We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Book 4: Chapter 4: Played

Bill

July 2334

Virt

I stared at the listing results, my jaw hanging slack. I briefly considered having my jaw fall to my waist, but this wasn’t the time for visual gags. Garfield had a grimace on his face that seemed to have been permanently etched on. His skin was almost grey, and I had a moment of admiration for the level of VR we’d achieved, now that we were competing with mannies.

“Starfleet rootkitted the standard image?” Gar asked.

“Looks like it. The standard autofactory O/S gets updated so frequently that it made sense to have a canonical version on BobHub. Or not, as it turns out.” I gritted my teeth to avoid sharing some choice curses with the universe.

“Well, it explains how they got into the autofactories. Based on which ones they’ve taken, I’d say the rootkit was added about ten years ago. And added to source code, or it would have been overwritten on the next build.”

“Sounds right,” I said, then frowned. “But ten years—”

“Yeah, boss. Ten years ago, Starfleet was barely more than a discussion group. Plus, let’s be honest, as a group they just don’t strike me as that smart. Look at some of the bonehead moves they’ve made since this conflict started. This smells.”

“I wonder if it was something like Vickers and VEHEMENT—someone with an agenda of their own, teaming up with Starfleet because their goals coincided.”

“This would have to be a Bob. A Bob who had diverged enough to want to do this, but managed to keep it secret for literally years.” Garfield shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t buy it.”

“You’re very hard to please.”

Garfield grinned at me. “Call me skeptical, call me cynical, whatever. The dots just don’t connect.”

“Gotcha. In any case, we have to deal with what we have. I’ll call Will.”

Will put his head in his hand and held the pose for several mils. Finally he looked blearily up at me. “This is bad. Really bad.”

“I know, Will. The number of autofactories—”

“No, Bill, not just that. I mean, that’s bad and all, but when meatspace gets—”

“Oh, God, Will. Meatspace?”

He gave me a sickly grin. “Yeah, I know, you don’t like derogatory labels. And you’ve mostly managed to put a stake through the heart of ephemeral, but I don’t think you’ll have as much success with this one. The relationship between digitals and bios has been getting more and more strained lately. It was going sour even before the Starfleet thing, but since that started, it’s accelerated. When this hits the waves …”

“Aw, hell.” It was my turn to put my head in my hand. “Well, the good news is that we have an image with the rootkit removed that can be uploaded once you get control back. But it’ll be a one-at-a-time thing.”

“Assuming there isn’t a booby trap similar to the one in the space stations,” Will replied. “Also, the planet-based factories won’t have the same vulnerabilities, so the humans are less at risk than we are. They might continue to nuke all space-based autofactories, just to be safe.”

“I’m not sure they’d be wrong, Will. We have enough sanitized units so we won’t be dead in the water, but the amount of time it’d take to rebuild capacity …”

Will nodded. “Look, a significant reduction in autofactory production capability would have large economic impacts, even though the UFS claims not to count Bobiverse-owned autofactories in their monetary policy calculations. So they won’t go off half-cocked. We’ll have time to talk them down.”

“Let’s hope. This is truly getting messy.”

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