Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  He wasn’t sure if he could bring himself to say something as unscientific as ‘a sort of vacuum-momentum tide thing’ in Janya’s presence. But again, it felt right. And the eejits … well, they were proof.

  Somehow.

  Damn it, he’d thought. And it was gone again. But it had been enough. He was almost certain it had been enough.

  Whye’s hand had moved despite his steely resolve to remain passive and immobile.

  “Hi, guys?” he’d said into his communicator. “I, uh, I’m here with Contro in the, in the engine room I guess…”

  SALLY

  Sally, Decay, Janya and Z-Lin stood in main engineering and listened in surprise as the usually quiet and self-effacing Janus Whye explained his grand unifying underspace-Artist-eejit theory in what was, for him, extreme agitation. Waffa and Zeegon had grudgingly agreed to take Contro and a small group of Contro-distracting eejits on their clean-up round, preserving the buddy system Clue still considered necessary.

  “…and then he sort of went off on this, I don’t know, this jag about the gates of space and how Molren – some of them – have this belief that they can get out of the universe,” the counsellor explained.

  “And from this, you made a deductive leap about what we need to do about the underspace drive?” Sally asked.

  “Right. Sort of. So,” Janus said, “let’s say it’s a gate, right? The Artist made this device that opened a gateway, that you could fly a spaceship or a scooter or two-thirds of a synth hub manufactory and a couple of hundred hapless sons of bitches into – right? Fly in, then fly out anywhere. And in between, you’re somewhere else.”

  “I’m sure the Artist would quibble,” Z-Lin said, “but since he’s not here, and unless Bruce wants to weigh in…” they waited, but Bruce seemed to have vagued out again for the time being, so she continued. “Sure. Gate. Probably an oversimplification, but yeah.”

  “Oh, definitely an oversimplification,” Whye agreed, “I mean, just consider it an, I don’t know, a metaphor. But it’s the underspace part that’s important. The gate, the drive, opens into a place where there’s no time, no space, no matter, no nothing, right? It opens into nothing. It send us into nothing. That’s why you can travel anywhere, because distance and time mean nothing. Enter the underspace wherever, exit wherever. There’s no actual gate, not a literal hole from one place to another. Because the place it ‘leads’ to isn’t a place, in any meaning of the sense we understand ‘place’ to mean. So. The gate’s where the drive is. Maybe wherever the drive’s been. Maybe a whole bunch of other places, as those blobs start to spread and hang around. Whatever. Not important right now.

  “He opened it, and the first time in he went deep, probably by accident, and now he just seems to come and go, willy-nilly, going through the gate, if you can call it that.”

  “Okay,” Clue said.

  “The underspace is nowhere,” Decay added, “so you can enter and leave it basically everywhere. That seemed to be the gist of what Bruce and the Artist were saying.”

  “Okay, so – gate that isn’t a gate,” Sally summarised. “Sorry Janus, I’m not being flippant on purpose – but what’s that tell us?”

  “And what does it have to do with the eejits?” Clue appended.

  “Oh, nothing really,” Janus said, then went on when several crewmembers slumped in frustration, “I mean, something, for sure, but unless we learn a whole lot more about it, and study it and stuff, we’re never going to find out. And I’d really suggest we not study it any more than we have to. The eejits just struck me because they’ve got this sensitivity to it, there’s like a resonance. The nothingness – or whateveriness – of the underspace, it seems to strike a chord with the eejits. It’s like … the damage that was done to the fabrication plant during The Accident, the damage that was done to the whole ship, and to the computer, resonated somehow with the underspace, or the drive or whatever. And the hub, the whole Bruce-thing, when that went through the underspace and maybe got corrupted, and then synchronised up with our computer to bring it to full active synthetic intelligence levels…”

  “So The Accident may not have caused damage to the ship, so much as made compatibility changes to it,” Decay said harshly, “making it work better with the Artist and Bruce. Which might have been the Artist’s plan all along.”

  “Or might just be a complete coincidence,” Janya said. “Go on, Janus.”

  “Like I say, it just sort of came to me when I heard Contro talking,” Whye said, watching the Blaran nervously. Sally wondered if Decay’s veins were about to start bioluminescing again, but he seemed to be largely back to his usual calm self. “You know,” Whye went on, “about the Molran myth of the gates of space, and how they were destroyed … destroyed, but could still be used to get out of.”

  “I think I see where he’s going with this,” Janya said. “If we destroy the last drive, the way we destroyed the manufactory on Jauren Silva, it might well break the underspace entrance, but not necessarily close it.”

  “So there’s still a hole back there at Jauren Silva?” Sally said. “What are we supposed to do about that?”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works,” Janus said. “Because of the completely alien nature of the underspace.”

  “There isn’t a ‘hole’ anywhere,” Janya put in.

  “Or there’s a ‘hole’ everywhere,” Decay added.

  “Wow,” Sally put a hand to her head.

  “Right,” Whye agreed. “It’s about as good if we blow them up, or switch them off and dismantle them, or just put them in storage and never use them. Those are important considerations in this universe, where actions and reactions mean anything. Actually, destroying them seems like the best course, because that prevents anyone else from even accidentally using them again from this side.”

  Finally, something I understand. “Right then,” Sally clapped her hands together, then paused as an unpleasant thought occurred to her. “You said it was about as good either way,” she said, “as far as people using the underspace from this side goes. That means you think it’s things using the gate from the other side – from the darkerness – that we need to worry about,” she paused again. “Or not things,” she corrected herself, “but whatever the underspace version of things is.”

  “Right,” Whye said. “We can blow up or close the ‘gates’, or the technology that allows us to access the ‘gates’, as much as we like from here, but … well, okay, first of all we’ll never know if the Artist had other experimental outposts or prototypes or backups lying around.”

  “Like that whatever-it-maybe-was in the scooter’s compartment,” Janya muttered. “There probably aren’t any more, but we can’t know. Bruce might be able to help us…”

  There was another extended pause.

  “Hmmm?” Bruce said. “Sorry. Thinking.”

  “Not important right now,” Janus said again, “that whole tangent was just to outline how pointless it is to mess with the ‘gate’ from this side. We can’t close it. We can only break it, leave it open, and maybe send ourselves diving over and over, the way we probably did when the Artist died,” he paused and pondered this. “Add inverted commas and / or quotey-marks to taste,” he added.

  “It needs to be closed over there,” Clue said.

  “Exactly. Because there is no here, really,” Whye said. “There’s no there either, not as such … but at least over there it might have something to seal. Or at least something – or the underspace equivalent of something – to correspond to us destroying the drives over here. It doesn’t necessarily only need to be done over there, but it needs to be done over there too.”

  “Okay,” Sally squared her shoulders. “So I need to get in that scooter, fly it out of range of the Tramp, activate the last remaining drive, dive into the underspace, and stay there and close the circuit somehow,” she said.

  Whye blinked. “Well, let’s not go nuts,” he said. “First of all, in theory nobody actually needs to go down w
ith the ship. We could just send it down with remote instructions or something. But second, and most relevant, speaking of remote instructions – none of us know how to use the drive anyway. Would any of us know how to even make it dive somewhere, let alone dive and never come back up, let alone dive and then deactivate the whole underspace connection from inside the darkerness, if that’s even possible?”

  “I can only think of one of us who might know,” Janya said.

  “Bruce,” Decay nodded.

  “Huh?” Bruce said distractedly, after another pause. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

  “What are you thinking about?” Sally demanded.

  “I was just thinking,” Bruce said, “that I need to take the last underspace drive–”

  “–And go into the darkerness with it and stay down there and use it to seal the breach from the far side,” Decay said with a certain amount of satisfaction. “We know, we were just talking about it too.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Bruce muttered. “It was so my idea.”

  “Now we’re even for ‘darkerness’,” Decay smirked.

  “Anyway, my reasoning was that we – I – have to dive,” Bruce said. “Destroying the equipment would just cut the connection temporarily, and leave a hole – a metaphorical live wire lying severed on the floor.”

  “We’re good for metaphors, I think,” Sally remarked.

  “I need to take the last of the underspace stuff in, and stay there,” Bruce said. “The body, the drive, all of it. Including my hub. The nature of the darkerspace growths inside the matter of this universe is more than just creepy. I don’t even know what it means, except that we have to stop it. You haven’t been down there enough times, and not deep enough, to really feel that communion, that sense of adjustments being made to enable a full incursion, a full melding. I have, and I know it needs to be reversed, stopped in its tracks, prevented from ever happening again.”

  “I suspect our eejits might be feeling that already,” Janya suggested.

  “I accept that we don’t have much choice here,” Sally said, “but are we supposed to just send you off into the underspace, with all this gear and a Molran body that already seems to be half-converted into darkerness, and hope for the best? How will we ever know you’ve achieved your mission, instead of just festering out there and completing whatever process the Artist was starting? For all we know, you and the Artist could come back later, after merging with the underspace entirely and coming back to life as some sort of God-awful hybrid.”

  “This is true,” Bruce said. “You actually don’t even know whether I’m still secretly on the Artist’s side, a believer in his grand plan, a part of it, and still carrying it out in his absence. His apparent absence,” it added significantly, after a theatrical pause.

  “I wish you hadn’t reminded me of that,” Sally said. “I was just deciding to ignore how keen you were on the whole the-Artist-is-a-genius thing back when we were dragged into this. When did you decide the underspace had to be bricked back up and the revolutionary universe-spanning drive forgotten for the good of us all?”

  “Bruce lost its mirror,” Janus said quietly.

  “I admit,” Bruce agreed, “a lot of it has only recently become apparent to me. Maybe I am finding new thought routines in order to bypass systems damaged either by The Accident or by exposure to the underspace itself. Maybe it’s just the severing of the connection between me and the Artist, allowing me to re-examine my priorities and values. Like Whye says, we’re no longer reinforcing each other. My fundamental desire to protect this crew is no longer at odds with his psychosis,” it paused again. “You saw the manufactory,” it said. “You saw Testing Core 3. You saw that he was developing ways to miniaturise the drive, make it portable, make it organic, make the extrusions permanent? Like actual gateways. He was working on a way to feed the entire universe into this thing. All the people, at least. What was driving him to do that? Will I be able to stand against it, or will I simply be folded under and allow the darkerness to consume you all?”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see,” Clue said. “Sally’s right, we don’t have much choice,” she glanced at Sally, Janya, Decay, Whye, and waved directionlessly at the air to indicate Bruce’s presence. “If it decides to take this action, there’s really not much we can do about it. It’s already on board the Artist’s scooter. It could just go. It might just go the second the drive gets it into its head to dive again.”

  “I still don’t understand why this is better than just whorling the whole thing,” Sally admitted.

  “A relative whorl just operates between this universe and its flipside, unreality,” Bruce said. “The matter is destroyed, but the laws of physics mean that on some level it still exists. That’s probably fine for the stuff you already hit, but if you do the same with all of it…”

  “It’ll still leave whatever’s going on in the underspace,” Whye said. “That – those, whatever – will still be trying to get back here.”

  “Right,” Bruce said. “The connection, the communion is made, the door is open and the reaction is still ongoing. It’s still intensifying, and soon it probably won’t even need a machine on this side, or indeed anywhere. Scattering this gear, the prime drive and the Artist himself – the prime node of communion – all through unreality and back also seems like a pretty terrible idea, simply because it’s … I don’t know, it’s just like spraying a bacteria-infected corpse across two habitats instead of one. Worst-case scenario, the underspace seeps into unreality as well as reality.”

  “And what would that do?” Sally asked. “Keeping in mind that we’ve already done it anyway, so if it’s too disastrous we’d probably prefer not to know about it.”

  “Danged if I know, actually,” Bruce confessed. “Maybe it won’t do anything – as long as we fix it now. But if you destroy the drive, we will have lost our ability to control it in any way from this side. We’ll be at the mercy of the darkerness. Whatever that actually entails, which I couldn’t say either. But after seeing what happened to the crew of the Boonie, I don’t think it’s good.”

  “What did happen to them?” Z-Lin inquired.

  “I don’t know,” Bruce replied helplessly. “I only saw it. And it was through the hub, not any sort of dependable synthetic intelligence sensory apparatus. They – it was like the process the Artist was undergoing, but he knew things they didn’t, his communion was deeper and more pure, he didn’t fight it, he had access to the technology – he’d invented the technology – so he was able to hold it off, work with it. Control it, even. I don’t–”

  “What happened to them?” Sally snapped.

  “You saw them,” Bruce said, “those of you who went into the Boonie, at least, you saw them. Most of them, anyway – the ones who came back. You saw them in Testing Core 3.”

  “That was … that was people?” Z-Lin asked a little sickly.

  “Some of it was,” Bruce said. “As far as I know.”

  “I thought the crew sabotaged the station and its shuttles and stuff when the darkerness got inside them,” Waffa said when nobody else seemed inclined to speak up, “and they ‘freaked out’. So there wasn’t any way they could actually go anywhere,” he paused. “And I only now realise that’s not what you meant when you said ‘the ones who came back’. They weren’t on shuttles or in escape pods at all, were they?”

  “They dived,” Bruce said. “Again – as far as I know.”

  “I assumed the Artist just killed them,” Clue added.

  “In a way he did,” Bruce admitted, “but in a far worse way, he didn’t.”

  “Okay, the communion with the underspace is awful and can contaminate people,” Clue said briskly, “we sort of already suspected this so let’s move on.”

  “Yes,” Waffa said, “let’s move on to the part where it doesn’t happen to us because we come up with some brilliant way of stopping it, please.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do,” Bruce said, before Janus could do more
than open his mouth. Whye subsided. “That was the point of all this,” Bruce went on. “Destroying all the Artist’s machinery and equipment, the drives, even the whole Testing Core 3 and the remains of the Boonie’s crew, might seem to work. It might even work in the short term, but sooner or later this is going to get out of control, if it isn’t already. And then it’s going to continue, and get more severe.”

  “So sooner or later, those blobs will come back to the surface,” Whye spoke up. “Diving in the opposite direction. The eejits can see this better than we can, can see that the shadows are just waiting. Sort of lying dormant, ready to become darkerness again.”

  “Won’t sending all this stuff into the underspace just help provide the blobs, this underspace-darkerness ‘them’-thing, with a means of diving in the opposite direction?” Sally asked.

  “That assumes ‘they’ need any sort of drive to do it,” Janus said. “It doesn’t look like ‘they’ do.”

  “Why have we started using wacky inverted commas?” Waffa asked.

  Ignoring him, Sally threw her hands up. “So doesn’t that mean we’re screwed either way?”

  “Not if I actually succeed in my mission,” Bruce said ruggedly. “Communion. I’d be there as an ambassador of sorts, closing the door behind me and removing the need for further incursions.”

  “At least this way is a shot,” Clue said while Sally was still rallying her objections. “It’s a chance to solve the problem. Whorling would just smash the machine. It wouldn’t close whatever connection the Artist has made between here and the underspace. It wouldn’t get rid of whatever it is the eejits are sensing. Zeegon disconnected the drive, and that hasn’t seemed to get rid of whatever they’re seeing,” she glanced at Janus. “Right?”