I think this question put Julia on more familiar ground. “More than twenty currently alive that I know of, Mr. Johansson, uh, Riker…” She looked down, embarrassed.
“It’s okay, Julia,” I held up a hand. “I’m not really your great-great-great-grand-uncle, I’m just his memories. And I don’t go by Bob anymore, so that’s out. Might as well just call me Riker, like everyone else does. Almost everyone.” I gave Minister Cranston a hard glance. “Or William. Or even Will. I don’t expect you to really care about me, although I’m guessing Minister Cranston expects me to care about you and your relatives.” I tilted my head sideways, a minimal shrug. “And he’s right. But that’s not the same as saying I’ll bend the rules.”
Minister Cranston leaned fully into frame. “We’re all adults, Mr. Riker, and we all know I have ulterior motives, just as all the other delegates do. Nevertheless, you have relatives here, and you will be able to talk to them whenever you want without interference. I’ll leave you to it.” And with that, he got up and left the office. Of course, they could still monitor the conversation, but it was a nice touch.
Julia and I looked at each other in shock for a moment, then we both started to speak at the same time.
The log says we talked for three hours, but it felt like no time at all.
Bob – October 2165 – Delta Eridani
I sat back in my chair, coffee in hand, and watched the fusion signatures of Luke and Bender as they accelerated out of the Delta Eridani system. Picking destination systems for them had been difficult and contentious. There were a lot of M and K class stars relatively close to this system. The problem with those is that they tended to be small and dim, with comfort zones very close to the star. A couple of the candidates were what you’d call marginal, and there was some argument about whether we should even bother with them. In the end, it was up to Luke and Bender. Luke was heading for Kappa Ceti, a G5eV star, just a touch smaller than Sol. Bender had selected Gamma Leporis A, an F6V star, a bit bigger and brighter than Sol. Bender was going to have a long trip—his target was more than 16 light years away. But hey, we’re immortal.
“Report went off to Bill all right?”
[Affirmative. The space station is fully operational. AMI controller is now in charge. The report was handed off for transmission]
I tented my fingers and drummed them together. “Excellent.”
Marvin sat across the desk, nursing a coffee of his own. I watched that for a second, frowned, and asked, “Hey which of us is supplying the VR for your coffee, you or me?”
Marvin rolled his eyes. “Geez, way to break the spell. To answer your question, I am. You’re just supporting the visuals at your end. Crying out loud, we all invented this stuff.”
“Sure, but we’ve also all been hacking away at it and sharing mods. I’d have to really sit down and go over the code to understand what it’s doing nowadays.”
“Hmm,” he said, then changed the subject. “Did you notice with Luke and Bender that they really weren’t carbon copies?”
“Yeah, but I, we, had that discussion with Bill way back about Milo and Mario, remember? Each of us is a bit different. Differences in hardware, quantum effects…”
Marvin waved his hand dismissively. “Invoking quantum effects is just hand-waving. Just means we don’t know. I wonder if, as we get older and accumulate memories, we’re getting too complex for a backup to contain everything. The backup is a digital attempt to save an analog phenomenon. It may simply be too granular.”
I stared into space. “Interesting thought. Y’know, I still have the backup I made you from. Maybe I should use that for the next batch of Bobs and bring them up to date the old fashioned way.”
“Whiskey, with a little sugar and bitters round the lip of the glass?”
I put my hand vertically in front of my nose. “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. No, funny boy, verbally.”
Marvin grinned at me, then reached forward and poked one of the video feeds. It expanded to full-size.
Things had settled down in the colony. In all, over forty Deltans had died in the gorilloid attack. Several who were injured but not killed were maimed for life. I’d finally gotten to see how the Deltans handled their dead. They did indeed have a ceremony, and they buried their dead. They also mourned them, every bit as heart-wrenchingly as any human. I’d had to turn away from the video for most of that.
The colony had been cleaned up, and the gorilloid carcasses were gone. Archimedes had found the remains of the buster drone. Not that it would do him much good. All that was really left were the steel caps at either end. Most of the rest of it had been shredded and scattered. But Archimedes had discovered that the two twenty-pound items could be used as a hammer or an anvil. They seemed to be able to take any punishment he threw at them. Well, on a scale of zero to ten for cultural contamination, I’d rate that as a one point five, so screw it.
Arnold kept the axe. No one wanted to try to take it away, and anyway, Arnold was willing to do any chopping that anyone needed. He seemed to enjoy the action, he was very good at it, and the requestor didn’t have to do any work. Very much a win-win.
We’d done enough language analysis that we could now follow conversations, and maybe even speak intelligibly. I massaged the phonemes in my speech routine to produce a generic Deltan voice and tried the result on Marvin with a couple of phrases. He approved of the result. I did some design changes to the exploration drone to add a speaker system and sent an order to the autofactory to build a couple. If the Deltans didn’t decide to head back to the flint site on their own, I was prepared to prompt them directly. If that meant being the great sky god, so be it.
Linus – April 2165 – Epsilon Indi
It took fourteen and a half years to get to Epsilon Indi. Funny, I still sort of thought in terms of human time-scales, so there was this feeling that I’d just used up a major part of my life. Of course, intellectually, that wasn’t true. First, I’d only experienced a little over three years of personal time thanks to Einstein and time dilation. Second, we’re immortal. I just don’t think we’ve internalized that fact, yet.
I had gone off on my own rather than wait for Bill to build another cohort. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to team up with either of the loonie brothers. I don’t know what the deal was with Calvin and Goku. In theory they’re me, but I’m pretty sure I’m not that obnoxious. Um, I hope. Anyway, for all their constant fighting, they seemed to be connected somehow. And I guess they knew it, since they took off together.