And I wasn’t entirely sure that any of this was a bad thing. I was intended to be a Von Neumann probe, and so far I’d done a really crappy job of it. Expansion of known space had stalled at about a hundred or so light-years’ radius, since most Bobs were more interested in setting up their own territories, whether it was Bill’s Skunk Works, the Skippies’ Matryoshka Brain, or Starfleet’s enclave out Perseus Transit way.