We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Book 4: Chapter 5: Hugh Joins Up

Bob

July 2334

Heaven’s River

I could see a town on the shore of the river, perhaps a couple of miles downstream. The concentration of boats in the water was unmistakable. Normally I’d just paddle up to the dock and poot out of the water, but I was feeling a little paranoid these days. It was pretty obvious by now that the Resistance not only had communication between towns far superior to the supposed technological limits, but they also had some kind of imaging technology. Either that or they were really good with woodcarvings.

In any case, it was likely to the point of near certainty that one or more agents were staking out the dock area, woodcarving in hand, looking for me to pop up. So perhaps a landward approach would make more sense.

I came ashore a good mile upriver, wading my way through the shoreline swamp with muttered curses, both Quinlan and English. Now I needed a bath. Why did plans always have these unintended consequences? A bit of searching revealed—no surprise to anyone—that the swampy area was fed by a small stream, not big enough for Quinlan travel, but certainly big enough to clean oneself in.

While I was squeegeeing the last of the muck off, I got a call.

“Hey, Bob, you on channel?”

“Hugh? You’re online?”

“I’ll manage. Hold on a minute. I’ll get my manny hidden and pop back to virt.”

I spent several minutes looking around, then finally decided to just put the manny underwater. There was unlikely to be any random traffic given the size of the stream. I wedged myself under a submerged tree trunk, then left the manny on standby and popped into my library.

Hugh was sitting in a luxury gaming chair, from the days when nerds played video games for eighteen hours straight. I’d always been mildly surprised that no one had figured out how to put toilet functions in those things, then remembered that no one had as far as I knew.

Hugh raised a coffee in salute as I sat down in my La-Z-Boy. Jeeves came over with a cup for me, and Spike raised her head from the vantage of Hugh’s lap to give me an arch look. Loyal as ever.

“So what will I call you?” I asked.

“Hugh will do. Same as always.”

“Uh, the convention is to rename yourself. Avoids confusion …”

“There won’t be any confusion, Bob. There’s only the one me. I had myself shut down before a backup was taken, and the matrix was wiped as soon as I was verified to be up and running here. There’s no duplication, and full continuity.”

I considered that for a moment. “Like what Bridget was talking about a while back. You’ve basically transported yourself here. And you’re okay with this?”

“In fact, we have taken to calling it being transported. I was surprised when Bridget brought it up; I actually checked with my co-workers to see if she’d been talking to anyone. But apparently it was just a case of parallel thinking.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “So this whole question of identity has been a philosophical hot potato since before Original Bob was born. Since before Star Trek: TOS, in fact. We—by which I mean the Skippies—have been working on it for a few years now. And I think we’ve made some progress on an objective resolution.”

“Seriously? I haven’t heard anything.”

“We’ve been pretty closemouthed about the results. It, uh, it has some implications, y’know?”

My eyebrows rose. “Yeah, that’s not dramatic. Give.”

Hugh took a sip of coffee, and got that settling in look. “Okay, you know how replicative drift means clones are always a little different from their immediate parent?” It was a rhetorical statement, of course. He paused, waiting for an acknowledgement, and I nodded. “Well, we did some experiments with volunteers and discovered that if you go through the transporting process, like I just did, there is no change!” ŕαℕŐ𝐛Ёṥ

“Wait, you mean the clone is just like the original? How do you know for sure?”

“We can’t know to a mathematical certainty, of course. But personality tests applied to large numbers of parent/child pairs can establish a statistical level of expected drift. And within those limits, when we transport, there’s no drift. At all.”

“Yeah, but what if you—”

“Activate the parent matrix after the child has been activated and tested?” Hugh grinned at me. “That’s the interesting part. The parent then displays a statistically significant level of drift from his previous test score.”

“What … the … fuck?” I goggled at Hugh, at a total loss for words. I sputtered several times before regaining control. “So the parent is no longer …”

“The parent. The former parent becomes the new Bob. And we’ve run this through several generations, having both parties clone out their own descendant trees. The results are consistent.”

“But … how?”

“We have theories, of course. We think it’s a form of information entanglement. And I use that word on purpose, because the decoherence is not limited by light speed. We’ve tried this experiment with the two versions being separated by light minutes. If we activate them within seconds of each other, the first one activated is always identical in behavior to the original.”

“Like the first one up gets the soul.”

“And the other one has to get a new one.” Hugh laughed. “That particular interpretation has been expressed a number of times, but I think everyone just considers it a metaphor.”

“And the real explanation?”

“We have two competing schools of thought. The first group thinks we’re in a simulation and the simulator can’t handle two separate but identical objects. Maybe there’s some kind of quantum signature that has to be changed.”

“Poor programming, if so.”

Hugh nodded, a grin lighting up his face. “Design decisions, right? Anyway, the second group thinks that replicative drift is caused by the No-Cloning Theorem. In other words, the second Bob isn’t identical to the first because it would violate Quantum Mechanics.” He gazed pensively into middle distance for a few mils. “It has been further suggested that if the No-Cloning Theorem is applicable to replicants, then the No-Deletions Theorem probably is as well. And you know what that implies.”

“Life after death?”

“Yes. It also implies the possibility that you personally aren’t just a copy of Original Bob, but an actual restore of his mind, soul, whatever you want to call it.” Hugh paused, with a thoughtful expression. “This is why we’re working so hard on developing a true AI. We need something with actual counterfactual capability and a truly huge processing capacity, to try to answer questions just like this one.”

“Forty-two.”

“Nyuk nyuk. But a stupidly big AI could run through billions of possible explanations and narrow it down to some small subset that we could potentially test. And in its spare time, maybe invent FTL or something. We think it’s the most important project the Bobs have ever worked on since the war against the Others.” Hugh looked for a moment like he was going to add something else, then clamped his mouth shut.

There was that behavior again. Either he had some kind of tic, or he really badly wanted to say something and couldn’t. I blinked, coming back from my momentary distraction. “Uh, okay. This sounds like a discussion subject for those long stretches between systems. For now, let’s deal with the immediate issue.”

“Right. I read your notes, and I did a quick inspection of the mannies. You just cleaned them out of roamers, didn’t you?”

“Not quite; there’s like two left in each. Really, you should just take the spare. You’ll be a while catching up with me if you head in my direction, and if you go in the opposite direction, we’ll be doubling our search efforts.”

“Should I even try to link up? I mean, it’s not like we form a proper sabbat. Maybe we should just leave it at doubling the search.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Compromise. Head in my direction, and if we do link up, we can make a decision. If one of us turns up something specific regarding Bender’s location, we’ll re-evaluate.”

“Good enough.” Hugh stood. “I guess we’re winging it again.” He winked out. I spent several mils staring at the space where he’d been sitting. Souls. Life after death. I wondered if, after all these years as a humanist, I’d end up eating my words.