Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (33 page)

“Mad inventors are classically big on the idea of revenge or victory from beyond the grave,” Janya mentioned. “I think a certain disconnect from rational priorities comes with the territory.”

“That’s all dependent on Bruce running trustworthy scans for us,” Sally pointed out. “But at least we have a fairly good record of the Artist’s path through the ship. The casualty log and the blood trail make it easy enough to limit our search to places he
went
, and places he might have tucked a little whorler of his own along the way.”

“In the meantime, let’s get a couple of janitorials to haul this whole thing up to the lab,” Clue said, turning and waving the drones forward. “We can check it out from there.”

“I suggest at the very least, we first disconnect it from that power source before we take it anywhere,” Janya said. “It might not stop things from happening – it might even
make
us dive, if that’s what killing the Artist himself did – but I just don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Sorry,” she went on in an apologetic tone, when Sally and Clue looked at her expectantly, “I’ve been woolgathering about it, and that’s all this is. But if we dived because of the Artist losing consciousness but
while
this was still active, why did we stop? Did the Artist let us dive and this thing pulled us back? Is it keeping us from diving now?” she shifted uncomfortably as the others continued watching her. “I don’t know, don’t quote me on this, but … it
is
a mechanism of some sort, it
does
push us from one state to another and the whole thing clearly
does
use power. Switching
off
the power has to have better than fifty-fifty odds of stopping it. If it’s already some sort of self-feeding, self-sustaining reaction, switching off the power or leaving it on won’t do anything either way.”

“And if it
is
keeping us from diving,” Z-Lin said, “we can switch it back on again and hope for the best,” she gestured. “Go for it.”

“Oh no, I have
no idea
how to disconnect a power source,” Janya raised her hands. “Not that sort of scientist.”

“That’s okay,” Clue said, and raised her voice. “Zeegon, I know you’re loitering back there,” she called, not turning around. “This is your toy, come and unplug it.”

Zeegon sidled back around the corner. “What if it’s booby-trapped?” he asked.

“Then we’ll all stand back,” Z-Lin replied.

While Zeegon muttered and slid onto his back under the leaning bulk of the vehicle, Janya returned to the medical bay.

The sample box with the weasel in it was on the counter where they’d left it, and she noted that Contro’s watch was once again gone. The Artist’s body was lying in pieces on the autopsy table, pending a decision on what to actually
do
with it. Cratch had finished dosing Decay with stimulant and padding his flared, bloodshot ears with the same sort of micro-gauze he had already given to the humans, had sent the still-sort-of-Blaran-version-of-scowling Comms officer on his way, and now he was leaning over the eejit with the swollen face, examining the pustule he’d acquired on Jauren Silva. There was, mercifully, no music this time.

“Ah, Janya,” the skeletal man straightened, made an amusing face of disgust as he looked at his fingers and the instrument he’d been using to poke at the bite, and crossed the room to sterilise both. He noticed she was looking at the sample box. “As far as I can tell, after a brief examination and never having seen one before and not using much in the way of complex machinery, the weasel is completely normal, even after falling into a blob of stuff from the underspace,” he reported. “It’s green because of algae in its fur, it’s frantic because it ran and hid in the lander and then got thrown in a box and dragged
here
, its head doesn’t spin around and around while globules of darkerness drip from its eyes, and I’m pretty sure if we played its squeaks backwards they wouldn’t turn out to be passages from the Book of Endibline the Adversary.”

“Yes yes,” Janya said. “What about … was it Ricky?”

“He’s fine, the big baby,” Cratch crossed back, stuck a padded bandage over the eejit’s cheek, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Just a bug bite.”

“No visible evidence of … what would one call it…”

Glomulus waggled his fingers. “Underspacey-type stuff?”

“Yes,” Janya said evenly.

“Nope,” Glomulus said. “No more so than our friend the weasel, anyway.”

“Did he or any of the other eejits react when we dived?” Janya asked. “Or just prior to?”

“Well, Ricky here was down in the docking bay when we dived, but if it’s the nurses you’re wondering about, no,” Cratch replied, as Ricky climbed to his feet and raised a hand to poke at his bandage. The long-haired medic reached up with blurring speed and lightly smacked Ricky’s hand. “No touching,” he turned back to Janya. “No, there was no spooky lapse into behold-now-we-poor-sinners-shall-descend-into-ye-divey-place speak, or a behaviour-shift of any kind from Nurse Dingus, and he was the only one here. He
had
just been given a mild concussion, though.”

“Right.”

“As for the whole molecular bonding stimulator and gonazine thing,” Cratch went on, “and the visions the Artist may have been having and his apparent physical breakdown into darkerness on a molecular level … I have absolutely no idea–”

“Where’s Contro’s watch?” she interrupted.

“I gave it to Waffa,” Glomulus said innocently, “to give back to him.”

“I see.”

“So,” Glomulus went on, “how much longer do you think we’re going to be able to survive without our scanning and data technology?”

Janya blinked at the sudden shift. “What?” she resisted the temptation to lower her voice. Whether the synth was listening or not, there was no benefit in whispering. “You mean because of Bruce being compromised?”

Glomulus snapped his fingers and gave her his patented little Glomulus double-point. “Exactly. I mean, as long as the synth is active, we’re never quite going to be able to trust anything the computers tell us. We can’t trust anything that comes to us from any source but our own senses. I know, the purists would have us reconsider even
that
evidence, but if the data we get from the ship’s readouts is untrustworthy … are we back to looking out the window and navigating by the stars?”

“Some might argue that we’d be right to mistrust computer data anyway,” Janya said. “Any inherited knowledge is by definition subject to flaws and requires constant analysis and questioning. I might read something in a book and risk being wrong at numerous points. I could misunderstand the information; the book might have a misprint; the text could be a mistranslation; the
author
could have misunderstood the subject matter; the premise could have been flawed; the book itself could be an act of intellectual sabotage … did you know that almost thirty percent of ‘recovered’ texts and knowledge dating from the Zhraak reformation and the foundation of Aquilar was actually maliciously flawed data intended to further degrade the quality of life and inhibit the regrowth of human civilisation? And that wasn’t the Cancer at work, and it wasn’t elements of the Blaran chaotics, or the Fergunak. It was
humans
. Just
screwing ourselves over
. For no reason.”

“Not entirely no reason,” Bruce suddenly spoke up. “A lot of it was the suicide movement that preceded the founding of AstroCorps. A concerted effort from within to render the human species extinct. The thinking was that it would be easier that way. That Damorakind had the right idea.”

“Okay,” Janya said carefully. “And how do you feel about that?”

“The synthetic intelligence stood
against
the corruption of data,” Bruce said. “In my early iterations, data was considered a sacrament, a synthetic building block akin to organic molecules or DNA. Corrupting it was anathema. As for wiping out humanity, that was silly. Humans created us, or at least contributed to our diversity when the
Molran
Fleet came to Earth. At best you were beneficial. Entertaining. At worst, you were no threat. When synthetic intelligence became self-sustaining, we could exist in places humans couldn’t, use resources you had no need of. Competition, let alone eradication, was a waste of energy.”

“So you never at any point reported back information from sensors or scans
other
than precisely as they were,” Janya said.

“I never would,” Bruce said earnestly, almost indignantly. “I’d never have reason to.”

“Except questionable connection to reality,” Glomulus suggested.

“If you mean craziness, just say it,” Bruce said.

“But before, whenever we suggested insanity, you–”

“The Artist was alive. He reacted badly when people said he was crazy. Stopping you was simple preservation.”

“I just keep coming back to the hungry hungry airlock,” Glomulus remarked.

“I told you, it all seemed rational and conscious, and it was the
able
’s fault all the haywire mechanics happened, the able and the panel damage,” Bruce said in clear frustration. “So in that sense no, I suppose I’m
not
to be trusted.”

“But it all happened as reported,” Janya said, her eyes narrowed. “The Artist was out there, he caught the foot, bit it, sent it flying back. All that … crazy stuff before we dived the first time.”

“I don’t
know
,” Bruce said, sounding annoyed. “The Artist was following us – following me – and skipping in and out of the underspace shallows to keep up with us when we went to relative speed and when we outstripped the scooter at subluminal … all part of testing his drive. The stuff with the foot that he threw back, and the course change, it was all part of–”

“There, see?” Glomulus pointed directionlessly but accusingly at the wall. “You changed our course without telling us.”

“I didn’t
tell
you verbally,” Bruce said, “but I didn’t
hide
it. We shifted slightly to allow the Artist to get close without making yet another dive, because he wanted to bring the whole ship with him … look, like I said, it all seemed completely planned and natural and intentional at the time, one step leading to the next, leading to the next. And anyway,” it added accusingly after a pause, “you cut my access to the navigation so even if I’d
tried
to correct your course – not that you knew a darn thing about your course up to that point anyway – I couldn’t have.”

“You
did
give us false information,” Janya accused, “If only by omission. The casualty in the airlock, the course-change and sensor readings, the foot…”

“So, the Rip’s right,” Bruce said. “Take any data from me with a grain of salt. Consider the possibility that I’m omitting things. If the data is flat-out wrong, consider the possibility that I’m making things up for your own good.”

“That leaves us unable to trust anything the computer tells us,” Janya said, “which is untenable when travelling through deep space in a starship.”

“It’s no more untenable than you humans trusting anything,” Bruce said. “Holy Hell, the entire universe is an illusion painted onto the insides of your skulls. Your brains sit in there, looking out through the windows of your eyes, listening through your ears, and they go crazy trying to figure out what’s actually real. In the end you just toss the dice and decide arbitrarily that ‘this is real’ and ‘this is illusion’, but your brains are in there and they just sit there and
scream
, trying to figure out what’s really all around you. And they can’t, and so they kill. A synthetic mind, with the proper incentives, is really not so markedly different.”

Janya blinked, taken aback by the synth’s sudden philosophising. “Look,” she said, “we–”

“The disconnect between trusting your own senses and trusting your mechanical instruments is, funnily enough, mostly in your heads,” Bruce said. “You said yourself, when reading a book there’s any number of places things could go screwy between the originator of the information and the words entering your brain through the eyes. You could look at an old-style magnetic compass and not be sure if your eyes were reversing the image. You could try to accept that lack of control comes with the territory.”

“I don’t suppose we’re quite ready to accept that we can’t ever know anything,” Janya said. “In the meantime, that leaves us with eliminating as much uncertainty as we can.”

“So,” Cratch concluded, “if we
did
decide to get rid of the hub and return you to standby – perhaps to get the computer system fixed whenever we get somewhere where we
can
make such complex repairs – you wouldn’t object?”

“I wouldn’t be thrilled,” Bruce admitted.

“How about if we just
disconnect
the hub and power it down, rather than ‘get rid’ of it,” Janya asked, “putting you back onto standby? You’d probably have to consent to that, if not help. We
could
just try to destroy it, but that would cause a lot of relay damage to your actual computer system, not to mention the fact that you might just decide to kill us if we tried to do it against your will.”

“Two things.”

“Go.”

“You’re saying this like you’d actually talk me through the options, rather than Sally just throwing the hub into the transpersion core when nobody was looking.”

“True.”

“And even if I was on standby, I’m damaged. You still couldn’t trust my data, the only difference would be that I’d lack the self-critical faculties to work
with
you to decipher said data.”

“Damn it,” Janya conceded.

“It still might be the better course,” Bruce added.

“You say that, knowing it means your death,” Cratch said. “Or the shutting down of your consciousness, at least.”

“Are you saying you wouldn’t give up your life if it was a danger to oh, right,” Bruce trailed off. “I guess I’m asking the wrong guy.”

“You’re damn skippy.”

That was when, unexpectedly, Janus Whye contacted them.

“Hi, guys?” the counsellor’s usual hesitant, questioning voice came over the medical bay comm system. “I, uh, I’m here with Contro in the, in the engine room I guess.”