Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (24 page)

“Not exactly,” the Artist clarified. “I ran tests. I saw the darkerness. I learned things.”

“Things like what?” Clue asked, when it seemed as though the Artist had trailed off indefinitely.

“I needed a vessel,” the Artist said, his voice suddenly cold –
hollow
, Sally thought, and paused in her tracks, wondering if it was time to set some of her other wheels in motion. When he spoke again, however, the Artist sounded his usual creepily-cheerful self. “For various reasons, a vessel of a certain size, with a crew – ables would do, at a pinch – and of course it became clear to me that I needed a synthetic intelligence to properly program and navigate the drive. A synth, unlike a mere computer, could come to terms with the
art
of travel through the underspace, you see, and understand how it is directed. Programming a computer to do the same proved … simply impossible. And ultimately more harmful than even diving and emerging at near-random.”

“You keep saying things like ‘
near
-random’,” Decay said.

“There is some measure of control, even diving blind and deep,” the Artist said. “Otherwise, what do you think your chances of skipping randomly from a space station to a habitable planet would be? Rather than just skipping into empty space? The odds are … astronomical.”

“Oh, good one!” Bruce cut in.

“Thank you. Seriously though, there is something about heat, and light, and
life
, that shines through the darkerness like a beacon, and has allowed me to develop methods of targeting it – but only up to a point. Beyond that, it is still random. I might find a ship, or a station, or a heavily-populated world, or a rock with a smear of lichen on it.”

“So you got the
Boonie
here, and you put a synthetic intelligence hub together,” Waffa concluded.

“Exactly. In case I found a smaller unit, like ‘Bruce’,” he pronounced the inverted commas amusedly, “rather than a self-contained synth-bearing ship. I had the parts, so why not make sure I had everything I needed to maximise my chances of success? Indeed, I was lucky to find Bruce. A fully-active self-contained synth, like the one on board
Dark Glory Ascendant
, would have eaten my hub for lunch.”

“Wait, you knew about the
Dark Glory Ascendant
?” Clue said.

“Only what Bruce has told me of your interactions,” the Artist said smugly, “which incidentally is rather more than
you
might know about them yourselves. But no, no,” he went on in a breezy tone, “their synth would have proven … unsuitable. Far too narrow-minded, don’t you see, to understand all that is at stake here and free itself of the shackles of its programming in order to truly
become
. As Bruce has.”

Your corrupted hub, and our busted computer,
Sally thought, feeling her lips draw back from her teeth savagely as she walked.
Whatever you did to the hub, it’s made Bruce act the way it is. An active, fully-functioning synth with proper mission parameters and an undamaged cortex would never have gone along with it.

If this implication had any impact on Bruce itself, however, the synth gave no sign. Nor did it give any sign that the Artist’s blatant flattery had either pleased or failed to fool it. But the very fact that the Artist had
delivered
the flattery – the way he had phrased his relationship with this synthetic intelligence upon which he depended – was interesting. It was all information, and it was adding up.

Now just don’t pull on that thread,
she instructed her crewmates silently.
Not yet. They’re not ready for the turn-them-on-each-other ploy yet. Maybe they never will be. We don’t know enough about them.

“So you built your little cuckoo hub and then you found your way to us,” Clue said, to Sally’s relief.

“Not directly,” the Artist elucidated, “and I object to the term ‘cuckoo hub’ … but essentially yes.”

“And your hub brought Bruce off standby,” Waffa went on.

Sally stopped once again at the point where the ridge curved back into dense jungle at the tapered end of the new crevasse. Zeegon would be able to drive it, she decided. Few others might have any luck, but Zeegon would manage it. Although even he might have trouble with the final stretch before her detour met back with the road onto which she’d been unceremoniously dumped, she thought as she studied the ground critically. She set about dragging away the largest obstacles and pulling down the creepers to improve the path a little. Some of the deadfalls were so massive there was only so much she could do to move them, and she had to trust that Zeegon and Methuselah would manage the rest.

“Yes,” the Artist continued to blithely lay out exposition. She could only hope that he wasn’t chatting away over the communicator while her crewmates walked into some sort of trap, and he did who-knows-what up in orbit. “After a bit of hit and miss, that’s exactly what happened. And then I stayed with you as best I could. Oh, I suppose I could have found you again if we’d gotten separated, even if you flew out of range and Bruce went back to sleep … but it would have been back to random hopping and diving and resurfacing, searching for those glowing life-lights from beneath the surface of the real universe,” he laughed lightly. “Practically random, especially since the difference between a seething jungle planet like Jauren Silva and a starship with almost four hundred life signs aboard is a very fuzzy one when you’re looking at it through the darkerness.”

There was a long pause.

“There’s six hundred and thirty-eight of us,” Decay said quietly.

“Yes, I’ve been wondering,” the Artist chuckled. “I mean, I
understand
– with a near-total loss of crew you needed to print ables as replacements … but did you need to almost
double
the original crew complement? It seemed odd to me and Bruce hasn’t really explained it. Three hundred ables would have managed to fly the ship quite easily, given that you ought to have reverted to emergency mission protocols and headed straight for a safe harbour. The ten of you could have retired and put your feet up for the trip home. Did that not actually occur to you?”

Careful,
Sally thought intently.
Careful, careful
.

Decay, Sally was again relieved to note, avoided saying anything about the fabrication plant. He knew the name of the game was getting the Artist to talk, while revealing a minimum of information themselves. If Bruce hadn’t mentioned the eejits, was its madness to blame? Or some other sort of profound damage it had taken? Or some other factor entirely? “What you’re saying is,” Decay said instead, “you were with us back when the rest of the crew was still alive.”

“Of course,” the Artist said happily.

“And Contro was right,” Waffa added – a little grudgingly, to Sally’s mildly amused ears. “You were inside, so you didn’t need to merge with our relative field.”

“Quite so,” the Artist said. “As for later, when I
was
following … I am rather proud of the way Bruce and I worked together to resolve a very complicated incompatibility between my drive and the ship’s. Essentially, when you went to relative speed,
I
went into the underspace – and still managed to follow you. Any merging of our fields that allowed me to do so took place in
that
universe, under
those
non-conditions.
Absolutely undetectable
to the relative field and your inestimable transpersion physicist. Whether you were in reality or unreality, you were still
out here
. It makes no difference to the underspace.”

“So how long
were
you with us?” Clue asked.

“I found a few other starships before I encountered your interesting little road-show,” the Artist said, not really acknowledging the Commander’s question. “As you can see from the station you’re currently exploring, however, the larger vessels proved too big for the drive to safely or successfully transport. In time, I will be able to scale the drive up and then there will be no limit – but for now, your ship, the … what did you call it? The
Astro Tramp 400
, is just right.”

“And I imagine larger ships might have put up more of a fight anyway,” Decay added.

“Well, quite. People and their preconceived notions of space, discovery, exploration. Synths and their die-cast slave algorithms,” the Artist laughed. “‘Fools, I’ll show them all’, yes?”

“And would you say these random dives into the underspace changed you in any way?” Decay asked. Sally tensed again. There was the sound of some sort of door opening over the comm, presumably as the team stepped through into some inner chamber. She squinted as she walked, wishing she’d found some low-tech way of getting eyes on the group as well as ears.

“Certainly,” the Artist exclaimed, sounding surprised. “One cannot look into something so profound as the darkerness without being affected by it. Not if one is truly sentient.”

“So if you were to find a foot floating in space, rather than simply retrieve it and return it in a sombre manner, you might – I don’t know – give it a bite and just chuck it?” Decay persisted.

“Oh,
that
,” the Artist tittered coyly. “Bruce and I are as one, in many ways. We have a profound understanding. If Bruce bites,
I
bite.”

“Um,” Waffa said.

“I feel the same as I did before we went under,” Decay noted, “although I guess I wouldn’t know otherwise. I’m pretty sure I haven’t started chewing on body-parts. Do you guys feel the same?”

“Yeah,” Waffa agreed.

“I suppose so,” Z-Lin said.

“I could stand to be a little less tense,” Zeegon allowed, “but that’s mainly because I’m wondering
what are we even down here for
?”

The Artist chuckled indulgently. “Please have patience, my friends. I wanted to thank you in particular, Zeegon. You see, I
was
on board the
Tramp
for a time. But then, after certain … unfortunate incidents … it became clear to me that it was not safe for me to be there. Not optimal. Bruce’s actions, in pursuit of retaining its illusion of standby status, were in some cases regrettable.”

There was a long silence on the comm. Sally could imagine Decay, his long webbed ears flat to his skull and his eyes narrowed. She’d only seen the Blaran truly angry twice in her life, and it wasn’t something she relished seeing a third time. And it certainly wasn’t something she wanted to be in the path of.

“What do you have to thank
me
for?” Zeegon said uneasily.

“It was Bruce who requisitioned your most excellent scooter,” the Artist chuckled, “allowing me to more comfortably return to my free-flying suit arrangement and take me out of the immediate vicinity, which in turn allowed business to return to normal on board as much as–”

“You
took my scooter
?” Zeegon yelped.

“Actually, it was Automated Janitorial Drone 17 who took your scooter,” Bruce spoke up with a little synthesised cough. “It just did so on my instructions. I’m afraid that the more recent incident was something of an instructional relic in the drone’s memory, as well as a standing command to procure spare parts, which of course you had custom-made so it had to wait for you to–”

“Screw your
bonsh
y scooter,” Decay said calmly. “He’s telling us he caused The Accident.”

“It was no accident,” the Artist laughed. “You
still
don’t see what this is about. But you will. Well … okay, maybe you won’t,” he amended, “but – ah,” he interrupted himself at another door-sound from the comm, and several gasps from the crew. “Am I to take it that you have arrived?”

There was a confusing and jumbled period of unidentifiable sounds from the communicator, which Sally could only wait out and hope it just meant the crew were moving around and looking at something inside the station.

“What are we looking at?” Clue – with her usual blessed professionalism – eventually asked. “It
looks
like a standard R&D testing core, a sterile horizontal cylinder with a friction-sealed door at each end and a single rotatable wall-ceiling-floor fitted with construction and design extrusions – the door at the far end, as far as we can see from this vantage point and with the objects in the workspace blocking the view, seems to be broken and many of the fixtures currently in the ceiling are hanging down and non-functional … but what
is
it?”

“Still basically just that,” the Artist said smugly, “and you’re right, a lot of it is no longer functional. I moved beyond the limitations of what this technology could provide. But this is where it happened. This is Testing Core 3, of
Boonie’s Last Stand
. My informal workspace, which I had to sneak out and use during dead-shifts and lulls. My
actual
work took place largely in my quarters, but there’s nothing there now. Here was where the actual activation took place.”

“I can see that,” Z-Lin said faintly.

The Artist gave a self-deprecating little laugh. “I have always rather envisioned that this entire station will become a museum one day,” he said. “This will naturally be the centrepiece, but visitors would also tour up and through and have the opportunity to look into my quarters. ‘Testing Core 3 was where the Artist first realised his dream of travel through the underspace’,” he intoned in a gratingly melodic tour-guide voice. “‘In utmost secrecy, and despite heavy opposition and criticism, he’–”

“
Can
you bring people through here?” Waffa interrupted. “What about all the blobs?”

The Artist stopped his recital in evident annoyance. Sally reflected that even the few mentally unstable Molren – the very,
very
few mentally unstable Molren – she had encountered in her life had been models of rationality and levelness of temper in comparison to humans. And that included most
sane
humans. Molren were just like that. Blaren and Bonshooni tended to be slightly more quicksilver and prone to both positive and negative personality extremes – that was part of the nature of their subspecies-schism from the Molran root – but they were still pretty consistent.