Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  I imagined Gemima Gray hurrying through darkened streets, bundled in a coat, beret pulled down low. I imagined her in a car, sunglasses at night to fox retinal scans. I imagined helicopters with search beams, roadblocks, worse.

  My channel: I will cover for you.

  No reply from her, but I started making a nuisance of myself in the electronic world. Specifically I started spoofing DisInt signals. I’d done the theory, after all. I’d published papers. I knew exactly what one node of a Distributed Intelligence network looks like when it’s trying to reconnect with the whole. And when questioned later I would say that it had been an idle experiment, just an academic playing games, and Did you really think I…?

  I was in my car by then, which had been designed as a six-seater family transporter but basically only had the one reclining seat in the back. One major advantage of modern vehicles was that they drove themselves, and this was so much the norm that actually getting a personal driving licence was insanely difficult because random, unpredictable people didn’t mesh well with the great mass of net-linked autodrive vehicles. Even when I was young and quick, I’d never much cared for driving myself around, and now I didn’t have the eyes or the reflexes for it. Much better to lounge back and pop a handful of hazelnuts and let the car do its thing while I messed with the heads of whoever was after HumOS.

  The downside to autodrive vehicles was that, when the authorities decided to flag you down, you couldn’t go all Thelma and Louise on them in a mad chase to avoid apprehension. They gave the car its orders and it just slowed down to a responsible stop on the roadside, and this was exactly what happened to me. I remember looking at the dashboard and seeing that a valid stop-and-search request had come in that I was obliged to comply with. And right then I thought they were just after HumOS, and didn’t even worry much about it.

  I waited in the car for a knock on the window. I was even anticipating a little amusement at some human police officer’s alarm at seeing an ‘OS’ that was far less ‘Hum’ than he’d been anticipating. Instead there was a booming voice, a dog’s bark augmented enough to rattle the chassis.

  “Step out of the car with your hands out and open!”

  I un-shaded the windows and took a look outside. There was a big police cruiser out there, certainly large enough to haul a bear away in, and two smaller vehicles too. A handful of human officers were hanging back, but between me and them were a dozen dog-Bioforms, all in uniform, all of them serious combat models, the sort more used to military functions than policing traffic. Their badges and logos showed that they were a private outfit licensed for law enforcement, not the dwindling regular police. My car’s onboard processed their credentials and found no fault with them, but I had a bad feeling about just who might be signing their paycheques.

  My channel: I may be in some trouble here.

  But I wasn’t getting through. I caught a big ECM field coming from the cruiser, and when I tried to hack it, I found enough hardened systems that it wasn’t going to fall over in a useful period of time. Someone had done their forward planning.

  I told the car to open the door before they did it for me, and slid my bulk out into the open with creditable slowness, paws held high. The dogs loped forwards a little. They all had heavy calibre automatic weapons, designed precisely for the take-down of larger Bioforms, such as themselves, such as me. And I was an old, tired bear with my fur going grey, and my fighting days were long behind me.

  I thought about some sort of clever remark, such as Did I steal your picnic basket, officer? and then I thought better of it, because that kind of nonsense gets you shot. Instead I just asked, politely, “What seems to be the problem?”

  The lead dog got closer, and there was that interesting little moment of connection when we both accepted that he was within reach of my claws, and I was in range of a lunge from his teeth. Not that either of us would, you understand, but there’s something very deeply buried in us both that has the tape measure out. And I glanced past him at those human officers staying well back and reflected that, with people and bears and dogs, some things never change. But I will not allow myself to be baited.

  “Doctor ‘Honey’ Medici,” the lead dog said. He’s the biggest, and that’s because humans will generally promote a bigger dog, in the belief that’s all there is to pack mentality. I have myself published papers about the ‘Alpha fallacy’ but nobody seems to take any notice and that, I suspect, is because a lot of the people who otherwise might are those who like to think of themselves as ‘Alphas’ and want the world to work that way.

  “I am, yes,” I confirm. I mean, I’m the only bear here. Who else is Honey if not me?

  The dog is a little hesitant, unexpectedly. Then I see the little medallion pinned to his uniform chest. It’s a cross with a dog’s head in the centre, not a spectacular piece of heresy but a genuine article of faith. The Sons of Adam are man’s best friends, and a group with whom I have a rocky relationship. Mostly negative, on my part, but that dog’s head at the nexus of the cross is painfully familiar. Saint Rex, who died for my sins, who died that we might live. And this dog soldier knows that Rex and I, we were close. It won’t give me an escape route, but it might win me something, some concession somewhere along the line.

  “Doctor ‘Honey’ Medici, you are under arrest under accusation of sedition, illegal association and aiding the representatives of prohibited groups under the Criminal Association Directive. You are being taken into confinement for questioning and may subsequently be charged. Your full cooperation is requested and will be taken into account when charges are considered. If you remain silent or refuse to answer questions then authorities and the court may draw appropriate inference from your unwillingness to assist enquiries.”

  “I wish to exercise my right to an attorney,” I told him, because they didn’t have to remind you about that and it’s up to you, as a free and responsible citizen, to know your rights. The old Miranda had lost a lot of fruit off her hat in the past few decades. “I’ve literally just left his office. Drop your jamming field and I’ll call him now.”

  He paused a moment, meaning he was bouncing this up the chain through some closed channel I couldn’t access. “You’ll get your chance once you’re in custody,” he said after a few seconds. “Into the cruiser, please, and surrender control of your vehicle so we can impound it.”

  I looked around. I was still downtown. Lit windows spilled all the way up the old buildings on either side, all those late night workers still putting the hours in. Cars slid past in a constant chain and, while their passengers might try to rubberneck, the vehicles’ autodrive systems wouldn’t slow them. I was right there in full view, a bear at bay, ringed by the dogs whose masters kept prudently out of reach. I was in the heart of America, a published academic, an author, a TV celebrity, and nobody would stop, and nobody would care. In that moment I was nothing more than an animal. And if I’d fought, they’d have gunned me down.

  *

  They didn’t get HumOS, or at least Gray, her local branch operative. I know this because we didn’t go straight to any police station, holding cell or similar place of incarceration, but just drove around aimlessly for over an hour, obviously looking for someone that we never found. I have no doubt that they knew who I was meeting with, and that the war HumOS was fighting with various security forces was getting hotter. I did dare to hope that, in the absence of actual evidence, they might let me go with a stern talking to. No such luck.

  They collared me, small ‘c’. There was a rack of big metal rings in the cruiser’s interior and they put a heavy collar on me and chained me to one. It wasn’t exactly dignified. The world has come up with less humiliating ways of restraining any size or shape of Bioform. It wasn’t entirely an atavism, though. Plenty of nations still used such methods, or worse. After all, there were easier platforms to argue for than humane treatment of dangerous animals that had gone far enough to end up in custody. Dangerous animals, wicked animals, fit only to be treated as
such. Even if the crime in this case was holding political opinions unpopular with a resurgent element of the US state and some of the World Senate.

  Two of the police dogs were in the back with me, still armed and with those guns pointed at me. Both of them had the same cruciform badges, which filled me with an extra layer of depression. And true, there were the very rare times when the existence of the Sons of Adam had played into my rhetorical hands: an association of Bioforms, almost all dogs, who were practically socially acceptable. But they were acceptable because they bought into the creed that they knew their place. They’d got religion, you see. About ten years after Rex died, when the world was going through another fit of Bioform fear, there was a Vatican priest named Father Jacomo Ionescu. This was long after the walkback of the Papal pronouncement about Bioform souls, so we were on the table to be saved along with natural born people, even though regular dogs and bears and the rest weren’t. It was a mire of theology, asking at what point in the eminently human-run process the soul got in. It kept a lot of very abstract religious thinkers very busy. Other religions were still on the fence or had come down against the idea, but there had been the odd progressive Pope and when the old boy comes out with something in a public address it’s hard for the establishment at large to pretend it didn’t happen.

  Father Ionescu had appointed himself chief missionary to the animals, a latter-day Saint Francis. He had actually listened to what Bioforms were saying, and he’d worked out that a great many of us were very insecure about our place in the world. Not just that mainstream humanity’s mind might shift again, on the topic of what we are and what rights we’re entitled to. No, the uncertainty that Father Ionescu identified was more existential. What, after all, were we? We were artificial beings made out of natural beings. Where did we fit? What was our purpose? A lot of us, especially the dog-forms, covertly yearned for a simpler time when we were just told what to do. And Rex would have understood that – not agreed, I hope, but understood. And even I remember those days, no rights, no responsibilities. No knowledge of good and evil.

  So arose the creed of the Sons of Adam – not Cain and Abel but the other living things given into his dominion by God. The purpose of Bioforms, said Father Ionescu, was to serve mankind, and in doing so they would find their own way to the Heavenly Kingdom. And although the philosophy fell on my ears like a wet fish, he won a lot of adherents, and the cult has never really gone away. And wearing the Dog Cross looks good when you’re going for a job with the security services or certain companies. A lot of people have even told me I should speak out in support of them, as a force that brings humans and Bioforms closer together. Except, of course, it brings them together in a very specific relationship, and that is Master and Servant. And if I’d been happy with that then I wouldn’t have done all the many and varied things I’ve done over the last fifty years, frankly. But some Bioforms, some dogs, get anxious, and they want to trade all the agency I’ve won for them, sell it for a certainty that seems utterly spurious to me but infinitely reassuring to them.

  “I knew him, you know,” I said tiredly, as the cruiser swung another left and we swept the area one last time. I mean Rex of course, not Father Ionescu, although I did meet the man once. For what it’s worth he wasn’t the political tyrant I’d been expecting, but well-meaning men can cause just as much damage, if not more.

  The lead dog stared at me for a long time, and I almost missed his small nod.

  “I was his friend. I was with him from the start,” I went on. I could talk forever about all the things I did for Rex, many of them behind his back because he wouldn’t have understood.

  “I know who you are,” the dog told me, in that angry voice that was the only one a lot of the military-built models got. Adding new voice functions is big biomod business for Bioforms that have worked out their contact, but perhaps he would have considered it hubris. He met my eyes and I could see it cost him some effort. He was ashamed; he wanted to look away.

  “I’m sorry it has to be like this,” he said. “But you have stepped from the path.”

  “There’s a difference between accusation and conviction,” I pointed out, but I knew that, for him, there wouldn’t be. He did what he was told, and that was his cardinal virtue, both in his job and in his theology. He would tell himself it made him a Good Dog.

  “What’s your name, soldier?” I asked him, thinking he wouldn’t say.

  “Scout,” he said, and then, at some message on his closed channel, “You’re to be taken to the Shambles.”

  That wasn’t the place’s name, of course. It was the Rhodes Point Bioform Holding Facility, and I hadn’t even realised it was still in operation. And likely Scout didn’t even know what the old word ‘Shambles’ meant.

  10

  JIMMY

  “What did you put in my head?” I demand, and Sugar must get just how goddamn upset I am about all this because Murder and Marmalade are right at my shoulders and she doesn’t expect this sort of disrespect from a nobody like your man Jimmy. So she doesn’t have me gutted by bears, just stares at me, wide-eyed at my affrontery.

  “This thing you gave me,” I go on. “I mean… what the fuck, Sugar?”

  She’s sitting in her throne of crates there in Storage Nineteen, sure enough, and now she makes one little imperious gesture and the handful of her crew who were loitering about are just gone, slinking away past the stacked walls of containers so it’s just her, me and the two bears. And my passenger.

  “Jimmy,” she says, low and dangerous, “are you telling me you peeked?”

  Behind me, Murder makes a low, bowel-loosening sound, unless it’s Marmalade.

  “I? I did goddamn nothing, Sugar,” and I’m still shouting at her, which under other circumstances would be a catastrophically unwise thing to do but right now is actually giving her pause. See, she knows Yours Truly isn’t a punchy guy, under regular circumstances. She knows that only a pretty goddamn extreme situation would bring me to her door hollering and making a scene. And probably she’s still thinking about burying me in the next foundation slab to get laid down, but at least she wants to know why.

  “Seriously,” I go on, a little more in control. “I get home, and your data is talking to me. It’s a full-on personality and it’s just loose in my head. It took me over, Sugar.”

  She blinks lazily, one set of lids and then the other. Then Marmalade has a scanner up by my head, same model as Brian was messing about with. Murder shambles off a few steps and I try to watch both bears in case Honey pulls the same trick with them as she did with the Bad News crowd.

  “My, that is busy,” Sugar murmurs, fed data from the scanner direct to her implant. “I guess whatever we put in there just unpacked itself like a jack-in-the-box, eh, Jimbles? So, what’re you getting? Audio-visual? Number strings? Or just static?” And she’s interested, which is probably on the better end of the potential outcomes with her. Means she won’t just have me ripped up and left somewhere.

  “Sugar,” I tell her. “There is a working copy of a person inside my head.”

  And then the voice that I’ve been dreading, saying, “Who’s this, now?”

  Sugar must have seen me wince. “Ain’t possible,” she tells me, but she’s still looking past me at the data. “You just got something from it?”

  “Spoke to me,” I confirm. “Right then.” And obviously that coincided with some spike from the scanner because she raises a delicate eyebrow.

  “Who’s it say it is?”

  “Sugar, I’m not being funny, but it says it’s called Honey.”

  Her face freezes, and at first I think it’s because she thinks I’m taking the piss. Then I realise that the name means something to her.

  “You don’t keep up with current affairs back home, do you, Jimbles?”

  I can only shake my head. I mean, what’s the point, precisely? Not going to be that way by the time we finally get back. “She took me over, Sugar. Like, moved me about, arms, legs, like a puppe
t.”

  “Ain’t possible,” she says again. “Jimmy, how much Stringer did you take in one go?”

  “You think this is just a… psychotic break?”

  “Known side effect. It’d be there on the doctor’s warning label if it weren’t so damn illegal,” she says, hunching forwards to stare at me. “Hearing voices, stranger in your own body.”

  “She’s right, you know. You shouldn’t take any more of that stuff,” Honey adds helpfully.

  “Shut the fuck up!” I shout, and from the echo I realise that was full volume. Nobody kills me, though. Sugar’s actually looking ever so slightly concerned.

  “Jesus, Jimbles, you are fucked up on something.”

  “I am not. Believe me there are not drugs on Mars to fuck me up like this. There is someone in my head, Sugar. Not just loose data, not just Stringer. Look, your girls here threw down with Rufus over at Mall’s. They tell you that? I’ve got the posse after me because of this shit you stuck in me. Take it out, Sugar. For the love of God just… find somewhere else to hide it. I, I don’t have my life any more. I don’t even have my own body. Any moment I’m gonna start talking like I’m from goddamn Harvard and tell you everything’s fine and walk out, and it won’t be me, Sugar! It won’t be me running my own body.”

  Sugar’s expression is… I mean, she’s her own little crime baroness, with a couple of killer Bioform henchbears. She’s ruler of her own little fiefdom here in Storage Nineteen. She takes shit from nobody. And here she is, looking at your man Jimmy Marten and on her face isn’t even anger, not even the cold disdain of a mob boss about to dispose of an inconvenience. It’s pity. Poor Jimbles is going crazy on her and she’s actually a little sorry for me. And that makes me feel a lot sorry for myself and I’m almost crying, right there and then. It’s all too much.

  “Tell her I need to contact Bees,” Honey prompts, in the resulting silence.

  “You even know why, now?” I demand, because why not stand here talking to myself in front of Sugar. How can it make anything worse?