Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  “I don’t think Molren get disqualified from the species for getting saliva on a piece of able meat,” Janya demurred. “But that’s really the least of my concerns with this theory.”

  “So he crawls away from the impact, along the hull,” Cratch went on.

  “That’s the spirit! And works the lump of foot back out of his suit and tosses it overboard,” Contro added.

  “Only he doesn’t get it to escape velocity,” Glomulus went on, raising his hands high, “sending it looping back to be retrieved by the catchers.”

  “It’s flawless!” Contro exclaimed, and gave Glomulus a hearty and unexpected high-five.

  “Ouch.”

  “Ha ha ha! You’re a wuss! Anyway, it’s much better than my other idea,” Contro concluded, “which was about a superluminal comet of frozen Molran saliva and well, it was quite silly now I come to think about it.”

  “It’s a very … vivid theory,” Janya said, “but none of it is borne out by any of the sensor data,” the little researcher tapped a nearby console for emphasis. “A giant spitball moving at light speed would actually make more sense than a Molran clinging to the hull. Maybe we can go back to the towing or tailing question,” she suggested, “where it seemed like your expertise might have been, you know, lending something to the endeavour.”

  “A fellow on the hull would circumvent the problem of matching our relative field profile,” Contro suggested hesitantly.

  “But not the problem of that not being what the sensors saw.”

  “Or the problem of not being as funny as a spitcomet,” Glomulus put in, then spread his hands. “The sensors didn’t spot any ship or entity out there that might catch and throw a foot at us, either,” he pointed out innocently.

  “Maybe the computer made up the sensor information because it was bored,” Contro reasoned in a surge of triumph.

  Janya sighed. “I–”

  “In fact, it’s the computer that runs the main drive engines and field settings anyway,” Contro remarked. “If he was trailing us, and didn’t just start doing so after we last came down into normal flight, about the only way he could match our field profile would be with the help of the computer,” he laughed. “Or a quite-good guess, I suppose.”

  “He could guess it?”

  “Sure.”

  “How good a quite-good guess?” Glomulus asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Contro flapped his hands. “Like correctly guessing the exact number of hydrogen atoms in the galaxy?”

  “That would be quite a good guess,” Glomulus agreed.

  Janya nodded. “So he couldn’t, in other words.”

  “Sure he could,” Contro said. “He’d just have to be lucky!”

  “But with the computer?”

  “Easy.”

  “Easy like guessing the number of hydrogen atoms in … ?”

  “I don’t know,” Contro was starting to get dizzy from all the super-precise specifics they were demanding of him. “The number of hydrogen atoms in a single hydrogen atom?”

  “So either practically impossible, or practically impossible to get wrong?”

  “Well, same computer means same field!” Contro laughed. “Honestly! You people!”

  “See,” Janya said, “this is why you’re here.”

  Contro beamed.

  “Of course, not to burst your bubble, but we were already sort of aware of the difficulty of two objects matching fields and keeping up with one another at relative speed,” Glomulus pointed out. “Not only is it basically one of the only things everyone knows about travelling at relative speed, but it was one of the first things Whitehall brought up when we started thinking about the possibility of a ship following us. We didn’t think about the computer, though,” he added positively. “That was good.”

  “Yes it was,” Janya said, “although I’m not sure about the idea of it changing sensor readings and other stuff. That’s a lot of effort and a lot of different systems, and all the hiding is sort of ruined by the, well…”

  “The throwing body parts,” Glomulus agreed.

  “Exactly. Where’s the logic? If the Tramp’s computer is behind this–”

  “I wouldn’t go looking for logic there,” Waffa stepped unexpectedly into the lab. He glanced at his wrist display, tapped it, and crossed to the examination table.

  “Well hello there!” Contro exclaimed. “Gosh, what brings you here?”

  Waffa had taken up station at one end of the table, directly opposite Glomulus. “I sent you a notification,” he said to Contro levelly, without shifting his steady gaze from the ship’s medic.

  Contro rummaged deep in his cardigan pockets for his organiser pad. Sure enough, there were a few little message lights blinking and twirling on the screen, which was partially obscured by a sticky tube of Boddington’s Toffees that had come unwrapped in his pocket as well. “So you did!”

  “Sally’s on the case,” Waffa reported, “I was just there. I figured I’d better talk to her in person in case the communicators had been compromised – you know, in case it wasn’t just a matter of Contro not getting my messages.”

  “Sorry!”

  “Anyway, I dropped past Sally’s and then came here. Six decks, on foot, without even using the elevator. Pretty bracing actually,” Waffa went on with a lightness that even Contro could tell was a little forced. “Communications might be untrustworthy, hard to be certain about that. I wanted to be sure you’d heard the actual words from my mouth, without risking the Artist messing around with them. Or at least minimising that risk.”

  Janya frowned. “The Artist?”

  Waffa paused, then chuckled. “Maybe I should start at the start.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Just don’t be surprised if we’re interrupted. I’m not sure what to expect at this point, I don’t know just how widespread the control is and what level either of them are willing to take it to. I can’t even be sure if the synth is messing with our data, it says that’s against its character but you know, synths can lie,” Waffa told them about their apparent shadow, and his commandeering and awakening of the Tramp’s computer. “I don’t think sneaking around and doing things analogue is going to help us all that much,” he concluded. “If Bruce gets tired of listening to us and watching us scurrying around in here, it can just open all those wonderful airlocks and flush us all into space. With or without chewing on us first. No more problem. Like I say, I’m having a hard time figuring out just how far they’re taking any of this.”

  “I was with you right up until that ‘Bruce’ bit,” Glomulus ventured.

  “The Tramp’s computer,” Janya said impatiently while Waffa glared at Glomulus. “When it’s in full synthetic intelligence mode.”

  “I was supposed to know that?” Glomulus protested.

  “He’s mentioned it in a couple of his reports.”

  For a moment, Waffa looked slightly dizzy at the idea that someone had actually read any of his reports in that much detail, but he recovered. “Anyway,” he went on, “it didn’t kill me while I was on my way here or while I was talking to Sally, and as far as I know it hasn’t killed her, so I guess we just have to operate on the assumption that it’s got an agenda but that the agenda doesn’t necessarily include killing us unless we become too much of a threat,” he paused judiciously. “Maybe not even then,” he added. “It’s hard to gauge a synthetic intelligence and figure out what it wants.”

  “But it’s paired up with this Artist character,” Janya said.

  “I’m not actually allowed to read the official reports…” Glomulus pointed out.

  “Right,” Waffa nodded, ignoring the medic. “I don’t think Bruce is hostile as such, although it is a bit messed up. In fact, it offered to help me with my distillery project…” he shook his head, momentarily distracted. “The Artist, though, is a bit more of an unknown quantity,” he concluded.

  “He’s a Molran,” Janya said, “most likely.”

  “So an un
known quantity of Molran!” Contro declared.

  “I suppose so,” Janya smiled slightly. “But most likely a whole one.”

  “So!” Contro carried on merrily. “And an artist, by golly! And he gets his spit on things! Ha ha ha! Things like feet! Honestly! Artists these days!”

  “We also have teeth marks,” Janya said, “although the remains were in such bad shape it is hard to tell if it was just the imprint from having the flesh near his mouth, or if he actually bit the remains. Still, it helps us rule out a few things.”

  “Was it enough to get some sort of dental match?” Waffa suggested.

  “The teeth are Molran, that’s all we know,” Glomulus took up the thread after consulting his panel. “Of course, we’re relying on the same computer that failed to give us DNA identity to give us dental identity, so if it didn’t give us one there’s no logical reason for it to give us the other.”

  “What was Sally going to do about Bruce anyway?” Janya asked.

  SALLY

  “Right, you bastard. Let’s see you get out of this one.”

  Unlike Contro, Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed had actually been raised Mygonite rather than just being named by them and then slowly growing up in a fluffy pink Controesque fog with blurry Mygonite silhouettes making comforting foghorn noises in the general vicinity.

  Sally’s people were warriors. They’d been warriors for generations, standing in readiness of the Cancer in the Core should it ever begin to spread. It had left her fight-or-flight model hopelessly unbalanced.

  She tinkered with the heavy box in front of her, adjusting clunky-looking diodes and ridiculous pieces of soldered circuitry. A little screen in the middle of the eighteen-inch-on-a-side, eight-pound box showed a charmingly ancient little blue squiggly oscillation pattern. It was a thing of low-tech, classical beauty. And it might quite possibly kill them all.

  Her ancestors had been in so many wars, she felt she was letting the side down with the petty squabbles on board the Tramp. The fight she’d been mediating – or at least post-mortem-ing – before Waffa showed up at her office, for example. The fight between Zeegon and Automated Janitorial Drone 17.

  Hardly the stuff of glorious song.

  Fights among the crew weren’t uncommon. Even a couple of their more volatile eejits got into it from time to time, although they had some inhibiting factors in their configurations that fortunately – so far – the Tramp’s flawed printing plant had not managed to accidentally overwrite. They were usually Waffa’s problem as Chief of Security and Operations, but in this case he had successfully escalated it to her on the grounds that it was related to EVA devices, and promptly made himself busy with some airlock glitch or other.

  Zeegon had gotten in a fight with Automated Janitorial Drone 17 when it had attempted, with reasonable success, to tidy away his latest scooter project. It had been close, but Zeegon had won with only minor buffer-pad burns, and hadn’t required any sort of medical attention. After securing his work, however, he had kitted up and gone after the unit as it dragged itself off to an automated repair station.

  That was when it had become a broader tactical matter, at least according to Waffa’s extended essay justifying the escalation. Minor dust-ups with the machinery were one thing, since even in their damaged state the little stuff was easily fixed by the automated stations. But full-scale punitive missions, complete with bandoleers of tools and the slogan “this time it’s personal”, not so much. Space-worthy scooter technology, potential ejection of materials, breakdown in human / mechanical interaction … Sally had skimmed Waffa’s report, but had soon realised that it would be more effort to read it thoroughly and argue the point than it would be to get Zeegon to just settle the Hell down.

  Sally reached into a compartment in her desk and pulled out a loop of silver wire she had made herself. She measured out a careful length of it – silver wasn’t your classically naturally-occurring-in-space sort of metal, generally speaking – and clipped it off.

  Now, technically Automated Janitorial Drone 17 had been within its operational rights because Zeegon was supposed to prepare his workspaces and it was a very easy booking process to classify a whole workshop area – or indeed any floorspace, really – as off-limits for building purposes. He’d fallen out of the habit since The Accident, however, because there was so much space and so few Automated Janitorial Drones, and nobody shouted at him anymore when he started to randomly assemble things in quiet corners, flipball courts and corridors.

  For his larger projects, he should have learned his lesson long since. This was not the first time he had been burned by the cleaning service. In fact, he swore this was the same over-zealous Automated Janitorial Drone as last time. Without even considering the possibility that it might be a symptom of the computer’s return to full synthetic intelligence status, Sally had closed the file and let Zeegon off with a short, sharp finger-poke in the carpet-burn.

  That was the way Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed dealt with confrontations. Sally’s great-great-great-grandparents had been kicked so hard, she woke up with a dislocated butt. And the only way she could react to it was to plant her heels and swing.

  She’d never say so herself, but Sally – five-feet-and-change in her jackboots, scarcely taller than Janya, plump and round-faced and top-knotted and usually-smiling – was probably the most formidable, most magnificent example of humanity left in the galaxy.

  She’d always remember what her father had said to her when she was a young child, growing up in Gífrheim. “You will be like life in the Last Days of Earth,” he’d told her. “Bright, brutal, beautiful … and short.”

  Sally’s mother, if possible even more cynical than her father, had usually added “and pointlessly, hopelessly circular” to that heart-warming simile. Being of much the same compact build as her daughter, she’d felt it was her place to inject realistic expectations wherever necessary.

  So, that had been Sally’s day. A trashed Automated Janitorial Drone and a lightly-injured and severely-cheesed-off crewmember, and the nagging problem of how she was going to phrase the whole thing when she related it to Clue. She’d also been informed, later, about the airlock incident and had taken a moment to quietly congratulate herself on dodging a bureaucratic bullet by taking on the Zeegon fight instead, but she wasn’t going to tell Clue about that.

  She wired up the connections between three of the points on the box, and a small green light came on. Sally nodded to herself and spooled out another length of the precious silver wire.

  When Waffa had actually arrived at her office in person a short while ago, she’d been glad for the distraction even as she was inwardly rolling her eyes. She’d assumed, if it wasn’t going to be about Waffa trying to offload the airlock thing onto her after all, it would be about the tunnelling jurisdiction thing again.

  Seriously, was it a security thing or a tactical thing when the eight remaining non-command crewmembers just up and started knocking out walls between crew quarters and expanding their apartment sizes? For a while there it had been like a game of Black Lieutenants’ grasp, with each of the sillier crewmembers carving out rows of quarters up and down and back and forth across the crew decks, with the unwritten rule that a block of quarters fully-encircled by interconnected rooms and not intersecting with any competing rows became the de facto property of the encircler. At least Zeegon, Decay, Whye, and even Contro had joined this ludicrous game, although his efforts had been slapdash and had actually resulted in a hole knocked through into a corridor – and it was only by dint of the hull reinforcements that he hadn’t gone in the other direction and flushed himself into space. Waffa himself was guilty of it, too, which just added another layer of annoyance to the whole debate over who should do something about it, since Clue didn’t appear to give a good God damn and the Captain might as well not even have been on board.

  Even Janya had tried her hand at interior design, although at least she had lodged a request and given proper professional reasons for her little li
brary.

  Sally herself had wanted to have a go at it. To be honest, she wasn’t sure why each crewmember couldn’t just take a couple of officers’ suites and worry about the adjustment required should a full crew complement return to the Tramp in the unlikely event of it ever happening. As it was, if they stumbled upon new crewmembers now, they’d have to rent quarters-space from one of the vast, rambling empires the noncoms had built on the habitation decks. Z-Lin was the only person on the officers’ decks, since the Captain had his own chambers in the dome.

  And the looting, that had had to stop. In the end they’d paired up to do the work, and Sally had delegated the reporting to Waffa by the simple expedient of not doing any reports. She’d assumed, optimistically, that this would be the end of it.

  But Waffa hadn’t wanted to reopen that can of crap, Mygon be praised.

  All Sally had known, up to that moment, was what Waffa had said in his general casualty alert – an airlock had gone haywire and chewed up an eejit, and that they were now flying again. She was in charge of tactical and technically the incoming objects and retrievals fell under that, but usually only when they were something relevant to a battle situation. Waffa sent so damn many notifications about the automatic retrievals and routine maintenance and the rocks and space junk they ran into and the risk analyses of things that might happen later, Sally had learned to tune it out.

  And the death of an eejit, while sad for the eejit, wasn’t really a casualty that threatened general shipboard welfare.

  Sally had long since identified the computer as a threat, even though it was difficult to consider the synth itself as one. Computer damage and corruption seemed more likely to cause life-threatening problems, and synths were largely immune to such things. Damage bad enough to make a synthetic intelligence ‘go weird’ would simply stop it from initiating. The Tramp’s synth should have remained on standby.