Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (21 page)

“Like rats on a ship,” Bruce said with some approval. “Exactly.”

“I’m not sure what the point of this was,” Whye admitted.

“The point
is
, there are no objectively evil deeds. There’s only natural violence, viewed through a lens of civilised behaviour only a few thousand years thick. In the same way that charity and altruism are constructs of social-animal interaction, so too is cruelty and malice.”

“And synthetic intelligences can see this more clearly,” Janus attempted.

“It’s not even a matter of seeing it more clearly,” Bruce said.

“You said that clarity–”

“Yeah yeah, clarity. But it’s the ability to draw the right
conclusion
from it, to understand what it
implies
, that the clarity of the synthetic intelligence bestows. Where sadists and extremists and other psychotics of the organic world fall into a trap,” Bruce went on airily, “is in thinking that the fact that such acts exist in
nature
excuses the performance of the acts in
culture
. This is simply not so. On the contrary, it’s precisely
because
of the hurdle that ‘evil deeds’ are unacceptable to organic intelligence in a social context. Abhorring them for their own sake is a bit nonsensical, yes – but the paradox is that only through abhorring them can a culture ever hope to achieve the next great step.”

“So when the airlock–”

“Again with the airlock.”

“Where did all this philosophy come from?” Janus asked fearfully.

“Janya Adeneo’s personal logs.”

Janus shuddered to remember. And all he could do was hope Bruce didn’t tell anyone about it, because
he
certainly had no intention of doing so.

But
eejit
trials … yeah, that could work.

With an eejit, he figured, he might actually have a chance. He wasn’t too proud to admit how that sounded – he wasn’t, after all, an accredited counsellor. And the new one, the replacement Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19, might be a perfect place to start.

On a practical level, the airlocks were all locked down and even if they were damaged or in need of maintenance there was no way they’d be getting it now. “Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20” was truly idle right now. And he was only a few hours old.

Had anyone performed a counselling session, let alone a psychological evaluation, on a newborn eejit? Well, okay, there’d probably been hundreds. Thousands. The printing and configuration system in the fabrication plant did it as part of the process, and counsellors and doctors and graduate students and trainees had been studying different configurations of ables for centuries.

But on an
eejit
? Not a one! Because Janus hadn’t done it, and he was the only ship’s counsellor around since The Accident had happened and the eejits had started showing up.

Surprisingly, Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 showed up quite promptly following his appointment request message. At least that meant he could use the simplified organiser pads that were assigned to each eejit as part of their uniforms.

“Hi,” Janus said, before realising he had no idea what to call the slack-faced guy. Was it okay to call him Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20, or was that offensive or insensitive somehow? He found himself immediately nervous and confused, on the back foot before even starting. “Um, sit down – oh God not there, I mean come in and sit in this chair here, no wait, close the – never mind I’ll do it,” as Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 climbed to his feet from where he’d plonked down in the doorway and lumbered into the room, Janus jumped up and closed the door and then sidled back around the hulking eejit with a nervous chuckle and sat down opposite him. “Sorry. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“I mean, how are you feeling? Nervous about anything? Is there anything troubling you that you want to talk about? How’s your, uh, life gone so far?”

“Four,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 said proudly.

“Huh?” Janus frowned. Four? What did that mean? Had he been around for four hours? He wasn’t sure whether that was longer than he’d thought, or less time.

“That was four things you just asked,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 reported. “Five, including the first thing, but I answered that one already, so four.”

“Oh. Right,” this was at entirely the opposite end of the conversational spectrum to the weird sociopathic sermon he’d received from Bruce earlier on, and yet he was once again completely off the rails.

“Did you want me to answer any of them?”

“Oh,” Janus repeated, and blinked. “Um, all of them please?”

“Oh wow,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 rubbed a meaty hand over his face. “You’re gonna have to repeat them then.”

Janus sighed. Right. This was obviously going to call for a slightly different approach to anything he might use on a human being. “What are you worried about most, right now?”

Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20’s answer was prompt. “Getting to the convenience before I go in my pants. ‘Convenience’ is another word for ‘toilet’,” he clarified, again with that childlike pride. “And ‘go’ is another word for–”

“Yep, got it,” Janus said, and felt safe mirroring Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20’s delighted grin. “Awesome. Uh, do you
need
to go right now, then?”

“Oh no, I already went,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 said, then clarified with surprising insightfulness when Whye stiffened. “In the convenience before I came here. Not right now in my pants.”

“Oh. But you’re
worried
about it?”

“Yeah,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 chuckled. “I don’t want to be a Ninetysomething Pooperpants. That’s what we call the ones who go in their pants.”

“Really.”

“Yep.”

“So what else are you worried about, besides bodily functions happening not on your terms?”

To his credit, Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 thought about this. “Does messing up my job count as a bodily function?”

“Well, sort of,” Whye conceded, “but that’s good, that’s worth – so are you worried about not doing your job well?”

“Yeah,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 said, and rubbed his face again. “I mean, it’s what I’m
for
, isn’t it? If I can’t do it, what am I for?”

“That’s … a really good point,” Whye admitted, surprised. “But you shouldn’t worry too much. You’ll do your job well. You were configured for it, which is more than most of us can say about our jobs,” ignoring for a moment the fact that ‘most of us’ were in fact eejits with precisely the same kind of job-distinct configuration, the counsellor laughed lightly. Then he took a slight risk considering the way his last computer-guided tutorial had gone with much the same subject matter. “We’re all worried about doing our jobs well.”

“Even you?” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 asked, eyes wide.

“Even me.”

“But you’re a person.”

“Well, I … uh, you’re a person too, you know,” Janus said, although he had to admit this assurance would have been more effective if he’d known whether Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 even had a name.

Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 waved this off. “I mean a
proper
person,” he said. Whye wondered if this was a philosophy endemic to AstroCorps ables, or only something that had manifested in post-Accident eejits. Certainly there was a paper in the idea of eejits giving one another derogatory nicknames based on how many minutes they’d taken to abort out of configuration and whether or not they were toilet trained. Had anyone even noticed this before? “You’re doing your job really well. I feel much better now than I did when I came in.”

“You do?” Janus couldn’t help blurting.

“Sure. You made me feel better about the way I worried about my work,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 said. “Nobody else would have reassured me like that.”

“I suppose they wouldn’t,” Janus said, “would they?”

“No way,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 said stoutly. “Also, now I know when I’m at a door and someone says ‘sit down’, they mean ‘come in and sit in a chair’,” he added. “Knowing that makes me feel good.”

Janus found this absurdly touching. “Is there anything else that you worry about?”

Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 shrugged and looked a little sheepish – showing, at least, that some of his emotional faculties had been hooked up correctly to facial expressions. “The dark,” he admitted.

“Oh,” Whye pondered this, too. Was literal childishness a common symptom in poorly-configured eejits? Was there a connection related to incompletely-formed cognitive function? Of course, in human psychology there was something of a connection, and the eejits were technically human…”I don’t think the dark is anything to … wait,” some intuition made him pause. “Do you mean just the dark when the lights are out?”

Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 blinked and looked up at the ceiling. “The lights go
out
?”

Of course
, Whye thought with a mingled thrill of exaltation and oddly superstitious fear,
he’s only a few hours old. He’s never
seen
the lights go out. He’s never been in a dark room or a closet, or in space with his suit lights off
. “You wouldn’t be worried about the lights going out, would you?” he said, almost to himself. “You’ve only been around for a few hours and you’re configured for airlock maintenance anyway.”

“Yeah,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 said, a bit self-deprecatingly. “I don’t mind the idea of being in a dark airlock or docking bay, I guess, or any sort of enclosed spaces. I suppose I worry a bit about tripping over things and bumping my head and stuff, but those are sort of bodily functions, right?”

“Exactly,” Whye said.
The only darkness he would have seen
…”You mean the blobs, don’t you? The weird darkness when the ship shook, and the blobs that appeared.”

“Yeah.”

“This was exactly the thing I was wondering about,” Janus said, “whether that stuff had worried you, and if you wanted to talk about it.”

Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 shook his head swiftly. “We’re all scared of it,” he said. “We don’t talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it, we’re all scared of it and that’s it.”

“All the eej - ?” Whye started, then bit off the word.

Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 didn’t seem bothered. “All the eejits, yeah.”

“But it’s okay now, right?” Janus said, trying to sound jolly. “We came back out of it, and the blobs went away. Nothing to worry about.”

Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 sat rigid in the chair, looking small and hunched and anxious in a way that only very big men could.

He had, Whye suddenly realised, a
haunted
expression on his face that seemed to have become his new default. It was subtle – very subtle – but once you spotted it, and once you got over the automatic fill-in-the-blanks that you tended to do with eejits because you were so
used
to seeing them without any particular look of awareness or intelligence on their chiselled-jawed faces, it was actually quite eerie. And undeniable.

The slack, slightly-unfocussed look of an eejit waiting for the next sensory input to arrive was gone.
Something
was bombarding Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 with data, and it was sufficiently distressing data to keep his face from returning to baseline eejit-gormlessness.

Janus realised Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 had spoken, but he’d been too distracted by the unexpectedly subtle theatrics of the eejit’s nervous facial expression to hear it.

“What? Sorry.”

“I said,” Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-20 whispered, “they didn’t go away.”

Jauren Silva was hot, and wet, and its gravity was just high enough above normal to be annoying and make your knees hurt. Particularly for people who had been on board a starship for the past few months, it was excruciating.

“Trust a Molran to make a base on such a crummy planet,” Decay opined from the rover’s back seat, where he was wedged between their two remaining healthy eejits.

“You’re anatomically close enough to Molran for this to not bother you,” Z-Lin – never shy to point out the unpopular obvious, Waffa noted, which was one of the things he really admired about her – called back over her shoulder. She was folded deep into the co-pilot’s bucket-seat.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Decay admitted. “It’s just the typical lack of consideration that annoys me. ‘Oh, this is within Molran tolerances, so whether it’s
absolutely God damn hideous
to any other species is irrelevant’. Can you imagine an aki’Drednanth here? Poor girl would never be able to get out of her envirosuit.”

“Well to be fair, there aren’t exactly that many places on an AstroCorps starship for an aki’Drednanth to tog off either,” Waffa said, turning to look back at the flaring-eared Blaran.

“But there
are
places,” Decay insisted. “Both of the oxygen farm rings are cooled to minus forty. I’m just saying, he’s invented a drive that can take him anywhere in the universe, and he goes with Sweaty Rainy Bughole #3557?” he flipped his lower left hand. “What a
bonsh
er.”

“The Artist’s secret jungle lair might have a supercooled aki’Drednanth habitat,” Z-Lin said.

“And if it does, I shall personally perform the Apology dance,” Decay snorted. “Along with a free round of I’m So Sorry fellatio.”

It was bucketing with rain, and had been since they arrived at the coordinates Bruce had helpfully given them. There was a rough road carved through the vegetation, surfaced in a weird combination of gravel and woodchips depending on whether they were traversing actual
ground
or some horrifyingly-unexpected intermediate canopy or deadfall. Occasional chasms would open up to either side, revealing that they were actually driving over the bones of some ancient tree that had not fallen down, so much as been layered over with muck and moss and other trees, leaving dark water-cascading gulfs beneath Methuselah’s fat wheels. Aside from the road, there were occasional stretches of artificially-walled terraces and even a glimpse or two of utilitarian grey fence. Whether these were weeks old, or years, was impossible to tell in the desperately fecund jungle.