Bender had been missing now for more than 100 years, despite Bill transmitting the SCUT plans for FTL communication to every system that Bender could possibly have reached. Despite searches along his probable path by Victor and later by his clone-mates Marvin and Luke, we haven't found hide nor hair of Bender. Or bolt or deck plate, what with him actually being a sentient spaceship and all.
I should explain, I guess. Bender is a computer who thinks he's one Robert Johansson - and engineer/nerd who died in the early 21st century. As are all the Bobs, including me. I was the first replicant launched from Earth in 2133. Every single Bob is my descendant, because that's what Von Neumann probes do. We make copies. We’re up to thousands of Bobs now, spread over an almost 100 lightyear radius, centered around the Sol system.
Bender was from my second batch of clones, constructed in Delta Eridani. He took off in the direction of Gamma Leporos A… and he's never been heard from again. Lots of Bob's have died over the years in battles, and some without the benefit of a backup, but Bender just disappeared without a trace and without a reason. I knew Bender's original destination, but then so did Victor, Marvin, and Luke, and they haven’t found diddly. Specifically, they couldn't find any sign that he'd ever reached Gamma Leporos A. No autofactory set up, no mining activity, no communications relay station, and no Bussard trail in or out of the system.
I’d just returned to Delta Eridani after my big pilgrimage back to Earth. It had been an emotionally loaded trip for me. The Earth would probably be drastically altered once it came out of this Ice Age, so in a way it was my last visit to my home in any recognizable form. It was ironic that humanity had solved the global warming problem by implementing a nuclear winter. And killed off 99.9% of themselves in the process, but who's keeping score anymore? Stupid humans.
The Delta Eridani system was pretty much as I'd left it. Autofactory support systems continued to collect raw materials from the asteroids, ferrying them back to be formed into ingots against any future need. In the absence of any specific orders, the autofactory slowly produced more auto factories and spare parts for all my various mechanical servants. Satisfied with the status quo, I invoked my virtual reality system and settled into my La-Z-Boy recliner, surrounded by my library. Shelves full of books, floor-to-ceiling, never failed to relax me. Spike immediately jumped up and settled herself on my lap, purring contentedly, and Jeeves brought a fresh coffee. The VR environment was an essential part of my existence. Without it, I was just a disembodied mind. In VR, I had a body and pets and a home. And before the addition of the personal VR, four out of five replicants went insane. I’m pretty sure there's a connection.
“Sorry bud, but I need to concentrate right now” I said to the cat. I turned to Guppy, who was standing at parade rest as usual. “Suspend Spike’s program and bring up a representation of the stellar neighborhood, centered on us, radius 40 lightyears.”
Huge fishy eyes blinked. “Acknowledged.” Spike disappeared in a scatter of pixelation. A moment later a sphere appeared before me filled with numerous points of light, all conveniently labeled. All the star systems within 40 lightyears of Delta Eridani categorized by stellar type.
I drew a line with my finger from Delta Eridani to Gamma Leporos A - Bender's presumed flightpath. He’d taken off in the right direction back in 2165, but had never reached the destination. The options were foul play, misadventure, or deliberate decision. The first two explanations might leave some kind of trace. Debris, cross trail of some theoretical attacking force, radioactivity, whatever.
The third would at least show up as a redirected Bussard trail. But to detect any of those alternatives, I’d have to be crawling along at 5% of c. That would require 320 years to completely scan Bender's projected path. Of course, if I found something, I wouldn't do the whole route, but it would still be a whole lotta not very much for a long time. We’re immortal, being computers, but we also operated millisecond resolutions, so several hundred years would be an eternity to me.
Now back to the third option: deliberate decision. If Bender had noticed something and turned to investigate it, perhaps someone following his path would see the same thing. Luke and the others hadn’t noticed anything, but they probably been closely scrutinizing their own course rather than looking around. Bender, facing a long interstellar jump in pre-SCUT days, would've been looking for something to cut the tedium.
I tapped my chin for a few milliseconds, working through the options, then turn to Guppy again. “I think I need to attack this from all angles. Have the auto factories build a hundred or so those long-range scouts we used in the battle of 82 Eridani. Make sure their SURGE drives are powerful enough for interstellar travel.”
“Acknowledged.”
Once the drones were ready, I would send them along Bender's projected path at 5% c, looking for anything unusual. Meanwhile there is no reason for me to wait around I treated myself to one last long look at the planet Eden rotating below me, and left orbit heading for Gamma Leporos A at 5 g.
Travel between stellar systems is uneventful. Thank god. It's hard to think of something eventful out between the stars that wouldn't leave me as a cloud of free-floating atoms. I consider limiting myself to 0.75 c so that I could continue to interact with the Bobiverse in general. SCUT allowed instantaneous communications over BobNet, but if my tau got to high, or to low (there was some argument about how we should be expressing tau) I wouldn't be able to interact in real time, even frame-jacked. But I was just too impatient to
