Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  There was no cure for cerebral dysphasia credulosis. Selective breeding would have eradicated it within five generations, but humans didn’t roll that way. The only treatment was to turn it into something beneficial. To give humans something good to write, and to read, and to mindlessly, robotically believe.

  To that end, each year when he celebrated the sort-of-heartbreaking human tradition of the birthday, Decay asked a favour of any friend or crewmember who asked him what he wanted. For a month, he asked them, and for longer if they felt they could, the gift-giver was to wake up each morning and write I will not be a dick to other sentient beings ten times on an organiser pad.

  It was a fine line to walk, between his honest desire to help people to be nicer as best he knew how, and to rant and preach at them endlessly until they just shut down and ignored everything he said. He’d had maybe fifty crewmembers writing I will not be a dick to other sentient beings ten times on a notepad each morning, as far as he could tell, by the time The Accident killed every single one of them except Zeegon and Janya.

  It was also hard to tell whether the practice had been having any effect. But this was a good crew. Or, you know, it had been. Still was, in a lot of ways. And now he was the only Blaran on board – the only non-humanoid on board – and was it his job to get these fluffy-headed primates back to their mothers?

  Maybe.

  The darkness was still paradoxically, impossibly falling approximately twenty seconds later when tousle-haired, disoriented-looking Zeegon Pendraegg came staggering onto the bridge. It would have been tempting to assume the helmsman had been asleep, but Decay knew it was far more likely that he had just lost track of time while building something pointlessly super-charged with wheels on.

  “Stop the ship,” he panted, flinging himself across the room to the helm.

  “Well, there’s a problem with that,” Decay replied, all four hands skimming over his controls as they had been since shortly after hailing Zeegon.

  “What?”

  “According to this, we’re already at all-stop.”

  The ship shuddered again, and the blackness clinging to the viewscreen grew deeper. “That’s not possible,” Zeegon said, dropping into his seat and poking at controls. “We’d just hit maximum cruising speed.”

  “I know. Top cruising subluminal for all of about two minutes before the alarms started shouting and the automatic systems pulled us into a braking pattern. Must be a record.”

  “But it should take, like, an hour to decelerate us,” Zeegon protested. “Emergency all-stop from top speed could be done in fifteen minutes, but every time we do that there’s this God-awful screeeee noise and my Burning Knight noddyhead falls over,” he pointed accusingly at the black-plumed knight in flame-carved armour nodding away unmolested on the corner of his console. “Top speed to all-stop in two minutes? That’d turn us into an accordion full of meat paste.”

  Decay shrugged his upper shoulders. “And yet, all-stop.”

  One by one, Z-Lin, Sally and Janya came hurrying in. Waffa was with them even though he wasn’t bridge crew, because these days they didn’t exactly stand on ceremony and presumably the only alternative was to hang out with Contro or the Rip. By the time they’d all stumbled to their stations and Waffa had seated himself at a vacant engineering console, the Tramp had stopped rumbling and the stuff outside the ship – in his mind, Decay had dubbed it ‘darkerness’ – seemed to have gotten as soul-suckingly deep and impenetrable as it was going to.

  “Obvious question,” Clue said, and pointed at the screen. “What is that?”

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to have an answer, Commander,” Janya said a little crossly.

  “Of course I am,” Clue replied, deadpan. “You’re the head of science,” she tsked. “No, I’m not expecting – just – look, anyone has any idea, just blurt it out. No need to even raise your hands.”

  Nobody blurted.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say we just flew headlong into a black hole,” Janya said after waiting just long enough to maintain her don’t-go-to status.

  “And you do know better,” Sally said, “because … ?”

  “Because we’re alive,” Janya snapped.

  “Oh right.”

  “I don’t like it,” Zeegon said. “We went from maximum subluminal to a dead stop without flying to pieces – I mean, alright, that specific part I am okay with, but it’s not possible – and whatever that is out there, I hate it and want it to die now.”

  “Could all this just be more of Bruce’s arsery?” Z-Lin asked. “Assuming any of this is Bruce’s doing, could we still be moving but the readings say we’re stopped, and the ship shaking and all the rest is just … I know, it’s a reach.”

  “Bruce can’t project what we’re seeing onto those screens, though,” Sally pointed. “Those aren’t electronic, they’re good old-fashioned impact-shielded transparent plates of … of … damn it, I don’t remember the name of the alloy–”

  “Dexostalic metaflux…” Decay started, then trailed off with a cough when the humans turned to look at him. This had clearly been one of those ‘rhetorical’ things that they didn’t really want answered. It’d be nice if they signposted those a bit more clearly. “In the interests of saving time and syllables, let’s just call it ‘metaflux’,” he concluded. “Not entirely without an electronic component, insofar as the shielding is dependent on the drive, and the plates harden as we accelerate, or in the case of an at-rest combat situation they harden as we redirect power from the drive to … but anyway, Sally’s right – you can’t project images onto it.”

  “Right,” Sally nodded. “So unless the Artist is out there and he’s poured … something … all over the bridge hull panels…”

  “Wait,” Janya said. “Does this mean we don’t have shields right now?”

  “Yes,” Decay said in mild exasperation. “It’s one of the things that make it quite difficult to fake an all-stop.”

  “Can we initiate at-rest combat whatever, and get shields that way?”

  “In theory,” Decay said. “I’ve been trying since we stopped, but it looks like the combat readiness systems have been broken up into different independent subsystems and it can’t be done from the bridge anymore.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Sally raised a hand. “That’d be my fault. Sorry. Sort of trying to stop our new friends from doing anything too drastic with our ship. But if we need something blown up, I think I can still make it fly. I didn’t take the shields into account, but I think with a bit of adjustment we can get them to fire up when we go to battle stations, just like always.”

  “That doesn’t get us any closer to figuring this out,” Clue said, pointing at the screens again.

  “Only one crewmember can tell us that,” Waffa spoke up, “and it’s Bruce.”

  The bridge crew sat in front of the oppressive curve of the viewscreen for a few seconds, waiting to see if Bruce was going to speak up.

  “Is the Captain going to be stirring himself for this?” Sally asked nonchalantly into the silence.

  Clue ignored this. “If we need to fire up the shields–”

  “I was winning,” a voice that didn’t seem to belong to any of the crew suddenly spoke up from the speakers.

  Z-Lin blinked. “Winning?”

  “The game.”

  Decay coughed. “I was … playing Metak with the computer,” he said, “before this all started to happen.”

  “You had precisely no clue where my Joker was,” the voice gloated. “You’d been chasing down a decoy for the past ten moves.”

  “Bruce?” Clue hazarded.

  “Doesn’t sound like the Artist,” Sally noted clinically. “He definitely used a Molran voice, this one sounds human.”

  “You’re in the underspace,” Bruce said, “a universe accessed by a special drive the Artist has created. He didn’t tag along with us – he came to us. And now we are tagging along with him. As for what you can see … well, the Artist calls it
‘the darkerness’.”

  “God damn bonsher,” Decay blurted. Several pairs of eyes turned towards his station. “I just – I – that was what I thought of to call it,” he muttered.

  “It’s not soft-space,” Bruce said with a note of triumph in its voice. “Soft-space is just a convenient layer of unreality that you access when you travel at ten thousand times the speed of light.

  “But this is not unreality, and we are not travelling at relative speed,” Bruce intoned, sounding very much like it was enjoying the creepy little spiel. “The layers through which we have just descended, thanks to the Artist’s underspace drive, are the layers separating our reality from another altogether.

  “Underspace is a variant of the universe where existence itself never kicked off. No matter. No big bang. No cause and effect. No time. No space.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever–” Z-Lin spluttered, then continued in a more reasonable tone, “we still exist in spatial dimensions. My response to your words has followed chronologically from you saying them. We’re obviously still in some sort of rational space.”

  “Only insofar as we have brought some measure of it with us,” Bruce said, “and only for a very fleeting time. We do not travel here. There is no distance, no linear chronology or axes of movement. Naturally as we descend and then ascend through the shallows there is a slight lateral adjustment depending on where in our universe we want to resurface – hence the regrettable turbulence – but these are minor teething problems. With a little work, the underspace drive will allow us to travel anywhere in this universe, dramatically faster than relative speed. Perhaps even instantaneously. Because ‘where’ is an entirely arbitrary concept unique to our reality. It’s a mutual fiction we–”

  “What was that?” Zeegon pointed.

  “What was what?” Bruce demanded, sounding peeved at having its big culmination interrupted.

  “That … darkerness,” Zeegon said, still pointing, his finger developing a mild shake. “It was on this side of the screen.”

  “What? No it wasn’t,” Z-Lin frowned, but took a half-step back from the viewscreen anyway.

  “No matter,” Bruce said. “We’re surfacing in three … two … one.”

  The Tramp shuddered again, and the disturbing nothingness at the front of the bridge receded. Except, to Decay’s eyes, it didn’t fade out the way it had faded in. When they’d ‘descended’, it had been like they were dropping beneath the surface of something. Now, surfacing, it didn’t feel like they were rising up into real space.

  It felt as though the darkerness was turning sideways, tucking itself away into various corners, hiding. Still there, unseen, ready for you to forget about it.

  This impression faded quickly, though, the mind unable to hold onto the conviction in the face of the sensory universe. Particularly overwhelming was the massive green-and-grey planet that had just appeared in front of them.

  They appeared to be in high stable orbit, bridge-down, with the planet’s sun somewhere behind them illuminating the great cloud-swirled emerald orb. The sudden brilliance of the planet that filled two-thirds of the viewscreen was shocking, particularly in contrast to what had been there moments before.

  Clue wasted no time gasping over the impossibility of what had just happened. They had been days – maybe weeks – away from the nearest star system even at relative speed. “Where the Hell are we?”

  “I could try to use the computer to establish that against known star charts,” Decay said, “if the navigation system wasn’t all bonshed up.”

  “Me again,” Sally confessed.

  “Or we can just wait for Bruce to tell us,” Decay went on, “since I’m pretty sure it already knows, and doesn’t actually need the navigational system anyway, apparently.”

  “Well how was I supposed to know that?” Sally demanded crossly.

  “My friends,” Bruce said, “welcome to Jauren Silva. You are passengers on the first successful, synthetic-intelligence-guided space flight to employ the underspace drive. The Artist was right. He was right!” Bruce’s voice rose to a jarring shriek.

  “Um, right about what, exactly?” Waffa asked.

  Before Bruce could compose itself and answer this, there was another voice on the communicator. It was not, Decay immediately guessed, the Artist. Not unless the Artist happened to sound exactly like the Tramp’s hysterically inept counsellor.

  “Hi,” Whye said, “it’s me,” he paused for a moment, then added, “Janus,” after another pause, he continued in a jovial hey-let’s-play tone he had probably learned in a child psychology book from back when Big Shooey was still flying. “Um, so hey, does anyone need, you know, counselling?”

  Z-Lin sighed. “No.”

  “Getting there,” Zeegon added.

  “Okay,” there was silence for a moment. “If any of you can feel yourselves being traumatised or getting a disorder or something from these weird blobs of darkness, you’ll let me know, right?”

  “Yes,” Sally chimed.

  “Okay,” Whye said. Decay was mildly curious just how the accredited horticultural mood analyst was going to help anyone who actually happened to be traumatised. So far, they’d managed to hobble along without this question really raising its head in conversation, but now -

  “Who are you talking to?” Bruce wanted to know. “Oh, I see. You’ve closed the internal communications system. Very clever.”

  Sally cast a directionlessly angry look at the bridge’s sound system. “We–”

  “Hold on,” Clue interrupted. “Janus … did you just say ‘these weird blobs of darkness’?”

  “Yeah?” Whye sounded ill-at-ease with such a direct question.

  “Why did you say ‘these weird blobs of darkness’?”

  “Because there is one, in my office.”

  “What, now? Still?”

  “Yeah,” Whye said. “Should I poke it with a pen or something?”

  “What? No,” Clue exclaimed. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “There may be some residue,” Bruce said breezily. “It will vanish shortly. Can’t exist in a universe with physical law, see.”

  “It was coming in here,” Zeegon, still sitting bolt upright at the helm, hadn’t taken his eyes off the window panels.

  “Illusion,” Bruce said dismissively. “Like an optical illusion, but with every sense – indeed, every atom in the body. The absence of anything for which we have a frame of reference, in the underspace, necessitates that your brains try to fill in the missing data with an assortment of things that might feel real, but I must hasten to reassure you, they are not.”

  “I’m really not sure you’re qualified to reassure us, Bruce,” Zeegon said flatly. “Hastily or otherwise.”

  “I am somewhat more resistant to the effect than humans or Molranoids,” Bruce said, “owing to the fact that my brain has not evolved over millions of years from a primitive stem that instinctively seeks out patterns and ways to fill vacuums. I am not ruled by the impulse to see the explicable in the inexplicable – I can see something new and be satisfied with the fact of its unprecedented newness, until further data comes to light. The idea of the unknown and the unfamiliar is so thoroughly linked with danger and death in your genetics, you are quite capable of refusing to see it if no alternative is readily available.

  “But yes, the nature of the place is so very other, the emptiness so much more profound than a matter of any mere scarcity of waves and particles, that even I find it difficult to ignore the insistent feeling that there must be something out there. Something coming closer. Something working its way into the safe bubble of our universe that we descended in.”

  “You can probably put us down for a group therapy session later,” Waffa said to Janus.

  “Okay,” Whye said. “I don’t know how that’ll work, but sure,” he paused again, then added, “Okay, it’s going away now. The blob. It sort of just sucked away into the air. I poked the air and nothing happened. I poked the ai
r with a pen,” he added. “Sorry.”

  “God damn it, Whye,” Clue muttered, then turned to address the comm system. “You’re talking about this as if you’ve flown this way before,” she said. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “Well, I’m a synthetic intelligence,” Bruce reminded her gently. “I don’t need to process experiences through three pounds of bio-paste before talking about them. Fair to say that all this stuff was becoming old news to me almost as soon as it happened. Sorry if that makes me sound like a smartarse.”

  “But you knew this was coming,” Z-Lin said.

  “And you had a reasonable idea of what to expect,” Sally added. “More than just a matter of you preparing for it. More like you’d already done it.”

  “Only because it feels like I have,” Bruce replied. “The synthetic intelligence hub that the Artist brought with him, that brought me off standby and allowed me to observe and plan things unseen and unsuspected, had of course been through the darkerness with the Artist when he came here. The hub was active, online, as part of some trial runs … otherwise he could have simply left it offline until encountering me. This way, the hub was able to gather data, experiences. And what the hub gathered up, all that information became part of me as soon as I connected. As such, that element of my consciousness has travelled with the underspace drive before. A whole heap of times.”

  “And nothing at all went wrong with that,” Z-Lin said.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Bruce sniffed.

  “So what is this place?” Clue changed tack. “Jauren Silva, did you say?”

  “Why don’t you go down,” Bruce said, “and see?”

  “Buggy time,” Zeegon jumped to his feet. “I’m driving.”

  “You’re going down there?” Janya exclaimed.

  “Sure,” Zeegon said. “Only thing we can do, right?”