Book 5: Chapter 11: Frustrations
Bill
September 2336
In Virt
Garfield was visiting, and since I was currently upgrading the spare manny, we were in VR. These days, I was keeping my virt and real lab spaces synced as much as possible to avoid confusion. I told myself it was for efficiency, but I wondered at the back of my mind if I was just becoming cantankerous and inflexible. Wow, wouldn’t that be a downer—a senile, immortal replicant.
I shook my head in irritation, earning a bemused look from Garfield. He regrouped and continued with what he’d been saying.
“I’ve talked to Hugh a couple of times and tried to pump him for more information, but he claims to be as in the dark as anyone. And I can’t really accuse him of anything because it’s a perfectly reasonable scenario. Trouble is … ”
“Either way, we got squat,” I finished for him.
I paused and rubbed my eyes, gathering my thoughts. In the science-fiction stories from when Original Bob was alive, there were wormholes, subspace, hyperspace (and what’s the difference between those two, anyway?), probability drives, warp drives, folding space, null space, and so on and so on. Of course, other than wormholes, they were mostly just word salad, with no real definition. And there was no immediate indication which of these, if any, might actually produce an FTL drive. We knew that SCUT worked, obviously, so the speed of light was not a universal speed limit. Or a source of time-travel paradoxes. Very likely, a lot of twenty-first-century pundits would have had fits.
But the process that allowed information to flow instantaneously across interstellar distances had no obvious corresponding feature for moving matter. So other than the bare knowledge that you could do an end run around Einstein, I had nothing.