We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Mario

November 2180

Gliese 54

I stared in frank amazement at the header on this latest communication from Bill.

Plans for a Subspace Communications Universal Transceiver (SCUT) with zero latency.

Holy. Crap. On a cracker.

Well, the big guy had delivered. I examined the plans and attached notes. Bill was candid that this was an early version, and probably cantankerous. He also wasn’t sure about the range. Yeah, yeah, disclaimer, disclaimer. A hundred-plus years after our death and we still felt the need to lawyer at ourselves. Hmm, and keeping up the FAITH tradition of bad acronyms, too.

Simple math said other stars had received the plans already. I didn’t know if any of them had Bobs crewing the stations rather than AMIs. That would have been a decision made by the Bobs involved at the time. But there was a good chance I’d be able to get a line all the way back to Bill. The specs indicated that the system took care of discovery, routing, and encryption. Cool!

I was lucky to have been still in the system when I intercepted the radio transmission. Bill was obviously beaming the plans to all stars within some arbitrary radius of Epsilon Eridani, but if I’d been between stars, it probably would have missed me entirely.