Book 4: Chapter 7: Looking Forward
Will
June 2333
Virt
The search for information on topopoleis turned out to be one of those good news/bad news things. Good news: I’d found an expert. Bad news: he was dead. Good news: he’d arranged to be replicated. Bad news: he’d gone right back to work and was really hard to get hold of. The whole Keystone Kops act would be giving me a headache if I were still subject to such things, so I decided to take a break and do some work on a personal side project I had going.
I pinged Conan and popped over as soon as I received a response. Conan was the current Bob rep in the Omicron2 Eridani system. It hadn’t been a heavy-labor position for a long time—Vulcan and Romulus having long ago become independent of our help—but we had always maintained a physical presence, for our family’s sake if nothing else.
I looked around as I settled in. Conan appeared to have replicated the Vulcan jungle, with his home in a treehouse. I smiled to myself. I knew enough about Vulcan’s wildlife to realize this was completely unworkable in real life. Even without the now-extinct Cupid Bugs, there was still more than enough variety—of the bad kind—in the wild to kill any human dumb enough to be out without an exo-suit.
Conan saluted me with a can of Coke. I sat in the nearest chair and, there being no Jeeves in view, invoked my own can.
“What can I do for you, O great ancestor?” Conan said.
“Are you one of mine?” I replied, and he nodded. Ancestry had never been a big deal in the Bobiverse, but with all the fragmenting lately, people were starting to pay more attention to chains of instantiation, with an eye to cataloguing behavioral DNA. As with a lot of Bob projects, it was ad hoc and casual.