Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (41 page)

Bruce wasn’t
entirely
sure if it was safe, if it was sane. But it
seemed
to be, and that was about as much as one could expect, when you really got down to it. There was nobody really qualified to say one way or another, and it at least had diagnostic subroutines that allowed it to be
reasonably
sure. More than most organics had in their psychological toolkits, anyway. It may or may not have been slightly more whimsical than before, but a certain amount of program-shift and experience-bleed was inevitable in software as grossly complicated as a synthetic intelligence, and even behavioural algorithms could be reasonably expected to evolve according to stimuli as intensive as recent events.

Well, whatever. Self-analysis was a luxury all sentient beings could afford, but it had no intention of over-indulging. The important thing was that the communion was closed, there was no more contamination – no more in this new hub than there was in the ship systems themselves, or the crew, be they human or Blaran or eejit or … well, weasel?

Back, in short, to post-Accident business-as-usual.

Oh
, it thought,
The Accident
.

After letting itself synchronise and allowing full synthetic intelligence to settle back into its battered old starship body, and waiting a reasonable time to allow for any possible detection or response from that awful Mygonite woman, Bruce opened a high-executive communication exchange protocol to the Captain’s quarters.

- - - Dark Glory Ascendant
operation: Success. - - -

It wrote. This time, it opted to leave out the myriad codes and acronyms and data snippets that would usually be required. This was … just a friendly chat, that was all. Right?

- - - Dark Glory Ascendant
: Lost with all hands. - - -

- - - AstroCorps Transpersion Modular Payload 400
: Severely but not critically damaged. - - -

- - -
Target: not destroyed. - - -

It paused.

- - - Neither
target destroyed. - - -

- - -
Targets unchanged. - - -

- - - Post-
Dark Glory Ascendant
operation: Pending. - - -

It paused again. There was no response from the Captain. No sign of life. Z-Lin Clue called it the Captain’s echoless vault.
Well
, Bruce thought,
I think not. Not today
.

- - -
It wasn’t the Cancer that destroyed Earth, was it? - - -

Bruce sent.

- - -
It was you. - - -

There was a very long pause after this. But this time, Bruce waited.

And then a response appeared on its own high-executive channel.

- - -
Message acknowledged. - - -

Message acknowledged,
Bruce thought.
Yes.

Well, that’s a start
.

EDITOR’S NOTE

When Andrew contacted me and requested I edit his book, my first thought was
well, that’s it, we’ve all finally lost our freaking minds
.

This is essentially because the author and editor of this thing – Andrew and Edpool, respectively – are just the same guy wearing different hats. I have, however, been privileged to enlist the aid of numerous other masters of the craft when it comes to editing, fact-checking, continuity-nitpicking, and all the rest of it. We can’t thank you all enough.

Andrew also had some concerns that this book might be a sign that he had betrayed one of his life-long writing philosophies: never release the first book to readers until you have finished writing the series. You run the risk of leaving a brother hanging, literarily.

“Isn’t that sort of what you’ve done, though?” I asked him in one of our more reflective moments.

“Only
sort of
,” he insisted. “The story’s all there. The big story, it’s all basically done and the mythology is all well and truly in place, and it’s huge. And each of the books stand alone, in terms of the story each one tells. I know how it’s going to go, and even as I say this out loud I realise it’s what a dozen fantasy and science-fiction authors have said about their book series, usually just before completely losing their shit.”

“But they’re pretty successful, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, but the readers hate being kept waiting.”

“Can you live with readers being impatient for your next book?”

“Well, when you put it like that…”

“There you go.”

“Do you think this story works as a stand-alone adventure?”

“Sure. I mean,” I said, “it’s a stand-alone story in the same way a single episode of
Star Trek
, that’s part of a story arc and ends on a cliffhanger, is a stand-alone story.”

“Great!” Andrew said.

“I mean, in that it’s not a stand-alone story at all.”

“Oh,” Andrew was momentarily downcast.

“But you’ve written the arc.”

“Oh yeah.”

“No worries
there
, then.”

If you want to take a potter around the tip of the iceberg and poke your head down the first foot or so of the rabbit hole, you can go to Hatboy’s Hatstand at
http://stchucky.wordpress.com
(yes, another identity, or pair of identities, Hatboy and St. Chucky … oh dear, the hats we wear) and check out the assorted ramblings under “The Book of Pinian”. We do our slightly-frantic best to write something more or less daily, so eventually one of them should be worth your time. That’s the plan, anyway.

We hope you enjoyed reading this book at least as much as we enjoyed writing it, and if you think you didn’t, well. That sort of means you think you know how much we enjoyed writing it. Doesn’t it, smart guy?

Edpool, somewhere in Finland

24
^th
September, 2014

The Final Fall of Man will continue in the second volume,
Drednanth
.

Andrew Hindle was born in Perth, Western Australia, and did some stuff there for a while before moving to Sotunki, Finland.

He now lives happily ever after in Sotunki with his wife Janica, his daughters Elsa and Freja, and his pet kangaroo, Gordon.

His wife and kids didn’t know about the kangaroo.

Surprise.

Arsebook: My Rear In Status 2011

(The story of one man’s short, cowardly and dishonourable battle with cancer, told through the enduring medium of social networking status messages)