Book 3: Chapter 76: Pilgrimage
Bob
October 2263
Earth
Full circle.
A couple hundred meters or so, straight down, a city named Las Vegas had once stood. Lost Wages. Sin City. The place where my first life ended.
I turned slowly to survey the landscape. Icescape, I guess. The Earth was now in full snowball mode. Snow, once fallen, was not melting, and glaciers were closing in on the equator.
Today was a beautiful bluebird day. The sun shone down on the ice, leaving the world awash in light. If I’d still been biological, I’d be snow-blind by now.
I had arranged with the current Bob-in-residence, a tenth-generation named Harvey, to have an android printed up from Howard’s most recent published set of plans. I could have done this visit remotely from Delta Eridani—or from anywhere in range of BobNet, really. But I wanted to actually come to Earth, to make the pilgrimage physically as well as emotionally. The Heaven-1B was currently in geosynchronous orbit, thirty-five thousand kilometers straight overhead.
I raised my face into the breeze and closed my eyes. The air ruffled my hair and whistled thinly against my ears. Heads-up readings, visible even on the inside of my eyelids, indicated a balmy minus thirty Celsius—well within operating range for current android tech. The Earth was definitely done for, though. For a few millennia, anyway. There was some argument at moots about whether we should set up space mirrors to reheat the planet, or just let things run their course.