We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

And that’s the idea behind panspermia. I’ve been asked many times why panspermia isn’t just another layer of turtles. People have commented that moving the creation of the basic building blocks of life from Earth to space just adds a step and doesn’t make their creation any easier to explain. Yet in fact, it does. We’ve detected the basic building blocks of RNA and DNA in space. Conditions are ideal. The raw materials are there, the energy is there, and the components can come together through simple Brownian motion without requiring a solvent.

… Dr. Steven Carlisle, from the Convention panel Exploring the Galaxy

I leaned back in my La-Z-Boy, enjoying the moment. The fire crackled and popped in a very realistic manner. Spike had abandoned me to curl up on the bear skin rug in front of the fireplace. Books lined the shelves, floor to ceiling, and I even had a wheeled ladder to reach the upper levels.

I cradled a coffee in my hands as I examined the hologram floating in front of me. The image depicted a cubic kilometer of space, located on the inside edge of the inner asteroid belt and centered on the Heaven-1.

The area was a beehive of activity. Five version-2 HEAVEN vessels were under construction, one of which was a trade-up for me. The new designs included a bigger reactor and drive, a rail-gun, storage and launch facilities for busters, replicant systems with twice the capacity of version one, more room for storing roamers and mining drones, and more cargo capacity in general.

The manufacturing systems cranked out parts as fast as the roamers could feed in the raw ore. Other roamers gathered the parts and assembled the ships. Two large reactors supplied power for all the equipment. A couple of smaller printer operations cranked out more roamers and the components for more ship-busters. I had considered using explosive warheads, but I had an aversion to anything that included the word “explosive.”

I looked over at the corner of the holoview where the space station was shown. Part of the mission instructions included a directive to build an automated station with powerful interstellar communications capability in every system I visited. Its first task would be to send an encrypted status report back to Earth, and all the planetary surveys that I’d just completed. After that, depending on whether or not the system was a viable colonization target, it would act as a beacon and communications relay for me and any incoming colonists from Earth, and later as an in-system communications hub. It would be ‘staffed’ with an AMI and would have its own limited manufacturing capability.

Mind you, all that presupposed that Earth still harbored a technological civilization. Sooner or later, one of me was going to have to go back and check it out.

So far, I hadn’t picked up any radio transmissions from Sol directed at me. But realistically, I didn’t expect any. The point of the HEAVEN project was for information to flow from me to them. There would be no conversations, certainly not with a 10.5-year wait, each way.