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

  “So … cause of death would be something like … neck being off?” Dingus suggested.

  “Neck parts missing,” Wingus Jr. amended professionally.

  Dingus nodded crisply. “Cause of death, neck loss.”

  “Cause of death,” Wingus Jr. concluded triumphantly, “asphyxiation due to insufficient neckal tissue.”

  “That one,” Cratch said, ending his tennis-match back-and-forth administration of the diagnostic consultation, snapping his fingers and pointing at Wingus Jr. “The points you lost by using the word ‘neckal’, you more than made up for with ‘asphyxiation’,” he nodded approvingly. “For ‘neckal’, try substituting ‘spinal’ or, depending on the context and if you’re feeling particularly loquacious, ‘oesophageal’.”

  “Oesophageal.”

  “Right,” Cratch stepped back to look at, as it were, the big picture. He waited for Mr. Larouchel to croon to the end of Sad Little Doggy and launch into the soft opening bars of Oræl Rides To War before continuing. “Although, if we’re talking about cause of death and being absolute sticklers for, you know, facts and stuff … given that his skull is still mostly intact and that the damage goes chop chop chop legs, crunch crunch pelvis-and-gut, chomp diaphragm and then smear on up to the neck … I’ll hazard a guess that he went feet-first.

  “By the weight of this physical evidence, my esteemed colleagues, I think I’m going to risk going on record saying that our old friend Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 was probably dead by the time he got squeezed from the access corridor into the airlock up to his neck,” he looked around, his face grave. “I think we’ve all learned that massive trauma and blood-loss were the real monsters here today.”

  “Oesophageal.”

  “Indeed,” Doctor Cratch mused. “Indeed,” he paused for a time, giving this the deep consideration it deserved. Then he bent, picked up a pulped hand for the third time, looked down at it in silent reflection for a moment before depositing it back in the middle of the heap, and carrying on brightly, “I would say, if I had to speculate about the specific cause of death – which I don’t, because that’s a job for Sally and Waffa – I would suggest that these injuries were caused by a combination of technical and eejit error. Viz,” he tambourined his red hands briefly for emphasis, “the airlock access panel jammed up and the safeties shorted, our inestimable colleague Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 pressed on a whole lot of buttons over and over again trying to get it to work,” Cratch jabbed his fingers in a frustrated pantomime, “then the system un-jammed and all the commands played out in rapid sequence. Which under no account should ever happen, but nevertheless … specifically this meant the outer door cracking open enough to start him on his outward journey, the inner door opening and closing six or seven times to cause this chewing effect as he went on through, and then both doors lodging partway open – perhaps due to another circuit glitch or a maintenance override shortcut caused by Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 mashing the buttons randomly,” here Cratch performed another little pantomime, before concluding, “…so he could be sucked out to his ultimate placement, before both doors finally closed and locked down,” he stepped back and posed, as Oræl Rides To War reached its bittersweet crescendo. “Elementary, my dear Wingus.”

  Doctor Cratch was about to begin cataloguing the organs and tissues that would not be worth salvaging for medical reasons due to excessive damage – this wasn’t likely to take long, because it was all of them except Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19’s scalp, and nobody on board needed new hair – when the Tramp’s proximity alarm started sounding.

  WAFFA

  When the external sensors spotted an inbound object on a trajectory that would result in hull impact, they sent a notification to workstation 19, which was … well, it was wherever Waffa happened to be at that moment, because workstation 19 was his wristwatch. It was Waffa’s job, as Chief of Security and Operations, to decide which of the multitude of notifications, impact or otherwise, warranted escalation to alarms. And to then log the alarms. And then to figure out what to do about the alarms. And then to do that thing he just figured out. And then to turn off the alarms. And then to explain to everyone why the noise had happened, what he’d done, and why the noise had stopped.

  In many ways, The Accident had been a real kick in the balls for Waffa’s spare time. “The buck starts here,” as he always liked to say. In his brain. In his brain, it was in fact his catchphrase, although in reality it would be more accurate to say his catchphrase was “damn it.”

  Today, the inbound object notification caught him on the toilet.

  He studied the readings, muttering the first syllable of the key ones out loud because nobody has time to read every syllable of a technical data dump. “Imp traj … mass … small cross-sec … oh come on, it’s a bloody rock,” he concluded, with no idea of the cosmic humorousness of his choice of words.

  With impacts, there was a time element because no amount of dicking around with the sensors was going to change the fact that there was a piece of high-speed frozen whatever barrelling towards the ship. Since it was incoming at speed, Waffa confirmed the telemetry – because that sounded like the sort of thing he should do – and then set off the alarm and activated the intercept scoop. Because even if it was a rock, it had an atypical profile and was moving at atypical speed, and why waste time deflecting it when you could grab it and see if it was worth something? They might as well use the ship systems that still worked properly.

  Then he finished going to the toilet.

  He was washing his hands when Contro buzzed him from the engine room. The call came through on – yes – workstation 19.

  “Hi!”

  “Die in a fire,” Waffa said matter-of-factly, then tapped his watch to open comms. “Hey Chief,” technically they were both Chief Officers, but Chief Engineer was considerably more prestigious – not to mention definitively Chief – than Chief of Security and Operations, which was a title somewhere beneath Sally’s Chief Tactical Officer umbrella. Theirs was a ship of Chief Officers, these days, even if hardly any of them were actually officer-trained in any way.

  “So there’s an alarm happening, huh?” Contro said cheerfully, and punctuated his question with a laugh. “Ha ha!”

  Waffa shuddered, and locked eyes with himself in the mirror before answering very steadily. “Yep.”

  “Anything I need to worry about?”

  “Only if you’re worried about the ship getting a hole bored through it by a piece of frozen star moving at a few thousand feet per second,” he said, in his brain. “Which you’re not, are you?” In reality, however, he said, “Nah Chief, I’ve already set the catchers. As soon as I get confirmation that they’ve got hold of the rock, I’ll turn off the alarm.”

  “Righto!” Contro, with what you might call a troublingly characteristic lack of social awareness, had picked up the expression from Doctor Cratch and it was a tough call as to which of the two – Contro, or the Rip – made the jolly exclamation sound more horrible. “Ha ha! Excellent job, Mister Waffa!”

  “No worries,” Waffa said, still staring at himself steadily and wondering, not for the first or fifth of two-hundredth time, whether it was somehow possible for an eejit to glitch so spectacularly that it came out looking like a little smiling man with a round face, a penchant for cardigans and the interpersonal skills of an amphetamine-addicted chipmunk. And then somehow pass itself off as human. “I’ll just–”

  “Oh! I almost forgot, there’s also a few flashing lights and stuff down here, the yellow ones on the whatsit panel, the one with the outline of the ship on it, you know the one.”

  “Yeah,” Waffa said, “those are the same alarm, they just flash in case there are people who can’t hear the siren. It means the ship’s not aborting its acceleration process, but that the countermeasures are – that the catchers are going to grab the rock and we’ll continue on our way. They’ll all go off when I turn off the alarm.”

  “Righto!”

&nbs
p; “Ping me back if I switch off the alarm and the lights keep flashing, though,” Waffa said, and instantly regretted it.

  “Oh! Why will the lights keep flashing?”

  “They won’t – they shouldn’t – but–”

  “What should I do to stop them?”

  “Nothing. Contact me again.”

  “Righto, so the alarm will stop but the lights will keep flashing, but what does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t – they won’t keep flashing, the alarm and the lights will all stop together, but if the lights keep flashing–”

  “Yes I know! What then?”

  Waffa gritted his teeth. “Contact me.”

  “Can’t we just deal with it now? Why should I hang up and then call you again? Ha ha! That’s very inefficient, Mister Waffa!”

  Waffa took a few deep breaths, then continued. “Alright, Chief,” he said, “let’s do that. I’ll deactivate the alarm – the noise and the lights – as soon as the incoming bit of space debris that caused the alarm is safely in our catchers. Problem sorted. Alright?”

  “Okay then! Sounds good.”

  Waffa tapped his wrist, slumped against the toilet wall and sighed. A tall and well-built man – albeit not quite as impressive a physical specimen as an eejit himself – he looked at his short, tousled, greying blonde hair and weary face in the mirror and fancied he’d been compressed a few cubic inches by the pressure of his life since The Accident. Then he leaned over the sink, washed his face lingeringly, and returned his attention to his workstation.

  Sensors were generally triggered by inbound or nearby objects of a certain size. While the Tramp was shielded and could deflect dust and small particles – and even larger ones, especially once she cycled up to full cruising speed and even a minuscule dust mote became a theoretically devastating projectile and evasive manoeuvres became a fantasy – there were still notifications about objects of unusual size or composition. Oh Lord, there were so many notifications.

  And in space, the general rule was that the anomalous should be examined, albeit at a careful distance if possible.

  “Come on then,” Waffa muttered, brushing his screen, “let’s catch that little bastard and get on with our lives.”

  Matter tended to clump together. That was gravity, and even some eejits understood the basics of that one. Most of the particles in the universe that weren’t floating around as innocuous dust or gases had already long since coalesced into stars and planets and things like that. And those were a bit easier to pick up even without a proximity alarm. Which made the middle-range things worth keeping an eye open for, even if they were ridiculously small.

  Yes, there were still plenty of things in space that were bigger than dust and smaller than planets. But that was like saying ‘there are plenty of peas in the freezer,’ when there were ten thousand peas and the freezer was five hundred thousand miles on a side. It didn’t matter how many pebbles there were floating around out there pretending to be comets – the chances of bumping into one were really not that high. Space, as Waffa also liked to say, was bloody enormous. That was why it was called ‘space’ and not ‘cramped’.

  And all this had come on top of the day he’d already had, which was just perfect.

  Immediately upon waking up that morning – an hour and a half before he was scheduled to wake up, and that after going to bed three hours later than he’d planned due to another set of reports – he’d been required to seal off an airlock and call a general all-stop in order for Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 to do some routine repairs on a suspected input panel malfunction. All-stop because, obviously, when there was a chance that an accidentally-pressed button would open an airlock, it was best to be in one place when you fixed it to avoid too much running around picking people up from one end of space to the other in case of accidents.

  But certainly there had been no sign that anything remotely like the airlock in question eating an eejit would occur.

  After that happened, a thoroughly-awake Waffa had made sure the accident had in fact come absolutely without warning. He knew eejits were easy to come by and there was no real penalty for messing one up, although a high-end eejit like Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 was a palpable loss. It would actually have been more serious if Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 had clotted up the works and caused the airlock to get more seriously damaged, although Waffa was of the opinion that a) an airlock that chews you up and sprays you into space through an eighth-of-an-inch-wide crack is already about as seriously damaged as it’s possible for an airlock to get, and b) he couldn’t actually remember anybody using the airlock to embark, disembark or go EVA, ever. They used the docking blister for pretty much every entrance and exit they ever performed. So why not just weld it shut?

  Anyway, after the attempted repair and resultant fatality Waffa had made sure the whole region of the Tramp’s hull was safe and locked down, and had allowed them to resume course while a full investigation took place. Repairs would now happen with a full security bulkhead in place and strictly on one door at a time, totally powered down and rigorously tested, and all from inside with absolutely no chance of decompression. As it would have been before, if Waffa had assigned himself to run the input panel diagnostic instead of an eejit. But he’d foolishly thought it was a minor repair job.

  He’d been snatching a few minutes to take a crap before starting the new repairs when the whole proximity alarm thing had started.

  “Damn it,” he sighed, and swept his hand across workstation 19 yet again to open a new memo. “Damn it, okay. Right.”

  The first part of his preparation, as ever, was the checklist. Set off alarm (check); activate retrieval (check); report to General Command Group and Engineering and Tactical Group (in progress); oversee retrieval; prepare repair crew; repair airlock; don’t get killed by airlock (this was a very important one); report to General Command Group and Engineering and Tactical Group; prepare replacement for Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19; report to General Command Group and Engineering and Tactical Group …

  It wasn’t that Waffa was anal. At least, he’d never thought of himself as anal. He hadn’t been anal, back before The Accident. He’d just been a non-Corps operations crewman, not even certified AstroCorps. He just felt that if, at the end of the day, he couldn’t mark one thing off a specially-formatted tick-the-box to-do list, then it was a day he had taken one step closer to death with nothing to show for it. So he did his best to cross off as many items as he could, which sometimes meant he had to write some very small and rather pointless to-do lists but they still counted.

  He’d considered, in his darker hours, the possibility that he might run out of action points before he ran out of days.

  That was when he drank.

  Muttering to himself he headed for the maintenance prep area, pecking at his watch with one finger. He wrote up the outstanding report while on the move from one task to the next. His time wasn’t that limited, he could have taken a moment to sit down and do the damn fool thing, but Waffa knew that to sit was to snooze.

  Very often, the most difficult part of writing up an official report was getting the dumb template to work.

  That was actually what it was officially called, for reasons as long-forgotten as Able Darko himself: the dumb template. And Waffa made sure he called it by its official name, lest the official name be forgotten, forcing him to come up with an inferior insulting term. So ‘dumb template’ it was, ‘dumb’ as in a blank slate with no words – with the dubious exception of the little symbols and icons that he had to twiddle around with every time …

  Right.

  The actual event code in this case was HLCF, which meant ‘Hardware Lapse Causing Fatality’, but which Waffa had re-assigned as ‘Hideous Lethal Cluster Fuck’ in the code metadata. The extenuator code was SAE, ‘Single Able Expired’, or alternatively ‘Squashed An Eejit’. The variation on this, MAE, he’d repurposed as ‘Mangled Assload of Eejits’. That one actually got more use than the SAE code, due
to the eejits’ unerring instinct to beach themselves en masse on HLCFs.

  In this case, thankfully, it was just the one.

  He added the OOF (‘One-Off Fault’, or ‘Once Only, Fingers crossed’ in Waffa’s parlance) code, and concluded with the NJDI suffix, which meant ‘No Janitorial Drone Involvement’ or ‘Just Cleaned It Up My God Damn Self As Usual’. That one didn’t match the acronym, but Waffa didn’t care. The converse to the NJDI, out of interest, was EJDI, or ‘Extensive Janitorial Drone Involvement’ / ‘Ewwww, Janitors Do It’.

  So.

  - - - HLCF + SAE + OOF + NJDI - - -

  - - - Routine repairs performed on suspected input panel malfunction + Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 assigned + all-stop - - -

  - - - Severe airlock fault + decompression + mechanical / safety fallback failure - - -

  - - - Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 expired - - -

  - - - Full lockdown and security measures - - -

  - - - Repair and analysis ongoing + flight to resume on satisfactory conclusion of repairs - - -

  The report ended, as it usually did, with his initials – GJW4 – which he manually fixed to read ‘Waffa’ instead. It was perhaps the most infuriating part of the dumb template – he had fixed this to automatically include his de facto name instead of his non-Corps crew ID maybe eight times before realising that the template always forgot the change. So it was manual all the way.

  He could have just signed off with ‘GJW4’. People knew who that was, and he was the only person submitting regular reports anyway so even if they hadn’t known, they could have taken an educated guess. But then again, he could drink out of the toilet too. But he didn’t, because he was a human-God-damn-being.

  Sending off the report to the General Command Group – that meant Z-Lin Clue and theoretically the Captain – and the Engineering and Tactical Group – Sally and Contro – Waffa stepped up to maintenance prep. Overseeing the retrieval of the object was an easy check, since the whole system was automated and largely, theoretically foolproof for all that the Tramp seemed to have a knack for printing out bigger, better fools with every passing day.