We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 2: Chapter 52: Bullwinkle

Book 2: Chapter 52: Bullwinkle

Bill

December 2195

Epsilon Eridani

I was touring the Ragnarök landscape in Bullwinkle when I got a ping from Garfield.

I sent an IM back. “What’s up?”

Garfield responded on audio only. I hadn’t implemented head’s-up visuals yet, and I didn’t want to exit the moose.

“Report’s back from 82 Eridani.”

Well, that would be interesting no matter how it had ended up. Come to think of it, the fact that someone was still alive to report back limited the extent to which the news could be bad. I tried to focus on that thought. I shut down Bullwinkle and called the transport drone to come and get him.

It took a moment to refocus myself in my regular VR. Garfield was sitting at the table, swiping through a report.

Garfield leaned back and grinned. “It’ll take a while to go through everything, and they’re still consolidating, but it’s looking damned good. A couple of the guys are checking biocompatibility. Unless there’s something really poisonous, we have three new colony targets.”

He reached forward and popped up a couple of items in separate windows. “Then there’s this. One of the advantages of using busters as a weapon is there’s lots of wreckage to examine. Loki thinks he may already be getting a handle on the cloaking stuff.” Garfield’s grin looked like it was becoming permanent. “We’ve also got a couple of unexploded fission bombs. The guys will be very careful, of course, but we think a V4 SUDDAR pulse might be able to get us a scan without setting off a booby trap.”

“Excellent.” I sat down and requested a couple of coffees from Jeeves. I was silent for a moment, scrubbing my face with my hands. “The thing is, Gar, even with this stuff we can’t do more than delay and annoy the Others. The more I see of them, the bigger and more invincible they look. Their population, based on the latest models, could easily be a couple of hundred billion. They could field a space navy that would just roll over us, if we really pissed them off.”

Garfield nodded, a morose expression on his face. After a short silence, he looked up at me. “How’s it going with Bullwinkle? I notice you no longer have a drone following.”

“Yeppers.” I was glad to change the subject. “Improvements in miniaturization, local processing, better comms. I still need a large body, but it’s coming down gradually. Not quite to the point of a human body yet.”

“Still too big for Rocky?”

“Afraid so, buddy. Working on it, though.”

“So what’s your ultimate goal?”

“To walk in and punch Cranston right in the nose.”

Garfield threw his head back and laughed.

* * *

We settled into the pub, beers and coffees scattered around the tables. Another game of Scrub, another reminder that I was never an athlete. I grinned at the thought. At least there were no jocks around to rub it in anymore.

Monty parked himself at my table and took a tentative sip of his beer. I’d recently introduced a new dark beer that I thought was a serviceable substitute for Guinness. I watched him carefully.

Monty stared at the glass for a moment, nodded, and took a deeper sip. Success! I messaged Guppy to add the beer to the menu.

“Hey, Monty, how’s things up Poseidon way?”

Monty raised the glass in my direction. “Pretty good, actually, Bill. We had a couple of bad months where the krakens started hanging around a lot, hoping for a meal, but the new underwater defenses seem to be gradually changing their minds.”

“But you’re still going ahead with the floating city plans.”

“Oh, sure.” Monty shrugged. “No matter what you do, living on a floating plant mat is still going a little more native than most of the colonists are comfortable with. Proper cities will mean permanent construction, transit, and all the amenities that we like to call civilization.”

“And you’ll be out of there.”

He laughed. “Yeah, you caught me. As soon as they have enough infrastructure and redundancy to handle their own destiny, I’m heading out. I’ve had enough of shepherding humans, y’know?”

I smiled at him, but his comments worried me.

New Bobs were increasingly voicing an unwillingness to hang around and help humanity. On top of the tendency to use dismissive language, it told me that there was some kind of shift in psychology going on.

Then I admitted to myself that I might be the one out of step. I’d been holed up at Epsilon Eridani for fifty years, with only second-hand exposure to humanity. It was easy for me to have an attitude. Bobs cloned from Riker’s tree might just be getting heartily sick of people.

Anyway, there were still enough interested Bobs to keep things rolling. I decided not to worry about it. I could always start my own dynasty if I needed to.

I looked around for Howard, but didn’t see him. The moot directory indicated he hadn’t shown up today. Now there was a case of going too far in the other direction. The man was head over heels over a human. Everyone but Howard could see it. Had Original Bob ever been that naïve? I sighed. Yeah. He had.

Riker was surrounded by a group of Bobs, being grilled on the situation on Earth. The results from 82 Eridani would certainly have caused a stir with the enclaves. I had a TODO to talk to Will about it myself, but I wasn’t going to wade into that scrum. It could wait.

Marvin and Luke came over and joined Monty and me.

“Hi, Bill. Sorry to be a pest…”

“S’okay, Marv. I understand. No, still nothing from Bender. Sorry. Unless he decided to pull a Mario and head for the far reaches, I think the greatest likelihood is that something happened to him.”

Marvin looked downcast, and Luke nodded and looked away. Those three were from the same cohort, so they were related in a way that was somehow one step closer than mere clonedom. It was now coming up on thirty years since Luke and Bender left Delta Eridani. The chances of an innocent explanation for Bender’s silence became smaller every year.

Marvin laced his fingers together and put his forehead to them for a moment. “Victor followed Bender’s departure vector. So far, nothing. He thinks Bender may have changed direction at some point. Victor’s not willing to backtrack, so we’re thinking of mounting an expedition.”

My eyebrows rose. “Going after him? Space is pretty big. What do you think your chances are?”

Luke leaned forward, arms encircling his drink. “You know we leave a trail when we fly between systems. The gas is slightly thinner along the flight path of a Heaven vessel where we’ve scooped it up. It’s not much, and you have to be very careful, but even if he changed course mid-flight we should be able to follow his new vector.”

“Okay. You know where he was aiming when he left Eden. I guess you just start with that?”

Marvin and Luke nodded in sync.

It would take decades, if not centuries. Then I smiled. Still thinking like an ephemeral. How long it would take was irrelevant. We had forever.