Wow, that was tight. I reviewed the script that I’d written for the drones. Twelve minutes required for a clean retrieval. That was with some wiggle room, but still…
There were twelve separate structures that had to be released from their anchors and flown off the interplanetary iceberg before it hit atmosphere. I’d already written off the anchors – they would take far too long to extract. Hopefully they wouldn’t do too much damage when they hit the ground.
Garfield popped into my VR. “How’s it looking, Bill?”
He was watching the whole drama unfold, and thankfully hadn’t tried kibitzing. There wasn’t anything he could do, anyway, from his location in the outer system. Twice the number of drones wouldn’t have been enough to save all the equipment.
I grinned at him. “Just another day at the office. Nothing to see here. Move along…”
[Shutdown. Begin retrieval]
I ordered the drones to start the retrieval process. From here on, it was up to the AMI artificial intelligences controlling the drones. All I could do was stay out of their way and not joggle their elbows. Either they’d save the equipment, or Ragnar?k would have some new craters.
Six hundred and fifty seconds later, the ice asteroid hit atmosphere. We were out of time. If the berg was left to itself, it would skip through the upper atmosphere and sail on into the sunset. Quite literally. Instead, I activated a number of explosive devices, and the iceberg fractured into a huge number of chunks, small enough to be melted before they made it through the layer of atmosphere. As the air dragged at them, they separated into diverging trajectories. They would all melt at high altitude, and fall to the ground as rain over the next several days to weeks.
Except for a bunch of anchors, and two drive segments, which would suffer a slightly different fate. Nuts.
I looked at Garfield and shrugged.
“Well, I did warn you that could happen. Far be it for me to say I told you so…”
“No, of course not.” I grimaced at the video. “The next chunk of ice is due in a week. It’s going to go splat, I’m afraid. Nothing we can do about that one, but if you can fly a couple of segments here ASAP, I can catch the ones after that.”
“And then build some spares?”
“Short term, yes. Longer term, Garfield, the whole anchoring thing bugs me. Slows down the installation, slows down the removal. Something was bound to go wrong, eventually. I’ve been thinking of ways to do this without actual ground contact.”
Garfield looked surprised. “Seriously? Like, just position the segments in orbit around the ice chunk?”
“Mmm, hmm. It would require two separate drive channels, but there’s nothing wrong in principle with the idea. It would speed things up a lot. And I need a break from the Android project. Working the bugs out of that thing has become a game of Whack-a-Mole.”
Garfield laughed. “Okay, old man. I’ll pull a couple of segments and head them your way.”
***
Despite my comment to Garfield, as soon as I had parked the surviving drive segments, I opened up my Android Project file. A video window opened up, showing my current prototype, located over on one of the orbiting labs.
The android was currently powered down and draped on the support rack. Bullwinkle was a quadruped design, about the size of a moose, and every bit as pretty. The external comms array on its head was strangely reminiscent of a famous pair of antlers. Probably not coincidence. Did I mention I’m not very mature?
This was Bullwinkle version five kajillion or something. The basic concepts weren’t that difficult. Artificial skeleton, made from carbon fiber matrix, muscles made from memory plastics that would contract when a current was applied, and sensors to replicate the normal five senses. Package the whole thing up with a remote control system, and a replicant—like yours truly—should be able to control it as if it was my own body.
Well, that was the theory. Getting it working was an ongoing exercise in frustration.
Bullwinkle was working fine, mechanically. The problem was with senses, reflexes, and communications. Wiring for touch, heat, and cold sensitivity required micro precision akin to neurosurgery. Printers could only help so much. And the more of the contextual processing I built into Bullwinkle, the bigger the required local computer system. The more of it I designed to be handled remotely, the greater the required bandwidth. And the more that light-speed latency screwed things up. FTL communications would alleviate that, but I was still nowhere near making a SCUT small enough to fit into the moose.
I ultimately wanted controlling the android to be an immersive experience. I wanted to feel myself running across the ground. I wanted to feel heat and cold and touch, and the wind on my face. This was a far cry from controlling a drone or buster, which was more like playing a video game. I was ninety percent there, but the last ten percent was turning out to be a real PITA.
With a sigh, I closed the folder, and re-opened the asteroid-mover project. Back to work.
Mario – August 2169 – Beta Hydri
Beta Hydri was 23.4 light years from Sol. Rather than argue and compete with the other new Bobs for the closer candidate stars, I had decided to head for the far reaches. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” and all that Melvillish stuff. By the time everyone else worked their way out to this point, I hoped to have a working space station declaring, “Mario was here.”
And let’s face it, I really didn’t want to be around the other Bobs. It still amazed me how oblivious they were to the differences between each clone. It was creepy—Not enough variation to make them separate people, but enough to give them different opinions. It was like seeing myself with brain damage. And yeah, Bob-1 had set the rule about senior Bob being in charge, but I didn’t see that holding for long. Original Bob had never been much of a follower.
Well, whatever. I was here, they were there, and I liked it that way. Time to explore my domain.
I dropped into the system, decelerating at a leisurely 2 g. I could have come in a lot hotter, but on the off-chance that there was a Medeiros here, I didn’t want him to know what I had under my hood. He’d see the 2 g, a fraction of the output of my heavily shielded reactor, and he’d get cocky. I hoped. I really wanted a chance to meet up and hand him another ass-whupping. I had a couple of busters with his name on them. No, really. There wasn’t a lot to do between systems, so I’d had the roamers stencil his name on a couple of busters.