I passed the time by reviewing my archived surveillance vids of the Deltans. A primitive race of humanoids, the Deltans resembled a sort of bipedal pig-bat mash up. I more or less adopted them and become the great sky god for a generation or two, before joining the tribe in android form. It had been 63 years since I walked out of Camelot for the last time. After Archimedes' funeral. I desperately missed my friends and the feeling of family that I got from living among them. Bill had scolded me on more than one occasion about the dangers of transferring my affections to a bunch of alien primitives. Well, tough.
As it turned out, things got interesting before even got up enough tau to drop out of touch. About two months subjective time into the voyage, something triggered one of the monitoring scripts that I'd set up. We were playing baseball in the Bob Moot VR when a Guppy popped in unannounced. Every Bob on the field stopped dead. Having someone's Guppy show up in the moot couldn't be anything but interesting. Metadata indicated that he was mine, so I put down the bat and gave them a raised eyebrow. As usual, he completely ignored it. Facial expressions didn't mean much to the Guppy interface. Or sarcasm, metaphor, irony, body language, or social conventions for that matter.
Guppy stared back waiting for me to say something. Well, apparently, that was enough.
“Astronomical monitoring has picked up an anomaly. You asked to be advised immediately.” ‘Anomaly’ to Guppy could mean anything though. Mario's Guppy had once reported an entire dead planetary ecosystem as an ‘anomaly’.
Luke and Marvin rushed over and hovered. They knew I was following Bender's trail and this might be news. I glanced at them, then said to Guppy, “Elaborate.”
“System Eta Leporos displays unusual infrared signature, together with periodic dimming of the star’s light.”
Luke and Marvin exchanged a glance, then Luke said, “Like a Dyson Swarm signature? You think there's some sort of mega-structure? Bender would have investigated that.”
By now most of the field was gathering around us. Baseball was doubtless done for the day, an opinion that Bill shared.
“Alright guys, I think were done. I’ll waive the five-inning minimum for this week. To the pub!”
The players gave a ragged cheer, then began to pop out of the baseball VR. I dismissed Guppy, then transferred to the pub VR with Luke and Marvin and signaled the resident Jeeves for my usual. We grabbed a table and Luke glared at me. “Okay, talk.”
“Hmm. Well, you guys know I've been scanning for anything unusual around me as I follow Bender's original flightpath. My theory is that he saw something and changed course, and we've just been unable to pick up the faint bend in the Bussard trail.”
“Yeah yeah, get to the punchline.”
I gave Lucas a smile that said I'm going to draw this out as much as I can, and continued. “Granted, I had no idea what Bender might've been watching for and what he might've seen, so I've been basically looking for everything I could possibly imagine. I've had to double Guppy's memory so he could keep up.”
“And you found a megastructure signature?”
“I appear to have found something that could be interpreted that way. The question is, do I commit to a course change to investigate? If it turns out to be a false alarm I’ll basically have to almost start over from Delta Eridani. Forget the time required to circle around - eventually between all our follow-up trips we’ll have trashed up the interstellar medium so much we’ll never learn anything.”
“I think you have to, Bob” Marvin said. “If it comes down to it, I can order the Delta Eridani AMI to build a new Heaven vessel and matrix. Then I'll clone myself into it. That'll be faster than you circling around, or one of us heading over.”
“Fair enough, give me a second.” I popped back into my personal VR. Guppy was, as usual, standing at parade rest. For the millionth time, I wondered if I should retire the Admiral Akbar image. And for the millionth time my juvenile sense of humor balked.
“Turn us to heavily anomaly, Guppy. Let me know estimated travel time when you're done. Low priority, don't pop in the moot for that.”
“Acknowledged.”
I popped back to Marvin and Luke to find Luke tasting my beer. “Hey, boundaries? Guys?”
“What I gonna give you germs?” Luke grinned at me. “That’s a pretty good red. I was a little surprised since I remember us says a mostly dark beer drinker.”
“Blame Howard.” Vulcan has a thriving beer industry and Howard keeps transferring the templates into VR. “He introduced me to this last time I visited.”
Marvin nodded slowly. “He’s setting up interstellar trade routes.”
I frowned. “With transit times of years? You can't…”
“Turns out you can, oh great all-father. Stasis pods are highly effective for preserving beer.”
I glared at Marvin, both for the correction and the glib dig. “I thought he got rid of his interest in the distillery.”
“He did. Gave it all to original Bridget and Stephan, and her kids inherited it when she died. But they specialized in hard spirits. Remember the great Romulan presidential scandal?”
The thought made us all laugh. Cranston had deserved every bit of what was done to him and had never been able to come up with any evidence that Howard engineer the whole thing.
“Howard and Bridget bought up a few microbreweries on Vulcan,” Marvin continued. “And it would seem they have some kind of natural talent for the creation and marketing of the devil's brew. Or maybe just good business sense. They’re now one of the three biggest breweries in the
