Book 3: Chapter 33: Project
Herschel
October 2227
Delta Pavonis
Be careful what you wish for. Uh huh. I was visiting Neil, while we took a break. He’d draped himself across his chair sideways and was doing a good imitation of a boneless corpse. I could remember sitting like that when original Bob was a teenager. Neil had a couple of behaviors that seemed to hearken back to Bob’s adolescence.
“Friggin’ hell,” he finally moaned. “Can we go back to being pondscum? Life was so much easier!”
I laughed, and signaled Jeeves for a beer. Neil had a template for a particularly good ale, and I tried to make a point of having one when I was visiting. I sat down, took a drink, then called up the project plan. “Well, we’re a little ahead of schedule, buddy. You could afford to take a few milliseconds off.”
“Oh, hah hah. You are too funny.” Neil straightened up. “Well, at least we’ve finally finished cutting up Hulk-2. Loading it all into Hulk-1’s cargo bays is routine enough to be left to the AMIs. But building the mover plates…”
“Yeah, I know. We weren’t really anticipating having to deploy our printers when we came out here. It’s a pain…” We grinned at each other and said, in unison, “but it’s a good pain!”
“Anyway,” I continued. “Moot is in a half-hour. You might want to get organized.”