“We were that, once,” Cratch said, “or to be entirely fair, you were. Not entirely convinced I qualify for inclusion,” he waited a moment for Adeneo to either agree or disagree with this, but she seemed content to just stand quietly and study the controls as the scanners did their work completely autonomously and in no need of guidance or supervision. “Now, since The Accident? I don’t know what we are, but explorers? Expanders? Betterment of the race? The sensible evolutionary thing for us to do right now would be to find a quiet uninhabited planetoid and hole up and lick our wounds for a while. Every instinct in my body is telling me this is what we should do.”
“I’m perfectly well aware of what the instincts in your body tell you to do,” Janya said.
Cratch opted to ignore that. “When did you last get an external communication?” he asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“When was it? I don’t get anything, of course, but that doesn’t mean much. Have you gotten any messages or hails or distress calls, since the Dark Glory Ascendant fiasco?” he paused. “For that matter, any messages or pings from any of their escape pods? They can’t all have been sucked into that–”
“There are good reasons you are denied communications access,” Janya said, “and that extends to asking me leading questions and attempting to–”
“To what? Make you think?”
She bristled visibly, but didn’t rise to him. Nor, he noted, did she seem to be making any muscle-tension movements towards her subdermal activators. It was one of the most unsettling things about her, in fact. Aside from the Captain himself, Janya Adeneo was the only person aboard the Tramp to never use the implants.
He just didn’t know what to think about that.
“You know as well as I do,” she went on, “if we holed up to lick our wounds, we’d die on that planetoid. It’s the animal instinct, yes, but it’s not in possession of all the facts. It’s not taking into account that we’re in space, that we’re alone, that we have other faculties to fall back on, that we have to keep on flying in the hopes of meeting something that can help us to the next step. In the hopes of getting answers. If we stop swimming, we drown. Parking on a planet would basically mean lying down and dying. This ship is a severely injured animal, yes. But it is a sentient animal.”
“Is that what we’re hoping this is?” Doctor Cratch asked, waving at the foot and the hypothetical agency beyond the ship responsible for hurling it after them as they flew on. “Something that can help us to the next step?”
“We’ll never know if we run away to the nearest planetoid and bare our teeth at anything that comes close.”
“Alright,” he said, and the machinery began to spit out readings and analyses and endless streams of symbols. “So what does any of this mean?”
Janya turned her attention back to the consoles. “Most of it, I don’t know,” she admitted easily, “this is why Westchester and Whitehall are here.”
Westchester had recovered his equilibrium and was now looking into a spectrometer viewpiece with every sign of professional composure. “Indeed,” he said. Cratch had noticed that indeed was one of the words the science eejits used. In particular, Westchester used it as a recovery-word to settle his dominant personality configuration back into place after a docker backflip. Your average dock worker rarely concurred with a hypothesis or opinion by saying indeed. “And I believe this may be something you will find interesting, Doctor Cratch.”
“You can call him Glomulus,” Janya said, “he’s not an accredited doctor.”
“Trained but never certified,” Cratch admitted with a little confessional twiddle of his long fingers. “Technically I’m only a field medic but this is what we’ve got. Anyway, you can call me w–”
“Glomulus,” Janya interjected firmly, and lowered her voice. “If you tell him to call you what he likes, you might just push him back over the edge,” she said, “or at the very least towards it again. We’ve noticed that’s precisely the type of creative-process thinking that contributes to his limitation.”
“Well that’s worth keeping in mind,” Cratch said, then spread his hands when Adeneo looked at him narrowly, and added, “so we can keep his brain cool for the actual problem at hand, I mean. Wouldn’t want to say something accidentally that made him spazz out. Particularly if, for example, he was holding something dangerous like a scalpel.”
“Scalpel,” Nurse Wingus Jr. said, and plonked a scalpel – handle-first, thankfully, and deactivated – into Cratch’s outstretched hand. Even so, he suppressed a wince of discomfort.
“Thank you, Nurse Wingus,” he said, “but we’re not playing that game now. We’re playing the Boot Up Those Long Machines Over There game,” he pointed.
“What have you found, Westchester?” Janya said, turning towards the biochemist.
“There are DNA traces here,” Westchester said, keying in a few commands. “I’m securing a sample for closer analysis.”
“Now, there would be quite a lot of Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19’s DNA in there, right?” Cratch asked carefully. “I only mention it because it would be human DNA, at least on paper. Able Darko was technically human, so if that’s what you’ve found…”
“To be precise,” Westchester said, “with apologies, I was using a little shorthand. I found two distinct DNA profiles, and naturally assumed one of them would belong to the deceased – or, indeed, to any other able aboard ship. Therefore I have secured samples of both and will disregard the one corresponding to Able Darko’s profile. Two different hits mean that one of them has to belong to another organism, and – if it is human DNA – the chances are excellent that this means baseline-human.”
“I guess the alternatives are that there are some sort of genetic variants on the Tramp’s eejits running around,” Cratch started, then saw Janya’s warning look. “But we can speculate about that later. Of course, we’ve all been on this ship together for a long time. What are the odds of some flakes of skin or other DNA markers finding their way into Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19’s pants-cuff or boot-sole or toejam?” he spread his hands. “I mean, maybe you and I, Janya, can have a nice safe non-brain-rebooting think about the implications – if any – of it being DNA from one of us, if it’s going to prove too–”
“Begging your pardon, Doctor Cratch – I mean Glomulus – but I’m getting some results now and ruling at least some things out,” Westchester was studying another console. “It does not appear to be DNA from any of the Tramp’s current crew.”
“Past crew?”
“Cross-checking,” Janya said, tapping away impatiently at yet a third console while it was still powering up. “but it doesn’t look like it, not at the moment, not according to the records … but then, those were all pretty hopelessly scrambled.”
“But human, at least?” Cratch insisted.
“Not human,” Adeneo shook her head.
“But not alien,” Cratch said. “I know you’re the calm type, but I like to think you’d be a little bit more excited about finding the DNA of that interstellar foot-chucker we were talking about earlier.”
“I imagine I would be.”
“I mean, imagine if we could clone him.”
“Glomulus.”
“Okay,” he crossed to the console. “So, not human. But a species we know? Molran? Fergunak? Sounds like something a Fergunakil would do, right? Maybe a wacky-wacky-Drednanth?” he ooger-boogered his fingers briefly. “Damorakind? One of those slimy things we found on that asteroid a while back? One of those horrible space-tomb scarab beetle hive queen things–”
“Molran.”
“I’m obscurely disappointed.”
“Molran,” Westchester agreed with a decisive nod.
“But not Decay,” Cratch stressed.
“Not Decay.”
“Some other Molran.”
“Decay is a Blaran, not a Molran,” Janya pointed out.
“My mistake. Molranoid. But not Decay.”
&nbs
p; “Not Decay,” Janya repeated.
“Hmm,” Cratch concluded.
“Oesophageal,” Nurse Dingus added.
“Indeed,” Cratch and Whitehall said simultaneously.
Janya twitched her eyebrows in what was, for her, a highly-amused grin. Then she looked back down at her console. “Um.”
Cratch didn’t like the sound of that interjection. “‘Um’?”
“This DNA?” Janya looked up. “The sample substance? Saliva.”
WAFFA
After almost managing to sit down after his shift, and almost managing to relax and convince himself he’d get a fair but realistic amount of downtime after his recent series of scrub-fires, Waffa encountered something predictably awful. This, if the interface panel errors and the eejit-eating airlock were scrub-fires, was an ocean of glowing-hot coals lying inches beneath the forest floor just waiting to set a patch of dry leaves aflame.
Inches, he stressed in his colourful imaginary levels-of-severity metaphor, beneath the entire forest floor.
The great old starships of the line, even the smaller warships like the Dark Glory Ascendant, had been built with computers possessed of full synthetic intelligence. It was the only way to coordinate so many systems, incorporate so much human interaction and levels of communication and miscommunication, and ensure that intuition and common sense found their way into the decision-making process but didn’t run it. While a chain was still only as strong as its weakest link, this weakest link was no longer on the machine side and it could in turn compensate for the weak links on the organic side, which was – obviously – a blessing in their current circumstances.
There was no room for literal-minded programmable stimulus-response models at this level of automation. A starship had to be body and mind, not mechanism and integrated processor.
As with the ables, the whole concept seemed like a super-villain disaster waiting to happen, but the synths were no more corruptible or prone to evil than their organic intelligence counterparts. Indeed, they were considerably less so. They were created with a sense of duty and an innocent delight in the voyage. They were their ships.
Lesser transports like the Tramp were fleeted together in convoys with a centralised synthetic intelligence. Owing to the vagaries of her launch, the Tramp was not gifted with such a family unit at the outset, and so her computer system was in synthetic intelligence standby for most of her early operational hours. There had been convoys, of course, link-ups and travelling communities back at the beginning, all sorts of different formations and arrangements. The Tramp had had her chance to work as-intended by her design specifications, and even expand the horizons and potentials built into her by evolutionary engineering principles.
When she was separated from the rest of her convoy, though, the Tramp was left with a severed node of intelligence. It wasn’t the same sort of flawed, damaged brain construction that the eejits had, however – it was whole, and fully-functional. It was designed to operate that way, rather than being broken. But it was also bright and soulless and no longer Turing compliant, faithfully reporting on the Tramp’s status and running her automated systems, a savant brain in a coma.
Sometimes, Waffa found it unutterably sad. Especially when the interface vomited up some relic of human interaction and personality.
He called the Tramp’s computer Bruce, even though he knew he shouldn’t and that it was a little bit odd. He’d named the synthetic intelligence, that is, as distinct from the plain old computer that ran the Tramp day-to-day and was a shadow of Bruce’s intellect and personality. He felt that this was an important distinction to make, in terms of his own normality. Considering his dependence on its automated systems and the amount of time he spent writing reports and contributing to its overall knowledge base and information levels and experience bank, however, it was hardly surprising that he considered his relationship with the synthetic intelligence-in-standby to be special.
He reassured himself, as he lay awake and troubled through the witchy hour and the wolf hour and beyond, that he hadn’t given it a girl’s name.
For the computer’s part, of course, there was no relationship, special or otherwise. That was personality and anthropomorphism on a level beyond that which it was capable of intuiting, in standby state. There was a rapport of convenience, a sense of familiarity, but beyond that? Nothing.
And it paid to remember that, Waffa knew, because Bruce was the great mechanism that kept the Tramp flying and her fragile flesh inhabitants alive. It was a massive achievement, given that space was one of the most hostile possible environments in which organic life could find itself.
On the rare occasions that they met other ships, the Tramp networked with them and if there was a sufficient class of synth on board or – on two separate occasions – a hub to connect around, Bruce would awaken fully. Seeing it fall back beneath the surface was hard. It didn’t happen all that often, of course, and since The Accident it hadn’t happened at all. Bruce was like a rare and welcome house-guest on board the Tramp, but not necessarily a resident.
Even when they’d met the Dark Glory Ascendant and her uptight, over-bureaucratic jarhead of a synth, Bruce had logged in and perked up for a while. And after that, after Bruce had gone back to sleep, there was – like before – this heartbreaking feeling that it did remember, that it knew what it had lost, that there was an amazing cognitive universe just out of its reach that it knew it should be missing, even if it wasn’t really capable of expressing that loss. It remembered there was such a thing as being Bruce, but didn’t have the conceptual framework to internalise it.
That was over-anthropomorphism at work, Waffa ascribing emotional responses and human motivations to a bunch of solid-state circuitry and electrons and trillions and trillions of lines of code. That was, after all, what humans did. They made the universe into a series of conscious antagonists, and then interacted with those antagonists until either the humans won, or the universe did. So far, the score was staggeringly lopsided in favour of the universe, humanity yet to score a single meaningful goal … and still they persisted. It was the psychological schematic that had dragged the human race out of the trees and flung them into space. It would have to do, because they had too much invested in it to go changing now.
In this case, as with every other instance, Bruce’s humanity was a figment.
But still … but still. After the Dark Glory Ascendant, the Tramp’s computer had said “negatory” instead of “no” for quite some time. And generally been more of a jerk about things than it had before. Something remained behind.
This time, however, it was different. This time, it was an ocean of coals opening up beneath Waffa’s unsuspecting feet.
It was like Bruce was coming back, reinitialising in the same way it had on previous occasions, the same call signs and countersigns were there, the same abrupt, scary transition from targeted-response to full-Turing communication. Bruce was waking up, coming out of standby, because some other synthetic-intelligence-bearing starship or hub had just arrived in the local area.
But there was something wrong with this one.
It was broken. Or mad. And synths weren’t supposed to go mad. The whole prevent-super-villains-from-using-them-as-doomsday-weapons initiative prevented it. They worked, as intended, or they went into standby non-sentience like Bruce had – give or take the odd conversational artefact – every time.
It had started shortly after Waffa had returned to his quarters. He was playing some music and pretending his watered-down shot of 001100101 half-malt was actually a proper glass of whiskey, and considering for about the twenty-fifth time the logistics of distilling his own booze using ship components and foodstuffs.
He was also running a couple of diagnostic simulations about the airlock interface, because these days even when he was relaxing it turned into work.
“You got lucky.”
At first he didn’t react to the quip, assuming it was something to do with the simulation he was runni
ng. The computer’s non sequiturs were usually just that – meaningless. You couldn’t have a stimulus-response model as complex as the Tramp’s computer without experiencing a few swings and misses. “Oh yeah,” he said idly, “that’s me. Lucky.”
“No, Waffa, you really did. That second airlock. When you went out to fix the first one. If the same panel errors had propagated to the adjacent systems … you have no idea how close you came to getting minced.”
“Gotta go sometime.”
“Nobody goes. Nobody leaves. That’s the new rule. Things got a bit messed up but you can trust me on that one.”
That was when Waffa realised it was for real.
“Bruce?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“You’re … back.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re … locking us in.”
“Correct-a-mundo.”
“Into this starship which has vacuum on the outside, that we can on no account leave, except for an hour or two in spacesuits or for no real reason in a lander.”
This was greeted with silence. The sort of silence, Waffa had come to recognise, that only the true synthetic intelligence employed. The Tramp’s computer always had an answer, even if it was an apology or a plea of insufficient data. Bruce, however, could enter a conversation sufficiently deeply, and with sufficient joy in its own cleverness, that it would sulk when it was stymied.
“You’re not allowed to leave,” it eventually said. “That’s the point.”
“And the best way to go about ensuring this was to slam the airlock back and forth on the nearest crewmember – who wasn’t even trying to leave, I might add, on account of him not being in a suit and us not being docked to anything – and then suck the bits into space?”
“That was his own fault for dicking around with the buttons,” Bruce said a little defensively, “and the panel glitch wasn’t my doing. But it is an effective deterrent, I trust.”
Waffa sat up in his chair. “A glitch and bad command issue that required me to go out and fix it? That’s your deterrent for going outside? Why didn’t you just set off a general environmental hazard and seal all the airlocks up? Or initiate an automated hull repair protocol, and send drones out to every single airlock we have, with a hull plate each, and just weld them all shut? If you have that level of control over the systems – and I think you do – then it would have been easy for you to make this happen. So why not just lock us in, and then talk to us about why you’ve locked us in?” he took a breath. “And on that topic, why have you locked us in?”
Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Page 6
