Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Read online

  Eejit

  A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

  Andrew Hindle

  Copyright © 2014 Andrew Hindle

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1501016882

  ISBN-13: 1501016881

  For my girls: Janica, Elsa and Freja,

  for giving me a reason to write.

  And for my boys: Aaron, Lucas and Timo,

  for making me write it.

  PROLOGUE

  In the Thirty-Ninth Century, great men and women of the human race strode among the stars and trod the jewelled thrones of the universe under their sandal’d feet.

  Well, they weren’t wearing sandals, they were mostly wearing spacesuits because that was just plain common sense. And there weren’t really any jewelled thrones as such – not as far as anyone knew – so much as dusty ice-balls and emptiness and some algae in a couple of places. But human beings went out there and stepped in that algae, and then tracked it back into their starship airlocks and then looked around behind themselves as they walked on through into their recreation areas and said “oh damn, was that me?”

  Yes, human beings did that.

  And sometimes the algae turned out to be highly contagious or flesh-eating or toxic or fecund beyond terrestrial comprehension, and sometimes those human beings who had brought it on board their starships all died in graphic, horrible ways. And sometimes the emptiness turned out to be not quite so empty, and those human beings who had blundered into it had all their things taken away from them or were never heard from again.

  And sometimes the ice turned out to have terrifying alien monsters capable of perfectly impersonating their hapless prey frozen inside just waiting to be dug out and thawed for some reason, and those human beings seemed to be okay but you never could be quite sure about them again after that.

  But these incidents were rare, and there were always more human beings. Making more human beings was one of human beings’ all-time favourite things to do. It was basically the cornerstone of their entire civilisation.

  So they spread, and as a species – with a little help from their friends – they survived. And they prospered and flourished. And they were noble and poetic and fearless and, occasionally, they were colossal bastards. But, in those final years of the human race, they mostly got it right.

  The swan song of homo sapiens sapiens was sweet and sad and, if not harmonious, then at least glorious. If you’re going to go out on a song, as a rather famous entertainer once said, make it a beautiful, beautiful song. And if you can’t do that, well – make it deafening.

  Yes, in the Thirty-Ninth Century, great men and women of the human race strode among the stars.

  Also, these guys were there.

  GLOMULUS

  As always, Cratch reflected, the casualty report was a case of good news and bad news. Or, more accurately, alternating layers of good news and bad news in a sort of emotional lasagne that, like a regular lasagne, ended up making you feel bloated and sleepy and occasionally also gave you heartburn.

  The good news was, as ship’s medic the announcement of a dead body meant that there wasn’t significant work for him to do, or all that much pressure to do it. Life-saving was off the table, which was always a relief. The bad news, he was compelled by hilariously-outmoded social convention to add, was that an arguably sentient being had died.

  The good news, again, was that it was just an eejit.

  “Righto,” Cratch said in his jovial voice, clapping his hands and rubbing them together as he stepped out into the medical bay proper and smiled at his blank-faced nurses. He reached up and, with a light clink-clink as his smooth metal bracelets tapped together, tied his straw-blonde hair back in a lazy ponytail. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  The bright-eyed, pale-skinned, stick-insect-thin doctor didn’t drop the friendly little charade when he realised he was the only human in the wide, sterile blue-white room. This would form part of the accident report, an official inquiry if not an actual criminal investigation, and there was a better than fifty-fifty chance the scene would be recorded for the logs. The Tramp’s media was not the most discriminating system ever devised. He would be seen, he would be noticed, and so he kept his face in place as he crossed the room, sterilised his hands with another clink of bracelets and waved them in a jolly ad-libbed minimalist dance routine to accelerate the micro-film setting process, finally concluding with a tambourine-like oscillation of his long, thin fingers and a little “yeah!” at the side of the examination table.

  He had found that the act inexplicably set people at ease. It was an amusing paradox to Cratch, because his behaviour was objectively and calculatedly ghoulish … and yet pupil dilation, heart-rates and breathing and speech patterns didn’t lie. People were reassured by it, and in fact were so distracted by trying to see through it that they seemed to forget what it was they were looking for in the first place.

  Sometimes he liked to make a game out of how long he could sustain the Good Doctor façade. See whether he would crack first, or the people watching him.

  “Able Airlock Maintenance 2-19,” one of the nurses said in his gelatinous voice, reading laboriously from a monitor. Then he turned and pointed, completely unnecessarily, at what was lying on the table.

  “Oh, there he is,” Cratch said, leaning over and giving the second nurse a conspiratorial nudge. “You know, I had an inkling.”

  When The Accident had eradicated the overwhelming majority of the Tramp’s crew, it had meant more than just Cratch’s new job and a standing requirement that he henceforth consider all deaths to be “bad news”, at least out loud. It had also meant that Astro Tramp 400 was critically undermanned, all human survivors bumped into the highest possible vacant slots and the rest of the slots filled, as per standard practice that admittedly could use adjustment for cases of such extreme depopulation, with clones. Ables.

  The ables were multi-purpose synthesised organisms with a very limited subset of sentient rights, intended for short-term fill-in work, menial labour and heavy lifting. They were named for semi-mythical AstroCorps figure Able Darko, who in turn had been named in the ancient maritime tradition of Able Seaman. The original Able was engineered, almost literally, for physical impressiveness, strength and resilience, as well as strong organ function and high donor compatibility, broad-spectrum immunities and universal blood type. He was also designed with large cranial and raw-brain capacity, as well as a pliable and easily-guided nature.

  This was perfect for the able fabrication and configuration program, since it allowed for a wide range of intensively technical and muscle-memory-ingrained skill-set types to be loaded onto the blank able template wetware, creating stable, if unimaginative substitute crewmembers.

  It was also the basis for several super-villain clone armies and a whole subset of campfire astromythology, but the risks in this regard were actually very minimal. Ables were severely limited, useful for emergency and skeleton crew starship operation and maintenance, but were no substitute for the real thing. Classically an able was fabricated, configured and assigned in the absence of a crew position only for the time required to secure a human replacement.

  There was just a teensy tiny problem with all this.

  “Would you like me to pass you the instrument you say the name of when you hold out your hand and say the instrument, and then I say the instrument too and put it in your hand? Doctor?”

  Doctor Cratch smiled and glanced at the broad, placid-eyed humanoid, then at the identical second nurse, then sidelong at the nearest surveillance bumper and the eyes of electronic posterity.

  “Shouldn’t be necessary, old chum,” he said winningly. �
�That’s our Doing A Surgery Operation game, while this is more of a Soggy Jigsaw Puzzle We Don’t Need To Reassemble game.”

  While the machinery controlling the actual fabrication of ables was in perfect working order, the software responsible for configuration – imprinting their skill-sets – had been hopelessly mangled. This meant that at best, the attempted drive engineer you’d just printed would work mostly as required, but with some fundamental gap or flaw in his knowledge and behaviour. Like continually forgetting that the number ‘2’ existed, or thinking that he was part of the engine and needed to be welded back in there unless someone stood nearby and stopped him.

  Cratch cleared his throat and straightened his lapels. “Beginning posthumous examination of Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19.”

  And there was no ‘securing a replacement’ now, nor did it seem likely there ever would be. Not for the foreseeable future. The eejits were no longer a temporary stopgap. The eejits were it.

  Equally unfortunately, Able Darko’s broad-compatibility brain layout also happened to leave him with a resting facial expression of gormless bovinity, which wasn’t usually an issue since his facial responses would be determined by his skill-set configuration. On board Astro Tramp 400, however, part of the damage to the configuration machinery meant that this expression – as well as a dangerous amount of the accompanying stupidity it implied – was a permanent feature of the fabricated ables.

  Which was why they were promptly nicknamed eejits.

  “Put on some music,” Cratch instructed, then went on before the nurse – he’d dubbed him Nurse Wingus, or technically Nurse Wingus Jr. – could do more than open his mouth and wrinkle his forehead in bewilderment. “Over there, third panel, top row, green button. Here,” still holding his hands up, Cratch soft-shoe-shuffled over to the panel and beckoned Nurse Wingus. “This button. Don’t press it yet, just keep your finger hovering over it and wait,” making sure Wingus was standing patient and primed, Cratch crossed back to the table. “Where was I? Right. Right, right, righto. Beginning posthumous examination of Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19, roll music.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Um.”

  The Tramp’s eejits suffered a wide spectrum of flaws, starting with the facial expression and severely gappy skill-sets, and ranging up through stupidity, clumsiness, reckless lack of forethought and sudden-onset catatonia, all the way to the heady stratospheric reaches of utter dribbling lackwittery. The extreme lower-bell-curve eejits were summarily disposed of, but the fabrication plant did not support the ceaseless churning-out and weeding through of copies in order to collect the occasional almost-perfectly-configured one when such an aberration came along. As part of the aforementioned ‘super-villain clone army’ issue, a certain amount of dead man’s boots protocol had to be observed, meaning a clear and justified need for additional eejits had to be signed off by the Captain and the senior officers, in accordance with automatically-and-mechanically-upheld regulations, and not even they could tweak the numbers to make it look like they needed another galley janitor when the Tramp already had eight of them doing the work of three. Plus, of course, all those slack, gaping mouths needed to be fed.

  And not only did the fabrication plant have built-in morality inhibitions on the number of eejits one could stamp out and then mulch and feed to the survivors in the hope that the next print-out would have a few more brain cells banging around up there, but there were safeguards on the level of cognitive fragmentation that could be used to justify termination. Not even the Captain could say “okay, we need a qualified microsurgeon but this one keeps using the molecular isolator to pick his nose so we’re going to kill him and make a new one and hope for an improvement.” Not even now. The machinery would just throw up a Role Already Filled error message if he tried. The crew had figured out several creative solutions to this dilemma – it was, after all, not much of a challenge to find ways for an eejit to kill himself, once you waded into the warm, urine-rich shallows of the intelligence pool – but there were limits.

  The net result of this was that for every eejit aboard Astro Tramp 400 that was almost qualified to fulfil his role, there were fifty who couldn’t tell shooey from dandruff. And twenty-five more who would happily sit with mittens on their feet and underpants on their heads, eating handfuls of either dandruff or shooey until their stomachs ruptured. And they were the ones the crew didn’t have the heart to find lethal work-arounds for. The ship’s disposal systems, relics of a safer and more starry-eyed time, wouldn’t even let them destroy eejits who made the dandruff-eaters look like nuclear transpersion physicists. Only in cases of clear and obvious suffering would the plant countenance the recycling of a print.

  It was this devastating lack of expertise that resulted in a half-dozen eejits taking the place of each former crewmember. While they tended to work surprisingly well in synchrony and not get in each other’s way, they were still no real substitute for an actual expert – or even a reasonably imaginative amateur human – and had a habit of falling inside things and getting crushed. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes not so much.

  It was also the reason Contro was Chief Engineer.

  “Green button,” Cratch said, turning to give the surveillance bumper another sidelong grin, this time adding a sly wink. “I left you with your finger on it there, sparky.”

  “Oh.”

  The bombacious strains of Lars Larouchel’s Big Brass Ball started to thump and swing through the medical bay with a sh-boom, a bop-bop and a tinkle of Vermish pipes, and Doctor Cratch turned his full and piercing attention on the thing lying mostly on the examination table.

  So.

  The good news was, it was just an eejit. The bad news, once again, was that for something to go sufficiently wrong to kill an eejit, there had to be a catastrophic breakdown somewhere and sooner or later that would be actual-human-life-threatening. After all, if an eejit could get killed by it a human feasibly could too, although the human in question may need to be sleepwalking or drunk out of his or her mind or, possibly, performing some incredibly unlikely and irretrievably stupid act on a dare at the precise same moment a series of cosmically unlikely coincidences lined up with a sequence of safety system failures, while sleepwalking drunk. Well, it was unlikely … but possible. That was the point.

  The good news was, there were plenty more eejits to throw at the problem until the problem either went away or – and this was bad news all over again, in a way, because it happened all too often – just got clogged up with dead eejits and sort of ground harmlessly to a halt. Because, well, they were God damn eejits. But – good news – the opportunity to send in the clowns meant a certain number of justified replacement slots and the shot at a statistically anomalous eejit who could actually do his job without simultaneously forgetting how to breathe.

  As he checked the file on Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19, Cratch realised the bad news just kept coming. Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 was a high-end eejit. Which meant that they’d just lost an almost-competent mechanic that might take agonising months and years of printed shooeyheads to replace. Since Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 had presumably been unable to foresee or avoid his fate, it also logically followed that said fate had been a comparatively unlucky one. Certainly unlucky for him, but more than that. It meant that whatever had done this to Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 had a better-than-one-in-fifty chance of doing the same to a human.

  A better-than-one-in-twenty chance of doing the same to a human like Contro.

  “Layers upon layers upon layers,” Cratch murmured to himself, then gave a merry little shake-and-blink. “Oh well. Professionally-begun is half-done,” he began to pick his way through the sodden red-and-white mass on the table, occasionally bending to retrieve a bit as it slithered onto the floor, or peel away a flap of skin or uniform or the plastic maintenance report flimsy Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 had been carrying when he died. “On initial visual inspection I would say that the injuries here are consisten
t with the accompanying casualty report,” he said, shifting to a slightly more sombre tone. “Limbs and torso crushed and almost severed by rapidly opening-and-closing inner airlock door, finally pinning victim at sternum level, then outer airlock door opening a small amount resulting in decompression and the pulping of the upper body as it was dragged through inner airlock door by force. Some cold damage and lost material from lower extremities, presumably when they were sucked against the narrow opening in outer airlock door. One leg severed at lower-shin, presumed lost into space. Cause of death…”

  Doctor Cratch looked at the partially-collapsed head, the scattered bones and the mounds of flesh and intestines.

  Dingus, the second nurse, pointed helpfully at the ragged stump of the neck where it now largely failed to connect with the base of the skull. “I think people die when the neck is open like that,” he said.

  “Yes,” Cratch said solemnly. “Yes, I can say with confidence that they do.”

  Wingus and Dingus did look slightly different, both to one another and to the ancient Able Darko archetype. It was an enduring myth that clones all came out looking totally identical. The production of a clone was not, after all, the same genetic process as might take place for the gestation of identical twins, let alone completely synthesised printed replicants – another set of horrific myths altogether. No, ables were more like non-identical siblings, although their genetic-level identicality and the fabrication process itself served to draw them towards that identical baseline far more than if they had simply been cloned from the same stock. Their similarity of appearance was a reflection of the similarity in their blood, organs, skin and tissues – it wasn’t because they were clones, as such.

  But long story short, they were strikingly similar. Each was embedded with an identity at fabrication, and whatever name they were later assigned became linked to that identity. Glomulus could tell Wingus and Dingus apart, nine times out of ten. For the hundreds of other eejits on board, name-tags were a definite plus.