We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 45: Everyone Goes Ballistic

Book 5: Chapter 45: Everyone Goes Ballistic

Howard

March 2344

Trantor

Sooooo, marketing campaigns. Not worth their weight in bird droppings, apparently.

I sat on the couch in our Trantor apartment and read the report from the Hawking Institute. The hueys had been rolled out across all civilized worlds, too much hoopla in all available media. A huge blitz, extolling the advantages combined with some well-applied FOMO for those who might resist. Piece of cake, right?

Yeah, no. The Luddies went ballistic, FAITH went absolutely apeshit, talking heads everywhere expressed skepticism, and about half the governments of the UFS expressed guarded concern (the half, I noted silently, that were on the more authoritarian end of the political spectrum). I wasn’t quite sure how hueys threatened them, but it was obvious they did.

Hector laughed. “Not the least bit. I sent you that report, Howard. Honestly, I expected a little more cursing. You must know what we’ve been up to.”

I gave Hector the hairy eyeball. That sounded almost—

“You’ve been talking to Will,” I exclaimed.

“If you mean the Bob formerly known as Riker, I plead the Fifth.” Hector grinned. “But yes. He’s very cynical about humanity, which is helpful in this kind of fight. In any case”—Hector looked down and played with something, and another email popped into my inbox—“we have more than two hundred thousand firm orders with deposits, plus close to a million tentative orders queued up already, and every one of those customers could be convinced to join a class action if someone actually managed to delay us.”

I was impressed. My initial take of Hector as an ass-kisser had wildly missed the mark. This guy was a serious pugilist.

I thanked him and hung up. The hueys were just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Companies that rented mannies would expand to include generic hueys in their lineups, for people who only occasionally needed one. Companies that stored mannies for ex-human customers would expand to include huey storage for still-living clients. A new vacation industry would evolve as people realized they could visit other worlds using hueys instead of spending years in stasis. Or having to die first. ŘÃNÒᛒЕș

And I owned most of those companies. Well, the Bobiverse did.

There were also other, more salacious uses that we really didn’t want to advertise to the general public, but it was a dead certainty that a secondary industry would form within a day.