We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it’s a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.

Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the State. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling A.I. in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high, no less than first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he’ll be switched off and they’ll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target for sabotage. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.

The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. The way to get there is to do what the State wants. But to get to that point he will have to survive everything from foreign saboteurs to guerilla raids. If he manages to live through launch day, there’s still a good chance the other probes will be armed and focused on eliminating competition the old-fashioned way.

And Bob will find out that the universe contains entities even more unfriendly than the competing probes.