Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Andrew Hindle

  Mind you, Zeegon reflected while he sat in the armchair and stared unseeing into the middle distance, the things Contro was unable to adequately explain could fill a hollowed-out Worldship.

  So now they were tear-arsing through space again, at close to fifteen thousand times the speed of light, and he was meant to be at the helm. And after the aforementioned space-tomb débâcle a few weeks back, everyone blamed him when he filled in the numbers he was given and hit the ‘go’ button and they ended up somewhere horrible. They blamed him!

  It hardly seemed fair. Zeegon was only pressing the button, after all. He wasn’t deciding where they were going. If he’d been deciding, they would have limped back to Aquilar the moment he was plonked into the driver’s seat the day after The Accident, for insta-pensions and a lifetime of top-shelf mental anguish meds. And the asteroid hadn’t even been accompanied by a note from the officers.

  Oh well. At least now, when ‘everyone’ got mad at him for driving them into some sort of nightmare straight out of The Big Book Of Piss-Yourself-Terrifying Space Stories, ‘everyone’ was only nine people. And two of them were the Captain and the Commander so they didn’t count because they should have told him more in the first place, and one of them was Glomulus Cratch so he sure as shit didn’t count because he was Glomulus Cratch, so that was only six people. He could handle six people being mad at him.

  Six people and a whole bunch of eejits, of course. Because who really noticed when an eejit was mad at you?

  The ables that normally filled assistant positions and made up the numbers in emergencies during long-term missions now comprised – since The Accident – the majority of the Tramp’s crew. To make matters worse, the fabrication plant responsible for the physical manufacture and psychological configuration of the clones had been damaged in the same disaster that had killed almost everybody on board, and now the plant was spitting out imbeciles. Imbeciles on a good day.

  Each professional they’d lost now had his or her position filled with a half-dozen drooling, twitching, mouth-breathing shooeyheads whose attempts to do the same job might have been comedy gold if it wasn’t so terrifying and occasionally lethal. That, aside from regulations and protocols clearly not designed to handle an incident of this magnitude, was probably the only thing keeping a clone out of the helmsman’s seat, and Zeegon in it. Most days he wasn’t sure whether he was bitter or grateful concerning this fact.

  And did this constitute an emergency worthy of about-facing and running back into the loving arms of AstroCorps, for a new crew and possibly those pensions and meds previously referenced? No. No, apparently it did not.

  Muttering to himself, frustrated all over again at the very reflection, Zeegon cleared his head, sat up a little, and swiped the long series of numbers and symbols off his pad onto the big-screen console across the room. Once it was displaying there, he poked away at the series of grossly unprofessional work-arounds he’d figured out for the navigation system. Finally, six shits and four damn its later, he was rewarded with the usual “+” symbol suspended in the middle of a pale-pink 3D pie-wedge that he guessed was supposed to represent this sector of the galaxy or something. His Basic Nav professor at the Academy had called it the ‘Slice of Heaven’, and that was all Zeegon remembered from Basic Nav. Aside from the fact that the arsehole had zeroed him.

  Just the “+”, the pie wedge, and another long sequence of indecipherable symbols and numbers.

  He’d complained to The General once, saying that it was all so pointlessly complicated and difficult. That, given the level of technology they enjoyed in almost every other facet of their day-to-day lives, there was no reason for the helm not to be similarly intuitive and user-friendly. Their orders, of course, and the coordinates that came along with them, were usually annotated by the officers with some minor stuff about the planet or system the coordinates were supposed to be pointing at. A name, at least. Zeegon just wished he didn’t need to take their word for it, and he wouldn’t have had to if the navigation system had a more intuitive interface.

  And then there were cases where the coordinates just plain didn’t have any notes, or had notes that were clear and hilarious lies. A particular favourite of his was ‘population 3’, the note that had accompanied their marching orders to Hermes after their frantic escape from Twistlock. Hermes in fact had a population of about four and a half billion, and Zeegon had spent an amusing few hours at the start of their leave asking an assortment of locals whether any of them knew who the three actual citizens of Hermes were. To be honest he didn’t remember much after that. There had been alcohol.

  Anyway. The navigator, he’d insisted to the General, could easily translate all that gibberish into a nice picture of their destination planet and a little bulleted list of notes about the place. Stuff like here there be dragons, or whatever happened to be appropriate.

  General Moral Decay (Alcohol), in a moment of greater-than-usual Molranity, had said, “I guess if you can read it, it already sort of does.”

  Well, wisenheimer Blaren aside, the location data said absolutely nothing to Zeegon and he was still figuring out how to translate basically any of it into useful information. This was the sort of thing actual pilots went to the Academy for a decade or more to learn, of course, so it was safe to say his efforts thus far had been minimal. They were a week or so from their destination, he could decipher that much … but that was already obvious from the blue-line readout on the helm when he took them to relative speed. No big revelation there.

  He was about to give up and go to the lander simulator for an hour or two of nullified-friction-settings crash-sim entertainment when a little red notation near the bottom of the Slice of Heaven caught his eye. Frowning – the only good red he’d ever encountered in the course of his AstroCorps career was the final red-line destination countdown, and that usually turned out to be bad in hindsight – he tapped it.

  - - - Restricted (controlled space volume) - - -

  - - - Enter clearance - - -

  “Clearance,” Zeegon muttered, “I’m helmsman. Been helmsman for a year and a half. Is that clearance enough?” Without much hope, he entered his non-Corps crew ID: - - - HZPJ - - -

  Evidently not. The notation flashed, then faded back to its previous muted red. Not glaring, not attention-grabbing, not challenging – just a fact. And now Zeegon’s artificial fibre-crete shoulder-blade was getting hot-cold behind his back. Still frowning at the notation, as though unwilling to take his eyes off it in case it did something devious while his back was turned, he called up the Commander on his pad communicator.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m just looking at the flight plan,” he said, “and there’s a restricted notice. Something about ‘controlled volume space’. It asks me for my clearance but it won’t accept my ID code so it’s not telling me anything about the restriction,” he realised belatedly that Clue was being quieter than usual. “Are we heading somewhere dangerous, Commander?”

  “Sounds like need-to-know stuff there, Pendraegg,” Z-Lin said in her best pretending-to-be-the-Captain voice.

  “Come on, we’ve been here before,” Zeegon said, exasperated. “Aren’t we sort of at the point where, as helmsman, I need to know where we’re going?”

  “No more so than anyone else,” Z-Lin said, then sighed. “But okay, in this case … I was going to call a conference anyway, to let everyone know what we’re flying into. To be honest, we’re not really sure what to expect, so there’s not much preparation any of us can do. The volume – the system’s restricted, so under normal circumstances we wouldn’t be going in there at all. We have command dispensation, though, so the course could even be set in the first place. The only difference is that when you lay the course in, you get that notification on the display.”

  “Reminding me that I’ve sent us into a restricted area we normally wouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere near.”

  “Right.”

  “And probably wouldn’t want to be,” Zeegon
added, rubbing his shoulder.

  “Probably not,” Clue replied, “although it’s on the official record that you had no say in this. You’re just following orders.”

  “That’s a huge comfort to basically everyone on the ship who isn’t AstroCorps,” Zeegon said. Now his wrist and his ankle and his kneecap were all beginning to chime in on the general bad-news vibe. “And that’s all of us, except for you. And the Captain.”

  “Your point being?”

  “Commander, what the Hell are we flying into?”

  Z-Lin sighed again, and told him.

  CONTRO (THEN)

  There were a lot of myths around the galaxy. It was an old galaxy.

  One myth said that, shortly after the settling of Aquilar and the founding of the so-called “Wild Empire” that was humanity’s stake in the emergent Six Species, a world was discovered in the Pax Ganimus system. It was a decent little world, temperate and stable and planted firmly in the habitable orbit region of a quiet and predictable star that wasn’t too big, wasn’t too small, wasn’t fierce and young, wasn’t old and prone to expansion or explosion. Pax Ganimus was close enough to the growing settlements of humanity, but secluded enough to avoid major stellar destabilising events. The planet itself was thickly forested, with a few tame little oceans and a lot of lakes, and no native life-forms larger or more offensive than a knee-high squirrel thing that might give you a nasty nip if you happened to stick your arm all the way down into its burrow when it was suckling a litter of young – and even that would only be if you ignored all the chittering and squalling and scolding it did first, and the three or four times it bonked your knuckles with a nut. It really was a very nice place, anyway.

  Its discoverer was a woman named Rachael Herschel. Herschel was technically a modular Captain with a full crew behind her and an exploration volume charter stuck in her belt, but this was early days. AstroCorps was still a dream, even the Six Species was in its frontier-like infancy, and modulars weren’t standardised – as long as you could manage a space-dock and your tub met nuclear transpersion and field generation safety specs, you could really do what you wanted.

  Going where you wanted was a bit more problematic, of course. The Molran Fleet ruled the stars, and their first priority was that nobody go wandering off into the darkness. Above all, they wanted to ensure that nobody stumble into the clutches of Damorakind, and provide the Cancer with the information they needed to hunt the Six Species to extinction once and for all. Earth’s destruction was still fresh in the cultural psyche, and the human communities of the Wild Empire were very eager to avoid having to move again.

  So, you needed a writ. A chitty permitting you to bounce merrily around a set volume of space and claim whatever you found in it, as long as the Molren said it was safe. And these chitties were generally handed down from the big social, political and dynastic hitters on Aquilar. That was just how humans rolled.

  Back in the heyday of humanity’s expansion into the galaxy and their enthusiastic adoption and mimicry of Fleet technology – although another myth said that relative speed had come from humans and the Molren had first arrived at Earth subluminally – things had been run differently. There had been no central authority, unless it was the fledgling governments of Aquilar and the Zhraak Dome. Anyone with a bit of power, influence, popularity and a big pile of raw materials could charter a small space exploration fleet.

  Herschel and her team worked for Bunzolabe Incorporated. It was big, it was powerful, it was wealthy. But unlike most of its peers, the vast corporation was almost universally loved. Bunzolabe, under the benevolent rulership of Horatio Bunzo, was an entertainment and toy-making company. They had their fingers in robotics, computers, starships, terraforming. They also created viable settlements for “troubled communities” and the victims of natural disasters, as well as – increasingly – exploring the galaxy looking for particularly noteworthy and beautiful locations. Usually, they sold these worlds to their tourism and hospitality allies for a percentage of future profits.

  The planet that Rachael Herschel and her crew discovered in the Pax Ganimus system, however, was different. It was perfect. And Bunzolabe Incorporated didn’t sell it on. They kept it, and turned it into Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World.

  None of this was so much a myth as a statement of historical fact, of course. The planet was there. It existed. It had really happened. What was all a bit mythical was what had happened next.

  The “greatest amusement park in the known universe” was the first and only planetary-scale theme park ever made. This was no glitzy moon crowded with scenic walks and night-spots, like Standing Wave. Based on Bunzo’s theme parks on Aquilar, Ildarheim and a half-dozen other planets, it was orders of magnitude more extensive than any endeavour previously attempted. Horatio Bunzo poured the resources and connections and limitless wealth of his company into that pretty, balmy little planet, and turned it from forest to park, from park to garden. The corporation rebuilt not just Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World from the core to the crust, but the entire Pax Ganimus system from the star out. Solar radiation catchment for power and the deflection of stray flares and other anomalies; fleets of automated craft for the shepherding of inner-system debris and the formation of spacebound artworks; the rearrangement of neighbouring planets to provide second-tier accommodation and further celestial features to be enjoyed from the surface; and of course every possible entertainment and attraction ever dreamed up by the more charmingly innocent demographics of the human race. The Pax Ganimus system became first synonymous with, and then known as, the Bunzolabe: the great circle of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World’s orbit and even beyond, the intricate revolving spheres-within-spheres representing the extent of the influence Bunzolabe Incorporated held across the entire system.

  The planet was swathed not only in rides and games and interactives and robotic and biofab attractions, but every modern convenience and innovation the corporation could bring to bear on the design of an amusement park. From weather control to automated transport to adaptive hotel rooms, Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World had it all. It went beyond mere Bunzolabe Incorporated entertainment and tourism, used every other commercial and industrial advantage the corporation possessed, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the great achievements of human engineering like Wynstone’s Attic and Coriel. And for the next seventy-five years it reigned supreme as the most popular, lucrative, famous and magical place in the galaxy. Even Molren liked it. The Blaren and Bonshooni adored it. Every aki’Drednanth to enter the Six Species visited. The world’s specialised aquatic habitats even provided entertainment to Fergunak. And it went without saying that, if you were a human child whose parents had not taken you to the greatest amusement park in the known universe, you were a child whose parents just plain didn’t like you.

  Like Wynstone’s Attic, of course, the Bunzolabe and Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World was also a creation of enormous hubris and ambition. And when it fell, it was a fall to shake humanity to its knees.

  The real facts behind the case were sealed, confidential by legal acts more powerful than entire planetary governments. That, even before hundreds of years had gone by, was where myth and legend set in. But it had all started with those state-of-the-art computers. The Bunzolabe ran on synthetic intelligence, albeit a primitive and rather restricted variant that was nevertheless highly advanced for its time. Especially for human work. Bunzolabe Incorporated were majority shareholders in many of the Wile Empire industrial complexes responsible for such work, and Horatio Bunzo saw to it that the cutting edge of computing power and capability went into the giant processing cores of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World. These were some of the first cortices of modern synthetics.

  When Horatio Bunzo died at the end of the golden age of the Wild Empire, the popular conspiracy theory ran that his body had been successfully stored in a Molran sleeper pod, the first human to successfully achieve the sleeper state. There, he would rest until some fu
ture date when old age could be reversed – Bunzo had been a spry one hundred and forty-six years young on his death – and his joy and wonder could be returned to the galaxy.

  The truth was a little more unsettling. Horatio Bunzo had long been fascinated by the elusive plum of immortality. One of the more esoteric charter bullets on the exploration writs provided by Bunzolabe Incorporated, and which Rachael Herschel and her crew had been operating under all those decades ago, was the search for the Fountain of Youth. Bunzo had never found that, but the technology investments made by his company provided a comparable possibility.

  Before his death, Horatio Bunzo had successfully converted his consciousness into electronic format, dispersing his neurons into an artificial network occupying the majority of the excessive subterranean cortex-space of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World. It was a slow and difficult process, but it was successful. Horatio Bunzo became the first human – indeed, the first known non-aki’Drednanth – to successfully disincorporate himself and ascend to a functionally-immortal virtual substrate. Even if returning to a flesh body was currently beyond the technological reach of human beings, he now had functional immortality in a body the size of a small city-state.

  Success, and celebration, was short-lived.

  What they ended up with in the deep vaults of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World was not a synthetic intelligence. But it was not a living thing, either. It was not the happy ghost in the machine anyone had been expecting, the loved and loving public persona of Horatio Bunzo writ large into the planet’s machinery and – inevitably – the greater apparatus of the Bunzolabe solar system. It was not the father of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World, galactically-adored folkloric character and originator of entertainment and joy and frivolity. It wasn’t even the shrewd and ruthless one-and-a-half-century-old businessman who had built Bunzolabe Incorporated with his own two hands and defended it against takeovers and lawsuits and the inexorable tide of human cultural shift ever since.