“Uh-huh.” I headed for the stairs. BeeBee fell in step beside me as I descended the sturdy staircase.
And she wasn’t through poking me, either. “Sort of bad form for Lina to invite you to name her baby when you’d made it clear you were hoping to be the father.”
I decided to meet that with a face-saving lie. “You’re exaggerating. I like Lina. She likes me. We mutually decided that ‘like’ was where things should stay.”
We reached the bottom of the stairs and BeeBee continued: “No, Bow, I need you alive.”
I snorted. “For what?”
“To start a revolution.”
“Our first one’s far from done.”
“This one will be against the Nest.”
2: Wine-Dark
People who look back at the Dollganger Revolution often bring up the subject of babies. They ask, “Why, when you had too little personnel, too few resources, did you use the Stork to fabricate babies instead of full-grown warriors?”
Fair question. And my answer, in part, is “That was my fault, and I’m proud of it.”
When we set up the Nest, the universal assumption, among free ’gangers, ’gangers still in human hands, and the humans themselves, was that we would begin rolling burly sociopaths off the assembly line. But at the post-Escape meeting where we formed the Directors, the top level of government of the Nest—consisting of me, Petal, Pothole Charlie, BeeBee, the King, Lloranda, and Ko—I floated the idea that we couldn’t do that. I knew from personal experience that ’gangers who belonged to humans who cared about them were better-rounded and more compassionate than those kept as ill-treated workers or slaves. Dollgangers treated as machines tended to be more brittle in their emotions, more primitive in their dealings with others.
But when humans got something right, they got it right. A family environment, two or more sensible, empathic parents rearing children from a very impressionable age to self-reliant young adulthood, worked. I wanted Dollganger culture to work the same way.
So I proposed a crazy, resource-intensive plan: create children and rear them in a fashion as close to the human process as we could simulate.
Start by finding two ’gangers who want to rear children together. Copy their psychological matrices, pare away characteristics that are the result of life experience, and create a new pattern using elements of both, plus some random factors. This process requires a very complicated set of programs.
Do full-body scans and reverse engineer specifications for the bodies of both parents. Design an adult image for that new ’ganger, based on physical characteristics of both parents, again with wild card factors in the mix and a general leaning toward traits that benefitted survival and community. Regress that image from “adult” to “baby” in order to have a sense of this ’ganger’s growth pattern.
Then engineer bodies for that new ’ganger for four physical ages: infant, child, youth, adult. The designs of the first three include innovations not found in the ’gangers created as adults, including bones that lengthen over time, memory-flexor bundles—muscles—that increase in mass, and so on. This requires careful coordination with the new ’ganger’s internal nanoplant; materials consumed by the ’ganger across a span of years will be reconstituted into those body components.
Put the child, youth, and adult designs on hold. Program the Stork to generate the baby form.
So the new ’ganger would be created as an infant, as helpless and vulnerable as a human baby, and would be in that body for about a year, during which time his or her body would experience growth from newborn to about the maturity of a human two-year-old. Then the baby’s skull, containing the contents of his or her experience and personality, and some other components, such as the nanomaterials plant and spinal nerve system, would be transplanted into the child body. The ’ganger would be in that body for another four years, and during that time would grow and mature to the equivalent of a human of about ten years of age. Next would be a transplant to the youth body, which would take three years to mature to the equivalent of human age 16. Then would come the final transplant to the adult body.
So a new ’ganger would go from infant to young adult in eight years. I wanted the process to take that long to allow the new ’ganger’s emotional development to be a rich and detailed one. Mental development didn’t take that long; our learning rate is so much faster than humans’ that we didn’t have to wait for purely mental processes to mature.
To my surprise, after an appropriate period of debate and deliberation, all six of the other Directors agreed with me, and the measure was met by the Nest’s general population with overwhelming support. I thought I’d been floating a radical notion, but it turned out that almost everyone wanted what I was suggesting. They wanted to be a people, not a corps of fighting machines.
My baby-making plan was only half of a two-pronged tactic. I later proposed the second prong: a dangerous, I’ll admit that, plan to smuggle ’gangers off-world to tell our story, foment Dollganger revolutions elsewhere in colonized space, and gain support for our cause.
Of the Directors, Pothole Charlie was the only one to support my plan. Petal, Ko, and Lloranda responded negatively, almost viciously. BeeBee and the King mostly listened to the debate, contributing little. When the mood of the Nest population was gauged, common Dollgangers wanted nothing to do with the idea—they seemed satisfied to live free, even in a hole in the ground, rather than run more risk to achieve a goal that might not gain them any benefit. Public opinion swung even further against me when a technical and mathematical whiz, Mister Science, distributed his conclusions that a hide-and-reproduce policy was the Revolution’s best chance for success.
So the King and BeeBee voted with Petal, Ko, and Lloranda.
I didn’t give up. I proposed a different plan: smuggle messages onto outbound human ships or gain access to one of the two tanglecomms systems on Chiron to send messages directly to distant worlds. But outbound ships and the tanglecomms units were now the most secure human facilities on Chiron, and that measure was voted down.
I’ll admit I got strident at that point ... and I got voted out of the Directors.
Oh, it was all done very nicely, with thanks for my meritorious service leading up to and during the Escape. But I was finished in Nest politics. Mister Science was brought in to replace me.
And that was that. Babies, yes. Going or sending messages off-world, no.
***
BeeBee and I left the Stork Chamber, taking a Dollganger-sized open rail car, repurposed from a human child’s toy set, to one of the Nest’s exit points. En route, we passed Canterbury, the little city we had collectively built to replace the Warrens, the Zhou City ’ganger habitat that spiteful humans had razed after the Escape. Our rail car took us into the main Canterbury chamber high on one natural stone wall, where we could look out and down on the vista of architecture made from metal storage cans and plumbing pipes welded together as supports, walls made from resinated cardboard, stolen dryplast, or salvage plastic, all of it painted in brilliant clashing designs or realistic images. On building fronts and chamber walls, human-scale computer screens acted as advertising marquees, news tickers, or ever-changing Welcome signs.
I spotted my own home, three stories of innocuous faux brown brick, against the far wall forty meters away. Then our car swept us into another tunnel, half-natural and half-concrete, cutting off the sight of our home city.
Our rail car pulled to a halt at Termite Station, one of a series of small limestone caves, some of them still with dripping water creating stalactites. We exited the Nest at the nearby Gopher Hole, our nickname for a cave barely tall enough to allow someone like Wolfe to walk upright. In the last thirty tunnel meters on the way out, we had to separately open and close metal-mesh gates—loaded with sensors and remotely lockable, they kept insect-sized drones from discovering the Nest. We knew the gates worked because we were still alive.
The surface world just beyond the Gopher Hole was wilderne
ss—temperate forest, lots of oaks, lots of underbrush. It was nighttime; BeeBee told me, “I’m going infrared,” meaning she’d be optimizing her vision for heat emissions, so I adjusted my own optics to light amplification mode. Between the two of us, we’d see as well as any nocturnal predators, including sensor drones operated by humans.
We moved through the forest fifty meters to be well away from the exit. In an earthen nook framed on three sides by exposed tree roots, we finally felt sufficiently removed from possible observers, Dollganger observation, that we could talk.
BeeBee went first. She didn’t use radio, didn’t want even the weakest transmission to be detectable by drones, and she kept her voice very quiet. “What do you think our survival odds are?”
I shrugged. “Excellent ... for the next five minutes. Pretty good for the next five weeks. They deteriorate steadily as our time frame stretches out into months or years. In five years? We’re all dead. The humans ... they want their fabricator back, but most of all they’re eager to put a stop to the Revolution. To keep it from spreading. They have time and resources on their side.”
“But the other Directors disagree with you.”
“Yes, including you.” I tried to keep anger out of my voice.
She nodded. “Yes ... except that I agreed with your assessment.”
“Just before you voted to retire me.”
She gave me a chilly little smile. “That’s because I’m smarter than you, Bow. I knew which way the Directors were going to vote, and how Petal was planning to deal with opposition. Now they think I’m on their side on this issue, and you’re the lone voice of crazy talk—”
“But you don’t actually think I’m crazy?”
“I don’t. But cracking security at the spaceport to smuggle messages offworld or getting at one of the tanglecomms systems will be hell.” She let her sun shades slide down her nose so she could give me an admonishing look over them, pinning me with her red pupils. “You also lost a lot of credibility when you wouldn’t sneak off to visit your beloved former owner and ask him to get a message off-world.”
I gave her a scornful look. “You’re just playing developer’s advocate. If the humans aren’t watching every cubic centimeter of Doc Chiang’s surroundings for fifty yards in every direction, I’m a tin soldier. If I went to him, I’d be picked up for sure, and if I didn’t self-terminate in time, the location of the Nest would be compromised. The ’gangers in the Nest would be exterminated that much faster.” I leaned back, resting the back of my head on my interlaced fingers. “Besides, I don’t think we should try to smuggle a message off-world.”
“You’ve given up.”
“I’ve given up on that.” I leaned farther back against a root and looked skyward. There was a break in the canopy of leaves overhead and I adjusted my vision until I could see like a human at night, giving me a view of the starry sky. “Back on Earth, in the classical era, the Greeks were a great people.”
BeeBee sighed. “Not another history lesson.”
“They sailed everywhere. To trade, to colonize, and to make war. Homer called the Mediterranean the ‘wine-dark sea.’”
“Your point, Bow?”
I did point, gesturing up at the patch of stars. “That’s our sea, BeeBee. Not dark like wine, but black like coffee. And we’re not going to be a great people, even a people with a chance to survive, by ignoring it or by sending messages across it. We have to travel it as freely as the humans do.”
“So you have been thinking about this since you were kicked out of the Directors.”
“I have.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Like I suggested originally, I’d steal a spacecraft. Not one of the little Coracle scouts engineered for us—they’re too obvious a target. Too well-guarded. I’d take a wormdrive-enabled human-scaled ship. And send a ’ganger delegation off-world to tell our story, to raise support, to create controversy. And to get more ships.”
“I agree.”
I glanced at her. She didn’t look like she was humoring or mocking me.
She went on, “So why haven’t you done anything?”
“I couldn’t organize it on my own. After so many years of being an outsider, I wouldn’t know who to trust. I’d try to recruit someone and be in a cell minutes later. The only question is whether the Directors would keep me there or terminate me. I couldn’t ask you—you’d voted against me. Or Pothole Charlie—I can trust him, but only to kill me. I’m alone on this, BeeBee.”
“And yet you spilled your entire thinking to me.”
“Because I haven’t done anything to get me in trouble. I’ve just thought. And because ...” Because what?
Because I desperately needed the help of an insider who could persuade the Directors to back my plan. Even with their backing, I’d need help from someone who knew other skilled Dollgangers well enough to recruit and trust them. I needed BeeBee. It just hadn’t ever occurred to me that she might side with me. “Just because. I have no idea why I’m talking.”
I’d been so distracted by revisiting this subject, so important to me and so impossible to accomplish, that I hadn’t put our current conversation in the context of our earlier one. Now I frowned. “You said ‘To start a revolution’. You were talking about doing this exact thing—doing it behind the backs of the Directors.”
“Correct.”
“BeeBee, if we do this, even if it succeeds, it might make us enemies of the Directors. Sentenced to exile or even death.”
“Uh-huh. And I can tell that you’re in.”
“I haven’t agreed to anything.”
“Do you know what I like about you, Bow?”
“Other than nothing?”
“Other than nothing. First, I know you’ll make your decisions without factoring in personal gain or what the consequences are to you. A result of being an outsider all your life, I bet. Second, I like the fact that you’re as easy to manipulate as putty.”
“Bitch.”
She chuckled at me. “So you’re in.”
I didn’t answer right away. Because BeeBee was wrong.
In the last several months, since the Escape, I’d experienced a change. Sure, the Directors had voted me out, but I was still Jack One to much of the rest of the Nest. Some Dollgangers still hated me for having been a privileged companion of a human, but others now invited me to their social events, into their homes. Not so much into their beds, sad to say. But losing even those tenuous gains, after having had them for such a short time, would hurt. I didn’t know if I wanted to contemplate living on the run with a small band of BeeBee’s friends, most of whom were bound to dislike me as much as she always had.
I sighed. “The War of Sapience Parity.”
“Come again?”
“Do you know how much I hate that name?” And I did. While I was still on the Directors, after a days-long debate of what to call our Dollganger Revolution for historical and official-document purposes, a majority of the others had settled on the War of Sapience Parity. It was saying “human rights for non-human sapient species” in the dullest fashion possible. “If what we do turns into another revolution, I get to name it. No committee.”
She didn’t answer, and I wasn’t looking at her at that moment. Then she did make a noise—a laugh, not her usual chuckle, but something high-pitched, protracted.
I did look at her then. She began laughing so hard she was unable to sit upright; she slumped forward across her legs, shaking. She grew so loud I was afraid she’d bring gate guards from the Gopher Hole or a drone.
Finally her laughter subsided. She pulled her sun shades off; on their inner surface, I could see colored images flickering, since her sun shades acted as a backup monitor for data. She was one of the ’gangers who could cry, and she spent a moment wiping tears away from her checks. Finally she straightened up to look at me. “It’s a deal.”
We shook hands.
She donned her sun shades again but left the optics resting up on her
forehead. She looked at me with her red eyes. “You said you’d been thinking about this. Do you have a plan?”
“Part of one.”
“Tell me.”
That was how Operation Coffee and Cream was set into motion.
3: Lying Well
It was a pretty even division of labor. BeeBee was in charge of recruitment and of supply. I was in charge of tactics and intelligence. In theory we were equal partners—if we couldn’t agree on something, that avenue of planning stalled, so we had to find a way to agree. In practice, I suspected BeeBee had the stronger hand, because she’d be recruiting ’gangers who trusted and believed in her.
We had our first meeting a couple of days after our forest conversation. I chose my home, my secure study, as the location. I prepped it, double-and-triple-checking it to make sure no listening devices could be productively trained on it, no radio waves could penetrate its shielded walls.
This was easy. I’d built my new home to be secure. Over against one concrete wall of Canterbury’s main chamber, it was spacious, for the Directors had granted me a good-sized lot as a reward for being a Hero of the Revolution. I’d welded its frame from the most choice steel struts scavenged from a human-scale heavy-haul trailer. Walls were multi-layered and insulated. The three-Dollganger-stories-tall structure had few windows, and none into the large chamber against the back wall that served as my study. Other features of the room could save my life if Canterbury were suddenly invaded by human forces.
In this room, its walls dark with wood-grain paint and its floor brightened by tan felt carpeting, the dominant feature was a massive circular table. This had once been an irrigation pipe access cover made of cast stone, shaped in the form of the ancient Mayan calendar from Earth, all weird faces, figures, and symbols. I’d used plastic strips to build a temporary rim around it, poured liquid plass atop it, let it harden, removed the plastic strips, attached sturdy legs, and polished the surface to glossy smoothness, resulting in one of the most envied furnishings in the Nest. Now the conspirators of Operation Coffee and Cream sat around it and looked at one another.
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