“So we could eventually move stars?” Mario grinned at me, obviously trolling.
I laughed. “Sure, in a million years or so. Theoretically possible doesn’t mean easy. ”
I nodded to the group and moved on. Another group was discussing the expanding bubble of the Bobiverse. In principle, we should be approaching a forty-light-year radius by now. But reproduction tended to be uneven and spotty. It was generally accepted that we Bobs were only marginally enthusiastic about cloning more of ourselves. I shrugged. The Others might change that.
The moot continued for many objective minutes—hours in our time-sense.
Eventually, though, Bobs started to pay their respects and pop out. It had been a good game. Okay, not really, but a good post-game wrap-up. I smiled
to myself. That was really the point.
* * *
“I have something to show you.” Garfield was trying and mostly failing to keep a huge grin off his face. Well, okay, not bad news, then.
“All right, Gar, I’ll bite. What’cha got?”
“I give you my answer to Bullwinkle.” With a flourish, he popped up a video window. “Rocky!”
“That does not look like Rocky. More like Rodan.”
“Hey, if we’re going to get pedantic,” Garfield said, laughing, “the real Bullwinkle was bipedal.”
“If we’re going to get pedantic, the real Bullwinkle was a cartoon. So, does it fly?”
“In theory.” The android stood in the hold of a cargo drone, still attached to its support cradle. Metadata told me that the drone was parked on the surface of Ragnarök. Garfield opened the cargo bay door, revealing the bare rock of the planet’s surface. His avatar froze as he switched his consciousness to the android. Another window popped up, showing Rocky’s viewpoint.
Rocky detached itself from the cradle and waddled to the door and out into the Ragnarök wilderness. The communications relay drone stayed with it and provided another viewpoint.
The android was not graceful on foot. Not really surprising. The still relatively thin air of Ragnarök would require a lot of wing surface in order to lift off, even with the powerful artificial musculature. But walking wasn’t the point.
Garfield set himself, opened his massive wings, and launched. Several powerful flaps were sufficient to get off the ground, and he steadily gained altitude. The comms drone kept pace, keeping Rocky centered in the frame.
The other window showed the view from Rocky’s eyes.
Honestly, it wasn’t impressive from any objective metric. Drones could fly faster, higher, with less energy, and were more maneuverable. But based on my experience with Bullwinkle, Garfield would be experiencing something entirely different from flying a drone.
Things went well for the first two minutes.
Then Garfield ran into some turbulence. Maybe a crosswind, maybe a downdraft, who knew? But Rocky went into a roll that approached ninety
degrees. He attempted to correct, and rolled farther in the opposite direction.
The motion kept reinforcing itself, and every attempt by Garfield to get it under control either made it worse or introduced pitch and yaw.
Finally, Garfield folded his wings and went into free fall. This stopped the harmonic cycle, but he was now rapidly losing altitude.
“Maybe time to start flying again, buddy.” I blushed as soon as the words left my mouth. Nothing like stating the obvious to help out.
“Thanks, Bill, I might just try that.”
Garfield was taking my foot-in-mouth moment with good grace. I resolved to try shutting the hell up as a strategy.
Garfield stuck out his wings just the smallest amount, trying to establish stability. It seemed to be working for a few moments. Then the rushing air snapped his wings out like a parachute opening up. Every status light went red, and Garfield screamed.
I pulled back to VR, to find Garfield sitting hunched forward, hugging himself, a wild look in his eyes. He took a few deep breaths, then glared at me.
“Um, I guess we did too good of a job of setting up the neural feedback.
That hurt! ”
I nodded. “In theory, that’s what we want. But maybe we should put a limiter on it.”
“Yeah, let’s do that.” Garfield stood and stretched carefully. “Where’s Rocky?”
“Still on his way down. Wings are snapped, though, as is his keel. I don’t think you want to be in there for the landing.” I pulled up the video feed from the trailing drone, which was still faithfully following the tumbling android.
Rocky was definitely junk, and Garfield hadn’t thought to add a parachute.
I looked at Garfield, and he shrugged. “Well, it’s not the fall that kills you…” he said, with a rueful half-smile on his face.
We watched as Rocky hit the ground. Every status indicator went dead, and the trailing drone picked up the loud, hollow thump of impact.
I instructed the cargo drone to head for the impact site and pick up the pieces. I turned to Garfield.
“So, other than the unfortunate ending, how did it feel?”
“Incredible. I was flying. Actually flying, not just working a control panel.
I think hang gliding might come close, but nothing else.”
I smiled at him. I could understand the feeling. “It’s a lot more real than VR.”
“Yeah, and what we’ve got here will allow Bobs to interact with the real world. As beings, I mean, not as floating cameras.”
“You’re right, Garfield. In an emergency, I think we could even use them with the comms drone hanging around, although that’s messy.”
Garfield gazed into space for a few moments. “I wonder if we’re missing the big picture. Take this to its logical conclusion and we could replace our HEAVEN hulls with bodies.”
“Like mechanical versions of van Vogt’s Silkies?” That was a mind-boggling thought.
“Yeah, like that. Bill, we may be the beginning of a new species. Homo siderea.”
“Hmm, the TODO just keeps getting longer and longer. Let’s see if we can get rid of the trailing communication drone first, okay?”
Garfield smiled and shrugged. “So, you know what comes now, right?”
“What?”
He grinned and held the beat. “Rocky II.”
“I hate you.”
45. Replication
Howard
August 2193
Vulcan
“You want what? ” Riker frowned and leaned back in surprise.
I waited for him to finish overacting. “Any information on creating a replicant. We have the replicant hardware and all, but we’re a little light on the part where you start with a body and end up with a recording.”
“Why the fleeming hell would you want that?”
I shrugged. “No particular reason. I just think it’s a gap in our knowledge base. If we wanted to create a new replicant, right now we couldn’t.
Basically, we’re it.”
Riker gave me the hairy eyeball, and a caption flashed below him, at waist height: ‘Not sure if joking or serious.’
I laughed. Will rarely attempted a joke, especially since Homer, but when he did, it was always funny.
“What’s really going on, Howard?”
“It’s nothing, really, Will. I’m not imminently intending to replicate someone, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just that we only have the one generation of humans to get the information from. After that, we’d be reduced to reverse-engineering, with all the failures and false starts that implies.”