We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 34: Prototype

Book 5: Chapter 34: Prototype

Bill

December 2342

In Virt

Ihad called a meeting of what Garfield had lately started calling “The Ancient Ones.” Myself, Garfield, Will, and Bob were seated in the moot pub, with Hugh attending via video window. Also in attendance were Howard and Bridget, simply because they’d picked this time to pop over and visit, saying they had some news.

Although I was displaying a calm demeanor—at least I thought so—Garfield was fairly vibrating in place. And in VR, where you could control your avatar at a pixel level, that was notable. Bob had already noticed Garfield’s excitement and was frowning in perplexity.

I opened my mouth to say the obvious, but Bob beat me to it. “You suppose we’re all wondering why you’ve gathered us here,” he said. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, talk.”

I grinned at him, relieved that I could put the drama behind me.

“We’ve done it.”

Bob cocked his head. “You’ve figured out how they get the Tootsie Roll in the Tootsie Pop?”

“Funny guy.” I paused for more drama, and a small bit of revenge. “We’ve successfully pushed matter through a wormhole.”

You could have heard a pin drop. The only motion in the room was Garfield’s continued vibrating. Then Bob said, deliberately deadpan, “Okay, that’s interesting. Pray continue.”

I glanced at Gar, whose grin was threatening to sever his head at the jawline, before continuing. “We created a wormhole and split it into two endpoints. Nothing new there. We moved one endpoint to a distance of one hundred kilometers. Successfully. New distance record, but still not cataclysmic. We then, based on the hint from Thoth, expanded and stabilized both ends using negative energy. And pushed ten hydrogen atoms through, one at a time. They all appeared at the other end.” I crossed my arms and tried not to look too smug.

“Ten hydrogen atoms?” Bridget grumbled. “I am not a physicist, so maybe I don’t understand why that should be impressive.”

Howard leaned toward her. “No one has ever pushed so much as a quark through a wormhole before, Bridge. Without something to brace the endpoint, even light can’t get through before it collapses.”

Bridget nodded slowly. “This sounds like something else you boys are going to be making more money off, soon.”

Howard grinned back at her. “It does generally seem to work out that way.”

I looked more carefully at Howard. He’d said something about having some news, and he didn’t seem as engaged by my announcement as I’d have expected. Kind of distracted, actually—unlike Will and Bob, who both looked totally boggled. “Okay, Howard, you said you had some news. Obviously, that’s on your mind. Let’s just get everything on the table, shall we?”

Howard nodded and smiled at the group. “Mannies for humans. You know we’ve been working on that project for a while now—”

“Well, to be fair, all you’ve ever told us was that someone was rumored to be working on it,” I interjected.

Howard continued, ignoring me. “We’re ready to announce them, and we’ll be rolling them out to early adopters. Hueys, we call them.”

“Short for human mannies, no doubt,” Bob said.

Bridget rolled her eyes. “Same infantile sense of humor. All of you.”

“That is interesting,” Will said to Howard, ignoring Bridget’s comment. “It’s going to create some issues with FAITH on Romulus, too, I bet. I foresee some of their policies becoming far less popular.”

Garfield waved his hands in the air. “That’s great, Howard. And not to minimize your achievement, but we’ve got FTL travel! I think we win.”

“Ten atoms at a time,” Howard retorted. “That sounds like travel would be painful.”

Garfield looked at me pleadingly. “Jump in anytime, Bill.”

“No one’s wrong,” I said with a laugh. “Howard’s right—we’re still in the concepts stage. On the other hand, the theory’s nailed down. It’s just engineering from here on. On the third hand, there are some limitations. Or will be.”

“Like?”

“Well, you can only have wormhole travel where you already have a wormhole endpoint set up. And you have to create the pair together, then fly one of the endpoints to a destination. Via slower-than-light flight.”

Bridget frowned. “So you can’t go somewhere instantly until you’ve already gone there the hard way. Seems like a significant shortcoming. You can’t create the wormhole endpoints at two different locations?”

I shook my head. “No, they literally start out as a single virtual particle, then get separated. No way around that, even in theory. But look, in twenty years or so at most, we’ll have every world in the UFS connected. You’ll be able to actually visit other worlds.”

“You’ll be able to do that this year with hueys,” Howard replied with a grin.

“Say, who invited you, anyway?” I paused. “And … trade. You’ll be able to export your devil’s brew to everyone.”

Howard conceded my point with a nod.

“But Howard’s right in a way,” Will added. “It’s not going to be a game changer the way a proper warp drive would. I don’t suppose … ?”

“Still working on the warp drive, Will,” I said. “A lot more theoretical issues involved, since there’s never been a way to test some of the base assumptions.”

“Actually, guys, I think this might be very useful,” Hugh said from his video window. We all looked at him, and he continued, “It’s seventy light-years to Skippyland from Epsilon Eridani. I’m breaking some rules telling you that, but I think we’re kinda past that point. But there are nine star systems between us and you, with a total chain length of eighty-two light-years.”

“And this is better, how?” Garfield said.

“Every system in the chain already has a space station with manufacturing capability. That’s been standard operating procedure since SCUT was invented. If you create wormhole pairs in every system in the chain and fly one of the endpoints across to the next one, you can complete the chain in twelve years, that being the biggest single gap in the chain. Which means we can have a highway from Epsilon Eridani to Skippyland fifty-eight years before Fake Hugh gets here from Ultima Thule to bust out Thoth. It’ll involve ten hops, but that’s trivial.”

“And what good does being able to get to Skippyland do us? Or you?” Bob asked.

“Telepresence isn’t good enough to help with the minion’s arrival, Bob. We need physical assistance. We need something like the picket line that Will and Bill set up to detect the Others’ approach to Sol. And we need to be able to detect a single Heaven vessel, probably cloaked, rather than a fleet of giant ships. And since the Titan class is the latest and greatest—and way faster than anything we have—we’ll need to build or import some of those, too.”

Bob thought for a moment, then replied, “And there’s a reason why you can’t set that up yourselves?”

“Uh, resources. We’ve stripped our system, and several nearby systems, for resources to build JOVAH. And we, uh … ” Hugh looked embarrassed for a moment. “Only a few of us still reside in spaceships. It seemed like a poor use of resources.”

“You could salvage your old computer system for parts,” Will suggested.

Hugh hesitated for even longer before replying. “Well, see, that’s the thing. The JOVAH hardware is so much more powerful than replicant matrices … ”

“Oh my God,” I exclaimed. “You’ve migrated into the cloud? All of you?”

“Most of us. That’s also why we couldn’t just shut everything down when Thoth got loose. It would be mass murder. Or suicide. Depending.”

Bob put his head in his hand. “Unbelievable.”

“We’ll get started on the wormholes right away,” Will said. “The equipment to generate baby wormholes and separate them isn’t a huge deal to build, and we can operate through roamers. What about the negative-energy generator, Bill?”

“Just a Casimir generator with a few tweaks, really. But Will, I’m at the ten-atom stage in development. I am nowhere near ready to push through anything macroscopic.”

“But you have the wormhole-creation process nailed, right? And any future development won’t affect that process, right? If we start now, we can have the wormhole endpoints in place when you’re ready to go to the next phase.”

I frowned, thinking the problem through. “Hmm, you’re right. A wormhole is a wormhole. But maybe send some spares, just in case.”

“Sure, no prob. We can even send a couple of deliveries separated by a month, in case one of them goes bad. Redundancy is our friend.”

“Any other issues, Bill?” Bob interjected.

“Well, one.” I paused, feeling unaccountably embarrassed, as if I was responsible for this issue. “The wormhole doesn’t do anything about intrinsic velocity. If the two endpoints are moving relative to each other, any object pushed into the source will come out at the destination with an apparent velocity in the opposite direction. So if our wormholes end up orbiting their home stars—and I can’t think of any other configuration that makes sense—then the orbital velocities at both ends, as well as the proper motion of the stars, will have to be taken into account.”

“What if the net velocity is right back down the mouth of the wormhole?” Howard asked. “Does it just return to sender?”

I smirked at Howard, and I noticed the others—except Bridget—were looking at him with amusement as well. “Jeez, Howard, you’ve been out of it for a long time. Or the booze has rotted your brain. The wormhole isn’t a tunnel, like in Stargate or DS9. It’s a sphere. You dive into the sphere and come rocketing out of the destination sphere in the same direction, adjusted for the relative velocities of the wormhole endpoints, of course. In the scenario you’ve proposed, you’d come out the wrong side, facing the wormhole and flying backward.”

“Huh,” Howard said, and sat back. He looked at Bridget. “I do have to cut back on the martinis.”

*****

The meeting had eventually broken up, until only Garfield, Will, and I were left. I guessed Will wanted to talk to me about something, so I made a head motion at Gar. He saluted and disappeared.

“What’s up, Will?”

He gave me a weak smile in reply. “Nothing earthshaking. It’s just that I’ve been heading for the hinterland for almost ten years now, and I’ve dropped AMI-crewed stations off at thirteen star systems along the way.”

“That many? You must be really flying.”

“They aren’t all in a row. Anything anywhere close to my flight path gets a station, just because. So I’m populating a cylindrical area with stations out to about a four- or five-light-year radius. The point, though, is that if I’d known about this sooner, I’d have sent them with wormholes.”

“Can’t help you there, Will. This hasn’t been classified top secret; I just haven’t had anything to report before.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you, just bitching a little. And by the way, maybe we should classify it as top secret, at least for the moment. But I can use your idea of creating wormhole pairs at each location and flying one of the endpoints to the next one over. In a decade or so, I’ll be connected to WormNet.”

“No. Absolutely not. WormNet? Hell no.”

Will grinned back at me. “Then you’d better come up with another name fast. If I’ve thought of it … ”

I sighed. “Noted. And I think as another side project, we should send a ship and wormhole after every Bob who’s headed for the far reaches. Even Ick and Dae. But why top secret?”

Will shrugged but avoided meeting my eyes. “No big deal. We wouldn’t release any info until we had something really working anyway. I’d just like to have it as a hole card. Got some stuff coming up in Omicron2 Eridani that could be a problem.” Then he paused and got a thoughtful look. “Hey, I keep meaning to ask. Do the wormhole endpoints end up being a time tunnel if they’re flown around?”

Will was referring to an old theory that a wormhole endpoint flown at relativistic velocity would end up pointing into the past relative to the stationary endpoint. If the traveling wormhole arrived back at its origin five years younger due to time dilation, you could then send items five years into your past.

I shook my head. “Nope. Tested it. If you think about it, that behavior never made sense anyway. If you send someone on the same ship as the wormhole, do they arrive in the past? No. They arrive in the present, just younger. Same with the wormhole.”

“So … ” Will made that rolling motion with his hand. It seemed to have become a tic with him.

“Look, if you send a ship off with a person and a wormhole, and you send food through the wormhole every day and the other end on the ship is at fifty percent tau, it doesn’t arrive further and further in the past. How would that work anyway? It just comes out twice a day on the ship, according to their clock. But in proper chronological sequence. At the end of the trip, they’ve received twice as many meals as they expected. That’s all.”

“Huh. Okay then.” Will stood. “I’ll get started on those wormhole factories. And I guess we’re going to make this standard practice from now on?”

I nodded and made a face. “WormNet. Yee-haw.”