Heaven's River

“I understand.” I nodded and stood up. “It will be kept aside for you, for whenever you decide.” I turned to my escort. “Well, boys, shall we?”

The squad leader showed me his teeth—again—and stepped aside to make room for my departure. I turned back to Azzma for a moment and we exchanged Pav head bobs. I found myself missing Hazjiar and her version of the Vulcan salute.

Ephemerals. It was so hard not to think it.

There was a clunk as my cargo drone docked with the comms station. In keeping with the increased use of mannies for local physical presence, stations were now being constructed with a living area of sorts, and docking facilities. I stepped out of the drone’s hold and walked over to the manny pod. For humanoid androids, the pods had pretty much replaced the older and bulkier storage racks. As the pod cover closed over me, umbilicals and feeder tubes attached to the manny. I powered down and transferred my POV to my personal VR.

My latest VR environment, a ski chalet, was already boring me. It seemed I couldn’t stay interested for long in any one theme, and I couldn’t get up the energy to work on something grand. I sighed and reset the VR to the default library theme.

On a whim, I sent a text to Ferb. He replied immediately, and I popped over to the Pav Reclamation Project administration center. The center was hosted by Bill’s moot VR system, and had been the nexus for our efforts to rebuild the Pav home world for almost a hundred years now.

I examined the empty room, a sense of nostalgia filling me. We’d spent so many years working on the problem of rebooting the Pav ecology from nothing more than some plant and animal samples, taken in a huge rush as the Others’ armada bore down on the planet. It was ironic: now that we were finally making some significant progress, the Pav simply didn’t seem to care.

Ferb popped in as I stood, ruminating. “Hey, bud,” he said. “Long time.”

“Yeah. I, uh …” I waved a hand at the room. “Ghosts. It feels like we just abandoned the Pav.”

“Aw, don’t get melodramatic, Jacques. It’s all pretty much automated these days. Takes maybe a couple of hours a month to make sure everything’s on track.”

“Uh-huh. And that’s why, right? Where’s Phineas these days, Ferb?”

He glared at me. “Why’d you have to bring that up?”

“Because it’s the real reason why this place is deserted. Heard from Phineas?”

“Nothing live.” Ferb looked down. “He isn’t bothering to build interstellar relays, and he’s way the hell out of SCUT range now. I get a heavily Dopplered radio transmission every month or so, though.”

“Heading for the Large Magellanic Cloud. He’ll be a while.”

“What’s your point, Jacques?”

“You, me, Phineas, Claude, we’re all haunted by what happened. Ghosts. Billions of Pav—”

“We did everything we could!”

I sighed. “I know, I know. But there’s still an emotional toll. Especially since the Pav haven’t exactly embraced us for our efforts. We’ve all, every one of us who were involved, gone on to other things as far removed from this as possible. Phineas, well …” I snorted. “He’s taken far a bit too far, maybe.”

Ferb nodded, the slightest trace of a smile showing for only an instant.

I cocked my head as I took a good look at him. “What’re you doing with yourself these days?”

“LARPing. Well, designing campaigns more than participating.” Now Ferb finally did smile. “The Gamers—you know, Gandalf and his group—do live-action D&D campaigns in virt. But they kind of have a problem where they all want to play and no one wants to DM, so they’re happy enough for the help. And I, uh …”

“What?”

“I have to admit I get a little uncomfortable around them, sometimes. Not that they’re dangerous; it’s just they’re like strangers, but strangers who all look like me, you know? Some of them are out-and-out jerks.”

“Yeah. Replicative drift. It’s a thing, as Bill says. So why do you work with them?”

He shrugged. “Something to do. Keeps me busy.”

“You can’t find anything better to do with your time?”

“Thanks for that, mom.” Ferb hesitated. “Actually, I’m kind of working on something. Not quite ready, yet. Don’t noise it around, okay?”

He had my interest now. “Okay.”

“I’m building a huge cargo vessel for myself, and I’m filling it with SCUT relays, stripped down to the essentials to keep their size down. When I’m ready, I’m going to launch straight up toward galactic north. I’ll drop off relays as I go. I want to get at least a thousand light-years above the galactic plane. Then I’ll be able to see what’s on the other side of the galaxy.”

“You know you could just put an AMI in the vessel, give it some marching orders, and stay home.”

“Maybe. Not the same, though. Or maybe you’re right about Phineas. And all of us. Maybe we are trying to run away.” Ferb gave me a look that I would have to describe as pleading, as if he was asking for forgiveness or something. “Gotta go, Jacques. We’ll talk again, sometime.”

For some reason, I doubted that would happen. And just like that, I was alone again in the PRP center. Alone with my ghosts.

2. Working the Options

Bob

January 2296

Above Eden

Space is big.

I know that sounds like a duh statement, and Douglas Adams already made it anyway, but when you’re looking for a single spaceship over literally interstellar distances, space gets right in your face with its bigness.

Bender had been missing now for more than a hundred years. Despite Bill transmitting the SCUT plans for FTL communication to every system that Bender could possibly have reached, despite searches along his probable path by Victor and later by his clone-mates Marvin and Luke, we hadn’t found hide nor hair of Bender. Or bolt or deck plate, what with him actually being a sentient spaceship and all.

I should explain that, I guess. Bender is a computer who thinks he’s one Robert Johansson, an engineer slash nerd who died in the early 21st century. As are all the Bobs, including me. I was the first replicant, launched from Earth in 2133. Every single Bob is my descendent, because that’s what Von Neumann probes do. We make copies. We’re up to thousands of Bobs now, spread over an almost one-hundred-light-year radius centered around the Sol System.

Bender was from my second batch of clones, constructed in Delta Eridani. He took off in the direction of Gamma Leporis A, and he’s never been heard from again. Lots of Bobs have died over the years in battles, and some without the benefit of a backup. But Bender just disappeared without a trace and without a reason.

I knew Bender’s original destination, but then so did Victor, Marvin, and Luke, and they hadn’t found diddly. Specifically, they couldn’t find any sign that he’d ever reached Gamma Leporis A. No autofactory setup, no mining activity, no communications relay station, and no Bussard trail in or out of the system.

I had just returned to Delta Eridani after my big pilgrimage back to Earth. It had been an emotionally loaded trip for me—the Earth would probably be drastically altered once it came out of this ice age, so in a way it was my last visit to my home in any recognizable form. It was ironic that humanity had solved the global warming problem by implementing a nuclear winter. And killed off 99.9% of themselves in the process, but who’s keeping score anymore? Stupid humans.

The Delta Eridani system was pretty much as I’d left it. Autofactory support systems continued to collect raw materials from the asteroids, ferrying them back to be formed into ingots against any future need. In the absence of any specific orders, the autofactories slowly produced more autofactories and spare parts for all my various mechanical servants.

Satisfied with the status quo, I invoked my virtual reality system and settled into my La-Z-Boy recliner, surrounded by my library. Shelves full of books, floor to ceiling, never failed to relax me. Spike immediately jumped up and settled herself on my lap, purring contentedly, and Jeeves brought a fresh coffee.

The VR environment was an essential part of my existence. Without it, I was just a disembodied mind. In VR, I had a body, and pets, and a home. And before the addition of the personal VR, four out of five replicants went insane. I’m pretty sure there’s a connection.

“Sorry, bud, but I need to concentrate right now,” I said to the cat. I turned to Guppy, who was standing at parade rest as usual. “Suspend Spike’s program and bring up a representation of the stellar neighborhood, centered on us, radius forty light-years.”

Huge fishy eyes blinked.

[Acknowledged]

Spike disappeared in a scatter of pixellation. A moment later, a sphere appeared before me, filled with numerous points of light, all conveniently labelled. All the star systems within forty light-years of Delta Eridani, categorized by stellar type.

I drew a line with my finger from Delta Eridani to Gamma Leporis A, Bender’s presumed flight path. He’d taken off in the right direction, back in 2165, but had never reached the destination. The options were foul play, misadventure, or deliberate decision.

The first two explanations might leave some kind of trace—debris, cross-trail of some theoretical attacking force, radioactivity, whatever. The third would at least show up as a redirected Bussard trail. But to detect any of those alternatives, I’d have to be crawling along at 5% of C. That would require 320 years to completely scan Bender’s projected path. Of course, if I found something, I wouldn’t do the whole route, but it would still be a whole lot of not very much for a long time.

We’re immortal, being computers. But we also operate at millisecond resolutions, so several hundred years would be an eternity to me.

Now, back to the third option—deliberate decision. If Bender had noticed something and turned to investigate it, perhaps someone following his path would see the same thing. Luke and the others hadn’t noticed anything, but they had probably been closely scrutinizing their own course rather than looking around. Bender, facing a long interstellar jump in pre-SCUT days, would have been looking for something to cut the tedium.

I tapped my chin for a few milliseconds, working through the options, then turned to Guppy again. “I think I need to attack this from all angles. Have the autofactories build a hundred or so of those long-range scouts we used in the battle of 82 Eridani. Make sure their SURGE drives are powerful enough for interstellar travel.”

[Acknowledged]

Once the drones were ready, I would send them along Bender’s projected path at 5% C, looking for anything unusual. Meanwhile, there was no reason for me to wait around. I treated myself to one last long look at the planet Eden, rotating below me, then left orbit, heading for Gamma Leporis A at 5 G.

Travel between stellar systems is uneventful—thank God. It’s hard to think of something eventful out between the stars that wouldn’t leave me as a cloud of free-floating atoms.

I considered limiting myself to 0.75 C so that I could continue to interact with the Bobiverse in general. SCUT allowed instantaneous communications over BobNet, but if my tau got too high (or too low—there was some argument about how we should be expressing tau), I wouldn’t be able to interact in real time, even frame-jacked. But I was just too impatient to test my theory, and anyway the Bobiverse was starting to get weird and cliquish these days. Bobs were getting less Bob-like, and going off in directions that I think would have left Original Bob baffled. Well, if they hit the singularity or something while I was out of touch, hopefully Bill would leave a note with instructions.

I passed the time by reviewing my archived surveillance vids of the Deltans. A primitive race of humanoids, the Deltans resembled a sort of bipedal pig/bat mashup. I’d more or less adopted them and become the great sky god for a generation or two, before joining the tribe in android form. It had been 63 years since I’d walked out of Camelot for the last time, after Archimedes’s funeral. I desperately missed my friends and the feeling of family that I got from living among them. Bill had scolded me on more than one occasion about the dangers of transferring my affections to a bunch of alien primitives. Well, tough.

As it turned out, things got interesting before I even got up enough tau to drop out of touch. About two months subjective time into the voyage, something triggered one of the monitoring scripts that I’d set up.

We were playing baseball in the Bobmoot VR when a Guppy popped in unannounced. Every Bob on the field stopped dead. Having someone’s Guppy show up in the moot couldn’t be anything but interesting. Metadata indicated that he was mine, so I put down the bat and gave him a raised eyebrow. As usual, he completely ignored it. Facial expressions didn’t mean much to the GUPPI interface. Or sarcasm, metaphor, irony, body language, or social conventions, for that matter. Guppy stared back, waiting for me to say something.

“Well?”

Apparently, that was enough.

[Astronomical monitoring has picked up an anomaly. You asked to be advised immediately.]

Anomaly, to Guppy, could mean anything, though. Mario’s Guppy had once reported an entire dead planetary ecosystem as an “anomaly.”

Luke and Marvin rushed over and hovered. They knew I was following Bender’s trail, and this might be news.

I glanced at them, then said to Guppy, “Elaborate.”

[System Eta Leporis displays unusual infrared signature, together with periodic dimming of the star’s light.]

Luke and Marvin exchanged a glance, then Luke said, “Like a Dyson Swarm signature? You think there’s some sort of megastructure? Bender would have investigated that.”

By now most of the field was gathering around us. Baseball was doubtless done for the day, an opinion that Bill shared. “All right, guys. I think we’re done. I’ll waive the five-inning minimum for this week. To the pub!”

The players gave a ragged cheer, then began to pop out of the baseball VR.

I dismissed Guppy, then transferred to the pub VR with Luke and Marvin and signaled the resident Jeeves for my usual.

We grabbed a table, and Luke glared at me. “Okay, talk.”

“Hmm, well, you guys know I’ve been scanning for anything unusual around me as I follow Bender’s original flight path. My theory is that he saw something and changed course, and we’ve just been unable to pick up the faint bend in the Bussard trail.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get to the punch line.”

I gave Luke a smile that said I’m going to draw this out as much as I can and continued. “Granted, I had no idea what Bender might have been watching for, and what he might have seen, so I’ve been basically looking for everything I could possibly imagine. I’ve had to double Guppy’s memory so he could keep up.”

“And you found a megastructure signature?”

“I appear to have found something that could be interpreted that way. The question is, do I commit to a course change to investigate? If it turns out to be a false alarm, I’ll basically have to almost start over from Delta Eridani. Forget the time required to circle around—eventually, between all our follow-up trips, we’ll have trashed up the interstellar medium so much we’ll never learn anything.”

“I think you have to, Bob,” Marvin said. “If it comes down to it, I can order the Delta Eridani AMI to build a new Heaven vessel and matrix, then I’ll clone myself into it. That’ll be faster than you circling around or one of us heading over.”

“Fair enough. Give me a second.” I popped back into my personal VR. Guppy was, as usual, standing at parade rest. For the millionth time, I wondered if I should retire the Admiral Ackbar image. And for the millionth time, my juvenile sense of humor balked.

“Turn us to head for the anomaly, Guppy. Let me know estimated travel time when you’re done. Low priority, don’t pop into the moot for that.”

[Acknowledged.]

I popped back to Marvin and Luke, to find Luke tasting my beer. “Hey, boundaries, guys!”

“What, I’m going to give you germs?” Luke grinned at me. “That’s a pretty good red. I was a little surprised, since I remember us as a mostly dark-beer drinker.”

“Blame Howard. Vulcan has a thriving beer industry, and Howard keeps transferring the templates into VR. He introduced me to this last time I visited.”

Marvin nodded slowly. “He’s setting up interstellar trade routes.”

I frowned. “With transit times of years? You can’t—”

“Turns out you can, O great all-father. Stasis pods are highly effective for preserving beer.”

I glared at Marvin, both for the correction and the glib dig. “I thought he got rid of his interest in Enniscorthy Distillery.”

“He did. Gave it all to Original Bridget and Stéphane. And her kids inherited it when she died. But Enniscorthy specialized in hard spirits. Remember the Great Romulan Presidential Scandal?”

The thought made us all laugh. Cranston had deserved every bit of what was done to him, and had never been able to come up with any evidence that Howard engineered the whole thing.

“Howard and Bridget bought up a few microbreweries on Vulcan,” Marvin continued, “and it would seem they have some kind of natural talent for the creation and marketing of the devil’s brew. Or maybe just good business sense. They’re now one of the three biggest breweries in the Omicron2 Eridani system.”

“Hmmph.” I tapped my chin with a finger as I thought it through—a nervous tic that I seemed to have developed all on my own. Original Bob had never done that, nor did any of my clones. “Well, you can’t print liquids, and there’s no point in emailing the recipe without having the actual ingredients available, so I guess physical exports are the only way.” I raised my glass in salute. “Here’s to Howard, the family entrepreneur.”

I glanced around the pub as I slowly sipped my beer. There seemed to be a lot more variation in dress and style these days, and the clumps of Bobs had a tendency to match, as if we were self-filtering by fashion sense. I could swear that some of them were just short of cosplay. Oh, there were no Klingons or Chewbaccae strutting around, but some of the clothing was reminiscent of TNG uniforms or Jedi robes. There was even a Bob in a suit and tie. Why in God’s name would anyone voluntarily wear a suit and tie?

I frowned and tilted my head in the direction of the suit, glancing at Marvin. He replied with a baffled smile and a shrug. “Don’t ask me, Bob. Replicative drift seems to be accelerating. I think we’re approaching fifteen to twenty generations, and it’s no longer just a matter of enhanced or suppressed attributes of Original Bob. The differences are accumulating, and some clones are going in completely new directions.”

“Uh-huh. And the almost-cosplay outfits?”

Marvin’s bemused expression didn’t change. “Some of those are probably just for fun. Or making an ironic commentary. But the rest, well, I’m not sure if the clothes are influencing the attitudes or the other way around. The TNG guys are talking about forming an actual organization in the vein of Starfleet to monitor—that’s the word they’re using—the Bobiverse’s effect on biologicals.”

“Oh good grief. And how are they going to do that? Pass laws? Create a police force?”

“I think it’s just discussion, Bob. No one is actually pushing for organizational changes. At least not yet.”

“Is this anything to do with Thor and his lobby group, after the war with the Others?”

“Not really, no. Thor and his group were stating their preferences, not trying to impose anything on the rest of us. This”—Marvin made a small gesture toward the TNG guys—“has a more intrusive feel about it, if you get my drift.”

I shook my head, refusing to give the matter any more psychic energy. I raised a hand and Jeeves appeared with another beer.

I popped into my personal VR, sporting a pleasant beer buzz and a not-so-pleasant feeling of foreboding. I dismissed the beer buzz, but couldn’t do the same for the foreboding. Bill was right that I didn’t go to moots often enough, but today’s revelations hadn’t been the kind of thing that would encourage me to do so.

I had recently added an outside patio to my library, complete with deck furniture. The weather was perpetually late summer/early fall, with warm sun and a cool breeze. Loons called across the lake, competing with geese and other waterfowl. Sighing with contentment, I settled into a lounge chair, then invoked Guppy. “Fire up Spike and Jeeves, please. Then update me on the course change.”

Jeeves appeared at my elbow with a pot of coffee and some small sandwiches with no crusts. Spike appeared on my lap, right where she’d been when I suspended her program. I scratched the cat’s ear and she began purring.

Finally, sandwich in one hand and coffee in the other, I was ready for business. “Status?”

[En route to Eta Leporis. Travel time approximately 35 years, including time required to change direction.]

“Wow, that’s a hike. Will we be in SCUT range when we get there?”

[Negative. It will be necessary to construct and deploy an intersystem relay station.]

Crap. More wasted time. Well, it couldn’t be helped. I wasn’t about to do a side-hop to some nothing system just to build a communication station so I could still access BobNet. Of course, if Eta Leporis had no suitable raw materials when I got there, I was going to look pretty foolish.

“All right, Guppy. Send orders to the trailing drones to adopt a minimum-time flight plan to get to where we changed course. I want the whole area mapped in detail, looking for Bussard-trail spoor.”

[Acknowledged. They will require approximately 24 months.]

“Noted. Let me know when they arrive and start mapping, and give me the completed report as soon as it’s received.”

Guppy blinked huge fish eyes and disappeared. I settled back into my La-Z-Boy and put my hands behind my head.

First problem: communications. I could—maybe—build a communications relay station when I reached Eta Leporis and send it back along my route to the halfway point. That was suboptimal, though. Beside the uncertainty of materials availability at my destination, I’d be out of touch for years. More years, I mean.

Instead, I could direct the Delta Eridani autofactory to build a full-sized relay station with a SURGE drive and send it out. That would be faster, since I could get it started immediately, but this option would still leave at least some gap during which I’d be incommunicado.

To handle that gap, I could take one of the drones in my hold, modify it to act as a SCUT relay station, and drop it off en route with orders to decelerate to zero velocity. It wouldn’t be ideal; no repair or upgrade capability, for starters. And not a lot of bandwidth, with the size limitation. Well, I wouldn’t be running any moots from Eta Leporis anyway. I could live with that. And I could stock it with some spare roamers in case of breakdowns.

Anyway, it only had to operate for a couple of years, until the much larger and more powerful station from Delta Eridani was in position. And investment of equipment was minimal. I had enough spare drones and roamers in my hold for basic necessities.

Okay, one problem solved. I queued up the required tasks on my TODO. Next, the Bender problem …

Item: There was a good chance that Bender had veered off and headed for Eta Leporis. But if that turned out to be wrong, I’d receive the report from my trailing drones long before I got there. I’d let Marvin know, and be able to swing around to pick up the trail again. So for the sake of argument, consider that a given.