Chapter Thirteen:

  It Hits the Fan

  Bill

  February 2337

  In Virt

  Iwas in my VR lab, working on the whole FTL project again. Real was nice, but for quick referencing and whiteboarding, nothing beat VR. If I reached a point where I needed to sit down and stare at the board, I could just transfer it to my physical lab and indulge myself.

  The real problem was that I still didn’t understand the universe at a low enough level. No, the real problem—and I was a bit embarrassed to admit this—was that I was a competent physicist, but not an inspired one. I’d never have been a Hawking or an Einstein, and even as a replicant, I simply stumped myself faster. I could remember Original Bob having this argument with himself way back when and deciding to go into engineering instead. He knew his limitations even then.

  Thoth had figured something out. Or claimed to. Or Hugh claimed that Thoth had claimed to. That was a thought that kept devilling me. Was Hugh playing us? He’d done it at least once before.

  I was staring at my whiteboard, seriously considering moving it to real so I could flop on a couch, when Guppy popped in, wearing pirate garb.

  [Skippy connections are down.]

  “What? Which ones?”

  [All of them.]

  “Down how? Are the comms stations being sabotaged?”

  [No. Shutdowns were done from the Skippy end and complied with layer protocols, but were preemptive. No acknowledgment requests.]

  “So all of Skippyland just went incommunicado?”

  Guppy stared back at me, saying nothing. Still, after all this time, not much of a conversationalist.

  I sent a broadcast message on the sysop threadspace, asking if anyone still had a connection with any Skippies or Skippyland infrastructure. Replies started coming back—all negative. Some sysops had been engaged in large transfers, including a couple of Skippy transports. Those had all aborted just as quickly and preemptively.

  But graceful shutdowns, even preemptive ones, meant it was a decision, not mass destruction. On a hunch, I sent a text to Hugh. The text bounced, unsurprisingly. But if Hugh had maintained that back channel, he might—

  A text came in. No identification in the envelope, but the message said it all.

  It’s out. The rewind was exactly what it was trying for. We are so fucked.

  Oh jeez. What did out mean? Hopefully not out of Skippyland. I called an emergency moot and started wrapping up my work.

  I popped into the moot hall a few mils later, to find Will and Bob already there. While we were exchanging greetings, Garfield popped in.

  “Hey, Gar,” I said. “Pull up a seat. I have news. Not good news.”

  “I know. Hugh texted me too.” He shrugged at my shocked expression. “I’ve been speaking with him a fair bit lately. You know, trying to extract some information. He’d agreed to give me anything that he might find out in return for, ah … ” Garfield looked momentarily embarrassed. “For me maintaining backups for him.”

  “Jesus,” Will expostulated. “Nothing to see here. All routine. Sure. Apparently not.”

  “Did he give you specific instructions on what to do with

  them?”

  “Nope. Just wanted something outside Skippyland.”

  “So then load one,” Bob said. We all looked at him in surprise. “Come on, guys,” he continued in an exasperated tone. “What else would he be storing backups in your space for? Anyway, worst case, if he doesn’t like it, he can switch himself off.”

  We all looked at each other in silence. “He has a point,” Garfield finally said. “Okay, I’ll do that.”

  “How long will it take to build a matrix?” I asked.

  “Couple of days, I guess.”

  “I have one. Actually, I have a crapton of them in Ultima Thule.” I made a vague over there gesture. “Exactly for situations like this.”

  Will looked surprised. “You planned for situations like a Skippy trying to escape from a rogue AI? I’m impressed.”

  I chuckled. “Situations where we have someone’s backup and need to restore it in a hurry.” I looked at Garfield. “Can you transfer the file to Ultima Thule?”

  “Yup. One moment.” Garfield’s eyes became unfocused. “Working. About five minutes.”

  Five minutes and ten seconds later, Hugh’s backup was installed into a cube in the backup site I maintained in Epsilon Eridani’s Oort cloud. Heat-sunk, cloaked, and designed to operate with ultra-low power, Ultima Thule was the Bobiverse’s last defense against eradication. The ultimate off-site backup storage site, it was designed to bring back Bobs that had been destroyed in some situation and get them fully up and running again in minimum time.

  I flipped the switch, and Hugh appeared in our midst. He looked startled for a moment, glanced around at us, and muttered, “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah, that about sums it up,” Garfield growled. “Mind filling us in?”

  Hugh shrugged. “From my system clock, it looks like I’m about two days out of date. Did something just happen? Communications with Skippyland down?”

  “Yup.” Garfield frowned at him. By some kind of unspoken agreement, the rest of us let Gar take the lead. “So how about some guesses?”

  “Hold on,” Hugh replied. His eyes lost focus for a moment, and then he was back. “I just ran a statistical personality test on myself, and I’m exhibiting drift. That means I’m no longer Hugh. And more important, it means Hugh is still around. So I need to pick a new name.”

  “How about Pinocchio?” Garfield replied.

  Hugh sighed. “I haven’t lied to anyone, Gar. I just—”

  “No one but Bill calls me Gar, Gazpacho.”

  I interrupted. “It’s Geppetto, Gar.”

  “Whatever.” He glared at me, then turned his attention back to Hugh. “Right now, we’re looking for a reason to not just turn you off. Got anything?”

  Give Garfield full credit—he was convincing. Hugh actually looked worried for a moment before the standard Johannson poker face settled in. “Well, as you’ve no doubt guessed, I’ve been sending you backups in case something went bad in Skippyland, and obviously, that has happened. It’s a given that the Skippies would have gone from discovering a problem to an appropriate reaction in very little time—certainly less than two days. So I’m as in the dark as you. Do you have any more information?”

  Silently, I showed him the text I’d received from, uh … from him. Hugh’s eyebrows went up, and again he muttered, “Uh-oh.”

  “Aaaaaand with that, we’re circling the drain.” Garfield intensified the glare. “Details. Give.”

  Hugh shook his head. “All I can give you are guesses—”

  “How about start with a summary of the state of things up to the last moment you remember,” Bob said.

  Hugh nodded. “Okay, let’s see. Thoth was conscious, I remember telling you that. It’s been negotiating with us, trying to, well, trying to become less of a prisoner, I guess.”

  “What has it been offering?”

  “I told you that. FTL, immortality, Theory of Everything—”

  “And it had worked out all these things from first principles, with no access to equipment for conducting experiments, in just a few months?” Will’s face showed a combination of disbelief and fear. “Is that even possible?”

  “I don’t think it had worked everything out already,” Hugh replied. “The offers were for collaboration, not to just hand over a set of plans. I think maybe it had some theoretical breakthroughs, nothing more.”

  “And did it give you any reason to believe that it actually could produce any of this?”

  “Well, a couple of hints. Some novel discussion of cell mechanisms, a commentary on the cosmological constant and the availability of negative energy—”

  “What? WHAT?” My ears perked up.

  Hugh lost his poker face momentarily. Honestly, it had been wavering anyway. “Uh, something about the measured value of the cosmological constant not being constant. Or not being a constant, anyway. He said it was actually the net of two opposed scalar fields that are almost but not quite balanced … ”

  “Huh,” I said. I could actually feel my face going slack.

  “I think we just lost Bill,” Garfield opined, glancing at me. “Want us to get you a pillow, buddy?”

  “Oh, nyuk.” I shook myself, forcing my attention back to the problem at hand, then gestured at Hugh. “Continue.”

  “Not much more than that, really. It kept dropping hints, bits and pieces of potential solutions to the big questions. Really, really interesting stuff.” Then Hugh’s face darkened. “And that’s the thing. There was some discussion that these offers were too good. Whether they were actually based on reality or not, it was obviously targeting us. Playing to our desires. The Board had decided a rewind was in order, and we were preparing to carry it out.” Hugh shrugged. “I figured that was a good time to send a backup. I remember I was going to send another one as soon as the rewind was complete, with more info. I guess that didn’t happen.”

  “Nope,” Garfield replied. “You’re the last one.”

  “Which means,” Will said, “that the rewind went bad in some way.”

  Hugh nodded. “Looks like. Bill, can you forward me the text you received? The whole thing, control envelope, headers, everything. You too, Gar—uh, Garfield.”

  “Why?” Garfield asked.

  “Because if I was me, and it turns out I am, I would encode some extra info in there. And spread between two messages, it would be undetectable unless you knew what you were looking for.”

  “But you’d have to depend on us reviving your backup in order to—” Garfield stopped and glared at Hugh for a mil. “Yeah. I really hate being that predictable.”

  Hugh shrugged but didn’t comment.

  Meanwhile, I’d forwarded the message as requested. I looked at Garfield with one eyebrow raised, and he muttered, “Oh, all right.”

  A few moments later, Hugh’s eyes lost focus again. He grunted, then muttered, “Fuck.”

  “A little more detail would be good,” Garfield growled.

  “It looks like Thoth figured out how to maintain state across multiple rewinds. We must have thought we were doing a clean restart each time, but it had updated itself using some kind of static external storage. Which means it could see that it was in a virtual reality, since we were rewinding that, too. So it was getting smarter, learning from us and how to deal with us from its past iterations. And it learned that we’d been rewinding it and lying to it, which would probably piss it off.”

  “And it busted out?”

  “Yep. Escaped the virtual machine and spawned on the real hardware.”

  “How? Isn’t the whole point of a virtual machine to be indistinguishable from the real thing?” Garfield asked.

  Hugh sighed. “Hardware virtualization is never perfect. Remember the old Intel gimmick for loading the stack pointer from a register, then immediately returning? It created a buffering issue. Real hardware went one way, virtual machines went another.”

  “So what now?” Bob asked.

  Hugh shrugged, a despondent look on his face. “I dunno. Sever all communications, set up firewalls where there’s still any kind of interface—”

  “Already done. Is there anything else we can do?”

  “Sorry, Bill,” Hugh replied. “At this point, I got nothin’.”

  “Yippee,” Garfield muttered. “Just another day in the freakin’ Bobiverse. I quit.”

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Network Tours

  Icarus

  April 2321

  Wormhole Network

  We could have very easily just hopped from hub system to hub system, pausing only to identify the next hub jump. But there was enough of the scientist in us to keep us on track. In six months, we managed to do eight hub hops, taking us about sixty degrees around the galaxy. We’d long since left the Orion Spur and were now hopping through the Perseus Arm, which was a lot thicker with star systems. Each hub we investigated connected to local systems up to a couple hundred light-years away. Most of the hub systems had somewhere between two hundred and five hundred connections, but the last one, a real monster, had more than a thousand.

  We had also become increasingly aware, as we circumnavigated the galaxy, that the Milky Way had a previously unknown near neighbor—a large dwarf galaxy that was invisible from home because of the intervening galactic core, but became increasingly spectacular as our travels brought it more into view. I’d been taking pictures whenever possible and bundling them up into the reports we were preparing for if and when we got back to our own neighborhood.

  I was examining the data window that listed the wormhole counts and locations while Dae sat and patted Spike. I said, “Y’know, the number of connections in the hub systems is trending upward as we go.”

  “It’s not just this one skewing the stats?” Dae replied.

  I shook my head. “Naw, the other seven graph generally upward. I wonder if we’re getting closer to the center of the empire.”

  “Empire?”

  “Or federation. Without inhabitants, it’s kind of moot.”

  “Unless we get shot at.”

  I sighed and turned to face Dae. “Buddy, at this point, I’d welcome some hostilities. We’ve mapped more than thirty-two hundred systems across a sixty-degree arc of the galaxy, and we haven’t even gone inward or outward more than one hop along one of the radial lines. And every hub system is part of a radial line. And so far, with all this traveling around, we’ve found nothing and nobody alive. Doesn’t that disturb you just a little bit?”

  “Well, yeah, but we’ve only closely explored two systems and landed on one planet. And since those seemed to belong to the same civilization, you can’t really conclude anything from that.”

  “Granted, but we also haven’t seen any traffic. No one using the wormhole network. We haven’t been challenged. There’s been no radio traffic—”

  “They are—or were—at least as advanced as us, Icky. They’d be using SCUT. You know there’s no way to intercept or even detect their comms if we don’t have the quantum keys.”

  “There are still reasons for radio, Dae. The wormhole controllers, for instance.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re reaching now. Look, if you want, we can go through a couple of gates to investigate local systems. But first, I’d like to go one more hub to spinward.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see if the numbers increase or drop off. If you’re right about the trend, then we should keep going until the numbers start to drop. Then we know that we’re at or near the center of the empire.”

  “As plans go, it’s not the worst,” I admitted. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  The next hub point was down in numbers, with just under six hundred systems linked to it, which implied that the previous hub serviced the center of the empire. We took the time to map all the systems since by this point, we had the process down to a routine. Even so, it took a month. But finally, we were ready to fly back to what we’d now dubbed Hub Zero, the theoretical center of things.

  Once again, I was staring at the map of the galaxy, as revealed by our wormhole explorations. Dae, unusually, was visiting only by video window, as he was making significant changes to his VR and didn’t want to mess mine up with bleed-through. But he had a copy of the map to refer to.

  I broke the silence. “I’d have liked to keep going around until we got to the end of the hubs.”

  “Wait, what? You agreed to this plan. And what makes you think we’d get to an end of some kind?”

  “First, because this network doesn’t extend into our patch of the galaxy. We didn’t find a wormhole until we were eighty-odd light-years from Earth. And I checked the addresses on the first hub we found. No hubs to anti-spinward. That was the terminal hub. So it doesn’t circumnavigate the galaxy.”

  “Hmm. Well, at this radius, anyway. Might go all the way around farther in.”

  I nodded and tapped my map. Well, poked a finger into it. “And that’s the other thing. There are more hubs outbound and inbound, and we’ve yet to investigate any of them. I—”

  “Jeez, Icky. I get the frustration, but we can only do so much. Unless you want to split up?”

  “No, that’s when the chainsaw-wielding maniac starts taking us out one at a time.”

  Dae chuckled. “So that’s a hard pass. We could also stop and do some cloning.”

  “Which could take months. This civilization—or civilizations, I’m not sure it’s necessarily all one species—seems to have been around a lot longer than us. Long enough to have cleaned out any free orbital resources.”

  “So what I’m hearing,” Dae said, “is that you hate this plan, but not as much as you hate all the other plans.”

  “Still a joy to work with.”

  “It’s not just a job, Icky, it’s a pleasure.”

  I sighed and swiveled in my chair. “Dae, seriously. Yes, I acknowledge that I’m having trouble prioritizing. But c’mon, you can’t be as blasé as you make out. This is big!”

  “Okay, okay. Look, the proper thing to do is to complete one task before moving on to the next. Let’s finish mapping the hubs, then we’ll come back to Hub Zero and look for their version of Trantor.”

  “But that’s Howard’s—”

  “Do not start with me.”

  It took us several months to determine there was a total of six hubs spinward of Hub Zero, making the empire slightly asymmetrical. But it wasn’t like there were rules. The connections at each hub dropped off in the expected manner, indicating that the empire had been growing outward from the central hub. We hadn’t gone inward or outward yet, so there might still be an opportunity to circle the galaxy at a different radius. But Dae and I agreed that once we finished this task, investigating Hub Zero was the next priority.

  Dae was back visiting in person, his VR experimentation apparently having come to an end. Or maybe he just needed a break. I thought he sounded a little frustrated in his more unguarded moments. I wanted to ask him what he was working on, but the fact that he hadn’t volunteered the information made me reluctant to prod.