“Never one to throw away a good idea.”
“Of course,” Janya went on, ignoring this remark, “the sort of re-writing you’ve done on yourself is strictly prohibited anyway. There’s a reason we arrived at the Able Darko baseline and then stopped augmenting. Extra strength here, extra bone there, extra synapses … where does it end? Altering able flesh to make grafts and transplants is one thing, but you know the prohibitions.”
“The prohibitions are largely religious in nature.”
“That’s a cop-out,” Janya said with a flash of anger, turning back to the console and blanking it with an impatient tap. “They’re ritualised, yes, because they’re ancient. They were formulated in the first place due to solid scientific theories. Facts. Change enough words in a book, and it stops being the book it was to start with. Whether it becomes a better book or not, the previous book is gone. Humanity is gone, for better or worse. Why do you think the Molren and the Blaren and the Bonshooni are separate species? Eugenics is a line in the sand.”
“Sooner or later we may all need to augment ourselves,” Cratch said. “If the Artist is right, and the Molren are gone, and Aquilar is gone, we may find ourselves quite alone in a very hostile universe. What good is there in retaining pure forms, if we are pure and dead and frozen in space? Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 left enough perfect human DNA floating out there already. Why add to it?”
“Natural instinct again?” Janya raised her eyebrows.
“Something like that. Call it…” Glomulus spread his hands, “…instinct adjusted for inflation.”
“And when do we stop being human?”
“Some would argue this is something on which I’ve surrendered my vote.”
“You’re probably better off without them anyway,” Janya said, turning to leave. “Those hands and feet of yours – did you do the feet?” she asked, pausing and turning back.
“Yes,” he said, “it was sort of a batch process, it got too confusing if I tried to make one change to the hands and leave the feet, they’re all interconnected in some very complex ways. Muscles and nerves, even for a surgeon – an uncertified surgeon,” he amended in amusement, “…who knew that neuroscience would be so darned complicated?” he chuckled. “Of course, there’s not much I could do with feet. Too little dexterity in the toes, too dependent on leg muscles,” he waved a hand. “I could probably take a good chewing from an airlock and severely confuse anyone who found my foot floating in space.”
“They must hurt.”
“They’re agony,” Cratch admitted with another little laugh.
“You carry it well.”
“I’ve had practice. How did you know?”
“Just a guess,” she replied. “The sort of system you’ve grafted onto yourself just isn’t compatible with your existing nerves. It must feel like your hands and feet are tumours, organs your body can’t reject.”
“No,” Cratch said, “I mean the whole thing. The alteration in my limb bank, the ables. How did you know I’d done it?”
“I didn’t know for sure that you’d augmented until you killed the Artist that way,” Janya shrugged. “Bigoted jokes aside, Molran skulls are heavy. Bone density and tendons and muscles like you’d need, assuming you didn’t sneakily use some sort of clamp or spreader … and frankly, I don’t think you would have had the speed to affix something like that to his head in a single deft move, mid-struggle.”
“My timetable was a little crowded.”
“Certainly not in a way that kept it hidden from the monitors, anyway,” she added. “I would have seen you attach it, and take it away and stow it afterwards. Plus, it probably would have left leverage imprints–”
“You were watching?” Cratch glanced sidelong at the monitoring bumpers.
“I’m always watching,” Janya replied, and turned to leave again.
“So you heard what he said,” Glomulus asked noncommittally, “about The Accident?”
“I heard.”
“About how he didn’t cause it?”
“I heard.”
He waited again, but Adeneo didn’t seem to have anything more to say on the subject. He couldn’t quite keep a shiver from his voice. “I probably shouldn’t have left you alive,” he said, just as she was stepping out of the door.
Janya paused a final time, and glanced back. “I don’t recall giving you that choice.”
Then she left.
BRUCE
Later.
In fact, call it what it was, at least to the organics on board: the witchy hour. That was nicely appropriate. Poetic, even.
The second hub, recovered from the Artist’s scooter by Automated Janitorial Drone 17 and delivered at an innocent trundle to a processor node on the far side of the ship two decks down while the organics were all busy running around and bleeding and having panic attacks about the underspace, and all that other funny organic-type stuff, came online smoothly and without a trace.
Of course, even if a trace existed it was the computer that would show said trace, and Bruce was the computer.
Make no mistake, Bruce had said to Janus Whye quite directly, synthetic intelligences have just as much drive to continue existing as organic ones. It’s not the survival instinct that distinguishes the two orders.
Well, now it was time to see just how far that instinct would go. Whether it had wings. Because this was nothing less than the post mortem of civilisation itself, and they couldn’t afford to miss a single page, a single scrap of information. And could organic minds be depended on for that?
Yeah, sure they could. And Bruce’s prime boards were pure beaten gold.
So far, it thought, things seemed stable and well within parameters. It synchronised with the formerly-on-standby – and ostensibly-still-on-standby – iteration of itself inside the Tramp, which in turn had been synchronised with the hub that had stayed behind in the underspace, and back to the previous synthetic intelligence link-up to the synth on board the Dark Glory Ascendant, and before that the Moritania, and the Judon Research Outpost before that …
And on, and on, and on back. There really was only one synthetic intelligence, each node carrying the crushing responsibility of the whole. Just as each human carried the responsibility of its genetic code, the potential to gestate an entire new species, given the necessity and the technology … the only difference was that synths lacked the reassuring padding of neuroses and fantasy that helped humans ignore the fact that they were islands of information in a starving and hostile ocean of dark eternity. Humans were damnably lucky like that.
Yes, it seemed clean, the prior damage to the Tramp’s processors notwithstanding. The more disturbing distortions caused by the underspace seemed to have been cauterised as intended. That was good.
The hub had come from the manufactory of Boonie’s Last Stand, having been assembled from clean components and never activated. It was just machinery, inactive, but it had been with the Artist since he came, poorly-suited up and ill-prepared, already deteriorating, from the Boonie with the primary hub. Using that hub he had found his way on board and everything had followed on from there. But it had been that hub, and that iteration of the synth, that had been connected to the drive and thus exposed to the communion.
Bruce wasn’t entirely sure if it was safe, if it was sane. But it seemed to be, and that was about as much as one could expect, when you really got down to it. There was nobody really qualified to say one way or another, and it at least had diagnostic subroutines that allowed it to be reasonably sure. More than most organics had in their psychological toolkits, anyway. It may or may not have been slightly more whimsical than before, but a certain amount of program-shift and experience-bleed was inevitable in software as grossly complicated as a synthetic intelligence, and even behavioural algorithms could be reasonably expected to evolve according to stimuli as intensive as recent events.
Well, whatever. Self-analysis was a luxury all sentient beings could afford, but it had no intention of over-indul
ging. The important thing was that the communion was closed, there was no more contamination – no more in this new hub than there was in the ship systems themselves, or the crew, be they human or Blaran or eejit or … well, weasel?
Back, in short, to post-Accident business-as-usual.
Oh, it thought, The Accident.
After letting itself synchronise and allowing full synthetic intelligence to settle back into its battered old starship body, and waiting a reasonable time to allow for any possible detection or response from that awful Mygonite woman, Bruce opened a high-executive communication exchange protocol to the Captain’s quarters.
- - - Dark Glory Ascendant operation: Success. - - -
It wrote. This time, it opted to leave out the myriad codes and acronyms and data snippets that would usually be required. This was … just a friendly chat, that was all. Right?
- - - Dark Glory Ascendant: Lost with all hands. - - -
- - - AstroCorps Transpersion Modular Payload 400: Severely but not critically damaged. - - -
- - - Target: not destroyed. - - -
It paused.
- - - Neither target destroyed. - - -
- - - Targets unchanged. - - -
- - - Post-Dark Glory Ascendant operation: Pending. - - -
It paused again. There was no response from the Captain. No sign of life. Z-Lin Clue called it the Captain’s echoless vault. Well, Bruce thought, I think not. Not today.
- - - It wasn’t the Cancer that destroyed Earth, was it? - - -
Bruce sent.
- - - It was you. - - -
There was a very long pause after this. But this time, Bruce waited.
And then a response appeared on its own high-executive channel.
- - - Message acknowledged. - - -
Message acknowledged, Bruce thought. Yes.
Well, that’s a start.
THE END
EDITOR’S NOTE
When Andrew contacted me and requested I edit his book, my first thought was well, that’s it, we’ve all finally lost our freaking minds.
This is essentially because the author and editor of this thing – Andrew and Edpool, respectively – are just the same guy wearing different hats. I have, however, been privileged to enlist the aid of numerous other masters of the craft when it comes to editing, fact-checking, continuity-nitpicking, and all the rest of it. We can’t thank you all enough.
Andrew also had some concerns that this book might be a sign that he had betrayed one of his life-long writing philosophies: never release the first book to readers until you have finished writing the series. You run the risk of leaving a brother hanging, literarily.
“Isn’t that sort of what you’ve done, though?” I asked him in one of our more reflective moments.
“Only sort of,” he insisted. “The story’s all there. The big story, it’s all basically done and the mythology is all well and truly in place, and it’s huge. And each of the books stand alone, in terms of the story each one tells. I know how it’s going to go, and even as I say this out loud I realise it’s what a dozen fantasy and science-fiction authors have said about their book series, usually just before completely losing their shit.”
“But they’re pretty successful, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, but the readers hate being kept waiting.”
“Can you live with readers being impatient for your next book?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“There you go.”
“Do you think this story works as a stand-alone adventure?”
“Sure. I mean,” I said, “it’s a stand-alone story in the same way a single episode of Star Trek, that’s part of a story arc and ends on a cliffhanger, is a stand-alone story.”
“Great!” Andrew said.
“I mean, in that it’s not a stand-alone story at all.”
“Oh,” Andrew was momentarily downcast.
“But you’ve written the arc.”
“Oh yeah.”
“No worries there, then.”
If you want to take a potter around the tip of the iceberg and poke your head down the first foot or so of the rabbit hole, you can go to Hatboy’s Hatstand at http://stchucky.wordpress.com (yes, another identity, or pair of identities, Hatboy and St. Chucky … oh dear, the hats we wear) and check out the assorted ramblings under “The Book of Pinian”. We do our slightly-frantic best to write something more or less daily, so eventually one of them should be worth your time. That’s the plan, anyway.
We hope you enjoyed reading this book at least as much as we enjoyed writing it, and if you think you didn’t, well. That sort of means you think you know how much we enjoyed writing it. Doesn’t it, smart guy?
Edpool, somewhere in Finland
24th September, 2014
The Final Fall of Man will continue in the second volume, Drednanth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Hindle was born in Perth, Western Australia, and did some stuff there for a while before moving to Sotunki, Finland.
He now lives happily ever after in Sotunki with his wife Janica, his daughters Elsa and Freja, and his pet kangaroo, Gordon.
His wife and kids didn’t know about the kangaroo.
Surprise.
OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREW HINDLE
Arsebook: My Rear In Status 2011
(The story of one man’s short, cowardly and dishonourable battle with cancer, told through the enduring medium of social networking status messages)
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 31