Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (40 page)

“Right into your mouth, Mister Pendraegg,” Clue said crisply, not breaking stride. “Should be enough room to go in diagonally, don’t you think?”

She stepped up to the tactical station while Decay was laughing at Zeegon and the helmsman was attempting to rally a smartarse comeback.

“Commander,” Sally said, looking up from the open panel on the top of her console, where a variety of filaments and nodes protruded messily. “Help you?”

“The Captain only wants to know one thing,” Z-Lin said, looking down at her organiser pad and then at the half-gutted mechanism in front of the Chief Tactical Officer. “
Was
there a runaway loop protocol or something else to blow up the ship? Or was that whole thing just a magnificent bluff?”

“If it was a bluff, magnificent or otherwise, it’s going to have to stand,” Sally said. Clue favoured her with a narrow stare, and Sally looked back blandly. Evolution and the relentless march of human civilisation had given the Chief Tactical Officer a galaxy-class poker face. “We still don’t know whether we can trust our computer,” she added. “Or
will
be able to, if it ever comes back to full synth. Or if some other agency is ever going to try to steal the ship. It’s best if only I know – that’s just a logical security measure, right?”

“Right,” Clue said wryly. “You never can tell who to trust, can you?”

“Oh, not an issue,” Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed replied. “It’s my duty to trust nobody.”

The music lilting over the medical bay airwaves was subdued as Glomulus Cratch finished the final autopsy on the final brutally-slain eejit, logged the minimal but relevant information, and sent the beefy, blood-soaked body into the recycling system.

“Next up,” he said, spinning on the spot and ending up facing Nurse Dingus with a jab of his index fingers, “a pot-luck print-out party where we hope the clone fabrication Gods are with us and are willing to provide halfway competent new crewmembers as we try to replace the men who heroically laid down their lives,” he
tsk
ed sadly. “Their funny, funny lives,” he brightened, and turned the other way. “Nurse Wingus, if–”

He stopped when he saw not Wingus Jr., but Janya Adeneo stepping into the pristine white room.

“Glomulus,” she said coolly.

“Ah! Welcome,” Cratch said, giving a grand but minimalist bow. “I’ve just tallied up the butcher’s bill and sent all the mortal remains back to the meatworks. In a respectful way.”

“Good,” Janya said, crossing to a console and pulling up his autopsy reports. “The injuries were all Molran-inflicted, then,” she asked, “nothing that might suggest the computer used any drones or life support mechanisms to help?”

“No,” Glomulus said, sufficiently surprised that he felt his cheerful theatrics slip a bit. “Nothing like that. Were you expecting there to be?”

“Not really,” she said, studying the screens intently. “And what about the computer?” she looked up. “The instruments, readings, the sensors? All working within parameters?”

“If any of the machinery is falsifying data,” Glomulus said, “it’s on a level too complicated for little old me to spot. And computer diagnostics are for Sally and Waffa to worry about,” Adeneo went back to the autopsies, and a silence that was uncomfortable even for Cratch descended over the medical bay. Dingus cleared his throat, then went back to standing in
lumpen
tranquillity when this failed to have any enlivening result on the two humans. “Never really did figure out what he wanted the gonazine and molecular bonding stimulator for,” Glomulus eventually said to break the hush, “did we?” he waited. Silence. “The Artist,” silence. “I figured he was trying to direct or slow down this
becoming
of his, until such time as he felt he was ready for it,” he carried on lightly. “He didn’t want to go dissolving into whatever-it-was, before his master plan was put into motion here. That would have been most inconvenient. And he had a whole lot of feet to bite and unsuspecting travellers to waylay before he could get around to the whole master-plan thing anyway, I’ll bet. I guess we’ll never know now,” he forced a laugh. “So many feet to bite,” he mourned, “so little–”

“That was quite a move,” Janya said. “Breaking the Artist’s skull open with your thumbs. Well beyond the tolerances of human flesh and bone. Nobody else seems to think anything of it, except Z-Lin who thought it was weird, and she left it up to me,” she looked up from the screen again, eyeing Glomulus with unreadable grey eyes. “The Captain found it noteworthy as well, according to Clue,” she added, “but who can guess what he thinks about anything?”

“Indeed,” Cratch waited.

“I checked your medical file,” Janya went on, bringing up some more information with a sweep of her hand. “I didn’t understand a single line of it – not that sort of scientist, I keep telling them – but I
could
spot the edits, in the sections about your … bracelet incidents,” she looked up again, and glanced at his wrists, the detonators there, “in the files where your hand-and foot-grafts had been recorded. And from there it was easy enough to see that they’d been tweaked. I couldn’t see
how
, but I could see it had been done. They’re just customised able limbs, after all,” she said, bringing up a medical report alongside the autopsies, “altered a bit to fit your musculature and skin and nerves. Adding further tweaks was … if not easy, then apparently possible.”

“Maybe I should have let the Artist kill me,” Glomulus said easily.

Janya shrugged. “Maybe,” Cratch waited again. “Anyway,” she went on, stepping away from the console and facing the Barnalk High Ripper calmly, “no enhancement will allow your flesh to actually survive the detonation of those bracelets and anklets.”

Glomulus looked pointedly at Janya’s own pale, scar-lined hands. “Is today that day, then?”

Janya’s eyebrows twitched. “I reset your template,” she said, “with override authorisation from the Commander. Next time you get pruned, the printers will be giving you your normal hands back. Although some might take issue with the word ‘normal’, and argue that the hands you were born with are enough.”

“You’re not going to … ?” Cratch raised his hands and tapped long fingers suggestively against palms, miming the subdermal detonation sequence.

“Just don’t give anyone an excuse to trigger their implants.”

“They generally don’t need much of an excuse.”

“Then don’t give them
any
excuse, and keep your fingers crossed – while you still have them – and hope none of us come down with a sudden random desire to see your hands and feet blow up. Your fancy little super-hands template is gone. The Captain might have retained a copy in his files, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“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.

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.