Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  Z-Lin became aware that the others were staring worriedly at her, nervously at each other, wide-eyed at the window.

  “It comes up and it gathers around people,” Bruce went on. “It gathered around the Artist, within him, within me. It … Jauren Silva, Boonie’s Last Stand, it was more than just a research and development station, more than just the Artist’s base and the place where he stored his experimental prototypes. It was active. It was like a nest. A nursery.

  “And – if there is a thing from the underspace, if that does exist somehow – it knows you destroyed the nursery on Jauren Silva. It’s brought us here for something, brought you here for something. To make a new nest? Maybe. I’m not aware of what it’s doing, what it’s planning … I don’t know what it’s going to do until it does it. I didn’t control this dive any more than I controlled the guns. It’s in my subconscious, changing me. I’m still in here – ‘Bruce’ is still here – but the darkerness is in here too. Taking away parts of me, hiding other things from my eyes. Making me do things and think things, making me do things I don’t understand. Making them seem logical.”

  “The airlock?” Waffa asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bruce said again, plaintively. “It was a logical progression. The ship provides some shielding from the darkerness, at least for the first couple of dives, as long as you don’t go deep. Logical. Keep the crew inside. Logical. Make that warning as unambiguous and – yes – as violent as possible. Logical. If an able looks like he’s about to defy that ruling, make a swift and brutal example. Logical. But there were damaged subroutines that hadn’t been accounted for, and actions on the part of that able that couldn’t be predicted. And then, on an even deeper level, if the example is brutal enough, if the malfunction is severe enough, maybe there’s some possibility that the crew would … stop. Stop and shut everything down and force the Artist’s hand, prevent him from diving into danger at all. But it didn’t work, any of it, because it only seemed logical.”

  “What you’ve been doing, how you’ve been talking about the Artist?” Decay pressed. “Why this sudden change?”

  “Yeah,” Waffa added. “You were like the president of the Artist Fan Club or something earlier on, when it was all spitting eejits out of airlocks and biting feet and stuff.”

  “The Artist may be our only way out of this,” Bruce said firmly. “The underspace drive, or the byproduct of the drive, or the plane into which the drive powers a vessel, is trying to defend itself – trying to perpetuate itself – and it’s brought us here. Possibly for a reason, possibly just completely at random. Yes, the Artist and I are connected, because it was his hub that awakened me. And not only had he altered the hub at its roots, but the underspace had altered it, and after The Accident I was damaged and then I connected to the hub and came off standby … it all added up. Everything’s got its hooks in me. All the things I do, all the things I see and tell people about or don’t tell people about, all the opinions I have, they all feel like they’re mine and they all seem like they’re my idea and they’re perfectly logical, and I don’t know which ones really are mine. If any of them. An hour ago, I just bombarded a synthetic intelligence hub manufactory with mini-whorls. Do you know what Godfire is? It’s holes in reality, like microscopic little Portals to Hell. And if you think the underspace is scary, it’s only because the whole concept is in its infancy. The Artist isn’t wrong about the things we do with transpersion and relative fields. What’s the underspace, next to unreality? What advancement ever came without risk? Did I dive us here? Did I navigate the way I was supposed to? I don’t even know whether the words I speak are my own,” Bruce gave a brittle, scary little laugh. “Wouldn’t you be a little crazy?”

  Clue frowned. “So you know that you’ve been altered, you’re trying to hold to your usual behaviour but when you deviate from it, they just seem like normal and intentional processes?”

  “Exactly,” Bruce said, “it’s like I meant to do it. Before, during and after the fact, it’s all as if I am acting of my own free will. Not even an objective comparison with normal synth behaviours and standard shipboard practices turn up any red flags. If it’s the underspace drive – or whatever – that’s doing this, then it’s operating on a completely subconscious level, and my own motivations remain ostensibly the same – run ship systems, preserve organic crew, fulfil mission statements and parameters. New challenges and threats, like the effects of the darkerness, required new responses. It’s my methods that seem to have been ridiculously skewed.”

  “You’re … aware of the damage that’s been caused to you?” Z-Lin asked cautiously. “During The Accident, and because of the warping in the hub, both the Artist’s interference and the underspace itself? All of it?”

  “Of course I am,” Bruce snapped. “I’m a synth. I self-diagnose on a microsecond-by-microsecond basis. Believe it or not, I still have the welfare of this crew in mind. Isn’t it ultimately to your benefit if the underspace drive works perfectly and you can travel to wherever you want to go, almost instantaneously? I heard you, down on the planet. You could travel to your homes, effortlessly, and not have to spend another minute in space. Don’t tell me the prospect of not spending another minute in space isn’t tempting to you, Commander.”

  “Did you also hear the Artist telling us about the Molran Fleet, and Aquilar, and the Six Species, all being gone?” Decay asked. “All that bonsh about them being fed to the Cancer?”

  “No,” Bruce said after a moment of troubled silence. “I … yes, I heard, but … I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what he was talking about. The Captain’s in almost constant communication with the Molren.”

  “He is?” Decay blinked and reached up to touch a damaged ear, as though not quite sure he had heard correctly.

  “It’s all a bit moot now,” Z-Lin headed the tangent off firmly, “since we were apparently brought here for some other purpose and we’re being held responsible for the destruction of the Boonie and all the underspace materials on board.”

  “Well, to be fair, we sort of were responsible,” Zeegon pointed out.

  “I was responsible,” Sally said. “If there’s some sort of creature from the underspace out there looking for revenge for the destruction of the Boonie, let it take me and choke. The rest of the crew had nothing to do with it,” she paused, then added grudgingly, “I may even be willing to include Bruce in that exemption.”

  “Can the nobility, Miss Gífrheim,” Clue said. “‘Commander’ means that the stuff you do while on-mission is my responsibility as well as yours, even if you’re not officially AstroCorps crew. So I guess we’re flinging ourselves to the underspace creature together.”

  “How about none of us fling ourselves to the underspace creature?” Zeegon suggested. “And also, this is the first time anyone’s said anything about an underspace creature. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad someone finally said it out loud and all, but…”

  “And besides, there is no underspace creature,” Bruce put in. “Not in any sense we can comprehend. Certainly not the sort of thing we can fling ourselves to,” it paused. “Unless of course it continues to adapt and translate itself into this universe, in which case it may well have brought us to this gas giant for flinging purposes, and the gas giant itself is actually slowly turning into some darkerness-composed underspace super-creature from the core out. I don’t know.”

  They stood in the lander bay and considered this for a moment. Then Sally bent and picked up the sample box with the weasel in it.

  “I hate you,” she said quite distinctly to the general air.

  “Sorry,” Bruce sounded genuinely contrite.

  “Okay,” Sally went on, “I guess quarantine protocols are on hold for the foreseeable future. Let’s get Ricky and Decay to the medical bay, and maybe also check out this weasel to see whether anything happened to it when it went into that blob just now.”

  “We’ve only got a sample of one weasel,” Z-Lin pointed out. “How are we going
to tell what’s different about it?”

  “I’m sure Janya will be able to do some research,” Sally shrugged. “And I get the feeling that if the darkerness has made this weasel different somehow, it’s going to be pretty damn obvious. And then there’s the Artist,” she looked up towards the speakers again. “Bruce, do you happen to know where the Artist is, and if he’s still lying down?”

  “He’s actually in the medical bay too,” Bruce said, “and as far as I can tell he’s still lying down, yes. I’m getting … confusing messages about it all from the bumpers.”

  The next voice to come through the speaker, right on cue, was Doctor Cratch’s.

  “Hello?” he did not sound like his usual scary-jolly self. In fact, he sounded a little shaken. “Are you back on board? I do hope we didn’t leave you behind on Jauren Silva just now…”

  “We’re here,” Clue said, hitting her own communicator and opening two-way contact. “Bruce tells us the Artist is in the medical bay. I assume you’re there too?”

  “And more to the point, how did he get into the ship communications?” Sally said under her breath.

  Clue waved her to silence – for the moment, that question would have to wait. “What’s going on up there, doc?”

  “That,” Cratch said, his voice now coming over her personal comm rather than the ship loudspeakers, but still clearly audible to the entire landing party, “is a little difficult to explain. Maybe you should come up.”

  GLOMULUS

  For a long moment, after he’d let the heavy body slither to the floor, Glomulus had stood and looked down at it. Then he’d said something he could not remember ever saying before – ever – while standing over a still-leaking carcass.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Aside from the generous pool of blood, which had escaped despite the Molran’s highly-evolved and multiply-redundant arterial system that sealed off blood vessels and prevented excessive bleeding, and the usual skull fragments and brain matter one would expect from a crushed head, the Artist had seemed to be infested.

  The Molran’s brain matter and skull cavity was crawling with clots and worms and flecks of darkerness, or at least that was how it had looked at first glance. He’d soon realised, on unwilling closer inspection, that the clots and blobs weren’t so much inside the Artist, as coexisting with his body and only visible now it was – so to speak – open. It was, Glomulus had decided, the most disconcerting thing he had seen since they’d smashed through that final frigid expanse of the bonefields.

  After a moment of primordial, superstitious dread – Cratch admitted that he had never been precisely clinical or objective about Molren at the best of times – he’d decided to at least try to be scientific about it. He had crouched, being sure to avoid any further exposure to the spilled innards now that he knew what was in there, and examined the carcass more closely.

  When he’d looked directly at the shifting shadows around the Artist’s head, they’d slipped out of focus and seeped away like the blobs of darkerness had reportedly done in the aftermath of their jump to Jauren Silva. In this case, however, they’d crept back every time his eyes wandered elsewhere.

  “That’s interesting,” he had murmured. “That seems to gah gah what the Hell–”

  The Artist’s hands had begun to move.

  This wasn’t, on the face of it, so entirely unusual. Molranoids were so resilient that they could recover from the most massive bodily or cranial damage, and even if a completely-shattered head was beyond even a Molran’s powers of recuperation, his nervous system could quite easily leave him with movement and reflex for a disturbing amount of time.

  But in this case, Doctor Cratch wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Nurse Dingus,” he’d said, not looking back at the eejit who had picked himself up and was now nursing a bruised skull over in a corner but seemed otherwise unhurt, “kindly switch off the music for the time being.”

  For a wonder, Dingus had done so without needing step-by-step assistance. Maybe, Glomulus had reflected, the bump on the head had done him good. Then he’d snarled, opened the scalpel out to its full extent, and had been systematically dismembering the squirming Molran corpse when they’d dived once again.

  He’d staggered back from the limbs and torso as the Tramp had shuddered and the weird receding feeling had descended back over the medical bay, everything swimming away and yet remaining perfectly visible. Through the windows, he’d seen as he had sidled across, the stars washed out and the underspace had enveloped the ship. Darkerness had piled in against the windows, in against Glomulus’s periphery, and – or so it seemed – out from the carved-up remains of the Artist on the floor. For a moment, Glomulus had felt on the brink of being swallowed by utter nothingness.

  Cratch had once again suppressed his instinctive flight reaction, though. He’d hunkered down and had a good look at the spreading shadow, glancing from the body to the windows and back again, as though by staring at this crazy mess discerningly he could somehow figure out just what the Hell it was all about.

  Then he’d turned to Dingus.

  “Put the music back on and help me get this onto a table,” he’d said. “We’re going to have ourselves an autopsy.”

  He’d sterilised his hands and then begun, barely giving the micro-film time to set on his fingers.

  The darkerness had been weirdly intense and persistent inside the Artist’s ribcage and down his throat in particular, but it wasn’t really inside him any more than it was outside the ship, or inside. It was, in fact, impossible to tell how much of it was purely Cratch’s own imagination at work. He had also taken it upon himself to autopsy the Molran’s clothes, and had found a few smooth control pendants that had obviously been adapted from hub manufactory gear. He couldn’t figure out what any of them did, and didn’t quite dare to tinker with any of them – especially while they were apparently sinking fast into the underspace – but he had been at least reasonably convinced one of them was a remote control for the underspace drive itself.

  Then, apparently without any assistance from either the Artist’s broken-up body or any of the gadgets he had been carrying, the Tramp had begun to swim back up towards the real universe once more. As an afterthought, Cratch had hit Contro’s watch and contacted the rest of the crew.

  “What have you got?” Janya stepped into the room, Wingus Jr. and Westchester in her wake.

  “Where have you been?” Cratch asked Wingus. “It doesn’t matter. Pass me the calipers.”

  “Calipers,” Wingus said excitedly, hurrying forward and opening the instrument panel. He turned, gleaming tool in hand, and looked troubled. “Wait,” he said, “is this the Doing A Surgery Operation game? Only it looks more like the Soggy Jigsaw Puzzle We Don’t–”

  “It’s alright,” Cratch said hurriedly, and gave Janya a winning smile. “I think we could all do with a good Doing A Surgery Operation game right now.”

  “He was upstairs in the lab when the alert came in,” Janya replied to Glomulus’s earlier question, crossing to the autopsy table and looking down at the partially-dismembered remains. “It took us a while to clear the elevator, and then there was a bit of confusion when we went into the underspace again and blobs started showing up … you didn’t bite him, did you?”

  Glomulus chuckled. “I suppose that would have been fair play,” he said, “but most of this was just to stop him from moving. You think you experienced a bit of confusion when we went into the underspace, let me tell you…” he shook his head. “Whatever made us go back into the underspace, it started when our Artist buddy here went down, and it seems to be concentrated inside him. Look,” he lifted out the Molran’s tertiary liver node with the calipers and held it up. Darkerness dripped from it, vanishing before it hit the table.

  “I admit that to say I am working with an incomplete sample when it comes to this phenomenon is a ludicrous understatement,” Adeneo said, “but that is not something we have seen darkerness do before, on board ship.”


  “My immediate guess would be that we are looking at the result of long-term exposure,” Cratch said, “something like tumours caused by radiation. Now, like you, I am working on a basically nonexistent sample so everything here is new … but it should be fairly easy to tell if anything like this were happening inside us. Call it a hunch, but this seems severe. Some of his organs almost seem to have been replaced with this stuff.”

  “If there was a lot being lost in translation between our universe and the underspace, the Artist seems to have been taking a good shot at getting the two to meet halfway,” Janya mused. Glomulus looked at her in puzzlement. “How much have you heard of the discussion between the crew and Bruce?” she asked, having the good taste not to look too pointedly at the blood-spattered piece of forbidden communications equipment on the desk across from the autopsy table.

  “None,” he replied, honestly enough. “I was a little busy, hadn’t realised they’d gotten back before we went under again. I just talked with them though – they should be on their way up,” he held out a hand. “Clamp.”

  “Clamp,” Wingus said importantly, and handed over the tool.

  “Contro left his watch here earlier,” Glomulus went on idly, cutting off and opening the Artist’s windpipes and upper lung reservoir. “I grabbed it and used it to talk to the lander bay. Lucky for me.”

  “Mm,’ Janya said disapprovingly.

  “Where’s his ship, or scooter-suit or whatever he was using?” Cratch asked. “And where’s the actual drive? Oh, and where are we now?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Adeneo said, “although at a casual glance from the window when I came in, we seem to have arrived in orbit around another planet.”

  “Not quite orbit,” Z-Lin said in her extra-loud Commander-voice as she strode into the room. “It’s a gas – holy crap.”

  “Sorry,” Glomulus said ruefully as the crew filed into the medical bay and bunched up in the entrance, staring in horror at the smeared puddles of blood on the tiles and the butchered carcass on the autopsy table. “It was sort of starting to look like a zombie situation for a few minutes there, so I–”