Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  And once you’d done that a half-dozen times in a room full of people who had shat themselves, oh boy, did the shine ever start to come off.

  Glamour? Forget it. And the sexy aliens with the turquoise abs most likely had toxic bacteria on their kinky long forked blue-black tongues, or reproduced using egg sacs that nature decreed had to incubate somewhere.

  Space was crap and Z-Lin Clue wanted to get off.

  Sometimes she thought the Molren were onto something with their wacky apocalyptic techno-mythology, the etta as they called it in Xidh. Etta, an odyssey where both start and finish were complete unknowns, just an aeon of flying through the universe in a sorrowful attempt to find the exit.

  She sighed.

  If Glomulus Cratch hadn’t been on board, Z-Lin would have had no recourse but to accept the descriptor ‘skinny’. As it was, she was free to revel in ‘slender’, ‘lean’, ‘slim’ and sometimes even ‘lithe’. In a weird way, then, she supposed she should have been grateful the Rip had survived The Accident.

  Z-Lin was, with the dubious exception of the Captain and the even more dubious exception of helmsman Zeegon Pendraegg, the only Academy-trained crewmember on board, in any weight category. And she was ninety percent sure she was the only graduate. She was pretty sure the Captain had performed some sort of nightmarish blood-soaked sacrificial ritual to Karl the Bloody-Handed in order to secure his position – or at least to secure the captaincy he’d apparently held before being busted down to Captain of AstroCorps Transpersion Modular Payload 400.

  The whole question of Academy training and rank, not to mention official protocols and considerations, all seemed a bit pointless when you stopped to think you were the only full AstroCorps crewmember on board. You learned about the possibility of establishing a chain of command in a total-loss situation, but it was hard to look at the pure theory at the time and realise just how silly it was.

  The uniforms were perhaps the best example of this.

  The very concept of a ‘uniform’, linguistically, became a bit of a joke when you were the only one wearing it. The overwhelming majority of the Tramp’s crew, of course, wore the able red – a standard non-command AstroCorps uniform that was nevertheless quite clearly an identifying wrapper on a part rather than clothing on a person. The fabricator printed out a half-dozen of them for each able and that was all they ever wore throughout their forty-odd years sucking air.

  Then there were the others. Sally, Waffa, Decay, Zeegon and Contro all wore the basic non-Corps crew uniform, approved and regulated but ultimately not official in any way. Janus and Janya wore regulation academic attire, and Glomulus wore his hospital whites over the top of whatever garish fashion monstrosity he’d selected from his very limited wardrobe.

  This, of course, was only when they were on shift. Which – depending on the situation – could actually turn out to be for cruel and unusual lengths of time.

  It was a system set in place entirely for the consistent and tidy identification and professionalism of a crew far more numerous and far more diverse than their current batch. And almost infinitely more professional. Frankly, as far as Z-Lin was concerned, if they just showed up for their shifts and didn’t attempt mutiny, sabotage or musical theatre, the dress code could go stuff itself.

  Z-Lin Clue was from an AstroCorps family. Her lineage stretched right back to the Destarion. She had the Elevator in her blood. And the added sarcasm value of her orders coming from ‘Commander Clue’ really couldn’t be overstated.

  Clue was standing at the fabrication plant, looking up at the huge, silent machine.

  Since all eejits and ables looked the same, and the configuration process was more like layering down a personality and training than just programming a drone, there was always a risk of the wrong one putting on the uniform and pins, going to the wrong area, doing the wrong job, slipping category and getting everybody killed. So they were carefully tagged and computer monitored, and redirected with very gentle electrical impulses when it looked like they were going to the wrong place and picking up the wrong set of tools.

  The computer again, Z-Lin thought. She wondered what they were going to do if Waffa’s precious ‘Bruce’ decided to mix the eejits around, switch off the impulse filaments or repurpose them to send the eejits meandering all over the ship, causing random mayhem in their attempts to do jobs they scarcely understood even when they were standing in the right room and in front of the right panel. She wondered if it had already thought of this trick. Wondered if it had already done it.

  She wondered if it was controlling the eejit fabrication in the first place, and making the plant fill the ship with gits.

  Or minions.

  Z-Lin also wondered, not for the first time, whatever had happened to the real Able Darko. Apparently there was a profile that the human original had, distinguishing him. And all ables were computer-identified, just as distinctly and infallibly as human fingerprints, navels, irises, genes. Plus they had the filaments. It was no more possible for one able to pass himself off as another than identical twins to swap identities.

  But there were conspiracy theories. Had Darko gone out into the vast able pool, invisible in plain sight, and made his way around the universe? Z-Lin had thought those stories were fun, once upon a time.

  Giving another sigh, she turned away from the looming plant and made her way down, and then back up, to the medical bay.

  “Alright. Talk to me,” she said, stepping into Cratch’s sterile domain. Glomulus, Janya, Sally, Waffa and Contro were already there, and looked up with palpable relief when she entered.

  “Ha ha! Well okay! Hello, aw, what do you want to talk about? I don’t suppose there’s any point in talking about the weather–”

  “Someone else talk to me,” Z-Lin interrupted the chattering Contro, closing her eyes.

  “We have a Molran going by the handle of ‘the Artist’,” Janya said, “infiltrating and spying on the Tramp’s interior and crew by way of jacking into our computer somehow. This has brought the synthetic intelligence off standby and made it behave … oddly. The Artist has apparently instructed it to keep us inside the ship, and it decided – independently or due to his influence – that this meant killing Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 with an airlock.”

  “But not me,” Waffa put in. “By complete coincidence, I might add,” he shifted his feet. “It’s also difficult to ascertain how much of the accident was intentional and how much really was down to a series of errors in the hardware and blunders by the eejit.”

  “Fair enough. It has also allowed him to piggyback along on our relative field when we go superluminal,” Janya concluded.

  “We think,” Waffa added. “We don’t actually know how long he’s been out there.”

  “We don’t even know if he’s out there,” Z-Lin declared.

  “Um,” Cratch pointed at the foot of Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19, lying on the examination table in its puddle of juice.

  “And exactly how much do we know that didn’t come directly from the machine?” Clue said. “Can any of us see DNA?” she waved towards the blob of flesh and shoe-bits. “What part of that mess looks like a Molran’s dental work?” she turned to Sally. “You’re the closest we have to a synthetic intelligence expert,” she said, “and I do actually mean that as a compliment. What do you think?”

  “She’s right,” Sally said morosely. “It all came from the computer. The scans, the readouts, all of it. Rip – Cratch most likely swabbed manually for samples–” Glomulus, looking faintly amused, nodded, “–but it was the scanners that told him it was Molran saliva and Molran DNA and Molran tooth-imprints. Even the debris trajectories from the initial airlock malfunction were mechanically plotted. Nobody was watching those bits fly off into space, unless the Cap was stargazing at the time. The synth – Bruce – could have caught that piece the second it squeezed out of the outer airlock, fed it over to the catchers and then sounded the impact alert. And let us think the foot was coming flying back
from some crazy impossible angle.”

  “But you talked to this guy,” Waffa said plaintively. “You were just saying–”

  “I talked to a voice out of a speaker,” Sally said, turning to address Z-Lin and simultaneously sending a transcript of the conversation to her organiser pad with a flick of her fingers across her own wristwatch communicator. “Bruce could easily have synthesised that.”

  “But you’ve activated your game changer,” Waffa pointed at the large square backpack Sally was carrying, “right? So it couldn’t have been faking the communication.”

  Sally grimaced. “External comms are much more robust and operate off a different system. Bruce could have been in that system all along, routing this eloquent-sociopath shooey through the external array. It’s the person-to-person comms, and the surveillance, that the game changer isolates,” she tapped her watch, and shook her head. “And even then, it could be bypassing a lot of my measures by using the externals.”

  “Okay,” Clue said, looking up from the transcript of Sally’s singularly unilluminating dialogue with the Artist. “Why?” there was a pause and a series of blank looks at this. “Why dismember Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 but then catch his bits?”

  “Simple,” Janya replied. “Because of its orders. Whether they came from an external source or from its own subroutines.”

  “Nobody leaves,” Waffa said sickly.

  “I’m struck by a sudden insatiable desire to talk about the weather,” Cratch remarked into the silence.

  Z-Lin pointed at him without looking. “Shut up,” she turned to Sally. “Why the elaborate charade, though?”

  “There doesn’t need to be logic behind a synth’s random whims any more than there needs to be logic behind a–” she stopped, and looked at their medic, “–human psychopath,” she concluded.

  “We were all weirded out but more or less accepting of the possibility that a Molran might catch a flying piece of corpse, bite it and throw it back at us,” Janya commented. “Once the readings said that’s what it was, we didn’t question it.”

  “Just in case it isn’t just the whimsy of madness,” Sally went on, “maybe somebody should ask Bruce whether there are any other rules like the whole nobody-leaves thing, that it might decide to dismember us in the execution of.”

  They waited for a moment, just in case Bruce happened to still be patched in despite the game changer. If it was, it opted not to speak up. Not even to huffily defend itself against the unfair accusation of being dismemberment-happy.

  “Waffa, it speaks to you,” Z-Lin said. “Let us know if and when you get a response.”

  “Look, we can discuss this all night,” Sally said, “the point is, once we accept that the machine is compromised, we have to second-guess everything we know that came to us through the machine. And that’s not an easy space to get our heads inside, because we live inside the machine and we get basically everything from it.”

  “Still,” Janya muttered, “we should have considered this as soon as Waffa told us about Bruce.”

  “No point wailing and gnashing about it,” Clue said. “The good thing about square one is, the only way is forward. Of course, this presupposes we are aware of all the squares and there are no as-yet unsuspected squares somewhere behind square one for us to be unexpectedly pushed back onto, my proverbs are crap, alright? Let’s move on.”

  “There might still be a foot-biting Molran lunatic in a scooter out there with a synthetic intelligence hub in his lap, referring to himself as ‘the Artist’ and calling the shots Bruceside,” Sally said. “Or the whole story might just be a fabrication intended to put us off the trail of whatever Bruce is actually doing. Or it might just be making it all up for no reason.”

  “Those are some widespread options,” Waffa remarked.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Contro said.

  Z-Lin tsked lightly but patiently. “Is now really the–”

  “–he hasn’t been matching our relative field profile and piggybacking along with us. Not in the last couple of dozen times we’ve gone relative.”

  “What? How do you know?” Clue demanded.

  “Well, it’s obvious, really!” Contro laughed. “It would have left a bubble on the surface of the field, a distortion. Not literally, of course, but like a puddle with a brick at the bottom, and a duck swims over the brick and its feet brush over the top and – well, honestly, you know what I mean!”

  “We actually don’t,” Waffa pointed out.

  Clue frowned. “Are you saying this Artist didn’t use the Tramp’s computer to merge its field with his and track us through soft-space?”

  “Using our computer or just by a lucky guess, either way it would have left a mark,” Contro said positively. “A duckprint on the–”

  “Can we leave the duck for just a second?” Z-Lin requested.

  “Righto!” Contro said cheerfully. “It’s not a perfect comparison anyway, since a duck floats on the surface of a puddle with its feet dangling down, and for this to work it really needs to be a torus-shaped puddle–”

  “Why didn’t you mention that this was impossible back when we were talking about the Artist merging fields?” Cratch interrupted gently.

  “Well, I didn’t know there wasn’t a lump until just now!” Contro said. “Honestly, you lot! I had to think about it!”

  “You’ve been … thinking about it,” Janya said, sounding a little lightheaded. Contro smiled innocently and tapped his temple. “Calculating the relative field profile of the ship and checking it for irregularities.”

  “Yep!”

  “In your head.”

  “Well, I don’t know how to do it on the computer and the computer might be acting all wacky anyway!” Contro exclaimed. “Honestly!”

  “Contro’s brain may be the only ship system not infiltrated by Bruce,” Clue said, mentally marking this sentence down on her list of things she never thought she would say in the course of her professional life. It was a long list, but this sentence came in quite close to the top of it.

  “Did pigs carry each other around a lot?” Contro asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that did.”

  “This does tend to bolster the ‘there is no Artist’ hypothesis,” Janya suggested smoothly. “It’s one of the few pieces of information – and I can’t believe I’m about to say this – that we can actually depend on.”

  “It is sort of one of those days,” Z-Lin concurred with a nod.

  “If Contro says there’s no sign of a second vessel following us through soft-space, that either means the Artist was floating right here in this area when we dropped out, or came in from somewhere else at relative speed and dropped out right here next to us – neither one of these is necessarily impossible, but they’re both staggeringly unlikely,” Janya said.

  “Or that he never existed in the first place and Bruce is just making him up,” Clue concluded.

  “Right,” Janya said, and turned to the smiling Contro. “I never thought I’d say this either, but what about your ‘clinging to the hull’ theory from earlier?” she asked. “Could he do that and ride along with us, and then launch himself out into space when we dropped out?”

  “Not without throwing a relative field of his own to surround him, and merging it with ours,” Contro said, “which would leave the ripple, see? The relative field is only a matter of microns around our hull, he couldn’t sit under it. If he’s come with us, he’s been inside the ship the whole time,” the transpersion physicist finished positively, “and Bruce has been hiding him from us. And maybe then jumping out into space when we slow down, and pretending he followed us, and Bruce hiding all that…”

  Everyone was staring at the smiling little man in the cardigan.

  “Bruce seemed pretty definite about the Artist being out there,” Waffa ventured. “It got all poetical on that particular point, actually.”

  “Misdirection?” Z-Lin suggested.

  “More to the point, is there any way w
e can tell for sure in either case, without just waiting for more information from some non-Bruce-related source?” Janya asked. “This course-change, for example. It happened before Sally locked navigation. Our acceleration had started before Sally locked the relative drive, too – how long before we hit maximum subluminal and start to burn out the conventional engines?”

  “The engines won’t burn out,” Z-Lin said firmly. “But we will reach maximum subluminal cruising speed and level off.”

  “Are we close enough to any stars or other bodies to make some sort of visual guesses as to our course and heading?” Waffa added.

  “Not really,” Z-Lin said, “and even if we had a sextant, none of us know how to use one.”

  “If we could see any stars, we could navigate by sextant,” Cratch said cheerfully, “if we had a sextant and knew how to use it and the navigational controls weren’t locked out. My proverbs are no better than yours, Commander.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”

  “Sorry.”

  “So what are the odds of us actually having been course-changed,” Janya said, “and crashing into whatever the Artist has us pointed towards because we locked Bruce out of the navigational system?”

  “At subluminal?” Sally said, and shook her head. “There’s nothing within fifty thousand years of here.”

  “So we have some time,” Clue concluded.

  “I guess we really can discuss this all night,” Cratch smiled.

  GLOMULUS

  There was, of course, only so much circular discussion even the intrepid crew of the Tramp could endure, so after a short while they departed for dinner and then to their quarters for an uneasy night-shift of sleep.