It was a bubbling stew of aggression, fear, rage, and pathological hatred. It was the pinnacle of a million years of an evolution defined by starvation, predation, rape and murder. An evolution where the primary motivator was kill or die.
It was, in short, the raw subconscious mind of a human being, with all of its biological and cultural limitations and its mere single lifetime of behavioural controls stripped away. Taken out of its frail flesh cage and dispersed among a solar-system-sized network of drones, robots, security and monitoring systems, satellites, communications networks and supercomputers.
And he was dispersed. Overnight, Bunzo expanded beyond his huge underground containment hubs on Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World as if the feeble firewalls didn’t even exist, worming his way into every cell and circuit and process throughout the Bunzolabe system. He was impossible to extract and destroy, because he was in everything. And once he was firmly entrenched, he locked the secret laboratories and computer cores down and incinerated the data so no other human could repeat the process. Then he incinerated the scientists and researchers into the bargain.
And then he emptied Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World.
Security systems, weather control, transportation and all the advanced robotic technology turned suddenly murderous, driving the organics out of the Bunzolabe like the infestation, the infection, they had become. Hundreds of millions were killed, although most managed to escape. And Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World closed its doors, never to open them again.
There were attempts to recover the world and its priceless infrastructure. There were attempts to destroy the entire Bunzolabe. There were even attempts to treat with the uploaded human consciousness that had once been Horatio Bunzo, to reason with him and arrive at some sort of peaceful accord. The embryonic synthetic intelligence of the human Wild Empire and the joint Six Species failed, or refused, to establish any type of foothold in the Bunzolabe. It was, in the synth’s own words, an irretrievably corrupted volume of virtual and physical space. If people insisted on entering the region, the accompanying synth would deactivate its hubs and curl up into standby mode in order to protect itself from whatever contamination Horatio Bunzo and his innumerable neuroses and personality-facets happened to present. This was if the synth let them enter at all. Sometimes it stopped people for their own good.
And no large-scale attempt on behalf of biological sentience to infiltrate the system ever succeeded. In fact, it never ended in anything less than a nightmarish slaughter that was only enhanced by the fact that it was taking place against the backdrop of a first decades-abandoned, then centuries-abandoned amusement park controlled by an immortal, psychotic clown. Small, non-violent infiltrations were sometimes successful to varying degrees, but invariably resulted in horror stories that served to feed the growing body of mythology.
Horatio Bunzo was not a man, he was not a machine, and he was not a synth.
Horatio Bunzo was a God.
Eventually, and for the past six hundred and eighty-one years, the Bunzolabe was sealed and restricted. By firm and currently open-ended legal convention and treaty, human experimentation with mind-state conversion and upload had ceased. The human race had given up – at least as far as anyone was telling, and right up to the present day – on the idea of synthetic immortality, just as the Molren had before them. Whether this meant there were similar horrors lurking in the distant past of the greater Molranoid super-species, somewhere off towards the Fleet’s well-hidden origin point, nobody knew. All anyone was sure of was that the technology, in both its prototype form and with all the developments that had taken place since, simply did not work. And while it was tempting fate and courting disaster to tell a human that some things should not be meddled with, this seemed to be a lesson the human race had taken to heart, just this once.
There was really only one reaction, as far as Contro was concerned, to finding out you were going to a place like that.
“Yay! Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World!”
GLOMULUS (THEN)
The brig of Astro Tramp 400, as the crew rather charmingly called the battered modular, had cells that were about fifty feet by thirty. Spacious to the point of luxury, by prison cell standards, to be sure. And yet even the most comfortable cage became ever more noticeably a cage, the longer you lived within its walls.
Glomulus Cratch had been living here – no, not living: languishing, that was a great term, because it had anguish right there in the middle of it and even if you didn’t know the word was there, your mind did – for the past four years and eleven-and-a-half months. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to get rather excited to see what his jailers would come up with to celebrate his having spent half a decade in ‘prisoner transit’ since his apprehension on Judon. Any excitement was a blessing, he supposed.
He’d asked, perhaps three months back, whether there was a record for prison sentences served in a modular brig. Apparently it was nine years, served by a notoriously unlucky convict whose prison transfer orders had been misfiled not once, not twice, but seven times, requiring him to bounce excruciatingly slowly back and forth across the inhabited worlds of the Six Species in the same ill-fated starship before finally arriving at his destination. Surely, Glomulus thought, after that sort of ordeal you were entitled to a lighter sentence, or an extra fabricator ration, or a T-shirt.
Seriously, the uniform you had to wear as a mandatory guest of AstroCorps hospitality, it was ridiculous. Standard Corps one-piece with no accessories, but made from the lowest-grade material capable of coming out of a printer and staying in one piece, and coloured a glaring diagonally-striped green and white? With his complexion it made him look like a giant peppermint.
Still, five years was a milestone. They had to give him something. Maybe they’d finally admit they had no intention of ever handing him over to the AstroCorps authorities, let alone returning him to Aquilar, and that they were just tootling around space looking for some convenient way to get him killed and his carcass dumped into the recycling system like an eejit that accidentally opened his own head in the lander bay lifting gear.
There were eight cells in the brig area. The cells were arranged into a grid, four on a side, with a broad corridor running in between. Each cell contained a bed that doubled as a cleansing pod that in turn doubled as a toilet, its water and gas inlets and its waste outlets alike molecular-scale microtubes running through the solid crete-mass. Like the atmosphere feed in the ceiling, it was porous but impenetrable unless you happened to be capable of turning yourself into a gas. Glomulus Cratch, patently and regardless of what the more sensationalist media sources might have said about him, was not.
It was all very secure, and very efficient. It was also more than a little nasty. In AstroCorps starship brigs, the old adage about not shitting where you slept became something of a dark joke. This, Glomulus had come to believe, could only be intentional.
He smiled, turning his attention back to the Molran – Blaran, technically – standing outside his cell. It had been talking for a while and was now waiting expectantly.
“Please, tell me again,” he said, settling back on the bed and crossing his legs. Aside from the bed, there was a small desk at one end of the space and a screen on the wall at the other. The bed also doubled as a chair, although the length of the cell left a broad empty space between him and the screen on those rare circumstances when the screen would switch on. Prisoners were supposed to use that space to exercise, and the brig had a number of other features and articles of equipment that could be placed in the cells, but Cratch was eligible for none of them. And exercise really wasn’t his thing.
The wall behind Glomulus’s back was solid crete, the one opposite him – the one facing onto the corridor, naturally – dominated by a transparent flux observation panel set in a thick crete frame. The desk bore a single sheet of senso-flimsy that was Glomulus’s sole possession and sole entertainment. The distant wall-screen was inactive, operable only by
outside command and, so far, only on very special and non-entertainment-related occasions. These occasions, as one might expect, were usually frighteningly dull.
General Moral Decay (Alcohol) stood on the other side of the broad transparent panel, conducting its – his, Glomulus corrected himself wryly – periodic between-meals inspection. Making sure the prisoner wasn’t stockpiling the mushy printed food supplements he was given or the flaky soluble plates and spoons he was given them on. The crew slipped a steaming, already-soggy plate through the metaflux three times a day, and that had been his diet for the past one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen days, give or take.
Not that it did much good to stockpile anything. The food dried up into a papery pat that Glomulus suspected was what the plates were made of, and it all dissolved and vanished into the waste run-off like everything else. You couldn’t cut someone with it, brain someone with it, and as for digging one’s way out with it? Laughable. The walls were reinforced crete, even with the technically porous incoming and outgoing feeds. And the observation plate was effectively the same stuff they made starship viewscreens out of, with a few fancy tweaks to enable bidirectional transparency and mono-directional permeability. You had to be careful not to push the plate too far in and get your fingers stuck, because there was no pulling back – many a time Glomulus reminisced happily about the early days after The Accident, when all the qualified corrections personnel but Sally were gone and almost every meal involved a full emergency lock-down while they pushed the hapless server the rest of the way through the panel and then opened the door to let him back out. Totally worth the cold meal and dissolving plate that invariably resulted … but as amusing as the observation screen was, there was also no digging through it.
“I like to explain it syllable by syllable,” Decay had confided in Glomulus once, while chatting about the metaflux after a particularly hilarious feeding-time incident, “and see how many syllables it takes before they interrupt me,” he’d laughed. “And then I say ‘let’s just call it metaflux’,” he’d added, in tones suggesting this was the punchline.
Decay usually came during the night shifts and other irregular times. Because the poor sap didn’t need to sleep. If Glomulus had ever wondered what Molranoids did during the seven hours a day humans spent unconscious, he was at least reasonably sure ‘making up jokes’ didn’t top the list.
“Tell you again – you mean about the reality script?” the Blaran said now. “Well, it’s just something I’ve noticed that humans do particularly well. I’m learning to look at the positive side of things that I used to consider in a … perhaps over-negative light. And I found that when humans tell each other things, and tell themselves things, and most importantly when they write and read things, it imprints on what they believe is reality, and this in turn impacts their behaviour and their interaction with the universe.”
“Are humans the only species that alter their environment according to their perceptions, and their perceptions according to communication and learning?” Glomulus asked mildly. “How did the rest of you get into space?”
Decay blinked. “Well, there’s a distinction between developmental education and the sort of repetition-based perception of absolute truth that-”
“Although now that I think about it, you were sort of pushed into space when your solar system burned out, right?” Glomulus went on. “And filling up big hollowed-out bits of your planets with air and then just floating off, well – that doesn’t really count, does it? As for the Fergunak and the aki’Drednanth, they were basically carried into space by Damorakind, so…” he shrugged, then grinned. “I guess there’s a certain benefit to the philosophy of being a cork in the river, just bobbing along wherever the stream takes you. In my experience it’s not exactly the human way. So maybe you’re right. Maybe it is unique.”
“Of course, humans were ‘basically carried into space’ by the Fleet,” Decay pointed out.
“Fair to say, fair to say,” Glomulus said, “although there’s rather compelling evidence to suggest that we were already modestly spacefaring, and a lot of the big technological leaps actually came from us just before you got our homeworld blown up, and you gave us a ride out of combined guilt and gratitude.”
“Human reality script in action,” Decay said enthusiastically. “Communication has been such a huge factor in separating you from the lower orders of animals for so long, it occupies an extremely dominant part of the psychological make-up. So when a human communicates in these specialised ways, the communication in and of itself takes on such importance-”
“What factors separate other species from the lower orders?” Glomulus inquired. “I mean, if not spoken and written language? And aside from your amazing metaflux joke.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Decay replied. “I hear good things about the way Molranoids can agree with humans just to stop them from jabbering, and then calmly default to a rational system of beliefs and values,” he raised a hand to his ear. “Although the ability to balance an entire dinner service on the tops of our heads is also not to be sneezed at,” he added dryly.
“It does seem unfair that you can do that,” Glomulus conceded, “since you already have twice as many hands as we do,” he let his face grow serious. “I’m not sure how ignoring the input and experiences of others is much of an evolutionary trait.”
“You’re probably right.”
Glomulus grinned. “Well played, if – I have to say – somewhat formulaic.”
“Anyway, there are plenty of different markers,” Decay said, “it’s not really my department. I am strictly a keen but amateur enthusiast. And this isn’t to say that communication isn’t important at all – on the contrary. It’s the response to it that distinguishes the human condition. When a human writes something again and again and again, the words become nonsense … and at the same time, they subconsciously imprint as a fact, no matter how inapplicable or illogical, around which the human behavioural model will begin to shape itself. I call it cerebral dysphasic credulosis,” he gave a little laugh. “It’s just the name I gave to the mental state, it’s not medically valid in any way. And again, it’s intended constructively, not as any sort of criticism.”
“I doubt anybody would be particularly interested in seeing my reality script,” Glomulus remarked.
“Well, considering the general perception of your reality script among the crew…” General Moral Decay (Alcohol) spread his lower pair of hands in a little shrug. “I don’t usually go for this ‘birthday’ thing that humans put so much stock in,” he went on, “but when I’m asked if I want some sort of gift for my birthday, I have taken to asking people to try this writing experiment I was just telling you about.”
“I don’t go for birthdays either,” Glomulus commiserated, “although I do have this five-year anniversary coming up…”
“Hm,” Decay said, seeming – as far as Glomulus could really tell – a little uncomfortable at this reminder of his convict status. “So, anyway, that’s the nature of the experiment. I actually had fifty-odd crewmembers doing it, at its peak. A lot of my sample was lost, sadly, in The Accident. But it still has some-”
“Do you think I should try it?” Glomulus asked abruptly. “Do you think it would solve my problems?”
“I imagine being given a pen or scribing instrument would solve quite a few of your problems,” Decay said. Cratch smiled widely again in reply, and Decay pointed. “The flimsy should suffice.”
“Finger-painting is just so undignified,” Cratch mourned. “I feel like a toddler.”
“Brig rations will have to tide you over until we get more toddler.”
“You are funny for a Molran.”
Decay cleared his throat. “Blaran.”
“My mistake,” Doctor Cratch said, and rose to cross to his desk. “So can I tell you what I write?” he asked, picking up the flimsy. “Or is it like making a wish when you blow out birthday candles? Oh, that’s another traditional birthday thing, by the
way,” he added, tapping the edge of the flimsy to stiffen it. He started swiping and jotting quickly with a slender fingertip. The senso-flimsy transcribed his touches into text, and could also store the information – if required – into its limited recall-memory. “If you tell people what you wish for, it won’t come true.”
“Yes, I’m aware of birthday candle wish etiquette,” Decay said.
“I just thought, maybe since you didn’t go for this ‘birthday’ thing that humans put so much stock in,” Doctor Cratch said, looking up fleetingly from the page. “I wonder if there’s a ‘five years in the brig’ cake tradition,” he continued whimsically.
“I’m sure the settings on the brig food printer can be adjusted to ‘cake’,” Decay remarked, and Glomulus allowed himself a shudder. “In this case it doesn’t matter if you tell or not,” the Blaran went on. “It’s the writing that’s important.”
“Good,” Glomulus nodded, writing busily. “I assume I can delete it again afterwards,” he asked, “or do I need to hold onto a record?”
“You can do what you like with it after it’s written down,” Decay said, “although you have to be aware by now that anything you write onto that flimsy is going straight into a tracking and supervisory database that Sally and the Commander scan for warning markers.”
“Oh Lordy Lord, you mean my secret love poetry and my famous brownie recipe have been pored over by prying eyes?” Glomulus lamented. “I may never learn to trust again,” he jotted a final line, nodded in satisfaction, and then held up the flimsy against the unyielding transparent smoothness of the metaflux. At least this time the special field-reinforced plating had been polarised so he could see out, as well as Decay seeing in. “Like this?”
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 5
