We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

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. Ȓ𝓪ΝȪ฿Ё𝙎

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 booby 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.

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 about 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.