimed. I jacked immediately, VR be damned.
“Anyone have any idea what that thing is doing here?” I said to the drone operators in general. At this clock speed they were represented only by their metadata tags, hanging in a virtual void.
One of the tags labeled ‘Randall’ replied “No, and it wasn't on the planning scans. There's nothing here, it's just a gap in the… oh.” A window popped up and spun around for all to see. “Looks like a bulkhead repair and progress.”
“Friggin’ hell,” I muttered. “It's times like this that I'm glad I don't have an actual heart to have a heart attack with.”
I returned to regular Bob time, reassembled my VR, and turned to Bill who was just moving his lips to begin whatever next sentence he had in mind. I cut in before he could get properly going.
“It's doing bulkhead repairs - complete coincidence. And were above its sensor area, so it probably hasn't noticed us.”
“Peachy,” Bill replied. “No alarms so far, anyway. We might just pull this off.”
It took several more hops by the drones, but there were no more coronary-inducing events. The drones found themselves in front of an access panel. According to our scans, this would lead to what some wit had called a jeffries tube. In theory, it should get us to the acceleration track used by the mechanism that connected the non-rotating outer shell to the rotating inner shell of the megastructure. But from that point on, there would be more ‘winging it’ involved, as not all the engineering control systems could be resolved in detail.
One of the drones released some roamers, which popped out customized screwdrivers, and attacked the attachment points on the panel. I had a moment of - I don’t know, déjà vu? nostalgia? something like that - as I noticed that the Snarks used a screw head virtually identical to a Robertson. I guess some geometry problems are universal.
The roamers couldn't re-seal the hatch properly from the inside, so once all our units entered, the roamers pulled the hatch closed and performed a small spot weld. It wouldn't hold against any kind of assault, but the point was for things to appear normal, not for us to fortify our rear. Job complete, the roamers climbed back into the drone and we continued on.
We couldn't wait around to catch a ride on the rail system, since there seemed to be no rides to catch. We certainly couldn't activate the system on our own, and even if we could figure out how to do that, it would probably attract unwelcome attention. That seemed like the kind of system that would require some high-level management involvement, if only for approvals and scheduling.
That left us with the strategy of scurrying around the innards like rodents trying to make our way to the inside of the megastructure. Which was easier than you’d think. Rodents had been finding pathways through everything humans had built for millennia. One advantage of the containers all being parked was that the ring was empty, like an elevator shaft with no elevator, and the drones had sufficient acceleration to be able to match up with the inner shell while following a circular path, so we would be able to dock on the inner shell receiving station.
It took several hours of preparation, mapping out small spaces and dodging maintenance bots, but we eventually found ourselves ready for the big step: lying from the stationary outer shell to the rotating inner shell. We decided to try out the strategy with one single drone before risking the entire squadron. There was some initial wobbling until Gandalf got the hang of it, then the drone’s path smoothed out.
The drone landed on a small maintenance platform in what I suppose I’d call the station or terminal on the inner shell, that was supposed to give the inhabitants of the topopolis access to the elevator system. I could see where the elevator containers would meet up with the pressure door, allowing passengers to go from a pressurized elevator cabin to a pressurized megastructure interior.
Up to this point, we’d been operating in vacuum. Now we’d have to figure out how to get into a shirt sleeve environment - again, without setting off any alarms. Once the entire squadron arrived, the next step was intelligence gathering. A couple of drones ejected roamers, which swarmed over the hatch system. In about 10 minutes we had a report.
“Well, the good news is that the systems are well-designed,” Gandalf said. “That means they have manual overrides, in case something goes wrong.”
“And the bad news?” I asked.
“The manual overrides have what I expect are alarm sensors, so as soon as we use them, management will know.”
“So…”
“We'll gimmick the sensors. If the door-opened sensor doesn't trip, no one will be the wiser.”
“That could take a while.”
“Yep. And some of the sensors are on the other side of bulkheads, so we have to drill through to get to them. We’ll send in the 2 mm roamers.”
“And this won't set off any alarms?”
Gandalf shook his head. “This isn't a top-secret military base, they wouldn't expect anyone to be trying to break in like this, so why would the engineer for it?”
That seemed like dubious logic, or wishful thinking. “Confidence level?”
“We scanned it, Bob. There’s just the one level of sensor security.”
I nodded, satisfied for the moment. But if alarms went off heads would be… slapped.
“Think about the scale, Bob,” Bill added, sidling up to me. “A billion miles of megastructure with doors, airlocks, passageways, restricted areas… how would you police that? You’d have to set up automated processes and trust those processes to bump alerts upstream. You want to avoid redundant signals as well, to keep the overall processing down.”
“So, kill the alerts at source and nothing happens.”
“Yep,” Gandalf said looking up from his monitor.
I'll give the Gamers there due: they were careful and methodical. It took almost half a day to defang the airlock to the point where it could be used without bringing Armageddon down on us. Finally, Gandalf gave the thumbs up, and we began manually cycling our devices through.
At one point had a thought and snorted. “It would be a helluva thing if you got this far, only to discover that the drones couldn't fit through the airlock.”
“It would indeed,” Gandalf replied with a smirk. “Which is why we checked for that during the planning stages. That is why you pay us the big bucks?”
“Assuming I paid you any bucks.”
“A valid point.” He grinned at me, then turned back to his monitor. “And this is the last load. Next stop: megastructure interior.”
Once past the airlock, our drones found themselves in a corridor leading from the spin-transfer system into presumably the main part of the station. I spent some time examining the corridor. There was much to see. Low-level lighting illuminated the area, and I could see what appeared to be traditional elevator doors at the other end. Unless you were shaped like a Krell, there were only so many ways to design corridors and doors, so it wouldn't have looked out of place in a human-based installation. Even the writing. Apparently, the need to label every damn thing was another universal. Although I couldn’t read any of it, I amused myself for a few moments by imagining Snark exhortations to “not injure one's limbs by sticking them in the crushy grindy place,” and other legally mandated warnings for idiots.
The elevators were reminiscent of any random office building on Earth. There was also, because the Snarks had some version of building codes, a set of emergency stairs. The stairs might or might not be alarmed, and the elevators might or might not alert someone when used. I hoped the Gamers had taken those possibilities into account.
“Elevators aren’t alarmed?”
“Don't know,” Gandalf replied. “Same problem as with the inter-shell rail system: we can’t tell where the signals go. But the stairs don't have door sensors.”
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