Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (3 page)

“Oh! Why will the lights keep flashing?”

“They won’t – they shouldn’t – but–”

“What should I do to stop them?”

“Nothing. Contact me again.”

“Righto, so the alarm will stop but the lights will keep flashing, but what does that
mean
?”

“It doesn’t – they won’t keep flashing, the alarm and the lights will all stop together, but
if
the lights keep flashing–”

“Yes I know! What then?”

Waffa gritted his teeth. “Contact me.”

“Can’t we just deal with it now? Why should I hang up and then call you again? Ha ha! That’s very inefficient, Mister Waffa!”

Waffa took a few deep breaths, then continued. “Alright, Chief,” he said, “let’s do that. I’ll deactivate the alarm – the noise
and
the lights – as soon as the incoming bit of space debris that
caused
the alarm is safely in our catchers. Problem sorted. Alright?”

“Okay then! Sounds good.”

Waffa tapped his wrist, slumped against the toilet wall and sighed. A tall and well-built man – albeit not quite as impressive a physical specimen as an eejit himself – he looked at his short, tousled, greying blonde hair and weary face in the mirror and fancied he’d been compressed a few cubic inches by the pressure of his life since The Accident. Then he leaned over the sink, washed his face lingeringly, and returned his attention to his workstation.

Sensors were generally triggered by inbound or nearby objects of a certain size. While the
Tramp
was shielded and could deflect dust and small particles – and even larger ones, especially once she cycled up to full cruising speed and even a minuscule dust mote became a theoretically devastating projectile and evasive manoeuvres became a fantasy – there were still notifications about objects of unusual size or composition. Oh Lord, there were so many notifications.

And in space, the general rule was that the anomalous should be examined, albeit at a careful distance if possible.

“Come on then,” Waffa muttered, brushing his screen, “let’s catch that little bastard and get on with our lives.”

Matter tended to clump together. That was gravity, and even some eejits understood the basics of that one. Most of the particles in the universe that weren’t floating around as innocuous dust or gases had already long since coalesced into stars and planets and things like that. And
those
were a bit easier to pick up even without a proximity alarm. Which made the middle-range things worth keeping an eye open for, even if they were ridiculously small.

Yes, there were still plenty of things in space that were bigger than dust and smaller than planets. But that was like saying ‘there are plenty of peas in the freezer,’ when there were ten thousand peas and the freezer was five hundred thousand miles on a side. It didn’t matter how many pebbles there were floating around out there pretending to be comets – the chances of bumping into one were really not that high. Space, as Waffa also liked to say, was bloody enormous. That was why it was called ‘space’ and not ‘cramped’.

And all this had come on top of the day he’d already had, which was just perfect.

Immediately upon waking up that morning – an hour and a half before he was scheduled to wake up, and
that
after going to bed three hours later than he’d planned due to
another
set of reports – he’d been required to seal off an airlock and call a general all-stop in order for Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 to do some routine repairs on a suspected input panel malfunction. All-stop because, obviously, when there was a chance that an accidentally-pressed button would open an airlock, it was best to be in one place when you fixed it to avoid too much running around picking people up from one end of space to the other in case of accidents.

But certainly there had been no sign that anything
remotely
like the airlock in question eating an eejit would occur.

After
that
happened, a thoroughly-awake Waffa had made sure the accident had in fact come absolutely without warning. He knew eejits were easy to come by and there was no real penalty for messing one up, although a high-end eejit like Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 was a palpable loss. It would actually have been
more
serious if Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 had clotted up the works and caused the
airlock
to get more seriously damaged, although Waffa was of the opinion that a) an airlock that chews you up and sprays you into space through an eighth-of-an-inch-wide crack is already about as seriously damaged as it’s possible for an airlock to get, and b) he couldn’t actually remember anybody using the airlock to embark, disembark or go EVA, ever. They used the docking blister for pretty much every entrance and exit they ever performed. So why not just weld it shut?

Anyway, after the attempted repair and resultant fatality Waffa had made sure the whole region of the
Tramp
’s hull was safe and locked down, and had allowed them to resume course while a full investigation took place. Repairs would
now
happen with a full security bulkhead in place and strictly on one door at a time, totally powered down and rigorously tested, and all from inside with absolutely no chance of decompression. As it would have been before, if Waffa had assigned himself to run the input panel diagnostic instead of an eejit. But he’d foolishly thought it was a minor repair job.

He’d been snatching a few minutes to take a crap before starting the
new
repairs when the whole proximity alarm thing had started.

“Damn it,” he sighed, and swept his hand across workstation 19 yet again to open a new memo. “Damn it, okay. Right.”

The first part of his preparation, as ever, was the checklist. Set off alarm (check); activate retrieval (check); report to General Command Group and Engineering and Tactical Group (in progress); oversee retrieval; prepare repair crew; repair airlock; don’t get killed by airlock (this was a very important one); report to General Command Group and Engineering and Tactical Group; prepare replacement for Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19; report to General Command Group and Engineering and Tactical Group …

It wasn’t that Waffa was anal. At least, he’d never
thought
of himself as anal. He
hadn’t
been anal, back before The Accident. He’d just been a non-Corps operations crewman, not even certified AstroCorps. He just felt that if, at the end of the day, he couldn’t mark
one
thing off a specially-formatted tick-the-box to-do list, then it was a day he had taken one step closer to death with nothing to show for it. So he did his best to cross off as many items as he could, which sometimes meant he had to write some very small and rather pointless to-do lists but they still counted.

He’d considered, in his darker hours, the possibility that he might run out of action points before he ran out of days.

That was when he drank.

Muttering to himself he headed for the maintenance prep area, pecking at his watch with one finger. He wrote up the outstanding report while on the move from one task to the next. His time wasn’t
that
limited, he could have taken a moment to sit down and do the damn fool thing, but Waffa knew that to sit was to snooze.

Very often, the most difficult part of writing up an official report was getting the dumb template to work.

That was actually what it was
officially
called, for reasons as long-forgotten as Able Darko himself: the dumb template. And Waffa made sure he
called
it by its official name, lest the official name be forgotten, forcing him to come up with an inferior insulting term. So ‘dumb template’ it was, ‘dumb’ as in a blank slate with no words – with the dubious exception of the little symbols and icons that he had to twiddle around with every time …

Right.

The actual event code in this case was HLCF, which
meant
‘Hardware Lapse Causing Fatality’, but which Waffa had re-assigned as ‘Hideous Lethal Cluster Fuck’ in the code metadata. The extenuator code was SAE, ‘Single Able Expired’, or alternatively ‘Squashed An Eejit’. The variation on this, MAE, he’d repurposed as ‘Mangled Assload of Eejits’. That one actually got
more
use than the SAE code, due to the eejits’ unerring instinct to beach themselves
en masse
on HLCFs.

In this case, thankfully, it was just the one.

He added the OOF (‘One-Off Fault’, or ‘Once Only, Fingers crossed’ in Waffa’s parlance) code, and concluded with the NJDI suffix, which meant ‘No Janitorial Drone Involvement’ or ‘Just Cleaned It Up My God Damn Self As Usual’. That one didn’t match the acronym, but Waffa didn’t care. The converse to the NJDI, out of interest, was EJDI, or ‘Extensive Janitorial Drone Involvement’ / ‘Ewwww, Janitors Do It’.

So.

- - - HLCF + SAE + OOF + NJDI - - -

- - - Routine repairs performed on suspected input panel malfunction + Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 assigned + all-stop - - -

- - - Severe airlock fault + decompression + mechanical / safety fallback failure - - -

- - - Eejit Airlock Maintenance 2-19 expired - - -

- - - Full lockdown and security measures - - -

- - - Repair and analysis ongoing + flight to resume on satisfactory conclusion of repairs - - -

The report ended, as it usually did, with his initials – GJW4 – which he manually fixed to read ‘Waffa’ instead. It was perhaps the most infuriating part of the dumb template – he had fixed this to automatically include his
de facto
name instead of his non-Corps crew ID maybe eight times before realising that the template
always
forgot the change. So it was manual all the way.

He could have just signed off with ‘GJW4’. People knew who that was, and he was the only person submitting regular reports anyway so even if they hadn’t known, they could have taken an educated guess. But then again, he could drink out of the toilet too. But he didn’t, because he was a human-God-damn-being.

Sending off the report to the General Command Group – that meant Z-Lin Clue and theoretically the Captain – and the Engineering and Tactical Group – Sally and Contro – Waffa stepped up to maintenance prep. Overseeing the retrieval of the object was an easy check, since the whole system was automated and largely, theoretically foolproof for all that the
Tramp
seemed to have a knack for printing out bigger, better fools with every passing day.

He finished that task, programmed the sample packaging shuttle to seal up the would-be projectile and send it to the secure semi-external quarantine point, turned off the alarm and reset the sensors, and then stepped into the ward.

Eight eejits sat and lounged in the main room from which various repair and janitorial supply chambers branched. Two were lying in hammocks – one was face-down, and Waffa eyed him very carefully before concluding that he
was
still breathing – and two more were sitting and staring blankly into the middle distance. Four were playing cards. Of those four, one looked up.

“Hey boss.”

“You four,” he said, pointing at the card players. “Can we – wait,” he added, looking more carefully at the cards. One of the eejits was, on closer inspection, holding up a sheaf of sterilising wipes. “You stay here. You three, with me.”

They went to the super-redundantly-sealed area adjacent to the faulty airlock, and spent a few minutes going over and over the procedure they were about to perform. Specifically, what Waffa wanted the eejits to do while he was making the actual repairs with the assistance of the
Tramp
’s robotic maintenance systems and drones. Those systems, while
also
damaged and not capable of completing the task unaided, were all he really needed and the eejits amounted to a backup-for-a-backup, holding panels open and testing keypads on the far side of the room to save him too much faffing around.

Together – although Waffa had to admit that only one of the three eejits with him turned out to be all that useful even in the limited capacity he’d assigned it – they repaired the inner lock and the interface. Then he and the sole useful eejit set the systems and remote drones to repair and triple-check the outer airlock, double-checking it against AstroCorps specs and then running a diagnostic, and making very sure every step of the way that the other two eejits, one of whom had done nothing but drop tools and say “poop” for most of the operation, were back in the ward where they couldn’t interfere further.

They finished the repairs. Waffa checked off the
prepare
,
repair
and
don’t get killed
boxes on his to-do list. It was a good day, he reflected, when he could put a tick in a
don’t get killed
box.

The heavy-lifting part of his morning’s work done, he dismissed the third eejit and made his way to the fabrication plant.

The great series of vats, splicing laboratories, genetic nanotech banks and configuration matrices were an almost total mystery to every human left alive on the
Tramp
, which was why the various and largely-unexplored damage done to the esoteric machine had so far left them unable to produce anything but different levels of eejit and without apparent hope of repair or reprieve in the future. Janya had been investigating the process and the eejits and the plant itself since The Accident, but had not made much headway – at least no headway that she was telling anyone about. Fabrication was far more ‘natural process’ than ‘mechanical assembly’, and Waffa didn’t even begin to understand it.

He did, however, know how the
interface
worked. That, at least, was astoundingly simple. It was the sort of simplicity that only came with obscene technological sophistication.

The fabrication plant, Waffa had occasionally found himself ruminating, was a great, radiation-poisoned womb capable of producing nothing but abominations. They didn’t
look
like abominations, and sometimes they didn’t even
act
like it … but there was something profoundly, monstrously broken in even the most high-end eejit, something that was not meant to be. And they had absolutely no choice but to keep on printing the poor creatures out, again and again, in the hopes that
this
time, the flaws would be minimal. In the hopes that
this
time, they’d gain a semi-competent crewmember instead of a dangerous liability.