hotmtlnovel Chapter 6: Bob – July 19, 2133
Chapter 6: Bob – July 19, 2133
Chapter 6: Bob – July 19, 2133
“Dammit!”
Dr. Landers leaned back with a surprised expression. “Problem, Bob?”
“Sorry, doc. I was reading up on current electrical engineering standards. You yanked me in mid-paragraph.”
Dr. Landers looked down at his tablet and cleared his throat. “Ah, yes. Bob, you’ve been in that simulation for two days subjective time. During that period, nothing went outside of specs, despite everything we threw at you. That’s very impressive. The logs from your GUPPI indicate that you’ve set up some interesting monitoring interfaces and scripts. Our software people are jumping around in excitement. Several of them have asked to keep a copy of you.”
“Is that possible?”
“Technically, of course it is. We back you up every night. Just a matter of doing a restore, assuming we had a matrix of our own big enough to hold you.” The doctor blew out a breath and shrugged. “Unfortunately, FAITH owns you, as they are financing this project. So we don’t have a lot of leeway.”
“On that subject, when are you going to tell me what I’m being groomed for?”
Dr. Landers cocked his head. “What one of you is being groomed for. There’s still one other candidate.”
“One was due to a psychotic break a few days ago, and the other was determined by Minister Travis to be unsuitable.”
The doctor took a deep breath, put his tablet down, and leaned back in his chair. He looked pensive for a few moments, then leaned forward on his elbows. “Okay, Bob. That’s about what I thought, but it’s nice to have confirmation. So, here’s the bottom line. Do you know what a Von Neumann probe is?”
“Yes, of course. It’s an automated interstellar probe that builds copies of itself as it visits systems.” There was a moment of silence as my brain caught up with the conversation. Oh... “Wait, are you saying—?”
“That is correct. We are preparing one of you to be the controlling intelligence for a Von Neumann probe.”
***
I watched through several video feeds as the small roamers reassembled a 3D printer that I’d been required to diagnose and repair. Roamers, it turned out, came in various sizes, from a huge monster spider eight feet across, through the medium-sized units that I had access to, right down to something the side of a gnat. Below that size, nanites were available, but they were single-purpose devices with very limited flexibility.
At the moment, I was working on coordinated activities using several different sizes of roamers. The 3D printer was only one of many challenges I’d been given.
The roamers required minimal supervision once the tasks and dependencies had been laid out. The trick was to figure out the proper level of detail in the instructions—to avoid errors from giving too much leeway without micromanaging them to a standstill.
Without my kibitzing they could do any job up to ten times as fast, so I tried to lay out the plan and then stay out of the way. Once I figured out how to define conditions under which the roamers would interrupt me, even active supervision became optional.
While they worked, my mind wandered. Once Dr. Landers had spilled the beans, he had made some of the project documents available to me. I hadn’t been this impatient since the day I signed the papers for the sale to Terasoft. Every second had dragged on that day, and every millisecond dragged now. I wanted today’s training to be over so I could concentrate on studying and reading. The doctor’s little robot was going to be enthusiastically cooperative from now on. Oh my God, this is like every nerd’s dream job. I could be going to the stars! ꞦAꞐƟbƐŚ