We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Beta Hydri was 23.4 light years from Sol. Rather than argue and compete with the other new Bobs for the closer candidate stars, I had decided to head for the far reaches. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” and all that Melvillish stuff. By the time everyone else worked their way out to this point, I hoped to have a working space station declaring, “Mario was here.”

And let’s face it, I really didn’t want to be around the other Bobs. It still amazed me how oblivious they were to the differences between each clone. It was creepy—Not enough variation to make them separate people, but enough to give them different opinions. It was like seeing myself with brain damage. And yeah, Bob-1 had set the rule about senior Bob being in charge, but I didn’t see that holding for long. Original Bob had never been much of a follower.

Well, whatever. I was here, they were there, and I liked it that way. Time to explore my domain.

I dropped into the system, decelerating at a leisurely 2 g. I could have come in a lot hotter, but on the off-chance that there was a Medeiros here, I didn’t want him to know what I had under my hood. He’d see the 2 g, a fraction of the output of my heavily shielded reactor, and he’d get cocky. I hoped. I really wanted a chance to meet up and hand him another ass-whupping. I had a couple of busters with his name on them. No, really. There wasn’t a lot to do between systems, so I’d had the roamers stencil his name on a couple of busters.

So far, though, there didn’t seem to be anything Brazilian in the neighborhood. Actually, there didn’t seem to be much of anything. It was a large, well-filled-out system, but so far, I’d found no metal ore. Seriously, nothing. This star’s spectral lines showed about two-thirds Sol’s metallicity. Generally, the composition of the system would follow the composition of the parent star.

Hands behind my back, I walked around the balcony of my tree house, enjoying the view and the thousand-meter drop to the forest floor. This forest had never existed except in literature, and even there, it was an amalgam of a lot of different books. Mostly it was from Foster’s Midworld, but I’d thinned things out so there were good lines-of-sight. I’d added lots of earth-birds and deleted any large, hungry, dragony things.

I raised an eyebrow at Guppy. “Got an opinion?”

[Above my pay grade]

I chuckled. The version-2 Heavens had more core and memory space than Bob-1 had started out with. Guppy had a lot of room to expand in the standard design, and I’d given him even more. He was becoming a person in his own right. He was acerbic and flip, just this side of insolent. I loved it. And, of course, he wasn’t a Bob clone.