We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  I inserted myself into a polar orbit and began deep scans for, well, anything, really. Metal deposits, of course, but also volcanic activity, and anything else interesting.

  It was one of those good news, bad news situations. Good news, I found lots that was interesting. Bad news, no metals. None. Not within reach of anything in my arsenal, anyway. The planet had a magnetic field, so it obviously had a metallic core. But next to nothing in the crust. Oh, a patch here and a patch there, but not worth grubbing for.

  [Anomaly detected]

  “And this isn’t anomalous enough already?”

  [Double-plus anomaly detected. Better?]

  Not loving it quite so much. For a fleeting moment, I thought of reinitializing Guppy. Only for a moment.

  Not that I needed to worry. One of our redesign items was to not allow GUPPI to read our thoughts. That was just too creepy. He now required voice commands, however you define voice in a computer system that talks to itself.

  “Okay, Guppy, what is it?”

  [Accumulation of refined metal detected. An artifact]

  “Holy crap.” I thought for a moment. “Deploy three of our exploration drones. Send them down to the location of the anomaly. Have them carry a couple of roamers too. Set one of the drones to spiral outward from the site, while the other two and the roamers investigate the site in detail.”

  [Aye]

  Guppy was all business now. This was serious. Had Medeiros crashed? Was it a probe from one of the other nations?

  The drones got there in record time—I think Guppy might have driven them a little aggressively—and settled around the anomaly. One started to circle, gradually getting farther from the center, while the other two landed and spit out twenty-centimeter roamers. The drones lifted off and started on close-up visual scans.

  One thing was obvious right away: this wasn’t one of the probes. In fact, this wasn’t from Earth at all. I couldn’t describe exactly what about it screamed alien, but no human mind designed that. The best metaphor I could come up with was the alien ship in Prometheus. It just didn’t make sense.

  I took a moment to savor the thought. I had just found the first intelligent life outside of Earth. Well, okay, looking at the wreck, I might have just found the corpses of the first intelligent life. But still…

  It was obvious that this had been some kind of cargo carrier. The thing had crashed and split open. It had spilled out part of its contents, which seemed to consist of stacks and stacks of large metal ingots of various types. Each ingot was pure, all one element. Iron, titanium, copper, nickel, tons of the stuff. The carrier looked like it had only been a quarter full, though, unless some had been taken.

  It appeared we had found our metal thieves. Well, one of them. And thief was probably too strong a word. But still…

  [Anomaly]

  “Oh, for—what now?”

  [See for yourself]

  I picked up the video that Guppy offered to me. And my jaw dropped. This planet wasn’t lifeless. Well, it was now, but it hadn’t been at some point in the past.

  I was looking at a dead ecosystem, what you’d get if everything in the Amazon basin died all at once. It was dry, it was weathered, it was corroded. But it was trees, and bushes, and the occasional animal. And it went on forever.

  ***

  I sent down some biological analysis drones to do some necropsies and try to figure out what had happened here. That wasn’t quite what they were designed for, but I had all the accumulated biological and medical knowledge from Earth, and a very advanced piece of technology designed by, uh, me.

  They poked and prodded and cut, and they got some suitable specimens. They had their orders, and the AMIs were entirely competent within the parameters they’d been assigned. I just had to stay out of the way and not joggle their mechanical elbows.

  The drones and roamers continued to examine the wreckage. Without being able to say why, I sent a couple of busters down to hover menacingly. Things looked deader than dead, but I just had a spooky feeling.

  The report from the biological drones arrived on my desktop with a ding. I hurried over and opened the file.

  Oh, wow.

  Based on cellular damage, everything had been killed by something along the lines of a gamma ray burst. Basically a huge surge of radiation, more than enough to kill instantly. I knew that because not only had the animals been killed but their intestinal flora (or the local equivalent) had been killed at the same time. There was no bloating, no rotting from the inside out. I had to make some assumptions, using terrestrial analogies, but I was pretty confident that they would be close enough.

  I also noted how few carcasses we’d found. The specimens were all small, in odd, inconvenient places, or in poor condition, even for dead bodies. I was pretty sure that 99% of the fauna were unaccounted for.

  Without decomposition to provide a clue, I couldn’t immediately tell how long ago this had happened. But wear and erosion on the carcasses and dead trees gave me some indications, as did an analysis of the number of forest fire tracks with no new growth. I estimated somewhere between fifty and a hundred years ago.

  I sent the biological drones off to check another couple of points on the planet, especially a point as close to antipodal to this location as possible.

  [Emergency! Hostile activity!]

  “What? What’s happening?”

  [One of the roamers is under attack]

  “Get the drones to do point-focused SUDDAR pings. I want as much detail as you can get.”

  [Done]

  I dissolved my VR and cranked up to maximum frame rate. The video feed was real-time. It showed a window from the perspective of the roamer that was under attack, and another from the perspective of the second roamer. The first roamer seemed to be infested with mechanical ants. As I watched, the roamer was being eaten—metal parts thinning and dissolving.

  “Guppy! Blow both roamers. Self-destructs, now!”

  Guppy didn’t argue or question. The video feeds disappeared.

  “And firewall our device comms. I doubt those things had time to finagle the encryption keys from the roamers, but why take chances?”

  I turned to the SUDDAR analysis, which was just assembling over the desk. To one side, Guppy had brought up the video record received from the roamers.

  I played back the video record first. The first roamer had opened a container or locker or something. It appeared to have activated the ants. Whether that was a defensive reaction, or the ants just considered the roamer to be a resource to be acquired, was anyone’s guess. I doubted there was really much practical difference. Either way, the ants had started to disassemble the roamer. The SUDDAR point-scan showed that they were separating it by element. They didn’t seem interested in the plastic and ceramic components.

  I didn’t regret blowing up the roamers. I certainly couldn’t have brought them back with the possibility of one of those ants coming along for the ride. And, silly as it was, I’d read and seen enough science fiction in my day about advanced technologies taking over the communication system and getting into the computer. That’s me we’re talking about, after all.

  I can build more roamers.

  Where did the ants get their power from? I scanned the ship again and found that about half of the ants that had survived the roamer suicides were now still. I didn’t know if they were dead or just on standby.

  I decided to scan at five-second intervals to see what they were up to. Strangely, every time I scanned, more ants became active. The hell? I cut off the SUDDAR scans for a full minute. When I did another scan, about a quarter of the ants were inactive. Oh, hell. I stopped scanning for five minutes, then did a quick scan, with as low power as I could manage. Sure enough, most of the ants were inactive.

  Dammit! They’re powered by the SUDDAR beam. It was my scans that reactivated them.

  Well, that was a fine pickle. Any attempt to find out what they were doing would power them up. But that meant that the aliens had found s
ome way to beam power through subspace and use it at the receiving end. I needed to examine those ants.

  I waited an hour, then sent a single one-centimeter roamer in. No way an ant could piggy-back undetected on a roamer only slightly bigger than itself. The roamer picked up a couple of ants and brought them out of the hulk. I had prepared a couple of small coffins for the ants, filled with a plastic goop. The roamer stuffed the ants into the goop, then added the hardener. I now had ants under glass, more or less. While they might be able to cut their way out of those, I hoped they couldn’t do it before I completed a scan.

  I brought my two drones in close, and they did the most intense and high-precision close-in scans of which they were capable. That would produce almost a molecular-level map of the ants. I watched in fascination as the ants both powered up and produced little cutters from their front appendages. Fortunately they couldn’t move, so all they did was drill a couple of holes in the plastic. Good to know.

  I detonated the roamer–can’t be too careful–and retired to my treehouse to ruminate.

  ***

  I had completed my survey. There was no sign of a civilization on this planet, so the wreck was definitely alien. The aliens had come in, presumably killed all life with some kind of radiation weapon, mined the star system, collected the carcasses, then left. There were a lot of assumptions in there, but it fit the evidence.

  The scan of the ants had shown some interesting technology. I was already setting up simulations to test some of it.

  The scans of the hulk didn’t have any huge surprises. It appeared to be run by an A.I. or AMI of some kind. It had a fusion reactor. It had a SURGE drive. It had a SUDDAR transmitter. However, the SUDDAR unit seemed designed to transmit power to a tuned receiver as well as using the SUDDAR as radar. I’d taken detailed scans of that for further study.

  Maybe the aliens had come and rescued the crew and left the hulk. I doubted that. There didn’t really seem to be any accommodation for anything biological. It was probable that the ship was completely A.I. Was this civilization biological at all? The fact that they’d collected all the carcasses hinted at an answer, and not one that I liked at all. I could only think of one reason to bother collecting all that protein.

  And was this a one-time event? Or were they raiding systems on an ongoing basis? If so, which way were they heading? I certainly wouldn’t want this fate to befall the Solar System, even if there weren’t any humans left. The dolphins and chimps still deserved their chance.

  I felt a pang of disappointment as visions of meeting Vulcans or Asgardians evaporated. This was more like an Alien scenario. As first contact situations went, this one sucked.

  Like it or not, I had to bring the other Bobs into this. Which brought up another problem. At this distance, I couldn’t send a message back to Bill. I would need the space station for a transmission, and I would need the raw materials in order to build one. The ore contained in the hulk, even adding in the hulk itself, wasn’t enough.

  I would have to leave.

  Riker – April 2171 – Sol

  The big day had arrived. The colony ships had been checked out end to end, they’d been inspected by the USE delegation, and they’d done a shakedown cruise to Jupiter and back. Now they were parked in low Earth orbit, waiting for their occupants.

  Homer was doing a kind of war dance around my captain’s chair, and I was forcibly reminded of my lack of rhythm. The VR upgrades from Bill meant that we Bobs could interact physically instead of just talking to each other through video windows. It had its downsides.

  I turned my attention back to the status vids, which showed people lining up for the ground-to-orbit shuttles. Each shuttle could handle five hundred people, packed in like rush-hour commuters.

  I remembered my early days as a working stiff, taking the seabus across the harbor twice a day. Hard plastic benches, barely wider than one’s shoulders, arranged in back-to-back rows so you spent the entire trip eye to eye with a total stranger. And that irritating recorded lecture, every single trip, telling you how to use the life jackets. Fun times.

  The shuttles carried more people, and the commute to the ship would take a little longer than fifteen minutes, but it would be the same prosaic, boring ride. At the end of it, the passengers would be hustled along to stasis pods, given a sedative, then hooked up and locked into a box the size of a coffin. Hopefully to wake up in less than four years ship’s time, at a new home.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  Ten shuttles made a total of forty trips to move the USE colonists to the ships. A percentage of the contents of the Svalbard Vaults were loaded onto each colony ship, and the shuttles were docked in the cargo holds.

  Then came the inevitable ceremony. Everyone had to make a speech. You’d expect the USE bigwigs to make a speech, but why did the groups from the other side of the planet feel the need? By the time we were half-way through, I had turned off my proprioception emulation to avoid falling over, virtually asleep. I reanimated sandbox Bob to take over the video and try to look attentive.

  Eventually, though, they were done. Howard, our newest Bob, was making the flight with them, acting as escort. And, just between Howard and me, to make sure that they behaved at the other end. I hoped that was just excessive paranoia on my part, but I’d loaded Howard’s cargo hold with a few of Bill’s recent inventions, just in case.

  The colony ships had a maximum sustained acceleration of 1 g, so the trip would take slightly longer than it would have for a version 1 Bob. They would be on the road for a little over eighteen years. About six years would pass on-board, but no time at all for the colonists in their stasis pods.

  The ships were crewed by a couple of Riker clones and a crap-ton of roamers. No need for humans to risk their DNA during the voyage. I had placed the replicant matrices in the ships as one of the final tasks, thereby giving no one time to pull anything underhanded. There had been no hacking attempts, so possibly whoever it was had given up.

  The third ship, designated for the Spits and the FAITH enclave, would be leaving in four months. They would establish the first settlement on whichever planet the USE contingent didn’t pick. The first settlement’s job would be to establish sufficient infrastructure for future groups to be able to settle in without undue hardship. It was the price of being first.

  Valter was philosophical about that. “Even second prize is still a magnificent gift,” he said in his speech.

  Three more vessels were already under construction. Between new builds and returning colony ships, we hoped to maintain a steady stream of exodus from Terra, as long as there were people who wanted to leave. Meanwhile, the resources left behind and the kudzu production would continue to feed an ever-shrinking populace for a long time to come.

  I just hoped we’d find more colonizable worlds before people started shooting at each other again.

  ***

  I found myself tearing up just a little as I watched the image in the holotank, which showed the colony ships passing the orbit of Mars. After more than a decade of work, of butting heads with, ahem, a bunch of buttheads, we had actually launched. It was an emotional moment. Even Homer was silent.

  Finally, with a groan, I stood up and stretched. “Back to the salt mines.”

  Homer grinned at me and pulled up a list. “Stuff for today…”

  Bill – May 2172 – Epsilon Eridani

  I held an air-horn over my head and pressed the button. A loud blaaaat filled the room. All conversation ceased, as every head turned towards me.

  “Hey, everyone. Welcome to the first Bob-moot. I’ve built a matrix here at the Skunk Works that is more than big enough to handle everyone in the bobiverse in VR.”

  “Bobiverse? Really?” Garfield gave me the stink-eye.

  I laughed. “Just thought of it. I think it’s pretty good, actually.”

  “Bobiverse. BobNet. This galaxy may not be big enough for our ego.” Garfield tried his best to look disapproving, but it’s hard to fool your
selves.

  I looked around at my audience. Not a huge crowd at this point. I had Riker, Homer, and the other clones from Sol; Bart and his clones in Alpha Centauri; and the Bobs on the way to Omicron2 Eridani with the colonists. That last group would be out of touch in another month or so, when their tau got too high for VR interfacing. Hopefully by then, a few other Bobs would have picked up the SCUT plans and linked in.

  Homer cupped his hands around his mouth and gave me a loud boo.

  I looked around the group. “Okay, guys. I’m hoping we can make this a regular thing. It helps to keep everyone up to date.”

  “Plus it’ll give you an excuse to inflict baseball on us!” Bart yelled.

  “I plead the fifth.” I smiled at everyone. “Meanwhile, we have beer. And coffee. And a pub to sit in. Shall we?”

  We all popped over to the pub VR and settled into chairs. Time to celebrate.

  Khan – April 2185 – 82 Eridani

  Do not engage an enemy more powerful than you. And if it is unavoidable and you do have to engage, then make sure you engage it on your terms, not on your enemy’s terms.

  … Sun Tzu, Art of War

  We slowed down to sub-relativistic speeds well short of 82 Eridani. We wanted plenty of time to scope out the situation, without alerting Medeiros to our presence.

  Bill had made good on his promise to avenge Milo. Eight version-3 Bobs, including myself, were poised outside the system, just itching to give Medeiros a piece of our collective mind. But Medeiros had had thirty-five years now to establish himself. None of us thought we’d be able to simply waltz in and whup his butt like back at Epsilon Eridani or Alpha Centauri.

  And because we have always been a cautious person, reconnaissance was going to be a major priority. We had two scout probes each, with heavily shielded reactors, three-light-hour-range SUDDARs, and SCUD communications. And booby traps. We didn’t want Medeiros getting hold of any of that tech.