But back to that moment.
*
“You’re looking well.” That was John Aslan, coming out with the usual pleasantries.
“I’m fifteen years past my use-by date,” I told him. “I’m looking miraculous, frankly.” I had a good voice back then, female, pleasant, authoritative, good for academic meetings and talk shows. It’s one I’ve done my best to reproduce in Jimmy’s ear but the fidelity isn’t what it could be.
Then Laika came out to say hi, grinning and lolling. She was the first Bioform to become a partner in a New York law firm, though the US was lagging behind nineteen other jurisdictions by that time. Laika wasn’t even a rights specialist. She did mediation and matrimonial disputes, mostly, anything about finding the middle ground both parties would accept, and her settlement rate was nothing short of uncanny. And of course she wanted to meet me, because in the Bioform world I was a celebrity. I was the one could play the human game enough to debate the bigots; I had the political and media connections to shine a light on the creeping injustices that seemed to be everywhere. I even got an invite to a White House dinner once, though that was years before and under a different administration.
After Laika had gone to meet her clients, Aslan and I retreated to his office where he had coffee and dried fruit out for us both. He slid the desk into the wall and sat on the floor with me, with only the slightest wince.
“I was sorry to hear about David, by the way.” More pleasantries, from me this time.
“He had a good run,” Aslan said. His long-time professional partner hadn’t lasted more than two years after retirement. “He was a good man. Better at the face-to-face work than I’ll ever be.”
“Are we expecting another guest?” I asked, because he had a third cushion out on the floor, a third cup awaiting the thick, strong coffee he poured out, that we were both partial to.
“Maybe.” Aslan shrugged. “She’s living like there’s a war on. Hard to say when she’ll show, or if.”
“For her, there is a war on.” My voice came out too sharply and I followed up with, “but you know that, of course.”
“Right now I’m picking the fights I can win.” Aslan sipped at his cup, blowing at the surface to cool it. His hand shook slightly, another fingerprint of time creeping up on him. “The Unascov group action will settle, I think.”
“Do we want it to settle?” Because settlement means burial, and I wanted that out in the open. A little unpacking tells the current copy-me why. Tech giant Unascov had gifted its employees with headware incorporating anti-whistle-blowing measures, tripping a little switch if any of their employees went to complain about anything from crunch-style working hours to sexual harassment, preventing them from giving details that might make the company look bad. It was one of a string of such cases over the years, and no matter how many times they were defeated they kept coming back, clothing themselves in reasonable arguments about company loyalty and the need to protect intellectual property or use internal procedures. So far a hard-line approach towards the right of people to control their own thoughts had worked, but each victory seemed to be narrower.
“We’re insisting on a public statement by Unascov,” Aslan told me. “And while that might not quite carry the weight of a court verdict in our favour, what’s on the table is good enough that it’s in the interest of our clients to take it. And it’s them I’m working for, no matter who helped fund the litigation.” And of course that was me. There were a string of human and Bioform rights charities where, if you dug down deep enough, you’d find me looking up at you. And I was – and am – all about human rights because the best defence to any attempt to stick a leash on Bioforms is to point out that humans would be next. Which brought us to…
“I’ve been looking over your submissions on the Collaring review committee.”
“I imagine you have some notes.” Aslan smiled thinly.
“I feel this needs stronger language, John.”
He nodded philosophically. “You may not appreciate just how the world is turning, Honey. The downside of Bioforms being people too is that they do people things. Every time a dog-model’s part of a gang or a heist, or even worse, there was that dragon-form hitman last year… And I know that on average Bioforms are half as likely to commit any kind of crime than a human, and five times as likely to get accused, and I have five juniors in this firm alone who basically deal with appeals against hasty convictions as a full time job. But public perception means the moment one apple turns bad, it’s…”
“John, I know.” I was ill-tempered. “And frankly, I can’t believe people have forgotten Morrow already, or all the other times they’ve tried to sneak this kind of thing in. Collaring Bioforms today is Collaring everyone tomorrow. Today they Collared the dogs and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a dog, John. And tomorrow they Collared me and then I couldn’t speak out, because I had a Collar.”
“Preaching to the converted, Honey.” He held his hands out. “But people just hear the pundits whipping them up about other people who are bigger and stronger than they are, more dangerous if they decided to be dangerous. You know how it is. I remember when you did that conference back in April last year. You saw the placards there: Bear Arms not Arm Bears?”
I shook my head heavily. I remembered finding it amusing at the time, when really I shouldn’t have. I was riding high, not realising how everything was turning.
“Your game-and-metagame speech touched a lot of nerves in high places. Insecure and powerful people felt called out,” Aslan went on.
“Good. I was calling them out.” I wasn’t feeling at my most diplomatic. “John, there is no compromise with people who want to slap controls inside our heads. There’s no soft approach. You can’t give them an inch. I need you to give this more punch.”
I could see the arguments mustering behind his eyes: not wanting to alienate the middle ground, not wanting to draw outright battle lines, conciliation, bridging gaps. But in the end he nodded.
“I’ll rewrite and get another copy to you.”
“Remember Morrow,” I told him, and he nodded again. I remember suddenly seeing how he really was old, however well he’d aged, and tired. How he’d spent his whole professional life fighting battles he didn’t have to, for the benefit of those who weren’t even his species. But he did remember Morrow, the first time someone had imposed those inner controls on humans for the benefit of a corporate master. The first battle in the war still rolling on in the shadows when he and I sat there and drank our coffee.
Then he blinked in that way that said his secretary had contacted him, and told me Gemima Gray was here. And the name didn’t mean anything, of course, but at the same time I received:
HumOS’s channel: Hello Honey.
I didn’t know the face. I remember – back in the early days when HumOS only had her first generation units – they all looked alike: artificial conception from a common genome, all the better to sync the test subjects’ mental processes. But she’d got out of the lab, gone under the radar, supposed to have been disposed of, that’s what the records said. Later, she made deals with criminals, funded black market biotech labs, grew a second, now a third generation. This Gemima Gray looked no more than twenty, a junior partner in the venture that was HumOS. She’d be an individual, and at the same time part of a collective, an exclusive sorority of like minds, literally. The second-greatest of the DisInt networks, and the oldest, though Bees overshadows her both in reality and in popular imagination. She wore a grey suit, a scarf that was likely shot through with intrusion countermeasures to preserve her tight link with some other HumOS unit close by. She had a beret on, too, a little too La Résistance, a little too on the nose, but HumOS always had a theatrical touch to her. Easy to favour the grand gesture when you have so many hands.
“Honey,” she said aloud for Aslan’s benefit. “John.”
“Ms Gray.” He offered her coffee and she took the little cup from him, folding to crossed-legged sitting
in a single motion. “I’ve given you access to my screens here, so you can…”
So she could keep in touch with the family, because Aslan thought his privacy screening might prevent that, or else he didn’t want to find out it wouldn’t. Gray nodded tightly, her eyes still a little suspicious. “Braintree,” she said.
“I guess we’re getting right into it then,” Aslan murmured.
“I don’t have much time, John.” And this unit, this Gemima Gray had never met Aslan before, but she still felt herself on first name terms with him. Aslan leant back slightly, and I knew he was scared of her, just a little and despite himself. The same way he used to be scared of me, the same way he was scared of Rex. He did his best, bless the man, but he was a product of the old pre-Bioform, pre-DisInt world, and adjustment only went so far.
“Mumbai,” he said, and Gray nodded fiercely.
“They wiped us out.” This unit had her own rhythms of speech, all Angry Young Activist.
“Wait, what was Mumbai?” Apparently I hadn’t heard.
“The clinic. My clinic. My new generation.” Gray’s eyes blazed with a fanatic’s fire. “They got wind of it, sent in the jackboot brigade to close it down. Killed the embryos, arrested the staff. I’ve had to burn my connection to the whole operation. I’m still looking for somewhere else to go, where I can get more bodies.”
My channel: I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.
HumOS’s channel: (Just a sound, angry, dismissive.)
I thought of how I was berating Aslan for being too kid-gloves with confronting the Collaring crowd, and then I wondered if Gray saw me the same way, a too-old, too-slow bear whose polite shuffling and dancing were trying to stop a war already declared against her.
“And while they hunt me down, and shut me down,” she went on heatedly, “Braintree’s all over illegal neural tech, brain mods, control implants.”
“Proof,” Aslan said flatly.
“The Mars job, the Hell City project!” Gray almost shouted at him.
“All confidential, behind the usual corporate intellectual property wall.”
“Bees tells me they’ve got Collared bear-forms working security there, like a slave police force.”
“Bees knows they aren’t sentient Bioforms, not quite. Just the other side of the line, and a legion of lawyers to explain how it is, at a thousand dollars an hour,” Aslan said drily, pouring himself another cup. “Chipping an animal, even an engineered animal, for control is by no means illegal. And they are animals. There were inquests, expert reports.”
Gray practically snarled at him. “And the humaniforms?”
“Well, that’s far more borderline, I agree, but not definitively illegal. And mostly that’s just physical mods that weren’t even done at Braintree. Braintree just did their headware, and there’s no suggestion that included Hierarchies, Collars, anything of the sort. It’s all just part of their distributed computing deal over there. And,” he added as Gray rose to make a further objection, “it’s complicated. Mars is outside any jurisdiction. The World Senate hasn’t agreed to extend the meaning of ‘World’ to cover more than one planet. Frontier law, Ms Gray. Which our friend Bees has taken full advantage of.”
“They are doing something at Braintree,” Gray pressed on stubbornly.
“So, proof?”
“Nothing that will stand up in court, but we’re working on it, Bees and me. So tell me about Ruthanne Lassi, because if anyone has information, it’s her. And we know she’s come to you, John.”
Aslan’s eyes flicked from her to me. “Well she has, yes. And I can’t talk about what she’s said. She’s under the most heavy-duty non-disclosure agreement I ever saw. It’s on her head if she decides to break it.”
“So what’s she told you?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty—”
“John!” Gemima was standing. I only registered the sound of the breaking coffee cup afterwards, because Aslan Kahner Laika put out real porcelain for valued visitors. “John, they are killing me. They killed twenty of us, in the womb.” And a glass womb was still a womb, and the men who sent men to do that thing were the people like Thompson who, I note, was also taking the anti-abortion crowd’s cash right at that moment.
“It is up to her,” Aslan said, calmly but firmly. “She spoke to me because I am her lawyer, and that is a confidential arrangement under which she can speak. If she decides to go further, they will ruin her. They will destroy her life. And perhaps worse, if what she has is that threatening. So it is her decision, not mine, not yours. But if you can crack Braintree and bring me actual evidence that will take some of that burden from her, split some of that attention so it is not simply one mother fighting for justice for her lost son, then I will gladly shout it from the rooftops, Ms Gray.” And he was still scared of her, what she was, what she might do, but the words came out measured and confident, the old lion still with a few teeth to bare. And when HumOS messaged me with, Do something! all I could send back was, He’s right.
“Bees wants action,” Gray snapped, and of course she was the only one Bees was talking to right now. My old distributed friend wasn’t even communicating with me since the anti-DisInt laws had been put into place to limit her and HumOS and anything else like them. “Bees says it’s all happening at Braintree. And if you won’t…” She let the words trail off, not a threat but a fight for emotional control by a young woman who was also many older women, a human Matryoshka. “Tell me this one thing, John. If we bring you the dirt out of Braintree, will you actually disclose it for us. Shout it from the rooftops? Really? Because Bees is working on it. She’s being as covert as can be, because you know that the World Senate is still searching everywhere for even the slightest suggestion that she’s back, but we are helping her, and she is back.”
“I have worked long and hard to protect the rights of everyone,” Aslan told her, still scared, still calm. “And I haven’t won every battle, I know. And when they limited the legal rights of distributed intelligences, of you and Bees and all the new networks that were springing up, you know I led the charge against that. And it was too much, and people were too scared of what you represented, and there were too many powerful people who made you out to be the Devil, and used you as a way to attack any kind of non-human intelligence. And we are still fighting that war. And we will win, Ms Gray. We’ll roll back the chains they put on you, today, tomorrow, in a generation’s time. Because the generation that held those chains are yesterday’s men, trying to hold on to power by whipping up fear of the other, just like always. But we’ll beat them. And yes, I will continue to do my part in that. Tell Bees, tell your sisters. I will.”
“As will I,” I confirmed. Gray looked from him to me, me to him.
“Well I hope so,” she allowed, still standing, taking the first step for the door. “Because, like I say, Bees has units here on the homeworld again, working on this directly. And right now she is pretty damn ambivalent about people, John.” And I knew from her look at me that I was people, in that equation.
8
JIMMY
She marches me back home to my nook, and all the goddamn way I’m fighting her. Or trying to, because I’m locked out. I can’t even talk at her like she was talking to me, prisoner in my own goddamn head. I’ve had that nightmare, and it’s all the more nightmarish because she can’t quite walk properly on my legs, she’s holding every part of me wrong, clenching muscles I don’t tend to use, sloping forwards like she’s going to fall on my face any moment. And all I see is whatever part of the walls or floor she’s looking at, moment to moment. I have zero agency. Inside my own head – or inside what was formerly my head but is now definitively hostile territory – I’m praying, begging, weeping. And she doesn’t even hear.
Once or twice people greet me, watching me stagger towards them. Honey waves my hand wildly at them, almost slaps Kira Miri the shift manager in the face with it. I can feel the muscles of my face contort as she gurns it into what she probably think
s is a smile. I’m already hurting in a dozen places from the way she’s wrenching my joints, from where she’s whomped into a wall. And I think to myself – thinking’s all I got left – that surely they’ll know, they’ll guess that something’s wrong, they’ll call someone, get me help, get this possessing fucking demon out of my skull. Except they just go on by, and Honey swivels my head to look back at Kira and catches an expression of disgust and pity on the woman’s face I’d really rather I hadn’t seen. There goes Jimmy again, says that look. Out of his head on Stringer or drunk or some goddamn thing. And it’s not the first time, that’s what that look says, and I am fucking furious at her. How dare she look down on me, like she’s so goddamn perfect. And then, as Honey lurches me off on my legs, I start to feel less angry and more just kind of sick, because I didn’t know. I thought I was doing a good job of hiding things. I thought… people maybe liked me when I was up, you know, comedy Jimmy, always a laugh, fun to be with. Except maybe not. Kira’s look says not.
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