Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  “So,” Cratch concluded, “if we did decide to get rid of the hub and return you to standby – perhaps to get the computer system fixed whenever we get somewhere where we can make such complex repairs – you wouldn’t object?”

  “I wouldn’t be thrilled,” Bruce admitted.

  “How about if we just disconnect the hub and power it down, rather than ‘get rid’ of it,” Janya asked, “putting you back onto standby? You’d probably have to consent to that, if not help. We could just try to destroy it, but that would cause a lot of relay damage to your actual computer system, not to mention the fact that you might just decide to kill us if we tried to do it against your will.”

  “Two things.”

  “Go.”

  “You’re saying this like you’d actually talk me through the options, rather than Sally just throwing the hub into the transpersion core when nobody was looking.”

  “True.”

  “And even if I was on standby, I’m damaged. You still couldn’t trust my data, the only difference would be that I’d lack the self-critical faculties to work with you to decipher said data.”

  “Damn it,” Janya conceded.

  “It still might be the better course,” Bruce added.

  “You say that, knowing it means your death,” Cratch said. “Or the shutting down of your consciousness, at least.”

  “Are you saying you wouldn’t give up your life if it was a danger to oh, right,” Bruce trailed off. “I guess I’m asking the wrong guy.”

  “You’re damn skippy.”

  That was when, unexpectedly, Janus Whye contacted them.

  “Hi, guys?” the counsellor’s usual hesitant, questioning voice came over the medical bay comm system. “I, uh, I’m here with Contro in the, in the engine room I guess.”

  “He guesses?” Glomulus mouthed.

  “And I just sort of had a thought,” Whye went on, “something about this whole underspace thing and the problem we’re having. Not important, just was a bit of a mind-blower for me, thought I should share it, you know, in case it was … I don’t know, the answer or whatever. Are you guys even still in the medical bay?”

  “We’re here,” Janya replied through her own communicator, “or at least I am. I’m on my way,” she turned to leave, then spun back to face Cratch. “Oh,” she added, “give it to me.”

  “What?”

  “The Artist’s tooth,” she said, holding out her hand. “You took it out during the autopsy. His head was a mess but I could still see he only had one eye tooth.”

  “His … tooth? I don’t know what you … what’s the relevance?” Janya continued to look at him steadily. “What if he only had one when he arrived?” Glomulus asked. “Plenty of Molren lose eye teeth and don’t graft in replacements.”

  “Yes,” Janya said. “All those Molren you killed on Barnalk High, for example. Every single one of them lost exactly the same eye tooth. It would be an amazing coincidence for the Artist to show up without one here.”

  “It’s an amazing universe.”

  “And why not do your part to make this particular over-amazing corner of it just that little bit more boring?” she stuck her hand out further. The thick scar on her forearm stood out pale against her skin as her sleeve pulled back.

  Glomulus sighed. “He almost cut me in half with a scalpel,” he complained, digging into his pocket and producing the little gleaming curl of enamel. “I thought it was only fair.”

  “I know you did,” Janya plucked the tooth unhesitatingly from his palm. “But you have a warped idea of what is fair. You also have a warped idea of what constitutes safe containment of a still-probably-contaminated biological sample,” she dropped the tooth on the autopsy table next to the Artist’s lower jaw, and then activated a spray of bio-sealant. “Depending on what happens with the underspace drive next, we’ll figure out what to do with the body,” she went on as the film hardened over the pieces like shrink-wrap and the little academic crossed to the sanitation console to sterilise her hands. “But whatever the final decision ends up being, I can safely say that ‘distributing body-parts as collectors’ items’ is not going to be among the options.”

  JANUS

  After being hustled to the big console-and-machinery-filled room that – he had to be honest – he hadn’t really ever spent much time in and only assumed was the engine room or something, and told by amusingly-earmuffed Decay that he should ‘stick with Contro’ and ‘report anything weird’, Janus had sat back, stretched, and done what he usually did.

  He’d relaxed, utterly and completely, at least to the extent where the tiniest iota of additional relaxation would have caused the release of several involuntary bodily functions and either inconvenience, embarrass or kill him, or all three in that order. He’d sagged slightly into his own centre of gravity, let his eyelids droop, and laid his hands on the desk.

  In this mode, he could pass several hours of a duty shift in complete comfort and as close to suspended animation as one could get without expensive machinery.

  Slightly out-of-focus in the middle-distance in front of him, across the tidy expanse of main engineering, Contro had been having one of his patented ouroboros conversations with the only people he could have them with and not get punched in the face: three eejits, each with superhuman – or perhaps more accurately superbovine – patience and attentiveness but levels of abstract thinking faculty to match their rationality and logic, ie. about a teaspoonful of each, per eejit. He’d been chattering in this manner when Decay had delivered Janus to the room and didn’t seem in any danger of stopping or, worse, requiring Janus to take part in the interaction.

  For a little while Janus had watched the eejits, rather than listening to the conversation. He’d tried to see if he could pinpoint anything in their mood or behaviour that could help with his vague underspace theory that wouldn’t require him to actually do any active study or questioning. He’d also tried to watch the casualty feeds on his organiser pad, to see if the eejits the Artist had killed had been reacting to the apparently-darkerness-contaminated Molran in any particular way. But he’d grown queasy quite fast, and hadn’t seen anything particularly enlightening before giving up.

  Janya was right, he’d thought heavily. It was difficult to think about any of this as a coincidence. They’d dived, that last time, at almost the same moment the guys were returning from Jauren Silva, and Glomulus Cratch was killing the Artist over in the medical bay. The Artist, as far as anyone knew, had been nowhere near his underspaceship at the time. Had he remote-controlled it? Had he set it to go off when his life-signs ceased? Had the darkerness in his own body somehow turned him into an underspace drive, and sent them diving as a result of his death?

  There was a connection. He just couldn’t see it.

  Anyway. The Artist was dead, the engines were humming and the Tramp was safely out of the gravitational field of the vast and unnamed gas giant, past its little scattering of moons, and was accelerating deeper into the unknown solar system upon which they’d been unceremoniously dumped.

  Most importantly, the indefinably horrifying blobs of shadow from an un-universe breached and dragged into this one by a mad Molran inventor all seemed to be gone. That was always an upside to the day, he’d thought, even if it was a rather obscure one that you really had to dig for. The only ones who seemed unconvinced by the vanishing blobs, perhaps due to some special sense that Janus was considering dubbing ‘eejie-sense’, were the erstwhile eejits.

  “And then they told me it was installed backwards,” Contro had been saying as Whye randomly tuned back into the conversational white noise, “which actually meant it was the right way around, or at least it was installed frontwards, which was wrong, because it’s meant to be installed back-first and then in segments going forward, so for that part of the accelerator, the Dahmer Column, forwards was backwards and backwards was forwards, so anyway it meant it was backwards, that is forwards, which was wrong, so they had to reinstall it the other way, bac
kwards, which was right! Ha ha ha, that was a crazy week before they finally explained that properly to me, I can tell you!”

  Now would be a good time, Janus had thought, to make a start on a new essay. A paper, even. He’d have to unrelax at least one arm, or his head and neck if he wanted to dictate, but recent events had certainly been interesting enough to warrant an arm. Minimum.

  Whye hadn’t really been listening with more than half an ear to the prattling going on – not listening with more than half an ear was all part of his relaxation regimen – and he didn’t really start once he’d straightened a little in his chair and begun doodling on his organiser pad. Organic, predictable in broad strokes but otherwise utterly random and only connected by free association within Contro’s mind, which to the average person meant no connection, the monologue-as-conversation had changed subject and gone on, and Whye had tuned it out again as he pondered.

  Leave the eejits for now. Come back to them. What about the Artist, and Bruce?

  The Artist hadn’t thought Bruce was mad. He couldn’t afford to. He’d invested himself in Bruce’s normality, because that was the only way the underspace drive would ever be safe to use, the only way it would ever be safe to spread it around and move the hub from synth to synth. Commercial viability may not have been a driving concern at such an early conceptual stage, but certainly generalised acceptance seemed to have been. The Artist had convinced himself Bruce was fine, Whye thought, by adjusting his own parameters. That didn’t make Bruce the originator of the insanity, of course – it was classic mirror madness. That was why he’d bitten the foot, why he’d excused all the decisions the synth had made. Why, indeed, the synth had excused the decisions the Artist had made. They’d fed on each other, fed into each other, self-reaffirming and self-enabling. A destructive spiral.

  It was the best damn bit of honest-to-God psychobabble Whye had ever conceptualised.

  “There were twelve bunnies in the original story, there had to be because that’s how many months in the old year, you see, but then they changed it to just three bunnies because nobody could remember them all and what they did in the story, which is fair enough because I never could either, in fact the three-bunny story also gave me trouble, but mostly because I kept on thinking of the three bunnies as three groups of four bunnies, see, to make twelve. So then when one of them got married, that was very confusing because were there then two bunnies, or five, or eight? So I decided it made sense to take an average between those three options, which was five, but that was weird because it meant there was four bunnies married to one bunny, not that there’s anything wrong with that but it made me think about that old nursery rhyme about the monkey…”

  “What does this have to do with the gates of the universe?” one of the eejits had asked. They tended to act more like sounding boards for Contro’s conversations, rather than useful or required partners, but it was amusing to see that sometimes even an eejit remained on-point with sufficient concentration to be exasperated by Contro’s ramblings. That particular eejit, Whye had been fairly certain, also had an extreme attention deficit issue.

  “I don’t know,” Contro had said, “was I talking about the gates of the universe? I don’t remember, maybe I was! Ha ha ha!”

  “You were saying that the underspace thing would have gotten us all to the gates,” another of the eejits had said, still evidently a little bit ill-at-ease talking about the frightening dark, but at least willing to mention it now, “and that it was weird that the Molren didn’t like the Artist’s idea since they were all a bit funny that way,” he’d paused. “Then you laughed, and said ‘well honestly they all are, aren’t they?’, and then you said ‘you know, just funny, as in a bit odd,’ and then you laughed again.”

  “Did I?” Contro had asked in puzzlement.

  “You did,” the eejit had replied.

  “You totally did,” the third eejit had spoken up in support. It wasn’t often you saw eejits cooperating on an abstract task, let alone intellectually ganging up on a human.

  “Oh! Ha ha ha! Maybe I did! Well you know, it’s a funny old story, the story of the gates of the universe! And by ‘funny old story’, I mean that it’s funny, and it’s old! Ha ha, and it’s a story! So you can’t argue with that description really, now can you?”

  Whye had carried on listening with his standard half an ear, which he’d idly judged was about one third of an ear more than it deserved, while Contro launched into another convoluted stream of consciousness about Molran astromythology. Janus had been thinking freeform about the underspace, and the bubbles of darkerness that came back into the real universe with them – and apparently inside things – when they returned from a dive. He’d been thinking about the way they seeped away, or lingered, according to some esoteric rule they had yet to figure out. About how they were artifacts of sensory deprivation, indeed, and how sense-damaged eejits might in fact have some sort of advantage in detecting the lingering bruises left behind in a piece of space-time that had been down there.

  Then he’d decided that was just a bit too out-there, so he had gone back to wondering about the different ‘depths’ seemingly available to a would-be underspace traveller.

  The Artist, he’d managed to pick up, had plunged Boonie’s Last Stand into a very deep, dangerous level of the underspace in the process of simultaneously stealing the manufactory and testing his drive. What this had done to the other people on board was a question that, with the death of the Artist, was probably never going to be answered – and at the same time, with the autopsy of the Artist, was probably answered as thoroughly as anyone was comfortable with anyway.

  The Artist had managed to tweak things, later, to make shallower dives – even to follow a ship, like their own Astro Tramp 400, as it travelled through real space … or even at relative speed. Once he’d found them, once he’d perhaps established the hub connection and awakened Bruce, the Artist had been able to track them regardless of their own velocity, using his underspace drive to skim through the ‘shallows’ with a certain amount of control. Would that also have been safer than diving deep?

  ‘Safer’, perhaps, was a relative term.

  Well, Janus had thought, actually ‘safer’ pretty much is literally a relative term, isn’t it …

  In all cases, when you dived it seemed possible to home in on vitality, life-energy somehow, and control one’s ascent to intersect with a ship or a planet or some other kind of life. This was as close as one could come to controlling the dive without a synthetic intelligence – again, apparently – and it was more or less completely random beyond that vague ‘glimmer of life’ concept towards which the prospective underspace pilot could surface. And as far as Whye knew, the only person who had known how to do even that much was now lying dead and in pieces in the Tramp’s medical bay.

  Arguably, they now had a synth willing – or at least able – to pilot them properly, so random hopping from planet to space station to lichen-smeared asteroid, growing steadily more contaminated and insane, was thankfully off the table. The question was whether they wanted to be piloted through the underspace at all, properly or otherwise.

  “…but if you think about it, the gates of space were meant to have been destroyed, instead of closed,” Contro was prattling happily. “Broken gates are the same as a hole in the wall, basically, so it’s the hole Molren are looking for! But then ‘looking for the hole in space’s wall’ isn’t quite as grand as ‘looking for the gates of space’, is it? Ha ha!”

  Obscurely captured by something in Contro’s relentless cascade of words, Janus had found himself reactivating muscles and sitting up in spite of himself.

  “…can’t close it from this side anyway, or open it – so just as well the gates were destroyed if you ask me, ha ha, otherwise there’d be no point in even looking for them, not that they exist anyway but aw, don’t you think it would be sad if all those Molren were looking for all that time, for no reason? Space probably doesn’t have a hole in it, though, be
cause space sort of already is a hole, if you think about it that way. So maybe it’s a metaphor! But that would be frightfully unsatisfying too, don’t you think? You know, one of those ‘it turns out that the secret was inside all of us’ sort of deals! Apparently Mygon the Last will be waiting out there, wouldn’t that be a thing? I imagine he’d be all ‘who broke my jolly gates, who’s going to pay for this then?’ Ha ha ha!”

  Hang on, Janus had thought, with sudden clarity. Why are they willing to talk about the underspace now? And why with Contro, and not with me? I’m ship’s counsellor.

  He’d watched them, watched them listening to Contro, watched Contro talking at them, watched them talking back at him.

  Broken machine, he’d thought, looking at the eejits. He’d looked at Contro. Warped hub.

  Whoa.

  And, as often seemed to happen when he stopped thinking about one thing and focussed on another, Whye had understood something that had been eluding him about the way they had dived, this last time. It had come to him suddenly, and with the indefinable symmetry of correctness. The eejits were receptive, open and vulnerable to the underspace in the same way they were open and vulnerable to ouroboros conversation tar-pits with the Tramp’s Chief Engineer. They didn’t have the filters to escape either phenomenon. What this meant, Whye wasn’t actually sure. Not yet. Not even the Artist had had any experience with eejits, which meant that he hadn’t been on the forefront of underspace / eejit interface research. Janus Whye was.

  The underspace drive was operating on its own. This much seemed clear. It was operating on its own, and it was active – ready to dive – in a sort of standing wave, according to principles they would probably never understand. It had barely been under the Artist’s command in the first place, and even that minimal control had been slipping as the Artist’s mind had drifted farther and farther from the metaphorical shore. But the Artist’s darkerness-riddled body had acted as a sort of doorstop, holding things in place for a time. When he’d died, whatever had been holding the drive’s standing wave in check had been released and they’d been pulled through, then pushed back out, in a sort of vacuum-momentum tide thing.