Book 4: Chapter 32: A Few Loose Ends
Bob
October 2334
Virt
Bridget and Steven were trudging through the foothills outside Garack’s Spine. The floating video window showed the area from Bridget’s point of view. Steven wasn’t much help, it appeared. He kept looking up, while Bridget kept looking down. I predicted a very short professional relationship. Steven was already agitating for an interview with ANEC. I smiled at the thought. Dr. Gilligan was very Bob-like in a lot of ways. He was one of the few post-Earth replicants, what Bill called ex-humans, whom I knew and wanted to stay in contact with.
Hugh had sent me some updates on their work with the Quinlan AI development template. I think he was trying to get back in my good graces. Time would tell. The unilateral deal with ANEC had touched a nerve with the Bobiverse, especially with Hugh’s frequent reiteration that there wasn’t a Bobiverse government to consult with. Generally speaking, people were more angry at the Skippies than they had been at Starfleet, although the latter weren’t by any means out of the doghouse either.
The Bobiverse was fracturing. Several groups had formed their own subnets and set up firewalls at the interface. Most of the rest had done audits and upgraded their security. The changes were far-reaching. For one thing, you couldn’t just pop in to visit anyone anymore, unless you were a close friend. The moots were on temporary hiatus until we upgraded the hardware to be able to handle the extra security and encryption requirements.
And the humans had formally declared their intention to divest themselves of any Bobiverse dependency. That meant their own autofactories, their own ships, their own space stations, and their own communications infrastructure. There was even talk of banning mannies, although Howard expressed considerable skepticism. Surrogates, like the movie, would be just too tempting for humanity, and no government ban would be able to hold back the tide.
Even the Pav had an expanding fleet, crewed by Pav. They had stated that their first extended voyage would be back to their home world to evaluate it for recolonization. And they had turned down, rather curtly, an offer by the local Bobs to give them remote access to the planet via drones. I expected that to change; it was most likely a public statement, which would be quietly reversed in private discussions.
And I wasn’t entirely sure that any of this was a bad thing. I was intended to be a Von Neumann probe, and so far I’d done a really crappy job of it. Expansion of known space had stalled at about a hundred or so light-years’ radius, since most Bobs were more interested in setting up their own territories, whether it was Bill’s Skunk Works, the Skippies’ Matryoshka Brain, or Starfleet’s enclave out Perseus Transit way.