Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “I don’t get it. What’s he doing?” Grubb’s breath smelled of beer and decay and he was standing too close again. “Why’s he listening to that.”

  It was a regular favourite of Thompson’s, if ‘favourite’ was the word. She kept it on hand at all times, along with a handful of other clips, for when the man decided he wanted motivation. It was from some talk somewhere, some televised academic circle-jerk where people with too much education and too much time made money out of talking some topic to death. Except the one giving the talk wasn’t people. It was a bear, rubbing shoulders with humans, wearing clothes, standing in front of a comically tiny lectern. A bear lecturing people about authority.

  “Everyone always looks at these systems,” came the bear’s voice, and it was a nice voice, a woman’s reassuring tones not so very far from the way Carole herself spoke to Thompson, “and asks how they go wrong so quickly. How is it that, the moment we actually look on them with an objective eye we start to wonder how he got that big office, how she ended up with the promotion instead of him or her. We’ve all been somewhere where there’s a roomful of geniuses working eighteen hour days and the manager can’t tie his shoelaces and knocks off at three for golf, am I right?” And there was a ripple of polite and terribly educated amusement from the crowd, and Carole wondered just how many of them worked eighteen hour days and how many of them played golf. Except there was a buffer in place, in talks like that. There was a complicit assumption that this doesn’t apply to us. It was an environment where one could expound general rules of human civilisation that applied to all human beings of whatever time and place save for the select group in the room.

  “And that’s because there are people who play the game, and there are people who play the metagame,” the bear with the woman’s voice went on. Behind her the screen was showing news reports, taken from the last ten years and highlighting a string of cases where companies had failed, governments had fallen over, banks had gone bust. There were photos of managing directors, ministers, officials associated with various failed enterprises, and perhaps the audience response was a little more muted, because these were actual people, actual real-world examples. Not merely some piece of theoretical whimsy that could, Schrödinger-like, be agreed as something that happened in the real world and yet, at the same time, not require anyone to change anything concrete.

  “It doesn’t actually matter what area you’re talking about. I suspect this is a universal once any organisation reaches a certain size, requires a certain level of hierarchy. Small ‘h’.” More polite laughter, slightly awkward given that this bear was old enough to have been fitted with a Hierarchy, back in the day.

  “So what’s the game? The game is what your business does. It’s what your government department does. It’s making shoes, designing software, teaching children about twentieth-century history. It’s the thing without which you don’t actually have a product or a service. And last year in this very room we had Doctor Capavela talking about pan-industrial management culture and making some very socialist arguments about shoemakers running shoe factories and why you couldn’t generalise management experience from one field to another, and frankly that’s not my point. Because management is the game, too. The ordering of people, the logistics of business, making sure that one moving part intersects with the next within your organisation’s structure is absolutely the game, because once a business grows past a certain size it needs people whose sole job is to administer it. But what puts a spanner in the works isn’t the game, but the metagame.”

  And Grubb’s face screwed up and he shot Carole a baffled look. “Why’s he even watching this shit?”

  Carole regarded Thompson’s slack face, seeing past it to the burning attention within his narrow eyes. “He’s hating,” she said quietly.

  Grubb stared at her. “He’s what now?”

  She ignored him, watching Thompson watch the bear. He had been so angry when he’d first caught this. He’d seen it on the internet. He hadn’t been tagged in it. Nobody had heard this speech and levelled an accusing finger at Warner S. Thompson. But he’d known. He’d heard all that academic language and boiled it down to one simple meaning. Someone had seen him. Someone had looked behind the curtain, behind the smile and the handshake and the bluster. Someone had looked past the slack, dead face and seen what Carole saw now behind those eyes. And he hadn’t liked it. He probably couldn’t even put into words what it was he didn’t like, but some deep instinct knew a threat when he saw it.

  And he had asked to see it again, a month later, and then again, and by then Carole knew to just keep the recording handy. For when he was tired after a long string of engagements. For when he flagged slightly. He would take this out, or some other titbit of media, and he would watch, once, twice, sometimes five or six times on loop. It would revitalise him. It would stir the primal pot of hate and anger that fuelled him. Grubb would never understand. Grubb, who had been raking in money through anti-Bioform hate sites for a decade before joining Thompson’s team, would never quite grasp the nature of his master, nor of the man’s complex relationship with the things he hated. Grubb knew Thompson hated DisInt and he hated Bioforms, but hate was not just a fire to destroy, not just an excuse to panhandle donations. Hate was an attractive force. Thompson needed his hates.

  Then her implant signalled an incoming call. Scout; the Trigger Dogs.

  “Report,” she murmured, stepping away from Grubb, turning her back on him.

  We have the bear, came Scout’s transmission, not his voice but the brisk, clinical tone of his channel.

  “And the other?”

  Scout’s channel: Evaded us. Or wasn’t there at all.

  Carole waited to see how she would feel about that. There had been a chance they’d catch a DisInt unit. She should feel disappointed they hadn’t. She should tell Scout his master would be angry at him. Although most likely Thompson wouldn’t remember, and Honey was more important to him, now he had his hate on. But inside herself she felt an odd absence. If any emotion crept into that void it was a timid relief, because a DisInt unit would look human, would look like a woman, like her. And she didn’t want to see Thompson with someone like her and his hate on.

  The immediate dissonance was almost painful, the chains in her head pulling awkwardly in multiple directions. Thompson was right to hate. Those he hated were his enemies. He was entitled to do what he wanted to them. To enjoy doing it. She wanted him to enjoy himself. And yet at the same time she did not want to see it, or to know of it. Let him bait bears. Let him have animals destroyed. And the following thought that might have been But not her or But not me and she couldn’t disentangle the strands enough to work out which.

  And then the knot was cut and she was stepping to Thompson’s shoulder.

  “Trigger Dogs say they have Honey, sir.”

  Thompson killed the screen immediately, then just stared at the darkness of it, squinting as though it was the sun. She glanced back at Grubb, who was still waiting to brag of his successes. He’d go on waiting, she knew. This would take precedence and it wasn’t something that included him. At the back of the room, Boyo had caught her mood if not the details. Standing, ready for action, already signalling the car. Grubb flinched as the Bioform got to his feet.

  “I want to go see,” Thompson said, pushing himself up from the couch where he’d been hunched.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Mr Thompson—” Grubb started, but Thompson stared at him, past him, through him as though unable to quite work out what this man-shaped object was that someone had brought into his room. Grubb retreated, mumbling about ‘later’.

  Soon after, Boyo was guiding the car out of the subterranean garage and off across town towards the Shambles.

  *

  It was a long ride out to Rhodes Point. Thompson sat in the back and drank from the bar. He had a debate on the screen, not for hating but watching himself talk. He did that a lot. Grubb thought it was because he was honing his
technique, but in truth Warner S. Thompson was the one thing that could hold Warner S. Thompson for any length of time. Thompson adored himself, and at the same time he didn’t seem to quite recognise that the man on the screen was him. Self-knowledge was absent from him. Confronted with his own image he was like an animal that couldn’t understand that the magnificent beast in the mirror is only a reflection. And maybe that had led to the plan. Maybe that deep dysfunction in him meant only he, of all the self-absorbed, powerful men in the world, could conceive such hubris. Maybe you had to be a grand master of the metagame, as Honey had called it, before you could decide you wanted such a thing to come about.

  Carole spent the ride pulling together the last two days’ developments on the World Senate scene, because she’d need to assimilate it to give a distilled summary to Thompson. The Senate, twenty-three years on from its formation, was about to have a shift change of a third of its members, or at least those seats were up for election, Alabama-Virginia among them. As always seemed to happen, everything was boiling down to where candidates stood on a handful of issues. As always seemed to happen, the issues weren’t the spreading famine, the coastal chaos, the droughts, the floods, the great camps of displaced climate refugees. Instead, the voters wanted to know where their man stood on the threat of DisInt. Were Bees going to descend from Mars to rule over all the kingdoms of the Earth? Were there networked human intelligences infiltrating government and the world banking system? Were free Bioforms just a fifth column for a shadowy conspiracy that was going to murder everyone in their beds? And the other usual suspects: candidates who were down on any sexual orientation beyond the default; candidates who wanted to preserve the traditional family values that imposed a hierarchy (small ‘h’, unless you were a real hard-liner) with a patriarch at the head of the table come Sunday lunchtime; candidates who felt that freedom of worship should only be upheld when you were worshipping at the right altar. All the old familiar battlegrounds now standing around a pulpit from which men like Thompson preached the looming threat posed by any kind of intelligence that went beyond the human.

  Carole had seen a lot of politicians on the other side of the debate founder on those rocks. She’d seen earnest environmentalists, committed humanitarians just choke into silence because the Big Issues that they had built their platforms from were getting swept away in the rising tide, while DisInt and Collars held against the flood. They couldn’t understand it. They were like the crazy people in the street, shouting at everyone that the world was ending, and people just hurried past with their faces averted. Carole had a privileged perspective from inside the machine, though. Plain enough to her why it worked out that way. The worsening climate, the mass displacement, the shortages, that was poor-people problems. DisInt and the growing agency of non-human intellect represented something that might eat into the status quo at the top, hence rich-people problems. Small wonder which one the attention of the world was being focused on.

  The World Senate was poised in the balance right now. The current Alabama-Virginia incumbent wasn’t exactly radical; it wasn’t that kind of seat. He was a sit-on-the-fence kind of guy, though, like a lot of them. Thompson was one of a wave of new candidates who were using the issues to leverage themselves into a commanding lead, feeding off the popular fear about the DisInt conspiracy everyone knew was out there; feeding off the wave of covert bigotry that was spreading through every city’s suburbs now that successful Bioforms weren’t just living in their own districts any more, but were moving into the next street, next door, heavy animal feet stomping in the apartment overhead, scaled reptile faces in your local corner shop. Dogs sitting at the desk next to you like they had a right to be there. Everyone had been all about Bioform rights three decades ago, after Morrow, but that had been when they’d still been in their ghettoes. Now they were passing you in the street and people were all about restrictions, limitations, mandatory Collaring, think of the children…

  For a lot of Thompson’s peers it was just riding the incoming tide, stoking fires already burning so they could use the hot air to rise. Others were genuine dyed-in-the-wool committed reactionaries or else just felt their commercial interests under threat from a changing world. Thompson was all of these, at various times, but mostly that was his outer shell, that part of his functioning personality maintained mostly by other people and coordinated by Carole and the campaign staff. The inner Thompson, the raw and naked creature that sat in his head and wanted things with such a clear and primal force that people made them manifest in the world for him, that Thompson had another reason not to want things like Bees and HumOS running unfettered about the world.

  Rhodes Point Bioform Holding Facility, aka the Shambles, wasn’t used much any more, since they’d constructed a more modern facility further out of town. It had been built in the early years after the old UN’s first resolution on limited Bioform rights, which boiled down to little more than a right to exist. The authorities had been very ready for Bioform delinquency, and places like the Shambles were the result. It was a hideous concrete eyesore, more below ground than above, surrounded by a barbed wire fence and a whole lot of warning signs, but there was only one inmate at present, and that one only as of the last few hours.

  A handful of human officers were there to watch Thompson step from his car, shifting back a few steps when Boyo came out to loom. He dismissed them almost immediately, though. He didn’t trust them, for all they were employed by one of his companies. They were loyal, but they weren’t Loyal, not like Boyo, like Scout, like Carole. They weren’t his. He didn’t trust them, because he didn’t trust anyone who might at some point harbour any thought that didn’t orbit him.

  Carole liaised with Scout, guided Thompson in through the lobby, down into the workings of the Shambles. Concrete walls and floors, harsh unshaded lighting, stains. Old, rust-coloured stains. When a Bioform had crossed the line, back in those days, they hadn’t been gentle. And the smell. Even though the place hadn’t seen more than a handful of brief residencies in the last ten years, the smell lingered. Stale urine, old blood, animals. Pain, fear, death.

  The bear had been wearing fancy clothes, hand-tailored to impart human fashion to an animal frame. All gone now. She was at the bottom of a bare walled pit, the single door down there massive enough that even a young, strong grizzly couldn’t have dented it. And she wasn’t that, not any more. And the walls of the cells in the Shambles were solid and three feet thick. They really had been very worried about rogue Bioforms, back in the day.

  Their vantage was high, looking five metres down past angled spikes, as though the designers had been worried about a bear or a dog going up the walls like a spider, like an alien in one of those movies. As though a tired old circus act could suddenly learn to fly. Carole peered down and waited for the vicarious rush of loathing. This was Thompson’s enemy, hence her enemy as well. This was the animal that had stood on its hind legs and had ideas above its station.

  And she saw just a tired old bear, grey and a little mangy, sitting in a corner of the cell. Without clothes, without context, there was no more of the human about it beyond that residual trace bears have always had; that odd anthropomorphism imparted to them by convergent evolution. Two legs, two arms, stand straight, sit up, until they sloped down on all fours and it all sloughed off them, animal after all.

  The hate didn’t come. She looked at this sad, sagging old thing, and thought about the woman’s sharp, incisive voice taking the human world to task for the games it played, and couldn’t square them.

  Then Thompson was beside her, holding on to the rail, staring down, and his eyes burned. She practically felt the heat off him, the single emotion that was hate and triumph and greed and hunger all snarled together, which fuelled his every move. And then she hated. Then she stared down at the caged beast and loathed it for its temerity. She would have thrown stones at it, had there been any. For him.

  “Sir,” said Scout. He and a couple of the Trigger Dogs were nearby, genuine law
enforcement, or at least private security with the appropriate permits, but Thompson’s, too. He owned them. And they were Sons of Adam all, which Thompson liked. They knew their place, revelled in it, Good Dogs every one of them. They couldn’t put their heads into a Collar fast enough. Safer for them, safer for everybody, as Thompson said in his interviews.

  “Who knows?” Thompson barked abruptly.

  Scout’s channel: We had to go on record that we’d opened up the holding centre. We’ve not said anything more. We have electronic security up. She can’t call out.

  And Carole was boiling that down for Thompson, cooking it until it had distilled into a single word. “Nobody.” And at the same time she felt her anxiety coming back, that twist inside her that writhed against the cage of her devotion, that she could never uproot and tear out of herself. It was because Scout had given the bear a gender. Let it be an it. But Honey was a her, with that pleasant voice and the clever mind behind it. Just a moth-eaten old menagerie inmate, just an animal. Except she was a person, and abruptly Carole was terrified for her. Would Thompson have Scout go get a cattle prod? Would he have the Trigger Dogs go into that cell with bared teeth, a spot of good old-fashioned entertainment for a twenty-first-century Renaissance man?

  He made a noise, not even a word, not even something you’d call a proper laugh. A snicker, small and unpleasant from such a big man. Staring at the captive bear, lips wet, face hanging there like a rag. The real Thompson, the one that was inside him, looked down and enjoyed the sight of his enemy caged, on the point of putting out a hand, thumb downwards, like the emperor he was.