But the most exciting item was a variant of a SURGE drive that could be used on large bodies. Like asteroids. Or Kuiper objects. Epsilon Eridani 2 needed about five or six hundred cubic kilometers of ice dropped on it, in order to connect the seas into oceans. I’d been mulling over how to get those Kuiper objects into the inner system. Hohmann orbits would take decades to centuries. That wasn’t necessarily a problem for me, but for humans needing a place to live, a little more alacrity might be in order.
Anyway, the planetary body SURGE drive wasn’t complicated, though it did require a lot of construction material. It occurred to me that I could use it to accelerate a chunk of ice into an orbit heading for Ragnarök, then remove the drive and fly it to another chunk. Rinse, repeat. As long as I had the drive available when flying icebergs started showing up at the tail end, I’d be golden.
I discussed the idea with Garfield. He looked skeptical.
“I understand the mechanics, Bill, but you’d better make sure that nothing goes wrong. You’re leaving yourself no wiggle room for adjustments.”
I shrugged. “Well, if I fail to catch one of the chunks on the back end, it’ll just sail past Ragnarök and probably end up in the sun.”
“If you fail to catch one, you’ll probably be failing to catch a lot of them. Why don’t you do a couple of simulations?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, Garfield. Why are you going on about this, anyway?”
“Look, Bill, you really have to stop treating me like Igor. I can do the math, too. Maybe you should take the time.”
Igor? I looked at Garfield in shock. Had I been patronizing him? I understood the reference, and the emotional undertone behind it. Something was definitely up.
“What’s going on, Igor, I mean Garfield?” I grinned at him to show I was kidding.
He returned a brief smile, acknowledging the joke. “I know Bob-1 made that rule about the senior Bob being in charge, but I’m getting tired of being a sidekick. We get a lot of stuff done here, and I’d hate to have to leave, but I think our working relationship needs some adjustment.”
I nodded, thoughtful. “I know you’ve been pestering me about some projects that you wanted added to our backlog. Is that what this is about?”
“Partly. Also, more input on the stuff we are working on. Original Bob was a bit of a lone wolf, and you tend to work the same way, expecting me to tag along. That’s not working so well for me.”
I prodded my psyche. No surprise, I was offended. But I definitely didn’t want Garfield to leave. We worked well together, and accomplished a lot more than each of us could individually. Time to suck it up.
“Okay, Gar, point taken. But don’t expect a raise.”
He laughed and waved a hand at the schematic, which had been hanging in the air, forgotten. “Good. Now, have a look at the plan, and do the math. Take the time, and consider the downside if you’re wrong.”
I nodded in thought. One of the important details of the project was that the ice chunks couldn’t be allowed to slam into Ragnarök at interplanetary speeds. They’d have to be inserted into an orbit around the planet and broken up. The ice would come down as increased rainfall for a few weeks.
I did the simulations as Garfield suggested. Turned out that having two of the drives would allow me to get all the ice to Ragnarök within twenty-five years. Now there was a plan I could get behind.
***
Garfield caught the softball—barely—and after due consideration, more or less whiffed it back to me. I cringed a little, watching him. Original Bob had never been much for sports, and even in VR we hadn’t improved on the basic model.
“You know what you throw like?” I said with a smile.
“Yeah, like you. Tell me again why we’re doing this?”
“First, it’s a good test scenario for fine-tuning the VR. Homer commented at one point that some of the physics is still a little off.” I bobbed the ball in my hand a few times. “Second, and more importantly, I think we have to do more than just sit in libraries and parks and command decks if we want to really retain our feeling of being human. I don’t want to be reduced to some Doctor Evil cliché.” I tossed the ball. “This isn’t exercise in the physical sense, but it does remind our brains what it’s like to do things.”
The return toss went way over my head and landed in the lake with a splash.
“Oops,” Garfield said with a grin.
I gave him my best glare and materialized another ball. “I might build a bunch of Bobs and field a team or two…”
“Oh jeez no. Half of them will turn Canadian and want to play hockey instead, eh.”
I laughed and tossed the new ball.
Riker – September 2164 – Sol
The two colony ships were impressive, even in their half-built state. They would feature two drive rings and a massive reactor cooling section, all necessary to move the huge central cargo section. Since the cargo would be ten thousand human beings in stasis, a significant proportion of the mass of the vessel consisted of shielding. Overall, the colony ship would have looked like a military vessel to a science fiction fan of my day, but without the phaser banks or frag cannons, of course.
One of the ships was farther along than the other—the concession to the Spits resulted in some shifting of manufacturing capability. The third ship would be ready only four months after the first two. Now we were trying to even out the construction of One and Two so that they would be ready together.
I snorted with amusement, thinking of the last couple of UN sessions. Now that the yelling was over, this was more like a project from my former life. Technical challenges and engineering issues. With the manufacturing AMIs doing all the work, I didn’t even have to worry about labor issues.
Negotiations still continued, of course, back on Earth. No one was willing to quietly go along with being scheduled “somewhere down the road.” We still had the fifteen-hundred-trip issue to deal with. We didn’t know for sure that it would be a death sentence, but there was general agreement that the climate on Earth was getting worse. If it got bad enough, starvation was a real possibility, despite all our efforts.
Homer and his crew continued to scour the system. They’d also implemented some techniques for bringing metal up from planetside. That was slow and laborious, especially given the scale of our requirements. I’d allocated a half-dozen printers to Homer—Colonel Butterworth, predictably, had screamed like a stuck pig—with instructions to bootstrap themselves up to a viable operation. So far, Homer was doing better than expected. The amount of refined metal on Earth was considerable, even after the war and subsequent bombardment. He’d already returned the printers to regular ship production, after printing up new ones.
Homer had calculated the possibilities, and gone into his “good news, bad news” comedy routine. The good news was that we could eventually build a lot more colony ships from what he estimated we could haul up from Earth. The bad news was that everyone would be long since dead.
You would think that 3D printers would have solved the scarcity problem. In fact, the technology had just moved the bottleneck. We could build more drones to extract and haul the metal out of Earth’s gravity well, or we could build colony ships, or we could build more printers in order to produce more drones and colony ships during which time we would be producing neither. The calculations to determine the optimum path were finicky and had large error bars. Even thinking about them made me grit my teeth.
The drone had reached its destination. I ordered it to establish a sideways vector, then watched the video as the colony ship’s exterior drifted by. Unfinished sections allowed drones and construction roamers access to the interior. A steady stream of laden drones entering the hull was matched by a stream of empty-clawed drones exiting. The status window revealed no current issues. The printers were keeping up with parts demand, Homer’s supply crew was keeping up with raw materials demand, and the construction crew was kept busy twenty-four-seven.
I sho
ok my head and closed the video windows. Inspection done.
***
Homer and Charles were in Earth orbit, taking a break from their outer-system patrols. We took advantage of the rare opportunity to have an all-Bobs meeting. Even without commentary from Arthur, the tone was a little gloomy. The climate of the planet continued to deteriorate, and was possibly accelerating.
“I think it’s a given that we won’t be getting fifteen million people out-system,” Homer said. “Which means we have to come up with some way to keep them alive here.”
“Triaging will help.” Charles poked a finger at his copy of the holographic globe. “Emigrate the most marginal groups first, move everyone else to the most equatorial locations.”
I shook my head. “Most of the equatorial locations aren’t habitable. Not because of climate—some of them are actually more temperate now—but because of a lack of infrastructure. Conventional bombings or falling rocks will make a city uninhabitable. Add in the problem of a lack of power and water, and you can’t just drop a bunch of people off in the jungle and expect them to survive.”
“A lot of the jungle isn’t jungle anymore,” Arthur retorted.
I grimaced in response. “I know, Arthur, but it doesn’t change the basic point. We can’t move that many people to anywhere that doesn’t have infrastructure, no matter how comfortable the climate. And I don’t see the point of building temporary infrastructure, when it’s going to delay ship-building.”
“And Butterworth will have a cow.” Charles smiled ruefully.
“Okay,” Homer interjected. “Spitballing, then. How about using space mirrors to warm up the Earth?”
I looked at him in surprise. “Not a bad idea in principle. A lot of unknowns, though, as it would be all new engineering. I think we’d need a minimum of a thousand kilometers’ radius for a mirror to have any appreciable effect. Plus, it wouldn’t do anything to clear the spreading radioactivity or repair the damaged and destroyed ecosystems, at least not within a human lifetime.”
“And Butterworth…” Charles said smiling.
“Will have a cow!” We all replied in chorus. Colonel Butterworth had become a bit of a cliché with his standard reaction to any change in plan.
Homer shrugged. He’d done the math, too. “Let’s pass it by the colonel, and see if he grabs his chest and falls over.”
“Space stations?” Charles ventured. “Same problem, though, I guess. Or moon colonies. Building all the structure and infrastructure to keep people alive in space would set the colony ships back decades. And you have to build for a population density sufficient to make a dent in the fifteen million or it’s pointless.”
I nodded, glum. I’d had all these thoughts. Not really surprising that the other Bobs had, too. But anything that we tried would detract from the ship-building. Any useful plan would need to either have negligible impact on the overall plan, or would have to produce significant enough results in a short enough time to be worthwhile.
“And the worst part,” Arthur said, “is that even if we stick to the plan as is, we probably can’t save everyone.”
I ran my hand through my hair. “We keep coming back to this. Nothing we can think of actually improves the overall prospects. I guess all we can do is keep on keeping on, and hope we stay ahead of it.” I looked around at the others. No one would meet my eyes.
Bob – January 2166 – Delta Eridani
I grinned. “A black featureless block. Dimensions one by four by nine.” I leered at Marvin.
He covered his face and shook his head vehemently.
“The strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra in the background…” I continued.
Marvin started to moan.
“As the Deltans leap about, one throws a bone into the air…” Marvin’s dropped his hands and his eyes rolled. I waited a few more seconds for effect, then relented. “So we’ll just go with the drone, then?”
Marvin pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can’t believe I’m related to you.”
I laughed and turned to the desk. “On a more realistic note, we have drones with speakers now, so we can talk to the Deltans. Honestly, I think I’ll just go straight to Archimedes rather than trying to contact an elder.”
“Oh, I agree with that. Any of the others would probably just run screeching from the area. Archimedes will be curious.”
I nodded. “So, no background music?”
“Oy.”
***
The surveillance drone showed Archimedes doing his usual patrol of the area. He varied his search from day to day, and had taken to randomly digging holes, looking for more flint. A couple of the other juveniles had accompanied him on occasion, but without any payoff, that had soon petered out.
I positioned one of the drones in a tree along his usual route. The drone camouflaged itself so that it looked like part of the tree trunk. Even if Archimedes spotted it, he wouldn’t think of it as anything but wood.
The Deltan language was far more guttural than anything humans could produce. I had set up a translation routine, so I could converse in English, without worrying about the fine details.
“Archimedes.”
Archimedes jerked, then went into a defensive crouch, looking wildly about.
“Don’t be afraid. I want to help you and your people.”
Archimedes slowly straightened up but continued to search for the source of the voice. “Who are you? Where are you?”
“I’m farther away than you can see, Archimedes. And I’m the one who destroyed the gorilloid that was attacking you. I’m also the one who brought the flint.”
Archimedes’s eyes lit up. Flint was priceless. I now had his complete attention.
“What do you want?”
I thought of all the ways I could answer that and decided to keep it simple. “I want your people to leave this place and go back to one of the old villages.”
Archimedes’ eyes went wide. “So old Moses wasn’t lying? There used to be other villages?”
“Yes, Archimedes. And some of them are better places to live than this one.”
“Some have flint?”
“Yes, and a better water supply, more food, and better defenses.”
His eyes narrowed. “If that’s so, why did we leave there? Wouldn’t that have been the place to stay?”
I turned and grinned at Marvin.
“Kid’s no fool,” he said.
“It would have been, Archimedes, but your people weren’t thinking of that at the time. Then it was too late, and they’d been driven out.”
“So, why tell me? Why not speak to the elders?”
“Would they listen to me?”
Archimedes had been searching for the source of my voice as we talked. Triumph lit up his face when he spotted the odd section of trunk.
“You are a tree?”
“No, that’s just where I am right now. Would they listen?”
He snorted. “Most of them are so stupid. They ask no questions; they have no answers. They just eat and sleep and hunt.”
I spent a few more minutes discussing it with him. He finally agreed to go talk to the village elders, although he made me promise to show a sign of some kind if it became necessary. In response, I cancelled the probe’s camouflage and floated it over to him. “How’s this?”
Archimedes went rigid and his eyes became huge, but he managed to not bolt. “That works.”
***
I watched from a distance as Archimedes talked to his elders, who sat in a semicircle facing him. It didn’t seem to be going well. Despite all his recent accomplishments and rise in status, Archimedes was still just a juvenile. Even some of the other juveniles had started to laugh and make jokes.
Finally, I’d had enough. I activated the probe and flew it over to hover above his head. The laughter and commentary cut off like a switch had been thrown.
Archimedes was no dummy. The sight of the whole village staring at a spot over his head had only one possible explanation. In a
n impressive display of natural showmanship, Archimedes didn’t look up or directly acknowledge the probe. He simply crossed his arms and looked smug.
In the background, Marvin commented, “Some things just transcend culture.”
“Or species,” I responded.
The disintegrating gorilloid was still very fresh in everyone’s mind, and the probe looked similar enough to the pieces of the buster to convince the Deltans. There was no backtalk after that. Archimedes explained to them what I’d told him. When he was done, Moses leaped to his feet and started yelling at everyone. It was pretty incoherent, but consisted mainly of variations on “I told you so.” Apparently Moses’ stories had been dismissed for years, and this was payback.
Eventually, Moses’ rant ran down, and the elders turned back to Archimedes. One of them—I decided to call him Hoffa—asked Archimedes if the floating thing would protect them from the gorilloids.
Archimedes looked up at the probe, finally acknowledging its existence. “It calls itself the bawbe.”
He looked around the circle. “It can help, but there are few of them and they are destroyed with each gorilloid they kill. They will guide, and they will help, but we must fight our own battles.”
Arnold, who had been standing outside the circle and listening, chimed in. “We fight here, or we fight somewhere else. The bawbe is right—this place is too open to defend. And I like the idea of more axes and spears.” He waved his axe around by way of emphasis, narrowly missing a few bystanders.
The argument went on for hours. Inevitably, some people wanted to stick with the status quo just because it was familiar. They fought the plan tooth and nail, even at one point suggesting that they send a party of Deltans to scout out the other location. Arnold dismissed that idea with a comment that he didn’t want to come home to a camp full of corpses.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) Page 23