Bonshoon: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man (6 page)

The planet was swathed not only in rides and games and interactives and robotic and biofab attractions, but every modern convenience and innovation the corporation could bring to bear on the design of an amusement park. From weather control to automated transport to adaptive hotel rooms, Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World had it all. It went beyond mere Bunzolabe Incorporated entertainment and tourism, used every other commercial and industrial advantage the corporation possessed, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the great achievements of human engineering like Wynstone’s Attic and Coriel. And for the next seventy-five years it reigned supreme as the most popular, lucrative, famous and magical place in the galaxy. Even Molren liked it. The Blaren and Bonshooni
adored
it. Every aki’Drednanth to enter the Six Species visited. The world’s specialised aquatic habitats even provided entertainment to Fergunak. And it went without saying that, if you were a human child whose parents had not taken you to the greatest amusement park in the known universe, you were a child whose parents just plain didn’t like you.

Like Wynstone’s Attic, of course, the Bunzolabe and Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World was also a creation of enormous hubris and ambition. And when it fell, it was a fall to shake humanity to its knees.

The real facts behind the case were sealed, confidential by legal acts more powerful than entire planetary governments. That, even before hundreds of years had gone by, was where myth and legend set in. But it had all started with those state-of-the-art computers. The Bunzolabe ran on synthetic intelligence, albeit a primitive and rather restricted variant that was nevertheless highly advanced for its time. Especially for human work. Bunzolabe Incorporated were majority shareholders in many of the Wile Empire industrial complexes responsible for such work, and Horatio Bunzo saw to it that the cutting edge of computing power and capability went into the giant processing cores of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World. These were some of the first cortices of modern synthetics.

When Horatio Bunzo died at the end of the golden age of the Wild Empire, the popular conspiracy theory ran that his body had been successfully stored in a Molran sleeper pod, the first human to successfully achieve the sleeper state. There, he would rest until some future date when old age could be reversed – Bunzo had been a spry one hundred and forty-six years young on his death – and his joy and wonder could be returned to the galaxy.

The truth was a little more unsettling. Horatio Bunzo had long been fascinated by the elusive plum of immortality. One of the more esoteric charter bullets on the exploration writs provided by Bunzolabe Incorporated, and which Rachael Herschel and her crew had been operating under all those decades ago, was the search for the Fountain of Youth. Bunzo had never found
that
, but the technology investments made by his company provided a comparable possibility.

Before his death, Horatio Bunzo had successfully converted his consciousness into electronic format, dispersing his neurons into an artificial network occupying the majority of the excessive subterranean cortex-space of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World. It was a slow and difficult process, but it was successful. Horatio Bunzo became the first human – indeed, the first known non-aki’Drednanth – to successfully disincorporate himself and ascend to a functionally-immortal virtual substrate. Even if returning to a flesh body was currently beyond the technological reach of human beings, he now had functional immortality in a body the size of a small city-state.

Success, and celebration, was short-lived.

What they ended up with in the deep vaults of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World was not a synthetic intelligence. But it was not a living thing, either. It was not the happy ghost in the machine anyone had been expecting, the loved and loving public persona of Horatio Bunzo writ large into the planet’s machinery and – inevitably – the greater apparatus of the Bunzolabe solar system. It was not the father of Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World, galactically-adored folkloric character and originator of entertainment and joy and frivolity. It wasn’t even the shrewd and ruthless one-and-a-half-century-old businessman who had built Bunzolabe Incorporated with his own two hands and defended it against takeovers and lawsuits and the inexorable tide of human cultural shift ever since.

It was a bubbling stew of aggression, fear, rage, and pathological hatred. It was the pinnacle of a million years of an evolution defined by starvation, predation, rape and murder. An evolution where the primary motivator was kill or die.

It was, in short, the raw subconscious mind of a human being, with all of its biological and cultural limitations and its mere single lifetime of behavioural controls stripped away. Taken out of its frail flesh cage and dispersed among a solar-system-sized network of drones, robots, security and monitoring systems, satellites, communications networks and supercomputers.

And he
was
dispersed. Overnight, Bunzo expanded beyond his huge underground containment hubs on Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World as if the feeble firewalls didn’t even exist, worming his way into every cell and circuit and process throughout the Bunzolabe system. He was impossible to extract and destroy, because he was
in everything
. And once he was firmly entrenched, he locked the secret laboratories and computer cores down and incinerated the data so no other human could repeat the process. Then he incinerated the scientists and researchers into the bargain.

And then he emptied Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World.

Security systems, weather control, transportation and all the advanced robotic technology turned suddenly murderous, driving the organics out of the Bunzolabe like the infestation, the infection, they had become. Hundreds of millions were killed, although most managed to escape. And Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World closed its doors, never to open them again.

There were attempts to recover the world and its priceless infrastructure. There were attempts to destroy the entire Bunzolabe. There were even attempts to treat with the uploaded human consciousness that had once been Horatio Bunzo, to reason with him and arrive at some sort of peaceful accord. The embryonic synthetic intelligence of the human Wild Empire and the joint Six Species failed, or refused, to establish any type of foothold in the Bunzolabe. It was, in the synth’s own words, an irretrievably corrupted volume of virtual and physical space. If people insisted on entering the region, the accompanying synth would deactivate its hubs and curl up into standby mode in order to protect itself from whatever contamination Horatio Bunzo and his innumerable neuroses and personality-facets happened to present. This was if the synth let them enter at all. Sometimes it stopped people for their own good.

And no large-scale attempt on behalf of biological sentience to infiltrate the system ever succeeded. In fact, it never ended in anything less than a nightmarish slaughter that was only enhanced by the fact that it was taking place against the backdrop of a first decades-abandoned, then centuries-abandoned amusement park controlled by an immortal, psychotic clown. Small, non-violent infiltrations were
sometimes
successful to varying degrees, but invariably resulted in horror stories that served to feed the growing body of mythology.

Horatio Bunzo was not a man, he was not a machine, and he was not a synth.

Horatio Bunzo was a God.

Eventually, and for the past six hundred and eighty-one years, the Bunzolabe was sealed and restricted. By firm and currently open-ended legal convention and treaty, human experimentation with mind-state conversion and upload had ceased. The human race had given up – at least as far as anyone was telling, and right up to the present day – on the idea of synthetic immortality, just as the Molren had before them. Whether this meant there were similar horrors lurking in the distant past of the greater Molranoid super-species, somewhere off towards the Fleet’s well-hidden origin point, nobody knew. All anyone was sure of was that the technology, in both its prototype form and with all the developments that had taken place since, simply
did not work
. And while it was tempting fate and courting disaster to tell a human that some things should not be meddled with, this seemed to be a lesson the human race had taken to heart, just this once.

There was really only one reaction, as far as Contro was concerned, to finding out you were going to a place like that.

“Yay! Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World!”

GLOMULUS (THEN)

The brig of
Astro Tramp 400
, as the crew rather charmingly called the battered modular, had cells that were about fifty feet by thirty. Spacious to the point of luxury, by prison cell standards, to be sure. And yet even the most comfortable cage became ever more noticeably a cage, the longer you lived within its walls.

Glomulus Cratch had been living here – no, not living:
languishing
, that was a great term, because it had
anguish
right there in the middle of it and even if you didn’t know the word was there, your
mind
did – for the past four years and eleven-and-a-half months. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to get rather excited to see what his jailers would come up with to celebrate his having spent half a decade in ‘prisoner transit’ since his apprehension on Judon. Any excitement was a blessing, he supposed.

He’d asked, perhaps three months back, whether there was a record for prison sentences served in a modular brig. Apparently it was nine years, served by a notoriously unlucky convict whose prison transfer orders had been misfiled not once, not twice, but seven times, requiring him to bounce excruciatingly slowly back and forth across the inhabited worlds of the Six Species in the same ill-fated starship before finally arriving at his destination. Surely, Glomulus thought, after that sort of ordeal you were entitled to a lighter sentence, or an extra fabricator ration, or a T-shirt.

Seriously, the uniform you had to wear as a mandatory guest of AstroCorps hospitality, it was ridiculous. Standard Corps one-piece with no accessories, but made from the lowest-grade material capable of coming out of a printer and staying in one piece, and coloured a glaring diagonally-striped green and white? With his complexion it made him look like a giant peppermint.

Still, five years was a milestone. They had to give him
something
. Maybe they’d finally admit they had no intention of ever handing him over to the AstroCorps authorities, let alone returning him to Aquilar, and that they were just tootling around space looking for some convenient way to get him killed and his carcass dumped into the recycling system like an eejit that accidentally opened his own head in the lander bay lifting gear.

There were eight cells in the brig area. The cells were arranged into a grid, four on a side, with a broad corridor running in between. Each cell contained a bed that doubled as a cleansing pod that in turn doubled as a toilet, its water and gas inlets and its waste outlets alike molecular-scale microtubes running through the solid crete-mass. Like the atmosphere feed in the ceiling, it was porous but impenetrable unless you happened to be capable of turning yourself into a gas. Glomulus Cratch, patently and regardless of what the more sensationalist media sources might have said about him, was not.

It was all very secure, and very efficient. It was also more than a little nasty. In AstroCorps starship brigs, the old adage about not shitting where you slept became something of a dark joke. This, Glomulus had come to believe, could only be intentional.

He smiled, turning his attention back to the Molran – Blaran, technically – standing outside his cell. It had been talking for a while and was now waiting expectantly.

“Please, tell me again,” he said, settling back on the bed and crossing his legs. Aside from the bed, there was a small desk at one end of the space and a screen on the wall at the other. The bed also doubled as a chair, although the length of the cell left a broad empty space between him and the screen on those rare circumstances when the screen would switch on. Prisoners were supposed to use that space to exercise, and the brig had a number of other features and articles of equipment that could be placed in the cells, but Cratch was eligible for none of them. And exercise really wasn’t his thing.

The wall behind Glomulus’s back was solid crete, the one opposite him – the one facing onto the corridor, naturally – dominated by a transparent flux observation panel set in a thick crete frame. The desk bore a single sheet of senso-flimsy that was Glomulus’s sole possession and sole entertainment. The distant wall-screen was inactive, operable only by outside command and, so far, only on very special and non-entertainment-related occasions. These occasions, as one might expect, were usually frighteningly dull.

General Moral Decay (Alcohol) stood on the other side of the broad transparent panel, conducting its –
his
, Glomulus corrected himself wryly – periodic between-meals inspection. Making sure the prisoner wasn’t stockpiling the mushy printed food supplements he was given or the flaky soluble plates and spoons he was given them on. The crew slipped a steaming, already-soggy plate through the metaflux three times a day, and that had been his diet for the past one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen days, give or take.

Not that it did much good to stockpile anything. The food dried up into a papery pat that Glomulus suspected was what the plates were made of, and it all dissolved and vanished into the waste run-off like everything else. You couldn’t cut someone with it, brain someone with it, and as for digging one’s way out with it? Laughable. The walls were reinforced crete, even with the technically porous incoming and outgoing feeds. And the observation plate was effectively the same stuff they made starship viewscreens out of, with a few fancy tweaks to enable bidirectional transparency and mono-directional permeability. You had to be careful not to push the plate too far in and get your fingers stuck, because there was no pulling back – many a time Glomulus reminisced happily about the early days after The Accident, when all the qualified corrections personnel but Sally were gone and almost every meal involved a full emergency lock-down while they pushed the hapless server the rest of the way through the panel and then opened the door to let him back out.
Totally
worth the cold meal and dissolving plate that invariably resulted … but as amusing as the observation screen was, there was also no digging through it.