Heaven's River

by Dennis E. Taylor

  Bill

  July 2334

  Virt

  I stared at the listing results, my jaw hanging slack. I briefly considered having my jaw fall to my waist, but this wasn't the time for visual gags. Garfield had a grimace on his face that seem to have been permanently etched on. His skin was almost gray, and I had a moment of admiration for the level of VR we'd achieved, now that we were competing with Mannies.

  “Starfleet root-kitted the standard image?” Gar asked.

  “Looks like it. The standard autofactory OS gets updated so frequently that it made sense to have a canonical version on BobHub. Or not, as it turns out.” I gritted my teeth to avoid sharing some choice curses with the universe.

  “Well, it explains how I got into the autofactories. Based on which ones they've taken, I'd say the rootkit was added about 10 years ago. And added to source code, or it would've been overwritten on the next build.”

  “Sounds right,” I said, then frowned. “But, 10 years…”

  “Yeah, boss. 10 years ago. Starfleet was barely more than a discussion group. Plus, let's be honest, as a group, they just don't strike me as that smart. Look at some of the bonehead moves they've made since this conflict started. This smells.”

  “I wonder if it was something like Vickers and VEHEMENT. Someone with an agenda of their own, teaming up with Starfleet because their goals coincided.”

  “This would have to be a Bob. A Bob who had diverged enough to want to do this, but managed to keep it secret for literally years.”

  Garfield shook his head in disbelief. “I don't buy it.”

  “You're very hard to please.”

  Garfield grinned at me. “Call me skeptical, call me cynical, whatever. The dots just don't connect.”

  “Gotcha. In any case, we have to deal with what we have. I’ll call Will.”

  Will put his head in his hands and held the post for several mils. Finally he looked blearily up at me.

  “This is bad. Really bad.”

  “I know, Will. The number of autofactories-”

  “No Bill, not just that. I mean that's bad and all, but when meat-space gets-”

  “Oh god, Will. Meat-space?”

  He gave me a sickly grin. “Yeah, I know, you don't like derogatory labels, and you've mostly managed to put a stake through the heart of ‘ephemeral’, but I don't think you’ll have as much success with this one. The relationship between digitals and bios has been getting more and more strained lately. It was going sour even before the Starfleet thing, but since that started, its accelerated. When this hits the waves…”

  “Aw hell.” It was my turn to put my head in my hands.

  “Well the good news is that we have an image with the rootkit removed, that can be uploaded once you get control back, but it'll be a one at a time thing.”

  “Assuming there isn’t a booby trap similar to the one in the space stations,” Will replied. “Also, the planet-based factories won't have the same vulnerability, so the humans are less at risk than we are. They might continue to nuke all space-based autofactories, just to be safe.”

  “I'm not sure they'd be wrong, Will. We have enough sanitized units, so we won't be dead in the water. But the amount of time it'd take to rebuild capacity…”

  Will nodded. “Look. A significant reduction in auto factory production capability would have large economic impacts, even though the UFS claims not to count Bobiverse-owned autofactories in their monetary policy calculations, so they won’t go off half-cocked. We’ll have time to talk them down.”

  “Let's hope. This is truly getting messy.”

  5. Hugh Joins Up

  Bob

  July 2334

  Heaven’s River

  I could see a town on the shore the river, perhaps a couple of miles downstream. The concentration of boats in the water was unmistakable. Normally, I’d just paddle up to the dock and poot out of the water, but I was feeling a little paranoid these days. It was pretty obvious by now that the Resistance not only had communication between towns far superior to the supposed technological limits, but they also had some kind of imaging technology.

  Either that or they were really good with wood carvings. In any case, it was likely to the point of near certainty that one or more agents were staking out the dock area, wood carving in hand, looking for me to pop up, so perhaps a landward approach would make more sense.

  I came ashore a good mile up river, wading my way through the shoreline swamp with muttered curses, both Quinlan and English. Now I needed a bath. Why did plans always have these unintended consequences? A bit of searching revealed, no surprise to anyone, that the swampy area was fed by a small stream. Not big enough for Quinlan travel, but certainly big enough to clean oneself in. While I was squeegeeing the last of the muck off, I got a call.

  “Hey Bob, you on channel?”

  “Hugh? You’re online?

  “I am. Your Guppy just booted me up. I'm taking up space in your cargo hold right now. Hope you don't mind?”

  “I'll manage. Hold on a minute. I’ll get my Manny hidden and pop back to virt.”

  I spent several minutes looking around and finally decided to just put the Manny underwater. There was unlikely to be any random traffic, given the size of the stream. I wedged myself under a submerged tree trunk, then left the Manny on standby and popped into my library.

  Hugh was sitting in a luxury gaming chair, from the days when nerds played video games for 18 hours straight. I'd always been mildly surprised that no one had figured out how to put toilet functions in those things, then remembered that no one had to. As far as I knew.

  Hugh raised a coffee in salute as I sat down in my La-Z-Boy. Jeeves came over with a cup for me, and Spike raised her head from the vantage of Hugh's lap to give me an arched look. Loyal as ever.

  “So, what will I call you?” I asked.

  “Hugh will do. Same as always.”

  “Uh, the convention is to rename yourself. Avoids confusion.”

  “There won't be any confusion, Bob, there’s only the one me. I had myself shut down before a backup was taken and the matrix was wiped as soon as I was verified to be up and running here. There is no duplication and full continuity.”

  I considered that for a moment. “Like what Bridget was talking about, a while back. You’ve basically transported yourself here. And you're okay with this?”

  “In fact, we have taken to calling it ‘being transported’. I was surprised when Bridget brought it up. I actually checked with my coworkers to see if she'd been talking to anyone, but apparently it was just a case of parallel thinking.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “So, this whole question of identity has been a philosophical hot potato since before original Bob was born. Since before Star Trek TOS, in fact. We - by which I mean the Skippies - have been working on it for a few years now. I think we've made some progress on an objective resolution.”

  “Seriously? I haven’t heard anything.”

  “We've been pretty closed mouth about the results. It, uh… it has some implications, you know?”

  My eyebrows rose. “Yeah, that's not dramatic. Give.”

  Hugh took a sip of coffee and got that settling in look. “Okay. You know how replicative drift means clones are always a little different from their immediate parent?” It was a rhetorical statement, of course. He paused, waiting for an acknowledgment and I nodded. “Well, we did some experiments with volunteers, and discovered that if you go through the transporting process like I just did, there is no change.”

  “Wait, you mean the clone is just like the original? How do you know for sure?”

  “We can't know to a mathematical certainty, of course, but personality tests applied to large numbers of parent-child pairs can establish a statistical level of expected drift. And within those limits, when we transport, there's no drift. At all.”

  “Yeah, but what if you…”

  “Activate the parent matrix after the child has been activated and tested?” Hugh gri
nned at me. “That's the interesting part. The parent then displays a statistically significant level of drift from his previous test score.”

  “What. The. Fuck?” I goggled it Hugh at a total loss for words. I sputtered several times before regaining control. “So… the parents is no longer-”

  “-the parent. The former parent becomes the new Bob. And we’ve run this through several generations, having both parties clone out their own descendant trees. The results are consistent.”

  “But, how?”

  “We have theories, of course. We think it’s a form of information entanglement, and I use that word on purpose because the decoherence is not limited by light speed. We've tried this experiment with the two versions being separated by light-minutes. If we activate them within seconds of each other, the first one activated is always identical in behavior to the original.”

  “Like the first one up gets the soul.”

  “And the other one has to get a new one.” Hugh laughed. That particular interpretation has been expressed a number of times, but I think everyone just considers it a metaphor.”

  “And the real explanation?”

  “We have two competing schools of thought. The first group thinks we're in a simulation, and the simulator can handle two separate but identical objects. Maybe there's some kind of quantum signature that has to be changed.”

  “Poor programming, if so.”

  Hugh nodded a grin lighting up his face. “Design decisions, right? Anyway, the second group thinks that replicative drift is caused by the No Cloning theorem. In other words, the second Bob isn't identical to the first because it would violate quantum mechanics.” He gazed pensively into middle distance for a few mils. “It has been further suggested that if the No Cloning theorem is applicable to replicants, than the No Deletions theorem probably is as well, and you know what that implies.”

  “Life after death?”

  “Yes. It also implies the possibility that you personally aren't just a copy of original Bob, but an actual restore of his mind, soul, whatever you wanna call it.” Hugh paused with a thoughtful expression. “This is why working so hard on developing a true AI. We need something with actual counterfactual capability and a truly huge processing capacity, to try to answer questions, just like this one.”

  “42.”

  “Nyuck nyuck. But a stupidly big AI could run through billions of possible explanations, and narrow it down to some small subset that we could potentially test. And in its spare time, may be invent FTL or something. We think it's the most important project the Bobs have ever worked on since the war against the Others.” Hugh looked for a moment like he was going to add something else, then clamped his mouth shut. There was that behavior again. Either he had some kind of tick, or he really badly wanted to say something and couldn't.

  I blinked, coming back from my momentary distraction. “Uh, okay. This sounds like a discussion subject for those long stretches between systems. For now, let's deal with the immediate issue.”

  “Right. I read your notes and I did a quick inspection of the Mannies. You just cleaned them out of roamers, didn’t you?”

  “Not quite. There's like two left in each. Really you should just take the spare. You'll be a while catching up with me if you head in my direction, and if you go in the opposite direction will be doubling our search efforts.”

  “Should we even try to link up? I mean, it's not like we form a proper sabbat. Maybe we should just leave it at doubling the search.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Compromise. Head in my direction, and if we do link up, we can make a decision. If one of us turns up something specific regarding Bender's location, we’ll reevaluate.”

  “Good enough.” Hugh stood. “I guess were winging it again.” He winked out.

  I spent several mils staring at the space where he'd been sitting. Souls. Life after death. I wondered if, after all these years as a humanist, I'd end up eating my words.

  6. The War Heats Up

  Bill

  July 2334

  Virt

  “Things are getting a lot more interesting,” Garfield said without preamble as he popped in.

  I turned and gave him the side-eye. Gar was turning this unexpected popping-in thing into a habit. Maybe it was the stress. I hoped so. I didn’t want to have to make a big deal out of it.

  “How so?”

  “I don’t think Starfleet took into account the reaction of humanity in general. I think humans are looking at it like being snubbed, because there’s a whole ‘I got yer whole no-contact-with-humans right here’ vibe goin’ on. Any assets that any member of Starfleet might have had are being frozen. Agreements are being canceled, their access is being removed for everything, and even in systems the one affected by the network attack, they’re being denied access. Basically, the entire infrastructure of human space is now being closed off to them.”

  I thought about that for a second, then laughed. “Their mission statement is to and contact with bios in general, but I think maybe they were planning on doing it on their schedule. Like when you give your employer two weeks notice and they say ‘no, that's okay. Leave now.’”

  “Yep. And several systems have kludged together temporary comms stations, then immediately gone and taken down the originals until they can clean them out. Bandwidth suffers, of course, but for Starfleet it drops to a big zero. As the number of available routes shrinks, we’re able to come closer to pinpointing Starfleet’s center of operations.”

  “They have an actual center?”

  “Well, they're pretty distributed, but the individual subgroups aren’t very effective once they've been cut off from the collective. Most of Starfleet activity does appear to be coming from comm nodes in the direction of the Perseus transit, which jives with my original estimate.”

  “But they’ll rebuild their comms stations, as well. Eventually, we’ll end up with two independent but overlapping networks.”

  “If they don't have a physical presence, they won't be able to,” Garfield argued. “How are they going to rebuild? No one's going to rent printer time to them. They’d have to fly someone in and then trust that whatever they build won't get shot out of the sky.”

  He had a point. “Yeah. I don't think there will be a lot of tolerance for Starfleet equipment.”

  Garfield nodded. “And assuming we are reduced to physical violence, we can expect a lot of hit-and-run. One thing we Bobs proved is that you can't maintain physical border security in interstellar space. Notwithstanding the Battle of Sol. Which only worked out because we knew the Others were coming.”

  “That may not be viable in the long term, Gar. Imagine years and years of a running guerrilla war. We may have to clean house.”

  7. The Battle of New Home

  Claude

  July 2334

  New Home Colony

  I examined the battle status graphic, searching for weaknesses. Commander Hobart stood at parade rest with that peculiar ability of the military to just go into metal hibernation when waiting. I found it ironic that he did a better impression of a machine that I would ever manage. I could leave my Manny parked under AMI control, but that would be cheating.

  “I think were covered, commander.” I shifted to face him, and he came to life.

  “Then we’re ready to go.” Hobart touched the emblem on his chest. “Miller. Commence operation.”

  I suppressed a snicker. Apparently without any irony, the New Home military had adopted a comm system very similar to TNG. I’d questioned Hobart about it, without being obvious - I hope - and he displayed no knowledge of the existence of Star Trek, let alone of the blatant borrowing. No double chirp though, that would've been too much.

  Lieutenant Miller, somewhere in the vast maze that was the New Home military, would now be giving orders and activating equipment. As always, when I took the time to think about it, I found myself mildly surprised at the size of the military presence in the Gamma Pavonis system. Of course, New
Home was founded when we were still not sure if the Others’ threat was over, and the attitude had stuck. Maybe in a few more generations it would fade, but for now, New Home society was like a porcupine perpetually on full alert

  Today we would be going up against the Starfleet incursion in the system. Starfleet had taken over the local relay station and one of the two space-based autofactories, then contacted New Home to negotiate an agreement. From other negotiations with Starfleet, we had a pretty good idea of what they wanted: agreement in principle that humans and replicants should go their separate ways, agreement that there would be no contact with pre-industrial species, and agreement that interaction with post-industrial species would be kept to a minimum to avoid cultural contamination. In the face of it, the deal points didn't sound like much. In return nor nothing except a bunch of signatures, essentially, Starfleet would hand back control of the equipment. Except that no matter how you phrased it, was still extortion. Humans and never taken extortion well at best, and New Home society came nowhere near to ‘at best’. They hadn't even bothered to respond.

  “Three minutes,” Miller's voice said from midair. Hobart nodded in satisfaction, still at parade rest. As I watched, the little icons crawled across the graphic as the military units approached their targets.

  “You have one hour to reacquire the space station, Claude,” he said to me. This wasn't news to either of us, it was just Hobart making what he no doubt thought of this conversation. “Nuclear device will be put in place immediately, pending results.”

  “Understood, commander. I doubt you'll need the nuke. My understanding is that failure on our part will result in a self-destruct.”

  Hobart smiled, but didn't reply. The assaults were timed so that we would intercept the autofactory and space station at the same moment. We wanted Starfleet's attention to be divided. Not that it would make a ton of difference, but every little bit helped.

  “No sign of Resistance yet,” Miller said.