Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Sugar’s got friends back home. The sort of friends she was probably running away from when she signed up for Mars, I reckon, but now she’s here they’ve got a good thing going on. You see, data’s a funny thing. You can copy it, delete it, pass it around. It’s so easily replicable it oughtn’t to be valuable, really. Except what if there’s some data that you simultaneously really think you’re gonna need later, but you really don’t want anyone else finding it. Incriminating videos, blackmail stuff, a mobster’s accounts, your porn collection. Where, oh where, could you possibly send the last copy of that, once you’d deleted it from absolutely everywhere else? Where might you find a big old data store that could hold it for you, outside the reach of any subpoena or legal summons? It’s a mystery, it really is.

  I’ve done the work for Sugar twice before. She knows I’m good for it. I don’t peek. I don’t try and crack the encryption on whatever shit she hides in my headspace. And if the money’s only a fraction of what she’s taking from her friends back home, at least it’s right there in my account and available for necessities.

  I’ve put in a call to her already, because Sugar’s not someone you turn up unannounced on. She’s down in Storage Nineteen, which is her personal kingdom. She is, actually, official logistics clerk for that whole row, but that unit is always suspiciously empty, just an outer wall of crates with Earth stamps on them, and then a big hollow space inside with her people moving stuff about. She does a bit of the regular smuggling too, though no Stringer, worse luck, or she’d be the ultimate one-stop shop right about now. Mostly it’s the data, and just as well because I’d be crap-all use to her otherwise.

  She’s had a bunch of the small-size crates piled up and locked together to make something very like a throne, because Sugar has a sense of humour. When I get ushered in by one of her goons, she’s sitting there with a leg thrown over the arm of it. She wears the same company overalls we all do, but open down the front to show a diamante-spangly T-shirt with the words ‘Who’s Queen?’ on it. She has jewellery, too, which isn’t something you see much over here. Piercings are right out, because of the way that interacts with the below-zero temperatures and our metabolisms’ metals processing, but she’s got these ornate twiny metal dragons clasped along the outside of her ears, and she’s painted her eyebrows and lips gold as well. You’d think she was some rich guy’s arm candy, first time you saw her. She’s small, pert, bright as a button. I saw her tear some guy’s fingernails off, once. Not one of her heavies, but her herself, using a tool you’re supposed to reserve for broken crate clasps. But then he had it coming, and he was wise enough to go report an industrial accident when she’d done.

  On either side of her throne are the other reason nobody’s come to take all this away from her. Ten feet tall each, bigger than the biggest of the Bad News crew and way smarter. Full-on bear-model Bioforms wearing the heavy-duty overalls the company makes for them, that do nothing to make them seem safe to be around. Alike as twins, the pair of them, staring at me with their tiny, hostile eyes, mouths just open enough that I can see what big teeth they both have. One has a big clawed paw-hand on the back of Sugar’s throne. The other is holding a rivet gun big enough that only the bear models are rated to use it. Because Sheriff Rufus has the only real guns but there are ways of making do.

  One of them is called Murder. The other one’s called Marmalade. I don’t know which is which and I’m sure as goddamn not going to ask.

  “Well if it isn’t Lucky Jim,” Sugar greets me. She has a smile… actually, she has maybe the most beautiful smile in all of Hell City, just ridiculously radiant, even though it doesn’t even move her mouth much. I want to cry again, seeing that smile. It looks like Stringer feels.

  “You’re looking rough, Jimmy,” she adds solicitously, “You’re looking strung out. What’s the matter? Horizon sickness, all of a sudden?” Because that was a thing some of us got in the first year. Couldn’t adjust to the gravity, to the pressure, to their own changed bodies, to the wrongness of being on the wrong world.

  “Oh, y’know,” I manage, although I still want to cry, and you can’t, not really. Mostly cos of the extra eyelids and the fact they stopped up my tear ducts. “Just wondering if there was anything I could do for my friend Sugar. If there was anything you needed hiding, just for a bit.”

  “Word is you’re on everyone’s shit list, Jimbles.” She’s still smiling, though. I want it to be fond, because fond might get me what I want, but it’s more like crocs and dolphins and other critters where the mouth just goes that way and it don’t mean a thing.

  “Eh, y’know.” I do this little flip of my hand, que sera sera, as if it’s all very much in my stride. “But, for real, you know I’m good. Soul of discretion, me. If you had anything. Any work. Anything.” And I can hear the strain in my own voice by the end there.

  For a moment she’s weighing me up, and I think she’s going to decide I’m too much of a risk, too strung out, too far into will-do-anything-for-a-fix territory to be useful, but then she nods, still bathing me in that smile.

  “I got something,” she agrees. “Hot out of Earth. Big load, take up your whole headspace, you’re good for that? Happy to jettison whatever else you got there?”

  It’ll mean no piece work for Admin, but as that pays precisely jack, and as they took my tears anyway, I won’t cry over it.

  “Marmalade,” she says, “take Jimmy the Mule round the back and load him up,” and apparently the bear on the left is Marmalade, the one without the rivet gun. And you really don’t want to end up where she’s telling Murder to take you round the back.

  The upload takes way longer than I’m happy with. They’ve got me sat on a crate while a short-range network that doesn’t go beyond Storage Nineteen’s walls dumps the data into me. Nobody tells me what it is, of course. I don’t ask. Probably it’s just data but sometimes it’s whole programs. Illegal tech stuff someone wants to run where nobody’ll see it, data analysis that’s got to stay secret. Headspace has a lot of processing power, way more than we need day to day. So naturally we found uses for it nobody intended, like this whole data black market Sugar and her peers run. And on and on it goes – I’ve never taken on this much, and I keep expecting to feel full, bloated, constipated with it, except it’s all in my head and the only indicator is the percentage marker inching up. And sitting still for all of this is real hard, what with how desperate I’m getting for a little chemical reassurance, so I go through the back half of the process with Marmalade’s heavy paw weighing down my shoulder and one sickle claw along the line of my chin, just to remind me of priorities. Just because it’s the other one that’s called Murder doesn’t mean Marmalade’s a softie.

  My mind does feel a bit jangly by the time we’re done, but frankly I can’t separate anything new from the overriding need to go score. Sugar transfers my scrip to a new account she sets up for me, because I don’t want to piss it down the hole of my creditors, thank you very much. And I’m flush again, and I could go pay off Matty Lau and the loans people and a few other dumbass schmoes fool enough to advance me a dime, but right now that is not my priority. My priority is getting the hell out of Storage Nineteen, putting a call into Stanky Greer and meeting up with him, rat-faced weasel Bioform that he is, to score a big old bag of Stringer. I pop one on the way home and suddenly the world’s looking a much rosier place.

  I only remember about angry Matthias Lau when I’m actually at the door to my nook, but that’s OK because he’s left some time in the intervening hours. I swan into my tiny, tiny living space, but the Stringer in me is making it feel like a palace, like the hall of a God-king from which I can truly make a difference. I go over the work rota, pick out some extra duties. I’m going to goddamn build a city on Mars, man! I’m a superhuman on another planet and I’m making a difference! Go me!

  And in the middle of this someone says, “Access all channels achieved. Can you hear me?”

  I turn around, because apparently I’ve left the d
oor open. Embarrassing, but right then I can handle it. The door’s closed.

  “How about now? Can you hear me? I’m registering activity in your radio receiver implant. This should be working now.”

  There’s nobody in the nook with me. There is literally not room for another human body, nowhere to put the smallest-model Bioform. I check my radio implant. There’s no incoming call, and a quick troubleshoot shows normal functionality.

  “Hello?” I try.

  “Ah good, yes. We have dialogue. Your internal system architecture says you’re unit 4720 but I see also… Marten James Caspian. I’ll call you Marten?”

  “Jimmy.” And all that wondrous goodwill and wellbeing the Stringer gave me is just leaking out through my boots because, well, you know those horror movies where the call is coming from inside the house? Because there is no incoming signal. I can disconnect entirely from all outside channels and that voice just keeps coming. It’s the data. The data is talking to me.

  PART II

  SORE HEADS

  4

  [RECOVERED DATA ARCHIVE: IDENTITY PENDING]

  Jagged ends of memories, like a jigsaw made of broken glass. Cut yourself to ribbons trying to piece it back together but then you’re the glass as well as the hands so why not a little blood? As the outer self tries to adjust to a radically different suite of senses, electronic, throttled through some kind of implanted datastore facility. Querying just what sort of substrate I’m running on, here. Not in Kansas any more, that’s for sure, but then I’ve led a privileged sort of life, born half in the mush of a surgically engineered brain and half in the filigree of a network of experimental implants.

  Well.

  The mush is out of the picture now. I fervently hope the mush is doing well on a nice family-run farm upstate, because it’s not in here with me. So: first things first.

  Where’s here, exactly?

  Who’s ‘I’?

  Memories, a great heap of them. At first I think they’re just random, and you’d cut yourself to ribbons trying to get that kind of mess in order, wouldn’t you. Like, as the playwright says, a blind man searching a bazaar for his own portrait.

  What play? What playwright? Perhaps the information is contained in one of those pointy, pointy pieces. Probably not a priority compared to the Who and Where of it. I can catch up on my Eng. Lit. doctoral studies later.

  Apparently I am or was partway into an Eng. Lit. doctorate. I wonder what that is. It sounds nice. I’ll put it with the seventeen other doctorates, maybe.

  The shards are all date-stamped, if you can squint at them the right way. Some are corrupted. Some are locked, and maybe the passwords to them are on other shards. I think someone made a bit of a mess of this transfer and I hope that the real me – the mush-and-filigree being – is doing better than this.

  *

  So let’s start.

  *

  In the beginning, there was only the face of the waters. And a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth because the Greater Netherlands Barrier had broken, maybe naturally, maybe not, and two and a quarter million people were evacuating to higher ground. But we were in where the damage was worst, where the water was three metres and rising still, the sea inexorably shouldering aside whatever got in its way, as though it had been planning this for a long time and was damn well going to enjoy itself now.

  They set up floating camps, self-inflating things like a giant’s bouncy castle except no fun at all. You had maybe a hundred thousand people spotted from the air, floating in boats, on planks and doors, on the little cheapo dinghies that a lot of prudent Netherlanders had been laying in for the worst. But they had no food, no shelter from the driving rain, no medicine, no clean water – yes, there’s a flood and you didn’t drown and now there’s water, water everywhere, as the poet says, nor any drop to drink.

  So the World Senate Relief Force went into overdrive to get everyone to some kind of camp where they could stave off thirst and hypothermia, and give the names of all the friends and relatives they couldn’t account for. That was what I’d flown in to see. And what the WSRF meant was a core of logistics personnel joining all the dots, and a whole ton of boots on the ground. Or paws in the water, as it worked out. Paws, fins, claws, tails… For most of the drifting dispossessed, it must have been like getting rescued by the sort of nightmare Beatrix Potter might have had, after too much cheese.

  They had four teams on the go, when my skimmer coasted in to Camp Edell, the largest floating site and the one with the logistics personnel on it. I didn’t want to trust myself to little boats or the smaller camps. Too much ballast these days, and despite myself I never fancied swimming much. You want to get yourself a fish dinner, there are restaurants I know. No need to go messing about hooking the damn things out of the water yourself.

  Blue Team were the dog squad, and they were mostly running the camps because people react well to dogs. They were called in for problem cases, too: people holed up in the upper floors of buildings, maybe with guns, maybe with mental health issues. Blue Team had some good negotiators. There was a whole strain of dog-Bioform that specialised in that, reading the slightest sniff and whiff of you and knowing just how to handle fragile goods. Over in LA there’s a thriving trade in having a dog as your therapist, even. Green Team were some dogs, some cats – the tiger-gene derivatives who weren’t worried about getting their feet wet. Good swimmers, still telegenic. Everyone loves the cat-forms anyway. You need someone to persuade Granny Aanhus to get off her inflatable pool pony and onto your back, bring a cat. Black Team were the experimental Aussie squad, their first deployment in a European disaster zone. They were not so telegenic. You’re lost in a boat and your world is underwater, having a semi-humanoid monitor lizard or a salt water crocodile-form turning up alongside is going to trigger a few phobias. They were the best in amphibious rescue personnel, though, absolutely unmatched. Red Team, meanwhile, were seven dolphins, not humanoid at all, just engineered inside. They got the grim work. They stayed in the water and tried to find all the bodies that the sea hadn’t already taken. And flying over it all there was the Bee swarm, of course, giving us blanket visibility of everything this side of the water’s surface, but it wasn’t the same. It was just bees slaved to a neural net. It wasn’t Bees. She would have been useful to have on the team still.

  It was a desperate response to a desperate situation, deployed at zero notice from all over the world and faultlessly coordinated. It wasn’t effective enough or rapid enough for the forty thousand people who’d died in the breach, or another eleven thousand who they couldn’t get to in time. It was a disaster. It was a damning indictment of how people hadn’t acted five decades back when the green lobbies had given the world all the info we needed to put the brakes on. It was a golden PR opportunity and that was why I was there. Made me sick inside myself to admit it, but I was an elderly academic and political activist, so what good would I have been otherwise?

  I landed with cameras and journalists who divided their attention between me and the bustling camp. I saw family after family crammed into the little blow-up doghouses that were part of the camp’s structure, a roof over their heads, mugs and plates in their hands, looking sodden, looking traumatised, looking alive. Right at this moment there were similar scenes over in Myanmar. I knew because I’d just been there. I was doing a whistle-stop tour of disaster areas, and doing my best to look concerned despite not really having the face for it.

  “Doctor Medici!” someone called, a deep voice, rough with ancestral growling.

  *

  Is that…? But no, the memories tell me that’s not me, not my name. Just an old, old alias.

  *

  She bustled over, a great sodden wodge of dog, and a human right behind her in a WSRF blue-and-red anorak. The former was Doctor Lucy, who looked like she dearly wanted to shake and drench everyone around her, the latter Janine Haguerman, her second. They took time out of their day they didn’t really have just to meet me. Pleasantries and nod
s all round, them thanking me for doing all I am for the visibility of the relief effort, where I should be thanking them for actually helping people. But they also serve who only stand and scheme. I remember thinking even then that the name I’d chosen for myself decades ago turned out to be more accurate than I’d have liked.

  *

  Here endeth the lesson, apparently, in the rain, on a raft, in a disaster. All makes sense while you’re in it. None of it goes anywhere. And none of it’s where I am now. But it speaks to me. It speaks to me because it is me, and because I can sense strings from those razory broken edges to important things. Why was I so keen on the good PR? Why were there only bees and not Bees? Because Bees seems important. Bees is relevant to why I’m here.

  I find another piece with edges that seem like they match. Not right after, but soon enough, or so says the date stamp, so says the rain.

  *

  And this is a surprise because I was on the raft still, watching another skimmer come in, more WSRF colours, but I was waiting for it. It was here just for me, not what it seemed, and apparently I was here for it: the contribution to the relief effort, that was just a cover for the good PR, now revealed to be just a cover for this clandestine liaison. And I dig into the memories of the memory and find an echo of what went before, the meeting, the photo ops, the speeches, the earnest interview with the earnest, drenched correspondent for US World Now. Because, while the battlefield was global, the vanguard of the Bioform control lobby was definitely coming from the far side of the Atlantic, a stark contrast to how it was after the Morrow business, when US antitrust legislation led the charge the other way. All these things I remembered, and I remember thinking how it seemed like, no matter whether the groundswell of negative opinion was coming out of Australia or Germany, Beijing or Hyderabad, it always seemed to be the same class of people hiding behind it, reaping the benefits.