All that’s really missing is a good artificial intelligence to control the whole process. And that’s the trick, isn’t it? These types of blue-sky discussions always assume certain advances for a successful implementation. Unfortunately, A.I. is the bottleneck in this case. We’re close with the replication and manufacturing processes, and we could probably build sufficiently effective ion drives if we had the budget. But we lack a way to provide enough intelligence for the probe to handle all the situations that it could face.
… Eduard Guijpers, from the Convention panel Designing a Von Neumann Probe
I listened carefully to the telemetry coming over the radio link. Garfield was over five light-minutes away and receding at a respectable 2000 km/s. The time signal in his telemetry fell behind at a steady, predictable rate. Well, I hadn’t really expected to prove ol’ Einstein wrong at this late date.
It was the other signal that I was excited about. I was receiving a subspace signal from Garfield that originated with the same telemetry, transmitted at the same time. But the timestamp on that signal still exactly synchronized with mine to the limit of accuracy of our systems.
I could tell I was grinning like an idiot. VR had long since become so realistic that it might as well have been real life. And that included aching facial muscles.
“Okay, Garfield. Radio telemetry has you coming up on six light-minutes away. Can you confirm my echo?”
“Yep. The return is just over 11.5 minutes behind my transmission.” Garfield’s voice held the same excitement. He’d been working with me for several years now on multiple projects, including this one. We’d turned into a regular Skunk Works, and this was our biggest breakthrough by far.
“Cut the transceiver loose, Garfield, and come on back. We’ll let the unit continue outbound for a few weeks and see what the dropout is like.”
“No problem.”
I jumped. “How the hell?”
He laughed at my reaction. “Hah! One-upped you, old man. Take that!”
“You integrated the VR into the subspace comms?” I felt a slow smile spread across my face. That was pretty impressive work.
His bobbing eyebrows were answer enough. Then he frowned in thought. “This tech isn’t going to make the space stations obsolete, is it?”
“Not a chance.” I shook my head. “We’ll have to wait until someone builds one at the other end, but theory says the signal dropout will be almost total after about twenty-five light years. We’ll have to use the space stations as routers.”
“The internet goes galactic!” Garfield laughed.
“Hey, with IPV8, we should be able to address every galaxy in the universe.” I knew I was preaching to the choir. After all, Bob, right? But I have a tendency to think out loud.
“That’s fine, Bill. When do you think we’ll be ready to transmit plans?”
“I think we should send what we have right now. It’s still clunky, but once they’ve built it at the other end, they don’t have to wait years for the next update.”
We grinned at each other across the virtual table. This changed everything.