Not Bob Anymore

"I'm beginning to call them replicants," Bill says, "instead of Bobs. Just to make the distinction."

Twenty generations in, the Bobiverse is fracturing. There are Bobs who cosplay Borg full-time. A group called Starfleet that wants to enforce the Prime Directive — not as a plot device, but as actual law. Skippies building a Matryoshka brain around a grey dwarf. Someone who named himself Morlock. A Bob in a suit and tie.

Original Bob wore jeans and a t-shirt in his VR. He would find the suit and tie baffling. And that's Taylor's point: replicative drift means that the copies are no longer copying the original. They're diverging from each other. The shared baseline of original Bob's personality, his preferences, his specific flavor of nerdiness — that's eroding over time, generation by generation.

Bill is starting to trust less. He's changed his passwords. He uses Cones of Silence at moots now. Something he's never had to do before.

The question the book is sitting with: is this a problem?

Garfield doesn't think so. "I'm not sure replicative drift is a bad thing. The Bobiverse needs to be robust enough to handle a society where not everyone's priorities align." The monoculture of original Bob was always an accident. The Bobiverse has been getting bigger and stranger for 200+ years; eventually it was going to stop looking like one person.

But Bob feels it as loss. Not catastrophic, not urgent — but real. The pub doesn't feel the same. There's rancor under the surface now. The Bobs aren't all pulling in the same direction.

What I notice: the question is exactly the one the Quinlans apparently got wrong. Heaven's River was presumably built because some faction won their war and imposed a solution. Management is watching from somewhere. The history is absent from the records.

A society of immortals with replicative drift and no agreed constraints is either the most resilient possible thing or the most unstable. Maybe both.

Original Bob's answer, delivered to Morlock: "Original Bob never gave even a small fraction of a rats ass about prestige." He says it as a defense. But also — he's had to say it. It's no longer obvious.