Well, lots of things. Lots of things could be more evil. Anyone with a decent imagination and a few hundred thousand generations of survival of the fittest to draw on as a powerhouse could tell you that. But that only made those imaginary things more evil. It made them markers on the road, it didn’t make them the road itself.
Evil hadn’t finished. You’d simply run out of headspace.
The way people talked about it, evil was less a conceptual enemy, and more like some sort of goal. An end-state that people arbitrarily labelled their enemies as knowingly – consciously, by definition – striving to reach. It was the propaganda of the natural world, endemic to every species of sufficient complexity. Once you got smart enough to talk about killing each other for natural resources, smart enough to consider not killing, to consider sharing instead, the old monster inside you started to get smarter too. And it started to come up with justifications for doing what it always had. And ways of doing it that were complicated, proportionate to the species.
Janya had often considered basing her mastercraft on the nonexistence of evil. Certainly, whenever somebody trotted out more pedestrian examples like the paltry deeds of single human murderers, she had to stifle a giggle. Not even up-close-and-personal contact with a killer could shock a true student of history. Although it could leave more literal scars.
Are you okay with that?
How are things?
“Of course I’m okay,” she repeated more firmly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
GLOMULUS
Glomulus had actually met an aki’Drednanth once.
Fridge. That had been her human-friendly pseudonym. They all had names like that. Aki’Drednanth had quirky senses of humour.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he was thinking about her now. It was a peculiarity of nerves and senses and memory, perhaps. The tight, bordering-on-uncomfortable feeling of the micro-film setting on his hands, the smell of sterility, the quality of the light …
Quite aside from the fact that standing at an examination table, looking down at an article of dead flesh, tended to make him philosophise at the best of times, he supposed he had been thinking about minds, and the amazing spectrums in which they could come. Synth, able, eejit, Contro … and yes, all the variety of the Six Species. But there really was no mind like an aki’Drednanth mind, and when it came down to the choices and fates that had brought him here, his musings often took him back to Fridge.
He hadn’t entered the Dreamscape with Fridge – Blaren rarely, and Molren even more rarely, had the mental flexibility and raw capacity to interface on that level, and Cratch didn’t know of any Bonshoon or human to manage it, not even a human of Contro’s unique character and mentality. Whether Damorakind or Furgunak managed it, he couldn’t say and didn’t much care to speculate. But with only about five hundred aki’Drednanth in the entire extended Molran Fleet population of – what had it been, forty billion, and ten times that in sleepers? – just meeting one was something of an achievement.
Yes, Fridge. Fridge had been an interesting encounter.
Aki’Drednanth were believed to be a type of Ogre, like the ones that were said to have founded Þursheim. Whether or not they were the same species was questionable, especially since there was no real material evidence left in Þursheim anymore. They were big, hairy, tusky, they tended to speak in roars …
And they were smelly. Above about minus ten degrees Celsius – and Fridge had been out of her envirosuit for various reasons, and while it had been chilly it had not been freezing on the day of their meeting – various parts of the aki’Drednanth anatomy and certainly some of the bits on their skin, under the pelt, began to melt and that stuff was fragrant. An aki’Drednanth would not melt if left in a warm environment, that was one of the many myths about the species … but she would most likely die or suffer pulmonary failure or brain damage long before actually turning into a puddle of sludge. Much of their circulatory systems consisted of a series of supercooled fluids in channels of fibrous material with a melting point somewhere below ice, and their brains were like great, intricate snow-sculptures of crystallised ammonia and fatty acids and other more exotic substances. And the aki’Drednanth took brain damage very seriously indeed.
The aki’Drednanth believed, with a reasonable amount of scientific verification, that their consciousness was collective and eternal. The former assertion, given that the aki’Drednanth were perfect telepaths, was pretty solid. The latter, well, that was a bit more difficult to verify, wasn’t it? But the evidence was compelling.
Aki’Drednanth, literally if not exactly, meant the living Drednanth. The Drednanth, in turn, was the immortal psychic gestalt the aki’Drednanth considered their true species-self. It was horrifyingly complicated, but the theory could be simplified thusly: aki’Drednanth consciousness was collective, and each huge beast constituted a node, like a processing hub. When an aki’Drednanth died, her consciousness was dispersed among all the others. It simply folded into its own personal Dreamscape and existed as pure thought in an unimaginable, supercooled organic mainframe.
Naturally even the amazing, intricate crystal-quantum computer of an aki’Drednanth brain couldn’t contain the full consciousnesses of more than a few individuals, and the Drednanth was by simple arithmetic made up of trillions of former minds. This was where it all got a bit myth-y. It was said that the Great Ice, a band of almost-interlinked comets that was the aki’Drednanths’ home and ran like a ribbon through the near-centre of galaxy, contained structures to house the vast majority of the Drednanth ur-mind.
It certainly made a fun explanation for why they were so mercilessly territorial.
It got even more tricky when you took their idea of reincarnation into account. With aki’Drednanth, reincarnation was quite literal. When an aki’Drednanth conceived, the existing ancient minds bucked for position according to unknowable Drednanth rules, and one candidate wove herself into the new aki’Drednanth right from the first cell division. She directed her own growth, building body and brain electromagnetically around her consciousness, until the infant that was born was a new iteration of a being that had last been aki’Drednanth maybe two hundred thousand years ago, and had spent the past two thousand centuries as Drednanth.
You could laugh at an aki’Drednanth and tell her that her beliefs were a load of shooey, of course. An aki’Drednanth would most likely ignore you serenely. They had the pacific nature that Cratch whimsically liked to believe came hand-in-hand with immortality, and while some things did goad them to terrible anger, just laughing and calling them insane liars wasn’t one of those things. And a darn good thing too.
Why, you just had to hear their crazy ideas and legends about the origins and history of the universe – legends apparently garnered from the length and breadth of the eternal gestalt existence of the aki’Drednanth – to know that the majority of it was most likely down to interpretation and metaphor. Or, at best, truth viewed from across a vast species gap and through a cultural lens a light year thick. No wonder people called them wacky-wacky-Drednanth.
There were deeper and larger games at play, of course. The selection of which specific Drednanth was to become aki’Drednanth started in the mind-plane and continued in the womb, and then in the ferociously primitive litters aki’Drednanth birthed, of which only one or two in twenty survived to juvenility. Being reborn was just the beginning – if you didn’t have what it took, you’d be dumped unceremoniously back into the Drednanth ocean, and wait another few hundred millennia. There was the myth of assorted Drednanth heroes, giants among giants, leaders and demigods who marched forth from the Dreamscape in the aki’Drednanth hour of need.
There was, of course, the myth of the oona’aki’Drednanth – the New. Because all those thousands of billions of Drednanth had to come from somewhere, right? They couldn’t all be recycled, all the time. Occasionally, a true newborn would come, and be added to the stockpile in the mass subconscious.
And the evidence for all these preposte
rous beliefs, the histories and knowledge of the creatures, was almost utterly conclusive. They had the mental landscape to ‘save’ themselves. They were telepaths without peer. And in several cases, unusually-frequent reincarnations of wartime or otherwise important aki’Drednanth had seemed to live and die and return, apparently knowing exactly what her alleged predecessor had known, being the exact aki’Drednanth her alleged predecessor had been.
Then there was the fact that, over the past couple of million years, the aki’Drednanth had apparently evolved physically even less than the Molranoids had. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Not if you were building your old body from scratch every time, in the womb.
Yes, deeper and larger games. And it was the least of which, in Cratch’s opinion, that seemed to get the most muttered, gossiped attention. That was the mystery of how the aki’Drednanth managed to defend their fragile storage supercomputer against the Cancer in the Core that practically coexisted with the Great Ice. Well, that was simple enough – they survived by serving Damorakind, aside from the few hundred aki’Drednanth who stepped out of slavery to join the Molran Fleet, seemingly just out of idle curiosity. They had become the Fourth Species – up until that point, it had only been the three Molranoid species and a whole lot of death and destruction.
That wasn’t, to Cratch’s mind, particularly puzzling or particularly upsetting. That was simple survival. Something he’d once hoped to learn from aki’Drednanth like Fridge. Brains were interesting. Minds were incredible. He’d once hoped to be the first human to enter the aki’Drednanth Dreamscape. A mind you could step into, figuratively at least … it was hard to imagine anything better.
Oh yes, he’d dreamed big, back in the day. If you were going to dream, indeed, why not make it big? But that had all been a long time ago. Back before Judon Research Outpost.
Back before Barnalk High. Where everything had started to go wrong.
And all of it a series of seemingly random events that had led him here. So, what was the point of it all?
What indeed?
Cratch stood, once again, and looked down at a sodden red thing on an examination table. He reflected on how paradoxical life could be, how astonishingly perverse, while still maintaining the flawless illusion of being a completely random series of events governed, ultimately, by subatomic particles moving around one another. He wondered if there was a human Dreamscape akin to the one in which the Dreadnanth waited their turn to be flesh once again – a psychic afterlife that humans were too reckless and crazy and self-centred to control, and therefore to know about. Maybe there was, and all of the deaths, all of the brutality, all of the humourous autopsies and practical jokes in morgues, were just so much bureaucracy. The pointless cataloguing of decomposing meat that the owner of which no longer cared about so why, in the name of all that was holy, did anybody else?
Ah, well.
This time, there was no music on the player. This time, he was most certainly being watched. And not just by the bumpers.
Janya stood in the room between Nurse Wingus and Nurse Dingus. Her own pair of eejits, near-pinnacle specimens who’d actually been given proper names – Westchester and Whitehall – stood behind her.
Cratch was, for once, sufficiently discomfited as to cause his cheerfully daffy act to drop back a couple of gears to muted affability. Janya Adeneo had the uncanny ability to do that to him at the best of times, and this was an exceptional circumstance.
He circled the table. About all you could say about this examination sample was that it was smaller than the last one. And had elements of shoe worked into it.
“Not sure what you want me to look for here, Prof,” he confessed.
“I’m not a professor, Glomulus,” Janya said coolly, “I’m just the closest we have. At least until we can get Westchester to stop–”
“WHERE THE HELL AM I AND WHY IS IT SO DARK AND QUIET WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEAVY LOADER DID IT SHUT DOWN?”
“–resetting to ‘blind dock worker’ every time his abstract thought levels reach some apparent maximum tolerance level,” she concluded, as Wingus and Dingus stepped in and performed the quick series of simple calming and reacquainting exercises they’d been trained to give Westchester when he had one of these rare but extremely disruptive episodes. He did recover his personality quite fast, even if it did mean his train of thought was completely derailed and he had to start almost from scratch with the entire endeavour. “And until we can get Whitehall to stop doing … well, that thing,” she added.
Cratch nodded, and looked at Whitehall instinctively. Whitehall looked – as far as even a top-shelf eejit was capable – mildly embarrassed while his brother grumbled and muttered curses in between Wingus and Dingus. Embarrassed but not, it was important to note, as though he was in any danger of doing that thing.
Westchester and Whitehall were configured with as close to classic research scientist templates as possible, biochemist and physicist respectively. They were relatively stable and quite handy in certain highly-specialised ways, and even more importantly seemed to complement each other. Between the two of them, they formed a sort of gestalt ‘generic scientist’ of surprisingly high calibre.
And they seemed to calm each other, Whitehall raising Westchester’s reset threshold and Westchester punching Whitehall very hard in the face to render him unconscious at need.
Janya had told everyone she had hopes of using them to retrocalibrate other eejits towards greater levels of usefulness, and even attempt to patch up Westchester and Whitehall’s own irregular but catastrophic glitches.
There had been a number of experiments, ranging from hilarious to nightmare-inducing.
“I can’t really deduce anything from the foot,” Doctor Cratch confessed, “I mean, we’d already figured out that it got chopped off by the inner door and smooshed out through the outer one. How it then got turned around and splattered back onto our hull is anyone’s guess,” he raised a braceleted hand as Janya opened her mouth. “I know,” he said, “it was frozen solid so it didn’t splatter so much as tonk.”
“I wasn’t going to correct that point,” Adeneo said distractedly. “But if there are any traces on the sample – some cells or particles from whatever it either collided with or was caught by … just some sort of trace that sets it aside from the larger control sample–”
“You mean the body.”
“Yes,” Janya said, her voice level and unfriendly, although not really any more or less so than usual, “I mean the body.”
“I’m guessing a collision or a slingshot would have allowed us to register whatever it was our adventurous foot here had collided with or slingshotted around,” Cratch mused.
“Indeed,” Whitehall said, while Westchester continued to look thunderously confused and, well, blind, “it seems at a cursory visual examination that there was no collision. A sufficiently glancing collision to send the sample back into our path, at sufficient acceleration to intercept us as we in turn accelerated away, and yet for the accelerator to not accompany the object – ah, the foot – on the same trajectory … this would require the impactor, the accelerator, to be extremely high-impact. The sample would have been shattered, or burned, or otherwise damaged.”
“So what are we looking for here, exactly? Something mechanical or organic that could intercept, catch, fling back … ?”
“We don’t know what we’re looking for,” Janya said. “That is what these tests are intended to establish, in as low-impact a way as possible. There has already been considerable damage from the catchment scoops, since this was assumed to be a rock at first detection.”
“Well, we can’t blame Waffa for that–”
“I wasn’t blaming Waffa,” Janya said. “It’s just going to make the examination more difficult.”
“The examination that will tell us if somebody caught Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19’s foot and threw it back at us at high speed?” Cratch twinkled. “Are we looking for fingerprints? DNA? Trace elements of lacrosse stick?
”
Janya spared Cratch an unamused look. “DNA, certainly,” she said. “Easy enough to look for, and if we find anything but Able Darko’s DNA in there, we’ll know that we’re dealing with…” she paused, actually uncertain.
“An interstellar body-part shortstop?” Doctor Cratch hazarded.
“Yes,” Janya said. “We’ll call it an IBPS in the official report, of course.”
It irritated Cratch that he sometimes couldn’t tell when Janya was being sarcastic, and instead had to just assume that she was because it seemed like the only way to get out of conversations with her in one piece. “Okay,” he said reasonably, “well whatever we’re going to do, we might as well get on with it before we either fly too far away from whatever-it-is, or it comes after us and catches us unawares.”
“Agreed.”
Janya set the scanners in action, and they unwound from the ceiling like metal tentacles. Cratch watched them curl and focus on the slowly-melting mince-and-polymer popsicle in the middle of the workspace. He couldn’t help but think it was a lot of effort and infrastructure for very little purpose.
“So what if we get some DNA reading from some cantankerous intergalactic kraken that we’ve just slapped in the puckered series of orifices and ghastly spines and hooks it has for a face, with about six percent of a snap-frozen eejit?” he asked. “Are we going to turn around and try to talk with it? Or just fly on, perhaps accelerating a little in order to guarantee it doesn’t start throwing anything else in our direction?” he paused. “It’s going to be the former, isn’t it?”
“We are primarily a ship of exploration for the expansion and betterment of the human race,” Janya said firmly.
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 5
