We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 2: Chapter 68: Recording

Book 2: Chapter 68: Recording

Jacques

September 2212

Delta Pavonis

Guppy popped into VR. [New memory core is online]

“Good. It was getting a little tight. Have the drones resume the full program.”

Guppy nodded and disappeared.

I had implemented a plan to record as much of the planet as I could before the Others got here. Not just Pav civilization, either. Plants, animals, scenery, geology, anything and everything I could think of. I built a standalone set of stasis chambers well in advance of the colony ships, and now I was slowly stocking it with genetic material from every species that I could get a needle into. A very informal and ad hoc genetic diversity vault, in essence. I had no overall organization, as I’d had no time to catalog and categorize the life on Delta Pavonis 4 into any kind of system. I was, in effect, stealing a strategy from Noah and treating everything as a “kind”. The recordings would help with identifying species and such later. If there was a later.

I was also recording Pav societies, cultures, and languages. Between all the spying and recording, my data storage requirements were massive. Guppy had just done the third upgrade since I’d started the project. I estimated there was at least one more upgrade coming.

I had played with the idea of contacting some Pav on the sly, perhaps to get a personal account of life. But Bill had convinced me that it would be cruel at best, and at worst, ghoulish.

Instead, I operated as a passive observer. Our technology was much better than the Victorian-era Pav sciences, but even so, things didn’t always go perfectly. There’d been a couple of sightings, and Pav society now had their own version of conspiracy theorists and flying-saucer nuts.

It made me wonder if the human equivalents had been based on some kind of reality. I tried to imagine some alien version of replicants hanging around Earth and kidnapping people. Mmm, nope. Especially with the anal probe thing. Just, no.

* * *

Since the plan involved kidnapping twenty thousand Pav, I wanted to have a pre-selected target group. Running around, grabbing people until I hit my quota, just didn’t strike me as efficient. I spent some time doing a census of small towns until I had found two that came in just under ten thousand souls each. I could, if necessary, top up the numbers from what appeared to be nearby military bases. The two towns, Mheijrkvaand Aizzilkva, were like small-town USA—rural, residential, stable population, family-oriented.

I wanted to document and understand Pav society at the grass-roots level. On the other hand, I didn’t want to go down the road of Bob-1 and end up getting attached to individuals. I had a bad feeling, though, that we Bobs had a shared weakness of some kind—some need for attachment. It would require a delicate balancing act.

I picked a house at random in the town of Mheijrkva and set up surveillance. Gnat-sized roamers installed cameras and microphones in the house. I felt dirty, like some kind of voyeur, but reminded myself that I was preserving the record of a culture that would likely not exist in another decade.

* * *

The Los family group seemed fairly average, as Pav families went. Six adults, split evenly between the genders, plus nine children at various ages. The Pav didn’t have a large need for privacy, so bedroom organization was based mostly on available space. Furniture tended to move around on a daily basis, depending on mood.

Meals were held at specific times, simply because of the logistics of preparing food for that many people. But there was no organization that I could see. My best metaphor was a birthday party attended by two-year-olds—a total free-for-all.

The adults held an assortment of jobs. The Pav didn’t seem to care about stratification of social classes. The matriarch of the house, Da Hazjiar Los, was on Mheirkva’s town council. She seemed intelligent and, for a Pav, very level-headed. I made a point of tagging her for special handling, if and when.

I settled in for some long-term spying on people’s lives.