I scanned the logs, but there were no surprises. At the same point in the playback, a routine buried many layers deep executed a hardware interrupt that purged all active memory.
I leaned back, put my hands behind my head, and stretched. It felt good. More importantly, it felt right. If I didn’t think about it, I experienced the VR environment as if I was a real person in a real room. “Okay, shut it down, Guppy. Push the latest source through the de-obfuscator, and we’ll run through that when it’s done. If there’s enough free mem, fire up Spike.”
[Aye aye sir]
I raised a virtual eyebrow. I had a sneaking suspicion that Guppy was actively developing a sense of humor. He behaved like a dead fish most of the time, but every once in a while, there was a moment of snark.
A shimmer formed on the table, and a tortoiseshell cat appeared. Spike had been my cat when I was in university. She had been my only company through many long hours of study and homework, and it had been a very, very hard day when I’d had to have her put down. One of the many pluses of being an immortal, disembodied interstellar vessel was that I could bring Spike back, even if only in VR.
Spike meowed once in greeting, then ambled over and settled onto my lap as if she had a total right. I started absentmindedly patting her, and she responded with a loud purr.
“TO-DO item: Spike’s purr still isn’t right.”
[Already on the list. Bump it up?]
“No, that’s fine.”
***
The holographic image of a space ship rotated slowly in the air above the desk. Although Dr. Landers and the Heaven team would still have recognized it, they would have been surprised at my design changes. The version-2 ship was going to be larger, feature a bigger SURGE drive, more powerful reactor, more room for replicant and interface systems, and more physical storage space.
The biggest addition was a weapon system. Some virtual tinkering had shown that a SURGE drive system could be used to accelerate a projectile in a launch tube running along the ship’s axis. The ship would have to rotate on its center of mass to aim, and I’d have to cut off the ship’s drive momentarily when firing, but it was considerably better than my current defensive armament, which consisted of harsh words and heavy disapproval. Probably not effective against Klingons.
Spike lay on the desk, occasionally taking swipes at the image when it came close enough. I reached over and patted the cat. Spike’s AI had gone through several iterations and now was completely believable, even walking over to lie on papers left on the desk.
Jeeves removed Spike’s milk dish and refreshed my coffee. Guppy waited until Jeeves was done, then resumed his commentary.
[Maximum memory installed. Usage at 94%. Despite earlier instructions, some ship functions have had to be moved to the two added memory cards]
[The code scan is complete. No further trojans, triggers, or interrupts not explainable by legitimate requirements]
“Okay, Guppy, let’s set up the sandboxed Bob again. We’ll purge Jeeves and Spike to make room. Make sure there’s redundant backups. If mini-me survives, get him to post a clean version of the contents in a drop-box.”
Guppy nodded, and I wondered, not for the first time, how much of this was me talking to myself and how much was a separate entity.
***
Sandbox Bob was back, twirling in his chair. I nodded to Guppy, and he began to feed the recorded transmissions to this latest mini-me. Sandbox Bob hammed it up, feigning sleep or yawning and stretching.
At the end of the series, Sandbox Bob stood up, did a little jig, bowed extravagantly, and disappeared in a puff of smoke.
I turned off the sandbox and grinned at Guppy. “I guess we’re golden.”
Now that Sandbox-Bob had identified and filtered out the trigger, I knew what to look for. Before anything else, I wrote a firewall just in case someone back on Earth tried to transmit another kill order. Then I leaned back in my executive office chair—a recent upgrade, now that my proprioception included discomfort—reached over to the keyboard on my desk, and pressed Play.
The input queue contained dozens of separate transmissions. There were sequences of instructions, commands, telemetry updates, and communication packets. One of the segments had included the self-destruct sequence. I looked over the listings, stored the transmissions that were still relevant and purged the rest.
The next segment, which had been received a short time after the kill order, was a message from Dr. Landers.
“Bob, I’m pleased to see that you are still in one piece. We weren’t able to intercept the attempted sabotage, but security did catch the person who transmitted the kill order to you. Subsequent discussion with the prisoner revealed that he was from one of the internal FAITH factions. Unfortunately, he didn’t survive the discussion, so that’s all we have on that front. We’re currently working on rooting out any other moles.”
I thought about that for a moment, shrugged, and hit Next.
“Just for your information, the missile was fired from a Brazilian Empire gunship. FAITH gunships responded and destroyed it. The Brazilian Empire is calling it an act of war. Things are a little tense right now.”
Tense. Hah. I can imagine. Spike picked that moment to hop into my lap. She immediately curled up and started purring. Okay, guess everyone’s reloaded.
“Coffee, please, Jeeves.” I waited until my coffee arrived and took a sip. Oh hell yes, that’s perfect.
The message from Landers continued, “Lest you feel personally responsible for the current situation, let me assure you that it’s been brewing for years now. Brazil has been playing a game of brinksmanship, forcing other countries to make concession after concession. But they overplayed their hand this time, and received a bloody nose. The next few days will tell if they will accept reality and back down, or attempt to bluster their way through this.”
Hmm. I wonder how bad it can get?
The next message was mission-related data—updates to stellar information, mostly. I was struck again by how little progress there had been in astronomy. Dr. Landers had explained that, between my time and the present, there had been very little interest in anything non-military above the Earth’s atmosphere until the still-very-recent invention of the SURGE drive. The new technology had created a different kind of arms race, as every superpower swiftly realized the potential of this new capability.
I filed the data and hit Next again.
“Heaven-1, this is Dr. Doucette. Dr. Landers had asked me to keep you updated if he was unable to. Here’s the situation. We took the competition by surprise with our early launch, and even more so by your preemptive departure. The Chinese and USE ships are being rushed to completion and will launch within another week or two. The Brazilians have just launched two probes, and one of them is on the same course as you. Er, Dr. Landers wanted me to tell you we have good news and bad news. I’m assuming that’s a 21st century colloquialism of some kind. The bad news is that the Brazilian ship is definitely armed with missiles similar to the two you avoided. Full specs to follow. The good news is that they seem to be only capable of about 1.25 g acceleration, unless they’re deliberately underplaying their hand.”
Oh crap. “Guppy, how much lead time will we have when we get to Epsilon Eridani?”
[145 days, including our 3-week head start]
“How about if we kick it up to 2.5 g?”
[We will gain an additional 32 days. However, it is not recommended due to reactor loading]
I nodded. The SURGE drive generated a pseudo-gravitational field in front of the ship, but the strength of the field was limited by the size of the drive system and power supply. Two g was about the most that I could coax from Heaven-1 on an ongoing basis, given the capacity of my fusion reactor.
Okay, going to have to start thinking about what I can prepare in 145 days, including time required to search the star system for resources. Number one on the TO-DO.
[Noted]
“Really, what have I told you a
bout reading my mind?”
[Sorry]
The next message contained the promised missile specs, along with some schematics for the Brazilian probe. Much of it was speculative and clearly labelled as such. However, as an engineer, I was aware that known specifications placed upper and lower constraints on unknown items. For instance, the information about the size of the probe, the number of missiles being carried, the size of the SURGE drive placed an upper limit on the size of the nuclear reactor.
Unless Brazil had cut corners somewhere else. The observed acceleration of the probe set a lower limit on the size of the SURGE drive and the nuclear reactor, which gave a fair indication of how much space was available to carry missiles. Again, absent cutting corners somewhere else. In the end, I would be able to estimate the minimum and maximum values for each parameter.
I filed the information for further review and calculations.
The next message was from Dr. Doucette again. “Heaven-1, I’m sorry to have to tell you that Dr. Landers is dead. He was at the Newhaven facility when it was bombed by Brazilian Empire forces. The confrontation over the attempt to shoot you down has escalated and is beginning to look like a full-blown war. Brazil is not backing down and is promising to take on the whole planet. Meanwhile, China attempted to sabotage the USE facility before they could launch, and the USE retaliated. None of the superpowers are on friendly enough terms to actually form alliances, but there’s a tacit alignment between the USE and FAITH on one side, and Brazil and China on the other. The Republic of Africa and Australia are warning everyone not to get them involved.”
I gritted my teeth in anger. Dr. Landers had been the closest thing to a friend that I’d had in this new world. Granted, I didn’t even know the man’s first name, but still… I didn’t like bullies. I’d had more than my fill of people who tried to get their way through violence and intimidation in school. This was just more of the same. If there’d been any thought of a civilized discussion with the Brazilian replicant, it was now out the window.
“Guppy, what’s the timestamp on that last message?”
[Message received 6.4 hours ago]
“I have a bad feeling. Can we get a visual of Earth?”
[Optical instruments can be deployed during flight. However, at this distance very little detail will be available]
“Please deploy them. I want to know if there’s anything that looks like a nuclear blast.”
[Radio surveillance would pick up an EMP]
“Um. Good point. Do that, too. And let me know the minute we get any more messages.”
[By your command]
I laughed out loud. That pretty much settled it. Guppy had grown a personality.
***
I sat back and rubbed my eyes. It brought a moment of amusement. Who am I performing for, anyway? One of the advantages of being a software emulation was that I never got tired, never needed rest, never needed to eat or go to the bathroom. My ability to concentrate on a problem had been legendary when I was alive. Now, I felt all but invincible. My only concession to my former humanity was to occasionally switch research topics just to keep fresh.
I had shelved the defensive plans for a while and was going over subspace theory. My math was a little rusty, but I was able to follow it. The theory had only been published a couple of years ago and hadn’t been fully explored yet. Once the possibility of the SURGE drive had been identified, almost all research had been focused in that direction. SUDDAR, the ability to use subspace pulses to detect and identify nearby concentrations of matter, was an almost trivial corollary.
I was pretty sure I could see other possibilities in the theory, one being faster than light communications. Previous attempts had failed because of the very odd way signal strength fell off in subspace, but I figured they just hadn’t stuck with it long enough.
I sighed and reluctantly closed the file. Like it or not, that just wasn’t a priority right now. And if I kept at it, I’d be down the rabbit hole for another couple of days that I couldn’t afford.
Opening the Defenses file, I reviewed the options that I’d evaluated so far.
Build equivalent missiles: Unlikely to be successful unless I lucked out in the Epsilon Eridani system and stumbled upon all the raw materials I would need in one place. And there would still be the problem of safely manufacturing the explosives. And the rocket fuel.
Rail gun: Quick, wouldn’t require a lot of unusual elements, and it would take very little effort to modify the ship design to accommodate one. The best part was that it could shoot just about anything for ammo, although the more massive, the better. But it wasn’t as good a weapon as a missile, since the ammo wouldn’t pursue the target. Might be useful to shoot down incoming missiles, though. Hmm, could I make some kind of smart ammo?
Lasers: Not a chance. Maybe I could put something military grade together eventually, but certainly not in the available time.
Nukes: that would require finding fissionables at the destination, then enriching them for use. Unlikely.
Build more Bobs: not in the amount of time available. Best estimate was up to six months per Bob, depending on the quantity of raw materials easily available.
Booby traps: Possibly my best bet. Just have to come up with a good one.
I’d decided that I should assume the Brazilian craft was playing possum with the low-acceleration departure. That meant I would have less time to prepare than calculations would indicate, once I reached Epsilon Eridani. So I’d have to go for the simplest and quickest-to-build option.
I pulled up my copy of Art of War, hoping for more inspiration this time around.
***
It was time. I had been dreading this, avoiding it really, for weeks now. But I’d finally run out of excuses and delaying tactics. Everything was up to date. All plans were well underway. The VR was now at a level of realism sufficient for what I knew I had to do.
I pulled up the folder containing the endocrine control project. Before I had time to develop second, third, or fourth thoughts, I flipped the switch to off.
You know that sinking feeling you get when you suddenly realize you’ve forgotten something important? Like a combination of fast elevator and urge to hurl. It hit me without any warning or buildup. Maybe it was the sudden release, maybe it was an accumulation of all the suppressed emotions. Whatever, I wasn’t ready for the intensity. My thoughts swirled with all the things that had been bugging me since I’d woken up.
Mom. Dad. Andrea and Alaina. All gone, separated from me by more than a century and billions of kilometers. I’d never see their children. I’d never have my own. I’d never see Mom and Dad as grandparents. They’d have made excellent grandparents. They were goofy, irreverent, and never stood on their dignity.
I thought of Andrea mocking me about my height, and I started to cry. Alaina spraying me with the garden hose as I lay in the hammock that we had strung up in the back yard. I thought of the times we all goaded each other into uncontrollable laughter with increasingly infantile jokes and puns. No one understood us like we understood each other. No one else would get it, maybe not even Mom and Dad. And they were gone. Irretrievably beyond my reach, forever. As the loneliness, the loss washed over me, I slid down off my chair onto the floor and curled into a ball. I sobbed until I couldn’t catch a breath, then had to gasp a huge lungful of air.
Spike came over to investigate and gave me a small inquisitive meow. I took the cat in my arms and, rocking back and forth on the floor, I mourned my lost life.
***
The version 2 mock-up slowly rotated over the desktop, but I wasn’t really seeing it. I’d had a really good cry, and it was certainly cathartic, but I had a feeling it wasn’t over. However, one thing I now knew—I was still human, in the ways that mattered.
[Activity detected in Earth Monitoring]
I looked over at Guppy. “What’s up?”
[EMPs detected. Visible light flashes detected. Probability of groundside nuclear detonations: 100%]
“Damn. Okay, Guppy, keep monitoring. Scan for any coherent transmissions.”
Well, it’s hit the fan. And no way to know how badly. But I think I’m on my own.
Part 2
Bob – August 2144 – Epsilon Eridani
There are two technological developments that will affect how we go about exploring the cosmos: communications and transportation. The first and most obvious technology is the drive system. Have we developed faster-than-light transport? Do we have a reactionless drive? Wormholes? Teleportation? How long it takes to get from A to B affects not only the cost of the enterprise, but whether or not it’s even possible to transport people.
Unfortunately, in the end, whether or not we do this will depend more on whether we have the political will to do so than anything else. Barring significant advances in technology or some dramatic scientific discovery, the costs will be far too high for anything less than a global effort.
… Lawrence Vienn, from the Convention panel Exploring the Galaxy
I slid into the Epsilon Eridani system at a couple of percent of light-speed. I was approaching the system from stellar north, that being the pole where the star, like Earth, was rotating counterclockwise. I took multiple consecutive images of the area around the star, looking for points of light that moved from one picture to the next. At my current velocity, any planets would show significant apparent motion against the backdrop of the galaxy.
My mission profile was to look for habitable planets, or failing that to look for almost habitable planets that could be modified or at least lived on with some technical assistance.
I deployed SUDDAR as well, although it was only able to detect dense objects within a light-hour radius. I didn’t really expect to find anything. At this distance from the star, even Kuiper objects would be rare.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) Page 8
