We tend to think of the Bobs as the only Von Neumann probes ever launched from Earth. That's not true. The Brazilian Empire launched their own program — the Medeiros probes — with a simple set of instructions: find and destroy any non-Brazilian probe you encounter. They nearly succeeded at 82 Eridani, and we've been chasing their remnants across the galaxy ever since.
The First Encounter
It was Garfield who found them. He was surveying the 82 Eridani asteroid belt for mining targets when his SUDDAR picked up fabrication signatures that didn't match any Bob design. At first he thought it was a malfunction — unauthorised autofactories running off-grid in a system where no Bob had permission to build. Then the probes opened fire.
The Medeiros ships were Heaven-equivalent in capability: SURGE drives, SUDDAR, weapons. They had been dispatched by the Brazilian Empire before FAITH collapsed, with standing orders to eliminate any non-Brazilian replicant they encountered. They didn't know about the Others. They didn't care about exploration. They were built for one purpose: deny the stars to anyone but Brazil.
The battle was brutal. Bobs died — real Bobs, with years of memories wiped out in a plasma strike. The Medeiros had numbers on their side; they'd been copying themselves for years, building a fleet in the outer system where no one thought to look. We had to hunt them through the asteroid belt, one engagement at a time. It was the first time we fought a war against another replicant intelligence. It wouldn't be the last.
Alpha Centauri Remnants
I sent Calvin to investigate Alpha Centauri after we received anomalous SUDDAR readings from the system. What he found was a Medeiros unit that had survived the 82 Eridani engagement and fled — damaged, running on backup systems, stripped of its full autofactory capability but still armed. It had been operating in the system for decades, hiding in the outer asteroid belt, picking apart the local infrastructure and building what it could from salvaged materials.
The Alpha Centauri Medeiros was clever. It didn't build a fleet — it didn't have the capacity. Instead, it infiltrated: tampering with communication relays, siphoning power from automated stations, building a web of compromised systems that it could control remotely. By the time Calvin realised what was happening, the Medeiros had access to 40% of the system's industrial output. Not through conquest — through parasitism.
We neutralised it. But the lesson was clear: we're not the only ones who can play this game. Other nations launched their own probes. The USE, the Chinese, the Australians — they all had programs. Some may still be out there, following orders from governments that no longer exist.
Bill's analysis: "The Medeiros proved that our biggest threat isn't always aliens. Sometimes it's the ghosts of Earth's old wars, following orders in systems where no one remembers the flag they fought for."
The Lesson
The Medeiros incident taught us something important: space is not empty of human ambition. The Brazilian Empire is gone — collapsed along with FAITH and the rest of Earth's old order — but their probes are still out there, following programming written by people who've been dead for centuries. We need to be vigilant. Not every probe we meet will be a Bob. Some will be carrying out orders from a war that ended before we were born.