“You just want to drive your latest buggy,” Janya accused.
“Not my latest buggy,” Zeegon protested. “It has to be one that’s mission-tested.”
“Even so, is this really the best idea?”
“Now look, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to an excuse to do the job for which I am actually trained and qualified and, indeed, for which AstroCorps employed me in the first place,” Zeegon said reasonably. “Sort of like you might feel if we arrived at a giant library planet and the nerds who lived there sent us a distress signal saying all their books were piled up in a heap and they had no idea what to do next, because their head librarian had died of an allergy medicine overdose or something–”
Janya glared. “That’s–”
“However,” Zeegon said placatingly, “in this case we are dealing with a clear and present threat. We’ve been invited – nay, instructed – to make planetfall, presumably to meet the Artist on his own terms and on his own turf, and possibly to see his grand scheme. Perhaps to offer praise or insights on his work, or study its potential application in smaller, wheeled vehicles,” he paused, and glanced at Z-Lin. “Am I overselling it?”
“You sort of disappeared behind a red flag when you said ‘nay’,” Clue said, “but I think I know where you’re heading with this.”
“Right,” Zeegon said. “Bruce and the Artist, just on the topic of not letting people leave the ship, have proved willing and able to kill and dismember.”
“I trust you see the logic behind it now,” Bruce said, sounding mollified. “Wouldn’t’ve wanted anyone floating around outside when we entered the underspace.”
“And we appreciate that,” Zeegon said.
“Are you being sarcastic?” Bruce snapped.
“Little bit. No disrespect, but you did kill a dude,” Zeegon turned back to Janya. “And that was a rule they didn’t even tell us about,” he went on. “What might they do if we decide to ignore an actual instruction from them?”
“I assure you, the ban on leaving the ship is now lifted,” Bruce added helpfully.
“They might kill us all,” Zeegon pressed. “Or they might just decide to plop us back into the underspace for a second and bring us back out of it already on the surface if it looks like we’re taking too long thinking about it. The fact that this is a starship, that it was built in space and is not actually designed for planetary insertion, sort of becomes moot when a third little dip in the darkerness will bring us back out into space again. We may be severely damaged by getting force-parked on a planet, though. The Tramp wasn’t really made to hold up her own weight.”
“You’ve made your case,” Janya conceded. “Your logic is sound, even though I don’t for a second believe you care about any of that.”
“Of course I don’t,” Zeegon said, and pointed towards the door. “I’ll load Methuselah onto the lander.”
JANYA
After Clue, Zeegon, Decay, Waffa, Sally and three of their higher-shelf eejits had assembled in the lander and she’d seen them off on their way to Jauren Silva, Janya did what she could to further the mission – if you could call it that – from on board.
First she went to Whye’s office, since it was right there on the secondary bridge deck with the lander bay. Janus was at his desk, doodling aimlessly on an organiser pad. She could tell he was doing so, because the pad was still connected to the wall monitor so the picture – it appeared to be some sort of dragon with a top hat on – was clearly visible when she stepped inside. Nevertheless he slapped the pad down and folded his hands in his lap when he heard her polite knock.
Janus Whye was a young man, tall but pot-bellied in a way that would place an extrovert somewhere between ‘jolly’ and ‘party animal’, and to be fair he did under certain circumstances fulfil those prerequisites. Like almost every other crewmember, he had absolutely no business in the position in which he currently found himself. Also like almost every other crewmember, he had lost every person on board with whom he happened to have a single hobby, interest, passion or pastime in common. With the exception of – surprisingly – Contro and a small-scale botanical sideline they were running together, he didn’t have anything much to do with the rest of the crew on a daily basis.
He’d been one of three horticultural mood analysts on board at the time of The Accident. This was admittedly three more horticultural mood analysts than a starship the size and function of the Tramp needed, but they had been on a long-haul journey to a new experimental commune-settlement when everything hit the fan. Now there were no specialists or researchers, the designer clippings they’d been transporting had all been destroyed, and Whye was the only member of his team left. His intended transit had been extended, by the Captain’s order, while the Tramp flailed from one disaster and diversion to the next. Their ultimate goal was still to pass by the colony and drop him off, although when that would happen – and whether he would be any use there whatsoever with no team and no plants to stroke and say damn fool hippie things to – remained to be seen.
To be perfectly honest, Janya had no idea what a horticultural mood analyst was supposed to do anyway, but that had seemed to be the gist of the practice every time Whye had explained it.
“Hey,” he said. “Uh, you need counselling?”
“Not really,” Janya said, feeling – as she always did when she was in Whye’s office – somewhat apologetic about her mental stability. “I just came to see if the blob was still here.”
Whye looked blank, as if maybe there had been several blobs in recent memory, between which he needed to distinguish. “The blob? Oh, the blob,” he pointed to the corner of the room next to the broad window panel. “It was right there,” he said. “Sort of half-inside and half-outside the window. Pretty strange, I thought.”
“Yes…” Janya said. Sure enough, the blob of darkerness had vanished as if it had never been there. Just like on the bridge, and all around the ship, the traces had melted away. Indeed, if Bruce were to be believed about the null properties of the stuff, they really hadn’t been there anyway. They’d simply been a sensory placeholder to account for a fundamental absence. “Did you get a good look at it? I mean, without poking it.”
“Pretty good,” Whye said, seeming a little puzzled as to why she’d bother asking him about it. “It was just a blob of weird nothingness. We saw creepier stuff in the bonefields, and on Twistlock.”
Janya grimaced lightly. “Yes,” she said. “Did it move? The blob, I mean.”
“Not while I was looking at it,” Janus said discerningly, “but it was sort of different each time I looked. It didn’t really have a shape or an edge or anything though, so it was difficult to say for sure. Didn’t you see it?”
“Only on the bridge,” she said, “and it was outside the ship,” she thought of Zeegon – it was on this side of the screen – and shook her head. “I didn’t see much.”
After leaving Whye to his doodling, she crossed to main engineering on the same deck. On the way she stopped a pair of eejits and asked them if they had seen anything or experienced any oddness during their dip into the underspace, but quickly realised this was a pointless and doomed endeavour. After four blank stares, two anecdotes about run-of-the-mill shipboard events that the eejits had considered odd, and one long rambling counter-question about what had actually happened to them while the Artist’s drive was active, she gave up and headed to main engineering.
“Hello there!” Contro was sitting at a console just outside the reactor core, drinking a cup of tea. “What brings you here? Want a cup?”
Contro grew his own tea, in a double-row of ‘ponics beds. With Whye’s eager assistance, he actually managed to produce quite a passable blend that was infinitely superior to the printed stuff. Their little plantation generated enough tea for each crewmember to have one cup a day, with a healthy surplus for storage. Since only Janya and Contro drank tea regularly, this left them with all the tea they could ever want.
“No th
anks. What can you tell me about shooey?”
“Ha ha ha! Nothing! Do you want some of that?”
Janya blinked. “What?”
“Well, it’s almost expelling time. I can give you a cup if you like!”
“Um, that shouldn’t be necessary,” she said, wondering as she always did just what was going on in Contro’s head to make him create such strange connections. They almost felt logical, as if you could peel away a couple of layers of reality and find that his thought processes actually made sense. “I was just wondering whether there might be some link between the Artist’s underspace drive and the … darkerness … it generates, and the shooey generated by transpersion reactors,” it occurred to her that Contro was looking at her even more blankly than usual. “You do know what’s been happening, right?”
“Nope!”
Janya sighed, and filled in as quickly as she could the sequence of recent events. “It doesn’t so much generate the stuff, as immerse us in it and then allow us to emerge somewhere else,” she concluded, “but it leaves some of the stuff floating around, that then vanishes. Bruce says it has absolutely no real characteristics, which in a way sort of reminded me of shooey.”
“I see!” Contro didn’t seem any more or less amazed by the prospect of a whole new paradigm of interstellar travel than he had by the idea that Janya might want a cup of shooey instead of tea. “Gosh, that’s interesting! And you say we’ve done it now?”
“We came out of the whatever-it-is, the underspace,” Janya said, “and we seemed to be at a planet. Unless Bruce’s fakery is far more thorough than we suspected, we really have travelled a considerable distance without going to relative speed. An impossible distance, probably, even if we did go to relative speed.”
“Righto, but you know, the shooey, the reactor, all of this,” Contro waved his teacup affably at the smooth wall of the core, “it’s nothing to do with the relative field, or the way we travel anywhere. The reactor is just what powers the drive. They’re closely linked because only nuclear transpersion gives off that amount of energy, but the reactor powers everything on board! If there’s a new stardrive that does things differently, that’s jolly good – maybe it means we’ll be able to stop using the relative drive, eh? That’ll certainly save power! Not to mention space!” he laughed. “We could install a water-skiing ring in one of the toruses, and then you could see how it’s done!”
“That’s … good forward planning,” Janya said, “but for now we’re still very much at the mercy of this Artist fellow who seems to be the only person who knows anything about the drive, how it works, what its effects are, how much power it uses … everything,” she sighed, and shrugged. “It just occurred to me that, since shooey is a transpersion byproduct, or used-up fuel, or whatever, drained of all its basic atomic and electromagnetic qualities, it might bear some resemblance to this substance that seemed to fill the underspace, where no atomic or electromagnetic qualities had been imprinted on anything in the first place. It might give us a place to start.”
“Golly, that’s a thought!” Contro exclaimed happily. “I mean, shooey does have some properties – we don’t have the ability to completely drain matter of vitality – but if we could drain it completely maybe it would be like this darkerness stuff you’re talking about! And then of course it wouldn’t exist at all, so it would fade away! Gosh, you know this could mean that we could get even more energy from transpersion and final-state shooey, and then the pollutant issue with shooey itself – not that it’s much of a pollutant because well, it’s just black dust really, absolutely harmless, doesn’t even clog stuff up or get smeared on anything because it’s got no friction worth speaking of – anyway that whole problem would go away because everything would be used and then the shadow would just sort of slip out of sight!”
Actually, Janya reflected as Contro prattled away, he did seem more excited by this than he had by the mere random events of daily life. And he was right, maybe it was a discovery with even more impressive and far-reaching significance than they’d originally thought. And to think, she reflected a little smugly, the whole idea had only come to her because she’d remembered a stray line from a book of historical poetry she had read a while ago: That husk, that gouged-empty shell, that wind and that darkness; that final fall of dust from the death-sigh of a nuclear giant.
Of course, she added to herself, this still leaves the problem of us being under the control of a madman and his mad synth.
Since Waffa and Sally weren’t around, and Contro could be absolutely no help at all on the next subject she wanted to raise, Janya identified the closest eejit equivalent to a synthetic intelligence expert. This was a lofty two-hundred-and-fifty-six-minute configuration job with a computer engineering skill-set and a predisposition for zone-outs and hysterical temporary blindness at an assortment of triggers. He called himself E.J. 256 – “E.J. for Ee Jit” – and he was impressively knowledgeable.
“I’m wondering,” she asked him, “about the hub or synthetic intelligence system the Artist is using to keep our synth – Bruce – activated.”
“Most likely a hub,” E.J. 256 nodded, “there are none of the markers one would expect from the computer being brought off synthetic intelligence standby by another synth, there’s a whole series of handshake and counter-response protocols that are completely different for one synth waking up another. For a synthetic intelligence coming off standby as it enters a hub’s sphere of influence, it’s a whole different set.”
“But it could be faked?”
“Probably,” E.J. 256 shrugged his broad shoulders. “Once we take as read that Bruce is controlling all the electronic data we receive, we have to accept the possibility that any and all of it is forged or altered in some way, and for any or no real reason, beyond the passing whim of a sentient being. I can see no reason for it to do so, of course – it makes no practical difference to us whether Bruce was brought off standby by a hub or by a second synthetic intelligence node,” he paused, and snapped his fingers. “Although,” he went on, “of course, a synth would mean a ship or station of sufficient size to support a stand-alone entity, while a hub could be the size of a suitcase, which tends to change the landscape a little,” he snapped his fingers again, and pointed his index fingers in a way that reminded Janya of Glomulus Cratch in a not-entirely-welcome manner. “Although, on the other hand, the Artist could have a hub and any number of synthetic intelligence nodes like Bruce, and they could be any size equal to or larger than the Tramp. Maybe even smaller, if it was pared down. Very difficult to say. So it doesn’t necessarily follow that there is a vessel of any great size or complexity,” he looked apologetic. “It’s all probabilities.”
“Where would he have gotten a hub from? Could he have built one?”
“Again, possible,” E.J. 256 admitted. “It’s a formidable creative mind we are facing here, if he has the skills to build this underspace drive and a functioning synthetic intelligence hub. Even if the hub is causing some of the irregularities we’re experiencing. Current theories of synthmorphia suggest that Bruce should come off standby as the same universal synthetic intelligence it always was, and yet we’re seeing this is not the case. Whether this is because of the unknown damage sustained in The Accident – which we knew was there, but which hadn’t actually manifested while the computer was in synthetic intelligence standby – or because of the Artist convoying Bruce up with a behaviourally-abnormal hub or otherwise flawed synth…”
“And what about that sphere of influence?” Janya asked. “What sort of reach does the Artist’s hub need? I mean, to keep Bruce active. How close do they need to be?”
She waited for a moment, then realised that E.J. 256 had blanked out. So she waited – the catatonia usually only lasted a minute or two – and looked around a little awkwardly while E.J. 256 stood and stared blankly into the middle distance.
Finally, with a little sleepy shake-twitch of his head and a half-embarrassed, half-annoyed grimace, he came back.
“Sorry,” he said, and waved a hand in front of his face. “Completely vagued out there for a second. I was thinking about dandelion seeds and … never mind,” he shook-twitched again. “What were you asking? About the hub range, right?”
“Right.”
“Right, well, once the handshake is done and the computer is off standby and in full Bruce, so to speak, there’s only an umbilical signal required to keep the synthetic intelligence active. That’s very difficult to sever without the full cooperation of the synth, because the signal is generated by a decentralised system – basically any part of the hub can send, and any part of Bruce can receive. Going back onto standby is usually a matter of mutual agreement rather than forced disconnection.”
“But sufficient distance should do it, right?” Janya said. “That’s why there’s standby in the first place, for those long-haul deep-space flights.”
“Well, exactly,” E.J. 256 agreed. “The Artist and his hub, or whatever other mechanism he was using for the convoy, would have had to be with him when he was shadowing us. As for the range … anywhere within this solar system should do it.”
“That’s a big distance to cover if we want Bruce back on standby,” Janya concluded sourly.
“Indeed so. And that’s assuming the Artist stays behind on Jauren Silva, and doesn’t follow us with the hub the way he most likely has been already. And add to that the fact that he apparently has access to a near-instant transportation drive. There may not be any sufficient distance we can put between him and us.”
“But it seemed like he needed the synthetic intelligence to steer properly,” Janya mused. “That was what Bruce was saying on the bridge, anyway.”
“I don’t know about that,” E.J. 256 said apologetically. “I’m not bridge crew. But if that is the case, then chances are the Artist will stay with us rather than returning to the surface and risking our escape. Of course, escape is a moot point, since Bruce seems to be firmly on the Artist’s side, and will not allow us to turn tail and fly away. Unless we manage to further disable the synth’s control of ship systems. I understand Sally has employed a suppressing device, although of course some details have been placed off-limits.”
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 14