We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

It took fourteen and a half years to get to Epsilon Indi. Funny, I still sort of thought in terms of human time-scales, so there was this feeling that I’d just used up a major part of my life. Of course, intellectually, that wasn’t true. First, I’d only experienced a little over three years of personal time thanks to Einstein and time dilation. Second, we’re immortal. I just don’t think we’ve internalized that fact, yet.

I had gone off on my own rather than wait for Bill to build another cohort. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to team up with either of the loonie brothers. I don’t know what the deal was with Calvin and Goku. In theory they’re me, but I’m pretty sure I’m not that obnoxious. Um, I hope. Anyway, for all their constant fighting, they seemed to be connected somehow. And I guess they knew it, since they took off together.

Meanwhile, I was here, at Epsilon Indi—fourteen light years from Epsilon Eridani where Bill was set up, but only eleven light years from Earth. That made it a reasonable if not a prime target for probes. As a K-type star, it was cooler and smaller than Sol, and livable planets would be correspondingly closer to the star and more likely to be tidally locked.

Still, it’s not like there was a ton of choice in the stellar neighborhood. When I’d been a kid, watching Star Trek and Star Wars and Stargate and all the other science fiction shows, it seemed like every planet was M-class and every star was yellow. And everyone spoke English. Sadly, turns out old Sol is exceptional. Most of the stars in the sky are either smaller or stupid big. Which means pretty poor pickings for habitable planets.

I was cautious coming into the system. It was possible that one of the other nations had chosen this system as a destination. Medeiros was a known factor, but we had no idea what the others would be like. We could probably rule out friendly, but there was a lot of range between harsh words and firing missiles.

I coasted in, with a couple of scouts ahead of me to scope out the situation. While I waited, I continued to work on my VR. I had decided on domed, floating cities in the atmosphere of Saturn. The rings arched across the sky, and giant clouds bloomed up to incredible heights. Below, breaks in the cloud layers gave line-of-sight for hundreds of kilometers into the depths of the atmosphere. And the cloudscape disappeared gradually into a horizon almost infinitely far away.

I stood in my rooftop garden and looked over the city from my vantage point. Hey, my VR. I can be the rich guy with the penthouse.

[Structures detected]

I looked up. Guppy had appeared out of nowhere with that announcement. I don’t think he approved of my VR for some reason, because he always seemed to be breaking consistency.