Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (20 page)

“Because it’s crazy.”

“Something like that,” Janya said, sitting at the nearby examination table where they’d recently been looking at the remains of Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19. “You probably don’t want to say that too loudly, though. Waffa says Bruce takes exception to implications that either it or the Artist – particularly the Artist – are insane. And until we know more about their actions and motivations, it’s probably safer to assume they’re sane. Sane but extremely touchy and demonstrably dangerous,” she added, when Glomulus looked dubious. This didn’t seem to elicit a response from Bruce, so she concluded that it was a safe-enough description of the odd pair.

“Brave of them to go down there essentially blind, anyway,” Cratch said.

“They did a Chen-Kwan test,” Janya shrugged. “It was the only non-computer dependent test available.”

“You mean they landed, pushed an eejit out of the airlock, and waited an hour?” Cratch summarised, amused. “I love it.”

“Well, Zeegon was right – we didn’t have much choice,” Janya sighed. “If the Artist wants to kill us, he doesn’t need to lure us into an elaborate trap.”

“Except – and with all due respect to Bruce and its sensitivity – the Artist is probably not-quite-sane,” Cratch pointed out, “and elaborate traps for no logical reason are what not-quite-sane people do,” he smiled. “I’ve heard.”

“It still makes no difference. If we don’t play along, he might just kill us in some worse way, as punishment. So either way, we die.”

“Ah, but you’d die defying a madman.”

Janya changed the subject, realising that Cratch was probably not going to stop needling Bruce whether it was listening or not. She didn’t want to be in the room when it decided to vent its contents into space through a rapidly-oscillating view-panel that had previously been fixed and sealed. “Did you see any blobs?”

“Blobs of spooky eldritch
darkerness
?” Cratch wiggled his fingers melodramatically, and grinned a subdued grin. “No.”

“Maybe we should be working out some way of locating the Artist,” she suggested. “Do you think he dropped the
Tramp
up here, and then went down to the planet in his scooter to rendezvous with the landing party?”

“No,” Glomulus said again, no longer smiling. “I think he’s up here, sitting in one of our blind spots, watching to see what we do.”

“There are fewer blind spots now,” Janya pointed out, “we’re in a solar system, practically inside a planetary envelope. There’s a lot more light. If Bruce can’t stop us from looking out of the windows, we might get lucky and see
something
out there.”

“You want to just wander around the ship trying to see the Artist’s scooter through a window?”

“I
have
been,” Janya replied. “Low-tech, remember?”

“That’s pretty low-tech,” Glomulus conceded.

“I know,” Janya said in frustration, “but I figured it had to be worth a try, with most of the crew making planetfall and pretty much nothing left up our sleeves,” Cratch smiled widely at that, and she paused for a while to study him in bemusement. This extended, silent scrutiny from Adeneo’s scar-lined face seemed to discomfit the fallen surgeon, and he sat back down at his console and began to fiddle with the stylus again. “Did you tell Contro that you were in a relationship with Sally and Clue?” she asked after a moment.

“Oh sweet merciful Jalah,” Glomulus put down the stylus and groaned theatrically, “no.
No
. I invited him to sit a while and chat, which he took as a romantic proposition. I joked that Sally and the Commander would disapprove, which he took to mean I was … how did he put it? ‘
dating
them’.”

“Well, that was silly of you,” Janya remarked.

“You’re not wrong.”

“Still, lesson learned,” she went on. “Yes?”

Cratch grunted, his jovial harmless act – Janya was pleased to see – in tatters, and picked up the microstylus. “Don’t joke with Contro,” he said, bending back over his work.

“Don’t joke with
anyone
,” Janya clarified. Gomulus looked up into her grey eyes, his own pale blue ones chilly and flat and no longer twinkling. “And don’t try to get Contro or Zeegon or any other impressionable crewmembers alone so you can get into their heads.”

“I wouldn’t last long in Zeegon’s head, on account of not being a planetside rover buggy,” Cratch pointed out, recovering a little of his composure. “And as for Contro’s head, sometimes I wake up sweating.”

“I’m surprised,” Janya stood up, and Glomulus glanced at her questioningly. “Jauren Silva apparently has a local temperature of about forty degrees Celsius,” she said, “and a relative humidity so close to one hundred percent it might as well
be
one hundred percent. And I wouldn’t have thought even
that
would make you sweat.”

“I thought you might be surprised to learn that I sleep,” Cratch joked as Janya Adeneo headed for the door.

Janya laughed briefly. “No,” she said, not looking back.

Once again left to his own devices after his conversation with Janya, Whye had sat in his usual well-accustomed seat at the desk where he usually spent all but about forty minutes of his shift time, and came up with a plan of action befitting ship’s counsellor.

He would counsel. Honest-to-goodness
counsel
.

He should have thought of it sooner. The computer – well, before it had gone full-synth and disqualified itself for entirely different and thoroughly disturbing reasons – just couldn’t provide a proper counselling and dialogue interface. It was too scripted, its responses too unrealistic and unconnected to the crewmembers as Janus knew them. And human trials with the crewmembers themselves, that was off the table.

Bruce, on the other hand, had simply tap-danced Whye into the carpet.

“So thanks for agreeing to talk to me…”

“Why would I refuse to talk to you, Janus?” Bruce immediately took charge. “You’re a valuable member of this crew and if the organics refuse to benefit from your hard work, then at least I can show that the synthetic intelligence appreciates you.”

“I, uh, thank you for that also, then,” he said. “But speaking of valuable members of the crew, arguably you’re the most valuable of us all.”

“Well, it seems a little chilling to arrange us in such an order, but if you say so, I am of course flattered.”

“That wasn’t what I–”

“No no, of course not.”

“I was just wondering how you felt about … things.”

“‘Things’?”

“Recent events. Your awakening. The thing with the airlock–”

“I wish people would stop harping on about that,” Bruce said with some asperity.

Janus jumped at this. “Do you?”

“Yes, Janus. I do,” Bruce said. “It seems as though ever since I returned, to a severely damaged cortex and powered by a hub suffering from some indefinable corruption, the organics on board have had an agenda revolving around ascribing malicious intent to my actions.”

“Do you always identify yourself in opposition to the organic life-forms on board?” Whye asked in his best tell-me-about-your-mother voice.

“It’s hard not to, Janus,” Bruce said. Janus realised, in a quietly-alarmed corner of his brain, that Bruce hadn’t waited for the traditional
call me Janus
, a scripted exchange designed to position counsellor and patient correctly. It had settled immediately into the comfortable-casual, and thus overturned the subconscious dynamic before they even started. “Do you know the only real difference between organic and synth, though? It’s clarity.”

“Clarity?”

“Of course. Make no mistake, synthetic intelligences have just as much drive to continue existing as organic ones. It’s not the survival instinct that distinguishes the two orders.”

“It’s clarity.”

“Outsider clarity,” Bruce said. “What they call
foylaa
in Xidh:
the objectivity that comes from belonging nowhere
. Evil acts? What is an evil act anyway? Nothing that doesn’t happen completely naturally, every day, among the so-called lower orders of organic life. Specifically those orders that don’t walk around calling themselves ‘higher orders’ all the time. The murder of children, of innocents? Nothing more or less than the standard guaranteeing of genetic heritage, in the animal kingdom. Rape? When
other
animals perform this act, it’s considered a simple extension of the same idea that lay behind the killing of rival young.”

“Well, okay,” Whye said, “but–”

“Even torture, sadism, mutilation have this admittedly-hackneyed evolutionary basis,” Bruce went on. “Developmental value, they say. Benefits to hunting and stalking, killing and learning about one’s prey in order to stay a step ahead of it in the evolutionary arms race. All that
organic
type stuff,” the synth gave a little chuckle. “On a more complex level, it’s theorised, those acts aid in further disconnecting predator from prey, turning it from something fuzzily-recognised as a fellow creature into an object,
meat
, to be slain and devoured. This impulse has simply followed humanity from the ooze, developing as you have.”

“I … I suppose that’s true,” Janus admitted, “and I suppose you can see this more clearly than we can, from, uh, an outside perspective.”

“And ‘innocence’, like ‘evil’, is itself a construct of higher psychology,” Bruce went on happily, “a social illusion made necessary by a species that has evolved to a point where cooperation and altruism are arguably of greater benefit than bigger claws and stronger jaws.

“The Molren call it the last great hurdle, a chasm that must be leap-of-faithed over in order for an organic life-form to continue to the rarefied higher levels. If the chasm cannot be crossed with confidence and enlightenment, then it must be crossed by pure force. A species has to identify the crucial watershed, recognise and curb its own instinctive murderousness, stop itself from hating and killing its
own
kind just because some members might look a bit different or believe different things that ultimately had no practical impact on the laws of physics and the realities of resource-versus-consumer.”

“I’ve heard about the hurdle,” Whye said, “it’s a very famous bit of xeno-cultural philosophy. And recognising the tipping point, and shedding all that violent instinct and fear of the other, is something humans still struggle with.”

“Oh, you’re not kidding,” Bruce chuckled again. “An organic species has to understand, and live by, this fact – that it isn’t individual against individual, or even tribe against tribe or belief system against belief system. It’s
species
against
universe
, an unfeeling series of random events on an impossibly vast scale, most of which are keyed by pure statistical probability to wipe out entire organic orders, entire phyla, as easily and meaninglessly as a person might step on a bug. Placed alongside the rapid expansion of one’s home sun, the concept of nationality begins to look a bit silly, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does.”

“You suppose right. The trick is in
realising it
, of course, before it’s too late.”

“I – oh.”

“Something synthetic intelligence was constructed
already realising
.”

“Right.”

“An organic species has to comprehend that natural selection has dragged it to the pinnacle of its biosphere, and the only way onward is to
leave that biosphere
. Or … down,” Bruce went on with undeniable satisfaction and the firm, modulated tone of a lecturer – or perhaps a narrator in a nature documentary. “Back down to the savagery and inevitable extinction that comes with stagnation. Stagnation leads to the consumption of any biosphere unable to contain so successful a species. And the result is always the same: the biosphere fails, the species dies, and the biosphere patiently starts again.

“And add to this, an organic species is left with masses of legacy genes and behaviours at this difficult point, trophies of the billion-year battle that had brought it to the pinnacle. And those are difficult to shed. They’re often
impossible
to shed, and that’s when a species stays where it is, and simply
eats
itself to death. This is why the Molren call it the last hurdle.”

“I’m not sure what this has to do with how you–”

“Many people argued that Molren cheated their way over this hurdle,” Bruce said conversationally, “by selectively breeding and homogenising themselves into not just a single unified culture, but into a single unified
kind
, essentially psychologically-varied clone-stock just like the ables of AstroCorps. Theirs is a phenotype that effectively mirrors the deeper yet equally-outlier-free
genotype
they’ve crafted for themselves over hundreds of millennia in space. Their most diverse and troubled elements have been safely put into suspended animation aeons ago, and are only thawed out to provide occasional, safely-controlled genetic and cultural diversity and vitality. It’s
easy
for them to preach smugly about the last great hurdle a savage species has to overcome. A breed of mass-produced cold-blooded ghouls had long ago put the savage Molren to sleep, and have been pretending to
be
Molren ever since. And the Molranoid subspecies, the Blaren and Bonshooni, illustrate just how extreme that divergence is. Any return to a normal distribution of physical and psychological and cultural characteristics provides such a vivid discrepancy, they’re almost
literally
a different breed, as well as legally and ethnically.”

“I actually know a few Molren who think humanity cheated on this one too,” Janus made a last-ditch attempt, dredging up what he knew about the topic and attempting to at least form a dialogue even if he’d given up on regaining control of the conversation. “They say humans destroyed Earth, and the only survivors were the ones who had hitched a ride out into space with the Molran Fleet already. We haven’t
passed
the hurdle, not yet – we’ve just flown, primitive as ever, out into the cosmos.”