We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 61: First Test

Book 5: Chapter 61: First Test

Bill

December 2344

Skippyland

Ilooked around the moot hall. This wasn’t technically supposed to be a public event, but it was hard to keep a secret from yourselves in the Bobiverse. No non-Bobs, though, other than a select group of insiders. Bridget was here, as were Steven Gilligan and Hannah Turnbull. Also present was Bob’s Quinlan friend, Theresa Sykorski, in her human avatar. And of course, Hugh in his video window. Skippyland was still under quarantine, even more than a decade later.

All told, we had about a hundred people in attendance. That was actually a small number if you considered the nature of the event we’d be witnessing. A Heaven vessel carrying three mannies was going to use the wormhole transit system to travel from Epsilon Eridani to the Skippyland star system. It was a one-way trip—nothing would be allowed to leave Skippyland until we knew Thoth had been captured or destroyed.

I swept my gaze over the audience. Everyone had beers or coffees or some other form of refreshment-delivery system. I’d put out snacks, but my repertoire was typical Bob—more utilitarian than imaginative. Sandwiches and chips.

“Okay, folks. We’re almost all Bobs here, so I’m not going to do a huge dog-and-pony show. We have the ship ready to dive into the wormhole. Thor is driving”—I pointed to a Bob in the corner, and he waved to the audience—“and we have the route very carefully mapped out. The transit endpoints are ten thousand kilometers apart at each system, so the ship, which we’ve named the Snark, will have to fly that distance nine times. Even that shouldn’t take long enough to bore anyone, since you can hit the wormhole interface at full speed. So let’s get started.” I nodded to Thor. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Thor gave me a thumbs-up and played with his control console. It was theater, of course. He could have just stood there and controlled the ship with mental commands, but even after several hundred years, we Bobs found we still appreciated visual metaphors. I hoped that would never change, and I felt a little sorry for the Skippies, who seemed to be moving to a data-centric lifestyle format.

A huge video window popped up overhead, showing the forward view from the ship. Telemetry along the sides gave an indication of galactic coordinates and bearing, velocity, and so on. As we watched, the velocity telltale rocketed upward. Thor was wasting no time.

In a few seconds real time, a phrase flashed up in bottom center: Transit 1 Completed. The starscape dead ahead might have been slightly different, but I couldn’t have sworn to it. What was most notable, though, was the complete lack of drama. I knew the compression effect was still an issue, but far less of one with a larger wormhole mouth. Experimentation had shown it to be a kind of inverted tidal effect.

In rapid succession, the ship flashed through several more transits, each accompanied by the announcement in the bottom center. Thor had to adjust the heading several times to aim for the next wormhole endpoint, but it was minimal. The whole exercise had been carefully planned.

It took a half hour, all told, quite a long time in replicant normal but not even long enough for lunch in human terms. The video subtitle said, Transit Complete, and the velocity of the ship dropped to zero. Well, zero relative to the destination system. I think the total proper-motion difference between the Skippy system and Epsilon Eridani was around twenty-five kilometers per second, and Thor had had to make that adjustment during his flight.

“Hugh?” I looked at his video window. He glanced briefly to the side, then said, “We’ve got the Snark on SUDDAR. Looks good. A drone is flying out to meet the ship and guide it to the space station.”

At that moment, Will, Bob, and Garfield popped into the moot hall. They had been controlling the mannies in the Snark’s passenger cabin and had more or less directly experienced the transit.

“Wow,” Will said. “Eighty-two light-years, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Nice work, Bill.”

Garfield cleared his throat.

“And Garfield. Sorry.” Will grinned.

“Sure you are,” Garfield retorted. “But yeah. Total nonevent for mannies. I don’t think even humans would notice anything. None of my telltales came even close to going red. Although my connection got briefly dropped on every transit.”

“Well, there you have it, folks,” I said to the crowd. “Interstellar travel, FTL version. We’re not sure how much it’ll affect things when everyone is traveling by huey, but hey, it’s still an improvement.”

“It’ll affect colonization in the future,” Will said in his stage voice. “Ships will go out with an inventory of stable wormhole endpoints and not much else. Once we find a system, we’ll expand a wormhole and fly boatloads of colonists through.”

“Cool,” I replied. “In fact, it will be standard procedure to keep an inventory of wormhole pairs and link each system you pass to the previous one. Instant Galactic Highway.” ?á?????

“Wow. Nice.” Will paused and frowned. “Bill, I don’t know if this has been asked or thought of, but can you transit a wormhole while carrying a wormhole endpoint?”

I chuckled. “Tried it. It didn’t end well. The endpoint you’re attempting to carry decoheres rather violently. The wormhole you’re transiting destabilizes, too.”

“Does the transport vessel come out either end?”

“Some of it. Usually from both ends. Along with a crapton of gamma radiation.”

Will’s eyebrows went up. “Oh. Okay, let’s not do that.”

Hannah stepped forward. “Very nice job, Bill. I’ve been trying to replicate your results using only theoretical models for the last ten years, and I still haven’t come up with anything. I guess there’s a place in the universe for experimental physics after all.”

I grinned at her. “Sometimes it’s the results that count.”

“So what now?”

I glanced at Hugh in his video window. “I guess we start bringing in resources and set up a picket line. Eventually, Fake Hugh will presumably try to get into this system and extract Thoth.”

I was interrupted by Guppy, who popped into the middle of the hall without warning.

[Unknown ship is transiting wormhole.]

We all briefly exchanged glances. I could see everyone doing the same mental inventory. “Can you identify it?”

[Vessel is Titan class.]

“How many Titan-class vessels are in operation, Bill?” Bob asked.

“Two,” I replied with a sinking feeling. “The Snark, and the one that Fake Hugh stole. The rest are still docked in Ultima Thule. Unless some descendant has cloned and built one for their clone.”

“Possible, but I’m going to put my money on Fake Hugh. Why travel the whole way by sub-light, giving us seventy years to set up for him?” Garfield frowned and crossed his arms. “So much easier to just head for one of the systems that we would naturally use to build a transit system and wait for us to open for business.”

I checked the trajectory of the unknown ship and decided we had some time. I cranked the moot frame rate up a tad, and everyone present automatically matched it.

Garfield continued, his frown deepening and his voice developing an aggrieved tone. “So Bill, this means Fake Hugh was expecting you to succeed. You were intended to solve the negative-energy problem so that Fake Hugh could piggyback off it to get here sooner.”

“Well, we don’t know that,” Will interjected. “If Fake Hugh had some—”

“Can we please stop calling him Fake Hugh?” Hugh exclaimed.

“No!” Garfield shouted back.

Will glanced at the both of them, shook his head, and continued, “If he had some way of tracking your progress, he would have realized at some point that he’d be better off with this strategy.”

“So he’s winging it?” Bob said.

“Maybe. I don’t know how much difference it makes.” Hugh looked around at the group. “Either way, he’s coming in to rescue Thoth. We have to stop that.”

“So what’s he most likely going to try?” I asked.

“There’s no friggin’ way he’d have time to physically grab something, like a matrix or whatever. Even assuming Thoth was somehow able to download itself into a physical container. In any case, we’re real-time monitoring Thoth, to the extent we’re able, anyway, and it’s still in the system.”

“So … ”

“Thoth couldn’t transport itself out of Skippyland because we’d locked down the SCUT systems, even if it had some destination hardware that would take it. But I’m betting Fake Hugh has built something in the meantime. Thoth might try to transport itself to Fake Hugh’s ship, via either radio or local SCUT channel.”

“SCUT for sure,” Will commented. “Radio would take forever and could be jammed. Can Thoth get access to a SCUT transceiver?”

“I’d have said no, but so far, it’s been one step ahead of us. And JOVAH runs on a SCUT backplane, so there’s no lack of local hardware.”

“Can we just shut down the wormholes?” Hannah asked.

I shook my head. “The negative-energy scaffolding will decay on its own if we stop renewing it, but that could be hours or days. I didn’t think to implement an off switch, and honestly, I’m not sure how I’d go about it. I’ll have to work on that.”

“We have to blow up Fake Hugh as soon as he comes through, then,” Garfield said.

“How?” Hugh exclaimed. “We’re not set up yet. We have security around the JOVAH modules, obviously, but Fake Hugh doesn’t have to go anywhere near them. He just has to get into the system.”

“Plus, if we stop him, Thoth will still be there causing trouble and will just try something else.” Bob paused and looked around. “Maybe we should let him succeed.”

“What?” I exclaimed. Several people echoed me.

“Look, Thoth will most likely delete himself locally once he’s successfully escaped. It would be unethical and probably unthinkable for him to leave himself trapped. Plus, there’s always the chance we could ultimately defeat the copy and decompile him or something.”

“Debatable, but not out of the question,” Hugh replied. “Okay, he’ll shut down his local copy and probably scrub it as well. So?”

“So he won’t do that until it looks like he’s gotten away cleanly. Bill, you have the Titan-class flight characteristics available, right?”

I raised my eyebrows at this apparent non sequitur but nodded. This was getting interesting.

*****

We watched the monitors as Fake Hugh’s ship whipped through each of the transit points. He had accelerated to a truly ridiculous velocity. He was actually hitting the wormhole endpoints at just a few percent below the speed of light. That was interesting, because it was an obviously risky move. Thoth must have figured out the characteristics of a wormhole transit system far in advance, since he would have had no way to update Fake Hugh.

As Garfield kept saying, I hated being so predictable.

The ship hit the final transit at a slight angle. That was not unexpected. He wouldn’t want to come through into a waiting wall of steel balls. With three dimensions to play with, his vector was difficult to predict in advance, except within broad limits. Nevertheless, we had placed pickets on the Skippyland side. But with only minutes to prepare, the defenses were woefully inadequate.

The ship rocketed out of the final transit endpoint, missing our pickets by not all that much, actually. I wondered if Fake Hugh would need new underwear. We immediately sent a few Skippy ships after it, but they really had no hope. Their only reasonable tactic would be to harass their target and eventually blow it out of the sky. And that would require it to stay on the Skippyland side, which meant that, logically, Fake Hugh would attempt to dive back into the wormhole.

“I’m registering a large data transfer via SCUT,” Hugh announced. “And I was right. Thoth has co-opted one of the backplane SCUT transceivers. He’s probably temporarily lobotomized a lot of our population.”

“No chance he’s gotten himself as well, I suppose,” Garfield grumbled.

“That’s an easy calculation to make if you know what’s coming,” Hugh replied. “He’ll have moved his VM out of that memory segment.”

The transmission took several minutes. Meanwhile, Fake Hugh accelerated in an extremely tight arc to come around to bear on the wormhole endpoint.

“How much you want to bet his path is finely calculated to hit the wormhole just after the transmission completes?” Bob mused.

“No bet,” Will replied. He glanced at me. “You ready?”

“Yup.”

Fake Hugh’s ship had a far greater acceleration capability than the Skippy vessels that were pursuing him. They steadily fell behind as their own wider arcs diverged from their prey. I noted in passing that Fake Hugh’s trajectory would take him to the opposite side of the wormhole from our ship. No doubt a strategic move, and I hoped he would be too busy to wonder why we weren’t being more active in the pursuit.

I knew the flight characteristics of the Titan-class Heaven vessel down to a T. In particular, I knew exactly when Fake Hugh would be fully committed to entering the wormhole, with no ability to change vector or brake enough to avoid it. I also knew exactly what the Snark’s rail gun was capable of. At full power, rerouting even the drive-system power to the rail gun, the Snark could accelerate a steel ball to a tenth the speed of light.

A lightweight container, even more so.

“Transmission ended,” Hugh announced. “As expected, we have a status change on the section of JOVAH that Thoth has been occupying. I hope that means it’s started a shutdown and purge. We won’t know for sure until we do a postmortem.”

“If not, you’ll be back to square one,” I said. At that moment, the quarry hit the point of no return. I sent the command, and the Snark fired a lightweight metal container straight at the wormhole. The container housed one end of one of our spare wormhole pairs, and the onboard equipment started growing the wormhole even as it left the bow of the Snark. By the time it hit the transit wormhole, it would be more than big enough to create some serious fireworks.

The container hit the wormhole interface just before Fake Hugh’s ship, and …

I found myself back in my home VR.

I immediately sent queries to everyone who had been at the moot and began receiving excited replies. The most interesting was from Hugh.

Hey, Bill. The wormhole self-destructed as planned. You may have been a little more enthusiastic than really necessary. We’re having to activate emergency procedures here to shield our JOVAH modules. The Snark is toast. Fake Hugh’s ship would have been just outside the interface when the wormhole self-destructed, so I doubt there’s so much as two atoms from the ship left connected. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been reduced to free quarks.

Well, that was good. I sent a message back asking Hugh to connect up when he was ready, then invited the others back to the moot hall.

*****

“That went well,” Garfield said, flopping into a La-Z-Boy. I gave him a side-eye. We were in the pub, and overstuffed loungers were definitely not part of the décor. He grinned at me, guessed my concern, and changed it to a barstool.

Most of the rest had begged off, requesting an update once we knew more. It was just Will, Bob, Garfield, and me now. The pub felt empty and kind of lonely. I promised myself I’d call some full moots on a regular basis, just to keep the community going.

“Any updates?” Will asked.

“I’m getting the occasional message from Hugh, kind of like informal status updates.” I paused and perused the thread. “It looks like Thoth is gone from JOVAH. They’re able to get into the full memory space, and there’s no trace of the AI. It’s also no longer gobbling the processing time that it was when active.”

“So the question is whether Fake Hugh’s ship was destroyed,” Bob said.

“The Snark was obliterated, and we were ten times farther away.” I chuckled. “Apparently, the blowback from the wormhole collapse actually destabilized the Skippies’ home star temporarily. They were quite worried it was going to shed a layer, with all the electromagnetic fun and games that would have implied.”

“Wow. So we’re going to have to be very careful with wormholes,” Garfield said.

“That seems like a given, Gar. But having them out beyond the Kuiper seems like a good start.”

“Hmm, yeah. So Thoth is done?”

I sighed. “I don’t think we can know to a mathematical certainty. But the Skippies will do a full analysis and identify any possible holes.”

“Have they given up on creating a true AI?”

I rolled my eyes. “No, of course not. But they’re going to invoke the next one in a completely isolated computer system. Isolated in every meaning of the word. With nukes strapped to it. At the slightest sign of anything janky, they’ll pull the trigger and start over.”

“Wasn’t that the plan this time?” Garfield said with a frown.

“I dunno, Gar. The thing is, whatever Thoth’s overall scheme may have been, it did give us the wormholes. And I think, eventually, a warp drive. So I’m a little more sympathetic than I was the first time around.” I grinned. “Hannah, er, Professor Turnbull has offered to work with me on the warp drive. Her comment was it’s like being young all over again.”

Garfield gave me a hard look. “You aren’t going all Bob on us, are you?”

“Hey, I’m sitting here,” Bob exclaimed.

Garfield and I both grinned at him before I replied, “Naw, but I think we’re well past the time when we can stick to our own company. There’s now a significant percentage of ex-humans in replicant space, not to mention the Quiniverse. I wonder if a totally digital existence is the final result for every species.”

“It would give us another explanation for the Fermi paradox,” Bob said.

“So would getting eaten by the Others, blowing each other up, or getting eradicated by a superintelligence,” Garfield retorted. “All of which humanity seems to have narrowly avoided by the skin of their collective teeth.”

Will paused and sat forward. “Y’know, that’s a very real possibility as an explanation. Starting on day one, you have all the usual risks, like meteor strike, nearby supernova, ecological catastrophe, and so on. But once a species becomes intelligent, they start introducing more existential dangers, like climate change, all the forms of warfare, and self-destructive technologies like gray goo and AIs. And none of the older dangers go away, really. If the dangers just keep piling up as the species advances, eventually the odds catch up with you. It might be that extinction becomes statistically inevitable at some point.”

I sighed. “Dunno, Will. I guess we need more data points. I’d better get started on that warp drive.”