I very quickly found some useful information. As part of my bag of tricks on Heaven-1, I had the ability to adjust my personal time sense. I could perceive time anywhere from one minute of personal time for each year on the clock, right up to the highest frame rate that my hardware would support. The docs weren’t clear on what that would be, so I turned the setting all the way up, and watched my Real-Time Clock slow to a crawl.
The ship used a fusion reactor for power. Although there was an onboard supply of hydrogen, fuel would be gathered in-flight from the interstellar medium. However, unlike in the old science-fiction novels, the gathered hydrogen wasn’t used for propulsion—at least not in the traditional way, as reaction mass. Heaven-1 used a reactionless system, the SURGE drive. I wanted to sigh. These people were so hung up on acronyms. I had yet to read up on the theory, but it seemed to push against the fabric of space in some way. Must read. Goes on the TO-DO.
There was a hail from the comms subsystem. I slowed to real-time and accepted a voice-only link to the station command.
“Heaven-1, Statcom, please verify receipt of mission profile.”
“Yep. Got it right here.” I imagined myself grinning—best I could do—at the stunned silence.
“Er, you’re a little light on procedure there, Heaven-1.”
“Ya think? Sorry Statcom, but this part of my training was scheduled for next week. We’re going to have to wing it, I’m afraid.”
“Wing it. Okayyyyy. Heaven-1, per countdown, we have just over four hours ten until launch. There will be several official bafflegabs at the following times…”
The briefing took almost ten minutes. I was able to get through it with my sanity intact by slowing down my internal clock until Statcom sounded like an irate squirrel.
As soon as Statcom signed off, I jacked up my frame rate to maximum, hoping to get in as much study-time as possible.
Some days, though, the universe just has it in for you.
I was interrupted in my reading by another radio message. At my current frame rate, the transmission was still droning through the first word. When I compressed and replayed it, I recognized Dr. Landers’ voice. The word was “missiles.”
Um. Ways in which a sentence beginning with the word “missiles” could be a good thing… Nope. I got nuthin’.
External sensors showed two objects approaching at high speed along my scheduled launch vector, presumably the better to overtake me if I launched early. It was a reasonable and predictable tactic, but I had no intention of being predictable.
I spent a full five milliseconds mulling over my options. In short order, I had a rough plan.
Fortunately, the ship had long since been fully prepped, and could leave any time. I blew the grapples and brought all flight systems to full function. While I waited for physical reality to catch up with my awareness, I sent a query to my libraries about the approaching missiles. The libraries gave three possible models, with generally similar flight characteristics. I chose the most pessimistic and calculated a takeoff vector as close to 180˚ to the missiles’ vector as I could safely manage.
As soon as sensors indicated that I was free, I gave a burst of the SURGE drive, just enough to clear the station. I rotated the ship and cranked up the reactor to maximum. That’s going to be hard on fuel reserves, but I guess being blown to smithereens would be harder. When reactor output rose to the required level, I engaged SURGE at maximum acceleration.
The ship shot away from the station in the opposite direction from the published launch trajectory. The first missile went right past me, its trajectory unaltered. I realized with a jolt that it had locked onto the space station. The second missile was altering its trajectory to follow me. I hoped that the published specs for the reactor and SURGE drive were accurate. If my acceleration fell short of expectations, I wouldn’t be able to avoid interception. And that would be the end of Heaven-1. And of me.
While I waited for velocity to build up, I checked the progress of the voice transmission. It now sat at “Missiles detected heading your way. Get away…” I checked acceleration using SUDDAR to monitor the increasing distance from the station. Calculations indicated a steady 2.5 g acceleration. The SURGE drive seemed to work on the entire ship, so there was no way to measure it internally.
The space station began firing on the approaching missile. The weapon appeared to be some kind of Gatling gun. I hoped they knew what they were doing. If those bullets ended up in a periodic orbit, they’d be coming back, sooner or later.
The flash of an explosion in the distance saturated one of my cameras. It couldn’t be either of the missiles, which were still accounted for. I did a quick calculation and realized that the explosion came from where the missiles had originated. Someone had blown up the shooter.
A second flash indicated the destruction of the missile that was targeting the space station.
This was all fine and interesting, but I still had a missile on my tail. Given enough time, I could outrun it. I did another quick millisecond calculation and realized that I could almost outrun it. Sadly, almost wasn’t good enough.
Normally, you’d use chaff against a missile, but I doubted I had anything like that on board. I had six mining drones, which were equipped with small SURGE drives of their own. Well, okay, maybe I could give the missile something else to blow up.
I activated and ejected two of the drones, with orders to ram the missile. As they flew toward my pursuer, I positioned them in a fore/aft configuration. Hopefully the lead drone would take the missile out; but if it missed, the second one would have better targeting information. I didn’t know if I’d have time to launch more drones if the first two failed.
A bright flash of light behind the ship saturated the rear camera. What the hell? That couldn’t be the missile, which was approaching from a different vector.
I waited a few seconds for the cameras to recover, then checked the rear view. The station was an expanding cloud of rapidly cooling debris. Dr. Landers’ voice transmission was still coming, so at least he hadn’t been on the station. The message now included “…quickly as you can. And disable…”
How could the station have blown up? All the missiles were accounted for. Speaking of which, I checked my rear view, where the drones were just coming up on the missile. The missile dodged the first drone, which told me it came with some intelligence. But the act of dodging forced the missile to commit. The second drone struck it at an angle, and the explosion destroyed both devices.
A quick systems check indicated that there had been no damage to Heaven-1 from all the excitement. I made sure everything was still properly stowed, then listened to the rest of Dr. Lander’s message.
“…your radio receiver. There’s a remote detonation device somewhere.”
Well, that’s double-plus ungood. I disabled the radio immediately, and for good measure I retracted the antenna dish. I did a quick long-range SUDDAR scan to look for any other surprises.
The area, which had been cleared for my expected launch, was a beehive of activity. I detected at least half a dozen ships, which my library identified as military. I also detected close to a dozen small signatures, moving at high speed, that were very likely more missiles. Fortunately, they seemed more interested in each other than in me.
So, someone shot a couple of missiles at me, someone else shot at them, someone else shot at the space station, and now we had something that looked very much like a naval engagement. Yeesh. It was time to leave, before I became interesting again.
I lined up my original planned departure vector and set the SURGE drive at a much more reasonable 2 g. That was still more than the mission plan had called for, and I was going to have to adjust for the squandered reactor fuel later.
With a mental sigh of relief, I began my journey to Epsilon Eridani.
Bob – August 17, 2133 – En Route
Epsilon Eridani is 10.52 light-years away from Sol. The specs indicated that the ship could run at 2g indefinitely with no
ill effects, which would get me to my target star in a little over eleven years. However, I wanted to make a little side trip first. Saturn wasn’t directly in line with my flight plan, but I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to do a flyby.
Saturn had always been my favorite planet. I had watched every second of Voyager and Cassini video from the Saturn missions, over and over, until I wore the electrons out. Now I was able to go there myself and see it first-hand.
The side trip would take a bit over six days at a constant two-g acceleration, which would give me time to track down any booby traps. I unstowed the roamers and ordered a half-dozen of the smaller ones to trace the circuitry from the radio antennae on in. The most likely scenario would be a tap on the antenna cable that wouldn’t show up on the blueprints.
Sure enough, within a couple of hours, the roamers found some circuitry that didn’t show up on any diagrams. I sent in some of the gnat-sized roamers and tracked down a small explosives package, positioned where it would take out the primary computer system. Me, in other words.
The package had obviously been a rush job, and an improvisation at that. The explodey stuff—I assumed it was C4 or some future equivalent—had been stuck to the bulkhead with duct tape. Yeah, they still make duct tape. And it still holds the universe together.
As I stared through the roamer’s camera at this jury-rigged mess, I kept thinking, Don’t cut the red wire. Don’t cut the red wire. I may not have mentioned it before, but I really hate explosives at the best of times. And this wasn’t the best of times.
Rather than try anything fancy, I had a larger roamer disconnect the whole package as a unit and chuck it out an airlock. The small chance I might find a use for it wasn’t worth the stress of having it on board.
Once the booby-trap was removed, I set up some receiving equipment to record any incoming transmissions and isolated the whole assemblage from the rest of the system. I didn’t want to find out the hard way if there was some kind of trigger in my circuitry as well, but I also didn’t want to miss any transmissions. This way, I could save everything to play back later, once I’d cleaned house.
I was travelling at over 5000 km/s by the time I reached the second-largest planet in the solar system. Saturn was immense, and the rings were at close to maximum inclination. The horizontal bands of cloud circling Saturn’s visible surface weren’t as distinctive as those of Jupiter, but each band was wider than the Earth. From this distance I could see lightning flashes from storms that must have been tens of thousands of miles across. Swirls and eddies at the boundaries were literally big enough to drop the moon into. The shadow of the rings fell across the planet, and I could see that it wasn’t just a flat surface—the shadow dipped and bent as it lay across different levels and layers of cloud. I remembered all the science fiction books I’d read that had whole ecosystems floating around in the different layers, and I wondered if I’d find anything like that in my travels.
I made sure my trajectory would take me near Titan on the way past. The libraries indicated that primitive life had been found on Saturn’s largest moon, and the USE had set up a space station in order to study it. I wanted to see what I could see.
I turned off the drive, locked the long-focal-length telescope onto Titan and aimed the wide-field unit at Saturn. I took as much video as I could manage before my trajectory put me on the other side of the giant planet. Close-ups of the various moons, details of the rings, high-resolution shots of the high cloud formations on Saturn—I tried not to miss anything. JPL would have drooled over the footage.
All too soon, I was past Saturn and on my way outbound. As I continued on toward the outer reaches of the solar system, I saw the night side of the planet, alive with electrical storms and auroras.
The flyby was over. My hydrogen reserves were within acceptable range and would be topped up over the course of the voyage. With a mental sigh, I adjusted my heading for Epsilon Eridani and cranked the drive back up to 2 g. The trip would take just under eleven and a half years to the universe at large, but only three years ship’s time. At midpoint, I would be travelling within a hair of light speed.
***
One of the irritating things about being a bodiless mind was, well, the lack of a body. I found that I had to keep myself constantly occupied, or I began to feel like I was in a sensory deprivation tank. All my attempts to smile, waggle my eyebrows, frown, had met the same fate—a feeling as though my whole face had been shot up with novocaine. And the rest of me felt like I’d been wrapped in a giant cotton ball. I wondered if that feeling contributed to the problems with replicant insanity.
It may be time to correct that. Sensory data is just electrical input, even in meatware. For me, a virtual reality interface should be a piece of cake. And, worst case, at least it’ll keep me busy.
I had to do some hardware mods, as a VR wasn’t part of the ship design. Fortunately, some spare parts had been stowed for in-flight requirements. But the bulk of the project was, and would continue to be, software.
My first attempt was primitive, and honestly, a little embarrassing. I had a basic room, blue walls, no windows, and a hard, nondescript floor. I floated in the middle of it like a ghost. Definitely needed work.
Over the next several weeks, I added furniture, a window, an outside view, carpeting, and a body to enjoy it all. Admittedly, my first body was as pixelated as something from an early Donkey Kong game, but hey, it was progress.
By the end of the first month, I was sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner, eating chips (not enough salt), feeling a cool breeze through the open window (too flat. No odors), and watching TV. The TV was playing one of many documentaries available in the libraries supplied by the HEAVEN project.
I looked around the room, sighed (feels good), and settled more comfortably into my chair.
***
I looked up from the active-surface desk which displayed a schematic of my hardware. Guppy stood on the other side of the desk, watching.
“I’m going to need more memory if I want to keep expanding my VR,” I told him. “How are we on expansion slots?”
[Memory usage averaging 86%. Available slots: 2. Spare memory boards: 4]
I had to swallow an incipient giggle. I had made Guppy look like Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars—a humanoid fish out of water. The first time he’d talked, I had collapsed in hysterics. I wasn’t sure if Guppy was self-aware enough to be offended.
“Right. If I’m going to raid my spares, I’d better be prepared for the worst. Guppy, when the new memory is installed, make sure the VR runs only in the new boards, and make sure nothing else runs there. If I have to pull them, I don’t want to lobotomize myself. Or you.”
Guppy nodded. It had taken some programming to convince GUPPI to interface through the VR and that verbal acknowledgements weren’t always necessary. Guppy wasn’t a sparkling dinner conversationalist, but at least now I could feel like I was interacting with another intelligent being. I was surprised at how much difference it made. I think I understood now why Tom Hanks made Wilson in Castaway.
Jeeves came in with fresh coffee. Another example of my lack of maturity, Jeeves was the image of John Cleese, complete with tuxedo and tails.
The coffee aroma wasn’t quite right yet, but I’d nailed the taste. For now, I could pretend I had a slight cold. I took the proffered cup, sat back, and relaxed. “Okay, Guppy, what’s the TO-DO looking like?”
[2,386 items, divided into the following categories: VR Systems, Replicant hardware upgrades, Weapons design, Review of exploration strategies, Ship design reviews, Ship replication strategies..]
I smiled at the response, thankful that Guppy was finally beginning to get colloquialisms. The first time I’d asked that, a couple hundred pages of dense printing had appeared in the air in front of me.
“Okay, okay. I’m going to be a busy guy. I get it. Let’s move on.”
I turned around in my chair to face an empty table up against the wall. “Testing replicant software for b
ooby traps. Take, uh.. [24] Okay, take 24. Activate software sandbox.”
A sandbox, in computer terms, was an isolated copy of a computer system where you could run potentially harmful programs in complete safety. I needed to find the actual sequence of bytes in the radio transmissions that was supposed to trigger the kill order, so I could trace what they did to Sandbox Bob and how. Then I could check for the same booby trap in my own code and remove it.
On the table, an actual sandbox appeared, with a miniature Bob sitting in a miniature chair in the middle of it. “I admit I’m not very mature. All right, Guppy, when ready, feed the recorded transmissions into the sandboxed replicant.”
On the table, the miniature Bob twirled lazily in his chair. Abruptly he leaped into the air, grabbed his throat and fell over, then disappeared in a scatter of pixilation.
“Dammit! Still haven’t found all the hooks. These guys were pretty good. Okay, Guppy, transfer the logs to my desk, and let’s see if we can figure out what the kill order is triggering.”
I knew approximately where in the incoming stream to find the kill order, but I had no idea what it consisted of. I certainly wasn’t about to take any chances with trying to analyze it close-up. I’d been running through my code with a fine-toothed comb, and had found several different booby traps, a depressing number of bugs, and a couple of out-and-out WTFs. The listings were massive—literally gigabytes—and even at my highest frame rate, it was a slog. I’d also, incidentally, found the buried imperatives to obey FAITH orders. Those had already been yanked.
The last, very important item that I had located was the endocrine control system. More than any other thing that they’d done, this enraged me. Well, to be honest, it made me mildly annoyed, but I knew that original me would have been furious. I was effectively a dog wearing a choke collar. And the choke collar was preventing me from properly mourning.
I sat with my finger over the delete button for what seemed like forever, then dropped my hand. Not yet. I wasn’t ready. To do this properly, I needed time, and I needed the ability to properly express myself. It would have to wait. With an effort of will, I dropped that project into a folder and set it aside.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) Page 7
