We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

If you start with one hundred planets, remove the Jovians, remove the frozen Plutos, the blistering Mercurys, the too-small Marses, too-large super-Earths and the baking Venuses, rule out the dwarf stars, giants, variables, close binaries, and classes of stars that won’t live long enough to allow life to develop, you’re down to ten or so planets.

Now the bad news. Our sun is bigger than 80% of stars. Most of the stuff out there is type K and M stars, which are considerably smaller and dimmer than Sol. The comfort zone for those would be so close to the star that the planet would almost certainly be tidally locked. Maybe livable, but not ideal. Maybe three in a hundred planets even has a chance of being habitable, overall. And I think that’s optimistic.

… Dr. Stepan Solokov, from the Convention panel Exploring the Galaxy

There was something special about the Solar System. The schematic in the holotank didn’t do it justice, but even the schematic made me feel nostalgic.

It had only been about nine years’ personal time since I’d left Earth as Bob, but twenty-six years would have passed for most of humanity. A lot could have changed in that time. That the war was still raging was unlikely. Just the same, I wasn’t going to parade into the system with my high beams on, honking my horn. The version-2 Heaven vessels had better reactor shielding, and mine and Homer’s were beefed up even more. I didn’t want anyone to know we were here until we decided to show ourselves. The decoy was coasting in the Oort on minimal power, until we established a vector for it. Meanwhile, we flew powered orbits through the outer reaches of the system—close enough to pick up standard reactor signatures, but not close enough to let them detect ours.

It took several weeks, but we were eventually able to build up a picture of the inner system. Such as it was.

Homer popped up a video chat. I noted in passing that he had given up on the cartoon avatar and gone back to standard Bob. I guess limiting our chats to audio only had finally sunk in. Chances are he’d be getting revenge in other ways, though.

I found it incredibly annoying that Bob-6 had decided on that particular avatar. Original Bob had always found the cartoon character grating. No Bobs were identical, but Homer seemed to be way out there in left field. Quantum effects? Subtle differences in the hardware? Another item for the ever-expanding TO-DO. The practical effect, though, was that talking to the various Bobs felt more like talking to other people and less like muttering to oneself.

Homer popped up some arrows in the system schematic. “High levels of radiation at all these locations. Nukes, I guess. Long-range imaging of Earth looks bad, too.”