We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 2: Chapter 44: Baseball

Book 2: Chapter 44: Baseball

Bill

March 2189

Epsilon Eridani

“Hey, batter batter, heeeeeeeeeeey, batter.”

Howard grinned at the outfield. “Has that ever worked?”

Bob yelled back, “It’s traditional. Just go with it.”

I sailed a perfect underhand toss across the plate. Howard swung and totally whiffed.

“That’s three. Everyone advance.”

Howard shrugged, materialized a glove, and jogged to the outfield. We were generally able to field a pretty full Scrub game these days, but we couldn’t depend on enough people for two teams. Original Bob had never been much of a team player anyway; we all preferred Scrub. More of a personal goals thing.

Some of us could even hit the ball.

I moved to the catcher position, and Loki took over as pitcher. Everyone else shuffled forward into the next position. As soon as we were all ready, Marvin came up to bat. Loki wound up and threw the ball right over the plate.

About ten feet over the plate.

There were boos from the outfield. I stood up. “Yeah, you’ve been practicing, my ass. That’s with practice?”

“At least it’s going in the right direction now.”

“Uh huh. In the interest of not walking every batter for the next half hour, I’m going to allow some Guppy intervention. Put it across at people height, okay?” I nodded to Marvin.

On the next pitch, Marvin knocked it into the outfield, between center and right. Howard and Dopey looked at each other, each waiting for the other to move. Marvin, no dummy, was closing in on second before the two stooges decided who should make an effort. By the time they had the ball into the infield, Marvin was at third. He took a moment to grin and thumb his nose.

We were all fairly evenly matched in sports prowess, for obvious reasons. It came down to who was paying attention and who was letting their mind drift. We played for a subjective half hour, the agreed-upon duration, then retired to the pub.

The pub was hosted in the same matrix that handled Bob-moots, so it had more than enough processor power to handle all the Bobs and all the beer. And Hungry’s coffee, of course.

As always, we ended up talking shop.

I had a group encircling me that wanted to talk about Bullwinkle.

“Bullwinkle? Really?”

“Hey, why not?” I grinned at Thor. “The thing needed an external antenna array because of the required bandwidth. I just played with the aesthetics a bit. You’ve seen the pictures.”

Howard chuckled. “It would be hard not to think of a moose. I think your sense of proportion was a little off when you built that thing.”

There were answering laughs from several people, plus some perplexed expressions from those who hadn’t seen the pictures.

“So what’s the long game, Bill?”

I shrugged. “Nothing dramatic, Mario. It’s an interesting project, and could be useful—”

“—It would give us a physical presence,” Howard interjected. “I remember Riker being frustrated sometimes, working with the enclaves. And it’s even more so for me. We have all this interaction with the ephemerals—” ȓàɴổBÈs

“Please don’t use that word, Howard.” I gave him the stink-eye, and he looked embarrassed for a moment.

“It’s not intended to be derogatory, Bill. It’s just—”

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.”