Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  But now the Cancer was spreading, and end times were coming to the Six Species. And yes, Domino had sent those instructions as his epitaph, and yes, Mos was obligated to see them through.

  “Sorry,” Skelliglyph had said to him jovially, “but The Cap’s fairly … picky about who he lets in here.”

  “Domino Hainey told me to meet with you.”

  “I haven’t talked to Tumbles Hainey in years.”

  Mos had been stunned at the time, totally unprepared for this response. The sheer gall of it. “You were with him on Aquilar barely two months ago. Please trust that I come by this information in the most-”

  “Nope, haven’t been to the A-Hole either,” Skelliglyph’s amusement had faded. “Haven’t been back there since we launched in ’55.”

  Mos recovered from his shock, again, at this blatant falsehood. “He told me personally that you had just been there, and that you’d be coming here looking for me. That you’d need me. The Fergunak fast-clippers out of-”

  “Look, you old fossil,” Skelliglyph had said, still forcedly jovial, “haven’t you got a Worldship to crash onto somebody’s home town somewhere?”

  Mos still seethed when he thought about that conversation. Oh, since they ‘launched’. Indeed! Domino had told him about that, too. In the process of warning him about the way this crew did business, oh yes, the ‘launch’ had certainly featured in that correspondence.

  But Mos had heard the stories about Skelliglyph. Of course he had. Even the less ludicrous ones were interesting.

  It still made him coldly angry, though. He was an old fossil? Him? And this was Çrom Skelliglyph talking?

  Better kill them all.

  If it hadn’t been Domino. If it hadn’t been him to pass on the word about this ship…

  Mos had to trust him, though. There was nothing left for him to do. Certainly now, he had no alternative. These were the ones who – God help them all – were going to finish this, one way or another. These were the ones who were going to push the Hacticos back into the Core and rub them out.

  It may not have been a patented prophecy from Horatio Bunzo, but it had been Domino’s last order. And that had to count for something.

  A part of him that was mostly still Mos, though, had decided that if he ever found out these monkeys had had anything to do with Aquilar, he was going to feed them to the abyss. If needs be, he could commandeer the ship and complete the mission himself. A larger ship might leave him safer, anyway.

  Safer from what?

  He just didn’t know what these people were up to now. They had a dangerous man in their brig – even Mos knew about the Barnalk High Ripper – but didn’t seem in any hurry to deliver him to the authorities. Of course, he knew better than they did that there were precious few authorities left.

  Unless…

  Unless they did already know on some level, as he suspected they had to, and that was the reason they weren’t delivering Cratch to face justice.

  Mos wasn’t all that interested in Glomulus Cratch, though. He was interested in the Ripper’s final victim, and only survivor.

  Yes, he’d been lucky that Domino had put him in their path. He’d had some encounters with other ships, although none of them had approached the Fleet’s size or resources, and none of them had been quite right. A modular, with a synth-in-potentia of this computer’s unique status and level, was just what he needed.

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to destroy them. Maybe he’d bring them into his discovery. Help them the way he had so rashly promised Domino he would.

  Doesn’t that amount to the same thing?

  “Shut up,” Mos insisted. “If they’re going to win this, they’re going to need what I have.”

  He’d have to make it seem as though he’d just stumbled onto them. If their madness, their memory-loss, was so complete … he’d have to hide the truth from them, until he knew more. Figured out once and for all whether they were the people Domino had thought they were.

  Or I could get rid of the unstable elements, and keep the ship. Fulfil the mission on my own.

  Are you convincing yourself of something?

  Stop it!

  Bunzo had been aware of him. May have actually pointed out his presence to some of the crew. That was no good. He’d have to go on watching them from afar. It was going to be uncomfortable. Uncomfortable and lonely.

  But Mos Karturi was never alone. Not anymore.

  He had his Art.

  THE END

  BLOGGER’S NOTE

  This is where I really start enjoying the writing process. This is the part where all the flying, spinning pieces start to fall, and land in a pattern, and the reader goes, “ohh, it’s turning into something, this changes everything, now I’ve got to go back and look at the rest of the story all over again.”

  Or, you know, if I’ve done my job right, that’s sort of what’s happening. Otherwise, a whole bunch of flying shards just fell onto the floor and turned into a hazard while walking barefoot.

  Some of you will already know the origins of my idea for this story, but others among you will not have read my blog (although you should, for it is a top quality blog). That is to say, Hatboy’s Hatstand at https://stchucky.wordpress.com/ (circa 2015). You see, the whole thing started out as a bit of a joke.

  Well, I’ll probably need to backtrack a little here.

  Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Andrew Hindle. He went to preschool in Fremantle, Western Australia, where he met another little boy named Michael ‘Watha’ Andrewartha. They became best buds, and remained best buds ever after. As of the writing of this book, it is worth pointing out that they have in fact been friends in excess of thirty holy-crapballing years.

  In the mid-nineties, teenage Andrew Hindle went to university in Perth, Western Australia, where he made a lot of exciting new friends. One of these friends happened to dub him ‘Hatboy’, because he was always wearing a hat and this friend was not in the habit of dicking around with obscure nicknames.

  This same friend dubbed another of Hatboy’s friends ‘Creepy’, for this other friend – Lucas Thorn – was creepy.

  And Hatboy and Creepy went on to have many great couch-potatoey adventures, and write many great works together. Some of these you can find on the aforementioned Hatboy’s Hatstand. Others can be found on Amazon from the virtual pen of Lucas Thorn himself. Well worth a look, really.

  I’m telling you all this for a reason, just bear with me.

  Anyway, as the years went by Hatboy and Creepy entered the wonderful world of Usenet together. Usenet, for you youngsters, was an ancient kind of Internet discussion forum, without any sort of moderation and no pictures (except in the binary newsgroups, and who had the time for binary newsgroups on a 56K dial-up?). It was a lot of fun. Hatboy posted to Usenet as ‘Saint Chucky’, but that’s not important right now. I’ll let him tell that part. For now, I’ll simply let this be the plot point required to shift the story’s confusing point of view permanently to the first person. For – surprise twist! – it turns out we’re talking about me. The canny reader would have twigged to that back when I wrote ‘Andrew Hindle’, if not sooner.

  In the virtual world of Usenet, exchanging fan theories and insults with science-fiction and fantasy geeks all over the world, I made many more amusing friends. There was Robin ‘Controversial to the End’ Browne, Robert ‘Beer Rot’ Everson, and of course a lovely, smart-as-all-Hell, geeky teenage girl in Finland, named Janica Palokas.

  I moved to Finland, and – as I believe the kids these days say – put a ring on that.

  After working for a few years in the steel and plastics industry and not finding it to be super-compatible with my Bachelor of English, I found my way to a little translation, testing and technical writing concern called – the occasional hostile takeover notwithstanding – Lionbridge. There, I made still more friends, including the indomitable Sari Tuomainen and the too-many-nicknames-to-fit-in-a-mere-note Janne Huovinen. That was also about the
point at which I started to write my blog, Hatboy’s Hatstand.

  Did I mention that Janica was a teacher? Well, she was. And as the years went by and her students graduated and became legal adults (and very fine ones), I was honoured to inherit another round of friends. For they had taken Janica’s hallowed geekery, and run with it like some sort of wildly inappropriate sporting metaphor.

  One such former student met and married a nice girl from Texas, whose name was (or came to be) Christina Linza Itkonen. She, too, became a friend of mine. It is worth noting, as a matter of historical interest, that these two had actually met as a result of the roleplaying group Janica had established, and continued to run because the campaign hadn’t had the consideration to end when school had.

  Still with me here? Good.

  Through Christina and her studies, and the magic of social media and a mutual enjoyment of being intolerable wisenheimers, I also met Zachary Hawkins, another fine US citizen washed up on these frozen Finnish shores. Hilarity, as they say, ensued.

  My point?

  In the decades since setting foot in that preschool, I have made a lot of friends. This – Watha, Creepy, Contro, Beer Rot, Janica, Sari, Janne, Linza, Zachary – was just nine of them.

  One day, while I was wasting time on this aforementioned social media (which, for you even-youngsters, was like Usenet except vastly moderated, and the visibility of everything was controlled according to targeted advertising algorithms), I saw a chain-letter question:

  “You’re the Captain of a Star Trek starship. Go to your profile and look at the first nine friends on the left-hand grid. Go in order. How long will your ship remain intact?”

  From there, positions were assigned according to the completely random friends who happened to be on that grid at that time: first officer, doctor, helmsman, science officer, and so on. And the nine friends in my grid were the nine I just finished telling you about. All of this, as well, is documented on Hatboy’s Hatstand under the categories “The Book of Pinian” and “Astro Tramp 400”.

  The idea was so amusing, and worked so well, that I started to scribble down ideas. A story took shape. At first it was just going to be a series of snippets of a television show, that my Hatboy and Creepy characters could watch on television and blatantly steal from without risking a lawsuit from the Star Trek people. Then, it was going to be a Galaxy Quest-esque comedy about ordinary people suddenly forced to be a starship crew. Then, quite abruptly, it became something else. And before I knew it – and at such a speed that many of my readers are not actually keeping up with the books as I write them – the Final Fall of Man was happening.

  One thing became quite clear at a very early stage, however: the characters in this story were nothing like my friends. My friends may have been a starting point, but about three pages into the first chapter it was obvious to me that these were very different people, with only occasional glimmers of their origins.

  And as for the Captain. Does the starting premise of this series, the silly social media game, mean that the Captain of this dauntless crew is some sort of reflection of me?

  No.

  Not even close. I’d say “ha, I wish” … but no, I really don’t.

  No, Çrom Skelliglyph found his way into this story by paths unknown. If you’ll excuse the appalling artsy-fartsy litwankery of it all, one day as I was finishing work on Drednanth I opened the door to the Captain’s chambers and found him there, a glass of whiskey in his hand and a smile of absolutely unwarranted confidence on his face.

  I don’t know how he got there. He just was. And then – because he’s Çrom Skelliglyph – he refused to go away.

  No, I was never the Captain of the Tramp. And my dear friends were only her crew in the first few fleeting days of the joking-and-brainstorming stages of this series.

  Still.

  That was the story – cut very, very short – of how those nine brilliant people came to be my friends. How they came, against staggering odds, to be in that left-hand grid on that social media user interface, after finding their respective ways into my life over the course of strange, wonderful decades. I owe them everything, and so this note is for them.

  Now.

  Over the course of this series, I will tell you the story of how the crew of the Tramp came together, and how it was that many of them came to be friends.

  I will then leave it to you to decide which story is the more preposterous.

  Hatboy, Sotunki, Finland

  27th April, 2015

  The Final Fall of Man will continue in the fourth volume, Fergunakil.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Hindle was born in Perth, Western Australia, and did some stuff there for a while before moving to Sotunki, Finland.

  He now lives happily ever after in Sotunki with his wife Janica, his daughters Elsa and Freja, and a small, guaranteed-easy-to-control colony of corrosive spitting beetles that turned out to be the only thing capable of taking down a caffeine-maddened dingo.

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREW HINDLE

  Arsebook: My Rear In Status 2011

  (The story of one man’s short, cowardly and dishonourable battle with cancer, told through the enduring medium of social networking status messages)

  THE FINAL FALL OF MAN

  Eejit

  Drednanth

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  Are You My Corpulent Brood Matriarch?