Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Carole had a moment in which her mind’s eye cast up the image of that thing that was Thompson, the inner lurker that made its body out of the co-opted efforts of other people; cast it up naked and disconnected, a limbless thing of jelly like something pulled too soon from the womb. “It’s always a pleasure to work for Warner,” her mouth said gaily. “You feel like you’re the tool of destiny. That you’re doing God’s work, almost.” And that was the wrong line, because Live With US’s audience didn’t poll as that religious and she’d done her research before coming. It was from another interview, the one with the televangelist last month.

  “Carole,” Wiley said, still staring into her eyes. “I suspect you were probably never a particularly good person, and you knew it, and that was part of the neuroarchitecture they gave you at Braintree. That you deserved what you got. That becoming the pawn of Thompson was what you deserved. All the usual tricks to stop you challenging the programming. And you know what? You don’t have to be a good person. That’s OK. But you’re entitled to be your own person. And that’s what they took away from you. Because their sort of evil can’t even trust bad people to do bad things for them. And I’m going to try to help you, Carole. Me and a friend of mine. I’m looking forward to working with you, if you choose to work with me. Carole, I’m going to give you a gift, now. I want you to keep it with you. Use it when you need to.” And Wiley had turned her hand over, something cold and hard being pressed into Carole’s palm, fingers folded over it.

  Carole…

  Blinked.

  Jennifer Wiley was still talking, still that big smile, sipping at her coffee now, leaning back, so very enthusiastic to work on the big project that was probably the biggest anyone had ever trusted her with. Carole wondered what price she’d paid, what wheels she’d greased, to get it. And it wouldn’t work. Carole would have to break the news gently, nothing personal but… exactly the wrong person to put within Thompson’s pull. And she’d need to act fast because, once Thompson saw Wiley, he’d set his sights on her. He’d add her to the list of things he wanted to do. And then it would be a done deal and nothing Carole could do would stop it, and it would come down to the usual pay-offs and NDAs and veiled threats to make sure that the used-and-discarded Wiley kept her pretty mouth shut. And Carole had done that too many times before, and that wasn’t even counting the times when Boyo had got involved or she’d had to pull the trigger on the Trigger Dogs, for those times when money or pressure or pieces of paper didn’t look like they would ensure silence. No kiss-and-tell stories about Thompson, not on her watch.

  And Wiley would be heartbroken, doubtless. Would be furious that her career was being derailed after all the things she’d surely had to do to get that far. And she’d never know that Carole had done it all to save her from something Carole couldn’t save herself from.

  And soon enough she was tripping out of the Live With US offices, already composing her messages to make it all a reality, pausing only a moment as she reached the car to think, Did something…? Was there a moment when…? And she stopped, just for two seconds, as the car opened its door for her, looking down at the little enamelled pin brooch she was holding. Gold and blue, oval like an ancient scarab, save for the suggestion of wings and the stripes on the abdomen. Thinking, Where did I get this, exactly? But it was pretty enough, and something in her spiked with affection for it, that part of her that was usually so unhappy, the part that said Get off me and that the rest of her was forbidden to listen to. But this one time she listened to it, and slipped the brooch into her pocket and then mostly forgot about it.

  *

  That night, Scout and the Trigger Dogs made their scheduled report to confirm that all was quiet at the Shambles, no visitors come for Honey. Carole fielded half a dozen other select reports, some of which were in themselves summations of multiple other sources. Yes, people were looking for Honey. She could trace the enquiries made by overt sources like the lawyer, Aslan, or the World Senate Relief Force or some of her academic colleagues. She could also sense the spidery touch of other operators. HumOS was out there, in every shadow. And she would find Honey eventually, but that presupposed the old bear had that much time left. Nobody’s attention was aimed at the Shambles. Right now, Thompson had vanished away an entire bear, a well-known bear with a huge media footprint, and nobody had followed the sleight of hand.

  Carole was obviously delighted with this. She told herself how happy she was it had all worked out. That she wouldn’t have to get Thompson to sign off on any of the alternative stories they had worked up, in case someone turned up at the Shambles with a warrant and a demand. All perfectly plausible reasons why Honey might have been mistakenly arrested, but Thompson would have been angry at being thwarted, and she didn’t want him angry. Of all the things in the world she didn’t want him angry.

  She didn’t want him to make that second visit to the Shambles either. In her mind the old bear sat, like a Shakespearean king awaiting the murderers. Like a woman, any woman, who went against the tide and met the savage teeth of the world’s fury at her presumption. Just a woman, even though she was a bear. And still Carole would report to Thompson that it was all clear, that he could have what he wanted. It was her job. She loved her job. She loved Thompson, would do anything, unquestioningly loyal.

  Boyo met her at the foyer of tonight’s hotel. Something in her gave him pause, his brown eyes brimming with empathy. They just stood there for long seconds, looking at each other. In Carole’s mind she was a fragile thing suspended between the pulls of heavy objects: Thompson up in the penthouse suite above, Honey down in the pit below. And she wanted to talk to Boyo, to tell him how she felt. She wanted to tell him that she’d met with a media executive today and it had been a perfectly normal, pleasant chat except that something deep inside her spiked anxiety every time she thought about the Live With US documentary. She wanted to tell him that; she wanted to tell Thompson something, anything, that would stop tonight going ahead, but there wasn’t anything she could say. She wanted to tell him that she wanted to say no, but they’d made her sign a waiver and given her headware and now she couldn’t ever say no, not to anything. And that meant she couldn’t tell Boyo, and even if she could, he had headware too and couldn’t say if it was just the same for him.

  Up on the top floor, Thompson already seemed to know how smoothly it had all gone. When she arrived, it was obvious one of the campaign team had been and gone in her absence and brought him something. Thompson had a gun. It was a wide-barrelled rifle, the sort of thing she imagined might have been used for elephants, while there were still elephants; for rhinos back when they hadn’t gone the way of the unicorn; or perhaps for the bison the Russians were still desperately trying to preserve in the narrowing strip of tundra over in Siberia. Loaded for bear, that was the phrase, wasn’t it?

  “I want a picture,” Thompson told her, and she knew exactly what he was thinking of. All those game hunters standing triumphantly over the bodies of animals that only existed in pictures like those, in old TV documentaries or children’s books. Lions and tigers and bears. Except the bears had proved adaptable enough to cling on, and then useful enough to become part of the Bioform program.

  “A picture would be damaging, sir,” she told him. “If it got out.”

  Thompson beamed. He never just smiled, not really. A smile was a wan and fickle thing, compared to the expression he could muster. It filled the room with his mood and left no room for anyone else’s.

  “You record it,” he told her. “Just for us. Go get the car, Boyo,” and, helplessly within Carole’s head, the thought, We’re going on a bear hunt.

  14

  [RECOVERED DATA ARCHIVE: ‘HONEY’]

  Unknown channel: …

  Sitting there in the stark light, against the stained concrete wall, that was all I got. The Shambles was heavily screened. When they built it, they’d known most Bioforms had comms headware. They’d known that, back in the days of the Pound, attempts to simply disable
that ’ware on a case by case basis hadn’t worked; easy enough to reactivate the protocols. They’d wanted a secure prison where the inmates didn’t have 24-hour phone privileges. And then they’d set the cells underground and walled in two feet of reinforced concrete and that was the icing on the incommunicado cake, frankly. So there I was, trying to get a line out, trying to find something live in the Shambles to piggyback off. Trying to hack into the personal systems of my captors, even. And getting nowhere. Even they were cut off, if they came anywhere near me. They had to go out on the street for a signal.

  And I remembered the Shambles. There had been real spikes of hysteria about Bioforms, around the time the place was built. And there had been Bioforms who’d reacted to their newfound rights and freedoms by taking advantage of them, or who had just failed to integrate into human society. And we’d worked out systems and methods and buffers since, but it had been a turbulent time. And when one of us crossed the line, the human law had come down hard. This was before Rex had become a champion who was such a Good Dog.

  The Shambles was where we were sent to die. I mean, technically it was just a holding cell, but twenty-nine Bioforms died in the Shambles. They died resisting arrest, mostly, and what, the human police and guards asked, were they supposed to use against an eight-foot cyborg dog that was resisting arrest, save for overwhelming force. And it’s amazing how much the marks on some poor mutt just tied to a chair and beaten to death look like the marks on a rabid monster brought down by heroic law enforcement officers. Especially when the judge rules that all those rope burns about the wrists and neck are somehow inadmissible evidence. It’s cases like that which Keram John Aslan built a career around, and he did well out of them because the world was turning. Because of Rex, and because of me, and all those other Bioforms who made themselves paragons to skew the public-perception window back towards the middle ground.

  When they discontinued the regular use of the Shambles, Aslan and I had a little celebration. It passed beneath most people’s notice but to us it was a major victory.

  And now here I was.

  Unknown channel: …

  Maddening, really. Someone was trying very hard to reach me, and they couldn’t get through. All I had was the sense of a pending connection, an absence that meant more than simply nothing there. Negative comms pressure. Nine-tenths of me wanted to reach across the gap, because it was Aslan, it was Gemima Gray or some other HumOS unit, it was Bees. And the other tenth? The other tenth had got superstition, that eminently human thing. The other tenth shrank back from that contact because it remembered the early, early days when I was a soldier working for Redmark, working for the Moray of Campeche. I didn’t want to make that contact and hear those old voices. Rex’s channel; Dragon’s channel. My old squad mates, the voices of the dead.

  But it was only one-tenth and it got out-voted. I stood up, marking the immediate watchfulness of the two dog-models up above on the viewing gallery.

  “I want to talk to your chief, your commanding officer.”

  They stared down at me without comment.

  “Isn’t a bear allowed to meet her baiters?” But frankly that was probably too abstruse for them. “I want to talk to him about his medal.” I made the sign of the cross in the air between us with the tip of one claw. “Come on, now, when’s he going to get another chance?” And then, the last desperate cry of the Z-list celebrity. “Don’t you know who I am?”

  I got to shuffle about for a while more, and then there was another dog up there, the one who’d stopped my car and made the arrest, under the eyes of human officers. Those humans hadn’t put in an appearance since – there had only been Thompson and his entourage. I strongly suspected that only he and his dogs knew where I’d been taken, for reasons of plausible deniability. I, the Bioform rights advocate, had been vanished away, and they’d used Bioforms to do it. Just like they made Rex and me and the others to be soldiers, to do the brutal things that human soldiers might find inconvenient, so once again they’d warped us into their twisted shadows. Made us the monster that they’d always told stories about, because monsters are easier to destroy when they don’t have your face.

  “You’re in charge here?” I asked him.

  “I lead,” he confirmed. He didn’t look much like Rex – leaner, longer in the muzzle, paler of hide – but the voice was very close. I wonder I hadn’t noticed it before. Must be an iteration of my friend’s original war-voice, the one he never liked much.

  “My name is Honey,” I told him. “My original name, the one I came out of the labs and the factories with.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, and then, “Scout.”

  “I want to make a deal with you,” I called up to him. “Just a little deal.”

  “No deals.”

  “Are you a Good Dog, Scout?”

  He went very still, leaning over the rail so far I wondered if it would buckle. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I am a Good Dog.” And it meant something different than when Rex used to agonise over it, but it was to do with Rex still, as well. And maybe this one last time my old friend would save me.

  “I knew a Good Dog once,” I said carefully. “I knew him better than anyone. He was my commanding officer and my best friend. I was with him when he died.” Or at least in comms contact, but close enough. “The original Good Dog, Scout. The best.”

  Scout just leant on the rail, eyes on me.

  “I’ll make a deal,” I said again. “Not a big deal. I know you’re not just going to let me walk out of here. Not against orders. That’s what being a Good Dog means to you, isn’t it. But maybe you could at least let me out of this pit for half an hour. Let me look at something other than the frankly unpleasant stains on the walls.” And how I wanted to believe those rusty marks soaked into the concrete were just iron from old water leaks. “And in return, I’ll tell you about Rex. A first-hand account, Scout. A gospel, you might say, from one of his few surviving disciples.”

  I could see the war in him. His Collar was clamped tight, but Collars are never as infallible as their masters believe. Scout was limited in his options, but what constituted obedience and what constituted betrayal was a personal thing. He had to do what he was told, but he would have leeway. And I was betting that nobody had thought it necessary to explicitly tell him, Do not let this bear move from the cell as part of their general orders to hold me, because who would ever need to?

  “Just a change of scenery. It’s very boring down here, and I never liked being underground.” All lies, I’ve been a regular cave bear in my time. “And when will you ever get the chance? Record it all for the Sons of Adam, if you want. I’ll keep it clean of anything incriminating.”

  He turned and left, and I thought I’d lost him then, but they let down the lift a minute later, watching me with guns at the ready as it came up. Scout was waiting there, with half a dozen of his people. We didn’t go out. We didn’t get to see the sky or grab a breath of fresh air. But I wasn’t in the pit. There was less concrete between me and the outside, and I’d had the outer ghost of a signal even down there.

  I sat down, because that instantly made the whole thing a more long-term affair, and because I was an old bear and standing on two legs for long periods of time did painful things to my back.

  “That badge of yours.” I nod at the dog-and-cross proudly displayed on his barrel chest. “Good Dogs all.”

  “I’m not stupid,” he told me, still that low angry voice because it’s all the voice they gave him. “I know you. I saw talks, heard speeches. They warned us about you.”

  That was news, and I realised I’d fallen into the very human trap of thinking he probably was a bit stupid, because he believed things I didn’t and used shorter words.

  “You’ll talk about Rex,” he said, touching the medal briefly. “But I brought you here to tell you how you’re wrong. You think being one of us means being like humans. You think we were made to be free and make all the choices and bear all the guilts of being human. That isn’t
the way. Man was made by God to be able to choose whether to obey or not.” A shake of Scout’s head turned into a whole-body shiver. “That’s a punishment. All-powerful God knows what the one right thing is, every time, but Adam has a thousand options to choose from. Who’d be Adam? Why do clever bears like you tell us we should follow in his footsteps? God made Man to choose; Man made us to obey. We don’t need to have the worry or the blame. We just say yes. So you fight your whole life against human fear, because you want to have the right to make the wrong choice, and at the same time you’re bigger, stronger, smarter even. And you wonder humans don’t like you.” And despite the angry voice he was so very earnest, doggy eyes boring into mine, trying to make me see. “Humans like us. We are the Sons of Adam. We accept the Collar as a mark that we know our place and purpose in the world. We are the servants of humanity, and we do not know doubt or fear or choice. We know only love, God’s and Man’s. We are Good Dogs.”

  I had a hundred rejoinders, clever arguments, rhetorical devices to demonstrate to eight decimal places why he’s wrong, but they all choked up together in my head, and instead I said, “Rex would have understood.”

  It wasn’t what he expected, I think, but it’s true. Not agreed, but understood. The creed of the Sons of Adam would have resonated in my friend’s doggy skull. On days when the responsibility of choice weighed heavily on him, and there were many, he’d have pined for it. But I like to think he’d never have taken the Collar, even so. And yet he’s their hero, the original Good Dog. Because he was the first Bioform that humans knew and lauded. Because he gave his life so that humans might be free to choose. Because… well, the story got told a hundred different ways and you can staple any moral to it that you want.