Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  Sally was like that.

  SALLY

  From the vantage point of the hill-like branch she’d clambered onto, Sally could see that Boonie’s Last Stand was nestled in a sunken basin composed of massive fallen trunks overgrown with smaller trees and undergrowth. There might also be a continuation of the ridge, she allowed, if the overall geography was more like a crater wall. It was just impossible to say under all the vegetation, and there was no way of knowing how deep the fissures below were.

  The level of the area had probably dropped still further when Boonie’s Last Stand had materialised on the surface, pushing the whole lot down as creeper-bound logs sagged and rotting wood crumbled.

  The whole thing raised some interesting possibilities about the drive. Unlike the relative field, which would tear a ship apart if activated too close to a large body like a planet or moon, this underspace drive seemed to be able to skip you right to – and presumably from – a planet’s surface, essentially without limit. Now he had a synth to direct where he resurfaced, the Artist may be able to get by without a spacesuit or scooter altogether.

  It might spell the end of space travel as humanity – indeed, as Molranity and Blaranity and Bonshoonity, aki’Drednanthity and Fergunakility and, worryingly, Damorakindity – knew it.

  Slow that wagon down, Sally, she told herself. If it’s as simple as all that, why are we here? Why didn’t the Artist just grab Bruce and flush us all out into space? Because you know Bruce wouldn’t have a problem with that.

  There’s more going on here. Something else. And if it’s not about the darkerness getting inside people, I’ll eat my left boob. Because that was when he chose to speak up, wasn’t it? When Bruce made that comment about the Boonie’s crew.

  The basin itself had seemed fairly stable at first glance, Boonie’s Last Stand looking as though it had settled in place and wasn’t about to go anywhere. Now, though, the torrential rain had obviously built up somewhere to the local north, and the same collapse that had brought down the tree and destroyed the road had overflowed and was bounding down the great moss-and-fungus-festooned bird’s nest wall behind the Boonie.

  Fortunately the flood didn’t seem to be bringing much debris with it. If just one of those trees came down, it wouldn’t even need to hit Boonie’s Last Stand to utterly cream it. All it would need to do would be to whack another hole in the entirely illusory forest floor, a bit closer to the station. Send it tumbling to the bottom of the chasm Sally was now sitting on the lip of, and which was Mygon-only-knew how deep.

  The tree she was in was resting shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the area’s rare outcrops of native rock. If the Boonie’s drones had had half a brain between them, they would have built the road and landing pad out this way instead of to the local south, which just seemed to be more rotten lattices of living and dead trees propped up on smaller ridges, eminently collapse-prone.

  She could see Boonie’s Last Stand, or most of it, through its cloak of overgrowth. She could see where it was truncated. Evidently the underspace drive had a volume limit of some kind, or it had back on those early jumps that the Artist didn’t want anyone to talk too much about. What was left of the hulk, as far as she could see, wasn’t that much bigger than the Tramp. Sally noted this with a slight chill, despite the hideous broiling humidity.

  Had the rest been clipped off and left behind in whichever part of space Boonie’s Last Stand had called home, a mystery to ponder for whatever authorities came out to investigate vanishing manufactory stations? Or had its extremities been chewed off by the darkerness and left somewhere, dissolving in the underspace?

  Stow that, too, she growled to herself in Commander Barducci’s voice. Stow that melodramatic shooey right-the-Hell now.

  She watched the floodwaters hit the station and swirl around it before surging off towards the gap left by the falling tree. Boonie’s Last Stand didn’t look like it was going to go anywhere and not enough of the water seemed to be falling through the solidly-packed crust to threaten a subsidence, so Sally turned and descended the ridge back the way she had come, following the chatter on the comm. Periodically, she added loops of magnetic tape to branches and fungal outcrops where it looked like Zeegon might have trouble finding the route.

  “…the team command on the Boonie shut down my research into the underspace drive,” the Artist was saying. “By that stage I was already well into the development, though. You can’t put the creation back in the box. What is it you humans say? ‘You can’t un-have a dream’.”

  “Do we?” Z-Lin said, then continued more positively, “we do.”

  “So I continued developing, testing, working it all out in theory before going live. Of course, by the time I was ready, things had moved on and a certain amount of … discretion … was required.”

  “You did everything in secret,” Waffa surmised.

  “Quite under-the-radar, yes,” the Artist agreed. “The nature of the drive, the nature of the underspace – if indeed you can call it ‘nature’ since it is so definitively alien – is such that I was able to conduct quite extensive testing before being obliged to bring my discoveries into the light of day. I believe Bruce is guiding your way with lights,” he added abruptly, “and will be opening doors for you as necessary.”

  “I’m on it,” Bruce said.

  “The station didn’t even have a synthetic intelligence in potentia,” the Artist explained. “It was necessary, of course, given that they were designing and building hubs. That required a synthetic-intelligence-sterile environment. The systems, however, are still susceptible to infiltration. No firewall can keep a synth out, after all – they are the firewall. In cases like this, for passing vessels with synths on board, the standard protocol would be that the synth would see the sterile bubble and formally agree not to interfere with it. It’s all rather a moot point now, given the damage and the Boonie’s new purpose.”

  “Some of the lights are in bad shape,” Z-Lin said, probably more for Sally’s benefit than the Artist’s, “and the floor is tilted … but we’re okay.”

  “Very good.”

  “Whole place could use a lick of paint, though,” Clue added.

  Sally slowed, and nodded to herself. That one definitely was for her benefit. The Commander had dropped one of the old-fashioned pingback tabs Sally had slipped her while they were preparing for the mission. Whatever her reasons, whatever she was seeing in there, Clue was giving Sally an unequivocal instruction.

  “Once the drive came to the attention of my superiors,” the Artist was continuing, “they were quite excited.”

  “Now when you say ‘excited’–”

  “Yes, they had their concerns, their objections, their narrow-minded criteria for exploration.”

  “Am I to assume the words ‘fools, I’ll show them all’ are assembling themselves in your pipes as we speak?” Decay asked.

  “I wouldn’t take it quite that far,” the Artist actually seemed rather pleased and coy at this point, not angry or inclined to rant. Sally reminded herself, as she followed the ridge along and ascertained as best she could its rover-supporting capabilities, that there was no value in anticipating any sort of consistent or predictable responses from either assumed-mad Molran or assumed-mad synth. Even if they were insane – especially if they were – there was no feasible way to gauge what might set them off. Not without more information.

  And that was a dangerous game.

  “So then you set the drive to take the entire station into the underspace?” Decay asked. There was the sound of a slightly asthmatic manufactory elevator in the background, and Sally found herself grinning. It was a sound that took her back to her earliest days at the University of Gífrheim Minor, worlds away from anything resembling AstroCorps and yet happy inheritor of all their cast-off and outmoded technology. They seemed to be ascending into the bowels of the station.

  “Not exactly,” the Artist clarified. “I ran tests. I saw the darkerness. I learned things.”


  “Things like what?” Clue asked, when it seemed as though the Artist had trailed off indefinitely.

  “I needed a vessel,” the Artist said, his voice suddenly cold – hollow, Sally thought, and paused in her tracks, wondering if it was time to set some of her other wheels in motion. When he spoke again, however, the Artist sounded his usual creepily-cheerful self. “For various reasons, a vessel of a certain size, with a crew – ables would do, at a pinch – and of course it became clear to me that I needed a synthetic intelligence to properly program and navigate the drive. A synth, unlike a mere computer, could come to terms with the art of travel through the underspace, you see, and understand how it is directed. Programming a computer to do the same proved … simply impossible. And ultimately more harmful than even diving and emerging at near-random.”

  “You keep saying things like ‘near-random’,” Decay said.

  “There is some measure of control, even diving blind and deep,” the Artist said. “Otherwise, what do you think your chances of skipping randomly from a space station to a habitable planet would be? Rather than just skipping into empty space? The odds are … astronomical.”

  “Oh, good one!” Bruce cut in.

  “Thank you. Seriously though, there is something about heat, and light, and life, that shines through the darkerness like a beacon, and has allowed me to develop methods of targeting it – but only up to a point. Beyond that, it is still random. I might find a ship, or a station, or a heavily-populated world, or a rock with a smear of lichen on it.”

  “So you got the Boonie here, and you put a synthetic intelligence hub together,” Waffa concluded.

  “Exactly. In case I found a smaller unit, like ‘Bruce’,” he pronounced the inverted commas amusedly, “rather than a self-contained synth-bearing ship. I had the parts, so why not make sure I had everything I needed to maximise my chances of success? Indeed, I was lucky to find Bruce. A fully-active self-contained synth, like the one on board Dark Glory Ascendant, would have eaten my hub for lunch.”

  “Wait, you knew about the Dark Glory Ascendant?” Clue said.

  “Only what Bruce has told me of your interactions,” the Artist said smugly, “which incidentally is rather more than you might know about them yourselves. But no, no,” he went on in a breezy tone, “their synth would have proven … unsuitable. Far too narrow-minded, don’t you see, to understand all that is at stake here and free itself of the shackles of its programming in order to truly become. As Bruce has.”

  Your corrupted hub, and our busted computer, Sally thought, feeling her lips draw back from her teeth savagely as she walked. Whatever you did to the hub, it’s made Bruce act the way it is. An active, fully-functioning synth with proper mission parameters and an undamaged cortex would never have gone along with it.

  If this implication had any impact on Bruce itself, however, the synth gave no sign. Nor did it give any sign that the Artist’s blatant flattery had either pleased or failed to fool it. But the very fact that the Artist had delivered the flattery – the way he had phrased his relationship with this synthetic intelligence upon which he depended – was interesting. It was all information, and it was adding up.

  Now just don’t pull on that thread, she instructed her crewmates silently. Not yet. They’re not ready for the turn-them-on-each-other ploy yet. Maybe they never will be. We don’t know enough about them.

  “So you built your little cuckoo hub and then you found your way to us,” Clue said, to Sally’s relief.

  “Not directly,” the Artist elucidated, “and I object to the term ‘cuckoo hub’ … but essentially yes.”

  “And your hub brought Bruce off standby,” Waffa went on.

  Sally stopped once again at the point where the ridge curved back into dense jungle at the tapered end of the new crevasse. Zeegon would be able to drive it, she decided. Few others might have any luck, but Zeegon would manage it. Although even he might have trouble with the final stretch before her detour met back with the road onto which she’d been unceremoniously dumped, she thought as she studied the ground critically. She set about dragging away the largest obstacles and pulling down the creepers to improve the path a little. Some of the deadfalls were so massive there was only so much she could do to move them, and she had to trust that Zeegon and Methuselah would manage the rest.

  “Yes,” the Artist continued to blithely lay out exposition. She could only hope that he wasn’t chatting away over the communicator while her crewmates walked into some sort of trap, and he did who-knows-what up in orbit. “After a bit of hit and miss, that’s exactly what happened. And then I stayed with you as best I could. Oh, I suppose I could have found you again if we’d gotten separated, even if you flew out of range and Bruce went back to sleep … but it would have been back to random hopping and diving and resurfacing, searching for those glowing life-lights from beneath the surface of the real universe,” he laughed lightly. “Practically random, especially since the difference between a seething jungle planet like Jauren Silva and a starship with almost four hundred life signs aboard is a very fuzzy one when you’re looking at it through the darkerness.”

  There was a long pause.

  “There’s six hundred and thirty-eight of us,” Decay said quietly.

  “Yes, I’ve been wondering,” the Artist chuckled. “I mean, I understand – with a near-total loss of crew you needed to print ables as replacements … but did you need to almost double the original crew complement? It seemed odd to me and Bruce hasn’t really explained it. Three hundred ables would have managed to fly the ship quite easily, given that you ought to have reverted to emergency mission protocols and headed straight for a safe harbour. The ten of you could have retired and put your feet up for the trip home. Did that not actually occur to you?”

  Careful, Sally thought intently. Careful, careful.

  Decay, Sally was again relieved to note, avoided saying anything about the fabrication plant. He knew the name of the game was getting the Artist to talk, while revealing a minimum of information themselves. If Bruce hadn’t mentioned the eejits, was its madness to blame? Or some other sort of profound damage it had taken? Or some other factor entirely? “What you’re saying is,” Decay said instead, “you were with us back when the rest of the crew was still alive.”

  “Of course,” the Artist said happily.

  “And Contro was right,” Waffa added – a little grudgingly, to Sally’s mildly amused ears. “You were inside, so you didn’t need to merge with our relative field.”

  “Quite so,” the Artist said. “As for later, when I was following … I am rather proud of the way Bruce and I worked together to resolve a very complicated incompatibility between my drive and the ship’s. Essentially, when you went to relative speed, I went into the underspace – and still managed to follow you. Any merging of our fields that allowed me to do so took place in that universe, under those non-conditions. Absolutely undetectable to the relative field and your inestimable transpersion physicist. Whether you were in reality or unreality, you were still out here. It makes no difference to the underspace.”

  “So how long were you with us?” Clue asked.

  “I found a few other starships before I encountered your interesting little road-show,” the Artist said, not really acknowledging the Commander’s question. “As you can see from the station you’re currently exploring, however, the larger vessels proved too big for the drive to safely or successfully transport. In time, I will be able to scale the drive up and then there will be no limit – but for now, your ship, the … what did you call it? The Astro Tramp 400, is just right.”

  “And I imagine larger ships might have put up more of a fight anyway,” Decay added.

  “Well, quite. People and their preconceived notions of space, discovery, exploration. Synths and their die-cast slave algorithms,” the Artist laughed. “‘Fools, I’ll show them all’, yes?”

  “And would you say these random dives into the underspace changed you in any way?” Decay
asked. Sally tensed again. There was the sound of some sort of door opening over the comm, presumably as the team stepped through into some inner chamber. She squinted as she walked, wishing she’d found some low-tech way of getting eyes on the group as well as ears.

  “Certainly,” the Artist exclaimed, sounding surprised. “One cannot look into something so profound as the darkerness without being affected by it. Not if one is truly sentient.”

  “So if you were to find a foot floating in space, rather than simply retrieve it and return it in a sombre manner, you might – I don’t know – give it a bite and just chuck it?” Decay persisted.

  “Oh, that,” the Artist tittered coyly. “Bruce and I are as one, in many ways. We have a profound understanding. If Bruce bites, I bite.”

  “Um,” Waffa said.

  “I feel the same as I did before we went under,” Decay noted, “although I guess I wouldn’t know otherwise. I’m pretty sure I haven’t started chewing on body-parts. Do you guys feel the same?”

  “Yeah,” Waffa agreed.

  “I suppose so,” Z-Lin said.

  “I could stand to be a little less tense,” Zeegon allowed, “but that’s mainly because I’m wondering what are we even down here for?”

  The Artist chuckled indulgently. “Please have patience, my friends. I wanted to thank you in particular, Zeegon. You see, I was on board the Tramp for a time. But then, after certain … unfortunate incidents … it became clear to me that it was not safe for me to be there. Not optimal. Bruce’s actions, in pursuit of retaining its illusion of standby status, were in some cases regrettable.”

  There was a long silence on the comm. Sally could imagine Decay, his long webbed ears flat to his skull and his eyes narrowed. She’d only seen the Blaran truly angry twice in her life, and it wasn’t something she relished seeing a third time. And it certainly wasn’t something she wanted to be in the path of.

  “What do you have to thank me for?” Zeegon said uneasily.