We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 43: Learning Curve

Book 5: Chapter 43: Learning Curve

Icarus

October 2321

Heading to Centaurvania

It took more than a week to get up to the point of being able to hold a conversation. The alien ship, which we named Gunther because it was close to the ship’s name for itself, picked up the math concepts immediately. But when we tried moving to language elements such as verbs, things faltered. Dae’s theory was that Gunther was more of an AMI or an AI rather than a replicant, so it had no actual physical life experience with which to contextualize statements like “See Dick run.” I thought perhaps it was just more alien than we were used to. Either way, we had to back up several steps and reduce the graphics to a Pac-Man level before we started to make progress.

But progress we did, and eventually, we had our translation routine loaded with a passable version of Gunther’s language. It didn’t seem interested in learning ours—or maybe wasn’t able to—so it fell to us to take care of the translation back and forth. Even then, things proceeded on more of a question-and-answer basis than any kind of conversation. Gunther was cooperative, but not inspired.

Star charts were easy, though. We quickly established that Gunther had come from a budding civilization near one of the leaf nodes of the third hub clockwise from Hub Zero, although it became cagey about specifics. This meant it had come from essentially the opposite end of the empire from us. The bios that had built Gunther appeared to be generally centauroid, in that they had four legs underneath and two arms at the front. The proportions were totally out of whack, though—more like dachshunds with arms sticking out of their necks rather than horses with human torsos. Still, centaurs stuck immediately, and the home planet became Centaurvania. And it turned out Gunther had once been a bio and actually was a true replicant.

The centaurs had three sexes, according to Gunther—male, female, and worker. The third was similar in nature to a worker ant—no participation in procreation but dedicated to the support of its genetic line. And apparently disposable when a mind was needed for replication into a space probe. Gunther was close-lipped about it, but I got the impression that the word volunteer hadn’t really figured into things.

The civilization that had built Gunther had discovered SURGE drives and SUDDAR but hadn’t yet invented SCUT communications. That seemed to be a standard tech path, based on our very small sample size of three: humanity, the Others, and centaurs. Once they had the base technologies working, they’d immediately sent out a scout. And done a rush job to beat out the local competition, which explained the bare-bones design. This was beginning to sound a lot like our human history.

Gunther had found a wormhole at its first destination, then apparently followed a very similar exploratory trajectory to Dae’s and mine, hopping from system to system and mapping each system location relative to the galaxy. This activity had eventually culminated in capture by the sentries and, as we’d suspected, a gradual loss of power reserves until it had been forced to shut down. Unlike us, Gunther had never deciphered the gate IDs. That was unfortunate, because we could have used the timestamps on the packets to determine how long it had been a captive.

Eventually, we managed to convince Gunther that we weren’t a threat, mostly by pointing out that we’d rescued and revived it, and we were armed and it wasn’t, and there wasn’t a logical scenario whereby lying about our intentions made sense. And it did need to go home to report in.

So in due time, we all agreed we would head for Gunther’s world.

The trip through the gate systems was routine—three hops through the hubs, then one hop to a leaf node. This was the star system that Gunther had originally aimed for from its home system. It had, of course, done an extensive survey when it arrived, but we wanted to see for ourselves. So we prevailed upon Gunther to wait while we surveyed the system.

*****

Like most star systems, as we’d learned by now, only one planet was in the Goldilocks zone, and that was where we found the civilization that had lived here. Based on city layouts and proportions, this was a new species to us, the sixteenth we’d catalogued while exploring the empire. And interestingly, this ecosystem had retinal-based photosynthesis—only the second such example. This resulted in plants that were a rich mauve or purple rather than the traditional green.

“It’s really odd,” Dae grumbled when we’d completed the planetary mapping. “By all measures, retinal should be a better basis for photosynthesis. It’s simpler and more energy efficient, and most stars radiate more powerfully in the green band, which would give retinal the advantage. Yet almost every planet uses chlorophyll.”

“There might be some obscure reason in evolutionary biology,” I replied. “Like the question of why virtually every species uses left-handed amino acids. We just don’t know what that is.”

Still, a new civilization was always a great view from space, and a purple-hued planet was especially striking. We took a lot of pictures for our blog—assuming we were ever in contact with the Bobiverse again.

The locals had, like most species, colonized most of the rocks in their system, as well as building a couple of megastructures. And like all the other civilizations we’d visited, everything was abandoned. No heat signatures, no radio traffic, no traffic, no nothin’.

I pinged Gunther. “Was this abandoned when you first arrived here?”

“Yes.”

Talkative as ever. Once again, I resolved to stop asking yes–no questions. “Why did your civilization send you here first? Did they detect radio signals? Heat signatures?”

“Anomalous microwave sources,” Gunther replied.

Of course. The microwave from the wormhole. Wait, sources? I did a quick sweep. Sure enough, there was another wormhole at minus ninety degrees. “The other wormhole—did you explore it?” ???????

“No.”

I rolled my eyes in exasperation, mostly at myself. But really, Gunther had been presented with a coin-flip situation and had made a choice that opened out into the empire.

“Is it worth checking out?” I asked Dae.

“Let’s at least send a drone through.”

We checked with Gunther, and it was willing to stay the extra week.

*****

A few days later, we found ourselves floating near the second wormhole. Yet another one, I thought. Then I caught my own attitude and mentally pinched myself. I was actually becoming bored with wormholes.

Dae had prepared a drone and sent it through with the usual precautions. The drone did the standard stellar survey and returned.

“Hmmph,” I grumbled when we’d finished the analysis. “I had half hoped it might put us in a system that’s a little closer to Gunther’s home, but no such luck. Fifteen light-years away in the wrong direction. Indication of planets, but no other wormholes and no traces of an active civilization.”

“Icky, this is really beyond weird and well into spooky. I’m beginning to worry that we might never find out what happened.”

“I know, Dae. These quickie surveys from space really aren’t getting us any closer to figuring things out. We might have to bite the bullet and do a full archaeological deep dive on one of the abandoned planets.”

“That’ll be next. For now, let’s visit Gunther’s system. That probably has a better chance of us meeting someone.”

“But they won’t have the answer, either.”

“One thing at a time. Let’s go.”