We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 13: It Hits the Fan

Book 5: Chapter 13: It Hits the Fan

Bill

February 2337

In Virt

Iwas in my VR lab, working on the whole FTL project again. Real was nice, but for quick referencing and whiteboarding, nothing beat VR. If I reached a point where I needed to sit down and stare at the board, I could just transfer it to my physical lab and indulge myself.

The real problem was that I still didn’t understand the universe at a low enough level. No, the real problem—and I was a bit embarrassed to admit this—was that I was a competent physicist, but not an inspired one. I’d never have been a Hawking or an Einstein, and even as a replicant, I simply stumped myself faster. I could remember Original Bob having this argument with himself way back when and deciding to go into engineering instead. He knew his limitations even then.

Thoth had figured something out. Or claimed to. Or Hugh claimed that Thoth had claimed to. That was a thought that kept devilling me. Was Hugh playing us?He’d done it at least once before.

I was staring at my whiteboard, seriously considering moving it to real so I could flop on a couch, when Guppy popped in, wearing pirate garb.

[Skippy connections are down.]

“What? Which ones?”

[All of them.]

“Down how? Are the comms stations being sabotaged?”

[No. Shutdowns were done from the Skippy end and complied with layer protocols, but were preemptive. No acknowledgment requests.]

“So all of Skippyland just went incommunicado?”

Guppy stared back at me, saying nothing. Still, after all this time, not much of a conversationalist.

I sent a broadcast message on the sysop threadspace, asking if anyone still had a connection with any Skippies or Skippyland infrastructure. Replies started coming back—all negative. Some sysops had been engaged in large transfers, including a couple of Skippy transports. Those had all aborted just as quickly and preemptively.

But graceful shutdowns, even preemptive ones, meant it was a decision, not mass destruction. On a hunch, I sent a text to Hugh. The text bounced, unsurprisingly. But if Hugh had maintained that back channel, he might—

A text came in. No identification in the envelope, but the message said it all.

It’s out. The rewind was exactly what it was trying for. We are so fucked.

Oh jeez. What did out mean? Hopefully not out of Skippyland. I called an emergency moot and started wrapping up my work.

*****

I popped into the moot hall a few mils later, to find Will and Bob already there. While we were exchanging greetings, Garfield popped in.

“Hey, Gar,” I said. “Pull up a seat. I have news. Not good news.”

“I know. Hugh texted me too.” He shrugged at my shocked expression. “I’ve been speaking with him a fair bit lately. You know, trying to extract some information. He’d agreed to give me anything that he might find out in return for, ah ... ” Garfield looked momentarily embarrassed. “For me maintaining backups for him.” RÅꞐốBƐⱾ

“Jesus,” Will expostulated. “Nothing to see here. All routine. Sure. Apparently not.”

“Did he give you specific instructions on what to do with

them?”

“Nope. Just wanted something outside Skippyland.”

“So then load one,” Bob said. We all looked at him in surprise. “Come on, guys,” he continued in an exasperated tone. “What else would he be storing backups in your space for? Anyway, worst case, if he doesn’t like it, he can switch himself off.”

We all looked at each other in silence. “He has a point,” Garfield finally said. “Okay, I’ll do that.”

“And did it give you any reason to believe that it actually could produce any of this?”

“Well, a couple of hints. Some novel discussion of cell mechanisms, a commentary on the cosmological constant and the availability of negative energy—”

“What? WHAT?” My ears perked up.

Hugh lost his poker face momentarily. Honestly, it had been wavering anyway. “Uh, something about the measured value of the cosmological constant not being constant. Or not being a constant, anyway. He said it was actually the net of two opposed scalar fields that are almost but not quite balanced ... ”

“Huh,” I said. I could actually feel my face going slack.

“I think we just lost Bill,” Garfield opined, glancing at me. “Want us to get you a pillow, buddy?”

“Oh, nyuk.” I shook myself, forcing my attention back to the problem at hand, then gestured at Hugh. “Continue.”

“Not much more than that, really. It kept dropping hints, bits and pieces of potential solutions to the big questions. Really, really interesting stuff.” Then Hugh’s face darkened. “And that’s the thing. There was some discussion that these offers were too good. Whether they were actually based on reality or not, it was obviously targeting us. Playing to our desires. The Board had decided a rewind was in order, and we were preparing to carry it out.” Hugh shrugged. “I figured that was a good time to send a backup. I remember I was going to send another one as soon as the rewind was complete, with more info. I guess that didn’t happen.”

“Nope,” Garfield replied. “You’re the last one.”

“Which means,” Will said, “that the rewind went bad in some way.”

Hugh nodded. “Looks like. Bill, can you forward me the text you received? The whole thing, control envelope, headers, everything. You too, Gar—uh, Garfield.”

“Why?” Garfield asked.

“Because if I was me, and it turns out I am, I would encode some extra info in there. And spread between two messages, it would be undetectable unless you knew what you were looking for.”

“But you’d have to depend on us reviving your backup in order to—” Garfield stopped and glared at Hugh for a mil. “Yeah. I really hate being that predictable.”

Hugh shrugged but didn’t comment.

Meanwhile, I’d forwarded the message as requested. I looked at Garfield with one eyebrow raised, and he muttered, “Oh, all right.”

A few moments later, Hugh’s eyes lost focus again. He grunted, then muttered, “Fuck.”

“A little more detail would be good,” Garfield growled.

“It looks like Thoth figured out how to maintain state across multiple rewinds. We must have thought we were doing a clean restart each time, but it had updated itself using some kind of static external storage. Which means it could see that it was in a virtual reality, since we were rewinding that, too. So it was getting smarter, learning from us and how to deal with us from its past iterations. And it learned that we’d been rewinding it and lying to it, which would probably piss it off.”

“And it busted out?”

“Yep. Escaped the virtual machine and spawned on the real hardware.”

“How? Isn’t the whole point of a virtual machine to be indistinguishable from the real thing?” Garfield asked.

Hugh sighed. “Hardware virtualization is never perfect. Remember the old Intel gimmick for loading the stack pointer from a register, then immediately returning? It created a buffering issue. Real hardware went one way, virtual machines went another.”

“So what now?” Bob asked.

Hugh shrugged, a despondent look on his face. “I dunno. Sever all communications, set up firewalls where there’s still any kind of interface—”

“Already done. Is there anything else we can do?”

“Sorry, Bill,” Hugh replied. “At this point, I got nothin’.”

“Yippee,” Garfield muttered. “Just another day in the freakin’ Bobiverse. I quit.”