Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (2 page)

It was this devastating lack of expertise that resulted in a half-dozen eejits taking the place of each former crewmember. While they tended to work surprisingly well in synchrony and not get in each other’s way, they were still no real substitute for an actual expert – or even a reasonably imaginative amateur human – and had a habit of falling inside things and getting crushed. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes not so much.

It was also the reason Contro was Chief Engineer.

“Green button,” Cratch said, turning to give the surveillance bumper another sidelong grin, this time adding a sly wink. “I left you with your finger on it there, sparky.”

“Oh.”

The bombacious strains of Lars Larouchel’s Big Brass Ball started to thump and swing through the medical bay with a
sh-boom
, a
bop-bop
and a tinkle of Vermish pipes, and Doctor Cratch turned his full and piercing attention on the thing lying mostly on the examination table.

So.

The
good
news was, it was just an eejit. The bad news, once again, was that for something to go sufficiently wrong to kill an eejit, there had to be a catastrophic breakdown somewhere and sooner or later that
would
be actual-human-life-threatening. After all, if an eejit could get killed by it a human feasibly could too, although the human in question may need to be sleepwalking or drunk out of his or her mind or, possibly, performing some incredibly unlikely and irretrievably stupid act on a dare at the precise same moment a series of cosmically unlikely coincidences lined up with a sequence of safety system failures,
while
sleepwalking drunk. Well, it was unlikely … but
possible
. That was the point.

The
good
news was, there were plenty more eejits to throw at the problem until the problem either went away or – and this was bad news all over again, in a way, because it happened all too often – just got clogged up with dead eejits and sort of ground harmlessly to a halt. Because, well, they were God damn eejits. But – good news – the opportunity to send in the clowns meant a certain number of justified replacement slots and the shot at a statistically anomalous eejit who could actually do his job without simultaneously forgetting how to breathe.

As he checked the file on Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19, Cratch realised the bad news just kept coming. Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 was a high-end eejit. Which meant that they’d just lost an
almost
-competent mechanic that might take agonising months and years of printed shooeyheads to replace. Since Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 had presumably been unable to foresee or avoid his fate, it also logically followed that said fate had been a comparatively unlucky one. Certainly unlucky for
him
, but more than that. It meant that whatever had done this to Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 had a better-than-one-in-fifty chance of doing the same to a human.

A better-than-one-in-twenty chance of doing the same to a human like Contro.

“Layers upon layers upon layers,” Cratch murmured to himself, then gave a merry little shake-and-blink. “Oh well. Professionally-begun is half-done,” he began to pick his way through the sodden red-and-white mass on the table, occasionally bending to retrieve a bit as it slithered onto the floor, or peel away a flap of skin or uniform or the plastic maintenance report flimsy Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 had been carrying when he died. “On initial visual inspection I would say that the injuries here are consistent with the accompanying casualty report,” he said, shifting to a slightly more sombre tone. “Limbs and torso crushed and almost severed by rapidly opening-and-closing inner airlock door, finally pinning victim at sternum level, then outer airlock door opening a small amount resulting in decompression and the pulping of the upper body as it was dragged through inner airlock door by force. Some cold damage and lost material from lower extremities, presumably when they were sucked against the narrow opening in outer airlock door. One leg severed at lower-shin, presumed lost into space. Cause of death…”

Doctor Cratch looked at the partially-collapsed head, the scattered bones and the mounds of flesh and intestines.

Dingus, the second nurse, pointed helpfully at the ragged stump of the neck where it now largely failed to connect with the base of the skull. “I think people die when the neck is open like that,” he said.

“Yes,” Cratch said solemnly. “Yes, I can say with confidence that they do.”

Wingus and Dingus did look
slightly
different, both to one another and to the ancient Able Darko archetype. It was an enduring myth that clones all came out looking
totally
identical. The production of a clone was not, after all, the same genetic process as might take place for the gestation of identical twins, let alone completely synthesised printed replicants – another set of horrific myths altogether. No, ables were more like non-identical siblings, although their genetic-level identicality and the fabrication process itself served to draw them towards that identical baseline far more than if they had simply been cloned from the same stock. Their similarity of appearance was a reflection of the similarity in their blood, organs, skin and tissues – it wasn’t
because
they were clones, as such.

But long story short, they
were
strikingly similar. Each was embedded with an identity at fabrication, and whatever name they were later assigned became linked to that identity. Glomulus could tell Wingus and Dingus apart, nine times out of ten. For the hundreds of other eejits on board, name-tags were a definite plus.

“So … cause of death would be something like … neck being off?” Dingus suggested.

“Neck parts missing,” Wingus Jr. amended professionally.

Dingus nodded crisply. “Cause of death, neck loss.”

“
Cause of death
,” Wingus Jr. concluded triumphantly, “asphyxiation due to insufficient neckal tissue.”

“
That
one,” Cratch said, ending his tennis-match back-and-forth administration of the diagnostic consultation, snapping his fingers and pointing at Wingus Jr. “The points you lost by using the word ‘neckal’, you more than made up for with ‘asphyxiation’,” he nodded approvingly. “For ‘neckal’, try substituting ‘spinal’ or, depending on the context and if you’re feeling particularly loquacious, ‘oesophageal’.”

“Oesophageal.”

“Right,” Cratch stepped back to look at, as it were, the big picture. He waited for Mr. Larouchel to croon to the end of
Sad Little Doggy
and launch into the soft opening bars of
Oræl Rides To War
before continuing. “Although, if we’re talking about cause of death and being absolute sticklers for, you know, facts and stuff … given that his skull is still mostly intact and that the damage goes
chop chop chop
legs,
crunch crunch
pelvis-and-gut,
chomp
diaphragm and then
smear
on up to the neck … I’ll hazard a guess that he went feet-first.

“By the weight of this physical evidence, my esteemed colleagues, I think I’m going to risk going on record saying that our old friend Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 was
probably
dead by the time he got squeezed from the access corridor into the airlock up to his neck,” he looked around, his face grave. “I think we’ve all learned that massive trauma and blood-loss were the
real
monsters here today.”

“Oesophageal.”

“Indeed,” Doctor Cratch mused. “In
deed
,” he paused for a time, giving this the deep consideration it deserved. Then he bent, picked up a pulped hand for the third time, looked down at it in silent reflection for a moment before depositing it back in the middle of the heap, and carrying on brightly, “I would say, if I had to speculate about the
specific
cause of death – which I don’t, because that’s a job for Sally and Waffa – I would suggest that these injuries were caused by a combination of technical and eejit error.
Viz
,” he tambourined his red hands briefly for emphasis, “the airlock access panel jammed up and the safeties shorted, our inestimable colleague Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 pressed on a whole lot of buttons over and over again trying to get it to work,” Cratch jabbed his fingers in a frustrated pantomime, “then the system
un
-jammed and all the commands played out in rapid sequence. Which under no account should ever happen, but nevertheless … specifically this meant the outer door cracking open enough to start him on his outward journey, the
inner
door opening and closing six or seven times to cause this chewing effect as he went on through, and then both doors lodging partway open – perhaps due to another circuit glitch or a maintenance override shortcut caused by Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 mashing the buttons randomly,” here Cratch performed another little pantomime, before concluding, “…so he could be sucked out to his ultimate placement, before both doors finally closed and locked down,” he stepped back and posed, as
Oræl Rides To War
reached its bittersweet crescendo. “Elementary, my dear Wingus.”

Doctor Cratch was about to begin cataloguing the organs and tissues that would not be worth salvaging for medical reasons due to excessive damage – this wasn’t likely to take long, because it was all of them except Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19’s scalp, and nobody on board needed new hair – when the
Tramp
’s proximity alarm started sounding.

When the external sensors spotted an inbound object on a trajectory that would result in hull impact, they sent a notification to workstation 19, which was … well, it was wherever Waffa happened to be at that moment, because workstation 19 was his wristwatch. It was Waffa’s job, as Chief of Security and Operations, to decide which of the multitude of notifications, impact or otherwise, warranted escalation to alarms. And to then log the alarms. And then to figure out what to do about the alarms. And then to do that thing he just figured out. And then to turn off the alarms. And then to explain to everyone why the noise had happened, what he’d done, and why the noise had stopped.

In many ways, The Accident had been a real kick in the balls for Waffa’s spare time. “The buck starts here,” as he always liked to say. In his brain. In his brain, it was in fact his catchphrase, although in reality it would be more accurate to say his catchphrase was “damn it.”

Today, the inbound object notification caught him on the toilet.

He studied the readings, muttering the first syllable of the key ones out loud because nobody has time to read every syllable of a technical data dump. “Imp traj … mass … small cross-sec … oh come on, it’s a bloody rock,” he concluded, with no idea of the cosmic humorousness of his choice of words.

With impacts, there was a time element because no amount of dicking around with the sensors was going to change the fact that there was a piece of high-speed frozen whatever barrelling towards the ship. Since it
was
incoming at speed, Waffa confirmed the telemetry – because that sounded like the sort of thing he should do – and then set off the alarm and activated the intercept scoop. Because even if it
was
a rock, it had an atypical profile and was moving at atypical speed, and why waste time deflecting it when you could grab it and see if it was worth something? They might as well use the ship systems that still worked properly.

Then he finished going to the toilet.

He was washing his hands when Contro buzzed him from the engine room. The call came through on – yes – workstation 19.

“Hi!”

“Die in a fire,” Waffa said matter-of-factly, then tapped his watch to open comms. “Hey Chief,” technically they were both Chief Officers, but Chief Engineer was considerably more prestigious – not to mention definitively
Chief
– than Chief of Security and Operations, which was a title somewhere beneath Sally’s Chief Tactical Officer umbrella. Theirs was a ship of Chief Officers, these days, even if hardly any of them were actually officer-trained in any way.

“So there’s an alarm happening, huh?” Contro said cheerfully, and punctuated his question with a laugh. “Ha ha!”

Waffa shuddered, and locked eyes with himself in the mirror before answering very steadily. “Yep.”

“Anything I need to worry about?”

“Only if you’re worried about the ship getting a hole bored through it by a piece of frozen star moving at a few thousand feet per second,” he said, in his brain. “Which you’re not, are you?” In reality, however, he said, “Nah Chief, I’ve already set the catchers. As soon as I get confirmation that they’ve got hold of the rock, I’ll turn off the alarm.”

“Righto!” Contro, with what you might call a troublingly characteristic lack of social awareness, had picked up the expression from Doctor Cratch and it was a tough call as to which of the two – Contro, or the Rip – made the jolly exclamation sound more horrible. “Ha ha! Excellent job, Mister Waffa!”

“No worries,” Waffa said, still staring at himself steadily and wondering, not for the first or fifth of two-hundredth time, whether it was somehow possible for an eejit to glitch so spectacularly that it came out looking like a little smiling man with a round face, a penchant for cardigans and the interpersonal skills of an amphetamine-addicted chipmunk. And then somehow pass itself off as human. “I’ll just–”

“Oh! I almost forgot, there’s also a few flashing lights and stuff down here, the yellow ones on the whatsit panel, the one with the outline of the ship on it, you know the one.”

“Yeah,” Waffa said, “those are the same alarm, they just flash in case there are people who can’t hear the siren. It means the ship’s not aborting its acceleration process, but that the countermeasures are – that the catchers are going to grab the rock and we’ll continue on our way. They’ll all go off when I turn off the alarm.”

“Righto!”

“Ping me back if I switch off the alarm and the lights keep flashing, though,” Waffa said, and instantly regretted it.