Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Last chance,” Honey tells them, staring up into those maddened animal eyes, and then the bear she’s talking to obviously decides that Jimmy Marten has gotten above himself and needs slapping down, and that slap is going to come with five goddamn great claws attached. I cower, but I don’t cower. Inside my head there is a fuckton of cowering going on, but the rest of me just stands there as that big old paw cuffs at me.

  And stops.

  I get a real good look at it, that great shaggy beanbag that’s almost slightly like a hand, and all the hooked cutlery that goes with it. It’s right there, frozen at the edge of my vision.

  I creep my eyes sideways. The other Bad News Bear has stopped too. It’s shaking its big head like there are wasps going for it. It makes a distressed sound, and then even that stops.

  “Honey?” I whisper into my throat mic.

  I feel… something from Honey’s channel. Not words but a brief moment of open contact. She’s still there, but she’s busy.

  And I just moved my eyes, and talked.

  The second bear makes a weird bleating sound and shuffles backwards on all fours awkwardly, like a remote car with a five-year-old at the controls. She’s hacked the Bad News Bears. She’s right in their headware, fucking them over. But it looks like old Honey ain’t as clever as she thinks she is because that means she’s not pulling my strings any more. I take an experimental step sideways. My leg is mine to call my own.

  “Honey…?” I murmur.

  Another stutter of wordless contact, and the bears are just wandering aimlessly, and I reckon old Honey’s bitten off more bear than she can chew. She’s stuck, or just engrossed, and I have my last best chance of saving myself.

  I link to the station – risky because it’ll tell Rufus right where I am if the Bad News Bears didn’t already – and download a ton of junk data: geophys, weather reports, three series of that Guatemalan soap Indra’s mad over. I chonk my headspace full of crap and set it spinning wheels in there, using up space and processor power in the hope it’ll make a real obstacle course for Honey, complicating life for her so she can’t just take over so easily. No question who’ll win this pissing contest long term, but hopefully I’ve bought myself some time. Then I put in a call to Sugar.

  You see I’ve done some serious thinking while Honey ran my body around. Do I really want to surrender to Rufus? No I do not. I reckon Honey was right on that score. Your man Jimmy knows a bit too much right now. Best to hope something changes and it blows over, but in the meantime I need to throw in with someone who can keep me out of the way of Admin and its hound. And the only person I’ve got any leverage with is Sugar, because this is her shit and presumably she’s got some reason to keep it intact. And maybe she can even get it out of my head, which right now is not big enough for the two of us.

  And I’m running, obviously; leaving the two baffled Bad News Bears behind and just skedaddling off through all the lower tunnels, the old maintenance ways nobody uses, the unsafe tunnels that aren’t on the plans, anything to keep me free until something resembling a plan has come together. And there are a stack of incoming contact requests from Rufus, but I am sure as hell ignoring his ass right now, begging Sugar to take my own desperate call.

  “Jimmy.” When I get through, she doesn’t sound happy to hear from me. “What the fuck is with you, Jimbles? What’d you do?”

  “It’s not me!” I tell her. “It’s your shit you put in my head. It’s gone live, Sugar. It just decided it was, like, a person, and then it tripped some damn alarm or something because the goddamn sheriff is after me now. Sugar, what did you do?”

  There’s a pause, then, after which she says, “Where are you, Jimbles?” And that’s both worrying and reassuring. The first, because it means she doesn’t know what she put in me. This isn’t her plan, and the pause was her thinking What the fuck? before making a call on it. Reassuring for exactly the same reasons, because if it wasn’t her plan, I haven’t dicked her plan over, and she probably won’t just have me killed on general principles.

  “Where do you want me to be?” I ask her.

  “Right answer,” she says approvingly. “You get yourself to Mall’s, stay low. I will send someone to get you. You and me need to talk.”

  Mall’s is a bar. Not one of the official ones run by Admin, which basically exist to take back all the scrip you earned with overpriced and understrength drinks and entertainment, but something run by one of us, where you get whatever anyone’s bootlegged or moonshined together for whatever scrip or barter or favours you can scrape together. Not as though it’s a big secret, not as though Rufus doesn’t know it exists or anything, but maybe not the first place he’d look, and maybe not the most sympathetic locale if you’re a cop. And not hard to get to from where I am, either. And best of all, my arms and legs do what I tell them, and Honey’s still stuck doing whateverthefuck she’s doing, and maybe the bears ate her.

  So, ten minutes later I’m sloping into Mall’s. They put up new lighting since I was last in, giving the whole place a golden glow that I reckon’s supposed to feel more like proper light, like summer. It looks like the place got marinated in piss, you ask me, but it’s still the best home away from home I’m going to see for a while. I pop a tab of Stringer, letting it dissolve on the tongue, and order a beer too because otherwise they’ll kick me out. Well, I say beer. It’s fermented refuse from the aquaculture vats. We call it beer. It’s kind of dark green-yellow like something that oozed from a really infected scab, which should also give you an idea how it tastes. The stuff Admin sells for ten times the price gets shipped over as powder and then diluted to nothingness with the water we get from the ice shipped in from the poles, and it’s not exactly much better. Mars is a piss-poor place to be an alcoholic. I’m just glad my own vice is easier to slip into a freighter hold or cook up from basic chem lab ingredients.

  Mall’s is busy, enough I can lose myself in it, and I can almost forget how much trouble I’m in until a familiar voice sounds in my ear.

  “Jimmy,” says Honey, “I’m back with you now. Update me, if you would. The system’s telling me you’re still at large.”

  My heart clenches, but it’s still mine to clench. She hasn’t taken the reins yet. “You see where I am,” I tell her.

  “Well I don’t,” she explains. “I turned your tracker off, so the system doesn’t know, and as I’m not using your eyes right now, I can only tell what the system is telling me. But you’ve found somewhere safe, I take it.”

  “No thanks to you.”

  “Listen, Jimmy, the sooner I can contact Bees the better. Then I can be out of your way.”

  “Bees is a monster, lady. We don’t go talking to Bees around here.”

  “Bees is my friend.”

  That isn’t something I wanted to hear. “Lady, Bees is the thing everyone in Hell City is goddamn terrified about letting in. Nobody here is a friend of Bees.”

  “I have reason to believe that’s not true,” Honey says thoughtfully, “but Bees has become very subtle about doing what she does. I have to accept that you don’t know any way of contacting her, but I will need to make enquiries.”

  And she still hasn’t taken back my motor functions, and in my book that means either my efforts or her own have locked her out for now, because she’d have done it if she could. I’ve still got a chance, if only Sugar would hurry up.

  And then someone enters Mall’s, and the place goes quiet. It’s that particular quiet that comes from dislike all mashed up with fear. Nobody here’s over-fond of regulations; after all, the whole place isn’t supposed to exist, what with buying and selling technically having to go through Admin and the company store. At the same time, when Sheriff Rufus strolls in, ain’t nobody here who’s going to ask him to stroll right on out again.

  And Admin knows we need dives like this as a release valve, and overlooks them. But that overlooking normally takes the form of a big old dog with a badge not actually being in them. So everyone is very quiet an
d stares at their drinks and not one of them stands in the way when Rufus ambles over to where I am.

  “Jimmy,” he says quietly.

  “You got here goddamn quick,” I say sourly.

  “There’s a BOLO reward posted for you. You honestly think nobody here was going to sell you out? Come on, Jimmy, let’s keep this quiet and civilised.” His voice is hitting that register that triggers my fear-response, like the bears did. Bioengineer us however much you want, sometimes we humans ain’t so very far from the caves and the stone tools.

  I stand up. I look up at him. I keep on looking up, because someone else has come into Mall’s who’s even bigger than Rufus, and they’ve soft-pawed right up behind him when he was focused on me. Mall’s is full of stink, all sorts of chemistry and unwashed bodies, human and Bioform, but I reckon Rufus is having an off day because a whole actual bear has just snuck up on him.

  It’s Murder, or else it’s Marmalade, one of Sugar’s two goons. Rufus registers I’m looking past him and turns, already reaching for his gun, but the bear just swipes him, all that raw animal muscle plus all that Bioform brain to direct it, plus a helping of light gravity to make the doggy fly across the room like you wouldn’t believe. The gun spins off separately and makes some scavenger’s day, but Rufus bounces off the wall and comes down on his feet, snarling bloody saliva and fangs. The other bear, Marmalade or maybe Murder, is in front of him, though, bellowing and roaring, and everyone else is piling out of Mall’s as quick as they can. My unlikely saviour takes my arm with a hand as big as my head and hauls me with them, and it’s not like I have much choice but that doesn’t matter. Sugar’s who I want to see.

  PART III

  SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE

  9

  [RECOVERED DATA ARCHIVE: ‘HONEY’]

  It looks as though I’ve overextended. Even if I’d have been myself, simultaneously invading two complex biotech systems and exerting control over them would have taxed me, let alone when I am just a copy and also trying to hold on to slippery little Jimmy Marten. And then there’s the sensory feedback… I can’t exactly say I’d forgotten, more like I haven’t got around to unpacking those memories, or perhaps I don’t have them in here with me at all, surplus to requirements when I got sent over. But suddenly I am awash with bear, drowning in it. The smells of this place, even through the thin air. The colours that are flat and dull compared to Jimmy’s eyes but familiar and comforting for all that. The sheer biofeedback of having a bear’s glorious, powerful body, and still strong and quick like I was when I had come off the factory line boosted and powerful. And I lose it, let Jimmy slip through my clawed fingers, drop all the memories I’ve been hoarding, and Jimmy takes his moment and leaves me picking up the pieces inside his mind. He may think he banjaxed me with some half-cocked denial of service nonsense, but really it’s just the bear-ness of it all, and how I miss it. Being a disembodied simulation inside a human’s head is no way the same thing as being me.

  And I plunge into the memories and try to reassemble them in a way that tells me what’s going on. Why the urgency? Why send a piece of myself to Mars because surely there was an easier way to talk to Bees.

  Except I was in trouble. That seems right. Even before the meeting with Aslan I’d been in trouble. The dogs had been closing in. But I remember all those doctorates, the public speaking, the White House lunch. What went wrong?

  This.

  *

  It was at a conference. Being at a conference, it wasn’t some hugely dramatic thing. I didn’t run amok or eat the ambassador’s wife or scale the Empire State Building with the screaming Dean of Liberal Studies clutched in my paw. It was just a speech, and after the speech a lot of people for whom I’d been an amiable dancing bear they could safely trot out to amuse their families decided that actually I wasn’t so funny after all. And it was a mistake, but I’d grown complacent in my dancing and had forgotten that just because you can’t see the bars doesn’t mean there isn’t a cage you’re supposed to stay in.

  I did a lot of conferences. I had nine doctorates after all, and was something of a celebrity. I attended symposiums on poverty, equality, biotech, AI and all manner of offshoots. Sometimes I’d give a talk – keynote speaker, once or twice. Sometimes I’d be on a panel with some similarly well-doctored types discussing some aspect of whatever the spécialité du jour was. Well, usually the same aspect.

  So I’d be at a conference about human rights issues, which I considered my serious work, and naturally I’d get to talk about rights as they applied to Bioforms, and that would be fair enough because I had, after all, made a public career of pushing for those from quite early on. I was just about the mascot of the Bioform Rights lobby. After poor sainted Rex, anyway, who conveniently for a figurehead was dead and therefore not liable to eventually say something politically inconvenient at a conference.

  And then a month later I’d be at a conference on some of the finer points of the organic-headware interface, and they’d get me up to talk about, well, the pioneering work done by dumb animals in the field, given that we’d been the first to experience what was now a common human thing. And maybe I’d asked, back when I applied to be a speaker, if I couldn’t get in on the discussion about headware security or the social aspects of interconnectivity, because those sounded like interesting topics to weigh in on, but when the schedule came back it was Bioforms or nothing, and so I’d take what I was given. Looking back (organising the shards of my mind’s stored data as I am) I am surprised it took me so many years to clock the pattern.

  And then there would be a literature conference, and I’d just put out a paper on Representation of the Other in Beowulf – fascinating, really, given that both the titular character and his nemeses are Othered in radically different ways – and I’d find myself on a panel alongside my old friend Chani Upaur, the cat-model poet with a new book out, and some supremely arch-literature critic from the Washington Post, and we’d be talking about ‘What Bioform Experience Brings to the Oeuvre’ or, if I was really lucky, something to do with animals in the Great American Novel, and I don’t know if you’re starting to see something of a pattern here, or…?

  And I’d remark in the bar afterwards, or over my link on some private group channel with colleagues, that really, I was in a position to make contributions on subjects not tethered to the fact of my native state, and they’d all agree wholeheartedly and mildly dress down the organisers, and then the next conference or literature festival or some such event would come along and there would be me, listed to talk about the Bioform in Contemporary Drama. If a lion could talk, as the saying goes, could we understand him? Apparently the answer was, only if the lion wants to talk about the representation of big cats in Renaissance art.

  And then came a big deal, an international conference on corporate and political theory, and I’d just had a mostly unrelated book out, and was therefore celebrity enough to get invited over, and there I was with a slot on a round table discussion on the Emerging Phenomenon of Bioform-driven Business Solutions, as though we were mushrooms suddenly turning up on the lawn after a brisk autumn rain. But they also gave me a talk slot. I had something lined up about chains of command, authority and servitude, and it was a bit edgy, practically racy for that conference, but they were apparently willing for me to push the envelope a bit in the name of publicity. There would be media there, recording it all. It brought them attention, to have one of the old-school Bioforms talking about liberty, who had been rolled out into a war zone with a Master and a Hierarchy in my head. A Collar, as the modern euphemism is for slavery.

  And they mostly got the speech they were supposed to, but I went a bit off track towards the end. I didn’t quite get to the ‘Well it’s all much better nowadays obviously ho ho’ bit that’s supposed to make people leave the room thinking that they don’t actually need to do anything, I deviated a bit. I hit the topic about why people build these authoritarian systems where the lower echelons don’t get a say, and why those syst
ems then degrade in effectiveness the longer they persist. I turned the mirror back on the audience, so to speak. Before the cameras, I gave what Aslan would later refer to as my ‘game-and-metagame’ piece. And they didn’t like that. All those managers, political figures, academic administrators, they got to see themselves through my eyes. I made an observation, not on Bioform this or animal that, but on society as a whole. And abruptly I had overstepped.

  I got fewer invitations after that, and to rather less salient events. More than that, though, I could sense some great unseen machinery of the world turning away. I was abruptly no longer amusing when I danced. The establishment was reminding me that all I had, I owed to its forbearance, no pun intended. Not a sudden fall, then, but a long, slow plummet, and all those people who had always loathed the idea of a talking bear, a free Bioform, an educated animal who could use longer words than them, were waiting with knives at the bottom.

  *

  So this, this next part, it happened right after I left Aslan’s offices. Even as I was leaving, in fact, I started to pick up the edges of electronic chatter. The presence of covert channels just bleeding into my awareness, because my electronic sensor suite was good when they made me, and I’ve only improved on it since.

  HumOS, I thought. Because, like she said, she was on the run, all of her. And if they caught any individual unit, well, it wasn’t as though it would blow her whole network wide open, but it would inconvenience her. She was finite, and new units were a significant investment of resources and secrecy for her.

  My channel: Trouble.

  HumOS’s channel: I know. They don’t have me yet, but they know I’m about.