I connected up with my Manny and found myself underwater with my hands clamped to something unidentifiable. Three other Mannies floated beside me in similar positions. So, the AMIs had been successful. I just hoped the incident didn't start a Legend of Zombie Quinlans staggering through town.
Working on my own would be harder. I needed to be able to cover more territory to make up for the loss of manpower. Well, maybe roamer power. I sent commands to the other three Mannies, and they opened their mouths. Out popped four 1-inch roamers from each android. I didn't have room internally for all the extra mechanical servants, so I have them attach themselves firmly to my fur and snuggle in as much as possible. I swam up to the dock as nonchalant as you please, and joined the line of Quinlans walking up the ramp. Five minutes of button hauling passersby got me the names and general locations of every pub in the area, not just the ones immediately around the dock. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was a start. And the only consistently successful source of information we discovered to date.
It took most of the day to visit each pub, look around, and place a roamer or two in a discreet location. That accounted for 12 of my roamers. I placed two more in the local equivalent of the municipal hall, and kept two as spares. Bill would have a fit if he knew what I'd done. The roamers were an irreplaceable resource, and their loss could endanger the Mannies as well. But it was time to bet the wad.
With everything in place, I retired to our hotel room. It really was a step or two up from the crap we've been staying in before. I visited the proprietor and paid for a week, just to make sure he didn't hassle us. I waited until nightfall, then one at a time, I rode the other Mannies from the river to the hotel room. Now we were all together, sort of. If the blackout didn't resolve itself, I'd have to adjust my plans. I couldn't keep shepherding four Mannies from city to city. For better or worse, I was going to make a stand here.
Three Lagoons. No kidding. I'd seen some of the Quinlans festivals, so I knew they were reasonably artsy, but it apparently didn't extend to town names. Well, Humans did always wax lyrical either. I remembered street names from back in the 20th century. Main, Broadway, East, First, or named after some city father. I scowled I seemed to be in a really black mood. Well, everything was in place. The roamers would record all conversations, and Guppy would forward them to the Skippies for processing. I would just about max out my relay’s bandwidth, but I felt it was a priority. Hugh would alert me if anything of importance surfaced. Meanwhile, I might as well relax.
I put my Manny to bed and returned to my VR library. A quick and quite unnecessary check of the status of all the roamers revealed nothing outside of expectations, so I summoned a coffee and settled back in my La-Z-Boy.
Bridget's voice broke my concentration. “Hi Bob.”
“Bridget! Bill said quilt was off-line. How did you -”
“Harold can give you the details, but something about routing the long way around through the original Pav home system.”
“Seriously? That is the long way around. Like New York to Miami by way of Hong Kong, but that's how routers work. Well, I'm glad to hear from you. Unfortunately, you won't be able to control your Manny with this connection. My relay station is too small.”
“Bill explained it to me, but is it good enough to transmit a backup?”
“Yes, but not in a reasonable timeframe. In any case, I don't have any matrices under construction. Too low on the TO-DO. I've been concentrating on increasing our spy drone inventory up until now. Why were you rethinking the whole cloning thing?”
“No, I hadn't gotten that far. Just working through options. I guess I was mostly hoping you’d have a workaround soon.”
“Well, we sort of do, but it'll take a while. I’m going to build some matrices as soon as I can, but I'm also working on getting the Midway station back. We’ll see which plan of attack pans out first.”
I received a ping from Hugh. I sent him a ‘please hold’ response. “Busy day. Hugh wants to talk to me now. Look, Bridget, even if I get the station back, we need to consider using local replicants, just to remove the vulnerability. Think about it, okay? Just in case?”
“Okay, Bob.” Bridget closed the connection.
Immediately, Hugh’s voice said “Hey.”
“Hi Hugh, what's up?”
“I've been talking to Bill. The comms outages are looking more widespread as we continue to investigate. Its seeming more and more like this is going to be a long drawn-out thing. Bill and Gar will probably not be able to return to the expedition right away, even if and when we get your main relay station backup. You need to consider setting up some local matrices.”
“Already there, Hugh. I’ll order Guppy to create three new ones, but I think they’ll be finished before I get my relay back. Even in the best-case scenario, so I think I'm going to have to clone myself. Much as I dislike the idea.”
“Well, I could send myself over, spare you the trouble of cloning.”
“That's a hell of a lot of bandwidth. It could take days, and screw up communications the whole time. It doesn't seem like the best alternative, and it leaves you out here the end of it. At least
