Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (20 page)

Bitterpill was the name of the guiding intelligence behind the border system. This was a bit odd, considering that it was a widely-dispersed and multiple-mechanised-unit-controlling electronic mind assigned specifically to safeguard against
another
widely-dispersed and multiple-mechanised-unit-controlling electronic mind. It had also been quite fast to point out that this irony was not lost on it. It had nodded quietly to them from the nearest buoy as soon as they’d dropped out of superluminal speed, and told them they were entering a dangerous spatial volume and should go away.

When they didn’t, it had declared them “damned fools” and told them to dock with the buoy for final data protocols. By the time they did
that
, the entire sentient crew aside from the Rip had assembled on the bridge.

“Now, considering that you have ignored all my warnings and entreaties,” it added while Decay was negotiating a data upload so antiquated it might as well have been a different language, “if any of you want to stay in the hab while the others go into the Bunzolabe, you’re more than welcome. Consider this an official invitation and final hopeless recommendation.”

“I understand the habitats are not frequently visited,” Z-Lin said.

“We’re between upkeep tours at this point, so you’ll have a wait, I’m not going to lie,” Bitterpill acknowledged, “but the last tour did add a new skullie to the library. I think this one has eating
and
sex in it. You organisms like that stuff, right?”

Bitterpill wasn’t a synth, by its own admission. Unless it was a severely crippled synth. A synth that actively didn’t update itself, routinely switched itself off and wiped vast tracts of its own mind, and basically kept itself consciously sub-sentient as a defence mechanism against infiltration and corruption. Its conversational response structure was on a par with a high-functioning non-synth computer.

This still left it, after almost six hundred years since its commissioning, capable of impressive feats of cynicism.

“We’re nuts about eating and sex,” Zeegon told it. “Just not entirely sure what a
skullie
is.”

“Oh, kids these days,” Decay said mildly from the comms console. “My parents had a home cranial interplex when I was a little one. They didn’t let me use it, there was this myth that it softened the
oolya
bones under the ear … but it’s classic. Old school interactive media.”

“Direct manipulation of the sensory, pleasure and memory centres,” Z-Lin explained, “usually stimulating synaptic pathways to tell stories between one and eight hours in length.”

“My dad told me that back before sleeper pods worked properly, the mind would stay awake,” Decay went on, “and after a few years the sleepers would go weird. So they used skullie tech to keep the brain occupied. Anyway, even skullie scenarios didn’t work long-term, because they only had a limited set of information. So they ended up fixing the pods to lock the brainwaves down completely. And the skullies were kept and adapted as a form of entertainment for the waking world. Which makes them one of the oldest technologies in the Fleet.”

“And you say it has eating
and
sex?” Zeegon mused.

“You’ll need an adaptor patch installed in the back of your skull,” Clue warned. “Molranoid synaptic jiggering would probably just give you a seizure.”

“But would it – and I feel this is a crucially relevant question – be a seizure that included eating and sex at some stage?” Zeegon insisted.

“You might bite your own tongue and get a spontaneous erection,” Bitterpill offered. “Does that count?”

“I guess I’ll have a think about it after we learn more about Bunzo,” he decided after some additional consideration. “Not sure I want to trust a cranial implant to Wingus and Dingus.”

“Not sure I’d trust Wingus and Dingus to implant the eyes on a snowman,” Waffa added.

“That’s a valid point.”

There was nothing in the general vicinity he had decelerated them into. Just the grey stone bug floating in the emptiness, and the sun a distant gleam slightly brighter than the background stars. Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World was well out of sight on the far side of the system. This was an intentional entry gambit on their part, but not one Zeegon could take credit for. It had already been factored into their entry coordinates.

Still, as Bitterpill said, it would be a mistake to imagine Horatio Bunzo wasn’t very close, at every point.

“There’s a pair of long-range hunter-comm satellites about two thousand miles from here,” it told them. “He doesn’t have machinery for every one of the buoys, although I’m sure he could rustle it up if he wanted to. But those sats are capable of sending and receiving data to and from any of the defence-grid buoys within thirty or forty thousand miles of here, and back to Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World into the bargain. That requires some piggybacking, of course.”

Bunzo, it seemed, didn’t regularly try to get out. His last protracted effort had been almost eighty years ago, aside from the occasional data bug that he tried sneaking on board the ships he allowed to leave. But those, Bitterpill said, always got purged.

“I haven’t decided yet,” it said, “whether he’s completely missed the point of data infiltration and time-bomb virals because he’s just not capable of understanding what it means to be a computer, or if he’s generations ahead of us all and the stuff we catch is just a brilliant decoy. For all I know, he’s out there already in every computer system in the galaxy.”

“Well, he’s not,” Janus assured the strange old computer.

“Of course, you’d
say
that,” Bitterpill replied, “wouldn’t you?”

Bitterpill’s non-sentient intellect had been developing, in an emergent sense, from a standard verbal-response model for centuries, but was founded on Fleet standard computing systems of the late 33
^rd
Century. It was lent simple-synapse-level complexity by the big old network of simple but vastly numerous defence computers on the buoys. It also admitted to developing to a certain extent in direct response to the assortment of comm-based exchanges of hostilities it had experienced with the vast entity it was supposed to be containing. That was, after all, one of its primary functions – to develop and learn in order to provide ongoing containment of the brilliant old ghost.

“What have you and Bunzo been talking about?” Janus asked.

“He tells me jokes,” Bitterpill said. “Horrible, horrible jokes, for decades at a time. And occasionally one of them is just a grotesquely descriptive mutilation-fantasy or other perversion, and he seems to be tracking my ability to pick each of these out of the line-up when they come.”

Whye frowned. “That’s all he does?”

“Well, he
can
multitask,” Bitterpill said. “Every
facet
of him has facets, every one of them capable of existing more or less independently and autonomously. He’s more like a synth army than a single computer system. And some of his personality aspects are more autonomous and realised than others. Are you a shrink?”

“Ship’s counsellor,” Janus clarified.

“He’ll like you.”

“Oh good.”

“I initiated contact with a dumbler species once,” Bitterpill continued reminiscently, “did you know? System perhaps two or three light-months from here. They started sending out pings, I bounced back the usual be-quiet routine, and sent a whisper out to headquarters. But it was over a year before they came out anyway, and in that time the little dears had sent this beautiful light-riding vessel. Such heroism. They must have known it was a one-way trip, but they had to meet this wonderful voice from the system next door. They were so excited about not being alone in the universe.

“It really was embarrassing to have to tell them what the Bunzolabe was, and why I was here.”

The crew glanced at each other uncomfortably.

“Embarrassing?” Zeegon felt obliged to ask.

“Well, imagine you’re the sole representative of the first alien culture a group of eager young dumblers ever met,” Bitterpill said. “A huge, ancient machine in dispersed orbit around a nearby star system, just gathering space-dust. So exciting! They see some of the buoys on their deep-space telescopes, they recognise them as artificial, they send a hopeful greeting to the mysterious artefact, and it sends back a deep and thrilling message:
be quiet, you’re not alone, there are dangerous things out here that will hear you and hunt you down
. Well, they’re not going to leave that alone, but to their credit they do stop shouting. Instead they build this marvellous sailing ship, miles and miles of reflective ultra-light sheeting that will pull their intrepid astronauts away from their sun and fling them across the gulf at almost a quarter the speed of light. They must have been experimenting with the technology already, but finding me made them change their focus and accelerate their timetable.

“And then they finally arrive at the artefact, and what do they find? A security fence around an abandoned amusement park. What’s my great cosmic function? Keep kids from wandering in here to drink beer, mostly. Keep them from getting minced up in the gears of the dodgy old hurble-burble.”

“Anything to say about ‘hurble-burble’, old man?” Zeegon asked Decay quietly.

“Quiet, sonny.”

“The three surviving astronauts – one of them had died in a high-speed debris impact that damaged the vessel – ended up stuck on a buoy not far from here,” Bitterpill concluded. “Their ship was too big and flossy to turn around and it lost all its juice, quite aside from the damage it had already sustained. I kept them alive with the standard habitat fare, since by sheer luck they were roughly compatible. They weren’t
well
, by the end, but they were alive. The upkeep team finally came and picked them up, finished their rounds and then took them back to their home system and did the full contact and hush-up properly. I haven’t heard from them since. They probably gave up space as a bad idea.”

They stayed with Bitterpill for another night and a day, preparing for their incursion and examining the defence system’s information upload. Such as it was.

“It’s about eight hours from here to Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World,” it told them, “which is where his power is focussed … but despite what you’ve heard, it would be a mistake to assume he is unaware of things that happen in the wider reaches of the Bunzolabe.”

“We didn’t make any such assumption,” Janya said calmly, “since we know basically nothing aside from what is in your info package.

“And
that
wasn’t very informative,” Zeegon added. “It was just a long series of warnings.”

“I consider the warnings very important,” Bitterpill said, “and you’d be surprised how many people still ignore them. But my point was, while Bunzo’s senses are centred on the planet, his awareness is dispersed among all the mechanisms of the wider Bunzolabe. You will not get to the planet unnoticed.”

“That’s okay,” Z-Lin said. “This isn’t a covert operation. But do you mean we should just head in and assume he knows we’re coming? Or should we announce ourselves and wait to be invited?”

“If you want my advice,” Bitterpill said, “and, you know,
you do
… I would suggest identifying yourself to that pair of long-range hunter-comm satellites I was talking about earlier. While good manners aren’t necessarily a defence,
bad
manners are sure to get you off on the wrong foot.”

“Right.”

“I didn’t tell the sats about you,” Bitterpill went on, “that’s for you to do. But I suggest you do it. They’ll know about you as soon as you enter the Bunzolabe anyway. In fact, I also strongly suggest you take off your big guns and leave them with the buoy. Do you have these new fancy Godfire cannons everyone’s talking about?”

“Yes,” Clue said, “but we’re not considering actually
removing
them. We have some alternatives.”

“And they’re not new and fancy,” Waffa added kindly. “They’ve been around for a long time.”

“Well, worth a shot. My point was, while the sats can act as an uplink and help Bunzo get inside your ship,” Bitterpill went on, ignoring Waffa, “they don’t have the raw destructive power of the orbital parking arrays. But take your ship in with guns, and you’re essentially offering them to him for use. Not that he doesn’t have plenty of his own, but-”

“The
parking arrays
have offensive capacity?” Sally asked.

“Sure,” Bitterpill said. “Back at the start, they were the places where most of the ships were stuck. The ones that didn’t get away clean. Over the years, Bunzo has turned them into munitions factories. It’s all in the data uplink.”

“There was a lot in there about his different personality traits,” Decay said. “It was light on for advice about how to keep them out of our computer systems. Any suggestions there?”

“You’re asking a computer system two hundred years older than anything on board your modular,” Bitterpill noted.

“Have you avoided being infiltrated by Bunzo because you’re out of date?” Decay inquired sweetly.

“I thought I told you,
yes
,” Bitterpill said. “But there’s more to it than that. Part of it is just long agreement, and an understanding that we won’t enter into an arms race with each other. Although like I said, there is a certain learning-and-adapting model by which I function, and Bunzo has advanced in the same way.”

“And that’s part of why Bunzo hasn’t taken you over?” Zeegon asked. The buoy habitat, with or without entertainment, was looking more and more tantalising.

“The rest is related to the fact that if I’m breached, big dumb tanker-ships loaded with exotic matter will fling themselves into this system’s sun,” Bitterpill admitted, “and, if not send it supernova, then at least blast out enough solar flares to fry every piece of machinery from the corona to the Hades line.”

“Why wouldn’t they do that if
we
got in trouble?” Janus asked.

“More to the point, why haven’t they done that already centuries ago?” Zeegon added.