We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Chapter 26: Riker – April 2157 – Sol

The signal was audio only, and very weak. “Unknown ship, do you copy?”

I looked at Homer and raised one eyebrow. He shrugged. “As good a place to start as any.”

Activating my transmitter, I responded, “This is the starship Heaven-2 of the United Federation of Planets. Commander Riker speaking.”

There were several seconds of silence. “Uh-huh. Listen, I don’t know who you are, but you’ve just apparently averted a global catastrophe, so I guess I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Our telemetry is not up to military snuff, but our systems tentatively identify you as similar to the Heaven-series interstellar probe that FAITH launched a couple or three decades back.”

“Guilty as charged. And to whom am I speaking?”

“I am Colonel George Butterworth of the United States of Eurasia Army Corps. Rest assured, commander, that our true position is obfuscated. If you attempt to destroy the source of this transmission, you will achieve nothing.”

The colonel’s accent was definitely British, and far too close to the cliché’d pronunciation portrayed in many American TV shows. I would have to be careful not to let Homer talk to him. I doubted Homer would be able to resist the urge toward mimicry. “Colonel, let’s not get off on the wrong foot, okay? We have no intention of blowing anyone up. We had a little disagreement with what appears to have been the last of the Brazilian Empire space navy. Now, I think it’s time to start fixing things.”

***

We had been in discussions with the USE military for three weeks now. I was faithfully forwarding recordings of everything to Bill. Negotiations were slow and cautious, mostly on the part of Colonel Butterworth. He had been very slow to accept the idea that Homer and I weren’t dyed-in-the-wool FAITH theologues. It took a very frank discussion in which I explained in detail the reasons for my atheism before the colonel really began to believe me.

Some of the refugees were scientific personnel who had been working on a USE colony ship back before the war. In the 22nd century, things were constructed in virtual space first. Once complete, the plans were uploaded to an autofactory, which built the entire item using 3D printers, roamers, and nanites.

The colony ship plans were ready, needing only a space-based construction yard. And a destination. The colonel informed us that the Chinese and USE probes had launched shortly after Bob-1, but the USE probe had never been heard from again.

The colonel and I were conversing via video link, as usual. He knew that the Heaven vessels were staffed by replicants, as were the USE and Brazilian probes. However, we were the first to have a full-on VR avatar that looked and behaved like a human being. The colonel was having a little trouble accepting at a visceral level that I wasn’t ‘real’. I’d toned down the Enterprise theme and stopped making Star Trek references, out of courtesy. It blew me away that almost two hundred years after Shatner first famously didn’t actually say, “Beam me up, Scotty,” people still knew Star Trek. Now that’s a franchise.

At the moment, the colonel was bringing me up to date on recent history. If we were going to make an attempt to save the human race, I wanted to have the whole picture.

“There was never actually a point where you could say now, we’re at war,” the colonel explained. “International tensions had been high for quite a number of years. The confrontation over the attempted destruction of Heaven-1 was simply the tipping point. Each act prompted a reaction, each reaction a retaliation. The other governments got dragged in one at a time, and eventually it became system-wide. Stations and colonies were abandoned, personnel were recalled. Some of the transports were destroyed, despite having no military value. Of course, that just escalated things.”

The colonel got up and began to pace around his office. The camera at his end kept him perfectly framed. “At first, the conflict was primarily spaceside. Annexation of strategic locations and orbits, denial of assets, that kind of thing. Then the first nuke was used planetside, and after that, all bets were off.”

Colonel Butterworth sat down at his desk and massaged his forehead for a few moments. He reached into a drawer and pulled out what looked very much like a bottle of Jameson. Hmm. Funny what survives the end of the world.

After pouring a glass and taking a sip, he continued, “It became a war of attrition. Each side tried to neutralize the other’s military capability. Then someone nuked most of the Brazilian Empire—your theory that it was the Chinese is reasonable—and civilian targets became fair game. The ships you took out were the last men standing. Metaphorically speaking, of course—they were only replicants.”

The colonel blushed slightly. “Er, no offence meant. In any case, they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at the height of the war, when everyone still had equipment. But here at the end, we had no way to stop them. They just started slowly pounding away at everyone. Call it a scorched-earth policy, call it revenge, whatever. It was genocide. They probably took out a couple of billion people on their own.”

I felt ill. I had waited an additional six months while Homer and the decoy were assembled. How many people had died for that delay?

The colonel had reached the end of his spiel, and was concentrating on the glass of Jameson.

“So what can we do, colonel? Help rebuild? Relocate people?”n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

“I think that ship has sailed, Commander. The Earth will recover eventually. It’s tough that way. But not in time for humanity. My tame scientists say it will be minimum five to ten thousand years before things recover to any degree. We won’t last that long.” ʀåΝổ𝐛È𝐬

Colonel Butterworth touched a control, and a schematic popped up in the video link. “This is the colony ship we designed and started to build in hopes that our probes would report back with something worth shipping out to. One of the first casualties of the war, I’m afraid. You have on-board autofactories that can bootstrap up to a full shipyard. With your help, we’d like to build a couple of these and leave the solar system.”

“And go where, specifically?”

The colonel sighed. “I’m actually hoping you’ll suggest a destination. It’s not like FAITH is going to be sending any ships. And you gave me to believe that you have no particular loyalty there.”

“And that’s true, colonel. I’m just making sure we’re all on the same wavelength.” I popped up a star chart of everything within twenty light-years of Earth. “You can see the stars rated for likelihood of a habitable planet. Unfortunately, Epsilon Eridani was a failure, unless you want to live under a dome. By now, Bill may have received reports back from a couple of our ships, but we won’t find out for a few more years. Can you last that long?”

“We have to. It’ll take most of a decade to go from a standing start to two colony ships.”

I nodded. “Okay, then, let’s get this show on the road.”