We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 1: Destination Galactic Center

Book 5: Chapter 1: Destination Galactic Center

Icarus

March 2309

Interstellar Space (en route to Sagittarius A*)

Daedalus and I had been accelerating for fifty-two years now, Earth time. The universe, if you looked at it without any visual compensation, was unrecognizable, nothing more than a bright smear in front of us. Also Doppler-shifted to lethal levels, but who’s counting? Fortunately, the SURGE drive field protected our ships from the onslaught of radiation and oncoming dust by warping it around us. And computer simulations allowed us to produce an image of the universe as it would appear if we were floating at rest in space, at this spot.

It didn’t really look that much different from the view of the sky from Earth. Fifty-odd light-years, on a galactic scale, was diddly. And we were on a twenty-six-thousand-year trip.

“Twenty-five thousand, nine hundred bottles of beer on the wall, twenty-five thousand, nine hundred bottles of beeeeeer,” I muttered.

“I heard that, Ick,” Daedalus said. He’d been relaxing in a lawn chair, doing calculations on some kind of spreadsheet as usual, and paused only long enough to comment. I smiled slightly. We’d become like an old married couple—long silences, working side by side while hardly acknowledging each other’s existence. Today I was visiting Dae’s VR—a garden setting, warm sun, slight breeze, birdsong in the background. Relaxing. I’d accepted the theme and conjured up a lawn chair of my own, but the reclining kind since I wasn’t working on anything.

“If we keep accelerating at this rate, we’ll get there in fifty years, personal time,” I continued. “Of course, who knows what will have happened back home in twenty-six thousand years?”

“Well, you know the standard nightmare, right?” Dae replied without looking up. “We arrive at Sagittarius A* and find a bunch of Bobs that have been there for twenty-five thousand, nine hundred years, FTL having been invented just after we left.”

“Yup. Fortunately, being Bobs and therefore obsessive, we’ve left instructions for that eventuality. Someone would message us with the news.”

Dae smiled without immediately replying and poked at his spreadsheet some more. “I calculate that if we had to slow down to galactic orbital speed for that or whatever other reason, it would take about five years at full power. Ten years with some safety factor built in.”

“Then all the way back home. Another fifty years.”

“Not if they invented FTL. There would be someone waiting when we came to a stop.”

“True. Ever regret not hanging around local space?”

“Not really, Icky. Based on the news updates Bill is still sending our way, it’s really kinda turning into a shit-show. Another shit-show, I mean. And what’s with this Starfleet? Who thought that up?”

“Bobs. Very weird Bobs.”

I should explain that, I guess. Daedalus and I are clones of the mind of one Bob Johannson, a computer programmer who got himself killed crossing the street in Las Vegas in the early 21st century. Bob’s brain was scanned and used to create the controlling intelligence for a Von Neumann probe a hundred years later.

Bob was a very good Von Neumann probe, and he not only explored, but he also made copies of himself, who also made copies of themselves. The Bobs now number in the tens of thousands, each of us, by convention, adopting a different name when created. The first Bob replicant, now called Bob-1, is still around, although he seems to have semi-retired.

Dae and I are currently heading for the galactic core at just a fraction under C, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Our news is getting more and more behind the times, the farther out we go.” Dae sighed. “I wish we could have figured out a way to drop off SCUT relay stations along the way so we could stay in touch in real time.”

“Mm-hmm. Price we pay, buddy. So what are you working on?”

“Ah.” Dae gestured at his spreadsheet, and it rotated so I could see it. “By carefully tuning the SURGE drive, we’ve always been able to vary the amount of incident radiation that we let through. It occurred to me at some point that if the drive could control the radiation in that way, it might also be able to refract it.”

“Like a lens?”

“Like a lens. The front end of the biggest damned refractor telescope you could hope for.”

“Uh, didn’t Asgard … ?”

“Yeah, yeah, Asgard colony, biggest telescope ever made. As they like to remind us at every opportunity. But theirs is in a solar orbit, not attached to a spaceship hurtling through the cosmos. And it’s a reflector, although that’s a detail. Given the limitations, I’m satisfied with what I can produce.”

“Have you tried it yet?”

“Yeppers. I’ve started surveying stellar systems as we pass. Targets that are just forward of a right angle to our vector give the best images with correction.”

“Cool. What are you looking for?”

“Anything interesting. Planets, coherent signals, anomalies … Even if we don’t stop to investigate, we can send a report back, and someone will send out a ship.”

“Via FTL?”

Dae chuckled. “With a definite target, they’d probably send a remote-controlled vessel and drop off some relays along the way. It’s what I’d do.”

I nodded. Typical. Even when we were abdicating our Bobiverse membership by heading for the hills, we still felt a responsibility to the group.

Bobs forever.