“Life after death?”
“Yes. It also implies the possibility that you personally aren't just a copy of original Bob, but an actual restore of his mind, soul, whatever you wanna call it.” Hugh paused with a thoughtful expression. “This is why working so hard on developing a true AI. We need something with actual counterfactual capability and a truly huge processing capacity, to try to answer questions, just like this one.”
“42.”
“Nyuck nyuck. But a stupidly big AI could run through billions of possible explanations, and narrow it down to some small subset that we could potentially test. And in its spare time, may be invent FTL or something. We think it's the most important project the Bobs have ever worked on since the war against the Others.” Hugh looked for a moment like he was going to add something else, then clamped his mouth shut. There was that behavior again. Either he had some kind of tick, or he really badly wanted to say something and couldn't.
I blinked, coming back from my momentary distraction. “Uh, okay. This sounds like a discussion subject for those long stretches between systems. For now, let's deal with the immediate issue.”
“Right. I read your notes and I did a quick inspection of the Mannies. You just cleaned them out of roamers, didn’t you?”
“Not quite. There's like two left in each. Really you should just take the spare. You'll be a while catching up with me if you head in my direction, and if you go in the opposite direction will be doubling our search efforts.”
“Should we even try to link up? I mean, it's not like we form a proper sabbat. Maybe we should just leave it at doubling the search.”
I thought about it for a moment. “Compromise. Head in my direction, and if we do link up, we can make a decision. If one of us turns up something specific regarding Bender's location, we’ll reevaluate.”
“Good enough.” Hugh stood. “I guess were winging it again.” He winked out.
I spent several mils staring at the space where he'd been sitting. Souls. Life after death. I wondered if, after all these years as a humanist, I'd end up eating my words.
6. The War Heats Up
Bill
July 2334
Virt
“Things are getting a lot more interesting,” Garfield said without preamble as he popped in.
I turned and gave him the side-eye. Gar was turning this unexpected popping-in thing into a habit. Maybe it was the stress. I hoped so. I didn’t want to have to make a big deal out of it.
“How so?”
“I don’t think Starfleet took into account the reaction of humanity in general. I think humans are looking at it like being snubbed, because there’s a whole ‘I got yer whole no-contact-with-humans right here’ vibe goin’ on. Any assets that any member of Starfleet might have had are being frozen. Agreements are being canceled, their access is being removed for everything, and even in systems the one affected by the network attack, they’re being denied access. Basically, the entire infrastructure of human space is now being closed off to them.”
I thought about that for a second, then laughed. “Their mission statement is to and contact with bios in general, but I think maybe they were planning on doing it on their schedule. Like when you give your employer two weeks notice and they say ‘no, that's okay. Leave now.’”
“Yep. And several systems have kludged together temporary comms stations, then immediately gone and taken down the originals until they can clean them out. Bandwidth suffers, of course, but for Starfleet it drops to a big zero. As the number of available routes shrinks, we’re able to come closer to pinpointing Starfleet’s center of operations.”
“They have an actual center?”
“Well, they're pretty distributed, but the individual subgroups aren’t very effective once they've been cut off from the collective. Most of Starfleet activity does appear to be coming from comm nodes in the direction of the Perseus transit, which jives with my original estimate.”
“But they’ll rebuild their comms stations, as well. Eventually, we’ll end up with two independent but overlapping networks.”
“If they don't have a physical presence, they won't be able to,” Garfield argued. “How are they going to rebuild? No one's going to rent printer time to them. They’d have to fly someone in and then trust that whatever they build won't get shot out of the sky.”
He had a point. “Yeah. I don't think there will be a lot of tolerance for Starfleet equipment.”
Garfield nodded. “And assuming we are reduced to physical violence, we can expect a lot of hit-and-run. One thing we Bobs proved is that you can't maintain physical border security in interstellar space. Notwithstanding the Battle of Sol. Which only worked out because we knew the Others were coming.”
“That may not be viable in the long term, Gar. Imagine years and years of a running guerrilla war. We may have to clean house.”
7. The Battle of New Home
Claude
July 2334
New Home Colony
I examined the battle status graphic, searching for weaknesses. Commander Hobart stood at parade rest with that peculiar ability of the military to just go into metal hibernation when waiting. I found it ironic that he did a better impression of a machine that I would ever manage. I could leave my Manny parked under AMI control, but that would be cheating.
“I think were covered, commander.” I shifted to face him, and he came to life.
“Then we’re ready to go.” Hobart touched the emblem on his chest. “Miller. Commence operation.”
I suppressed a snicker. Apparently without any irony, the New Home military had adopted a comm system very similar to TNG. I’d questioned Hobart about it, without being obvious - I hope - and he displayed no knowledge of the existence of Star Trek, let alone of the blatant borrowing. No double chirp though, that would've been too much.
Lieutenant Miller, somewhere in the vast maze that was the
