We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Taylor, Dennis E. We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1. Stevens Point, WI: Worldbuilers Press 2016. Available in Kindle and as an unabridged audiobook from Audible, narrated by Ray Porter, released 20 Sept. 2016, 9 hours and 30 minutes, publisher: Audio Studios.[1].

The other books in the Bobiverse series: For We Are Many: Bobiverse, Book 2, published by Worldbuilders and released as an Audible Studios audiobook 18 April 2017; and, ending a trilogy, anyway, All These Worlds: Bobiverse, Book 3, text and audiobook released 17 August 2017. From the Publisher's summary for the We Are Legion audiobook:

"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 AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the 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. 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. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad – very mad." 

The novel is mostly space adventure with a successfully-comic, wise-ass tone, using the motifs of space war, first contact, and climatic disaster on Earth, following war involving nuclear weapons and directed asteroids. The initial premise, though, is indeed the uploading of Bob as a sentient AI "in" computer storage and then as spacecraft, with the ability to clone himself (so to speak) and early in his new "life" consider questions of soul, personality, and identity. In a standard motif — note SHORT CIRCUIT — Bob comes to define himself as alive, but is soon too busy in his many, let's say paradoxically, virtual incarnations, to think much more on other existential questions. Significantly, and usefully for the narration, the subsequent iterations of Bob choose different names and develop different personalities, manifesting different aspects of the mind of initial Bob.

For the motif of AI as spaceship, see, e.g., 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) and novel, and their sequels. For the alternative but closely-related form of a ship run by an excised and encapsulated brain, see, e.g., Plus and Destination: Void, and Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang and other Helva stories. For later in the Bobiverse series, note virtual reality (VR) environments, 3-D printing, and the truncated handling here of identity and soul.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 2, 3Dec17