“Yes.” I nodded. “The open line should run all the way back to Bill. If necessary, stop and build a relay station. Keep up a constant stream of commentary and observations and send regular differential backups. Just in case…”
Sleepy took a sip of his drink before responding. “Sounds like a plan. Although I don’t like the implications. If I get taken down, the Bob that gets restored won’t really be me.”
“What, you’re positing a soul, now? For us?” Surly, I mean Hungry, rolled his eyes. “Every time the crew of Star Trek transported, they faced the same philosophical question.”
Sleepy rolled his eyes back at Hungry in exaggerated mockery. “Again with the fictional TV series. Is that where you get all your life lessons?”
Hungry frowned. “Well, you should know, shouldn’t you?”
“Children, children. Am I going to have to separate you?” I glared around the table. “Can we focus on the planet-destroying, rampaging alien whatzits for now?”
Sleepy and Hungry both looked embarrassed. After a moment of silence, I continued. “I would also suggest that we have some kind of self-destruct capability built in. Maybe a dead-man trigger. Personally, I don’t want to have to feel myself being slowly disassembled if I get caught, and I certainly don’t want it or them to learn anything from me.”
“Wow, this is getting morbid. I don’t feel quite so negative about the backups, now.”
I chuckled. “So let’s pick our destination systems, put together a working comms link, and get this show on the road.”
14. Sabotage
Riker
December 2170
Sol
The image on the video made me curl my lip in a sneer of both contempt and disgust. Half a herd of cattle lay dead in their paddock—fifty animals, poisoned by something in the food, according to the vet. On the other video window, Ms. Sharma, UN representative for the Maldives, waited silently. She was attempting to maintain a stone face, and failing.
The slaughter represented the third act of full-blown terrorism this month. VEHEMENT was ramping up from a nuisance to a full-blown threat. This was the first time they’d taken lives, though, even if livestock. I hadn’t come out and said it, but I considered this an act of war. If I caught up with this group, and it came down to an exchange of ordnance, I wouldn’t have any ethical issues with taking some of them down. I admitted to myself that I really didn’t know if I’d be able to pull the trigger. It was one thing to talk war, it was another entirely to actually take a human life.
But I would want to. That much, I was sure of.
Food supply continued to become more critical as Earth’s climate deteriorated. Over half of the thirty-five remaining enclaves around the planet were at least partly dependent on food subsidies from our orbital farms. The Maldives were still nominally self-supporting, but this assault on their food capacity would mean we’d have to kick in, at least in the short term.
Representative Sharma finally couldn’t hold it in any longer. “This is senseless. Senseless! Cattle? What have they proven? What have they accomplished? Cowards!”
I nodded at every word. For all the bickering in the UN, the various representatives were united in their hatred and contempt for VEHEMENT. After an event like this, I could probably push through any special measure I wanted to, with little debate or opposition.
Too bad I didn’t have anything in my queue.
“This is going to hurt, Ms. Sharma. Those cattle represent a lot of high-quality calories, not to mention the breeding capacity.” I took a moment to check the herd numbers. “It’s not life-threatening, but it is damaging. I think, if the handlers hadn’t noticed the animals getting sick, we could have lost this entire herd. And that would have been devastating.”
“I will move to set up a task force at the UN meeting tomorrow,” Ms. Sharma said. “I think there’s been a general feeling up to now that if we just ignored them and didn’t give them the attention they obviously crave, that they’d go away. No longer.”
I nodded without comment. I had the pronouncement from VEHEMENT up in another video window. These people were several screws short, but there was no doubt they were deadly serious. The essential message was that humanity had made a mess of the solar system, and it was time for them to bow out and let the universe recover. And because we might be reluctant to go along, VEHEMENT was going to help us towards that goal.
Great. Violent, self-absorbed crackpots. On top of everything else.
I forwarded the missive to Homer, Charles, and Ralph, and also sent a copy on to Bill. Not that he would have any specific ideas, but I’d gotten in the habit of looping him in on everything. I smiled briefly at the thought. Universal Archives.
Homer popped in a few milliseconds later. “Number Two, I am forced to admit I’m coming up blank. These clowns trump anything I could possibly say, just by existing.”
“Yup. Just when you think humanity has found the limits of stupid, they go and ratchet up the standard by another notch.” I shook my head. “We’re going to have to modify our schedules to replace the calories that the cattle would have supplied. Got any ideas?”
Homer bobbed his head back and forth. “Could be. It’s just possible that I’ve been under-reporting production a bit, to establish a small surplus. I suppose now would be a good time to notice the error with a gasp of relief.” He grinned at me, and I smiled back. Homer was full of surprises.
That was fine for right now. But what about next time VEHEMENT struck? I had a bad feeling that it was going to get worse, rather than better.
15. A Visit From Bill
Mario
November 2180
Gliese 54
I stared in frank amazement at the header on this latest communication from Bill.
Plans for a Subspace Communications Universal Transceiver (SCUT) with zero latency.
Holy. Crap. On a cracker.
Well, the big guy had delivered. I examined the plans and attached notes. Bill was candid that this was an early version, and probably cantankerous. He also wasn’t sure about the range. Yeah, yeah, disclaimer, disclaimer. A hundred-plus years after our death and we still felt the need to lawyer at ourselves. Hmm, and keeping up the FAITH tradition of bad acronyms, too.
Simple math said other stars had received the plans already. I didn’t know if any of them had Bobs crewing the stations rather than AMIs. That would have been a decision made by the Bobs involved at the time. But there was a good chance I’d be able to get a line all the way back to Bill. The specs indicated that the system took care of discovery, routing, and encryption. Cool!
I was lucky to have been still in the system when I intercepted the radio transmission. Bill was obviously beaming the plans to all stars within some arbitrary radius of Epsilon Eridani, but if I’d been between stars, it probably would have missed me entirely.
With no further ado, I suspended all other projects and turned every printer and roamer I had to the task of building myself a, er, SCUT.
* * *
It wasn’t visually impressive. Kind of kludge-looking, really, almost steampunk. I held my virtual breath and flipped the switch. Within moments, connection confirmations began to flood onto the console.
Tau Ceti
Omicron2 Eridani
Sol
Epsilon Eridani
Epsilon Indi
Alpha Centauri
Delta Eridani
Pi(3) Orionis
Eta Cassiopeiae A
Kappa Ceti
I checked the console menus and found that I could register myself on the global directory, which would get me on email, IM, and chat.
Very nice.
I set up my account, then pinged Bill.
“Bill here.”
“Wow. That is truly amazing stuff. Bill, this is Mario at GL 54. I have—”
“Really? Mario?” And with that, Bill appeared in my VR, sitting on the other side of my desk.
/> “Holy—”
Bill raised a coffee cup at me in greeting. “Dude! Long time!”
“Yeah, well, that’s what I get for aiming for the far reaches.” I gave him a quick smirk, then turned serious. “So, the light-speed report won’t reach you for a couple of decades yet, but we seem to have a problem out here. Here’s the relevant data.” I shoved a set of files over to him.
Bill’s avatar froze for a few milliseconds as he went into frame-jack and scanned the files. When he came back, his eyes were haunted.
“Entire planets… an entire intelligent species…”
“Yeah, buddy. We thought Medeiros was our biggest problem. On this scale, he doesn’t even tweak the needle.”
Bill looked down at his coffee for a bit. I understood the feeling of shock, so I let him work through it uninterrupted.
Finally, he looked up. “This has immediate ramifications. We’ve got humans out here to worry about too.” At the expression of surprise on my face, he waved a hand dismissively. “Stuff’s been happening. Read my current-affairs blog when you get a chance.”
Bill put his coffee down on the desk, and I was momentarily bemused by how well the VR was meshing over a 23-light-year distance.
“This is not the way I envisioned a First Contact situation,” I mused. “I sure hope this isn’t the norm in the universe. Although it would explain the Fermi Paradox.”
“Second.” Bill flashed a wan smile. “Bob beat you to first place by a couple of years. His is more of the good kind, though. Like I said, read the blog.”
He visibly shook himself. “I’ve been running a lot of projects here. The SCUT is just the most dramatic. I’ll pull a few other files and send them your way—stuff you can use for making weapons.”
I nodded. “Anything that’ll help. I don’t get the impression that busters are going to be enough against someone who can zap a whole planet.”
“Yeah, I’ll bump up the priority on anything that looks like it can be weaponized.” He picked up his cup. “And I’ll push this info out to every Bob in the directory. You’d be amazed what can come out when all the Bobs get together to brainstorm. You guys are on your own, though, physically. Even if we assembled a flotilla, it wouldn’t get there for a couple of decades.”
“I’ve already started. I built four to begin with— Bashful, Dopey, Sleepy, and Hungry, believe it or not.”
Bill threw his head back and laughed. “So, uh, Dopey? Really?”
“One of them suggested a name of one of the dwarves, then it became kind of a thing. Before they could grow some collective sense, they’d all taken dwarf names.”
Bill chuckled and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Hungry? So, fifty dwarves?”
I laughed in response. “Ah, yep. Half a century later, we’re all still working from the same material.”
* * *
I’d been working on another cohort of Bobs. This was certainly worth a small delay to modify the plans to add FTL communications, and to upgrade them to version-3. I didn’t expect any reports back from the first cohort for another decade. If I could send the new Bobs in the same directions, they’d intercept the return messages in four years or so and forward them to me via SCUT.
Once again, I scrapped my schedule.
16. Hunted
Howard
September 2189
Vulcan
The buster struck the raptor at just shy of Mach one, spreading fragments of carnivore over the hunting party, other raptors, and most of the nearby vegetation. The red cast that it added to the greenery lent an eerie, dangerous aura to the scene.
Not that a dozen hungry raptors needed help looking dangerous.
This was the third hunting party this week to run into a raptor ambush, and I was glad I’d decided to bring a couple of busters along. The raptors were getting bolder since they’d been successful in taking down a couple of settlers. The Landing City planning committee was still smarting over that—it was their decision to reprioritize guard details that had led directly to the deaths.
The spectacular death of one of their number caused the raptor hunting pride to hesitate, just long enough for the humans to regroup and open up on them. The raptors were tough, but they hadn’t evolved to withstand a twenty-second-century assault rifle.
Within seconds, the raptors were down. The hunters bent over, panting, more from nervous reaction than exertion. My observation drone hovered nearby, keeping watch.
The group leader, Stéphane, looked up at my drone. “Eh, thanks there, big guy. They come out of nowhere, those bastards.”
I bobbed the drone once by way of acknowledgement. The raptors had set up an ambush for the hunters and almost pulled it off. They were intelligent—there were still ongoing arguments about how intelligent. The original three-person hunting parties were now double the size. And everyone involved took the duty very seriously.
“No prob, Stéphane. A little buster billiards now and then is great fun.”
Stéphane laughed, and the group organized themselves back into a proper skirmish line. We had another kilometer of perimeter to cover before we could head back. I silently ordered down another buster from orbit, and assigned a mining drone to come pick up the remains of the one I’d just expended.
Bob’s personnel busters were a versatile tool for wildlife control. I still wasn’t sure if it was more economical than rigging up an armed drone, though. I resolved to discuss Bob’s plastics-backed shells, if I ever had five free seconds to rub together.
Security was turning out to be a much bigger deal than we’d initially planned for. This planet’s ecosystem was incredibly rich, diverse, and competitive. Even many of the plant eaters had weaponry that would give an earth predator pause. In that particular, it was very much like the popular vision of the dinosaur era.
We’d gotten the hint in the first week on Vulcan, when a pride of raptors had paced through the new townsite like they owned the place. Without so much as a please-and-thanks, they’d tried to eat one of the AMI backhoes.
I grinned at the memory. The backhoe wasn’t harmed, other than needing a new paint job. But it suddenly occurred to the planning committee that they weren’t in charge. At least not yet. Hunting and guarding details had been beefed up forthwith, and we’d mostly managed to keep people and raptors separate. Mostly.
And speaking of which, I had a job to do. I sent the drone up to a thousand meters to get a thorough scan. The colony spread below me, looking a lot like twenty-first-century suburbia—except for the very large fence around most of the perimeter. The fence was backed with sonic stunners, to handle the more unruly wildlife, and the trees had been cleared back an additional half kilometer. A small herd of brontos munched on leaves at the edge of the treeline. Like the raptors, they only generally resembled Apatosauri, and they were only half the size of their namesakes. The colonists had gotten on a dinosaur kick when naming the local fauna, even though some of the associations were a bit of a stretch.
I did a quick overflight of the cleared perimeter. Nothing big enough to matter revealed itself. Satisfied, I turned back towards Landing.
The larger buildings at the center of the town comprised the administrative hub, while the airport and two manufacturing centers formed a triangle around it. People and goods moved around in communally-owned AMI-driven vehicles, available in all sizes from commuter cars to buses. The colonists had decided to build their new life on Vulcan with some social changes, starting with the abolition of private vehicles.
Only three months after landing, the city looked and felt established and stable. I was truly impressed at how quickly everything had gone up. Of course, the USE staff had had literally decades to refine their plans while they were stuck in the enclave after the war. No surprise that they’d worked out a lot of the bugs.
I finished my aerial sweep. It looked like the raptors were done for the day. I called Stéphane. “Hey, chief. All clear. There’s nothing an
ywhere near the fence now.”
Stéphane grinned into the phone. “Bon! I guess the fence crew will have to come up with something new. They keep thinking they are finished…”
We both laughed. The Fence Construction group was taking a lot of flak lately.
“So, Howard,” Stéphane continued after a moment. “We will be going to the Groggery after our shift, to sample the latest attempt at beer. Care to tag along?”
“I might just meet you there, Stéphane. I have a meeting with the colonel first. I do love watching you guys fall over dead, though.”
Stéphane grinned at me. “Eh, the last batch did remind me a little of actual beer. I think they’ll have it right, soon.”
I nodded and promised to be there.
* * *
“Afternoon, Howard.”
“Colonel.” I noted that the colonel had his bottle of Jameson out again. Not that I disapproved, but there couldn’t be much of the stuff left, and the supplier was sixteen light-years away. And no longer in existence, but who’s counting. I said, in an aside to Guppy that wouldn’t show on the colonel’s video feed, “I have a TODO to build a distillery, right?”
[Affirmative. And set to a high priority]
Well, all work and no booze… I chuckled, and merged back into my public avatar.
The colonel had been talking during this sidebar. I frame-jacked momentarily and played back the video to get caught up.
“No deaths for the last three days on the patrols. I hope we’ve gotten ahead of this issue with the raptors.”
I put my hands behind my head and stretched while I considered that statement. The raptors weren’t really dinosaurs. They weren’t really anything Earth-equivalent. They were bipedal hunters, slightly larger than the velociraptors in the first Jurassic Park movie. They had large mouths full of teeth more reminiscent of a shark’s than the peg-shaped teeth of the canonical carnosaur. The raptors—and the USE settlers—had discovered that biocompatibility was a two-way street. Judging by the subsequent increase in raptor incursions, humans had proven to be a tasty treat.
Bobiverse 2: For We Are Many Page 7