***
“So now what, Will?” Julia was surrounded by several members of her family in the video window. Conversations with the famous ancestor had become a regular thing at the Hendricks household. There were always people entering and exiting the video window. I didn’t mind at all. The sight of my sister’s descendants made me feel real, much more than the VR could. Knowing that a piece of me had lived on was satisfying on a level that I couldn’t come up with words to describe. It might not be quite like being a parent or grandparent, but it would certainly do as a next-best.
I popped up an inset list. “System tests, integration tests, stress tests, and finally a shakedown cruise. Stuff happens, of course, but it should be pretty routine.”
“And the third ship?”
Naturally, Julia was interested in that one. She and her family would all be on Exodus-3, along with the Spits group. I had wrung that promise from Cranston before agreeing to his proposal. There was no reason for him to renege. The three hundred or so people who couldn’t fit on the third ship would be the first onto the fourth, and were guaranteed established homes when they arrived in Omicron2 Eridani. Cranston had asked for volunteers, and surprisingly, he’d gotten them. I guess some people are happy to skip the hard work part.
Julia sighed and smiled at me. “Before you arrived, there was a general feeling that we might be the last generation of humanity. Some people were saying it was selfish to have more children. I’m glad it didn’t turn out that way.” She hugged her son, Justin, one of the newest members of Clan Bob, sitting on her lap.
Justin had no idea what was going on. But the pictures were pretty, and he loved his uncle William. I made a face at him and he laughed. Justin Hendriks, Space Cadet.
Bob – July 2166 – Delta Eridani
The day finally arrived when we reached the area of the flint site. The former camp was at the top of a rise that stuck up out of the general forest level. On Earth, a castle would have been built there. From my earlier survey, I knew that it commanded a view of the forest for miles in every direction, right out to mountains and hills on the horizon. The site was rocky and bare but had a depression at the base of a rock shelf that formed a natural sheltered area. Several rock pools formed natural reservoirs, filled by the frequent rains. A central mesa rose from the shelf like the conning tower of a submarine.
It was in fact, such a naturally ideal site that conversations kept coming around to why it had been abandoned.
“Don’t know,” was all we got from most of the elders. Moses commented that he only remembered his parents being very scared. He thought—and it seemed likely—that the place had been overrun by gorilloids. One of the other elders, I noticed, didn’t seem comfortable with that explanation. I resolved to talk to him later.
I directed the drones to do a quick survey to a mile in radius, looking for gorilloids. The results were chilling. This appeared to be a gorilloid preserve or something. The damned things were everywhere. But why? With no Deltans to eat, this felt like a badly laid out D&D scenario.
The answer wasn’t long in coming. I hadn’t really done much in the way of biological analysis or investigation since I’d discovered the Deltans, and I guess this was my comeuppance for that oversight. The gorilloids were omnivores. The vegetation on this side included a tree with nutritious seedpods, the gorilloid’s primary staple. The pods were tough to get to and tough to open, which explained the size and strength of the animals.
And if the biochemistry of Eden followed that of Earth, the pods would be incomplete protein sources. So what has lots of protein? Deltans, of course.
That looked like the explanation. The seedpods were more than plentiful enough to supply a large population of gorilloids, but the beasts would be crazy attracted to protein sources. And I’d just marched a couple of hundred bundles of protein right into the middle of them. Great.
But there was still something about the gorilloid population that didn’t add up…
Without warning, a couple of loud booms reverberated through the forest.
[Two gorilloids approached within proscribed distance and were neutralized]
“Thanks, Guppy. Good job.”
I didn’t want any surprises, so I’d instructed Guppy to busterize any gorilloid that strayed within a hundred meters of the Deltans. The Deltans were quite used to the sonic booms now and only looked up to check for more gorilloids. But drone sensors showed gorilloids leaving the area in a hurry.
“Arnold, we need to get into a defensible position.”
Arnold nodded to the drone, then turned and started yelling orders. Deltans moved with alacrity toward the bluff. Outriders on guard brandished the biggest and best spears.
***
The Deltans settled in without difficulty. There were old firepits, cleared-off sleeping areas, and even piled up rocks usable for building small walls. Arnold set up sentries immediately and asked me about the distribution of local gorilloids. He didn’t look like he liked my answer. Couldn’t really blame him.
The moment their luggage hit the ground, Archimedes and Moses headed off for an area that Moses pointed to. The ACME Axe and Spearhead Manufacturing Company Unincorporated was about to be launched. I assigned a drone and a couple of busters to shadow them.
“Well, are we going to do a culling?” Marvin’s expression indicated pretty clearly what he thought of the idea.
“Naw. You’re right. We need a long-term solution, which involves gorilloids learning to avoid this area, and teaching their young to avoid it as well. I’ll keep the buster AMIs on sentry duty, and we’ll just take out any gorilloid that comes too close. They’ll eventually make the connection.”
“And the tribe will learn to expect the protection of the bawbe.” Marvin laughed, but I sensed an edge to his humor. I directed a raised eyebrow his way.
“Have a look, boss-man,” he said and pulled up video output from one of the drones.
In a corner of the flint site, some Deltans had carefully arranged pieces of a buster and had placed small torches around them.
My eyes widened. “That’s…”
“An altar. Yep. All hail the bawbe!”
Bill - March 2167 - Epsilon Eridani
The orbital schematic display laid it all out, and I didn’t like the message.
I looked over at Guppy. No help there. Admiral Ackbar stared back at me, blank fishy expression revealing nothing.
“Can we still save the iceberg?”
[Probability greater than 50%. However, we may not be able to save the asteroid-moving equipment]
I rubbed my forehead, and tried not to swear. “Okay, Guppy. You take care of the course corrections. I’ll set up a script for the drones for retrieval of the drive. Maybe we can cut some corners.”
The iceberg coming up on Ragnarök was one of the biggest we’d found so far in the Kuiper Belt. This particular piece of ice had come in a little off course, and we were going to have to run the asteroid drive at maximum until the very last moment to get it into the proper trajectory. I didn’t want to fumble it and have the berg sail off into the sun. Or worse, impact the planet at speed.
Guppy began applying course corrections, with the changes registering on the schematic in real time. I watched the display absently, while I weighed my options. If necessary, I was prepared to let the drive go down with the iceberg and just build a new one. For a smaller chunk of ice, I’d have just shrugged and let it sail on past the planet, but this baby was huge. I could lose every other incoming chunk for the next six months while I built a new drive, and still come out ahead.
But if I lost the drive, I’d have no control over the pieces following this one. If one came in dead center, I would have to watch it go splat.
We were shepherding chunks of ice from the Kuiper belt, spaced about a week apart. Garfield found them and sent them inwards using his asteroid-moving drive, and I caught them at this end with mine. In another ten years, we would have dropped enough ice on Ragnarök to con
nect its small seas into actual oceans. My long-term plan was to make the planet fit for humanity to colonize.
[Coming up on alignment. Two minutes to shutdown]
“Thanks, Guppy. How much time will I have to get the drive off the berg?”
[650 seconds]
Wow, that was tight. I reviewed the script that I’d written for the drones. Twelve minutes required for a clean retrieval. That was with some wiggle room, but still…
There were twelve separate structures that had to be released from their anchors and flown off the interplanetary iceberg before it hit atmosphere. I’d already written off the anchors – they would take far too long to extract. Hopefully they wouldn’t do too much damage when they hit the ground.
Garfield popped into my VR. “How’s it looking, Bill?”
He was watching the whole drama unfold, and thankfully hadn’t tried kibitzing. There wasn’t anything he could do, anyway, from his location in the outer system. Twice the number of drones wouldn’t have been enough to save all the equipment.
I grinned at him. “Just another day at the office. Nothing to see here. Move along…”
[Shutdown. Begin retrieval]
I ordered the drones to start the retrieval process. From here on, it was up to the AMI artificial intelligences controlling the drones. All I could do was stay out of their way and not joggle their elbows. Either they’d save the equipment, or Ragnarök would have some new craters.
Six hundred and fifty seconds later, the ice asteroid hit atmosphere. We were out of time. If the berg was left to itself, it would skip through the upper atmosphere and sail on into the sunset. Quite literally. Instead, I activated a number of explosive devices, and the iceberg fractured into a huge number of chunks, small enough to be melted before they made it through the layer of atmosphere. As the air dragged at them, they separated into diverging trajectories. They would all melt at high altitude, and fall to the ground as rain over the next several days to weeks.
Except for a bunch of anchors, and two drive segments, which would suffer a slightly different fate. Nuts.
I looked at Garfield and shrugged.
“Well, I did warn you that could happen. Far be it for me to say I told you so…”
“No, of course not.” I grimaced at the video. “The next chunk of ice is due in a week. It’s going to go splat, I’m afraid. Nothing we can do about that one, but if you can fly a couple of segments here ASAP, I can catch the ones after that.”
“And then build some spares?”
“Short term, yes. Longer term, Garfield, the whole anchoring thing bugs me. Slows down the installation, slows down the removal. Something was bound to go wrong, eventually. I’ve been thinking of ways to do this without actual ground contact.”
Garfield looked surprised. “Seriously? Like, just position the segments in orbit around the ice chunk?”
“Mmm, hmm. It would require two separate drive channels, but there’s nothing wrong in principle with the idea. It would speed things up a lot. And I need a break from the Android project. Working the bugs out of that thing has become a game of Whack-a-Mole.”
Garfield laughed. “Okay, old man. I’ll pull a couple of segments and head them your way.”
***
Despite my comment to Garfield, as soon as I had parked the surviving drive segments, I opened up my Android Project file. A video window opened up, showing my current prototype, located over on one of the orbiting labs.
The android was currently powered down and draped on the support rack. Bullwinkle was a quadruped design, about the size of a moose, and every bit as pretty. The external comms array on its head was strangely reminiscent of a famous pair of antlers. Probably not coincidence. Did I mention I’m not very mature?
This was Bullwinkle version five kajillion or something. The basic concepts weren’t that difficult. Artificial skeleton, made from carbon fiber matrix, muscles made from memory plastics that would contract when a current was applied, and sensors to replicate the normal five senses. Package the whole thing up with a remote control system, and a replicant—like yours truly—should be able to control it as if it was my own body.
Well, that was the theory. Getting it working was an ongoing exercise in frustration.
Bullwinkle was working fine, mechanically. The problem was with senses, reflexes, and communications. Wiring for touch, heat, and cold sensitivity required micro precision akin to neurosurgery. Printers could only help so much. And the more of the contextual processing I built into Bullwinkle, the bigger the required local computer system. The more of it I designed to be handled remotely, the greater the required bandwidth. And the more that light-speed latency screwed things up. FTL communications would alleviate that, but I was still nowhere near making a SCUT small enough to fit into the moose.
I ultimately wanted controlling the android to be an immersive experience. I wanted to feel myself running across the ground. I wanted to feel heat and cold and touch, and the wind on my face. This was a far cry from controlling a drone or buster, which was more like playing a video game. I was ninety percent there, but the last ten percent was turning out to be a real PITA.
With a sigh, I closed the folder, and re-opened the asteroid-mover project. Back to work.
Mario – August 2169 – Beta Hydri
Beta Hydri was 23.4 light years from Sol. Rather than argue and compete with the other new Bobs for the closer candidate stars, I had decided to head for the far reaches. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” and all that Melvillish stuff. By the time everyone else worked their way out to this point, I hoped to have a working space station declaring, “Mario was here.”
And let’s face it, I really didn’t want to be around the other Bobs. It still amazed me how oblivious they were to the differences between each clone. It was creepy—Not enough variation to make them separate people, but enough to give them different opinions. It was like seeing myself with brain damage. And yeah, Bob-1 had set the rule about senior Bob being in charge, but I didn’t see that holding for long. Original Bob had never been much of a follower.
Well, whatever. I was here, they were there, and I liked it that way. Time to explore my domain.
I dropped into the system, decelerating at a leisurely 2 g. I could have come in a lot hotter, but on the off-chance that there was a Medeiros here, I didn’t want him to know what I had under my hood. He’d see the 2 g, a fraction of the output of my heavily shielded reactor, and he’d get cocky. I hoped. I really wanted a chance to meet up and hand him another ass-whupping. I had a couple of busters with his name on them. No, really. There wasn’t a lot to do between systems, so I’d had the roamers stencil his name on a couple of busters.
So far, though, there didn’t seem to be anything Brazilian in the neighborhood. Actually, there didn’t seem to be much of anything. It was a large, well-filled-out system, but so far, I’d found no metal ore. Seriously, nothing. This star’s spectral lines showed about two-thirds Sol’s metallicity. Generally, the composition of the system would follow the composition of the parent star.
Hands behind my back, I walked around the balcony of my tree house, enjoying the view and the thousand-meter drop to the forest floor. This forest had never existed except in literature, and even there, it was an amalgam of a lot of different books. Mostly it was from Foster’s Midworld, but I’d thinned things out so there were good lines-of-sight. I’d added lots of earth-birds and deleted any large, hungry, dragony things.
I raised an eyebrow at Guppy. “Got an opinion?”
[Above my pay grade]
I chuckled. The version-2 Heavens had more core and memory space than Bob-1 had started out with. Guppy had a lot of room to expand in the standard design, and I’d given him even more. He was becoming a person in his own right. He was acerbic and flip, just this side of insolent. I loved it. And, of course, he wasn’t a Bob clone.
“Okay, wise guy. Got an analysis?”
[Those I have. Analysis: there’s no metal]
[No, but I note that all of the other elements are within expected ratios. Only metals are missing. And completely so]
And that was just not possible, not by any known theory of stellar or planetary formation. Guppy blinked once and turned to face me. I knew what was coming.
[Someone else was here first]
“Dammit. Medeiros. But shouldn’t there still be an autofactory around?”
I cut off what I was about to say and thought for a few seconds. Something was fishy with that theory, beside the originator.
“Hold on. How much ore are we talking about? Based on how much we think this system should have, how long would it take Medeiros to turn it all into cute little Medeiri?”
Guppy thought for a moment. Or calculated. Whatever.
[1,732 years. Give or take]
“So we can rule that out. We’ve only come twenty-odd light years. And he would have had to travel for the same amount of time.” I was belaboring the obvious, and I knew it, but I’d always found that talking something out helped to work through it in my mind.
[That does represent a flaw in the theory]
“Ya think?” I pointed to the inner planets on the system schematic. “We may end up having to do some planetary mining. Let’s go take a look at some of the rocky planets and see what’s available.”
[Your wish is my command]
We took a few days to get to the fourth planet—I still didn’t want to show all my cards in case someone was watching. GL19-4 was a brown ball of mud with gray oceans and a thick, murky atmosphere. It looked like the result of a lot of volcanic activity, but I didn’t see any immediate candidates in the way of rings or chains of volcanoes.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) Page 27