Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  They tore along the ridge as the great heaped layers of jungle collapsed behind them into the chasm left behind by Boonie’s Last Stand.

  Although Bruce had fallen silent – preoccupied, perhaps, with its failure to prevent the Tramp’s weapons from activating, or with the search for Sally’s supposed self-destruct lockout – the Artist was howling through the communicator.

  “You fools! I should have vented you into space when I had the chance! I tried to make you a part of something wonderful! This is the discovery of a lifetime! The greatest scientific advance in the history of all our species! And you were right there! You saw it! I showed you everything, and you turned on me! You turned away and destroyed what I created! Death is too good for you! Such stupidity cannot be permitted to exist!”

  “Can we tune that out?” Z-Lin asked in a shout-mutter.

  “Only if we don’t care whether the guys up on the ship still want to contact us,” Zeegon said. “Do you think he’s actually on board?”

  “I don’t know,” Z-Lin replied, “but we have to assume he is–”

  “Oh crap hold onto something!” Zeegon interrupted. The passengers, already strapped in and clinging white-knuckled to any available handhold, tensed still further as Methuselah leapt, shuddered and ripped through a tangled heap of logs and saplings where the ridge dipped back below the rotting canopy layer and their makeshift escape route rejoined the drone-built road on the far side of the gap left by the falling tree earlier. The gap that was now more like a slender crack on the edge of the far deeper and wider crater left behind by Pater and Fuck-ton.

  They found the road, slewed with a great flying rooster-tail of gravel and woodchips, then finally corrected.

  “Good stuff,” Waffa said shakily from the middle seat.

  “Can’t take all the credit,” Zeegon said, eyes fixed on the road and shoulders tense with his death-grip on the custom-made steering wheel. “Looks like Sally cleared a path for us. Still almost lost a wheel, though.”

  “There she is,” Decay said, snaking his long upper left arm forward and pointing through the windscreen. Sally’s small, uniformed frame swam out of the pouring rain, tugging her backpack straps into place on her shoulders with one hand and waving down the rover with the other. Zeegon slowed to what he considered a safe velocity, and Decay and Waffa opened the side door and helped her leap inside.

  “Welcome back,” Clue said, as Decay catapulted Sally into the middle row of seats and her backpack knocked the wind out of Waffa. Zeegon accelerated again, fishtailing with the force of it but keeping them on the waterlogged road.

  “Thanks,” Sally grunted, straightening up and fastening her straps. “I assume it worked?”

  “If you meant to fire the biggest guns on the ship at a location we were barely outside the blast radius of,” Zeegon said without looking back, “yeah. Mission accomplished.”

  “Oh good,” Sally said blandly.

  “Yeah, well, you’d better hope he doesn’t take the Tramp out of orbit,” Zeegon muttered, “or we’re going to be here a long time.”

  “No we won’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He needs the Tramp even more now,” Sally said, “and he’s not going to be able to find the self-destruct algorithm I left in place. If he leaves, the ship will blow and I suspect Bruce won’t let that happen. So he’s way more likely to either get Bruce to ad-lib some way of firing the big guns manually, or do it manually himself, or just turn the small ordnance on us. So either we get to the lander and return to the Tramp, or he blows us to smithereens. Either way, we’re not going to be on Jauren Silva for much longer.”

  “Relax, Zeegon,” Clue said as the helmsman spluttered and tried to rally a coherent response. “Sally was following agreed hostile protocol. And you saw that lab. There was no way we were going to leave it there, even if the Artist did strand us on this planet.”

  “Yeah, fair enough,” Zeegon said grudgingly, “just–”

  “Um, what am I hearing right now?” Sally interrupted.

  “I would have become as a father to you! I would have looked after you, taken you wherever you wished to go! Anywhere in the universe, the very cosmos was open to us, waiting for the first step! Together we could have ushered in a new golden age of–”

  “What’s he on about?” Sally asked.

  “Apparently it was really inconsiderate of us to blow seven colours of Hell out of the secret laboratory dungeon where he was intending to maroon us with a bunch of eerie-arse blobs of possibly-possessed über-darkness from another universe,” Waffa explained.

  “And super-unexpected,” Zeegon added.

  “I will kill you all! I will destroy you! I will cast you into the darkerness for all time! I will feed you to them! You have no idea of the horrors that await you! Horrors I would have spared you, had you but taken your places and followed where I led! Had you but listened to me! I would have protected you! But now you are theirs! You are theirs for all eternity! You will–”

  “Glad I won’t have to eat a boob,” Sally said cryptically.

  “Let’s none of us eat a boob,” Z-Lin agreed loudly.

  “And why are you all shouting?” Sally demanded, then looked apologetic when several pairs of eyes turned and stared flatly at her. “Oh,” she added. “Right. That.”

  They roared onto the wide stretch of drone-laid landing crete, jouncing over the ragged edges that were rapidly being broken up and consumed by the jungle as it re-grew over the site. The whole pad would probably only take a half-dozen landings in any case, badly-set as it was over practically no foundation and just more of the rotten vegetation and chaotic wood lattice that seemed to make up this entire region of Jauren Silva. The lander, despite its slightly more computer-vulnerable computer system, was still waiting for them and didn’t seem to be in any danger of taking off or frying them vindictively with its electrochemical jets.

  “Good job, ‘Thuse,” Zeegon said under his breath as he peeled around the lander and reversed them into the rover dock. As soon as the connection was established, he fired up the automatic takeoff sequence from the rover’s main console.

  Methuselah was a good buggy. Actually the technical term for this class of vehicle – Zeegon’s speciality – was Planetary Insertion Vehicle, or PIV. He mentioned this to anyone he thought might listen, but few people did and so he defaulted to calling them buggies just like everyone else did. He’d tried to have a conversation with Contro about PIVs once, with memorable results. “PIVs are VIPs,” Contro had told him, “to you that is!”

  Zeegon had liked that slogan, so he’d had it printed on his uniform. Z-Lin had told him to remove the catchphrase because it was against regulations. There had been a lot more full-Corps crew and a lot more concerted giving-of-shits about regulations back then, and so he had followed her instruction.

  He hadn’t bothered to try printing up a new “PIVs are VIPs” uniform shirt since The Accident, because he hadn’t needed to. Once Clue had told him to get rid of the slogan, he’d gone ahead and reprinted it on the inside of his uniform shirt. And it had been there ever since.

  “Do you think he’s on board the Tramp already?” Decay asked as they scrambled out of the buggy and headed for the cockpit and seats. His voice, as far as you could tell with that damnable Blaran calm and that thrice-damnable Blaran two-tone harmonic, was taut and eager, trembling with suppressed rage even as his bloodshot ears were trembling with reaction to the Godfire they’d just ridden out. He was also, Zeegon noticed, bioluminescing a bit. The infused veins and arteries that showed his Blaran gang markings, usually reserved for dance-floor light-shows during crew parties and ordinarily extremely cool to see, were illuminating in slow, pulsing flares like circuit diagrams under the skin of his neck and cheekbones. It was a sign of intense emotion to display them unconsciously, and it was even more unsettling than his vocal fury had been. “Do you think he’s there already?”

  There didn’t seem to be any way for them to
answer that probably-rhetorical question, so nobody tried. The Artist’s enraged howls had cut off as soon as Zeegon had docked Methuselah. Evidently neither Bruce nor the Artist himself felt inclined to transfer the telling-off to the lander’s comm system and continue it. Zeegon helped Waffa and one of the eejits – it was the one that wasn’t Foley or Ricky, the one that had managed to avoid getting himself hurt for the entire duration of the mission, and rather unfairly Zeegon just couldn’t remember his name or if he’d even been given one – to lock down the buggy and secure the dock doors for orbital insertion. Decay caught the still-feverish, still-swollen-faced Ricky under the shoulders and knees with his lower hands and hefted him effortlessly out of the back compartment.

  The lander completed its cycle-up and pre-flight checks, once again without any interference or lethal assaults from Bruce, and soon they were tearing into the heavy Jauren Silva overcast. Zeegon caught a brief, dizzying view of the sketchy spiderweb of hopeless little roads and fences the drones had made, almost invisible amidst the titanic vegetation. The hole that had once been Boonie’s Last Stand, however, was extremely visible.

  “Wherever he is,” Zeegon murmured, as the log-strewn crater and then all other surface details vanished into the thick clouds and he turned away from the window, “he’s likely to be pissed.”

  “Nothing like a mad Molran,” Waffa noted. There was a low ping as they cleared the atmosphere, and Zeegon released his straps and kicked off in freefall.

  “Have you noticed that Bruce seems to have left him out of the loop on a whole heap of stuff, though?” he remarked, floating across and double-checking the docking seals before angling his upper torso into Methuselah again to tap out a couple of destination commands. “Life on board ship even though he was with us on board…” he pushed back again and twirled. “A bunch of little details.”

  “Yeah,” Waffa said. “And it seems really unconcerned about these setbacks we’re throwing at them both, too.”

  “Could be something to do with the damage it took during The Accident,” Zeegon suggested. “Messing up its priorities and tactical responses.”

  “Which sort of makes it the Artist’s own fault, doesn’t it?” Waffa agreed.

  “Yeah,” Zeegon returned to his seat. “Or – and I prefer this idea – something in Bruce has retained its original synthetic intelligence personality and crewmember loyalty, and is sort of preserving us the best it can, doing all these little things that the Artist hasn’t noticed. Small acts of rebellion, see?”

  “Or it knows the setbacks are actually completely harmless because it can squash us like bugs any time it likes,” Waffa added, “so it’s not worrying too much about them.”

  “That idea I hate.”

  “Zeegon,” Clue’s voice came through the comm, “we need you on the bridge.”

  Zeegon exchanged a puzzled frown with Waffa, but didn’t bother to ask questions. Expecting at any moment to be blasted out of the sky, he unstrapped once again and kicked up into the cockpit module. “What’s up?” he asked. “The auto-route systems seem to be working okay.”

  “Yes, tirelessly and with pinpoint precision retracing our path back to the Tramp,” Z-Lin said, “adjusting for the orbital shifts and the battle manoeuvres she recently performed, as well as any other unforeseen movements. Done it a hundred times.”

  “So … ?”

  Clue pointed. “So maybe you can tell me why we just went belting past the Tramp,” she said, “and appear to be flying off into deep space,” she sniffed. “Also, explain why it smells like urine and burnt wiring in here.”

  “Um.”

  “I suspect the issues are linked.”

  That was when the access panel beside Zeegon’s head flew open and a moss-green weasel, mad with panic from its first time in zero-gravity, coiled itself around his head and dug its claws into his scalp.

  GLOMULUS

  Able Darko had been a powerful, well-built human. The ables – and indeed the eejits – that came from his physical genetic template were big, resilient, and strong.

  But a human – a normal one, albeit of high physical quality – really wasn’t a match for a Molran. Molren were taller, heavier, stronger and tougher, with much quicker reflexes. Not to mention the fact that they had considerably better eyesight, far better hearing, twice the number of arms, and – at a pinch – lethally sharp teeth.

  After docking on the recycling station level, careening through the open access passage and shedding his scooter and suit in a furious scrabble in the adjacent corridor, the Artist hurdled the trundling Automated Janitorial Drones holding station in the passageway and sprinted into the ship. He met two eejits in the corridor around by the elevator and killed them both with his bare hands, twisting them and smashing them against the wall. A third eejit, standing at the elevator, had the time and wherewithal to hit the general alert before the Artist caught hold of him, dislocated both of his shoulders with his lower hands, pulled back his head with the upper pair and tore out his throat with his teeth.

  The alarm didn’t sound, the elevators didn’t shut down, and the alert didn’t set off any of the emergency power-downs or blast-seals between sensitive levels and sectors that a general alert was supposed to trigger, because a combination of the game-changer and Bruce’s interference stopped all of that. The alert did, however, thanks to a reroute Sally had put in place, send a smaller alarm message to general quarters and the various eejit common rooms using the internal communications system, notifying them of the situation and advising them on steps to take. Whether they had the capacity to understand the notification, let alone take any of the steps Sally’s message advised, well. That was another story but at least a good-faith effort had been made for the official record.

  The message also went out to the remaining humans on board, and they at least were in a position to be able to act accordingly.

  As an additional bonus, the medical bay and general ship surveillance bumpers would activate during such an alert, to show areas of recent casualty activity. This system had been in place since Mays’s time, long before The Accident, but Doctor Cratch had successfully lobbied to keep Clue from discontinuing it. He’d cited the heightened need for automated medical response, owing to the shortness of staff and his own necessary limitations, and had basically made a good case, and so they’d left the system active. Active, and on a separate circuit to the wider comms system. The upshot was that when the third eejit to die performed his final noble act, the alert began routing surveillance information to the medical bay and allowed Glomulus to see what was happening and piece together with reasonable certainty what had happened previously. The more information that came in, from a variety of creatively-interlinked sources, the more clearly Glomulus saw. Bruce didn’t seem bothered by this so it failed to switch off the bumpers.

  And the Artist himself appeared far beyond caring.

  Most of the eejits remained where they were, although a few milled out into the corridors and headed for the elevators. Five died – two on the lander bay level, two on the primary bridge level, and one on crew quarters 1 – as the Artist made his way past the exchange and up towards the medical bay. They died simply because they had gone to the elevator and pressed the call panel, and were waiting at the doors when the elevator arrived with its hissing-furious Molran cargo. By the third time this happened, the Artist was so spectacularly enraged by the interrupted ascent that he pulled the fifth eejit bodily into the elevator and dismembered him completely.

  He met four more eejits – three, and then one – on his way through the corridors after that, making a total of twelve demolished bodies in his wake by the time he ended up in the medical bay.

  He stepped into the pristine white space like a mobile abattoir, blood covering almost every square inch of his feverishly-trembling body and making his shoes squelch on the tiles. He was only momentarily thrown off-balance by the warm tones of Lars Larouchel’s Big Brass Ball playing over the speakers, but one might argue
that he was so dramatically off-balance already that the difference it made was negligible. Nevertheless, he stopped trembling and looked around, ears pressed to his wide, flat-topped skull.

  “Can I help you?” Nurse Dingus stepped forward and asked the Molran politely. “You look like you need medical attention, and also you’re not a human, are you? We had a Molranoid anatomy specialist printed just after The Accident, I’m told, but he went urk.”

  ‘Urk’ wasn’t precisely what Nurse Sassmouth had done. As a matter of fact he had suffered a fatal embolism the first time Decay had agreed to a trial physical, and his final words had been let’s get you under the scope and see what you can OH MY SHIT OH FUCK, before he’d collapsed and Decay had politely declined the offer of a reprint. It wasn’t as though Blaren had much in the way of medical needs anyway – not medical needs that the Tramp’s medical bay was qualified or outfitted to help with, anyway, beyond the occasional bout of prodigestion and throat murmur.

  The Artist grabbed Dingus by the throat and hauled him towards the supply closets.

  “Gonazine,” he hissed, “and a molecular bonding stimulator, and if you have both of those I may leave you alive.”

  “You can help yourself to the gonazine,” Glomulus, who had been watching the Artist’s progress on the casualty monitors, stepped out from his sleeping niche. “We don’t have much need for it since we only have one Blaran on board and he’s not prone to … well, to whatever you things have when a species that sleeps would have nightmares,” he eyed the Artist up and down. The Artist had frozen and was glaring at Doctor Cratch as if offended his precious ears hadn’t warned him of the human’s presence. “Are you troubled by visions? No matter,” he waved a braceleted hand. “Top shelf, on the left. You probably won’t need a stool to stand on, will you? Big tall fellow like you. I’d just appreciate it if you didn’t kill Nurse Dingus there. No telling what I’d get next time, and I just got him trained.”