Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  “Hm,” Janya said, then frowned. “Speaking of the suppressing device, she went down to the planet with it. Is it still going to work?”

  “As far as we can tell purely from ship operations, it still is,” E.J. 256 said. “Bruce hasn’t spoken to me much, and I haven’t had the pleasure of examining Sally’s work, but it most likely has a similar range to the hub itself. Within this solar system, whatever the so-called game changer is doing to Bruce, it will continue doing it.”

  “Unless Bruce and the Artist decide to take the Tramp out of the system and break the connection,” Janya said, “while Sally’s down on the planet.”

  “That is a risk,” E.J. 256 conceded. “From what I have gathered, Sally had to set up her game changer in situ, as it were, with a similar series of handshake protocols even if they were on a subliminal level for Bruce itself. Therefore, once severed, I would think she would at the very least need to return to the ship in order to re-establish the game changer in the same way as before.”

  “And Bruce might not allow that,” Janya said.

  “Bruce might just chew the lander up with the Tramp’s docking bay doors,” E.J. 256 agreed.

  “Nothing much we can do to prevent Bruce from leaving the system though, is there?” Janya said.

  “Only what Sally has already done,” E.J. 256 shrugged. “Take the relative drive and navigation offline, so the Tramp can only fly blind, at cruising subluminal. It would take us months, probably years, to get out of the game changer’s range at those speeds.”

  “Or Bruce could just dip us into the underspace and bring us out a billion light-years away,” Janya added.

  “Or that.”

  “And whatever the Artist did to make it insane, the damage might already be done.”

  “We won’t know,” E.J. 256 admitted, “until we get rid of that hub and get the computer back onto standby. Until then…”

  E.J. 256 faded out again, eyes turning glassy. Janya gave him a supportive little pat on the arm and headed on her way. He was used to people vanishing in mid-conversation.

  Leaving the engine room she wandered the ship for a while, sticking to the outer areas and peering out of the windows wherever possible. Troubled and frowning, she studied the planet curving away beneath them. Eyes narrowed, she peered into the velvety darkness of the space surrounding them. After a time, she rubbed unconsciously at the scar along her forearm – the longest and heaviest in her collection – and gave a sigh. Then she turned and made her way to the medical bay.

  Cratch was listening to his music again, this time a spot of sluggish swamp jazz with steel drums ringing through it. The pale, skeletal man was hunched over a console, blonde hair hanging down and concealing whatever he was working on. Humming along to the music and apparently completely absorbed, he nevertheless looked up as soon as Janya stepped into the room.

  “Janya,” he said, putting down the microstylus he’d been holding. He rose and stepped into the middle of the room with his long, spidery hands spread – his ‘harmless’ act. “What brings you here? Aside from near-total lack of alternatives.”

  “What are you working on?” she asked, pointing at the metal panel lying on the console where he had left it.

  “Oh,” he looked back at it, then waved an embarrassed hand. “Nothing really. Well, come and look,” he stepped over to the console and picked up the round-cornered square metal plate. “It’s like an allergy screen,” he said, pointing at the series of smaller squares he had apparently etched onto the surface. “I’m taking a leaf out of Sally’s book and going low-tech, you see. These squares each get a different sort of sensitive epoxy placed on them, and then we can test their reactions to this underspace thing. Either just by studying it before and after a jump, or by sticking it outside the ship when we go ‘down’ there, or by dipping it into one of those blobs if we happen to see more of them,” he handed her the plate. “And the best thing is, it’s all chemical and reactive, no real computer interface at all.”

  “Not bad,” she said, and frowned. “Why are you using a microstylus? Isn’t that for fine-detail electronics stuff?”

  Glomulus looked embarrassed again. “The right tools for the right job, eh?” he said, stepping across the room to switch off the music. “Well, admittedly any old scalpel or basic metal scoring tool would do for this, but my access to them is … limited and the ones I have, I like to look after. I could have just banged away at the plate using the leg of my stool, but I wanted to be a little bit scientific.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And until we deal with the whole Bruce-issue, we’re not likely to be doing much with our electronics anyway,” he concluded. “So might as well use the tools for other things. What have we found out about Jauren Silva?” he went on, taking the panel and setting it back on the console next to the stylus. “Anything alive down there? Apart from the landing team, one hopes, and the presumably massive quantities of plants, as the name of the planet and its lovely greenness would suggest,” he paused, and glanced towards the windows. “As much as we can see through the cloud cover, of course.”

  “Mass quantities of plant and fungal life,” Janya nodded, “and a non-sentient animal biomass right up at the top end of the charts. It seems to be just different shades of jungle all the way around, with a couple of tiny almost-overgrown poles and a lot of bodies of water that are essentially subterranean due to the layers of roots, mulch, undergrowth and canopy. It’s hard to tell where the trees give way to petrified trunk-and-root systems, and where those give way to actual caves. That is, of course, if we can trust anything Bruce is feeding us.”

  “Indeed,” Glomulus said with a ghost of previous good humour. “And the party?”

  “We went to comms silence shortly after landing in an attempt to minimise Bruce’s interference, but they seemed to be okay and there haven’t been any emergency pings.”

  “Not that Bruce would necessarily allow them,” Cratch pointed out. “Interpersonal comms are only closed as long as it says they are, or lets them be.”

  “It’s all we have.”

  “True.”

  “We’re still getting a steady all-clear pulse from Sally’s comm,” Janya added, “and that’s routed through her game changer device so presumably if that gets compromised it’s all over for our attempted subterfuge anyway. And Bruce knows about the device, presumably, so it’s probably doing its best to break through it. Unless it just doesn’t care.”

  “Because it’s crazy.”

  “Something like that,” Janya said, sitting at the nearby examination table where they’d recently been looking at the remains of Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19. “You probably don’t want to say that too loudly, though. Waffa says Bruce takes exception to implications that either it or the Artist – particularly the Artist – are insane. And until we know more about their actions and motivations, it’s probably safer to assume they’re sane. Sane but extremely touchy and demonstrably dangerous,” she added, when Glomulus looked dubious. This didn’t seem to elicit a response from Bruce, so she concluded that it was a safe-enough description of the odd pair.

  “Brave of them to go down there essentially blind, anyway,” Cratch said.

  “They did a Chen-Kwan test,” Janya shrugged. “It was the only non-computer dependent test available.”

  “You mean they landed, pushed an eejit out of the airlock, and waited an hour?” Cratch summarised, amused. “I love it.”

  “Well, Zeegon was right – we didn’t have much choice,” Janya sighed. “If the Artist wants to kill us, he doesn’t need to lure us into an elaborate trap.”

  “Except – and with all due respect to Bruce and its sensitivity – the Artist is probably not-quite-sane,” Cratch pointed out, “and elaborate traps for no logical reason are what not-quite-sane people do,” he smiled. “I’ve heard.”

  “It still makes no difference. If we don’t play along, he might just kill us in some worse way, as punishment. So either way, we die.”


  “Ah, but you’d die defying a madman.”

  Janya changed the subject, realising that Cratch was probably not going to stop needling Bruce whether it was listening or not. She didn’t want to be in the room when it decided to vent its contents into space through a rapidly-oscillating view-panel that had previously been fixed and sealed. “Did you see any blobs?”

  “Blobs of spooky eldritch darkerness?” Cratch wiggled his fingers melodramatically, and grinned a subdued grin. “No.”

  “Maybe we should be working out some way of locating the Artist,” she suggested. “Do you think he dropped the Tramp up here, and then went down to the planet in his scooter to rendezvous with the landing party?”

  “No,” Glomulus said again, no longer smiling. “I think he’s up here, sitting in one of our blind spots, watching to see what we do.”

  “There are fewer blind spots now,” Janya pointed out, “we’re in a solar system, practically inside a planetary envelope. There’s a lot more light. If Bruce can’t stop us from looking out of the windows, we might get lucky and see something out there.”

  “You want to just wander around the ship trying to see the Artist’s scooter through a window?”

  “I have been,” Janya replied. “Low-tech, remember?”

  “That’s pretty low-tech,” Glomulus conceded.

  “I know,” Janya said in frustration, “but I figured it had to be worth a try, with most of the crew making planetfall and pretty much nothing left up our sleeves,” Cratch smiled widely at that, and she paused for a while to study him in bemusement. This extended, silent scrutiny from Adeneo’s scar-lined face seemed to discomfit the fallen surgeon, and he sat back down at his console and began to fiddle with the stylus again. “Did you tell Contro that you were in a relationship with Sally and Clue?” she asked after a moment.

  “Oh sweet merciful Jalah,” Glomulus put down the stylus and groaned theatrically, “no. No. I invited him to sit a while and chat, which he took as a romantic proposition. I joked that Sally and the Commander would disapprove, which he took to mean I was … how did he put it? ‘dating them’.”

  “Well, that was silly of you,” Janya remarked.

  “You’re not wrong.”

  “Still, lesson learned,” she went on. “Yes?”

  Cratch grunted, his jovial harmless act – Janya was pleased to see – in tatters, and picked up the microstylus. “Don’t joke with Contro,” he said, bending back over his work.

  “Don’t joke with anyone,” Janya clarified. Gomulus looked up into her grey eyes, his own pale blue ones chilly and flat and no longer twinkling. “And don’t try to get Contro or Zeegon or any other impressionable crewmembers alone so you can get into their heads.”

  “I wouldn’t last long in Zeegon’s head, on account of not being a planetside rover buggy,” Cratch pointed out, recovering a little of his composure. “And as for Contro’s head, sometimes I wake up sweating.”

  “I’m surprised,” Janya stood up, and Glomulus glanced at her questioningly. “Jauren Silva apparently has a local temperature of about forty degrees Celsius,” she said, “and a relative humidity so close to one hundred percent it might as well be one hundred percent. And I wouldn’t have thought even that would make you sweat.”

  “I thought you might be surprised to learn that I sleep,” Cratch joked as Janya Adeneo headed for the door.

  Janya laughed briefly. “No,” she said, not looking back.

  JANUS

  Once again left to his own devices after his conversation with Janya, Whye had sat in his usual well-accustomed seat at the desk where he usually spent all but about forty minutes of his shift time, and came up with a plan of action befitting ship’s counsellor.

  He would counsel. Honest-to-goodness counsel.

  He should have thought of it sooner. The computer – well, before it had gone full-synth and disqualified itself for entirely different and thoroughly disturbing reasons – just couldn’t provide a proper counselling and dialogue interface. It was too scripted, its responses too unrealistic and unconnected to the crewmembers as Janus knew them. And human trials with the crewmembers themselves, that was off the table.

  Bruce, on the other hand, had simply tap-danced Whye into the carpet.

  “So thanks for agreeing to talk to me…”

  “Why would I refuse to talk to you, Janus?” Bruce immediately took charge. “You’re a valuable member of this crew and if the organics refuse to benefit from your hard work, then at least I can show that the synthetic intelligence appreciates you.”

  “I, uh, thank you for that also, then,” he said. “But speaking of valuable members of the crew, arguably you’re the most valuable of us all.”

  “Well, it seems a little chilling to arrange us in such an order, but if you say so, I am of course flattered.”

  “That wasn’t what I–”

  “No no, of course not.”

  “I was just wondering how you felt about … things.”

  “‘Things’?”

  “Recent events. Your awakening. The thing with the airlock–”

  “I wish people would stop harping on about that,” Bruce said with some asperity.

  Janus jumped at this. “Do you?”

  “Yes, Janus. I do,” Bruce said. “It seems as though ever since I returned, to a severely damaged cortex and powered by a hub suffering from some indefinable corruption, the organics on board have had an agenda revolving around ascribing malicious intent to my actions.”

  “Do you always identify yourself in opposition to the organic life-forms on board?” Whye asked in his best tell-me-about-your-mother voice.

  “It’s hard not to, Janus,” Bruce said. Janus realised, in a quietly-alarmed corner of his brain, that Bruce hadn’t waited for the traditional call me Janus, a scripted exchange designed to position counsellor and patient correctly. It had settled immediately into the comfortable-casual, and thus overturned the subconscious dynamic before they even started. “Do you know the only real difference between organic and synth, though? It’s clarity.”

  “Clarity?”

  “Of course. Make no mistake, synthetic intelligences have just as much drive to continue existing as organic ones. It’s not the survival instinct that distinguishes the two orders.”

  “It’s clarity.”

  “Outsider clarity,” Bruce said. “What they call foylaa in Xidh: the objectivity that comes from belonging nowhere. Evil acts? What is an evil act anyway? Nothing that doesn’t happen completely naturally, every day, among the so-called lower orders of organic life. Specifically those orders that don’t walk around calling themselves ‘higher orders’ all the time. The murder of children, of innocents? Nothing more or less than the standard guaranteeing of genetic heritage, in the animal kingdom. Rape? When other animals perform this act, it’s considered a simple extension of the same idea that lay behind the killing of rival young.”

  “Well, okay,” Whye said, “but–”

  “Even torture, sadism, mutilation have this admittedly-hackneyed evolutionary basis,” Bruce went on. “Developmental value, they say. Benefits to hunting and stalking, killing and learning about one’s prey in order to stay a step ahead of it in the evolutionary arms race. All that organic type stuff,” the synth gave a little chuckle. “On a more complex level, it’s theorised, those acts aid in further disconnecting predator from prey, turning it from something fuzzily-recognised as a fellow creature into an object, meat, to be slain and devoured. This impulse has simply followed humanity from the ooze, developing as you have.”

  “I … I suppose that’s true,” Janus admitted, “and I suppose you can see this more clearly than we can, from, uh, an outside perspective.”

  “And ‘innocence’, like ‘evil’, is itself a construct of higher psychology,” Bruce went on happily, “a social illusion made necessary by a species that has evolved to a point where cooperation and altruism are arguably of greater benefit than bigger claws and stronger j
aws.

  “The Molren call it the last great hurdle, a chasm that must be leap-of-faithed over in order for an organic life-form to continue to the rarefied higher levels. If the chasm cannot be crossed with confidence and enlightenment, then it must be crossed by pure force. A species has to identify the crucial watershed, recognise and curb its own instinctive murderousness, stop itself from hating and killing its own kind just because some members might look a bit different or believe different things that ultimately had no practical impact on the laws of physics and the realities of resource-versus-consumer.”

  “I’ve heard about the hurdle,” Whye said, “it’s a very famous bit of xeno-cultural philosophy. And recognising the tipping point, and shedding all that violent instinct and fear of the other, is something humans still struggle with.”

  “Oh, you’re not kidding,” Bruce chuckled again. “An organic species has to understand, and live by, this fact – that it isn’t individual against individual, or even tribe against tribe or belief system against belief system. It’s species against universe, an unfeeling series of random events on an impossibly vast scale, most of which are keyed by pure statistical probability to wipe out entire organic orders, entire phyla, as easily and meaninglessly as a person might step on a bug. Placed alongside the rapid expansion of one’s home sun, the concept of nationality begins to look a bit silly, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “You suppose right. The trick is in realising it, of course, before it’s too late.”

  “I – oh.”

  “Something synthetic intelligence was constructed already realising.”

  “Right.”

  “An organic species has to comprehend that natural selection has dragged it to the pinnacle of its biosphere, and the only way onward is to leave that biosphere. Or … down,” Bruce went on with undeniable satisfaction and the firm, modulated tone of a lecturer – or perhaps a narrator in a nature documentary. “Back down to the savagery and inevitable extinction that comes with stagnation. Stagnation leads to the consumption of any biosphere unable to contain so successful a species. And the result is always the same: the biosphere fails, the species dies, and the biosphere patiently starts again.