“Not important. The point is, we agree the Bobs seem to have turned to various forms of navel-gazing. Gamers, Skippies, even Will with his Valhalla terraforming. They’ve become like old men with their stamp collecting!”
“There are still Bobs heading outward. Phineas, Ferb, Icarus, and Daedalus.”
“They’re running away as much is anything. I tell ya buddy, something is going on that's not healthy.”
“So you’ve changed your mind about this?”
“No. I think I maybe want to expand it some. Do more than just ferry another batch of humans to another planet.”
“Like?”
“We've got this crap ton of refined material from the Pav deal, so we don't have to stop for a long long time. Set up enough manufacturing internally so we can crank out heaven vessels assembly-line style. Populate them with AMIs like they did in the battle for Terra, and squirt them out at every system we pass by.”
“And remote control them?”
“Yeah, Neil it's called delegation.”
“Or laziness. What about the colony? If we’re sending the AMI control vessels ahead of us, we’ll know if a system has a viable candidate planet, and we can stop and set up.”
“Then continue on?”
“At least will be doing something. I'm tired of being a museum piece.”
“It’s not the most terrible idea you've ever had. Let’s talk to the Ever Onward people.”
I nodded to Neil and started composing an email. For the first time in a long long time, I was beginning to feel excited again.
11. Breaking In
Bob
October 2333
Outskirts, Eta Leporos
No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
Okay, the Snorts weren't ‘the enemy’, as such, but they were the opponent in the scenario we were executing, and the viewer count on the remote feed probably included half the Bobiverse currently in range of BobNet.
“There’s a gaggle of Boogens heading for the entrance,” Bill said.
“Should it be ‘gaggle’?” someone asked over the intercom channel. “How about murder?”
“How is that better?”
Crows or geese, either way, the argument went viral, and soon there was an actual discussion channel dedicated to the question of what unit would be used to describe a gathering of Boogens. Or maybe Booga. The question of plurals had a side discussion of its own, going. I shook my head in disbelief and chuckled. Replicative drift or not, original Bob was still very much alive in this gaggle of post-singularity replicants. Or maybe herd. Or pack.
While the name-obsessed discussion spiraled into ever more esoteric suggestions, Bill announced into the intercom, “Ballistic trajectory set. We should be able to drift right in and settle on a couple of them with minimal vector adjustment.”
“Assuming they don't pick today to change things up just for fun.”
“I'm pretty sure those are some equivalent of AMIs,” Bill replied. “They show no variability at all - strictly script-driven.”
There was a moment of silence as the cloaked drones approached within a dozen yards of the Boogens. Even the name discussion session petered out. The drones drifted in the last few yards, made a minute adjustment, and… contact.
The non-streamlined design of the Boogens allowed the much smaller drones to settle inside the Boogens skeletal frames, so that they didn't stick out. If there was some kind of automated security, it was highly likely that silhouette matching would form part of the strategy.
“Well, we appear to have been successful,” Bill said.
“Any traffic?” Will asked.
I turned to the voice. I hadn't sensed Will’s arrival. Then I remembered I was in the Moot VR, and didn't own the monitoring channel. “Just radio.” I pointed at the section of the data window that indicated radio traffic. “Packetized and either compressed or encrypted, or both. We've tentatively identified envelope and control fields, but we don't have enough context yet to spoof them, even assuming we could come up with a legitimate-looking addressing and data payload.”
“But no SCUT?”
“Nada.” I shook my head. “We’ve gotten used to… okay we HAD gotten used to everyone on Earth having the same technology, but who knows how much of that was caused by the fact that everyone was sharing knowledge.”
“Or stealing it.”
I smiled and nodded to acknowledge the point. “Sure, VEHEMENT and all that. But the Others had stuff we didn't, and vice versa.”
“And even with the Brazilians that was true. They had the cloaking thing.”
I shrugged and let the silence hang for a moment. “Yes. And to my point, the Boogens seem to be following the same pattern. More advanced in some ways, less in others. I guess in isolation, the tech tree development path isn't an inevitable march.”
“They’re going in,” Garfield said, interrupting our conversation.
Sure enough, I’d gotten wrapped up in the discussion with Will and lost track of the main event. Wow. Senior moment.
Given that it was a cylinder with a 56 mile radius, from close up the outer shell had the appearance of a flat wall. Directly ahead of the Boogens, a huge space dock stood open. Massive reinforced doors seemed to be there only for emergencies – we’d never seen the move since we began surveillance. The Boogens drifted in, small attitude jets giving occasional puffs as they corrected their individual vectors. Eventually, the crafts drifted into docking bays designed specifically for them. An army of small service bots stood ready to receive the arrivals.
After much discussion and argument, we'd settled on ‘winging it’ as a strategy. Not our finest moment, I felt. The best suggestion had been to bail the moment the Boogens docked, before any detailed examination could start. We had a good idea of what we could expect from SUDDAR scans, but there was still a large amount of risk. In these close quarters, the drones were visible, as in eyeball visible. Even with the camouflaged technology to make them appear to be part of the larger structure of the Boogens. If some kind of maintenance bot decided to take a detailed look, our geese might be cooked.
The space dock was long, but didn't penetrate deeply into the outer shell. It contained a large number of Boogen docking bays, about a third of
