Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (12 page)

Waffa had taken up station at one end of the table, directly opposite Glomulus. “I sent you a notification,” he said to Contro levelly, without shifting his steady gaze from the ship’s medic.

Contro rummaged deep in his cardigan pockets for his organiser pad. Sure enough, there were a few little message lights blinking and twirling on the screen, which was partially obscured by a sticky tube of Boddington’s Toffees that had come unwrapped in his pocket as well. “So you did!”

“Sally’s on the case,” Waffa reported, “I was just there. I figured I’d better talk to her in person in case the communicators had been compromised – you know, in case it wasn’t just a matter of Contro not getting my messages.”

“Sorry!”

“Anyway, I dropped past Sally’s and then came here. Six decks, on foot, without even using the elevator. Pretty bracing actually,” Waffa went on with a lightness that even Contro could tell was a little forced. “Communications might be untrustworthy, hard to be certain about that. I wanted to be sure you’d heard the actual words from my mouth, without risking the Artist messing around with them. Or at least minimising that risk.”

Janya frowned. “The Artist?”

Waffa paused, then chuckled. “Maybe I should start at the start.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Just don’t be surprised if we’re interrupted. I’m not sure what to expect at this point, I don’t know just how widespread the control is and what level either of them are willing to take it to. I can’t even be sure if the synth
is
messing with our data, it says that’s against its character but you know, synths can lie,” Waffa told them about their apparent shadow, and his commandeering and awakening of the
Tramp
’s computer. “I don’t think sneaking around and doing things analogue is going to help us all that much,” he concluded. “If Bruce gets tired of listening to us and watching us scurrying around in here, it can just open all those wonderful airlocks and flush us all into space. With or without chewing on us first. No more problem. Like I say, I’m having a hard time figuring out just how far they’re taking any of this.”

“I was with you right up until that ‘Bruce’ bit,” Glomulus ventured.

“The
Tramp
’s computer,” Janya said impatiently while Waffa glared at Glomulus. “When it’s in full synthetic intelligence mode.”

“I was supposed to know that?” Glomulus protested.

“He’s mentioned it in a couple of his reports.”

For a moment, Waffa looked slightly dizzy at the idea that someone had actually read any of his reports in that much detail, but he recovered. “Anyway,” he went on, “it didn’t kill me while I was on my way here or while I was talking to Sally, and as far as I know it hasn’t killed
her
, so I guess we just have to operate on the assumption that it’s got an agenda but that the agenda doesn’t
necessarily
include killing us unless we become too much of a threat,” he paused judiciously. “Maybe not even then,” he added. “It’s hard to gauge a synthetic intelligence and figure out what it wants.”

“But it’s paired up with this Artist character,” Janya said.

“I’m not actually allowed to
read
the official reports…” Glomulus pointed out.

“Right,” Waffa nodded, ignoring the medic. “I don’t think Bruce is hostile as such, although it is a bit messed up. In fact, it offered to help me with my distillery project…” he shook his head, momentarily distracted. “The Artist, though, is a bit more of an unknown quantity,” he concluded.

“He’s a Molran,” Janya said, “most likely.”

“So an unknown quantity of Molran!” Contro declared.

“I suppose so,” Janya smiled slightly. “But most likely a whole one.”

“So!” Contro carried on merrily. “And an artist, by golly! And he gets his spit on things! Ha ha ha! Things like feet! Honestly! Artists these days!”

“We also have teeth marks,” Janya said, “although the remains were in such bad shape it is hard to tell if it was just the imprint from having the flesh near his mouth, or if he actually bit the remains. Still, it helps us rule out a few things.”

“Was it enough to get some sort of dental match?” Waffa suggested.

“The teeth are Molran, that’s all we know,” Glomulus took up the thread after consulting his panel. “Of course, we’re relying on the same computer that failed to give us DNA identity to give us
dental
identity, so if it didn’t give us one there’s no logical reason for it to give us the other.”

“What was Sally going to do about Bruce anyway?” Janya asked.

“Right, you bastard. Let’s see you get out of this one.”

Unlike Contro, Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed had actually been
raised
Mygonite rather than just being named by them and then slowly growing up in a fluffy pink Controesque fog with blurry Mygonite silhouettes making comforting foghorn noises in the general vicinity.

Sally’s people were warriors. They’d been warriors for generations, standing in readiness of the Cancer in the Core should it ever begin to spread. It had left her fight-or-flight model hopelessly unbalanced.

She tinkered with the heavy box in front of her, adjusting clunky-looking diodes and ridiculous pieces of soldered circuitry. A little screen in the middle of the eighteen-inch-on-a-side, eight-pound box showed a charmingly ancient little blue squiggly oscillation pattern. It was a thing of low-tech, classical beauty. And it might quite possibly kill them all.

Her ancestors had been in so many wars, she felt she was letting the side down with the petty squabbles on board the
Tramp
. The fight she’d been mediating – or at least post-mortem-ing – before Waffa showed up at her office, for example. The fight between Zeegon and Automated Janitorial Drone 17.

Hardly the stuff of glorious song.

Fights among the crew weren’t uncommon. Even a couple of their more volatile eejits got into it from time to time, although they had some inhibiting factors in their configurations that fortunately – so far – the
Tramp
’s flawed printing plant had not managed to accidentally overwrite. They were usually Waffa’s problem as Chief of Security and Operations, but in this case he had successfully escalated it to her on the grounds that it was related to EVA devices, and promptly made himself busy with some airlock glitch or other.

Zeegon had gotten in a fight with Automated Janitorial Drone 17 when it had attempted, with reasonable success, to tidy away his latest scooter project. It had been close, but Zeegon had won with only minor buffer-pad burns, and hadn’t required any sort of medical attention. After securing his work, however, he had kitted up and gone after the unit as it dragged itself off to an automated repair station.

That was when it had become a broader tactical matter, at least according to Waffa’s extended essay justifying the escalation. Minor dust-ups with the machinery were one thing, since even in their damaged state the little stuff was easily fixed by the automated stations. But full-scale punitive missions, complete with bandoleers of tools and the slogan “this time it’s personal”, not so much. Space-worthy scooter technology, potential ejection of materials, breakdown in human / mechanical interaction … Sally had skimmed Waffa’s report, but had soon realised that it would be more effort to read it thoroughly and argue the point than it would be to get Zeegon to just settle the Hell down.

Sally reached into a compartment in her desk and pulled out a loop of silver wire she had made herself. She measured out a careful length of it – silver wasn’t your classically naturally-occurring-in-space sort of metal, generally speaking – and clipped it off.

Now, technically Automated Janitorial Drone 17 had been within its operational rights because Zeegon was supposed to prepare his workspaces and it was a very easy booking process to classify a whole workshop area – or indeed any floorspace, really – as off-limits for building purposes. He’d fallen out of the habit since The Accident, however, because there was so
much
space and so few Automated Janitorial Drones, and nobody shouted at him anymore when he started to randomly assemble things in quiet corners, flipball courts and corridors.

For his larger projects, he should have learned his lesson long since. This was not the first time he had been burned by the cleaning service. In fact, he swore this was the same over-zealous Automated Janitorial Drone as last time. Without even considering the possibility that it might be a symptom of the computer’s return to full synthetic intelligence status, Sally had closed the file and let Zeegon off with a short, sharp finger-poke in the carpet-burn.

That was the way Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed dealt with confrontations. Sally’s great-great-great-grandparents had been kicked so hard,
she
woke up with a dislocated butt. And the only way she could react to it was to plant her heels and
swing
.

She’d never say so herself, but Sally – five-feet-and-change in her jackboots, scarcely taller than Janya, plump and round-faced and top-knotted and usually-smiling – was probably the most formidable, most magnificent example of humanity left in the galaxy.

She’d always remember what her father had said to her when she was a young child, growing up in Gífrheim. “
You will be like life in the Last Days of Earth
,” he’d told her. “
Bright, brutal, beautiful
…
and short
.”

Sally’s mother, if possible even more cynical than her father, had usually added “
and pointlessly, hopelessly circular
” to that heart-warming simile. Being of much the same compact build as her daughter, she’d felt it was her place to inject realistic expectations wherever necessary.

So, that had been Sally’s day. A trashed Automated Janitorial Drone and a lightly-injured and severely-cheesed-off crewmember, and the nagging problem of how she was going to phrase the whole thing when she related it to Clue. She’d also been informed, later, about the airlock incident and had taken a moment to quietly congratulate herself on dodging a bureaucratic bullet by taking on the Zeegon fight instead, but she wasn’t going to tell Clue about
that
.

She wired up the connections between three of the points on the box, and a small green light came on. Sally nodded to herself and spooled out another length of the precious silver wire.

When Waffa had actually arrived at her office in person a short while ago, she’d been glad for the distraction even as she was inwardly rolling her eyes. She’d assumed, if it wasn’t going to be about Waffa trying to offload the airlock thing onto her after all, it would be about the tunnelling jurisdiction thing again.

Seriously, was it a security thing or a tactical thing when the eight remaining non-command crewmembers just up and started knocking out walls between crew quarters and expanding their apartment sizes? For a while there it had been like a game of Black Lieutenants’ grasp, with each of the sillier crewmembers carving out rows of quarters up and down and back and forth across the crew decks, with the unwritten rule that a block of quarters fully-encircled by interconnected rooms and not intersecting with any competing rows became the
de facto
property of the encircler. At least Zeegon, Decay, Whye, and even Contro had joined this ludicrous game, although his efforts had been slapdash and had actually resulted in a hole knocked through into a corridor – and it was only by dint of the hull reinforcements that he hadn’t gone in the
other
direction and flushed himself into space. Waffa himself was guilty of it, too, which just added another layer of annoyance to the whole debate over who should do something about it, since Clue didn’t appear to give a good God damn and the Captain might as well not even have been on board.

Even Janya had tried her hand at interior design, although at least she had lodged a request and given proper professional reasons for her little library.

Sally herself had wanted to have a go at it. To be honest, she wasn’t sure why each crewmember couldn’t just take a couple of officers’ suites and worry about the adjustment required should a full crew complement return to the
Tramp
in the unlikely event of it ever happening. As it was, if they stumbled upon new crewmembers now, they’d have to rent quarters-space from one of the vast, rambling empires the noncoms had built on the habitation decks. Z-Lin was the only person on the officers’ decks, since the Captain had his own chambers in the dome.

And the looting, that had
had
to stop. In the end they’d paired up to do the work, and Sally had delegated the reporting to Waffa by the simple expedient of not doing any reports. She’d assumed, optimistically, that this would be the end of it.

But Waffa hadn’t wanted to reopen that can of crap, Mygon be praised.

All Sally had known, up to that moment, was what Waffa had said in his general casualty alert – an airlock had gone haywire and chewed up an eejit, and that they were now flying again. She was in charge of tactical and technically the incoming objects and retrievals fell under that, but usually only when they were something relevant to a battle situation. Waffa sent so damn many notifications about the automatic retrievals and routine maintenance and the rocks and space junk they ran into and the risk analyses of things that might happen later, Sally had learned to tune it out.

And the death of an eejit, while sad for the eejit, wasn’t really a casualty that threatened general shipboard welfare.

Sally had long since identified the computer as a threat, even though it was difficult to consider the
synth itself
as one. Computer damage and corruption seemed more likely to cause life-threatening problems, and synths were largely immune to such things. Damage bad enough to make a synthetic intelligence ‘go weird’ would simply stop it from initiating. The
Tramp
’s synth should have remained on standby.

But this was new.

This was active repurposing of the synthetic intelligence into, apparently, a new
kind
of synth, something all modern thought – and certainly Sally’s education – insisted was impossible.