Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man by Andrew Hindle Page B

stockpile in the mass subconscious.
    And the evidence for all these preposterous beliefs, the histories and knowledge of the creatures, was almost utterly conclusive. They had the mental landscape to ‘save’ themselves. They were telepaths without peer. And in several cases, unusually-frequent reincarnations of wartime or otherwise important aki’Drednanth had seemed to live and die and return, apparently knowing exactly what her alleged predecessor had known, being the exact aki’Drednanth her alleged predecessor had been .
    Then there was the fact that, over the past couple of million years, the aki’Drednanth had apparently evolved physically even less than the Molranoids had. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Not if you were building your old body from scratch every time, in the womb.
    Yes, deeper and larger games. And it was the least of which, in Cratch’s opinion, that seemed to get the most muttered, gossiped attention. That was the mystery of how the aki’Drednanth managed to defend their fragile storage supercomputer against the Cancer in the Core that practically coexisted with the Great Ice. Well, that was simple enough – they survived by serving Damorakind, aside from the few hundred aki’Drednanth who stepped out of slavery to join the Molran Fleet, seemingly just out of idle curiosity. They had become the Fourth Species – up until that point, it had only been the three Molranoid species and a whole lot of death and destruction.
    That wasn’t, to Cratch’s mind, particularly puzzling or particularly upsetting. That was simple survival. Something he’d once hoped to learn from aki’Drednanth like Fridge. Brains were interesting. Minds were incredible. He’d once hoped to be the first human to enter the aki’Drednanth Dreamscape. A mind you could step into, figuratively at least … it was hard to imagine anything better.
    Oh yes, he’d dreamed big, back in the day. If you were going to dream, indeed, why not make it big? But that had all been a long time ago. Back before Judon Research Outpost.
    Back before Barnalk High. Where everything had started to go wrong.
    And all of it a series of seemingly random events that had led him here. So, what was the point of it all?
    What indeed?
    Cratch stood, once again, and looked down at a sodden red thing on an examination table. He reflected on how paradoxical life could be, how astonishingly perverse, while still maintaining the flawless illusion of being a completely random series of events governed, ultimately, by subatomic particles moving around one another. He wondered if there was a human Dreamscape akin to the one in which the Dreadnanth waited their turn to be flesh once again – a psychic afterlife that humans were too reckless and crazy and self-centred to control, and therefore to know about. Maybe there was, and all of the deaths, all of the brutality, all of the humourous autopsies and practical jokes in morgues, were just so much bureaucracy. The pointless cataloguing of decomposing meat that the owner of which no longer cared about so why, in the name of all that was holy, did anybody else?
    Ah, well.
    This time, there was no music on the player. This time, he was most certainly being watched. And not just by the bumpers.
    Janya stood in the room between Nurse Wingus and Nurse Dingus. Her own pair of eejits, near-pinnacle specimens who’d actually been given proper names – Westchester and Whitehall – stood behind her.
    Cratch was, for once, sufficiently discomfited as to cause his cheerfully daffy act to drop back a couple of gears to muted affability. Janya Adeneo had the uncanny ability to do that to him at the best of times, and this was an exceptional circumstance.
    He circled the table. About all you could say about this examination sample was that it was smaller than the last one. And had elements of shoe worked into it.
    “Not sure what you want me to look for here, Prof,” he confessed.
    “I’m not a professor,