For We Are Many (Bobiverse, #2)

by Dennis E. Taylor

families of our fire. Of course, it flowed a lot better in Deltan. This hunting group was part of Archimedes’ hexghi, which I’d more or less adopted as family.

“It’s a mystery, Marvin, and we do love a mystery.” We exchanged grins. After all, Bob.

Still very much in sync, copies feel like siblings almost

setting up a human colony on Vulcan was turning out to be a little bit like being pecked to death by ducks. Large ducks. With teeth and claws.

A self-propelled forty-pound ball of steel impacting at Mach 1 didn’t leave much room for argument.

Guppy somehow managed to look disappointed, although if pressed, I couldn’t for the life of me describe what a disappointed fish looked like.

The planet had water, all right. Oh, did it have water! What didn’t it have? Land. None. Nada. Not so much as an atoll. This was just one big ball of ocean. Not even any freakin’ ice caps to stand on.

Skinner seemed to agree with me, as he was looking askance at Jonny. This seemed like Mario or Milo all over again. I remembered Bob-1 wondering what he’d do if he found he didn’t like any particular clone. Turned out it didn’t matter. It’s a big galaxy.

when you think humanity has found the limits of stupid, they go and ratchet up the standard by another notch.”

“Colonel, it’s not like you’d have been any safer on Earth. If anything, Vulcan is slightly farther away from where they appear to be operating. And Earth has been advertising its presence for a couple of centuries with radio pollution.”

Funny, I couldn’t remember any science-fiction stories that actually dealt with how you’d handle timekeeping on a new planet.

“BobNet. Seven billion people on Earth in the early twenty-first century, and FAITH decided to replicate a nerd-slash-engineer with a Star Trek fixation.”

Seeing his family helps you understand the timescale, interesting perspective

The AMI controlling the surveillance system was an Artificial Machine Intelligence/GUPPI hybrid based on Bob’s work at Delta Eridani. It would combine the fast reflexes and multitasking of a true AI with the decision making capability of a replicant. Plus it would never get bored, or demand vacation time.

“Well, I’ve only existed for eight years’ subjective time as Howard. But my memories go back to Original Bob’s earliest memories as a child, maybe around two years old. So I remember around twenty-nine years as Original Bob, then four years as Bob-1 before he built his first set of clones; four years as Riker; fifteen years as Charles, who was one of Riker’s first clones; and eight years since Charles cloned me. That’s subjective time, as I said. There’s a lot of relativistic time dilation in there. So, I’ve experienced sixty years of life.”

Nobody thinks of everything. “If you have some variation on a god, asshole, you might want to have a very quick conversation with him. And fuck you to hell!”

“I remember Riker being frustrated sometimes, working with the enclaves. And it’s even more so for me. We have all this interaction with the ephemerals—” “Please don’t use that word, Howard.” I gave him the stink-eye, and he looked embarrassed for a moment. “It’s not

“Oh, sure.” Monty shrugged. “No matter what you do, living on a floating plant mat is still going a little more native than most of the colonists are comfortable with. Proper cities will mean permanent construction, transit, and all the amenities that we like to call civilization.”

New Bobs were increasingly voicing an unwillingness to hang around and help humanity. On top of the tendency to use dismissive language, it told me that there was some kind of shift in psychology going on. Then I admitted to myself that I might be the one out of step. I’d been holed up at Epsilon Eridani for fifty years, with only second-hand exposure to humanity. It was easy for me to have an attitude. Bobs cloned from Riker’s tree might just be getting heartily sick of people. Anyway, there were still enough interested Bobs to keep things rolling. I decided not to worry about it. I could always start my own dynasty if I needed to.

Hal; Well, the fecal matter seems to have struck the atmospheric propulsor. A squad of Others vessels was detected leaving GL 877, heading for GL 54. To be fair, scouting by other Bobs indicates that other, closer systems have already been stripped, so this isn’t necessarily anything more than a normal scavenging mission. Just the same, Mario has decided to hit the road, along with every piece of equipment he has. We’re going to leave a couple of drones behind for observation, and use one to try communicating with the Others. If they react by pointing one of the death asteroids at us, we’ll blow up the drone. Just thought you should know. It looks like we’re heading for a formal First Contact. You may want to re-route. Bill

them. For a first attempt, it was the most basic of communications: the first ten prime numbers, represented as a series of blips. Then I waited for a response. I had listed a number of possibilities while waiting for them to arrive. It might be the next ten primes, or it might be my message relayed back to me in reverse, or it might be another mathematical series. Or it might be a blast of cosmic rays. I was not expecting an audio message, in Mandarin.

“Okay, think of the posture of a gorilla. Not quite a quadruped, but not quite upright. These things that look kind of like meaty wings are the front, er, limbs. The back limbs are more like a split tail, except that there’s also a tail. Visualize a sea lion’s back end with a tail tacked on. The front limbs have these big appendages that look like fat fingers, but I don’t think they’re for manipulating. They have suckers on them, so I think they’re more for gripping their prey. The creature has what I’d have to describe as feeding fingers that fold out from here…“ I pointed to the front of the thing, “… and appear to be dexterous enough to act as manipulators. They also direct food into the maw…” I switched to another image which showed the thing with its front split open in a vertical slash. “… which doesn’t masticate so much as grind and strip the meal. I think it would be particularly slow and painful to be eaten by these things.”

I switched images again and pointed to the front. “The head does appear to have the primary sensory apparatus, although what looks like the brain is more centrally located, here.” I pointed to a spot high on the main trunk. “Vision is not great. It seems to be a large number of small eyes spaced around the dome of the head. You have to wonder why a predator would need 360-degree vision.”

New Jerusalem was now a full-fledged democracy. Seemed some incriminating videos had gotten out and Cranston had to step down. In the resulting mess, the citizenry had decided to separate Church and State once again.

Bill stared at me, frowning, for several milliseconds. Then a smile slowly formed. “I can’t decide if you’re brilliant or a moron. I’ll think about it. It’s definitely a noble idea, Jacques, but maybe not doable. I think we’re due for a moot. Maybe we should run it through the group consciousness.”

The Pav looked for all the world like giant meerkats. They stood six feet tall or so when upright. They could walk bipedally, but for any kind of distance, they went down on all fours. I was having a little trouble getting used to the sight. Apparently, I’m a bipedalism bigot. Who knew?

About the only real difference was the almost complete absence of monogamy. Pav seemed to organize into families of up to eight adults, generally evenly divided between genders.

But, you know, we are Bob. Smart, driven, and socially inept. I focused my attention on the presentation.

It’s the sacred duty of every parent to drive their kids crazy. Especially when they become grandparents.

Manny did indeed resemble a mannequin more than anything else. No hair, pale plastic-texture skin, and gray, staring eyes. According to the specs, facial muscle control was still a little spotty. I had a quick glance at the Deficiencies List.

Since the plan involved kidnapping twenty thousand Pav, I wanted to have a pre-selected target group. Running around, grabbing people until I hit my quota, just didn’t strike me as efficient. I spent some time doing a census of small towns until I had found two that came in just under ten thousand souls each. I could, if necessary, top up the numbers from what appeared to be nearby military bases. The two towns, Mheijrkva and Aizzilkva, were like small-town USA—rural, residential, stable population, family-oriented.

“That’s a philosophical argument that I freely admit I’m not able to be objective about. I’m not Original Bob. I’m not even Bob-1 or Will or Charles. But I’m me, and I feel just as alive as Original Bob did.”