My letter “W” pick for the A to Z Reading Challenge was WE ARE LEGION (WE ARE BOB) by Dennis E. Taylor. This delightful story (the beginning of a series known as “The Bobiverse”) introduces us to a guy named Bob who just sold his tech company for millions of dollars and splurged on a company the will cryogenically freeze your brain should you die before your time and promises to slap it in a new body once they know how to cure whatever ailed you. Shortly after announcing this to his friends during a weekend in Vegas, a car slams into Bob and he’s a goner.

Bob awakes more than a hundred years into the future to discover that the USA as he knows it is now a Christian zealot authoritarian state, the rest of the countries on the globe have rearranged themselves, and Brazil has become a threatening superpower. Worst of all, he’s no longer human. Bob’s brain has been mapped by cutting-edge technology and he’s now a sentient AI. Even worse, he’s fighting for his existence against other brain-based AI’s as they all undergo testing to find one great brain that can pilot a spaceship and help the new USA (referred to as FAITH) explore and colonize the galaxy.

He ends up being chosen (after a lot of close calls and assassination attempts by splinter groups of zealots who think they can speak better for God, and also by the evil Brazil, who wants to corner the market on space colonization. Eventually Bob gets out of the solar system and is a fully-equipped Von Neumann ship – or in non-sciency terms, a self-replicating spacecraft. His job is to mine rough materials and construct more Bob ships, then send them all over the galaxy to explore, build space stations, and reinvent himself perpetually.

This all probably sounds dry as dust, but it’s actually a clever and often funny story about what it means to really feel human – even after your body and everyone you love is dead and gone. Bob not only makes his replicas, he lets them each pick their own names (like Bill, Riker, Homer, Bert & Ernie). Each has its own personality that may be a lot like his or radically different. Some of them strongly dislike each other and peel off in a new direction just to get away. They all develop their own virtual reality simulations to live in and they are as varied as a mind can imagine. The chapters diverge after that, following various versions of Bob as they all take on different tasks (including checking in on Earth, where things have gone to hell). Each Bob and their particular quest is interesting, entertaining, quirky, and sometimes introspective. I got confused sometimes keeping them all straight, but I never got bored. Four stars.