He opened the door and was surprised to find Thorkhild standing there.
Thorkhild was a strange one, one of the nineteen remaining so-called ‘Midwich Eejits’ configured with the bolstering mental efforts of Thord and the Bonshooni. He was recognisable by the fact that in his case, the usual dopey vacuity that was the eejit standing expression was blank in a more profound way – Thorkhild was blind, although beyond the doll-like stare there was no physical sign. His eyes were perfectly alright, not milky or in any way damaged. Indeed, they’d been twiddled with, surgically, by the Rip and declared perfectly operational. You could graft one into a person’s injured eye socket and it would work. The blindness, like every eejitism, was related to the configuration, not the printing.
“Thorkhild,” Decay said, “how can I help you?”
“Uhh,” Thorkhild started. Blindness wasn’t his only flaw, although his slight brain-lag was very minor in comparison to other eejits. He swung his face ponderously upwards, adjusting for the direction from which Decay’s voice had come. Until that moment – probably forgetting Decay was a seven-foot-five Blaran, or possibly just not thinking it mattered one way or another – he had been carelessly addressing the Blaran’s chest. “I was looking for whoever’s in charge of the … uh, the murder thing, who’s investigating it, but they’re asleep?”
Decay’s ears dipped briefly. This was quite impressive abstract thought, for an eejit, and definitely outside the box. “Do you know something about the murder, Thorkhild?”
“I, uhh, no,” Thorkhild admitted. “Nope.”
“You didn’t witness anything?”
“Nope.”
The blind eejit looked so downcast at these failures, Decay felt moved to ask some follow-up questions. “What’s your function on board, Thorkhild?”
“Assistant maintenance,” he replied promptly, “equipment and console checks.”
“Medical bay?”
Thorkhild looked even more blank than usual for a moment, and actually reached out to touch the frame of Decay’s door. “No…?” he said. “I think, crew quarters one, near blister bay three…?”
“Sorry, I mean, do you work on equipment and console check maintenance for the medical bay?” Decay clarified. “Excellent ship-sense, though,” he complimented the eejit.
“Oh, uh, no, I’m assigned to obs, rec, comms … basically the domes,” Thorkhild said. “Not medical bay,” he paused, then went on just a little defensively, “I’m on down-time right now, going back to the crèche to rest and eat food and also poop,” he hesitated minutely. “To do poop, I mean, not eat it.”
“Right, right, it’s fine – I wasn’t worried about you skipping work or eating poop,” Decay hastened. “What I mean is, you weren’t working in the medical bay – you weren’t in the area when the murder took place, you didn’t find anything in the course of your work?” he’d already known there weren’t any other dedicated medical bay eejits, although of course there were throngs of random extras who might have been there for an assortment of backup or cleaning or repair purposes. He didn’t have the entire eejit roster memorised.
Thorkhild was shaking his head. “Nope.”
“Okay,” Decay said kindly, “why are you looking for the Chief Tactical Officer, then?”
“I want to help.”
“That’s … good,” Decay said. “I’m sure you can. We’ll think of something. Anything you can offer us, we’ll listen to. I’ll find you after your next shift and we can talk to the Chief Tactical Officer and Chief of Security and Operations, alright?”
“Alright,” Thorkhild paused. “Are we going to stop? The ship?”
Decay blinked. “Not that I’m aware of,” he said, “not until we know more. There’s … it’s complicated. Why do you ask?”
Thorkhild shrugged. “Don’t know.”
Decay watched, nonplussed, as Thorkhild turned and trundled back along the corridor, apparently as confident and surefooted as any sighted crewmember. Something compelled him to call out after the well-built humanoid. “Did you know Dunnkirk?”
Thorkhild stopped, turned back, and looked disconcertingly not-quite-directly-at Decay where he stood in his doorway.
“I had dreams about him,” he said.
Decay went back into his rooms, returned to his scoop, and picked up his glass. He frowned at the artworks on the walls. It was a long time before he finally took another sip of taktura.
JANYA (THEN)
Janya Adeneo sat in her quarters among her neat stacks of books, reading an article about the political history of the Total Human Consciousness Transcription Ban on her organiser. She preferred bound hard copy, but she’d read all her books already, and even re-read a few of the denser tomes. And besides, she didn’t have this one in print. It was one of the barrel-scrapings from the ship’s database, a huge solid-state repository that had been filtered and compressed and overwritten hundreds of times. It was no great treasury of Six Species knowledge, nothing approaching a totality of data. Its older and more irrelevant content had been dropped and new stuff layered on top with every stopover, every link-up with a synthetic intelligence hub, every fly-past of an entertainment sat.
And then, to top it off, the whole lot had been scrambled by the computer’s systemic meltdown during The Accident. All things considered, she’d been lucky to find anything at all on such an obscure topic.
Janya was not one to hold a grudge. She considered that there was a difference between holding a grudge and just remembering things. Janya remembered things. It was when you remembered things out loud, at carefully-planned times, when those things had proven harmful to yourself and others, that the line between remembering things and holding a grudge got blurry.
But Janya didn’t do that, although she could. The Accident had surely been the result of a cataclysmic failure somewhere along the line, but there was no point in dwelling on it. And the bonefields? She’d told them not to go there, and they’d ignored her. It would be nice if they could remember that, and recognise that she wasn’t reminding them of it every ten minutes, instead of remembering that she had been the one with the coordinates.
The rumoured coordinates, she corrected herself in mild irritation. She was a researcher, not a cartographer. Not a navigation officer. It had all been research, an exercise in astro-mythology. She’d still tried to stop them.
Besides, at least the bonefields were in the past. According to the legends, you could only go there once. And even if that was a load of superstitious nonsense, they presumably had the coordinates on record now so they couldn’t even go there by accident. It would also be nice, Janya thought, if the rest of the crew tried remembering these facts, instead of irrelevant ones.
Zeegon, now – Zeegon might be a grudge-holder. He remembered, and he took some things personally. Not that Janya could blame him for that. He was helmsman now, so when someone fed him coordinates and he flew the ship to them, he took a share of whatever happened next as befitted being the guy who had dropped them in it. Not fair, obviously, but when it was coupled with the fact that lives had been lost, it was difficult not to take it personally.
She didn’t waste time wishing she’d known ahead of time how things were going to happen, since it was pointless to regret the unavoidable and the past. If she had known in advance what these jarheads had been intending to do with her research, she would have … well, that was just it.
What would she have done? The data had already been stored in her personal files, moderately protected with her personal identification tags and key-terms, and archived according to her unique and extremely convoluted filing system, all of which had been digitally uprooted and dumped into the then-A-Mod 400’s personnel database in a single scoop when Janya had come aboard from Judon Research Outpost.
Knowing would have just added frustration to the mix, since there was little more she could have done. If she’d known far enough in advance, she supposed, she could have not done the research at all, but where would
human civilisation be if people started down that road? No. That way lay madness.
She’d deduced that it must have been done early. Right back at the start, logically, when she was in recovery and her relocation from the Outpost to the modular had essentially been affected while she was unconscious. The data must have been siphoned off somehow during the transfer, since her personal files had not been tampered with after that initial move. Well, not much, and not that she really had the skill to tell either way. Her research and personal logs weren’t exactly Megadyne-encrypted and they weren’t booby-trapped, but only Decay had actually done any infiltrating as far as she knew. And that had been random snooping, for fun, and he had been up-front about it. Nothing to do with the bonefields.
It hadn’t been Decay. It had been Z-Lin. Of course it had been Z-Lin. That stood to reason, didn’t it? She was one of them.
Oh, the Captain and his ‘shortcut’ had ultimately taken the blame for the whole sorry event, but Janya remembered that it had been her research that had gotten them there, and she was pretty sure Zeegon remembered too. And Clue, it seemed to Janya, used the Captain and his eccentricities as a convenient smokescreen for innumerable little deviations, breaches of AstroCorps protocol, and outright Six Species charter violations. It was impossible to tell which of these originated with the Captain and which originated with the Commander, of course. Janya would have catalogued each case more thoroughly, but she was reasonably sure the information would find its way back to Clue.
In this case, however, unless the Captain also happened to be descended from the same line – vanishingly unlikely – then the driving force behind their reckless plunge into the bonefields had been Z-Lin Clue, and only Z-Lin Clue.
Beyond that, it all got a little bit intrigue-y, and Janya tended to retreat into the nearest book in the face of intrigue. That was how almost five years had gone by on board the so-called Tramp, and she had no great regrets on that score.
It was all just so random. They must have copied her research, then held onto it for three years before finally deciding on this ludicrous ‘shortcut’ plan after their encounter with the Dark Glory Ascendant. Why then? Why not immediately? It wasn’t as if they had been waiting until they’d rid themselves of Glomulus Cratch, because they’d calmly gone for years without doing that, either. Cratch had been in the brig three years by the time they’d finally decided to use Janya’s information, his return to Aquilar for sentencing held off for a variety of extremely – and increasingly – dubious reasons. Shortcuts had been the least of it. They didn’t get told anything. There were good reasons for that, but it was also annoying.
Maybe it had just taken that long to hack into the files or to decipher her notes into any sort of useful real-world data. Janya had actually theorised that it had been the synth they’d needed. Their synthetic intelligence had been activated a couple of times since Judon, but maybe the specific synth instance on board the Dark Glory Ascendant had possessed some more specific information. They’d been a bunch of jarhead idiots as well.
Janya realised, with mild disgruntlement, that she was brooding about it instead of reading. Maybe it was a grudge, she reflected. She really didn’t like it when people stole her work. It was one of the reasons she’d retreated as far as Judon Research Outpost in the first place, to escape the endless academic warzone of lies, damned lies, and popularity contests. Well, that was over, and the bonefields was over. She wasn’t about to resume her studies on that topic. Not now that they had seen what they’d seen. And, more importantly, what they hadn’t seen.
No, now it was the political history of the Total Human Consciousness Transcription Ban. She’d actually been ordered to research this, as part of her job as Head of Science. It was work. She could have been doing it up in one of the dome labs just to make it official, but this was a more conducive environment.
She was just beginning to settle back into the extended, footnote-heavy treatise after her lapse in concentration when the door chime interrupted. Giving a mild tsk, she tapped the screen and set the pad down.
Oddly enough, it was Zeegon. Janya could have counted the times he’d come to her quarters on one hand – without even using up her original fingers, for that matter. “Zeegon.”
“Hi,” Zeegon coughed. Janya wondered if he was waiting for her to invite him in, and whether there was a cut-off point after which the conversation should continue in the corridor lest the belated relocation disrupt its flow and become awkward. If there was a cut-off, it was probably approaching fast.
“Can I help you?”
“Sorry to bother you at your place,” the helmsman said quickly. “I tried the lab, but you weren’t there.”
“I kn – would you like to come in?” Janya adjusted mid-sentence, and stepped back.
“Uh, right, thanks,” Zeegon stepped inside, and looked around at the book-crowded space. “Man,” he chuckled, “you need to digitise.”
“Books have the benefit of not getting erased when the computer has a bad day,” Janya said, “although I am considering construction of a research archive,” she sat back in her armchair and looked at Zeegon with mild expectation.
“Uh, so – anything new to tell us about Bunzo’s?” he led. “Found anything except the usual myths and fairytales?”
Even Janya, hopeless as she was in the face of silence-filling small-talk and courage-building prevarication, knew Zeegon wasn’t really there to talk about Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World. But she let him get to the point at his own pace. If he wanted a bit of knowledge while he worked up the nerve, that was something she could provide.
“Well, for a start, it seems like the spectacular failure of Horatio Bunzo wasn’t the only reason they scrapped the Total Human Consciousness Transcription project,” she said. “It doesn’t even look like it was the main reason. The main force behind the ban was the Fleet.”
“Didn’t like humans messing around with technology?”
“I have to admit our track record wasn’t great,” Janya conceded, “but there are a lot of different angles. The Molren had faith-based objections to the process – just as a lot of human factions did. What happens to the consciousness, the alleged immortal soul, if you digitise it? It’s the conundrum of the perfect printer, in a sense: if you had a printer capable of printing a perfect copy of a person, and configuring a perfect copy of his or her consciousness, then killed and mulched the original, is the person still alive? Arguably a book is the same book even if you lose the feel of the cover, but is a person still the same person when you change the format, or is it just a facsimile? Does that person live on, essentially moving into an artificial afterlife? And that was a whole separate issue. Were we about to create a literal version of Heaven and Hell? Were the mythological versions still there, taking the actual dead souls while these false fabrications lived on in this sphere? Where was the technology of virtual space headed? And of course, the Fleet had their classic reason as well – keeping the galaxy quiet.”
“I suppose a solar-system-sized psychotic computer network might have a hard time keeping its mouth shut,” Zeegon allowed.
“There’s a whole automated system made by the Fleet surrounding the Bunzolabe, apparently,” Janya said, “blocking and dampening out any signals or chatter Bunzo might be making, and warning people away as a last-line-of-defence, point-of-no-return sort of thing. But that scale of operation, essentially needing to be set up and then to run forever – it’s been centuries now, but that could feasibly stretch to millennia, even thousands of millennia … it just takes up too many resources, they couldn’t do it over and over again for every human who wants to digitise. And once a single consciousness has inhabited every computer processor within a volume of space, it seems to be impossible to uproot it, let alone get it to share with another. There was a footnote about assorted attempts to repeat the procedure, in the early days. The actual article is missing from the database, but apparently Bunzo didn’t allow a second transcription instanc
e, within any part of the Bunzolabe. Violently didn’t allow it.”
“But he hasn’t tried to spread?” Zeegon asked. “Get a bit of his mind onto a starship, or even build some sort of seeding ship of his own – they have shipyards, right? – and fly out to other systems?”
“He hasn’t seemed to want to expand beyond the Bunzolabe,” Janya said, “although the buoys, the Fleet signal-dampening countermeasures, might be helping block that as well. But if we’d kept trying to transcribe people … imagine if one got into the Aquilar system.”
“So the Molren have kept the Cancer from hearing him,” Zeegon concluded.
Janya nodded. “If indeed he’s doing much shouting. Then there’s also the aki’Drednanth angle,” she went on. “There’s a strong suggestion that the Molren didn’t want humans aping – quite literally, really – the Drednanth Dreamscape, and approaching aki’Drednanth immortality.”
“You mean, digitising … and then re-meating from digital and back into a baby’s brain?” Zeegon grimaced. “Can’t imagine anyone having a problem with that.”
“It’s not really known if there are secret experiments still going on elsewhere,” Janya said, “since it all dissolves into conspiracy theories and myth. Of course, the aforementioned perfect printer seems like the easier place to start, for humans, rather than a baby. Instead of … re-meating … into a developing foetus, the human-digital pattern could be printed and configured into a new body, given the right level of detail. There almost certainly are experiments still happening, with various levels of undeveloped printed intelligence. Like our own eejits, perhaps.”
“Hardly bears thinking about, does it?” Zeegon said with a forced chuckle. “Automated planet controlled by a guy who might suddenly decide he’s a kitten at any point. I told you about Whiskers, yeah?”
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 8