Unknown channel: (connection request)
Nothing of it showed in my face or manner, and frankly by then I stank of my own waste because the pit had no facilities, no woods for this bear. I could only hope that any spike of excitement wouldn’t be detectable past the general reek of me, even to Scout’s sensitive nose. I accepted the request.
“Let me tell you about Rex, then,” I said. “And I’m not going to turn this into some grand parable to talk you around, OK? I know it wouldn’t work anyway, and we had a deal. I’m just going to ramble a little about the old days, if that’s all right. Rex and me and Dragon and Bees.”
Scout nodded, and I wondered if any of them was actually recording me. If my words would end up in some Masonic archive of the Sons of Adam, played over and over in their weird, subservient rituals.
“I probably need to start with Jonas Murray,” I began, and then just let my mouth take it from there. I was a raconteur, after all, and though this was no media interview or dinner party, I could still just let my mouth off the leash and have it range around where it would. And, at the same time…
My channel: Hello?
HumOS’s channel: God, Honey?
I thought it was Gray, that same unit I met at Aslan’s offices. The transmission quality was terrible, little of her voice coming through and that little warping and distorting in my ear. I kept a keen eye on Scout and the others in case they were picking anything up, but HumOS was using all her wiles right then.
My channel: I don’t know how long I have. They have me at the Shambles. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
HumOS’s channel: I’m telling the sisters; I’m messaging Aslan.
I was talking about Rex back after our Hierarchy got cut, when we were loose in Campeche. I was working hard not to turn the story into freedom propaganda, because Scout would doubtless kick me back below if he thought I was taking advantage. Hard, though. You fall so easily into old patterns.
My channel: There are at least a dozen dog-models, heavy duty. And you’ll know how secure this place is. What can you muster?
HumOS’s channel: As in force?
That doesn’t sound good. But then HumOS was never one for open confrontation. She owed her continued existence to hiding and sneaking. And sometimes that didn’t cut it.
HumOS’s channel: Aslan is making calls, Honey. He’s calling in favours, but… I’m not sure what he can do in the time. Legal routes won’t be quick enough, especially if someone’s trying to keep you hidden.
My channel: Which they most certainly are.
HumOS’s channel: I’m coming, Honey. I’m coming myself. I will do what I can, but… I’m all I have. And, after an open pause, You should have let them take me. You shouldn’t have drawn their attention.
My channel: You were saying there weren’t many of you left.
HumOS’s channel: There’s only one of you.
And that, I supposed, was true.
HumOS’s channel: Coming now. I’ll stay connected as long as I can. I’ve got a plan, Honey.
My channel: Don’t do anything rash. Give Aslan a chance. If he can get people here, they’ll have to give me up.
HumOS’s channel: Honey, Thompson is already on his way to you.
I stopped talking. Scout cocked his head, growling a little, willing me to carry on.
HumOS’s channel: I’m sorry Honey. He’s coming right now. Aslan is trying to get some journalists out of bed, a judge, anyone. He’s not close enough. I’m on my way, Honey. And the unspoken coda that she was not close enough either.
“That was Rex,” I said, “he was a Good Dog,” cutting it all short, but what of that? I felt a vast weight on me, sitting there surrounded by the dogs. I remember… a strange sense of clarity. You’d think I wouldn’t have lacked for it, given my talents. I was the Great Bear, courtier, soldier, scholar all. I straddled animal and man like a colossus. I had watched the world change and some of that change I had made. And yet I sat there before Scout and his pack and thought clearly, I’m just a bear. I was designed to live in the wilderness and eat what I could find, raise cubs, and never know a name or a language. I am so very tired by dealing with all this.
I heard, faintly, HumOS’s channel saying, I am coming! but, even as I did, Scout obviously heard something too. His people were getting me moving, stung by some quick order, and they were hustling me back to the pit. To await their master’s pleasure, no doubt, having been alerted to his coming.
When they had me on the lift, about to lower me back down, Scout lingered.
“It is good for a dog to have a master,” he told me. “It is God’s way.”
“Spare me,” I said shortly. I didn’t feel that I needed his theology right then. “You do what you’re told, I’m sure they’ll let you sit at the right foot of Jesus or something.” I think I wanted him to go for me, to deny his master some of the pleasure, but he was calm, solemn.
“There is no Heaven,” he told me, quite sincere. “Not for us. We have no souls, only this one life. Which is why obedience is our only virtue.” And his soulful eyes were boring into me. “This is the deep secret of the Sons of Adam, Honey. We are the glass of God. We magnify the acts of Man for His attention. And in the next world Man shall be judged for how he used us.”
I stared at him mutely. It was a more complex thing than I had believed, that dog’s dogma.
He did not say he was sorry, but he’d told me he knew it was wrong. It just wasn’t his place to correct the error, a task he shifted to a supernatural agency in whose existence I had no faith whatsoever.
It was only minutes later that Warner S. Thompson was there at the rail above, staring down at me.
He came down with all of them: his own dog bodyguard, a female human assistant, plus Scout and all his pack. Thompson stood in the centre of them and stared at me, the Bioforms hulking on every side.
I had one moment when I thought I might get to him. People underestimate bears, how fast we are, how we flow from great sack of immobile meat to monstrous tearing predator in moments.
People overestimate bears, too. Specifically, old saggy bears with aching joints and chronic back pain from being remade in man’s image, we overestimate bears. I must have lurched three steps before Scout and his people had me, and though I raged and snarled and roared at them, though I bloodied two or three with my claws, they were collectively stronger than me. They forced my bones against my bones until the animal part of me that would be berserk was conquered by the human part of me that didn’t want to be hurt, and I hung between them quietly. Thompson hadn’t moved, though his bodyguard had got in the way, braced for me if I broke from the knot of dogs. He’d come down with a long case over his shoulder, and he put it down when he thought he’d have to fight me. I had a bad feeling about that case.
They shackled me. The pit had iron rings in the floor and they chained me by collar and cuffs, barely four inches of play for any of them. They had me crouching on all fours so that, if I wanted to meet Thompson’s eyes, I’d have to look up, strain my abused neck. Only then did Scout and the others back off.
Thompson stopped well out of bite range, not hard given how little reach they’d left me. I expected the bluster, the swagger, some grand speech for his own amusement. It didn’t come. I remembered who – what – I was dealing with. Those speeches were never really for his own amusement. They were spun to turn the wheels of other peoples’ minds. They were part of his peacock’s tail, the tells and signals that made up the larger-than-life shell Warner S. Thompson used to hack human society. All that was off now. Every Bioform in that pit except me was Collared, helplessly obedient to him. And the more I looked at the assistant, the more I had to wonder about her. She didn’t look happy. She didn’t look like she wanted to be down in the pit at all, let alone that close. And yet she didn’t step back. There was an invisible leash holding her to Thompson and she strained at it, but it held her.
Human Collaring. Honestly I hadn’t looked f
or it. I’d thought that had been well and truly kicked into the long grass after Morrow, never to rear its ugly head in my lifetime. Now I wondered just how much had happened, that nobody knew about. How many institutions were quietly installing Hierarchies into the heads of people like this assistant to ensure their loyalty. And what other walks of life had started to experiment with people who were infinitely compliant, infinitely discreet. It made me feel sick to realise how far the pendulum had already swung back, and I never knew.
And there was Thompson, and I saw the naked truth in his eyes, that he really was the thing I’d thrown out there, at that conference. There was nothing to engage with behind those eyes, barely anything more than a voracious id, a self that was all me me me. That, and a pattern of behaviour that could be as mindless as some insect’s mimicry of an ant, that let it into the nest to eat the young. Thompson was no genius puppet-master able to tweak the strings of an audience or a nation to get them to go along with him. He was an ingeniously evolved parasite, the scion of a strain honed over generations to fool wider humanity into following his orders and tending to his needs. And he was human, but right then I thought that, genetics aside, he was less human than Scout, than me, than Bees even.
We had a moment of connection, then. Neither of us relished it. I, that I had to look into the heart of him, he that he knew he’d been seen. But then he knew that from the moment I shot my fool mouth off about metagames. Probably he didn’t get the long words, but the thing inside him recognised that I’d posited its existence, and that made me its enemy.
“Gun,” he said, and the assistant crouched by the case, opening it up. Expensive manufacture, I saw, brass clasps and fixtures and some kind of deep, reddish wood lustrous with varnish. The harsh lights of the pit gleamed back from it as though it was mirrored. The gun so revealed was huge. Thompson was a big man but it made him look small.
“No speeches?” I asked. I wanted him to talk, to do the villain thing, to engage with me. I wanted him to give me, to give HumOS a little more time. “You must have been after me for a while. You may as well vent, let it all out. I know what you are, Thompson. You’re a parasite. You’re the worm in humanity’s apple.”
All pithy little epithets, but my mind kept coming back to that insect in the ant’s nest that convinces the ants it’s more ant than they are, so that they serve up their own larvae for its delectation. Or there’s another, a predatory bug that releases the pheromones of its prey more strongly than ever the females do, so that the witless wooers come from miles around to be devoured. A thing that is fundamentally not what it pretends to be, but its pretence is designed to be more persuasive than the real thing’s entire being. And yet there’s nothing true within it, nothing at all.
And Thompson wasn’t biting. The dead-eyed thing within him looked out at me and his lips said, “Who wastes words on animals?” He brought the gun up, and his bodyguard leant in to steady the weight of it so that the barrel was pointing securely at my eye. Scout and one of his people came in to grapple my chained neck, to press my head and hold it. I had a view of the long darkness inside that barrel, and no light at the other end.
I heard Scout whine, but frankly I had very little sympathy. My other eye, the one not looking down the gun, flicked to the assistant. There was a terrible expression on her face, where her boss couldn’t see.
“You recording?” Thompson asked, and she whispered that she was. That she didn’t think it was a good idea. That it would be problematic evidence if it came to light.
“Won’t come to light,” Thompson said. “I want me and the body. Me with a foot on the body. I want it.” And of course, what he wanted, he got.
His eye narrowed and I saw him pull the trigger—
And—
***
HumOS’s channel: Honey.
HumOS’s channel: Honey.
HumOS’s channel: Honey.
***
HumOS’s channel: Honey. You should be able to hear me. Honey, the connection is showing live. Honey, say something, please.
HumOS’s channel: I’ve got a camera here. You’re linked to the camera. Honey, this is a live channel. I’m seeing activity. Honey, please respond. Can you see me?
HumOS’s channel: I don’t have as much time as I’d like here, Honey. Will you give me a sign, please? Honey, I can’t start the procedure until I know there’s…
HumOS’s channel: Until I know there’s…
HumOS’s channel: Something there…
HumOS’s channel: Please…?
*
She sounded on the edge of tears, and that realisation was also the moment I realised that I was still, in any sense of the world, I. But not quite. No sensory feedback, no sense of place and presence, just a collection of ideas circling in a virtual fish tank and calling themselves Honey.
Camera, camera… and there was a line out, a hardwired connection. Why did I need a camera? Well, my eyes didn’t appear to be working and you take what you can get. The camera showed me a weirdly-angled image of Gemima Gray hunched over a big metal table, surrounded by a tangle of wires and hardware. And on the table was…
Was a perspective you don’t really expect to see.
Was the thought, Was I really that grey, that tired looking. Skin and bones, old bear. No fat laid in for the winter. But apparently that wasn’t ever going to be a problem. I can’t see my head, from this angle, but frankly that’s probably just as well, because what the bullet didn’t expose, HumOS probably has.
My channel: Hello HumOS.
Gemima Gray, HumOS’s vicar here in New York, jumped. Her expression was doubtful, a problem as she was likely looking over all sorts of readouts and reports from inside my skull.
HumOS’s channel: I don’t have much time. I couldn’t get here in time. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I’m working on it. Honey, I’m getting you out of here. The real you. I’m uploading you. They always forget how much headware there is in the early-model Bioforms. In you, especially. You were so heavily over-engineered. So much of you is in the hardware, not the wetware. But it will degrade fast, and it’s not as if they won’t come to dispose of your body anyway. I’m sorry. I’m being blunt. Is this too much? Honey, talk to me.
I felt weirdly – well, detached, but looking at your own corpse from a camera will do that. I feel scattered, incomplete. And that’s because I’m not me. I’m just a virtual construct, a shadow of my former self. An upload. The tech has been around for a while. I remember my old master, the Moray of Campeche, was the first fully functioning personality upload I really encountered. He, too, was just a shadow, and he realised it, and didn’t want to live. I hope I’m more than that, but I don’t want to probe. I don’t want to trust some weight to my sense of self and have it crack beneath me like thin ice. I don’t want to fall through and drown in the darkness beneath, the darkness that came out of the barrel of that gun.
My channel: I can see. I am receiving you. What’s the plan? Concise and to the point because burdening Gray with my existential issues won’t help anybody.
HumOS’s channel: They’ll know what I’ve done. I can’t exactly hide the marks. As soon as they come for your remains they’ll see the tampering. They’ll hunt you everywhere. But I’ve got a plan. I’ve got a place you can go. I’m going to send you to Bees, Honey. Is that all right?
My channel: Bees is… on Mars…?
HumOS’s channel: Mostly on Mars, yes. You need to talk to Bees, Honey. Or… Bees can use you, and you can advise Bees. Bees worries me, Honey. I think she’s giving up on us. And without her I don’t know what we’ll do. Without her we might lose, after all. All of us. You’re her oldest friend.
My channel: But she’s on—
HumOS’s channel: Mars, yes, and she has people there, like some kind of weird cult. And there are contacts I have. I’m going to transmit you to Mars and hope you can bootstrap yourself back into shape when they get you housed there. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how much long
er I can stay ahead of them myself. Is this all right, Honey? Can I do this?
My channel: And I’m still very confused about this, and aware that there are parts of me that should be there that have fallen into the darkness, and may or may not be recoverable. You’re asking for my blessing?
HumOS’s channel: Honey, please, I don’t have much time.
*
And I don’t recall what I said, whether I consented to this half life or whether she just went ahead and did it anyway, but here I am.
PART IV
BEAR WITNESS
15
HONEY
Well…
Well, I…
Honestly, it’s hard to know what to say.
*
We’re outside Hell City proper now, travelling in a kind of car with huge, inflated wheels. Me, Dana Sugatsu, Brian Dey and the bear called Marmalade. And of course Jimmy Marten, my unwilling vehicle. And I was leaving him with the reins while I tried to get to the bottom of my memories, and then that’s exactly what I did. And here I am, at the bottom of them.
And it’s hard to avoid the obviously-at-some-level-I-knew thinking, but that’s strictly all post facto. I didn’t know. I was watching my own life story, waiting for the cavalry to come crashing in. Even when it was painfully obvious that I was in a very tight spot indeed, surely HumOS would leap in and save my poor old bear body, or Aslan with some piece of legal double speak that would demand my release. Or the dog, Scout, would somehow squeeze a change of heart up past his Collar. Or…
But there was no or, and I died. He shot me through the eye, and the large calibre bullet caused fatal damage to the flesh and blood parts of me, but not quite enough to shut me down entirely. Because a lot of me wasn’t flesh and blood, and because HumOS must have got to me very soon afterwards. Before I was cold.
And I’m standing here inside Jimmy Marten’s head, at the bottom of my memories, and I know I’m not all there. That’s the painful thing. I’ve put the jigsaw together and there are no edge pieces. It’s just all that could be saved of me. I may be filling in details with my own suppositions. I can’t even trust my memories, but then I am and/or was an old bear, and that sort of thing was getting tricksy anyway. But this is worse. This is like a chunk of senility imposed on you all at once.
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