We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) (6 page)
Read We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) Online
Authors: Dennis E. Taylor
I was in the roamer room, working on an exercise, when I realized that Dr. Landers wasn’t alone. He always stood at the window, watching me and talking, and it took me a few moments to realize that the steady stream of commentary had stopped.
I directed one of the roamers to give me a video feed. Dr. Landers was talking to someone that I would have sworn was Minister Travis’s brother. Seriously, did they have that look listed in the job requirements? MUST LOOK LIKE SCARY GUY FROM POLTERGEIST 2. Jeez.
Dr. Landers had turned off the intercom system, but that represented about three milliseconds worth of inconvenience. Amateur.
I directed a roamer to move to the wall immediately below the window. By pressing its body against the wall, it was able to pick up transmitted vibrations. I had to crank the gain way up, but I had all the audio filtering tricks that two centuries of electronic media had developed.
“This is the work of the Devil. You are placing your immortal soul in jeopardy by participating in this enterprise.”
“The Ministry of Truth advised me otherwise.”
“These are poor imitations of God’s Creation. They mock humanity with their false display of intelligence and emotion.”
“The Ministry of Truth is of the opinion that, while they are without a soul, they are merely based on God’s creation and not an attempt to usurp His authority.”
The air grew momentarily brittle with that silence you get when someone is glaring. I stole a glance using one of the roamers on the table. Yep. Glaring.
“This unholy activity can have no good end. Especially considering the purpose—”
“—Which is officially sanctioned by the Ministry—”
“—Apostates! Heretics!”
Another quick glance verified that Dr. Landers was trying very hard not to roll his eyes. I took a moment to wish I had the option. This guy was seriously whack-a-doodle.
The barrage continued for several minutes. The minister alternately berated and threatened Dr. Landers, who remained carefully non-confrontational and showed a lot more patience than I could ever have. If Minister Loudmouth had been on this side of the window, I think I’d have tried to disassemble him.
I managed to remain objective and treat the running stream of vitriol as information rather than a condemnation of my very existence. It would seem that I was either a product of witchcraft or a result of hubris not seen since the days of Babel.
Dr. Landers took it for a few moments longer, then snapped. Sort of.
“Minister Jacoby, I understand your opinions and concerns. By which I mean only that I comprehend what you are saying. However, the Ministry of Truth is not only supporting but actively funding this endeavor. It seems to me, since we’re talking about blasphemous acts, that by opposing this activity, you are opposing the Ministry. And as they point out—in fact, as you yourself have pointed out twice—FAITH is the direct, revealed Word of God. Doesn’t that make your opposition an instance of blasphemy?”
There was a moment of indignant silence as Minister Loudmouth, looking like a fish desperately struggling to breathe, tried to de-hoist himself from his own petard.
“You have chosen the wrong friends, doctor. You will learn
that soon enough.”
And with that, he turned and flounced out, stage right. Yes, flounced. Honestly.
Dr. Landers leaned on the wall for a few moments with his eyes closed, breathing deeply. Then he turned to the window and played with his tablet for a moment.
“All done, Bob?”
I wasn’t going to play that game. “Who the freaking hell was that? And don’t tell me ‘Minister Jacoby.’
”
The doctor rubbed his forehead. “Just an example of some of the extreme viewpoints we have to navigate in this great nation. Bob, if he had any real power, he
non’t
, er, wouldn’t have been trying to browbeat me into line. I wouldn’t give his threats any extra credence.”
Which is not the same as saying you wouldn’t give his threats any credence at all.
“And I will note for the future,” the doctor said with a smile, “that turning off the intercom doesn’t appear to deter you at all. Shall we continue?”
He pointed at the semi-assembled mess on the lab table, and I got back to work.
I snapped back to consciousness. As usual, I did a systems check.
Wait, August 10
th
?
“Hey, doc, I seem to be missing a few days. Have you had me on ice for a week?”
Dr. Landers looked everywhere except at me. “Well, yes and no. Someone managed to sneak a small explosive into the computer room and take out the replicant matrices. We had to ship in a spare unit and restore you from backups. It took a few days.”
I was silent for a few moments. That meant that I wasn’t the Bob who woke up on June 24
th
. On the other hand, even back then I wasn’t the same Bob who got killed by a car. Did I have a soul? Did it matter if I was restored from a backup?
I realized that in the more than a month that I’d been back as a computer program, I’d somehow managed to avoid coming to any conclusions about my exact status. ‘Rolling with it’ had become a code phrase for avoiding the issue. But I knew that I had a tendency to avoid dealing with painful issues. Jenny had certainly proven that.
And being switched off when not in training contributed as well. I wondered if Dr. Landers had a plan, or if he was just going to wait until I was in space and hope for the best.
I had three issues that bothered me. Was I conscious? Could I actually consider myself to be alive? And was I still Bob? Philosophers had been going on and on about this type of thing for centuries, but now, for me, it was personal. A human, regardless of their opinion on the subject, could depend on being a human. The minister’s offhand reference to me as ‘it’ and ‘replicant’ had stung at a level I was just now starting to appreciate.
I thought back to all the arguments about Turing Tests and thinking machines. Was I nothing more than a Chinese Room? Could my entire behavior be explained as a set of scripted responses to given inputs? That was probably the easiest uncertainty to answer. The classic Chinese Room, which just used scripts to react to input, had no internal dialog. Even if you made its behavior stochastic to introduce some variation in behavior, it was still only active when responding to input. When not processing a response, it just sat there, idle. By worrying about this, right now, I fell into a different category.
For that matter, Descartes had his famous
cogito ergo sum
; but Thomas had added to it with his “Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist.” Well, I was certainly full of doubt. Doubt implied self-awareness, and a concern for one’s future. So I was a conscious entity, barring evidence to the contrary. One down.
Was I alive? Hmm, since no one had yet managed to define life rigorously, that was going to be a fun one. As the speaker at that long-ago panel in Vegas had pointed out, fire has most of the qualities of life but is not alive. According to Dr. Landers, I would be able to reproduce via printer-based autofactories. I certainly responded to stimuli, and acted with self-interest. The claim that life would have to be carbon-based was chauvinistic and narrow-minded, so yeah, I could consider myself alive.
Now, the big one. Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the metric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk of meat. Bob was a person, and a person was a history, a set of desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions. Bob was the accumulation of all that Bob had been for thirty-one years. The meat was dead, but the things that made Bob different from a chipmunk were alive. In me. I am Bob. Or at least, I am the important parts that made Bob.
With this last thought, a huge weight lifted off of me. I imagined it would feel the same for someone right after the jury said, “not guilty.”
I turned my attention back to the doctor, who was repeating my name in an increasingly panicked tone. I realized that I had been silent for several seconds.
“Hey, doc. I’m here.”
“Thank God.” Dr. Landers collapsed into a chair. “You went silent, and I thought you might have gone psychotic.”
They’d put a lot of effort into me by this point—into all of us, really—so I understood his reaction. I wanted to smile at him, but of course, no joy. “S’okay, doc. I think that ship just sailed, and I’m still here.”
Then realization hit me as I processed what he’d said. “Um, doc, how many spare matrices do you have?”
“Just the one, Bob. A decision had to be made. I guess congratulations are in order.”
“So Kenneth is gone?”
Dr. Landers nodded, then did a double-take. He looked at me, eyes narrowing.
Oh, shit. Damage control, Bob.
I quickly threw in the first question I could think of. “So why did they decide to attack now? Has something changed?”
“Mm, information about your progress has been circulated. Best guess is that internal FAITH factions have leaked it in order to goad competing nations into some form of reaction. That’s the word from our security people, anyway.” The doctor was still frowning, but seemed uncertain. I had to keep this going.
“Damn. Are we close to launch?”
The doctor’s expression changed to a frown of concentration. I just needed to keep him distracted long enough for my little faux pas to be forgotten. He consulted his tablet, idly swiping through some pages of information.
“Current project timeline has it about a month away. It can be moved up though. We’ve got a fair bit of slack in the schedule right now, thanks to your swift progress.”
Again, I tried to smile. And as usual, nothing happened, so I waved a waldo instead. “Still waiting for that raise…”
Dr. Landers laughed. “We’re pushing it through HR. Is that the right term?” He held the beat, head cocked to the side, then changed the subject. “Training session for today. I’ve got the details here.”
I heaved a mental sigh of relief. The immediate danger was over, and if the comment occurred to Dr. Landers later, hopefully he’d be uncertain if he had heard me correctly.
Dr. Landers raised a finger to poke at his tablet, hesitated for a moment, then put his hand down. He was silent for a few moments more, then sighed and looked up at me. “Bob, I’m going to take a chance, I think. I’m going to stop deactivating you during off-times, and I’m going to give you access to some more libraries. You’ll undergo a half-hour of semi-sleep every night while you are backed up, but other than that you’ll be online 24/7. If you do go insane, we’ll restore you from a previous backup. That sounds harsh, I know, and I apologize. But I don’t think we can afford the luxury of a leisurely project plan any more. We’re going to have to push forward as quickly as possible.”
I nodded in response. Well, I bobbed my cameras, I guess. It was a kind of good news/bad news thing. I’d finally have some time for some quiet reflection, but it could drive me nuts. Woo hah…
“So what
did
happen to Old Handeltown?”
The pretty blonde at the window looked surprised for a moment, then laughed. Dr. Doucette was covering for Landers today. She wasn’t nearly as chatty as he was, though. I’d been trying to get her talking, so far with minimal success.
Dr. Doucette was a looker. I was happy to discover that I hadn’t lost my appreciation for beauty with the, uh, change in my lifestyle. Although my appreciation wasn’t as
urgent
now, so to speak.
She spoke with the standard 22
nd
century accent, so I was using my translation routine. I’d integrated it to the point where I didn’t even notice the different speech patterns. I knew that Dr. Landers was specially trained to deal with replicants, and had studied my era. Which included getting his patois under control. Dr. Doucette either had skipped that class, or wasn’t normally supposed to be talking to me.
It wasn’t an issue as far as I was concerned, and if Dr. Landers was okay with her, then I didn’t see a problem. Hopefully, the State wouldn’t have a cow.
Anyway, today I was coordinating a team of roamers to assemble ship components, assembly-line style. It was routine work. By now, I had written scripts for so many roamer activities that I rarely had to do more than show up. But, the good folks at Applied Synergetics had a checklist to run through, so I had to humor them.
Dr. Doucette looked down at her tablet—yeah, everyone came with tablets—then, satisfied that the status was still quo, answered my question. “Original Handeltown was Handel’s birthplace—Salem, Oregon. When he died, the city changed the name and set up a large memorial in his honor. Someone objected and decided to take it out with a pocket nuke.”
“Nuke? On American soil?”
She wagged a finger at me. “Uh uh. Hasn’t been American soil for a hundred years now. But to answer your question, it
was
and still is the only nuclear weapon ever deployed in North America.”
“So they moved Handeltown to Portland?”
She nodded.
“A lot of people died?”
She shook her head. “Not like you’d think. We learned a lot about radiation treatments from the Middle-East feud. Lots of opportunity to try out different medical procedures. For all the death and horror that the Middle East war generated, it advanced medical knowledge greatly.”
“Like reviving replicants?”
“Like reviving replicants.”
I was silent for a few moments as I concentrated on guiding the roamers through a particularly tricky bit of assembly. As soon as they were able to continue on their own, I turned back to Dr. Doucette. “So what’s it like, living in a theocracy? Do you have daily prayers?”
Dr. Doucette held up one finger in a universal waitaminnit gesture. She poked at her tablet a few times, then looked up at me. “Sorry, just checking the location of the security patrols. Some of them might be Piety Monitors.”
I was blank for a moment, then I laughed. “So you’re monitoring the monitors. What are you doing, tracking their security card locations?”
Dr. Doucette smiled in return. “The government doesn’t really care what we do as long as we give the appearance of piety. But jabber-jiving them will get you a session with the Ministry of Proper Thought that you’ll never forget.”
“Mmm, yeah. Dr. Landers mentioned something about that. So while we’ve got some privacy, let me ask you this—how do you know I’ll do what you want instead of just heading off in some random direction, once you release me into the wild? Understand, I love this whole idea, and I can’t see myself
not
cooperating, but you couldn’t know that when you revived me.”
The doctor gazed down at her tablet for a few seconds, a thoughtful look on her face. “There are safeguards, Bob. Your software will ensure mission objectives are met. That’s all I’m going to say. But as you pointed out, it’s probably not an issue with you.”
Safeguards. There’s my word of the day not to like.
It was an interesting philosophical issue. How are you supposed to feel if you are forced to do what you would have done anyway? I wondered how it would work. Would I be a marionette on strings, unable to help myself? Or would I think the decisions were mine? I shuddered at the possibility I might find out.
