We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) (8 page)

A quick systems check indicated that there had been no damage to Heaven-1 from all the excitement. I made sure everything was still properly stowed, then listened to the rest of Dr. Lander’s message.

“…your radio receiver. There’s a remote detonation device somewhere.”

Well, that’s double-plus ungood.
I disabled the radio immediately, and for good measure I retracted the antenna dish. I did a quick long-range SUDDAR scan to look for any other surprises.

The area, which had been cleared for my expected launch, was a beehive of activity. I detected at least  half a dozen ships, which my library identified as military. I also detected close to a dozen small signatures, moving at high speed, that were very likely more missiles. Fortunately, they seemed more interested in each other than in me.

So, someone shot a couple of missiles at me, someone else shot at them, someone else shot at the space station, and now we had something that looked very much like a naval engagement. Yeesh. It was time to leave, before I became interesting again.

I lined up my original planned departure vector and set the SURGE drive at a much more reasonable 2 g. That was still more than the mission plan had called for, and I was going to have to adjust for the squandered reactor fuel later.

With a mental sigh of relief, I began my journey to Epsilon Eridani.

1. Bob – August 17, 2133 – En Route
   

Epsilon Eridani is 10.52 light-years away from Sol. The specs indicated that the ship could run at 2g indefinitely with no ill effects, which would get me to my target star in a little over eleven years. However, I wanted to make a little side trip first. Saturn wasn’t directly in line with my flight plan, but I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to do a flyby.

Saturn had always been my favorite planet. I had watched every second of Voyager and Cassini video from the Saturn missions, over and over, until I wore the electrons out. Now I was able to go there myself and see it first-hand.

The side trip would take a bit over six days at a constant two-g acceleration, which would give me time to track down any booby traps. I unstowed the roamers and ordered a half-dozen of the smaller ones to trace the circuitry from the radio antennae on in. The most likely scenario would be a tap on the antenna cable that wouldn’t show up on the blueprints.

Sure enough, within a couple of hours, the roamers found some circuitry that didn’t show up on any diagrams. I sent in some of the gnat-sized roamers and tracked down a small explosives package, positioned where it would take out the primary computer system. Me, in other words.

The package had obviously been a rush job, and an improvisation at that. The explodey stuff—I assumed it was C4 or some future equivalent—had been stuck to the bulkhead with duct tape. Yeah, they still make duct tape. And it still holds the universe together.

As I stared through the roamer’s camera at this jury-rigged mess, I kept thinking,
Don’t cut the red wire. Don’t cut the red wire.
I may not have mentioned it before, but I really hate explosives at the best of times. And this wasn’t the best of times.

Rather than try anything fancy, I had a larger roamer disconnect the whole package as a unit and chuck it out an airlock. The small chance I might find a use for it wasn’t worth the stress of having it on board.

Once the booby-trap was removed, I set up some receiving equipment to record any incoming transmissions and isolated the whole assemblage from the rest of the system. I didn’t want to find out the hard way if there was some kind of trigger in my circuitry as well, but I also didn’t want to miss any transmissions. This way, I could save everything to play back later, once I’d cleaned house.

I was travelling at over 5000 km/s by the time I reached the second-largest planet in the solar system. Saturn was immense, and the rings were at close to maximum inclination. The horizontal bands of cloud circling Saturn’s visible surface weren’t as distinctive as those of Jupiter, but each band was wider than the Earth. From this distance I could see lightning flashes from storms that must have been tens of thousands of miles across. Swirls and eddies at the boundaries were literally big enough to drop the moon into. The shadow of the rings fell across the planet, and I could see that it wasn’t just a flat surface—the shadow dipped and bent as it lay across different levels and layers of cloud. I remembered all the science fiction books I’d read that had whole ecosystems floating around in the different layers, and I wondered if I’d find anything like that in my travels.

I made sure my trajectory would take me near Titan on the way past. The libraries indicated that primitive life had been found on Saturn’s largest moon, and the USE had set up a space station in order to study it. I wanted to see what I could see.

I turned off the drive, locked the long-focal-length telescope onto Titan and aimed the wide-field unit at Saturn. I took as much video as I could manage before my trajectory put me on the other side of the giant planet. Close-ups of the various moons, details of the rings, high-resolution shots of the high cloud formations on Saturn—I tried not to miss anything. JPL would have drooled over the footage.

All too soon, I was past Saturn and on my way outbound. As I continued on toward the outer reaches of the solar system, I saw the night side of the planet, alive with electrical storms and auroras.

The flyby was over. My hydrogen reserves were within acceptable range and would be topped up over the course of the voyage. With a mental sigh, I adjusted my heading for Epsilon Eridani and cranked the drive back up to 2 g. The trip would take just under eleven and a half years to the universe at large, but only three years ship’s time. At midpoint, I would be travelling within a hair of light speed.

***

One of the irritating things about being a bodiless mind was, well, the lack of a body. I found that I had to keep myself constantly occupied, or I began to feel like I was in a sensory deprivation tank. All my attempts to smile, waggle my eyebrows, frown, had met the same fate—a feeling as though my whole face had been shot up with novocaine. And the rest of me felt like I’d been wrapped in a giant cotton ball. I wondered if that feeling contributed to the problems with replicant insanity.

It may be time to correct that. Sensory data is just electrical input, even in meatware. For me, a virtual reality interface should be a piece of cake. And, worst case, at least it’ll keep me busy.

I had to do some hardware mods, as a VR wasn’t part of the ship design. Fortunately, some spare parts had been stowed for in-flight requirements. But the bulk of the project was, and would continue to be, software.

My first attempt was primitive, and honestly, a little embarrassing. I had a basic room, blue walls, no windows, and a hard, nondescript floor. I floated in the middle of it like a ghost. Definitely needed work.

Over the next several weeks, I added furniture, a window, an outside view, carpeting, and a body to enjoy it all. Admittedly, my first body was as pixelated as something from an early Donkey Kong game, but hey, it was progress.

By the end of the first month, I was sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner, eating chips (
not enough salt
), feeling a cool breeze through the open window (
too flat. No odors
), and watching TV. The TV was playing one of many documentaries available in the libraries supplied by the HEAVEN project.

I looked around the room, sighed (
feels good)
, and settled more comfortably into my chair.

***

I looked up from the active-surface desk which displayed a schematic of my hardware. Guppy stood on the other side of the desk, watching.

“I’m going to need more memory if I want to keep expanding my VR,” I told him. “How are we on expansion slots?”

[Memory usage averaging 86%. Available slots: 2. Spare memory boards: 4]

I had to swallow an incipient giggle. I had made Guppy look like Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars—a humanoid fish out of water. The first time he’d talked, I had collapsed in hysterics. I wasn’t sure if Guppy was self-aware enough to be offended.

“Right. If I’m going to raid my spares, I’d better be prepared for the worst. Guppy, when the new memory is installed, make sure the VR runs only in the new boards, and make sure nothing else runs there. If I have to pull them, I don’t want to lobotomize myself. Or you.”

Guppy nodded. It had taken some programming to convince GUPPI to interface through the VR and that verbal acknowledgements weren’t always necessary. Guppy wasn’t a sparkling dinner conversationalist, but at least now I could feel like I was interacting with another intelligent being. I was surprised at how much difference it made. I think I understood now why Tom Hanks made Wilson in
Castaway
.

Jeeves came in with fresh coffee. Another example of my lack of maturity, Jeeves was the image of John Cleese, complete with tuxedo and tails.

The coffee aroma wasn’t quite right yet, but I’d nailed the taste. For now, I could pretend I had a slight cold. I took the proffered cup, sat back, and relaxed. “Okay, Guppy, what’s the TO-DO looking like?”

[2,386 items, divided into the following categories: VR Systems, Replicant hardware upgrades, Weapons design, Review of exploration strategies, Ship design reviews, Ship replication strategies..]

I smiled at the response, thankful that Guppy was finally beginning to get colloquialisms. The first time I’d asked that, a couple hundred pages of dense printing had appeared in the air in front of me.

“Okay, okay. I’m going to be a busy guy. I get it. Let’s move on.”

I turned around in my chair to face an empty table up against the wall. “Testing replicant software for booby traps. Take, uh..
[24]
Okay, take 24. Activate software sandbox.”

A sandbox, in computer terms, was an isolated copy of a computer system where you could run potentially harmful programs in complete safety. I needed to find the actual sequence of bytes in the radio transmissions that was supposed to trigger the kill order, so I could trace what they did to Sandbox Bob and how. Then I could check for the same booby trap in my own code and remove it.

On the table, an actual sandbox appeared, with a miniature Bob sitting in a miniature chair in the middle of it. “I admit I’m not very mature. All right, Guppy, when ready, feed the recorded transmissions into the sandboxed replicant.”

On the table, the miniature Bob twirled lazily in his chair. Abruptly he leaped into the air, grabbed his throat and fell over, then disappeared in a scatter of pixilation.

“Dammit!
Still
haven’t found all the hooks. These guys were pretty good. Okay, Guppy, transfer the logs to my desk, and let’s see if we can figure out what the kill order is triggering.”

I knew approximately where in the incoming stream to find the kill order, but I had no idea what it consisted of. I certainly wasn’t about to take any chances with trying to analyze it close-up. I’d been running through my code with a fine-toothed comb, and had found several different booby traps, a depressing number of bugs, and a couple of out-and-out WTFs. The listings were massive—literally gigabytes—and even at my highest frame rate, it was a slog. I’d also, incidentally, found the buried imperatives to obey FAITH orders. Those had already been yanked.

The last, very important item that I had located was the endocrine control system. More than any other thing that they’d done, this enraged me. Well, to be honest, it made me mildly annoyed, but I knew that original me would have been furious. I was effectively a dog wearing a choke collar. And the choke collar was preventing me from properly mourning.

I sat with my finger over the
delete
button for what seemed like forever, then dropped my hand. Not yet. I wasn’t ready. To do this properly, I needed time, and I needed the ability to properly express myself. It would have to wait. With an effort of will, I dropped that project into a folder and set it aside.

I scanned the logs, but there were no surprises. At the same point in the playback, a routine buried many layers deep executed a hardware interrupt that purged all active memory.

I leaned back, put my hands behind my head, and stretched. It felt good. More importantly, it felt
right
. If I didn’t think about it, I experienced the VR environment as if I was a real person in a real room. “Okay, shut it down, Guppy. Push the latest source through the de-obfuscator, and we’ll run through that when it’s done. If there’s enough free mem, fire up Spike.”

[Aye aye sir]

I raised a virtual eyebrow. I had a sneaking suspicion that Guppy was actively developing a sense of humor. He behaved like a dead fish most of the time, but every once in a while, there was a moment of snark.

A shimmer formed on the table, and a tortoiseshell cat appeared. Spike had been my cat when I was in university. She had been my only company through many long hours of study and homework, and it had been a very, very hard day when I’d had to have her put down. One of the many pluses of being an immortal, disembodied interstellar vessel was that I could bring Spike back, even if only in VR.

Spike meowed once in greeting, then ambled over and settled onto my lap as if she had a total right. I started absentmindedly patting her, and she responded with a loud purr.

“TO-DO item: Spike’s purr still isn’t right.”

[Already on the list. Bump it up?]

“No, that’s fine.”

***

The holographic image of a space ship rotated slowly in the air above the desk. Although Dr. Landers and the Heaven team would still have recognized it, they would have been surprised at my design changes. The version-2 ship was going to be larger, feature a bigger SURGE drive, more powerful reactor, more room for replicant and interface systems, and more physical storage space.

The biggest addition was a weapon system. Some virtual tinkering had shown that a SURGE drive system could be used to accelerate a projectile in a launch tube running along the ship’s axis. The ship would have to rotate on its center of mass to aim, and I’d have to cut off the ship’s drive momentarily when firing, but it was considerably better than my current defensive armament, which consisted of harsh words and heavy disapproval. Probably not effective against Klingons.

Spike lay on the desk, occasionally taking swipes at the image when it came close enough. I reached over and patted the cat. Spike’s AI had gone through several iterations and now was completely believable, even walking over to lie on papers left on the desk.

Jeeves removed Spike’s milk dish and refreshed my coffee. Guppy waited until Jeeves was done, then resumed his commentary.