We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Chapter 57: Mario – August 2169 – Beta Hydri

Chapter 57: Mario – August 2169 – Beta Hydri

Beta Hydri was 23.4 light years from Sol. Rather than argue and compete with the other new Bobs for the closer candidate stars, I had decided to head for the far reaches. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” and all that Melvillish stuff. By the time everyone else worked their way out to this point, I hoped to have a working space station declaring, “Mario was here.”

And let’s face it, I really didn’t want to be around the other Bobs. It still amazed me how oblivious they were to the differences between each clone. It was creepy—Not enough variation to make them separate people, but enough to give them different opinions. It was like seeing myself with brain damage. And yeah, Bob-1 had set the rule about senior Bob being in charge, but I didn’t see that holding for long. Original Bob had never been much of a follower.

Well, whatever. I was here, they were there, and I liked it that way. Time to explore my domain.

I dropped into the system, decelerating at a leisurely 2 g. I could have come in a lot hotter, but on the off-chance that there was a Medeiros here, I didn’t want him to know what I had under my hood. He’d see the 2 g, a fraction of the output of my heavily shielded reactor, and he’d get cocky. I hoped. I really wanted a chance to meet up and hand him another ass-whupping. I had a couple of busters with his name on them. No, really. There wasn’t a lot to do between systems, so I’d had the roamers stencil his name on a couple of busters.

So far, though, there didn’t seem to be anything Brazilian in the neighborhood. Actually, there didn’t seem to be much of anything. It was a large, well-filled-out system, but so far, I’d found no metal ore. Seriously, nothing. This star’s spectral lines showed about two-thirds Sol’s metallicity. Generally, the composition of the system would follow the composition of the parent star.

Hands behind my back, I walked around the balcony of my tree house, enjoying the view and the thousand-meter drop to the forest floor. This forest had never existed except in literature, and even there, it was an amalgam of a lot of different books. Mostly it was from Foster’s Midworld, but I’d thinned things out so there were good lines-of-sight. I’d added lots of earth-birds and deleted any large, hungry, dragony things.

I raised an eyebrow at Guppy. “Got an opinion?”

[Above my pay grade]

I chuckled. The version-2 Heavens had more core and memory space than Bob-1 had started out with. Guppy had a lot of room to expand in the standard design, and I’d given him even more. He was becoming a person in his own right. He was acerbic and flip, just this side of insolent. I loved it. And, of course, he wasn’t a Bob clone.

[Those I have. Analysis: there’s no metal]

“Thank you, Captain Obvious. Any idea why?”

[No, but I note that all of the other elements are within expected ratios. Only metals are missing. And completely so]

And that was just not possible, not by any known theory of stellar or planetary formation. Guppy blinked once and turned to face me. I knew what was coming.

[Someone else was here first]

“Dammit. Medeiros. But shouldn’t there still be an autofactory around?”

I cut off what I was about to say and thought for a few seconds. Something was fishy with that theory, beside the originator.

“Hold on. How much ore are we talking about? Based on how much we think this system should have, how long would it take Medeiros to turn it all into cute little Medeiri?”

Guppy thought for a moment. Or calculated. Whatever.

[1,732 years. Give or take]

“So we can rule that out. We’ve only come twenty-odd light years. And he would have had to travel for the same amount of time.” I was belaboring the obvious, and I knew it, but I’d always found that talking something out helped to work through it in my mind.

[That does represent a flaw in the theory]

“Ya think?” I pointed to the inner planets on the system schematic. “We may end up having to do some planetary mining. Let’s go take a look at some of the rocky planets and see what’s available.”

[Your wish is my command]

We took a few days to get to the fourth planet—I still didn’t want to show all my cards in case someone was watching. GL19-4 was a brown ball of mud with gray oceans and a thick, murky atmosphere. It looked like the result of a lot of volcanic activity, but I didn’t see any immediate candidates in the way of rings or chains of volcanoes.

I inserted myself into a polar orbit and began deep scans for, well, anything, really. Metal deposits, of course, but also volcanic activity, and anything else interesting.

It was one of those good news, bad news situations. Good news, I found lots that was interesting. Bad news, no metals. None. Not within reach of anything in my arsenal, anyway. The planet had a magnetic field, so it obviously had a metallic core. But next to nothing in the crust. Oh, a patch here and a patch there, but not worth grubbing for. ??N???S

[Anomaly detected]

“And this isn’t anomalous enough already?”

[Double-plus anomaly detected. Better?]

Not loving it quite so much. For a fleeting moment, I thought of reinitializing Guppy. Only for a moment.

Not that I needed to worry. One of our redesign items was to not allow GUPPI to read our thoughts. That was just too creepy. He now required voice commands, however you define voice in a computer system that talks to itself.

“Okay, Guppy, what is it?”

[Accumulation of refined metal detected. An artifact]

“Holy crap.” I thought for a moment. “Deploy three of our exploration drones. Send them down to the location of the anomaly. Have them carry a couple of roamers too. Set one of the drones to spiral outward from the site, while the other two and the roamers investigate the site in detail.”

[Aye]

Guppy was all business now. This was serious. Had Medeiros crashed? Was it a probe from one of the other nations?

The drones got there in record time—I think Guppy might have driven them a little aggressively—and settled around the anomaly. One started to circle, gradually getting farther from the center, while the other two landed and spit out twenty-centimeter roamers. The drones lifted off and started on close-up visual scans.

One thing was obvious right away: this wasn’t one of the probes. In fact, this wasn’t from Earth at all. I couldn’t describe exactly what about it screamed alien, but no human mind designed that. The best metaphor I could come up with was the alien ship in Prometheus. It just didn’t make sense.

I took a moment to savor the thought. I had just found the first intelligent life outside of Earth. Well, okay, looking at the wreck, I might have just found the corpses of the first intelligent life. But still…

It was obvious that this had been some kind of cargo carrier. The thing had crashed and split open. It had spilled out part of its contents, which seemed to consist of stacks and stacks of large metal ingots of various types. Each ingot was pure, all one element. Iron, titanium, copper, nickel, tons of the stuff. The carrier looked like it had only been a quarter full, though, unless some had been taken.

It appeared we had found our metal thieves. Well, one of them. And thief was probably too strong a word. But still…

[Anomaly]

“Oh, for—what now?”

[See for yourself]

I picked up the video that Guppy offered to me. And my jaw dropped. This planet wasn’t lifeless. Well, it was now, but it hadn’t been at some point in the past.

I was looking at a dead ecosystem, what you’d get if everything in the Amazon basin died all at once. It was dry, it was weathered, it was corroded. But it was trees, and bushes, and the occasional animal. And it went on forever.

***

I sent down some biological analysis drones to do some necropsies and try to figure out what had happened here. That wasn’t quite what they were designed for, but I had all the accumulated biological and medical knowledge from Earth, and a very advanced piece of technology designed by, uh, me.

They poked and prodded and cut, and they got some suitable specimens. They had their orders, and the AMIs were entirely competent within the parameters they’d been assigned. I just had to stay out of the way and not joggle their mechanical elbows.

The drones and roamers continued to examine the wreckage. Without being able to say why, I sent a couple of busters down to hover menacingly. Things looked deader than dead, but I just had a spooky feeling.

The report from the biological drones arrived on my desktop with a ding. I hurried over and opened the file.

Oh, wow.

Based on cellular damage, everything had been killed by something along the lines of a gamma ray burst. Basically a huge surge of radiation, more than enough to kill instantly. I knew that because not only had the animals been killed but their intestinal flora (or the local equivalent) had been killed at the same time. There was no bloating, no rotting from the inside out. I had to make some assumptions, using terrestrial analogies, but I was pretty confident that they would be close enough.

I also noted how few carcasses we’d found. The specimens were all small, in odd, inconvenient places, or in poor condition, even for dead bodies. I was pretty sure that 99% of the fauna were unaccounted for.

Without decomposition to provide a clue, I couldn’t immediately tell how long ago this had happened. But wear and erosion on the carcasses and dead trees gave me some indications, as did an analysis of the number of forest fire tracks with no new growth. I estimated somewhere between fifty and a hundred years ago.

I sent the biological drones off to check another couple of points on the planet, especially a point as close to antipodal to this location as possible.

[Emergency! Hostile activity!]

“What? What’s happening?”

[One of the roamers is under attack]

“Get the drones to do point-focused SUDDAR pings. I want as much detail as you can get.”

[Done]

I dissolved my VR and cranked up to maximum frame rate. The video feed was real-time. It showed a window from the perspective of the roamer that was under attack, and another from the perspective of the second roamer. The first roamer seemed to be infested with mechanical ants. As I watched, the roamer was being eaten—metal parts thinning and dissolving.

“Guppy! Blow both roamers. Self-destructs, now!”

Guppy didn’t argue or question. The video feeds disappeared.

“And firewall our device comms. I doubt those things had time to finagle the encryption keys from the roamers, but why take chances?”

I turned to the SUDDAR analysis, which was just assembling over the desk. To one side, Guppy had brought up the video record received from the roamers.

I played back the video record first. The first roamer had opened a container or locker or something. It appeared to have activated the ants. Whether that was a defensive reaction, or the ants just considered the roamer to be a resource to be acquired, was anyone’s guess. I doubted there was really much practical difference. Either way, the ants had started to disassemble the roamer. The SUDDAR point-scan showed that they were separating it by element. They didn’t seem interested in the plastic and ceramic components.

I didn’t regret blowing up the roamers. I certainly couldn’t have brought them back with the possibility of one of those ants coming along for the ride. And, silly as it was, I’d read and seen enough science fiction in my day about advanced technologies taking over the communication system and getting into the computer. That’s me we’re talking about, after all.

I can build more roamers.

Where did the ants get their power from? I scanned the ship again and found that about half of the ants that had survived the roamer suicides were now still. I didn’t know if they were dead or just on standby.

I decided to scan at five-second intervals to see what they were up to. Strangely, every time I scanned, more ants became active. The hell? I cut off the SUDDAR scans for a full minute. When I did another scan, about a quarter of the ants were inactive. Oh, hell. I stopped scanning for five minutes, then did a quick scan, with as low power as I could manage. Sure enough, most of the ants were inactive.

Dammit! They’re powered by the SUDDAR beam. It was my scans that reactivated them.

Well, that was a fine pickle. Any attempt to find out what they were doing would power them up. But that meant that the aliens had found some way to beam power through subspace and use it at the receiving end. I needed to examine those ants.

I waited an hour, then sent a single one-centimeter roamer in. No way an ant could piggy-back undetected on a roamer only slightly bigger than itself. The roamer picked up a couple of ants and brought them out of the hulk. I had prepared a couple of small coffins for the ants, filled with a plastic goop. The roamer stuffed the ants into the goop, then added the hardener. I now had ants under glass, more or less. While they might be able to cut their way out of those, I hoped they couldn’t do it before I completed a scan.

I brought my two drones in close, and they did the most intense and high-precision close-in scans of which they were capable. That would produce almost a molecular-level map of the ants. I watched in fascination as the ants both powered up and produced little cutters from their front appendages. Fortunately they couldn’t move, so all they did was drill a couple of holes in the plastic. Good to know.

I detonated the roamer–can’t be too careful–and retired to my treehouse to ruminate.

***

I had completed my survey. There was no sign of a civilization on this planet, so the wreck was definitely alien. The aliens had come in, presumably killed all life with some kind of radiation weapon, mined the star system, collected the carcasses, then left. There were a lot of assumptions in there, but it fit the evidence.

The scan of the ants had shown some interesting technology. I was already setting up simulations to test some of it.

The scans of the hulk didn’t have any huge surprises. It appeared to be run by an A.I. or AMI of some kind. It had a fusion reactor. It had a SURGE drive. It had a SUDDAR transmitter. However, the SUDDAR unit seemed designed to transmit power to a tuned receiver as well as using the SUDDAR as radar. I’d taken detailed scans of that for further study.

Maybe the aliens had come and rescued the crew and left the hulk. I doubted that. There didn’t really seem to be any accommodation for anything biological. It was probable that the ship was completely A.I. Was this civilization biological at all? The fact that they’d collected all the carcasses hinted at an answer, and not one that I liked at all. I could only think of one reason to bother collecting all that protein.

And was this a one-time event? Or were they raiding systems on an ongoing basis? If so, which way were they heading? I certainly wouldn’t want this fate to befall the Solar System, even if there weren’t any humans left. The dolphins and chimps still deserved their chance.

I felt a pang of disappointment as visions of meeting Vulcans or Asgardians evaporated. This was more like an Alien scenario. As first contact situations went, this one sucked.

Like it or not, I had to bring the other Bobs into this. Which brought up another problem. At this distance, I couldn’t send a message back to Bill. I would need the space station for a transmission, and I would need the raw materials in order to build one. The ore contained in the hulk, even adding in the hulk itself, wasn’t enough.

I would have to leave.