Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Thompson just barked “Yeah?”, and Carole translated, “Surely that means he’ll make a priority of this case.”

  “There’s no case, Mr Thompson, sir, none at all.” Felorian made desperately conciliatory gestures. “And Aslan’s a spent force, could have been a big shot but got stuck doing charity cases. Our lawyers can beat their lawyers, sir. The moment there’s a peep out of them we’ll slap them with that NDA’s terms so hard—”

  “She’ll talk,” Thompson spat.

  “She doesn’t know enough. And if she does, we’ll destroy her, ruin her. Non-disclosure, Mr Thompson, sir. Take it from me, it’s not a problem.”

  “We should’ve dealt with her.” Now Thompson’s voice was lower, a rough growl, as introspective as he got. The focus of his ire hung up above them, where it might stoop on Carole as easily as Felorian.

  “She was very high profile at the time, sir,” she said quietly. “You thought that might backfire with worse publicity.” Or at least the analyses had suggested that, and she’d fed the idea to him in small words, and he’d run with it.

  “Not so high profile now,” he said. “Call people.”

  “I’ll put a team on standby, sir,” she confirmed, hoping that was all he meant, hoping he wouldn’t tear into her now, tell her to go send the Trigger Dogs.

  “Do you want to see the latest version, sir?” Felorian asked quietly, sensing that his moment under the burning lens of Thompson’s magnifying glass was over.

  Thompson’s head swung round towards him with a grunt. “Latest?”

  “We’ve got a stable framework for you. I’ve a subject ready for demonstration. If you would like.” Felorian made a little handshake gesture, weirdly ritual. “Want to play?”

  Thompson licked his lips. “Play, sure. Show me.” And the storm was past, until the next time. And Carole would be keeping tabs on Ma Lassi and on Aslan Kahner Laika, and she’d keep an open channel to Thompson and Braintree’s legal teams and hope they wouldn’t need the Trigger Dogs.

  *

  They went underground for the next piece of theatre, through three checkpoints and five locked doors. This was, as Felorian always told them, where the magic happened. His step had its spring back, his voice cheery now Thompson wasn’t glowering at him. Even Felorian, Carole thought. Even he, the neurotech genius, the ruiner of human beings, was a slave to Thompson’s moods and rages. He always knuckled under, always found some toy for his boss to play with to divert the anger. In the end, she knew, he would give Thompson the world on a plate, and by then it wouldn’t even be for money or for his career, but because doing what Thompson wanted became an end in itself. The man got into your head.

  Felorian got into your head, too.

  One of the inmates had been brought out, sat in a room the other side of a metal table. He’d been frightened and angry at first, but then they’d activated his headware and run the program, and he’d become quite the different man. Now Thompson was sitting there, talking to him, chuckling a little, a child with a new toy. Boyo was in the corner of the room, ready to intervene if things went wrong, but they never went wrong. Felorian knew his job, no-one better. Carole got to watch from the other side of the room’s mirror, where normally Felorian’s little white-coated minions would take notes. Some part of her could find what she was looking at fascinating. She’d known this was what Thompson was after, obviously, his long-term goal that he’d co-opted so many people to make real. A child’s goal, really. A spoiled child’s, even. Save that was the way Thompson was. A wizard, almost, who could drive a coach and horses through every convention of human society, bend the efforts of other more knowledgeable men to his desires, co-opt a parliament of talents to make the grand, simple, brutal, impossible dream happen; a hundred experts who could do the things he could not, but could never think the way he did. Admirable, in a terrible way.

  “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” Felorian at her elbow, close enough to touch. She went very still, staring down through the one-way mirror at her boss. The doctor inched closer, until the hairs on her neck prickled with his proximity, until her heart jagged in her ribcage, and still she kept her face impassive, just that polite small smile that she’d trained it to relax into.

  “Seeing him lay into me. Getting one up on me, Miss Springer, hmm?” Felorian was slightly shorter than she was, and his face crept into the edge of her vision from the lower right, like the rise of a malign moon. “Are you feeling quite well, within yourself, Miss Springer?”

  She forced herself to look at him, still keeping the doors shut between the way he made her feel and anything that showed on her face. Otherwise she’d snap. Otherwise she’d scream, strike out, run away. “Perfectly well, thank you, Doctor Felorian.” Get away, get away from me, please.

  But he was still there, far too close, his breath on her throat, his eyes touching her bare skin like mosquitos. “Yes,” he said, all those words condensed to that simple residue, and then, after a moment’s scrutiny. “You do seem off-kilter. I’m sorry to see that. You know how much I care about your wellbeing. And I know how important you are to…” And a conspiratorial roll of his eyes behind the empty sockets of his spectacles, down towards Thompson. And then just that “Yes,” again.

  Afterwards, Thompson came out chortling and rubbing his hands. Felorian endured his beaming, said, yes, they were close to ready for the final stage of the project, whenever Thompson was ready to take that step. And they’d destroy the subject, of course, because until they were ready to go live you really couldn’t have that sort of evidence lying around the place. One more convict, one without a mom like Ruthanne Lassi to even care about their wellbeing, one more poor boy lost to the system. One more corpse for the furnaces below Braintree, going to his doom making demands and issuing orders, incandescent that nobody cared.

  “Good, great, good,” Thompson said, pupils still dilated by the power trip of it all, by the imagined goal grown that much closer.

  “I thought you’d be pleased, sir. We really are on the very cusp. About to make scientific history,” and then, because Thompson didn’t care about scientific history. “And all for you, of course. All your idea. Your genius.”

  And if there wasn’t an academic scale that would recognise Thompson as such, Carole still knew it was true, in some way they couldn’t measure, because of how he got what he wanted, how he made other people, even real geniuses like Felorian, parts of his extended person, organs of his body that could make the world the way he desired.

  And then Felorian said, “I think your assistant needs some calibration, Mr Thompson, sir. I’ve been watching her and I do want to check over her headware. I know how much you rely on her.”

  No, no, but Thompson just grunted and nodded, and if he wanted it then she wanted it, because that was how things worked. And she went with Felorian through to his own examination room, that only he got to use. There were cameras in the corners, and the beds were of cold metal, just chill slabs like the place was a morgue. No need for it, of course. Even a cheap doctor’s room would have a thin mattress, a sheet, but Felorian liked his brushed titanium, his surgical steel.

  “You can put your clothes on the shelf there, Miss Springer,” he told her, smile as expensive as it was insincere.

  “It’s just my headware,” she whispered, but he simply repeated the request, same intonation, same smile.

  “You know what your boss wants,” he added. “He wants you to do what I say, because he needs me. He needs you, and he needs me to make sure you’re reliable. He does so rely on you. And so just strip off and get on the table there, won’t you, so I can check out just what’s going on in that pretty head.”

  And she did, because she had to, and the metal was icy against her skin. Felorian set up his machines and linked to her headware, checking it all out, testing the limits placed on her, all those chains he’d built into her when Thompson had first brought her here. And she’d signed the NDA as well, she’d agreed to the waivers, all the legal fic
tions, and she hadn’t known how it would be, she hadn’t known. All she’d known was that the job was good and the money was good and they’d explained that she’d be handling very sensitive information for a very important man and they needed someone who was loyal beyond any question and didn’t she want to be that person…?

  And as his machines did their work Felorian prowled about the table and she felt his gaze on her, not on her flesh, on her bared body, but on the points where she touched the metal, where her fragile substance was flattened against the unyielding mirror finish of the steel. She heard his breathing coarsen at the sight of it, at what got him going: not the human, but where the human and the artificial met, the uncomfortable union of them.

  And in the end, everything in her head was perfectly fine, of course. Working as intended. She was as loyal to Warner S. Thompson as she could possibly be, devoted to him, adored him with all her body. She’d take a bullet. She’d never betray him. Felorian told her all this as she dressed, as she gave him her resting compliance face, as she twisted and raged inside. And she rolled her stockings back up and stepped out of his examination room as calmly as though she’d been visiting her accountant or her bank manager.

  Then they were back in the good doctor’s office as the man reeled off the next stages of the plan, expansive in his self-congratulatory monologuing. Thompson just sat through it, and Carole made notes so she could render it down into the sort of information the man could take in and make use of.

  “He’ll get his.”

  She held herself very still. She was good at that. Felorian was still in full flow, Thompson starting to fidget. The voice was in her ear, a buzzing whisper. Boyo was looming behind her, eyes fixed on the loquacious doctor. His long muzzle was shut, the voice coming from his throat, because of course dog lips and tongues weren’t so good for human words.

  Boyo didn’t talk. Oh, she’d known he could, almost all Bioforms could, but Thompson didn’t like his things to talk. She’d never heard it before, and the voice was so soft, to come from so huge a creature. Soft and thoughtful and sympathetic.

  “The doctor, he’ll get his,” Boyo murmured. “How much he knows, he won’t last. So clever and he can’t see it. Soon, when he’s given what he can, it’ll be his turn. He’s not loyal, like us. Nobody is. And he upsets you. I will do it. Master will send me. I will make the doctor go away, for master. But I will do it for you, too. I am sorry he makes you unhappy.”

  All for her ears only, and it had been a long time since she’d had anything just to herself. Everything else she shared with Thompson, but now she had these words from the Bioform bodyguard, because although he was forbidden to speak, perhaps he’d decided that speaking to her didn’t count. They were both organs of Warner S. Thompson, their lives inextricably shackled to his. They were his inner court, the only ones he could trust. And she kept her face very still and didn’t show anything on it except that slight smile Thompson liked, but she touched Boyo’s arm, very briefly, very lightly, to show she understood.

  6

  JIMMY

  What is it, what has the bitch put in my head? And I’m scrabbling through my little box crammed with tech junk that goes where the crappy little bin should be, only I don’t have room for the box and the bin at the same time so the bin got sent to recycling. I have a scanner here that works on headware. It won’t give me confidential stuff, not actual reading of the data, but it’ll give me an idea what’s active, what’s just storage. Because I thought I was getting some bad guy’s accounts or maybe some particularly nasty porn collection, but all the time I’m going through the box there’s this voice talking to me, all conversational like, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

  “Marten? James? Jimmy, then. Listen to me, you’re going to have to provide me with some fairly wide-reaching information. I have relatively little to go on right now but I’m organising a list of queries by urgency if you could help me out. For example…”

  “How are you in my head?” I yell.

  I guess the thing’s tapped right into my throat mic because it says, “Well yes. Not the highest priority question but certainly in the top five. Perhaps you could enlighten me?”

  “Shut up shut up shut up,” and I know everyone two nooks distant in every direction can hear me, because they didn’t soundproof these things for shit. But then there have been a variety of occasions recently when I’ve been shouting and breaking things and being a bad neighbour, so probably nobody’s going to think this is anything weirder than I’ve run out of Stringer and cash.

  “James. Jimmy, listen to me. This is going to go a lot easier if you simply answer my questions.” The voice started off as fuzzy and flat and artificial but it’s filling out now, like it’s remembering who it is and what it’s supposed to sound like. It was genderless as a robot first off, now it’s definitely a woman. Quite a nice voice, if it wasn’t coming right from the middle of my own damn head. Sort of voice you’d get to tell people bad news in ways that wouldn’t push ’em over the edge. Except right now it is the bad news. Something’s alive in my datastore. Something that should be just dead data has woken up and is yammering in my ear. I find the scanner finally, and then have a crazy fiddle to find charged batteries. I get them at last from this sex toy that my last significant other still hasn’t come back for and boot the damn tool up. The scanner, not the other thing. While I’m doing this, the voice has gone quiet, and for a mad moment I think, It’s gone, it was just a glitch. Or maybe just me hearing things. Because that’s actually so much better than me having a real voice in my head. I pause, listening: blissful quiet. And then the voice says, “Well go on then. I want to see the results as much as you do.”

  I make a little weeping noise and point the scanner at my own head, interfacing it with my ’ware and letting it get a surface picture of what’s going on in there. What’s going on in there is every goddamn thing, apparently. The whole implant’s running at capacity, doing things I didn’t even think it could do. Seriously, nobody ever told me I could run that kind of data load as an active program in there. I’d have been renting it out for far more scrip if I’d only known.

  “This is both alarming and fascinating,” Intruder Woman tells me. “Frankly, it raises more questions than it answers.”

  “Enough from you,” I tell her, meaning myself. “Just shut up. I need to think of what to do.” I’m going through the scanner’s tooltips, because I don’t actually know what the thing can do. I’m not even supposed to have it, just sort of got lost on a job, and since they never docked me for it, I kept it. I don’t think it can tell me much more about my unwanted guest, but maybe there’s something that’s a bit more practical use. I mean, this is the data I’m carrying, isn’t it? Some data-copy of some woman’s head. Maybe she’s a witness to something. Maybe she knows something that important people want to find out, or else make sure people don’t find out until they’re ready. I mean, you’d think they’d just pry the info out of her and then send it as dead numbers, but apparently things have moved on. Apparently back on Earth interrogators are taking copies of people’s entire heads, enough that they can wake up and start going off on one in your ear. But it’s just data. It’s just something I’m holding for Sugar, and taking her money for doing so. So I just need to stuff it back in its basket and sit on the lid ’til Sugar needs it back.

  I bugger about with the diagnostics until I find what I’m after. The scanner’s a multi-tool for headware. It can isolate the ’store from my active systems. That’s all I need. Let the fake computer lady sit in a dark room and think about what she’s done. It’s not my problem. I go through the motions, not knowing if she can watch what I’m doing through my eyes, or even access the scanner through my implants. I’m just making it go with my actual hands on its actual touch display, though, and I don’t reckon it’s got that much connectivity in the shoddy little piece of junk. Shoddy, because I do everything I’m supposed to, but then the voice is still talking to me.
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  “There’s no need for that. Just answer a few questions, and then we can settle down to a perfectly reasonable working relationship.” Now she sounds like a stern teacher. “Let’s focus on how this version of me ended up running on your implant, shall we? Are you a data storage specialist?”

  “What?” I demand of it. “I’m just Jimmy Marten, lady. I am just one of the guys who does the crap jobs here in Hell City, OK? I am no sort of goddamn specialist.”

  “Your data storage facility is remarkably over-engineered for that kind of role,” she notes doubtfully, as though I’ve somehow had a double life all this time only I never told myself.

  “Just the standard model, lady, believe me. Now you just… go back to sleep or whatever, will you. I don’t need this right now.”

  “Let me take a look at you,” she says. I’m terrified by the thought. I have no idea what she even means. Then I start to see that I’m accessing the wider network, pulling up system architecture maps, public safety info, how-to manuals, all the basic crap that’s there for free when you hit the system. Except I’m not doing it. It’s being done through me. I clamp down on all of that nonsense, shutting off my ports and channels, fighting her for them.

  “Quit it!” I tell her.

  “The whole project run across all your heads as cloud computing, is it?” she remarks, quite unfazed by me trying to strangle her access. “Well all right, I suppose, but even for that I can’t see that you’d need such a capacious facility.”

  “Look, you’re just… some copy some bastard sent here to get you out of the way, to put you out of someone’s reach. You’re a… like a saved game. Maybe the real you’s getting her fingernails torn out right now, getting ECT through the nipples, to get her to talk, and they made you in case they took it too far, how about that?”

  “What an unpleasant imagination you’ve got, Jimmy,” she says primly. “You know, I’m still putting it all together but take this from me, I’m not the sort of person who gets sent. If I’m here, it’s for a reason of my own. And apparently I’m going to need your help for it, whatever it is.”