Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  He finished that task, programmed the sample packaging shuttle to seal up the would-be projectile and send it to the secure semi-external quarantine point, turned off the alarm and reset the sensors, and then stepped into the ward.

  Eight eejits sat and lounged in the main room from which various repair and janitorial supply chambers branched. Two were lying in hammocks – one was face-down, and Waffa eyed him very carefully before concluding that he was still breathing – and two more were sitting and staring blankly into the middle distance. Four were playing cards. Of those four, one looked up.

  “Hey boss.”

  “You four,” he said, pointing at the card players. “Can we – wait,” he added, looking more carefully at the cards. One of the eejits was, on closer inspection, holding up a sheaf of sterilising wipes. “You stay here. You three, with me.”

  They went to the super-redundantly-sealed area adjacent to the faulty airlock, and spent a few minutes going over and over the procedure they were about to perform. Specifically, what Waffa wanted the eejits to do while he was making the actual repairs with the assistance of the Tramp’s robotic maintenance systems and drones. Those systems, while also damaged and not capable of completing the task unaided, were all he really needed and the eejits amounted to a backup-for-a-backup, holding panels open and testing keypads on the far side of the room to save him too much faffing around.

  Together – although Waffa had to admit that only one of the three eejits with him turned out to be all that useful even in the limited capacity he’d assigned it – they repaired the inner lock and the interface. Then he and the sole useful eejit set the systems and remote drones to repair and triple-check the outer airlock, double-checking it against AstroCorps specs and then running a diagnostic, and making very sure every step of the way that the other two eejits, one of whom had done nothing but drop tools and say “poop” for most of the operation, were back in the ward where they couldn’t interfere further.

  They finished the repairs. Waffa checked off the prepare, repair and don’t get killed boxes on his to-do list. It was a good day, he reflected, when he could put a tick in a don’t get killed box.

  The heavy-lifting part of his morning’s work done, he dismissed the third eejit and made his way to the fabrication plant.

  The great series of vats, splicing laboratories, genetic nanotech banks and configuration matrices were an almost total mystery to every human left alive on the Tramp, which was why the various and largely-unexplored damage done to the esoteric machine had so far left them unable to produce anything but different levels of eejit and without apparent hope of repair or reprieve in the future. Janya had been investigating the process and the eejits and the plant itself since The Accident, but had not made much headway – at least no headway that she was telling anyone about. Fabrication was far more ‘natural process’ than ‘mechanical assembly’, and Waffa didn’t even begin to understand it.

  He did, however, know how the interface worked. That, at least, was astoundingly simple. It was the sort of simplicity that only came with obscene technological sophistication.

  The fabrication plant, Waffa had occasionally found himself ruminating, was a great, radiation-poisoned womb capable of producing nothing but abominations. They didn’t look like abominations, and sometimes they didn’t even act like it … but there was something profoundly, monstrously broken in even the most high-end eejit, something that was not meant to be. And they had absolutely no choice but to keep on printing the poor creatures out, again and again, in the hopes that this time, the flaws would be minimal. In the hopes that this time, they’d gain a semi-competent crewmember instead of a dangerous liability.

  Or, as Sally sometimes proclaimed, in the hopes that this wouldn’t be the one eejit that came out with all the murderous hatred and subconscious fury steaming-raw on the surface. That this one wouldn’t be the one-in-a-million super-flawed throwback of cobbled-together human psychoses and pathologies, a crock-pot of bubblin’ insanity that would infect the six hundred and twenty-seven other eejits on board and send them rampaging through the Tramp on a quest for bloody vengeance and sweet, sweet human kidneys.

  As far as Waffa was concerned, one sociopath on board was more than enough without worrying about accidentally printing off another one. And the one thing worse than the sociopath they already had would be a sociopath with perfect God damn muscle definition.

  The printing process took twenty minutes, the configuration between ninety-two and two hundred and fifty-six depending on – very broadly speaking – the degree of messed-upness one could reasonably expect from the finished product. And the users had absolutely no control over this. The configuration ran its course when it ran its course. A configuration that ended in under ninety-two minutes could be safely recycled according to the plant’s own failure parameters without even taking him out of the tube, and they’d only needed to check out three of those before making it standard and immediate operating practice. Because sometimes a ninety-three-minute eejit turned out to be pretty good quality, while a two-hundred-and-thirty-minute eejit might be persistent vegetative, so why not a viable ninety-one? There was a general probability clustering of results, after all, but no hard and fast rule.

  But there were only so many screaming, shitting, spasming, quarter-brained meat-sacks you could club to death with a canteen tray before you gave up on the naïve, sanctimonious idea that organic function was sacred and some of them might have a shot at coming out alright.

  No. Ninety-oners are a-goners, as Waffa had tried to teach everyone to say but they’d refused to get on board with the slightly fubbed pronunciation of the words in order to make it rhyme.

  At the end of the day he was the only one printing eejits, though, so he used the slogan in his brain and it sounded just fine. He had yet to initiate a configuration process that went for longer than two hundred and fifty-six minutes, although he knew from the labels on the sides of the plant that it should actually take five hundred. Printing, on the other hand, had apparently always taken twenty. Meat was easy, he supposed.

  Waffa kind of wished he’d been part of the able fabrication crew before The Accident, so he’d had a chance to see the mythical five hundred minute counter tick down and a crisp, intact, non-awful able step out of the plant and say “howi”. This was, he had pieced together, what ables were supposed to say because it was what almost all the eejits he had printed had tried to say, with varying degrees of success, since his elevation to Chief of Security and Operations. He wasn’t sure what ‘howi’ meant. It was old space-dog speak of some sort, and the fabrication plant engineers had thought it sounded cute.

  He often wished that at least a few of the actual ables had survived The Accident … but, he supposed, if there could only be ten survivors – not that there could only have been that many, but still – he was morally obligated to be glad they’d all been humans. Well, apart from Decay of course.

  On the times when he drank, Waffa sometimes wished one or two of the five-hundred-minute ables had survived instead of Contro. Or the Rip. But mostly, damningly, Contro.

  Or, since they were arguably better off with one of Contro’s ilk on board, why couldn’t the survivor have been Stenna Hoyl, a Molran with the same basic starting position as Contro but all the benefits that came from being a Molran? Molren at least were able to maintain coherence under normal circumstances. And she would have been able to function as a working Chief Engineer.

  Or, if not that, then Contro and a handler for Contro, one with some engineering skill and a solid cable connection to reality.

  But these were just daydreams.

  He had time to clear some more of his electronic backlog and grab some lunch before the plant disgorged its latest eejit at a distressingly minimalist one hundred and one minutes. Waffa sighed. Although, again, it was no guarantee the eejit was going to be a train wreck, there was a very, very good chance of it.

  This one wasn’t a train wreck, but he was certainl
y a train service of very dubious quality, with missing carriages and lines that went nowhere and conductors who read out the wrong destinations to a confused group of morning commuters. He was a train service that told you meals would be served in the D cabin, and all the cabins turned out to be numbered and there was no number 4. He was a train service where half the passengers fell into the gap. Waffa had an extensive eejit classification system.

  Okay, so maybe he was a little anal.

  Still, the new Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 – Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20, he supposed – was mobile and he passed the cobbled-together series of tests designed to establish whether an eejit was capable of surviving on his own, so Waffa sent him in the direction of the general ward. Whether or not he found the place would be another test altogether. The computer’s discreet little impulse thread, coiled through the eejit’s motor cortex, would delicately make sure he didn’t get too lost or climb into a recycling chute, but was no guarantee of an unerring sense of direction.

  Of course, many eejits had problems that would only manifest later and the plant only gave the vaguest and most difficult-to-understand indications of what they might be from the configuration log, but so far there hadn’t been any major disasters.

  Waffa headed to the semi-external to take a look at the rock they’d picked up.

  There was an eejit manning the catching station, but the machinery was all automated – thank the various Gods and all the laws of physics that might amount to a guiding higher power – so there wasn’t much he could mess up. He was also working alone, unlike standard practice with eejits in charge of ship systems where actual change could be affected and disastrous, blood-splattering pooch-screws initiated. With those, a buddy system was always required.

  There was nothing much for him to do. The eejit was standing and watching the controls and readouts. Waffa had taken care of it all already, from his wristwatch.

  “How’s it going?” Waffa asked the eejit. He responded with a low, enthusiastic hoot and rolled his eyes, and Waffa nodded. “Right, I remember you. Let’s see.”

  He crossed to the console and guided the eejit to one side. The eejit had actually managed to collate the report, oversee the quarantine storage of the sample in the locker on the outside of the hull, and set the great whip-like catching extensions back into storage lockdown, which was why he’d been assigned to the station in the first place. Inability to talk or emote was a good trade-off for actual semi-dependable aptitude.

  He frowned as he looked at the readings, but they got a biohazard all-clear and so he cycled the object inside for direct observation and processing. The intercept machinery had scooped the hurtling projectile out of the void just before it impacted the hull. Which would have been harmless, Waffa reminded himself. They were cycling up, accelerating, and the Tramp’s shields were hardening like the shell of a freshly-laid egg as she went. Of course, a hardened eggshell was still an eggshell, but the point remained.

  As it happened, they needn’t have been concerned in any case. Sure, depending on the substance there might have been some damage, maybe even disaster. Most kinds of rock would have bounced off or cracked on the pulsing energy of the shields. This, however, would have shattered harmlessly into a billion pieces.

  He looked at the object for a long moment.

  “Better send this to Janya,” he said eventually. The eejit hooted. “Right,” he went on, “I was talking to myself. I’d better send this to Janya.”

  The final dreary act of Waffa’s day was delivering his summary to Contro, ostensibly so the Chief Engineer could deal with any course changes or energy requirement shifts brought about by the series of events. In this case, it had all moved a bit above the metaphorical pay-grade of either the Chief of Security and Operations or the Chief Engineer, but Waffa still had to make the report and then suffer the endless questions.

  He went back to his quarters, took himself off the work roster for 48 hours, and began to drink. By the time the witchy hour rolled around and he’d downed his second bottle of Lords of Áea, he was feeling quite mellow indeed.

  In his brain.

  In reality, he had a standing ration and was never allowed to have enough alcohol – or anything else – at any one time to impair his faculties.

  The Accident had been a real kick in the balls for Waffa’s recreational drinking, too.

  JANYA

  The little scientist with the scars sat calmly and read the logs. She always read the logs. Waffa didn’t believe anybody did – as a direct result of this, over the months she’d wiled away a number of boring evenings entertaining herself with the sarcastic asides and intentionally mixed-up metadata the Chief of Security and Operations put into his reports under the misapprehension that nobody was reading them – but Janya most certainly did. Janya read everything.

  It was said of Janya Adeneo that she was as big as she was stupid. And this was true. Admittedly it wasn’t said of her very often, because it was something of a one-off joke and when there were only ten people in one’s sphere of interaction – ten people and six hundred and twenty-eight decidedly sketchy facsimiles of people, to be specific – the number of any sorts of jokes you could tell to or about one another dwindled sharply. But it had been said.

  Janya was smart. Janya was terrifyingly, unnaturally, ridiculously smart. Like all unspeakably smart people, however, it was an intelligence confined to just a few key topics, narrow and rarefied and inapplicable to a lot of areas of endeavour to which other people seemed to think the same level of intelligence would simply extend. It was the false logic that made people insist that an expert in xenoarchaeology would be able to read Ancient Terellian, or a doctor of linguistics would know everything about sociology. It was the logic that insisted a professor of Twin Species or Pre-Fleet Molran architecture would know the first thing about setting up a mobile materials analysis lab.

  And it was the self-same logic that had placed Janya Adeneo in charge of the entire research and analysis quadrant.

  Unfortunately, the ship’s automated systems and laboratory equipment were so intuitive and user-friendly, Janya’s modest powers of deduction were enough to enable her to simply guess her way around them the first few times, with no major slip-ups. After that, it became impossible for her to convince anyone that she was just making it up as she went along and was in fact utterly unqualified to do any of the generic ‘sciencey-work’ to which she had apparently been assigned in perpetuity.

  And, like all such academic people – and as was also invariably ignored by everybody at every level of intellect – Janya’s highly-focussed intelligence was accompanied by an equal and opposite gaping vacuum of knowledge in many other areas of human endeavour. For example, knowledge of sports. And what to safely say when someone asks “how are things?”.

  How were things, anyway?

  These, then, comprised the first three characteristics anyone noticed about Janya. She was tiny, she was ferociously intelligent, and in an age when skin and bone and organs could be replaced and all but the staunchest Zhraaki removed even their umbilical scars, she wore the faint pale stripes left behind on her face and hands like the badges of honour they were. She had, however, had her missing pinky finger repaired with a slightly-mismatched replacement, because it was one thing to make a statement but one had to be rational.

  When people asked her why she didn’t have them removed, she told them she had suffered for them and that pain would have been for nothing if they vanished without a trace. One morning she would look in the mirror and not remember the pain of those cuts, and on that day she would step out of her door and let herself make exactly the same stupid mistake she had made the first time, back on Judon.

  When people asked her what that mistake had been, she said, “I hesitated.”

  She sometimes woke up to the sound of knives parting skin.

  Another sub-one-ten job at the plant, she confirmed silently to herself, noting the fabrication and configuration log as it ca
me in appended to Waffa’s report. Like the Chief of Security and Operations she had noted the rough correlation between baking time and cake quality, and knew that an eejit that came out so quickly was not likely to signify good news even if he wasn’t a skinful of raw dough. Also like Waffa, she had no real idea of why the plant aborted its configurations when it did or spat out eejits of the flaw-types it did, or what most of the log content actually meant. As part of her ‘research’ into the damage and the eejit situation, however, she had done a bit of work listing the eejit complement by flaw type, and cross-referencing it with whatever key-words seemed to be repeated throughout the logs. It was agonising work, but she was beginning to think she was onto something.

  Yes, ‘research’, she thought with a little roll of her eyes. She’d done a lot of that in the course of her academic career. She’d come to know what it was and what it meant. Or she thought she had. Back in those dreamlike days of yore, it had meant the systematic investigation of a given subject in order to ascertain or revise facts or theories in pursuit of my educational progress. Then, aboard post-Accident Astro Tramp 400, she’d found out that ‘research’ actually meant doing sciencey magic for between one and five hours and then solving whatever problem they’ve asked me to ‘research’.

  She often indulged in regret for her lost life at Judon Research Outpost, which had ended when she’d come aboard the Tramp under what the Captain – or at least the XO, Commander W’Tan – had referred to with typical Molran understatement as ‘exceptional circumstances’. Well, that was one way of saying it. An even better way of saying it was the deceptively simple Xidh word cholak, which roughly meant a fact with an explanation too long and complicated to be worth noting in the official record. Xidh, the common language of the greater Molranoid species-tree, was elegant like that.