We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

In typical con fashion, very little concession had been made for aesthetics. The tables and chairs were the standard folding variety, and the session information was written on a large whiteboard. In black marker, because I guess color would be too much bother.

No one cared.

The moderator, a short, round black man with a permanent smile, called for attention. “Good afternoon, gentlebeings. Today, we’ll be hearing from Lawrence Vienn—” Spontaneous cheering forced him to pause. “—who will talk about the technological and economic prerequisites to get interstellar probes into space. After that, Dr. Steven Carlisle—” More cheers. “—will talk about the biology of extraterrestrial life. We’re looking forward to a great panel today. So, without further ado, I give you Mr. Vienn.”

The applause went on for several minutes. Lawrence smiled patiently through it, and gave the occasional wave. Finally it died down, and I settled in for a good listen.

* * *

I sniffed at my clothing, just to make sure I hadn’t picked up some of the odor from the room. The second panel had been even more ripe than the first. If not for the subject matter, I’d have bailed. But any discussion of Von Neumann probes was like catnip.

I decided I wouldn’t need to change before meeting my soon-to-be-ex-employees for lunch.

I left the convention center and headed for the agreed-upon restaurant, grinning at the spectacle around me. Science-fiction conventions inevitably spilled out onto the streets. Storm troopers, Chewbaccae, and Enterprise crewcritters wandered everywhere. Throngs of fans filled the sidewalks and crossed the streets with or without traffic light assist. I’d seen more than a few exchanges of middle fingers, accompanied by suggestions of an autoerotic nature. Great fun. Fans packed the restaurants twenty-four-seven, but the waitstaff didn’t complain—nerds tend to overtip. I’d heard that the casinos were less happy with the level of gambling. Turns out nerds understand probability.

I made it to the restaurant without losing any body parts, and found my group.

* * *

“To Terasoft!” Carl raised his glass as he gave the toast.

“Terasoft.” The rest of us raised our glasses in response.

Carl, Karen, and Alan had been my first hires at InterGator Software. They had been loyal and patient through the early hard times, and I had made them shareholders in the company. My engineering design and analysis application had eventually grown to be the number one product in its niche, out-selling competitors like Terasoft by a significant margin.

Terasoft reacted with a truly eye-popping buy-out offer, and we were now all sharing in the windfall. These three might still have to work for a living, but they wouldn’t have to make mortgage or car payments.

I had invited the trio to spend the week in Las Vegas on my dime. Only Carl took me up on the offer of the VIP con pass, the other two pleading sanity. Alan and Karen stated their intention to see every single Las Vegas show. At several per day, they looked like they were approaching saturation.

“How are you holding up, Bob?” Carl looked at me with one eyebrow raised.

“Pretty good. I signed with CryoEterna this morning…” Karen made a low growling sound and looked away. She didn’t need to say anything; she’d already made her opinion very clear on that subject.

I waggled my eyebrows at her and continued, “And I just went to a couple of very interesting panels. Exploring the Galaxy and Designing a Von Neumann Probe.”

Alan laughed. “No theme there, not at all. Engineers. Jeez.”

“Yeah, but how are you doing, Bob?” Carl gave me the hairy eyeball.

Carl had managed to navigate the tricky pathway of being an employee and becoming a friend, without looking like he was brown-nosing. I guess I owed him the courtesy of not pretending to misunderstand.

“A lot better, Carl. ‘Jenny’ episodes are down to a couple a day. I might even be ready to rejoin the human race, soon.”

“The woman was an idiot,” Karen muttered. “You should have taken your mother up on her offer.”

That forced a chuckle from me. “My mother doesn’t actually know how to arrange a hit, Karen. I don’t think.” I pulled out my phone and glanced at it. “Speaking of which, she texted me. I’ll have to phone her back soon, or she’ll just keep sending more texts. She’s kind of like the Terminator, that way.”

“So it is genetic!”

I mimed exaggerated laughter at Carl and he grinned back, unrepentant. After a moment, he waved a hand dismissively and changed the subject. “Anyway, part of the purpose of coming to the con this year was as a distraction from the breakup, right? So how were the panels?”

Karen groaned, and I leaned forward to put my elbows on the table. “Really interesting. Dr. Carlisle theorizes that life will generally be similar on different planets with similar climates, and maybe even digestible by humans. Panspermia, ya know. Common biological origins.”

“Horse cookies.”

“No, seriously, Alan. He gave a pretty good argument for a common chemical basis for life. Not Star Trek level compatible, but we could probably subsist on an alien ecosystem.”

“I’ll wait and see,” Alan said. “How about the other one? Space probes?”

“Von Neumann probes. Automated probes that reproduce as they visit star systems. Turns out nanites are out and 3D printers are in for self-replication.”

Carl nodded. “As advancing technology leaves fiction behind, again.”

“Wait, what?” Alan said, looking perplexed.

Carl and I both smiled indulgently. Alan was not a science geek, despite a background in software development. I gestured with my hands as I described the idea. “You’ve seen 3D printers, right? Printing things like plastic parts, medical prosthetics, and toys?” At his nod, I continued, “So take it to the next level. Have them able to deliver any element, one atom at a time, according to a design. You could, in principle, print literally anything solid.”

“Including parts to make more probes,” Carl added, “using whatever elements they find in the systems they visit.”

Alan glanced at me. “This would work?”

“I minored in physics, Alan, you guys know that. I think it’s completely plausible.” I paused for a moment to taste my beer, then looked around at the others. “And the engineering—”

“You’re really going to freeze your head?”

We all turned to face Karen. “Here we go,” Alan muttered.

She glared at Alan, then at me. “When they revive you—if they revive you—it’ll probably be long after everyone you know is dead.”

“Including Jenny…” Alan said, sotto voce.

Karen glared at him again. “Whatever. Your family will be dead. Your friends will be dead. How are you good with that?”

I looked at her for a moment, considering my response. “I’m a humanist, Karen. You know that. No afterlife. If I die, my choices are revival or nothing. I’ll take my chances with whatever I wake up to.”

Karen’s expression grew even more thunderous, and she opened her mouth for a retort. Fortunately, the waiter picked that moment to arrive with our lunch. The odor of hamburgers, caramelized onions, and vinegarized fries wafted around the table as the plates were set down in front of us. By the time the food was distributed, the moment of tension had dissipated.

* * *

I dropped a trail of shoes and clothes behind me and settled onto the king-sized bed. The daily rate on the executive suite was ludicrous, but the luxurious bed alone was worth the price. One could get used to this. Oh, yes.

I set the alarm so I wouldn’t sleep the whole afternoon, and pulled out my phone. My mother really would keep texting me if I didn’t call her back.

The phone rang twice at the other end before her voice came on. “Hi Robert. Has it been a year already?”

“Hah hah. Hi Mom. Got your text. No, I don’t need a contract taken out on what’s-her-face, thanks. I’m at The Vortex, having a great time. K, bye.”

She laughed into the phone. This was a game we always played. I acted impatient and tried to end the call, but we both knew I’d stay on as long as she wanted.

“I’m fine Robert, thanks for asking.”

“And how are the mosquitos?”

“The mosquitos are fine. They miss you and your delicate Nordic skin. Are there no mosquitos in San Diego?”

“Not like Minnesota, Mom. One of the reasons I moved there.”

“Hmm. And how are you doing, son? The offer’s still open on what’s-her-face. I knows deze guys…”

“Thanks, but I don’t want to have to visit you in jail.” I sighed. “Look, Mom. People cheat. It happens. We weren’t married yet. I’d have hated to find out after we tied the knot. I’m good, now. Really.”

Can you hear disbelief? My mother didn’t say a word. Maybe it was her breathing. Whatever, I decided it was a good time to change the subject. “So how’s everyone?”

“Your father’s fine. He’s in the workshop, still trying to get that pile o’ junk to start. Your sisters are here for a visit, by the way. They visit their poor ailing mother. Andrea is motioning that she’d like to mock you for a bit.”

“Okay, put her on. I need my massive ego kicked out from under me.”

There was some muffled conversation, then, “Hi little brother.”

“I’m older than you.”

“Not what I meant.”

I smiled to myself at the sound of her voice and at the traditional exchange. Andrea, Alaina, and myself were as close as siblings could be. The two girls were twins only in that they were born at the same time. They had literally twelve inches difference in height between them. And Andrea never let me forget that she had an inch on me as well.

“So, rich guy, how are things out in Silicone Valley?” I could hear the smile in Andrea’s voice. She’d been doing this comedy routine ever since I’d moved west.

“It’s Silicon, Andrea. And that’s in Frisco.”

“I watch TMZ. I stand by my comment.”

“Ooh, the butt-hurt is strong in this one…”

Andrea laughed. We spent a few minutes more exchanging insults, updating news bites, then I told her to say hi to Alaina and Dad for me.

Thank God for family. And thank God for a couple thousand miles of distance. When everyone was home at the same time, I could generally take it for about half an hour before I retreated into the basement. Usually, Dad followed about ten minutes later. There’d be the mutual eye-rolling, and we’d settle down without a word, to read or watch TV. My father and I were both loners by disposition. We could sit in the same room for hours, not say five words to each other, and both be completely comfortable. It drove my mother crazy.

* * *

I was surprised when the alarm went off. I hadn’t intended to fall asleep. I jumped out of bed and got ready as quickly as I could. I would be meeting the gang for dinner, but I wanted to spend some time at the actual convention. The Vortex was a three-day gyrating bag of crazy, and I wanted to catch as much of it as I could. You couldn’t truly say you’d been to a science fiction con until you’d been run over by Farscape cosplayers, threatened by at least one drunken Darth, and had bought a cheap plastic movie prop for more than its weight in gold. Woo hah.

The elevator opened, and I stepped out into the lobby. The doorman nodded to me as I approached, and held the door open. As usual, I wasn’t sure if I should tip him or not. I decided to give him a large tip when I checked out, just in case.

The Las Vegas air hit like a hammer when I stepped out of the air-conditioned hotel. I stopped and let a gaggle of Enterprise crewcritters, several Ferengi, two Chewbaccas, and a storm trooper wander past. They were loud, truculent, and appeared to have been sampling Terran alcohol to excess. After a few seconds of semi-coherent argument, they turned and crossed the street more or less as a unit.

I smiled and shook my head, then I walked the extra fifty feet to the crosswalk. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry. As I started to cross, I heard a flurry of hurled insults, blaring horns, and squealing tires.

I turned toward the noise, and everything went into slow motion. The car came around the group, the driver’s mouth moving as he leaned out the window. He turned forward and looked right at me, and his eyes went wide. Tires squealed as the car went into a four-wheel lock.

You have GOT to be kidding me!

There was a flash of light, a moment of unimaginable pain…

* * *

I could hear voices. Urgent voices, calling out about codes. Someone in the background declaring that they had a right to be there. Something about a power of attorney, last will and testament. Angry responses. A calm voice, much closer, mentioning time of death…

The voices and the light faded, and the world ended.

Bob Version 2.0

I snapped back to consciousness. There was no transition, none of the normal vagueness you get when you wake up. I remembered the car coming at me, which I thought was odd. I would have expected the last few seconds to be lost as they didn’t have time to enter long-term memory. On the other hand, maybe the last few seconds had been lost.

I lay there, without moving or opening my eyes, and did careful inventory. I felt no pain. In fact, I couldn’t feel my arms, my legs, or my body at all. I was getting none of the normal proprioceptive cues that would tell me if I were lying down, comfortable, or anything. Not really a good sign—complete paralysis seemed a likely explanation.

I experienced a moment of panic, followed immediately by a kind of bemused surprise. The panic seemed to be purely intellectual. I had no sensation of elevated breathing, increased heart-rate, or fight-or-flight muscle tension. Nothing. While I was normally very analytical, this seemed especially Vulcan, even for me.

Wow. Am I paralyzed from the forehead down? Maybe I’m in an induced coma? If so, it’s not a very good one.

Gathering my resolve, I opened my eyes.

Or tried to. Nothing happened. This time, I did panic. Being blind was the stuff of nightmares for me. For a few moments, my thoughts spun out of control. I thought of movies I would never see, books I would never read.

But again, the panic didn’t self-reinforce. No adrenaline rush, no nothing. I couldn’t think of a medical condition that would do that. Maybe drugs. Good ones.

I was getting a little weirded out. Over and above the panic thing, I mean. I decided on drugs as a good working hypothesis.

Determined to get a handle on things, I tried again, really thought about opening my eyes. The mechanics, the feeling of my eyes opening…

And with no transition, I could see! There are no words to describe my relief with that small victory.

I appeared to be sitting up, since I was looking at a wall instead of a ceiling. The room could be a hospital room, or a lab, or any nondescript government office. The walls were painted in that peculiar off-white tone that new construction always seemed to start out with. The far wall had a large window, currently shielded by white, uh, something. I thought at first it might be Venetian blinds, but they seemed to be actually printed on the glass.

I expected to see part of my body in the foreground, perhaps under plain hospital sheets. But instead, there was just a flat plane, like maybe a desktop.

Just beyond the flat plane, a man sat, consulting a tablet. He looked, I kid you not, exactly how most of us visualize Sigmund Freud, right down to the lab coat. He can’t actually be a shrink. That would just be too cliché. Is he here to talk to me about my injuries? It has to be pretty bad if they have a counselor ready and waiting for me to wake up.

There was something off about him, though. The shirt he was wearing looked almost clerical in cut. And his watch…

It took me a moment longer to realize I was experiencing a problem with perspective. The room seemed to be deep and narrow, and Freud seemed to be about six feet from front to back. In fact, when he turned his head, his nose seemed to stick about a foot out from his face.

As I examined this odd optical illusion, I felt a shifting sensation and heard a whirring sound, and the perspective corrected itself. Before I could begin to analyze the sensation and sound, Freud looked up and smiled. “Good. You’re awake.”

I tried to respond, but what came out was something like a cross between a cough and static. For God’s sake, that sounded like a voice synthesizer having a breakdown.

Freud put down the tablet, leaned forward, and rested his arms on the desk or table or whatever. “Please keep trying. It can take a few attempts for the GUPPI interface to mesh.”

I considered what he’d said. It immediately brought up three points. Point one, I wasn’t dead. Well, okay, I think therefore I am, yadda yadda. Call that one proven. Point two, I wasn’t good as new— in fact I appeared to be speaking through a voice synthesizer. But doing so by mental control, which meant, point three, that the technology had advanced significantly since I’d been hit by the car. How long had I been out? And what the heck was a guppy interface?

I tried again, concentrating on forming the words. “Xzjjzzjjj… Someone want to zhixxxjx fill me in on what’s going on?”

Freud clapped his hands, once. “Excellent. I am Dr. Landers, Bob. I will answer any questions you have, and I will help to prepare you for your new life.”

New life…? What’s wrong with my old one? I already don’t like where this is going.

Dr. Landers pulled the tablet over so that it was directly in front of him. “So, Bob, what’s the last thing you remember?”

“A car coming right at me. I was sure it was going to hit me. I’m pretty sure it did.”

“It did indeed, Bob. You arrived at the hospital in critical condition with a very poor prognosis. Per your contract with CryoEterna, they were standing by with a cryocontainer when time of death was pronounced.”

“Well, good to know my money wasn’t wasted, anyway. So what year is it?”

Dr. Landers laughed. “So nice to talk to a subject so quick on the uptake. It is June 24, 2133, and we are currently in New Handeltown, which would have been Portland in your day.”

I was surprised by that. So that’s… [117] years. Wait, where did that come from?

I’d always been able to do math in my head with no effort, but it normally required me to at least go through the calculation steps. This answer had arrived as if spoken in my ear. Huh. Something to investigate later. Add to TO-DO list.

I turned my attention back to the doctor. The shirt made a little more sense, now. Styles would change in a hundred-plus years. I really wanted to get a look at that watch, though.

“Who’s Handel?” I asked.

“Ah, now, Bob, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I have an established script for bringing candidates up to date, and history lessons come later.”

“So what happened to Old Handeltown?”

Dr. Landers smiled and shook his head in mock sorrow.

I sighed and nodded. Well, I tried to nod. My field of view didn’t move. So I had control over my eyes but not my head. I was starting to suspect some kind of locked-in syndrome.

Instead, I grunted. “Right, so can we talk about how much of me is still human? This artificial voice thing tells me that you haven’t been able to make me good as new. How much is Borg? Should I ask for a mirror, or would that be a bad idea?”

“Ah…” Dr. Landers glanced down at his tablet and hesitated, then looked back at me. “It would be inaccurate to compare you to a Borg. If I remember my Trek trivia correctly, they are at least partly human. I think Mr. Data would be a better comparison.”

I simply stared at him for what seemed like forever. My mind was blank. I couldn’t seem to form a thought.

Finally, I found my voice. “Zhzzjjjz… Excuse me?” I noted almost in passing that I still wasn’t having a panic attack. For the first time, I suspected I knew why.

“You, Bob, are what most people would call an Artificial Intelligence, although that’s not strictly accurate. You are a copy of the mind of Robert Johansson, created by scanning his cryogenically frozen brain at the subcellular level and converting the data into a computer simulation. You are, essentially, a computer program that thinks it’s Robert Johansson. A replicant.”

“Does that mean I’m immortal, then?”

Dr. Landers looked startled for a moment, then threw his head back and laughed. “That is definitely not the reaction I normally get. We seem to have skipped the denial phase entirely. I’m feeling more and more confident about our decision to replicate you.”

“Well, thanks. I think. So then I’m… that is, Bob is still alive? Or still dead? I mean, still in cryo?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Dr. Landers shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “The recording process is destructive. We have to thaw the brain sufficiently to be able to measure the synaptic potentials, without allowing ice crystals to form. Chemicals are involved which render the brain non-viable. There’s no point in trying to re-freeze it afterwards.”

The revelation hit me with a jolt, almost like touching a live wire. I don’t know why I should be more bothered by the fact of original Bob being dead. Either way, I was a computer program. But somehow, the idea that I was all that was left of Bob felt like being stabbed. I had been—Bob had been—discarded.

“But… but that means you killed me!”

The doctor sighed. “And that’s the cue for the history lesson.”

He settled himself more comfortably in his chair and assumed that far-off expression people get when they’re lecturing. “In 2036, the USA elected an over-the-top, unapologetic fundamentalist president named Andrew Handel. Yes, that Handel. During his term, he tried to ban election of non-Christians to any public post, and tried to remove the constitutional separation between church and state. He was nominated, supported, and elected based on his religious views, rather than on his political or fiscal expertise. And of course, he appointed persons of similar persuasion to every post he could manage, in some cases blatantly ignoring laws and procedures. He and his cronies rammed through far-right policies with no thought for consequences. In a number of cases, when challenged on the results, he declared that God would not allow their just cause to fail. He eventually brought the USA to its knees in an economic collapse that made the 2008 recession look like a picnic in the park.”

Dr. Landers tapped his tablet absent-mindedly. It was obvious to me that he knew the whole spiel by rote.

“In the next election, the public voted in the USA’s first—and only—overtly atheist president, Desmond Ahearn, mostly in reaction to the Handel travesty. Needless to say, the religious right went ballistic. In 2041, they staged a successful coup. And thus was born the Free American Independent Theocratic Hegemony.”

It took me perhaps a millisecond to parse out the acronym. I groaned. “How long do you suppose it took them to work that out?”

Dr. Landers frowned. “The official history doesn’t mention Ahearn or the coup at all, and Handel is credited with being voted in after running on a platform of creating a theocracy. And just so you know, Bob, criticism of the government is a felony, punishable by, er, re-education. It’s certainly something to be avoided. As a machine, though, you’d just be deactivated. Part of my job is to instruct you in right-thinking so you can become a good servant of the state.”