“But the Fleet Captains, and AstroCorps High Command, know the truth,” Z-Lin said neutrally. “That it’s … safe for visitors here?”
“Make no mistake, I have no plans to reopen the park and spread my loving arms to the teeming millions once more,” Bunzo said. “The unlovely fact of my current condition is that I exist as a hundred million mechanical synapses spread throughout this quirky little bubble of space. Any visitors here are essentially living and walking in my brain. In hindsight, Total Human Consciousness Transcription was a terrible idea, but one has to make do, you see?” he chortled as if at a terribly droll little private joke. “It’s what I am now, so no use complaining. But controlled numbers? Quite acceptable. Indeed, quite welcome.”
“The long-range hunter-comm satellites have entered proximity and matched our course,” Decay murmured. Waffa glanced at the monitor on his Security and Operations console. The satellites weren’t visible through the bridge viewscreens, but the monitors magnified them to reveal a pair of gleaming egg-shaped objects, most likely ninety percent internal power station and maybe even a field torus in the broad part of each egg. The rest was a smoothly-interlocked, very alien-looking set of – presumably – communications gear, although he couldn’t rule out the possibility that the ‘hunter’ part of the designation also meant there were some guns in the narrow end.
Waffa whistled as he got a closer look. The sats definitely had toruses back there. “Relative-capable,” he said.
“Handsome little fellows, aren’t they?” Bunzo said fondly. “They’re what I’ve been talking to you through, of course. Although the truth is a little more complicated than that. I can’t really say I’m talking through the satellites, not the way you would talk through a communication relay. I can no more say I’m talking to you through a satellite than you would say you’re talking to me through your head. But it’s as close as I can get to an explanation.”
“So, just to clarify, you don’t mind a bit of bad language?” Z-Lin asked, as Tramp and satellites moved into a little triangular formation and cruised deeper into the Bunzolabe. “We were told to keep it clean, and then when you first contacted us-”
“Oh, that,” Bunzo said with a smile in his voice. “Talking to old Bitterpill, I take it?”
“We communicated with it on our way in,” Z-Lin confirmed. “It seemed impossible not to, since it surrounds this entire volume.”
“Quite so, quite so. I guessed as much from the rather businesslike name you gave to my satellites. Personally, and again for the benefit of visitors, I like to call them ‘fatellites’ or even ‘cellulites’,” he laughed merrily. “Because they’re so round and … ah well, never mind. Did it tell you that all the people who leave here just cruise on by without thanking it for all its excellent advice and warnings?”
“Now that you mention it…”
“Strange, yes? I mean, I know ol’ Bitty’s a tad dull and more than a little snarky, but you’d think people would still say so long. Unless Bitterpill’s function is to preserve the air of mysterious danger about this place, and my departing guests are obligated not to correct his misconceptions, and so neither party would have anything to say to one another.”
“It’s a compelling point,” Z-Lin hedged, and Waffa turned his face to hide a smile as he recognised the joint influences of both Janya and Contro in the Commander’s statement.
“Isn’t it, though? Anyway, as to the bad language, this particular aspect of my personality that you’re talking to – this meet-and-greet persona – is based a lot on my public image,” Bunzo went on, his tone becoming a little more clinical albeit in a gramps-waxing-long-winded sort of way. “Squeaky clean, family friendly, all of that.”
“So you do have different … aspects?” Janus spoke up.
“Only insofar as we all do, dear boy,” Bunzo replied. “Wasn’t it Thrigulé who said, we are all different people to different people?” Waffa wasn’t the only person to turn and glance at Janya when Bunzo said this, and the little scientist nodded with an eyebrow-twitch of amusement. “And like with the satellites,” Bunzo continued, “it doesn’t really make sense to talk about different parts as if they were separate, after all. Mine is a human mind, writ large and in the machine.”
“So – forgive me – your more primal characteristics…” Z-Lin said, “…like you said yourself, we are inside your brain…”
“I understand, I understand,” Bunzo said, rueful. “And yes, it is one of my most uncomfortable truths and one of the main reasons I prefer not to have too many guests, you see. Terribly embarrassing. But, like the primordial instincts and personality traits of any flesh-and-blood person, I keep my id deeply buried and away from the sensitive light of civilised interaction. It need concern you no more than your ids need concern me. And yes,” he concluded with a chuckle, “I will make sure you don’t wander into any parts of my deeper subconscious,” he gusted a heavy but cheerful sigh. “So,” he carried on, “shall we get going?”
“It’s going to take eight hours to get to the planet,” Zeegon said, “but yeah, we’re underway.”
“Oh, eight hours, eight hours,” Bunzo fussed, and Waffa could almost see the impatient hand-wave that belonged with the words. “Here now, if you’ll allow me this small indiscretion, I happen to have the calculations … oh!” his tone changed to one of high, worryingly fragile delight. “You’ve cut your relative drive off from computer control I see. Marvellous! What clever, industrious, thinky type people you are! Astounding! Most gratifying! How are you doing it? Never mind,” he went on quickly, before Z-Lin could do more than frown, “never mind, never mind, I understand, tricks of the trade, one must be cautious, and it is very clever. Well done! But I really wouldn’t hear of you sitting for eight hours at a subluminal crawl,” he went on, a little more soberly, “not on this of all days,” he paused, as if gauging the reactions of the crew. “You’re not here for my birthday, are you?”
“I’m sorry,” Z-Lin said. “We … didn’t know it was your birthday.”
“Nobody told you? But this is stupendous! Amazing! The coincidence of it all! My friends, today is my one thousandth birthday!”
They all looked at Janya again.
Adeneo spread her scar-lined hands. “All I know is that Horatio Bunzo was apparently one hundred and forty-six years old when he was transcribed, and this was at best guess some presumably short time before the Bunzolabe was sealed six hundred and eighty-one years ago,” she said, clearly aware of the fact that this analysis constituted a breach of Bitterpill’s advice don’t point out when he says something clearly incorrect, because it’s usually a test. “That still only makes eight hundred and twenty-seven, leaving a hundred and seventy-three years – a very long human lifetime in Bunzo’s era – unaccounted for. But it could work, with some archiving errors taken into account, or some fundamental misunderstanding of historical records. Those are not uncommon. It’s not unusual to lose decades, even centuries.
“It’s also possible that a hundred and seventy-three years passed in the Bunzolabe before Bunzo … assumed direct control. The records are sketchy, and although they all point at the change happening almost immediately and the region being declared off-limits to travellers, there’s a possibility at least that there was a period of adjustment while Bunzo’s transcription took hold, and it was business as usual in that time.”
“The little lady’s on the right track,” Bunzo said approvingly, “but I dare say she’s missing the obvious matter of calendars.”
“Of course,” Janya said, “it could have been a thousand local years since his birth, since this system is entirely cut off from the outside. I think I saw a footnote to the effect that Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World had a slightly shorter orbital path than the standard, although there were artificial orbital countermeasures in its heyday to synchronise its year with the Six Species calendar. Moving the whole planet’s orbit outwards, while technically possible with Bunzolabe Incorporated’s resources, wou
ld have drastically and unpredictably altered the planet’s environment and defeated the purpose of selecting this system in the first place. They deemed the rest of their alterations to the planet sufficient without risking environmental collapse. A shorter orbital path would result in a shorter year.”
“Bravo!” Bunzo exclaimed. “Now, if you don’t want me poking around in your systems – and let’s be honest, none of us want that, do we? – may I suggest I just feed you the calculations and you take care of matters manually? All totally harmless, just strings of numbers. Do with them what you wish. But goodness, eight hours, no no.”
“We’re getting a set of relative commands,” Decay reported. Z-Lin frowned, clearly torn between concern for their safety if they let Bunzo guide them, and concern for their safety if they insulted him. “It seems to be a single layer, although I admit we are not equipped to detect any and all potential infiltration bugs.”
“I think he can get in if he wants to,” Z-Lin said. “Go ahead and enter them, let’s not hang around.”
And so, just a few minutes later, they were dropping back out of the grey and decelerating, sun behind them, towards Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World. The satellites, although they were capable of following and presumably knew the coordinates since they’d passed them on to the Tramp, remained behind on the boundary.
“There it is,” Bunzo declared grandly, as if he had never been out of contact. “My shapely medulla oblongata. My superior vena cava. The big hakuna matata. Please enjoy your stay.”
Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World was, at least from orbit, a tranquil and picturesque planet of the pleasing blue-green-white palette. Its landmasses had been painstakingly reshaped into artistic and quirky forms, its ocean floors ridged to provide interesting contour-line shapes, its very atmosphere regulated. There was a faint speckle of orbital structures farther in, a fat and jolly moon just rising from behind the planet, and what sign of technology and industry there was on the surface seemed advanced and clean.
Close to where they had swept in, a pair of large saucer-shaped structures revealed themselves to be twenty-mile-wide habitats with rings of cavernous docking bays around their circumferences and low-domed upper surfaces gleaming in the sunlight – some sort of solar panelling, it looked like. These, presumably, were a couple of the orbital parking arrays Bitterpill had spoken of.
“Not getting any sort of nodback from the arrays,” Decay said quietly. “If there are AstroCorps ships on any of them, they’re completely powered down or otherwise dampened.”
Bunzo was burbling on, continuing his welcome-spiel and advising them that they didn’t need to worry about parking at the habitats since crowds were not what they were and they could feel free to enter whatever sort of orbital arrangement they liked, and no there weren’t any AstroCorps ships on the arrays because Mary took care of all that stuff, and by the way if they hadn’t come for his birthday, why had they come?
Waffa should have been interested in hearing what Z-Lin said to that one, but he didn’t listen to her off-the-cuff response. Something about lines of communication, diplomacy, and contact with previous guests, thus explaining their interest in AstroCorps nods. He didn’t even pause to wonder who ‘Mary’ was. Waffa was thinking about something Bunzo had said earlier.
Did he say ‘my current condition’, he thought, because it was just an easy, casual way of referring to his transcribed consciousness?
Or because he considers it temporary?
“Let’s move away from those parking habs for now then, if we can,” Z-Lin interrupted his reflection. “Move us around to the far side. It looks like they’re gathered on the day-side to catch the sunlight. Let’s not congest things more than necessary,” this, Waffa guessed, was the Commander’s way of saying let’s put Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World between us and these giant orbital arrays that Bitterpill said carried a lot of heavy firepower.
“Copy that,” Zeegon said.
They looped around and into the night-shadow of the planet.
Z-LIN (NOW)
Two days out from Mobi, Commander Z-Lin Clue walked the defective wetware from the brig to the recycling station.
What did one do with a murderous eejit? As far as any of them had been able to discover – and this was with help from Bruce – it was an issue completely without precedent. Villainous clone armies made for exciting horror stories, but fabricated bodies did not have the capacity to do violence. They just didn’t. No matter how rough their jobs or gruff their configured personalities, there was no point at which they would turn on their masters. It was a pervasive idea, but it was complete fantasy. No industrial or commercial institution would survive as long as able fabrication had if they’d left any possibility whatsoever of their products turning on humanity. The very concept was ludicrous, superstitious, on a par with thinking your food printer was lacing your meals with cyanide.
In short, only a colossally out-of-touch prehistoric Drednanth ancient, walking in her new brain like a pair of squeaky shoes, could possibly have thought it was a workable theory.
And yet.
And yet, ‘it was Thorkhild, it was Thorkhild, now stop’, Z-Lin thought, for approximately the seven thousandth time in the past two months.
Execution, imprisonment, rehabilitation, trials … these were all things that happened to people, not fabrications or robots or tools. When an able failed in his duty at the end of his forty-year lifespan as an assistant whatever-he’d-been-configured-as, he voluntarily resigned his commission. His brain sent out a “last drinks” signal throughout his body, his vital organs shut down and he died quickly and painlessly. Usually by this time he had already recycled his uniforms and his meagre ‘personal’ – usually profession-related – possessions, cleaned and purged his body, and had sealed himself up in medical micro-film with a couple of nose-holes. If he hadn’t simply strolled to the nearest handy reclamation centre and had himself rendered down, uniform and all. The removal and separate recycling of accessories was a legacy bit of wetware programming, and not really necessary.
Of course, if the eejits of the Tramp had all died the second they screwed something up, the crew would have been in big trouble. Fortunately, in at least some sense of the word, the configuration glitches in the plant meant that this retirement signal was short-circuited. This gave eejits license to mess up their jobs, to varying degrees of ship-damage and self-destructiveness, at least until three or four or six co-eejits could be piled onto the task to get it done by law of averages … but it never interfered with the more fundamental imprint. An eejit was harmless.
There were precedents for all kinds of failed able configurations throughout the AstroCorps records. Few quite so comprehensive or widespread as those currently wandering around on board Astro Tramp 400, but there were certainly reams of cases. The Trampster eejits, although some of them were occasionally unpredictable or volatile, and occasionally got into slap-and-flail fights with each other, were ultimately placid. Heck, the Artist had managed to kill twelve of them with his bare hands, and he’d been older than the Zhraak Dome. Okay, he’d been a Molran and more than capable of dismembering a dozen extremely-strong humanoids anyway, but it had probably made things easier for him when his victims had barely fought back.
Ables, or in their case eejits, were technically useful in case of a mutiny, armed civilian insurrection or hostile takeover, but not in any martial sense. They could be used as a resource by the defending officers under Corps protocols hopefully also worked into the deepest levels of their configuration, no matter how shitted up the configuration was. But they assisted purely by holding and locking out control stations and nerve centres, and providing basic nonviolent resistance methods that amounted to being meat-shields. That was what an eejit could do, at the greatest foreseeable extreme of a starship crew’s violence spectrum.
Most of the bad-config problems on the official AstroCorps record, moreover, were ones that had been easily solved by executive wetware r
ecall and a replacement plant.
Must be nice, Clue thought.
“Turning left, Thorkhild,” she said.
“Kill all humans.”
She sighed. For the past two weeks, the prisoner had spoken a grand total of four words. The fourth, strategically placed where “kill all humans” couldn’t cover all the complexities of the conversational requirements, was “potty”. He had also become far more catastrophically, well, blind. His symptoms were the same – permanent hysterical loss of vision due to a psychological imbalance – only recently he seemed completely unprepared for it. He banged into things, including the minimal and utterly unchanging furnishings in his own brig cell, and even poked himself with food and items of clothing in his attempts to eat and dress respectively.
Also, he drooled a lot and frequently fell over, often parlaying these tumbles into extended snoozes.
Z-Lin wasn’t surprised, and she didn’t intend to do anything about it. It had been one of the few things to have happened in the past nine-and-a-half weeks to restore her faith in humanity.
She just wished Waffa could have been more subtle.
“Hold up.”
“Kill all humans.”
“Yeah,” she drew him into the elevator, turned him to face the door, and they descended one level. “Out we go.”
The weeks between the edge and Mobi had been a weird dance between increasingly-desultory investigation and avoiding conducting a trial on an eejit. A weird dance through which everyone got steadily more surly and cynical, and this was in a group whose starting-level had been pretty high already. It had been a linguistic and semantic wrestle, attempting to establish Thorkhild’s guilt or innocence while acknowledging that they were irrelevant to his status as a component, and all the while all too aware of the fact that the pups in the oxygen farm seemed to want the whole investigation to go away.
And why was that? Well, that was the absolutely pointless question, wasn’t it?
Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 17
