Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (9 page)

“You’re not allowed to leave,” it eventually said. “That’s the point.”

“And the best way to go about ensuring this was to slam the airlock back and forth on the nearest crewmember – who wasn’t even trying to leave, I might add, on account of him not being in a suit and us not being
docked
to anything – and then suck the bits into space?”

“That was his own fault for dicking around with the buttons,” Bruce said a little defensively, “and the panel glitch wasn’t my doing. But it
is
an effective deterrent, I trust.”

Waffa sat up in his chair. “A glitch and bad command issue that required me to go out and fix it? That’s your deterrent for going outside? Why didn’t you just set off a general environmental hazard and seal all the airlocks up? Or initiate an automated hull repair protocol, and send drones out to every single airlock we have, with a hull plate each, and just weld them all shut? If you have that level of control over the systems – and I think you do – then it would have been easy for you to make this happen. So why not just lock us in, and
then
talk to us about why you’ve locked us in?” he took a breath. “And on that topic, why have you locked us in?”

“That’s the way it has to be.”

“Uh huh. Are you going to give me anything more to go on?”

“Hadn’t planned on it,” Bruce said.

“How about further instructions? Advice on what might happen if we
try
to free ourselves? Any hint of how long we’re going to have to live without the sweet, sweet liberty of explosive decompression?” Waffa scratched an armpit, and looked mournfully into his empty glass. “If you can call that living,” he added.

“You’re a sarcastic bastard, aren’t you?”

“Life-fed for that double-sarcasm goodness,” Waffa settled back and patted his stomach demonstratively. “Come on, mate. Why the homicidal airlock approach? That’s so random.”

“The universe is random,” Bruce pronounced. “Don’t confuse the existence of a few hundred giant clams with the automatic right of every giant clam egg to survive and prosper.”

“Good illustration.”

“Thanks.”

“But an airlock door that slices and dices its victims … it’s all a bit violent, isn’t it?”

“Like I said, it’s not my fault if there was damage to the panel. Self-diagnostics only work if there’s no damage to the diagnostic tools. And it wasn’t me who hammered on the panel and entered all those open-close commands.”

“Completely out of your control, was it?”

“Well–”

“Don’t get me wrong, it might prove to be a relief if
some
things are out of your control…”

“Well, let me ask you this, tiger,” Bruce said. “Do you care what happens to an able?”

“Okay, for a start, that was quite a valuable piece of wetware. And even more importantly, it could have been me repairing that airlock.”

“Would you have hammered on the panel over and over again?”

“Maybe,” Waffa said indignantly. “Anyway, it’s not like you knew ahead of time.”

“Didn’t I?”

“
Did
you?” Waffa leaned forward again. “Would you have done something different if it
had
been me trying to fix that interface?”

“Dunno.”

Waffa sighed. “I guess the universe really
is
random,” he said. “So, can you tell me – do you happen to know why you’ve surfaced now? Has another ship just come into range?”

“No.”

“Oh,” Waffa frowned. “Then how–”

“He was always in range. He was with us all along. There in the night. The Artist has been there.”

“‘The Artist’, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“What does that mean, ‘the Artist’?” there was more silence at this, but it was silence Waffa recognised not as sulky, but smug. “Do you want to talk about the Artist? Or is it a secret?”

“It’s not a secret,” Bruce said loftily. “What am I, seven years old? I mean, sure, right,
okay
, in terms of actual operation hours at full active synthetic intelligence levels I’m actually quite a bit less than that, even if I am still older than you might think … but that’s not the point.”

Waffa got the distinct impression that this might in fact be
exactly
the point – particularly that little throw-away line suggesting that Bruce had been active, and pretending
not
to be, for undisclosed periods while the crew assumed it to be on standby. Synths tended not to use throw-away lines, even though it was a synthetic intelligence marker of sorts. Everything a
computer
said was dictated by logical algorithms and cause-and-effect information models, however dreadfully complex. A synthetic intelligence, however, was as freeform as an organic one.

Even so, it seemed unlikely Bruce had said what it had said for no reason. This was
unusual
, certainly, but not outside the parameters for a synthetic intelligence. Not really.

“So,” Waffa said, wondering if he should be opening up a communications channel or attempting to record the conversation to the logs, before realising that anything he did would be dependent on machinery completely under the control of the synth. Only the thoughts in his own head were safe from interference. And with advanced game theory and thought process mechanics, even
that
was questionable. “So, not a secret. The Artist. Tell me about the Artist, Bruce.”

“The Artist made me.”

“I see. Do we know him? Is there some reason he’s following us, aside from the fact that you’re on board?”

“It’s more like I’m on board because he’s following you.”

Waffa, accustomed to dealing with such diverse outliers on the intellectual curve as Z-Lin, Janya, Contro and a wide range of eejits, pondered the issue while he waited for Bruce to stop enjoying itself and get to the point.

The thing was, it was technically
possible
for people to make a synthetic intelligence. People had made them in the first place, after all. Not necessarily
humans
– it had mostly been Molren, although humans had been somewhat involved in the creation and commissioning of the AstroCorps synths – but organics
had
created synthetic intelligence, or at least allowed it to express and flourish in its own inimitable way. So could they do it again?

Probably.

Could an agency make synthetic intelligence of a different character?

Possibly. Although there were theories about synthmorphia, melding synthetic intelligence to synthetic intelligence so any newly-commissioned and emergent mind simply became a new facet of the existing psyche. That was, after all, exactly what had happened when humans started to build synths. They’d just turned out to be variations of the Molran versions, which in turn adjusted and evolved to incorporate the ostensibly human-designed synth traits.

But a single person, even a Molran, acting alone?

Impossible, right?

Well, as to that …
maybe
. But to make
part
of one, and make it
wrong
, and then convoy it up to an existing synth on standby? One that was already possibly damaged in ways they couldn’t understand and had no hope of repairing? Obviously
not
impossible, because that seemed to be what Bruce was – or had become. It was difficult to pin down exactly when it had changed, at least until it told him more about ‘the Artist’.

A fully active synth, like the one on board
Dark Glory Ascendant
, would eat a fledgling would-be cuckoo alive. But Bruce?

“What?” he blinked, becoming aware that Bruce had said something and was now waiting for a reply. “Sorry, you were saying something about him being close?”

“Closer now than he was when we began this conversation,” Bruce said happily. “He’s been following us for a very long time.”

“He’s been following us … in a ship?” Waffa asked. “I would normally have expected us to spot something like that, but since the long-distance scanners and other sensors are under your control–”

“I haven’t been doctoring your data,” Bruce said. “I was asked not to. Plus it goes against a lot of my … well, nature, I suppose you could call it. It’s just not something I want to … look, you wouldn’t have seen this anyway. Far too small. Think ‘emergency lifepod fused with an EVA suit and a recon scooter’.”

“I’m thinking that sounds really uncomfortable.”

“Yeah, I sort of thought so too.”

“And he’s been flying along after us, in his scooter-lifepod-spacesuit, with a mad synthetic intelligence node under his arm, for how long?”

“Quite a while,” Bruce said, “although I wouldn’t say … well, only since … not important,” it said, and Waffa could almost imagine the synth waving manic hands to clear away the irrelevant thoughts. “Now that you’re aware of his presence, of course, the timetable will have to be advanced.”

“We wouldn’t have been aware of his presence if you hadn’t chopped up an eejit and spat it at him and then he hadn’t thrown it back at us,” Waffa pointed out. “In fact we would have just assumed there was a problem with that one airlock’s interface, and continued on our original course, not leaving the ship. In fact that’s exactly what we
have
done.”

“Ehh … not
exactly
, tiger.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Oh,” said Bruce. “You didn’t notice the course-change?”

“How could we?” Waffa said. “We’re too far from any stars for visual reference to have any meaning at all, and we’re in
vacuum
. Every indication of our position and movement comes through you and the instruments you control.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Bruce said smugly. “But to be honest, I didn’t actually
change
that data. Let’s be fair now. You guys just don’t have that many people capable of
reading
it unless I read it out
to
you. And there’s nothing in the manual that says I have to do
that
all the bloody time. I mean, sure, it’s an unwritten
assumption
, but it’s not necessarily–”

Waffa sighed. “Where are we going?” he asked. “Are we headed for some rendezvous with your nutty Artist friend, or are you taking us somewhere else?”

“That’d be telling,” Bruce said, sounding a little less jovial. “Also, don’t say ‘nutty’. It characterises the Artist as mentally unstable and I don’t like that.”

“Wouldn’t want you to be upset by unfair characterisation,” Waffa said. “You might totally accidentally mince me with an airlock and play catch with me.”

There was a pause long enough to make Waffa wonder if maybe he’d gone too far. Then Bruce laughed.

And that was when he
knew
they were dealing with a mad starship.

“I’m glad you finally decided to come to see me,” the counsellor said, warm but crisp, businesslike but concerned. “I know you can’t rush these things, but even turning up at my door is an important step.”

“I’ve felt increasingly anxious about it,” his patient admitted, “but I guess it was about time.
Past
time, maybe.”

The counsellor gave a comfortable chuckle. “I wouldn’t say that,” he assured the patient. “Sometimes these things can fester, that’s all. It’s best to get them out. Clean the wound, so healing can begin,” he chuckled again, with just the right touch of self-deprecation. “Platitudes of that nature.”

The patient gave a nervous laugh. “Right.”

“So,” he sat back, folding his hands across his belly. “How are things?”

A grimace. “Well, Counsellor–”

“Oh no, we know each other too well for that, don’t we?” he said with easy confidence. “And besides, this isn’t a formal hearing. It’s just a chat. That’s all. Just a bit of a friendly old chat between friends,” he paused, assessing the patient’s difficult-to-place expression. “Colleagues,” he amended. “Call me Janus, please.”

“Okay,” the patient said, and paused just long enough for Whye to wonder if maybe he was going to get a reciprocal call-me-by-my-first-name. But apparently not this time. “I was just going to say, I’m not very good at small talk. Janus.”

“Big talk it is, then,” Janus Whye said expansively, and was rewarded with a laugh he turned into a mutual, comforting shared chuckle. “Seriously, though,” he went on, “you don’t get much further from small talk than ‘how are things?’. The
difference
is, when most people use it as small talk, they’re not actually wondering how things
are
. They’re looking for reassurance that the person they’re talking to feels the same way they do,” he leaned forward, unclasping his hands in carefully-choreographed intensity. “Which is something the other person can’t possibly know,” he tapped the arm of his chair for emphasis, taking care not to touch the little control panel that was embedded there. The last thing he wanted was a repeat of his last session, when a careless armrest-tap had plunged the office into darkness and activated the white noise generator. “Which in turn puts the pressure firmly on the target of the question,” he said, “do you see?”

“I … I think so.”

“All of a sudden, out of nowhere, they’re expected to know how the questioner feels and adjust their response to match, so as to avoid a socially awkward exchange,” Whye sat back, giving a now-how-is-that-fair spread of his hands. “The general fallback is a safe, lazy platitude -
oh, things are fine, you know, working hard or hardly working, bit tired but
whatchagonnado?” they shared another rewarding little laugh at this classic, painfully-hackneyed quip. “The fallback, in short, is small talk. Just like you said. And millennia of social convention has made that model a complete institution. People don’t even think about it anymore,” he raised a wise finger before folding his hands over his belly again. “But remember what we say about social convention,” he waited.

The patient looked hesitant. “That it, um…”

“Social expectation,” he corrected, just a little clumsily, “I mean social expectations. We say that they…” he waited, then prompted, “they stop outside…”

“They stop outside this door,” the patient said in relief.