Bobiverse 2: For We Are Many

by Dennis E. Taylor

  Bill

  May 2217

  Delta Pavonis

  The Others ignored us.

  I wasn’t sure if they knew we had nothing left, or if they were simply not interested unless we attacked again. But either way, they didn’t chase us out of the system or attempt to sweep it for drones.

  We had a dozen or so stealth drones still in service, so we deployed them to record the harvesting process. This would be the hardest thing I’d ever done, but we needed as much information as possible.

  The Others took a week to set up around Delta Pavonis 4. Then the death asteroids started a series of sweeps that eventually covered the entire planet. We couldn’t get close enough for a visual, but we knew what was happening. Up to a billion sentient beings were being slaughtered, to serve as food and to clear the way for efficient mining operations.

  Over the next several weeks the Others deployed massive printer operations. It was too early to tell for sure, but it looked like at least some of them would be building new cargo vessels.

  I closed the windows and instructed Guppy to let me know if anything needed my attention. I pinged Jacques, and received an invitation to visit.

  Jacques had had ten years to prepare for the arrival of the Others, and he’d planned accordingly. He had built two colony ships adapted for Pav passengers. They now contained twenty thousand Pav in stasis. We could keep them in that state for as long as necessary. Eventually, the Others would leave. We would attempt to restart the ecology, then we’d decant the Pav. I didn’t look forward to that conversation.

  Jacques had also built several spare matrices and housed them in the colony ships, ready for any casualties of the attack. He probably hadn’t counted on being one of those. Now he was a passenger, with no ship of his own.

  Still, with the state of our VR tech and SCUT communications, it wasn’t a huge disability. More of an inconvenience.

  I popped in. “Hi Jacques. How’s the life of a passenger?”

  He shrugged. “Meh. I’m more of an administrator right now. Trying to clean up and organize the surviving Bobs and equipment, and do inventory. Nothing unaccounted for, so we don’t have to worry about the Others getting SCUT or something similar.”

  I waved that away. “I already checked up on that. I’m more worried about the Pav. Should we consider moving them to another system?”

  “I know what you mean, Bill. Here, they’ll be going back to a dead planet. Psychologically, that’s going to be devastating. I’ve got enough seed stock and such to rebuild a basic ecology, but ninety percent of the planetary diversity is gone for good.”

  “So, why not another system? Besides the psychological issues, by the time the Others are done with it, there’ll be no metal left.”

  “Erm, the Others aren’t that thorough. They take like 95% of it, but they don’t scrabble for every last gram. Still, it will be a problem if the Pav want to rebuild an industrial society. Could we bring in resources from out-system?”

  I sighed and shook my head. “Theoretically, sure. But then we’ve got another race depending on us. Another client race. Do you really want to become an overlord?”

  “Crap.” Jacques sat back and rubbed his forehead. “Whatever happened to heading off into the cosmos and exploring? I distinctly remember that was the plan when Bob-1 was heading for Epsilon Eridani in the first place.”

  “I know. No one to answer to, no responsibility except to ourself. Maybe we’ll get back to that eventually. Right now, though, we’ve got all these problems, and we can’t just walk away.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Jacques gave me a wry look, with one eyebrow raised. “Still, Pacino just keeps looking smarter and smarter.”

  “Mm. Look, all this is on the agenda for the next moot. It’s not going to be a fun meeting.”

  * * *

  It was not a fun meeting.

  We had just witnessed the death of somewhere between half a billion and a billion people. We Bobs are generally upbeat and optimistic, but this had really kicked the stuffing out of us.

  “I keep telling myself that this isn’t the first species that they’ve wiped out,” Howard said, to the room in general. “But it doesn’t help.”

  “This is the first one that we’ve witnessed,” Tony responded. “It’s just more real, somehow.”

  There were nods, followed by a long silence.

  From the back, a voice muttered, “They need to be exterminated.”

  The crowd muttered agreement. I looked in the general direction of the voice. “That’s a significant decision. Nevertheless, I’m not inclined to argue. Let’s wait a couple of days to let our emotions die down, then take a vote.”

  “Leaving outstanding,” Thor said, “the small detail of exactly how we’re going to do that.”

  This comment produced another long silence. No one was really in the mood for deep thought. We’d save this subject for another day.

  * * *

  I orbited over Ragnarök, watching listlessly through my forward camera as the planet turned beneath me. After the moot, I’d had some idea of working on my current android, but I couldn’t even get up the energy to do that. Funny, since Bob-1 had woken up in New Handeltown all those years ago, we’d always seemed to be on top of things. Yeah, there were dangers, there were scary times. I remembered being unsure of whether I’d come out alive in the encounter with Medeiros. And I also remembered being almost unsurprised when he went down.

  This was the first time that we had completely, unutterably failed at something. This was a total rout. There was no way to wring a moral victory out of it. And worse, I didn’t see any way to turn it around.

  I watched Bullseye slide across my view as I passed that section of the planet. The crater was now a freshwater sea, with a central island. Okay, that was kind of a failure, too.

  The Others had brushed us aside like fleas. They’d stated their intention to hit Earth, and if we tried to stop that, they’d probably just brush us aside again. There was no way that Will was going to be able to get everyone off Earth before the Others arrived. Not even a significant fraction.

  We might, if we threw everything into it, be able to get a couple million out of the way. But no more. And that would only delay the inevitable. The Others were coming, and coming to all the possible homes of humanity. We were an endangered species, as long as they continued to exist.

  Garfield popped in, and we exchanged a few words. He wasn’t in any better mood. There would be no cheering up happening here today, not by anyone. He sat and watched the video window with me.

  The time passed, almost unfelt. Eventually, Bullseye came around and slid across my view again, mocking me with this visible reminder of my fallibility. Nothing like a couple hundred thousand tons of ice to make a dent in a planet.

  Nothing like a couple hundred thousand tons… I sat up, abruptly, frowning. Garfield glanced sideways at my unexpected movement. Maybe we’d been looking at this all wrong.

  75. Reunion

  Howard

  January 2216

  HIP 14101

  Wow, and I thought the stage-fright was bad last time. I’d been staring at the inside of the cargo door for what felt like forever. By this time, Bridget would have given up and gone to bed.

  I checked the time. Three seconds elapsed. Oh, for—

  With a feeling akin to resignation, I ordered the door to open, and walked out of the cargo bay.

  Bridget stood on her porch, waiting. She gave me a smile and a small, aborted wave as I turned in her direction. I walked toward the patio, cataloguing all the sensations I was receiving from Manny—the cool evening breeze, the slight unevenness of the front walkway, the brush of my clothing as I moved. And the disappearance of every inch of distance as I approached her. Like falling down a gravity well.

  Finally, after a million years or so, I walked up the two wooden steps, stopped in front of her, and held out my hands. She took them and said, “You�
��re looking good, Howard.”

  I smiled—I’d checked in the mirror a few dozen times, and the smile looked normal—and replied, “It’s nice to see you again.” Bridget would be 57 by now, physically. She’d stopped dyeing her hair and was showing her natural gray. She had crow’s feet around her eyes, and an incipient double-chin.

  I quite literally couldn’t have cared less.

  76. Funeral

  Bob

  November 2220

  Delta Eridani

  I stood to one side as Archimedes hugged with Buster and his siblings, Rosa and Pete. Diana had died overnight. Peacefully, thank the Universe. Deltans didn’t cry as such, but their equivalent was just as heart-wrenching.

  Diana was laid carefully into the grave, then Archimedes and his children each placed one white flower in her arms. As they stepped out of the way, the long line-up of descendants filed past and added more flowers.

  Diana and Archimedes had done quite well with spreading their genes. When the line-up was finished, thirty-one flowers formed a large bouquet in her embrace. The family filled in the grave, then placed several large stone slabs over it to protect it from scavengers.

  When it was done, everyone but Archimedes stepped back. He slowly sank to his knees, leaned forward, and hugged himself. Uttering a low keening, Archimedes rocked slowly back and forth.

  I popped into VR, shaking and taking deep breaths. Charlie would be fine for a few moments on autonomous control, and I was very close to losing it. I rubbed my eyes savagely, muttered a few curses, then popped back into Charlie.

  The crowd was slowly dispersing, leaving Archimedes and his children to their mourning. I took the opportunity to look Archimedes over. I had only an estimate of his age from when I first showed up, of course, but I put him at about seventy, which put him slightly older than Moses when he passed away. And Moses had been considered ancient.

  All of which meant that I would probably be attending another funeral soon. I vowed it would be my last.

  77. Completion

  Bill

  April 2221

  Delta Pavonis

  It took a little over four years for the Others to strip Delta Pavonis.

  It was an impressive speed, until you realized that exponential behavior was involved. They brought a huge complement of autofactories, which they used to produce equipment, which mined resources for the production of more equipment. At some point, they stopped building equipment and started loading the cargo vessels. Finally, they harvested most of the equipment they’d built. The fleet that left the system consisted of only cargo vessels and death asteroids.

  Once they were gone, we moved in to examine the damage. The asteroid belt and any small moons in the system had been stripped, of course. What really hurt was the state of Delta Pavonis 4.

  The Others hadn’t been concerned with ecological damage, obviously. They’d left the planet a dirty ball of mud. All the green had long since faded to a dull brown. The blue of the oceans was replaced by a mottled grey, and the ice caps had either melted or been coated with dust and soot.

  Every major city had been demolished. The lack of corpses was, in a way, a blessing. But it left a ghostly, empty tableau that would have been completely appropriate to any of a hundred post-apocalyptic movies.

  I took it as long as I could, then I turned off the video feeds, put my face in my hands, and wept.

  * * *

  Jacques agreed that rehabilitation of DP-4 would take a long time, but he quite correctly pointed out that flying the Pavs to another system far enough away from the Others to be safe would possibly take just as long. We had a reasonable candidate—a wandering Bob had found a suitable colonization target at HIP 84051. At more than 40 light years from Sol, it didn’t even rate a name. Just a minor designation in the constellation Ara.

  I popped over to visit Will. “Hey guy. How are you holding up?”

  Riker still wore a haunted look. Homer’s suicide had affected him more than anyone would have thought possible. With the perfect memory that being a replicant brought with it, things didn’t fade with time. The vengeance that he had extracted had helped some, but there would always be a hole in the Bobiverse.

  He gave me a small smile. “Holding steady, Bill. You here about HIP 84051-2?”

  At my nod, he continued, “It was on the discussion agenda, and when I brought up the circumstances, the UN voted to make it available to the Pav refugees. Honestly, I think it’s a little too far from Sol to be really attractive, anyway.”

  I sat down and materialized a coffee, and took a moment to look around. Will had long since given up the Star Trek motif, and he was going by his first name—um, I guess Number One’s first name, anyway—most of the time, now. That was the name that our relatives knew him by, anyway.

  The VR resembled a housing unit on Vulcan, although I recognized some décor and paraphernalia from Original Bob’s apartment. I smiled to see the Limited Edition Spock plaque, signed by Leonard Nimoy, hanging on the wall.

  “Life just keeps getting more complicated, doesn’t it?” I raised the coffee in salute.

  “Suppose so.” Will stretched, then materialized a coffee of his own. “I’m beginning to think Bob-1 has the right idea. He’s been talking about going out again, once Archimedes is gone. Just point the ship and accelerate for a while.”

  I sighed and nodded. We were, what, eight to ten generations deep in Bobs, now? Bob-1 had achieved a kind of legendary status. He rarely showed up at moots any more, and when he did, it was like a Shatner sighting. I felt a deep sympathy for him. He was the first of us to get emotionally involved with ephemerals, and until Jacques and the Pavs, his had had the worst outcome.

  “I understand you’re going to wake some Pav and put the question to them,” Will said.

  “Mm, yeah. Jacques has an unreasonable attachment to the idea of recolonizing DP-4, in my opinion. But he’s rational enough to see it.”

  Will returned one of his rare full-on smiles. “Well, Bob, right?”

  We laughed together, and I continued, “So we’ll give them the choice—attempt to recolonize DP-4, or head for a new world with an already-established ecosystem. And a compatible one, as seems to be the norm.” I chuckled. “I sure wish I could go back and talk to Dr. Carlisle. I bet he’d be tickled that his theories have been so emphatically vindicated.”

  Will nodded but didn’t comment. I sat back, and we sipped our coffees in silence, simply enjoying the company and the momentary pause in existence.

  * * *

  The Pav huddled in a corner, whimpering. I’d expected a certain level of fear, but the Pav’s reaction bordered on xenophobia.

  But I doubted the, uh, recruitment had involved a lot of discussion and consent. Kidnapping was a pretty accurate description. The specimen in front of us was probably still traumatized.

  At that moment, the door to the chamber opened and three more Pav staggered in. They were still suffering from post-stasis confusion, but they reacted in instinctive Pav pack fashion, by huddling in a pile with our first candidate. The presence of company seemed to calm her significantly.

  Over the next few hours, we brought in several more Pav, until we had eight of them in the room. The number was arbitrary, but Jacques’ investigation of the species had indicated a general maximum of eight adults to a family group. We hoped that it was a significant number for them.

  When they appeared outwardly calm and had started to compare notes with each other, I decided it was time for official first contact.

  “Hello.”

  All eight Pav went into alert posture. The resemblance to meerkats was even more pronounced than usual, and in better circumstances I would have chuckled at the tableau.

  “Who are you? Where are we?”

  This was not going to be easy. “My name is Bill. I’m part of BobNet.” The translation routine rendered proper names phonetically, but the sounds wouldn’t mean anything to them. “Who
we are is a very long story. Where you are and why, is a shorter and very unpleasant story.”

  I described the Others to them, and explained their habit of raiding systems and killing off planets. A monitor on one wall displayed images of Others, the aftermath of Zeta Tucanae, and finally the destruction of Delta Pavonis 4.

  As the images of dead cities, oceans and forests flashed on the screen, the Pav began to keen. Sitting through that was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, but I had a moral obligation to stick with it.

  It took a few hours, but we finally got through the whole story. The group seemed perplexed.

  “You want us to decide? To return to Aszjan or settle a different world?”

  “That is correct.”

  The Pac huddled and argued in low voices for several minutes.

  Hazjiar, who seemed to have taken on the role of spokesperson, said, “Why?”

  “Because we don’t know you well enough to know what would work best for you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we haven’t been studying you for long enough.”

  “Why not?”

  Oh, holy… “That’s not important. We will make the decision if you don’t want to, but we wanted to give you the option first.”

  “And there are twenty thousand of us? Why not more?”

  “That’s how many will fit into the two ships that we were able to build.”

  “Why?”

  What’re you, a four-year-old? I would have to nip this in the bud, before I blew a transistor or something. “Again, not important now. Are you willing and able to make that decision? If not, let us know and we’ll take care of it.”

  “We will discuss this. Is there food?”

  “You mean at the new planet? Oh, you mean now. Sorry. I’ll get some.”

  Fortunately, Jacques had thought of stocking up on standard Pav food and drink. I decanted a small supply and delivered it. The Pav laid in as if they hadn’t eaten in a week.

  I stared in shock at the free-for-all. So far no one seemed to have lost a limb, but that could just be luck.