We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 4: Chapter 16: Human Replicant Reserve

Book 4: Chapter 16: Human Replicant Reserve

Will

May 2334

Virt, Vulcan Post-Life Arcology

I was outside the virtual door of one Professor Steven Gilligan, a former department chair at the University of Landing on Vulcan with a list of letters after his name that could choke a horse. Professor Gilligan had been an expert in many things when he was alive, but of most importance to myself and Bob was that he specialized in artificial environments.

Of even more interest to me personally was the fact that he continued to lecture at the university, although as a guest lecturer these days. And he did so in a manny custom-made for him. So it wasn’t just us Bobs anymore.

I’d done some research at Bob’s request, and the professor’s name came up a lot. I had finally received an invitation to visit, at the Vulcan Post-Life Arcology. The Arcology was physically located in a large space station orbiting Omicron2 Eridani just inside the Oort cloud. It currently had a membership of about two hundred, mostly rich and famous people who hadn’t felt like waiting for medicine to catch up with them.

I found myself unexpectedly unsettled. I’d been living in real, in a manny, for so long that virt had become a foreign experience. At the same time, I’d been away from human society for so long that I was noticeably behind the times. I resolved to give the situation a good think when I had some time.

The door opened and Professor Gilligan beamed at me. He was short, balding, and slight of build—which surprised me, since in virt he could look like anything he wanted.

“Ah, Mr. Riker. Or is it Johansson? Come in, please.”

I replied with a small laugh. “I run into that a lot, professor. As the only Bob to take a last name as my moniker, I kind of broke the conventions. These days I answer to either, or just Will.”

“And you can call me Steven. Please, have a seat.” He waved to his living room area, which featured a large picture window in which floated the image of a ring-shaped habitat. As with most personal VRs, the setting was comfortable and spacious, but not ostentatious. Fancy layouts and gilding lost their impact when they were free but for the wave of a hand.

I motioned to the view as I sat. “Ringworld?”

“That is a Bishop Ring, actually. This image is intended to be two thousand miles in diameter and a hundred miles across. More than six hundred thousand square miles of prime real estate.”

“Still theoretical, though.”

Steven replied with a shrug. “Of course. Technically it’s just an engineering problem, but the real roadblocks have always been economic and political. When you’re settling a new system, you have to choose to either sit in your ship for however many decades it takes to build the megastructure, or choose to populate the habitable planet essentially immediately. The latter option always wins.”

“And it’s not really just an engineering problem, is it?” I said.

“It is in that we have all the technology required to build one. Just not the knowledge. For instance, no one has ever been able to keep a closed ecology going for more than a year, at least on research scales.”

“And having your ecosystem collapse on a megastructure would be”—I grinned at him—“suboptimal.”

Steven laughed. “Keeping an ecosystem going would not be a trivial task. You can’t have actual bedrock, or a water table, or even very deep soil, at least not without major engineering challenges. So you’d have to pump water up to stream heads, and you’d have to be constantly transporting topsoil uphill to replace whatever gets washed downstream. Trees would have to be shallow-rooted. Burrowing and cave-dwelling animals would be at a disadvantage. It’s essentially like a zoo enclosure—designed to look natural, but carefully engineered nonetheless.”

“What if it’s big enough to have weather?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that work as well, at least for the water supply issue?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, although that scenario would increase the runoff issue. As I said, Will, it’s all theoretical. With study and experimentation, we could come up with compromises that would provide the best balance of weight savings and ecological robustness. That’s what I mean by not having the actual knowledge.”

I took a moment to admire the Bishop Ring. “Still, it would open up virtually every stellar system with a reasonably well-behaved star. No one at all has expressed any interest in building one?”

“Not to my knowledge, Will. It’s been somewhat a slap in the face for me,” he replied with a chuckle. “As I said, the problem is all the political and economic commitments that would have to be made. Humans have very rarely been able to come together to build anything on this scale, at least since the days of the pyramids.”

I shifted in my seat. “Which brings me to the reason for my visit. You’ve drawn up plans for any number of megastructures over the years, both as serious proposals and as study material for your courses. Have you ever done a topopolis?”

“Yes, certainly. As a megastructure, it has a lot going for it. Effectively infinite land area by simply adding more length; no increase in structural or material strength requirements no matter how long you make it; no need for inhabitants to ever go outside; and if built with sufficient diameter, no Coriolis force to speak of. And it can be added to at any time, if the initial design is done properly.”

“Really? You’d cut open the loop? How would you keep the air from escaping?”

“First, Will, you don’t need to have a closed loop. There’s really no physical reason why you couldn’t leave the ends unconnected. It wouldn’t have a stable orbit anyway, so in either scenario you’d need some method of orbital adjustment. And you’d build it in segments of some length, with some kind of barrier at the end of each segment. The barrier wouldn’t even have to go right to the center, as long as the segments were already rotating. Spillover would be trivial.”

I nodded slowly. Without knowing anything about Heaven’s River, Steven had described it with amazing accuracy. “Good. Steven, I wonder if I could ask you to look at some scans and comment?”

His eyebrows went up; I hadn’t given a lot of detail about the purpose of the meeting, except to say that I wanted to talk about megastructures. He accepted the files as I offered them and converted them to paper idioms, then started flipping through the stack. He muttered a few sentences, then his eyes grew rounder and wider and he went silent. Several times he flipped back to earlier pages. Finally he converted the idiom to a 3D image. Hanging between us was a four-segment-long stretch of Heaven’s River.

“Oh my God. Someone built one? Who?”

“They aren’t human, Steven. We’re still learning about them. Here.” I flipped up an image of a Quinlan, hanging in space beside the engineering segment.

“Have you talked to them?”

“Not openly, no. They have a disturbing tendency to shoot first. We’re trying to figure things out without exposing ourselves.”

“Not the Others all over again, though?”

“No, nothing like that. Just ground-level belligerence, I think.”

He nodded and leaned forward to inspect the segment. “So what would you like to know?”

“Limitations. What they can and can’t do. How they’re likely to lay it out. Infrastructure. We’re looking for someone in the structure, and any info that could narrow things down would be helpful.”

Steven glanced at me, then poked at the image. “Well, I see a transportation system right there. Vacuum monorail or something similar. That would be your long-distance travel option. I love the river concept. Artificial current, of course, since there’s no downhill along the length. I suppose you could raise one end of the river in each segment and pump the water upward, but then you have issues of topography. Even a one-tenth percent grade for this implementation would mean a half-mile elevation at the headwaters. And moving all that mass up and down would create issues of angular momentum.” He paused, then pointed. “The hollow mountains every five hundred miles or so would be where your maintenance and infrastructure would be—”

“Wait, hollow mountains?” I peered more closely at the image. It wasn’t obvious from the visual, but it appeared the interior of the mountains was actually void space.

“Of course, Will. You wouldn’t want mountains of real rock. The mass would place a lot of strain on that segment of the topopolis, and to no purpose. Instead you build a hollow shell which, being closer to the axis, exhibits less centrifugal weight than average. Then you put all your infrastructure that you don’t want people to have to look at inside the hollow. Like a theme park, all the mechanicals are hidden.”

“Oh, for crying—” I zoomed in on the image. At the upper limit of magnification, there was the barest hint of detail under the mountains. “And an entrance …?”

“No way to predict how that would be designed, but I’m sure now that you know where to look, you can locate one.”

Interesting. Something to check out if we could get a scanning drone into position. I sat back and made a gesture for him to continue.

Steven examined the hologram in silence for several more mils, then pointed at one of the impellers under a river segment. “I don’t think you’ve correctly characterized the river system, Will. This isn’t one river, it’s four. Alternately going in opposite directions. The tributaries and feeders allow the rivers to exchange contents, but if you check the impeller configurations, there are two main flow directions. And note how, at the segment boundaries, the rivers coalesce into four straits running through the mountain barriers. Two in each direction.”

I examined the hologram in silence. Steven appeared to be correct. We’d completely missed the fact that the impellers were pointing in two opposite directions. “I guess it makes sense. There’s no logical reason to give one direction priority over the other. This way, you can go downstream in either direction by just switching river systems.”

Steven examined the hologram for several more full seconds, then pointed to the radiators on the dark side of the strand. “Heat dispersal is, of course, a problem. The topopolis by its nature is a mostly closed system, and the artificial sun simply dumps more heat into the habitat. They’ve designed things to extract heat through an exchange system with the outer shell that actually generates electricity from the gradient—brilliant. Then it’s transferred to the cooling fins on the outer shell to be radiated into space. I imagine the heat signature would be significant.”

“Significant enough to be seen from light-years away,” I said, smiling. Steven was hitting it out of the park.

He continued to examine the document, but appeared to have extracted all the revelations he could. He finally sighed, sat back, and gestured at the image. “Can I get a copy of this? Could I use it in my lectures?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s not a secret. Although there’s some controversy in the Bobiverse about whether we should even be getting involved.”

Steven snorted. “You’d think being dead would free you from the dictates of politics. But apparently it’s even more inevitable than death or taxes. Do you know that I endure protests regularly?”

My eyebrows went up in surprise. “Protests? At the university?”

“Yes. There is some sentiment that I shouldn’t be taking up a position that could be filled by a living human being.”

“Unbelievable.” I shook my head. “And the university’s position?”

“They take the stance that they will consider replacing me when a replacement candidate is found with my qualifications.”

“Eminently logical. Probably drives the protestors crazy.”

Steven smiled. “Which is why I am so hopeful that your brother Howard’s human/android interface project will show some early success.”

“I—what?” Apparently, Howard had his fingers in more pies than I knew. “I’m visiting him after I leave here. I’ll certainly ask him about that.” I shifted forward in my chair. “Thank you very much, Professor Gilligan. You’ve been a great help.”

Steven waved off the compliment. “It is my job, after all. But you don’t have to leave just yet, do you? I’d love to learn more about the Bobiverse, as you call it.”

“Not at all. What would you like to know?” I wasn’t in a big hurry, and a little quid pro quo wasn’t unreasonable.

The conversation with Professor Gilligan had been fascinating, and he had extracted a promise from me to keep him updated, and possibly even invite him into the group. I would have to discuss that with the others, but the professor had a large knowledge set and, in my opinion, would be an asset.

Meanwhile, Howard was next on my list. I wanted to talk with one of the other Bobs about some personal issues, and Howard seemed like the best idea, since he lived in human society full-time. The conversation with Professor Gilligan just added more fuel. I pinged Howard and received an invitation and a manny address.

I entered the manny, and in seconds I was stepping out of the pod in Howard and Bridget’s apartment. Bridget waved at me from her seat and went back to what she was doing. She appeared to be working on a computer, but the monitor was virtual, floating in the air in front of her. Parts of the image were typical 2D info, but other parts were 3D, and appeared to pop out from the image. It was not only holographic, but also touch-sensitive. I checked my libraries and realized this was a breed of computer called a Canvas. Quite neat. Almost as good as the metaphors we used in virt.

“Hey, Will,” Howard said, motioning me to the couch. “What’s cooking?”

I sat, glanced down at my hands, and realized I was in a generic manny. I wasn’t sure why, but I’d been expecting to find myself in a Bob model. I held up my hands. “Uh …”

“Sorry, bud. If you wanted a Bob manny you’d have to pick one up from the public storage pods. We’ve got a couple—”

“Public storage pods?”

“Generic and custom mannies, stored for individuals and organizations according to need, or available for rental. Just like vehicles. We—by which I mean the Bobiverse—maintain a couple of Bob mannies in all major cities in human space. The monthly storage cost is trivial.”

“Paid in what?” I said, then held up my hand before Howard could answer. “Sorry, I came to ask you a couple of questions, and the questions are multiplying faster than I can even articulate them. I’ve been pretty much sidelined on Valhalla for a couple of decades now, Howard, and I feel like a hermit who has just hiked back down to civilization to discover cell phones.”

Howard grinned at my discomfiture. Even Bridget smiled briefly without turning around. Listening with at least one ear, apparently.

“Okay, well, to answer the last question first, pams. They’re a unit of currency that has been adopted across human space. Stands for printer/autofactory minutes. Basically, it’s the value of one minute of autofactory time.”

“But that’s ridiculous. You can just print more autofactories, and you’ll have—”

“More available autofactory minutes, but with reduced value due to inflation. Like a government back on Earth printing more currency. In fact, very much the same type of feedback systems. An economist from the 21st century would get it right away. The threat of reducing the value of a pam demotivates companies from making too many autofactories.”

I waved it away. “Okay, it makes sense, I guess. But I wanted to ask about something Professor Gilligan said—something about baseline humans being able to wear a manny? He said the research was being done here. By you.”

“Not quite true. I’m”—Howard glanced at Bridget—“we are financing it. It would avoid another situation like the Prometheus expedition …” Howard was silent for a moment, and I nodded in sympathy. The deaths had been hard on Howard and Bridget. “… as well as forestall some of the anti-manny sentiment going around these days.”

“Steven said something about that. University protests?”

Howard snorted. “Wow, you really have been out of it. Your professor friend lectures at the Vulcan university using a manny. There have been pretty regular protests against his presence. The gist seems to be that he’s dead and shouldn’t be taking up a spot that could be available for someone still living. That’s the most common complaint, but by no means the only one. Even just wandering around in a manny, you might find yourself being picketed.”

I put my head in my hand. “Oh, for chrissake. And how widespread is this?”

“Pretty localized right now, Will. But we’re of the opinion that it’ll just get worse as more replicants start using mannies. I’m hoping that if we can make the mannies usable by humans, then it’s no longer an ‘us versus them’ situation.”

“Unbelievable.” I shook my head. “I always thought your experience with Bridget’s daughter Rosie was just an aberration—an isolated incident. Not so much, maybe.”

“’Fraid not. It’s the standard ‘other’ prejudice. We’re immortal, stronger, faster, don’t get tired, and are generally just more capable than a bio. No surprise there’s concern about being displaced.” Howard paused and appeared uncomfortable for a moment, then deliberately continued in a lighter tone. “Anyway, it’s nowhere near ready for prime time, but the process works, at least in the lab. We use focused magnetic stimulation to, first, activate the brain regions that cause paralysis during sleep and, second, stimulate sensory regions with input from the manny and at the same time pick up intentional muscle cues.”

“So it’s like the subject is dreaming, but they’re awake, and everything is rerouted to the manny.”

“Exactly. All you need is a headset.”

“And it would be like that Bruce Willis movie, Surrogates.”

“Well, eventually. As I said, we haven’t worked all the bugs out.”

I nodded, impressed. “Jeez, Howard, you’re turning into a real mogul.”

Howard grinned. “You know what moguls are, right?”

“Uh …”

“The buried bodies of forty-something men who took up snowboarding.”

I laughed, then stopped abruptly. “Wait, you haven’t—”

“Yes,” Bridget said from her computer. “He has. We have a place up in New Fairbanks. He’s totalled four mannies already, trying to master the terrain park.”

Howard and I grinned at each other without comment. Definitely not mature.