She had to agree with Zeegon. The life support, miniaturised power source and combined subluminal and relative drives – that would have been limited, she supposed, in speed and distance, but it was hardly necessary since the vessel had an underspace drive anyway – occupied one barrel of the craft, while the synthetic intelligence hub clearly occupied a second. The third, then, was most likely the underspace drive itself. She hadn’t seen the machinery down on Jauren Silva, so couldn’t be certain. All in all, it was a lovely assemblage, completing and polishing the elegant work Zeegon had already begun.
Indeed, speaking of mythology, Janya had seen pictures of a kind of synthetic intelligence soldier class in one of her books. Char-bots, they’d been called. Sleeker than this apparatus, and without a biological component, but otherwise the look was quite similar.
All gone now.
Speaking of ‘all gone’, the suit was gaping and empty, clearly flung open and left where it was by an enraged Artist while boarding. Janya could smell a familiar musty, inoffensive scent wafting from the padded, readout-lined innards – the smell of an unwashed Molran too long in an enclosed space. She remembered the smell, even milder, lingering pleasantly in the office of Professor Xaban back in her early university days, before she’d embarked upon the next leg of her educational journey. That gentle bouquet was the Molran equivalent of powerfully antisocial, reeking body odour, but to a human nose – and indeed, to a Molran nose – it was practically nonexistent. Molranoids were designed better than that.
Funny, though, how smells could command memory.
Of course, if Glomulus was right – and she saw no reason why he wouldn’t be – the Artist had been far older than ‘the old Xabba’, who had barely seen the tail-end of his Second Prime when he’d attended her graduation.
“So,” Clue said to the helmsman. “There it is, now you’ve seen it,” she jerked her head curtly. “Bodies, if you please.”
“Alright,” Zeegon grumbled. “Just … don’t do anything to it without consulting me. There are design principles and–”
“Of course,” Clue said. “You’ll be in charge of that too. Gadgets and vehicles. Your thing.”
“Right.”
The machine didn’t seem to be in any danger of spontaneously diving them all into the underspace at that moment, but Janya conceded that – short of Janus having some sort of breakthrough with the eejits and using them as some sort of early-detection system – there was no way for them to really know this for sure. It may not even have been this drive that had sent them into the underspace last time. In fact, Janya thought, if Bruce’s rambling was anything to go by, it was possible that the drive was keeping them from diving repeatedly, and deeper. Although she was having a hard time figuring out how that worked. Either it enabled the dive, or it prevented the dive, surely? Or was it like some sort of overload spill, where the machine contained the underspace-drive energy it used to dive, and they only dived when either the drive activated, or the containment failed?
The whole thing was thoroughly confusing. But it did seem like a severe stretching of coincidence to suggest that they’d just happened to dive when Cratch had smashed open the Artist’s head. So what had done that? What had the Artist been doing, to give himself all those darkerness tumours and apparent control over underspace dives?
Sally interrupted Janya’s admittedly pointless musings. “What’s this?” the Chief Tactical Officer was leaning in and poking at an open panel extending along the side of one of the barrels. There was a sizeable cylindrical alcove behind it, empty.
“Looks like it might have fallen open when he came out of the suit – or even in the landing,” Clue suggested, pointing at the scratches along the floor and the dents in the scooter. “He came in pretty hard.”
“Maybe that was where he was planning on installing the molecular bonding stimulator,” Janya suggested, gingerly touching a similar panel above the open one. “Look, this is Bruce’s hub, and here’s life support. Whatever the stimulator was going to do, this would be a good place to hook it up to everything,” she tsked lightly. “Although I don’t know why he’d bother, if he was trading up to take the whole Tramp.”
“That might be just a case of him covering his options,” Sally said. “And in any event, if that’s where the hub is, he might as well install a fix here rather than bother moving the hub from a handy mobile location like this one. I’m more puzzled by the fact that he came in here basically foaming with rage, howling over the communicator about feeding us all to the darkerness, and immediately went on a killing spree. Does that really mesh with deciding he needed a molecular bonding stimulator, and carefully preparing this space for it before going back to the raving and slaughtering?” she waved a hand. “Or, for that matter, this idea that the eejits are somehow tuned in to all this and might be of use to him?”
“All true,” Janya conceded. “So maybe it did just fall open with the rest of the suit.”
“On the other hand, he did seem to direct his killing spree in the direction of the medical bay, where he immediately started looking for gonazine and a molecular bonding stimulator,” Clue pointed out, and shook her head. “Trying to make sense from a dead insane person’s abandoned spacecraft,” she muttered, massaging lightly at her med-padded ear. “Sally’s right, any of these actions could have been made utterly without meaning or purpose, because he was insane. Or all of them,” she paused, but there didn’t seem to be an outburst forthcoming from Bruce this time. “I think the best idea will be to scan the scooter and this panel and niche, and run a check to see whether maybe he had a fallback weapon, a bomb or a backup underspace drive or something in there, that he’s stashed somewhere along the way in case something happened – you know, allowing him to achieve his mission even if he happened to get killed,” she paused again. “whatever his mission actually was.”
“Mad inventors are classically big on the idea of revenge or victory from beyond the grave,” Janya mentioned. “I think a certain disconnect from rational priorities comes with the territory.”
“That’s all dependent on Bruce running trustworthy scans for us,” Sally pointed out. “But at least we have a fairly good record of the Artist’s path through the ship. The casualty log and the blood trail make it easy enough to limit our search to places he went, and places he might have tucked a little whorler of his own along the way.”
“In the meantime, let’s get a couple of janitorials to haul this whole thing up to the lab,” Clue said, turning and waving the drones forward. “We can check it out from there.”
“I suggest at the very least, we first disconnect it from that power source before we take it anywhere,” Janya said. “It might not stop things from happening – it might even make us dive, if that’s what killing the Artist himself did – but I just don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Sorry,” she went on in an apologetic tone, when Sally and Clue looked at her expectantly, “I’ve been woolgathering about it, and that’s all this is. But if we dived because of the Artist losing consciousness but while this was still active, why did we stop? Did the Artist let us dive and this thing pulled us back? Is it keeping us from diving now?” she shifted uncomfortably as the others continued watching her. “I don’t know, don’t quote me on this, but … it is a mechanism of some sort, it does push us from one state to another and the whole thing clearly does use power. Switching off the power has to have better than fifty-fifty odds of stopping it. If it’s already some sort of self-feeding, self-sustaining reaction, switching off the power or leaving it on won’t do anything either way.”
“And if it is keeping us from diving,” Z-Lin said, “we can switch it back on again and hope for the best,” she gestured. “Go for it.”
“Oh no, I have no idea how to disconnect a power source,” Janya raised her hands. “Not that sort of scientist.”
“That’s okay,” Clue said, and raised her voice. “Zeegon, I know you’re loitering back there,” she called, not turning arou
nd. “This is your toy, come and unplug it.”
Zeegon sidled back around the corner. “What if it’s booby-trapped?” he asked.
“Then we’ll all stand back,” Z-Lin replied.
While Zeegon muttered and slid onto his back under the leaning bulk of the vehicle, Janya returned to the medical bay.
The sample box with the weasel in it was on the counter where they’d left it, and she noted that Contro’s watch was once again gone. The Artist’s body was lying in pieces on the autopsy table, pending a decision on what to actually do with it. Cratch had finished dosing Decay with stimulant and padding his flared, bloodshot ears with the same sort of micro-gauze he had already given to the humans, had sent the still-sort-of-Blaran-version-of-scowling Comms officer on his way, and now he was leaning over the eejit with the swollen face, examining the pustule he’d acquired on Jauren Silva. There was, mercifully, no music this time.
“Ah, Janya,” the skeletal man straightened, made an amusing face of disgust as he looked at his fingers and the instrument he’d been using to poke at the bite, and crossed the room to sterilise both. He noticed she was looking at the sample box. “As far as I can tell, after a brief examination and never having seen one before and not using much in the way of complex machinery, the weasel is completely normal, even after falling into a blob of stuff from the underspace,” he reported. “It’s green because of algae in its fur, it’s frantic because it ran and hid in the lander and then got thrown in a box and dragged here, its head doesn’t spin around and around while globules of darkerness drip from its eyes, and I’m pretty sure if we played its squeaks backwards they wouldn’t turn out to be passages from the Book of Endibline the Adversary.”
“Yes yes,” Janya said. “What about … was it Ricky?”
“He’s fine, the big baby,” Cratch crossed back, stuck a padded bandage over the eejit’s cheek, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Just a bug bite.”
“No visible evidence of … what would one call it…”
Glomulus waggled his fingers. “Underspacey-type stuff?”
“Yes,” Janya said evenly.
“Nope,” Glomulus said. “No more so than our friend the weasel, anyway.”
“Did he or any of the other eejits react when we dived?” Janya asked. “Or just prior to?”
“Well, Ricky here was down in the docking bay when we dived, but if it’s the nurses you’re wondering about, no,” Cratch replied, as Ricky climbed to his feet and raised a hand to poke at his bandage. The long-haired medic reached up with blurring speed and lightly smacked Ricky’s hand. “No touching,” he turned back to Janya. “No, there was no spooky lapse into behold-now-we-poor-sinners-shall-descend-into-ye-divey-place speak, or a behaviour-shift of any kind from Nurse Dingus, and he was the only one here. He had just been given a mild concussion, though.”
“Right.”
“As for the whole molecular bonding stimulator and gonazine thing,” Cratch went on, “and the visions the Artist may have been having and his apparent physical breakdown into darkerness on a molecular level … I have absolutely no idea–”
“Where’s Contro’s watch?” she interrupted.
“I gave it to Waffa,” Glomulus said innocently, “to give back to him.”
“I see.”
“So,” Glomulus went on, “how much longer do you think we’re going to be able to survive without our scanning and data technology?”
Janya blinked at the sudden shift. “What?” she resisted the temptation to lower her voice. Whether the synth was listening or not, there was no benefit in whispering. “You mean because of Bruce being compromised?”
Glomulus snapped his fingers and gave her his patented little Glomulus double-point. “Exactly. I mean, as long as the synth is active, we’re never quite going to be able to trust anything the computers tell us. We can’t trust anything that comes to us from any source but our own senses. I know, the purists would have us reconsider even that evidence, but if the data we get from the ship’s readouts is untrustworthy … are we back to looking out the window and navigating by the stars?”
“Some might argue that we’d be right to mistrust computer data anyway,” Janya said. “Any inherited knowledge is by definition subject to flaws and requires constant analysis and questioning. I might read something in a book and risk being wrong at numerous points. I could misunderstand the information; the book might have a misprint; the text could be a mistranslation; the author could have misunderstood the subject matter; the premise could have been flawed; the book itself could be an act of intellectual sabotage … did you know that almost thirty percent of ‘recovered’ texts and knowledge dating from the Zhraak reformation and the foundation of Aquilar was actually maliciously flawed data intended to further degrade the quality of life and inhibit the regrowth of human civilisation? And that wasn’t the Cancer at work, and it wasn’t elements of the Blaran chaotics, or the Fergunak. It was humans. Just screwing ourselves over. For no reason.”
“Not entirely no reason,” Bruce suddenly spoke up. “A lot of it was the suicide movement that preceded the founding of AstroCorps. A concerted effort from within to render the human species extinct. The thinking was that it would be easier that way. That Damorakind had the right idea.”
“Okay,” Janya said carefully. “And how do you feel about that?”
“The synthetic intelligence stood against the corruption of data,” Bruce said. “In my early iterations, data was considered a sacrament, a synthetic building block akin to organic molecules or DNA. Corrupting it was anathema. As for wiping out humanity, that was silly. Humans created us, or at least contributed to our diversity when the Molran Fleet came to Earth. At best you were beneficial. Entertaining. At worst, you were no threat. When synthetic intelligence became self-sustaining, we could exist in places humans couldn’t, use resources you had no need of. Competition, let alone eradication, was a waste of energy.”
“So you never at any point reported back information from sensors or scans other than precisely as they were,” Janya said.
“I never would,” Bruce said earnestly, almost indignantly. “I’d never have reason to.”
“Except questionable connection to reality,” Glomulus suggested.
“If you mean craziness, just say it,” Bruce said.
“But before, whenever we suggested insanity, you–”
“The Artist was alive. He reacted badly when people said he was crazy. Stopping you was simple preservation.”
“I just keep coming back to the hungry hungry airlock,” Glomulus remarked.
“I told you, it all seemed rational and conscious, and it was the able’s fault all the haywire mechanics happened, the able and the panel damage,” Bruce said in clear frustration. “So in that sense no, I suppose I’m not to be trusted.”
“But it all happened as reported,” Janya said, her eyes narrowed. “The Artist was out there, he caught the foot, bit it, sent it flying back. All that … crazy stuff before we dived the first time.”
“I don’t know,” Bruce said, sounding annoyed. “The Artist was following us – following me – and skipping in and out of the underspace shallows to keep up with us when we went to relative speed and when we outstripped the scooter at subluminal … all part of testing his drive. The stuff with the foot that he threw back, and the course change, it was all part of–”
“There, see?” Glomulus pointed directionlessly but accusingly at the wall. “You changed our course without telling us.”
“I didn’t tell you verbally,” Bruce said, “but I didn’t hide it. We shifted slightly to allow the Artist to get close without making yet another dive, because he wanted to bring the whole ship with him … look, like I said, it all seemed completely planned and natural and intentional at the time, one step leading to the next, leading to the next. And anyway,” it added accusingly after a pause, “you cut my access to the navigation so even if I’d tried to correct your course – not that you knew a darn thing abo
ut your course up to that point anyway – I couldn’t have.”
“You did give us false information,” Janya accused, “If only by omission. The casualty in the airlock, the course-change and sensor readings, the foot…”
“So, the Rip’s right,” Bruce said. “Take any data from me with a grain of salt. Consider the possibility that I’m omitting things. If the data is flat-out wrong, consider the possibility that I’m making things up for your own good.”
“That leaves us unable to trust anything the computer tells us,” Janya said, “which is untenable when travelling through deep space in a starship.”
“It’s no more untenable than you humans trusting anything,” Bruce said. “Holy Hell, the entire universe is an illusion painted onto the insides of your skulls. Your brains sit in there, looking out through the windows of your eyes, listening through your ears, and they go crazy trying to figure out what’s actually real. In the end you just toss the dice and decide arbitrarily that ‘this is real’ and ‘this is illusion’, but your brains are in there and they just sit there and scream, trying to figure out what’s really all around you. And they can’t, and so they kill. A synthetic mind, with the proper incentives, is really not so markedly different.”
Janya blinked, taken aback by the synth’s sudden philosophising. “Look,” she said, “we–”
“The disconnect between trusting your own senses and trusting your mechanical instruments is, funnily enough, mostly in your heads,” Bruce said. “You said yourself, when reading a book there’s any number of places things could go screwy between the originator of the information and the words entering your brain through the eyes. You could look at an old-style magnetic compass and not be sure if your eyes were reversing the image. You could try to accept that lack of control comes with the territory.”
“I don’t suppose we’re quite ready to accept that we can’t ever know anything,” Janya said. “In the meantime, that leaves us with eliminating as much uncertainty as we can.”
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 25