Book 4: Chapter 3: Trouble
Bob
September 2331
Outskirts, Eta Leporis
I came to a stop, relatively speaking, more than fifty AU out from Eta Leporis. The definitions of Kuiper and Oort regions were completely arbitrary, especially for a system other than Sol, but there were some practical differences. For instance, matter became increasingly scarce farther out. And metallic deposits became harder to find. The physics of stellar system formation seemed to produce some consistent patterns, one of which was that the heavier elements tended to be closer in, and all the ice and frozen gasses congregated farther out. In the Kuiper and Oort zones, it was almost all frozen clumps of condensed gasses ejected from the inner system when the sun ignited. But, like raindrops, they generally condensed around something.
My first task would be to send scouts out to look for useful materials. This part fell within my original design. A Von Neumann probe needed to find raw materials, refine them, and use them to manufacture more Von Neumann probes. Of course, I’d long since exceeded my original design specifications. But it was still relaxing, like doing a routine and mindless task.
This process would take a while, though, which was making me antsy. After years in interstellar space, it might seem odd to be fretting over a question of months. But I’d been frame-jacked way down for most of the trip, I was here now, and I wanted to get moving on my search. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted to see if there was really a megastructure in the system. The Others’ Dyson Sphere was the only other piece of mega-engineering we’d ever seen, and that had been only partly constructed. That the Others might be here seemed unlikely, but it would certainly be a worst-case scenario.
My current orbit was too far out to resolve anything in the inner system with the onboard telescope. That was frustrating, and my immediate urge was to send in some observation drones. But Bender had probably just gone charging in, and that presumably had not worked out well for him. So, like it or not, a slow, careful exploration of the system was in order.
I spent the time deploying my printers and setting up a proper orbital autofactory. Regardless of what I found in the system proper, I would still have to set up a local communication station. In my idle moments, I checked my message backlog. It was huge, after a few decades out of touch. But I was mostly interested in messages from my trailing drones. I filtered for those.
The drones launched from Delta Eridani after I’d left had indeed found that Bender’s trail turned toward Eta Leporis—and only a fraction of a light-month before the point where I made that same turn. The fact made me feel more confident about my deductions, and about my plan of action. And slightly smug.