We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Bob

May 2334

Quin

The cargo drone settled carefully onto the very dead lawn. Or lawn-like flora, anyway. Whatever the plant once was, it had been used by the Quinlans as a lawn-equivalent. I glanced sideways at Bridget’s manny, an action made easy by the Quinlan form’s very mobile and independently movable eyes. The resulting double-image was hard for human minds to handle, but I was figuring out how to pay attention to one eye and ignore the other. It was something the Quinlans did easily and routinely, so it would probably be noticeable if the people in our group never did it. Like a human who never moved his eyes but only swiveled his head.

Bridget turned and smiled at me as the cargo bay doors started to open. Actually, she performed a beak-rubbing motion, which was the Quinlan equivalent. As had been standard procedure since my days on Eden, the manny operating system converted human expressions into native equivalents so that we never had to worry about the actual action. Language was handled in a similar manner, so we spoke and heard English, including colloquialisms. The O/S also chose English name equivalents for local proper names, and kept track of which substitutions were used.

The cargo doors finished opening, and we stepped out onto the surface of Quin. Bridget did a slow and probably unnecessary three-sixty, carefully examining the environment. “No obvious damage in this area. Any deaths here would have had to be from less obvious methods—radiation possibly, or biological. I don’t know if there will be anything to dissect.” She glanced at the drone hovering by her shoulder. Part scout, part beast of burden, part courier, it currently held her medical tools in its small hold.

The city, for city it was, had been built on the shore of a large, slow-flowing river. Instead of a maze of streets, the metropolis was crisscrossed by canals. The infrastructure had been set up so that the river flow turned over the contents of the canals, but with a mild current. That also meant that a design based on right angles would be suboptimal. The actual shape was more like slightly rounded diamonds, with the long axis along the direction of flow. Even if nothing else had been different, it would have made for a more elegant, less utilitarian design than the typical Earth city.

But in addition, the Quinlans seemed to enjoy embellishment for its own sake. Buildings were rarely just simple solid rectangles. We saw cantilevered terraces, elevated walkways between buildings, and even buildings with deliberately engineered gaps through their middles, like the dragon gates in some Hong Kong skyscrapers. Although I doubted feng shui was involved.

And the windows. Quinlans used both placement of windows and color tints to make the side of every building a piece of art. Like giant stained glass murals.