Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Human Collaring, Scout. You don’t think that’s a problem? That it’s wrong?”

  Another faint whine from the dog, and then, like a mantra, “I do not decide right or wrong. Knowledge of good and evil was given to Adam, as was mastery of all the beasts. It is not for me to say what is right. God will judge.”

  Gray started to make some comment about that but one of her guards wrung her arm until she hissed in pain and shut up.

  “They will send papers,” Scout said firmly. “Legal papers. You will know. Sign these papers. Say nothing. Name your price.”

  “I was talking about duty.” Keram John Aslan, rediscovering the non sequitur as a conversational form in his senescence. “You have your duty, for all it’s technologically enforced. So let me have my duty. I have a duty not just to my clients but to justice. I don’t get to duck out on my judgement of what is good and what is evil, Scout. Because I too believe God will judge.”

  The Bioform was shaking, ever so slightly. That ear cocked once more, and then he turned to look at the two other dogs.

  Aslan was waiting for the word, waiting for his moment to leap up and shout, No! But of course they communicated on their closed channels. The orders reached Scout and passed to his squad while he waited, and then one of the dogs shifted his grip and snapped Gray’s neck. The movement was so small, so precise in those big, brutal hands, that Aslan just stared, most of him not entirely convinced that violence had been done.

  They let the body drop.

  “That’s murder,” Aslan got out. “You… can’t…”

  “She was not Man,” Scout said, sounding surer of himself. “Murder is only for Man. She was a thing, a DisInt thing.”

  “That’s always the excuse they use,” Aslan whispered, staring past the lip of his desk at the body. “When they decide they’re going to kill you, they always take away your humanity first.” Then he was on his feet, knotted fists clenched. “You’d think,” he spat, “that someone like you, who’s kind has been on the borderline of human and thing all your life, that you’d think more about that. You’d think you wouldn’t want that border shifted an inch. But look what you did!”

  Scout whimpered and ducked down. “Please,” he got out, whether to his employer or the man in front of him, Aslan didn’t know. “Just sign. Just take money. Just be silent. Just. Please. Please. I can’t not do it. I can’t. I’m a Bad Dog. Bad Dog. Bad Dog.”

  Aslan took a deep breath. “Tell your master he’s too late. I’ve been sending the files out all this time. They’ve gone to politicians. They’ve gone to media outlets. They’ve girdled the damn Earth while we’ve been here speaking. Pandora’s box is well and truly open, Scout, and maybe we’ll get all the way down to the hope part now. What does your master say about that?”

  Scout snarled, though not, it seemed, at Aslan. No doubt that someone beyond these walls had heard those words, though. The Bioform was twitching all over as though trying to shed his skin. He lurched forward, clawed fingers digging into the desktop, splintering the expensive wood.

  “Bad Dog,” he whined. His eyes were huge, whites all the way around the edge. “Please, master. Please. I don’t want to be a Bad Dog. Please.” And Aslan could almost hear the voice yelling inside the dog’s head, see the flinching rhythm of it played out in the Bioform’s face.

  “Scout,” he said desperately, “you don’t have to—” But it was a lie. That was the point of the Collar. The beasts of the field weren’t allowed to say no to Cain, even when he told them to murder Abel.

  Scout was foaming at the mouth, and Aslan could only watch the war within the dog, watch his desk crack across, watch the shoulders of the Bioform’s suit split along the seams like a transformation in a werewolf movie. Is this it? Have I beaten the Collar somehow?

  Then the gunshot, the thunder of it obscenely loud in the office, like doomsday. The wide-barrelled pistol in the hands of one of the other dogs. Scout slumping onto the shattered desk, a hole at the base of his skull, kicking, spasming. Aslan looked up into that muzzle, past it to the terrified, agonised eyes of the dog that held it.

  The purloined Braintree data, racing around the world. Thompson’s demands and Felorian’s experiments. Light shone onto all that darkness. And perhaps, just perhaps it would help.

  It’s been worth it. It’s been good. I was a good man. And then the gun spoke again.

  19

  JIMMY

  There’s a thing called Prisoner’s Dilemma.

  All of this Honey tells me on the way back.

  It’s a game, she says. Sounds like a crap game to me. Two prisoners being questioned. Do you sell out your mate or keep schtum? You both shut up, you’re in gravy, you keep quiet and your mate rats you out, you’re screwed but your treacherous mate does super well. You both rat on each other, somewhere in the middle. Anyway, this guy Axelrod set up a championship for computers to play this scintillating diversion like a hundred times a pop, to see what the best strategy was. Honey says you play once, being a rat works out. You play a hundred times, you learn to cooperate. Being nice pays off more than being a shit. I can’t help but feel she’s using this as some kind of lesson concerning the habits of Yours Truly.

  Except, she says, there was this team from Southampton U, wherever that is, that worked out there was a better strategy to win. She says they entered a whole load of computers, fifty, a hundred, flooded the system. And from the way they played the first few matches, they could recognise each other, know when they were playing another Southampton guy. And then one of the two throws the match, always keeps schtum and lets the other one rat it out, over and over. Meaning, when all the dust has cleared, the top scorers in the whole match are a handful of Southampton alumni, Honey says. And right at the bottom of the league table are all the others, who’ve given up everything so their mates can grab the top spots.

  So what, says I? So they hacked the system, she tells me. So they took a real simple game and found there’s a metagame even in that. What they did, these computers, is basically they reinvented feudalism and called it winning. Not that you can generalise from prisoner’s dilemma to life, she tells me, but the lesson the Southampton Gambit teaches is that you win at life by convincing a bunch of other people to give up their lives for you, to fuck themselves over, to kneel down so’s you can stand on their backs and use them like stairs to get to the top.

  “All very goddam fascinating, but it’s not life, is it,” is my response, and she says, “No, Jimmy. And that’s why you’re out here building someone else’s big house on Mars,” because she’s a patronising bitch.

  Brian says that he and the whole Bees cult business have Hell City’s systems in hand, meaning we’ll sneak in without finding Sheriff Rufus and a whole pack of Bad News Bears waiting for us. After that, not really sure. I mean, it’s not like they ain’t still looking for me.

  “What’s your play?” I ask Sugar.

  She looks like she’s counting, doing hard sums in her head. “Not sure,” she admits. “I was hoping I’d get something out of this little jaunt we could use. Could sell Bri and the other two to Admin, get out of shit that way. I mean, Bees is big biz, right?”

  I have what I think of as one of my rare moments of clarity. “You want Bees as your enemy or you want Admin?”

  “Yeah, well,” she admits. “That is the actual fucking problem, ain’t it.”

  “I mean, you got friends, right?” Right now I ain’t got any, and I was kind of hoping to hide out in Sugar’s shadow. Save that someone’s turned a light on right over her and that shadow’s looking goddamn small.

  She stares moodily at the horizon, where you can see Hell City works dug into Hellas Planitia like a blister that got infected. “Maybe. Makes you want a dose of that Southampton Method, to make people get in line. So Honey, you in there?”

  “Course she’s fucking in there,” I say, because I should be so lucky.

  “Just thinking,” Honey confirms, because that’s the only goddamn r
eason she isn’t actually talking at any given moment.

  “Why’re these clowns on Earth looking into this game anyway?”

  “Well, I’ve been considering that,” because of course she has. “And the worrying thing is that it’s a mass Collaring strategy. Back when I was in the military we had what we called a Hierarchy, which is Collaring with a scale of who outranks who, so you know whose orders to follow. I still bless the man who freed us from it. That was when everything started.”

  “Sure, sure,” Sugar tells her. “Without etcetera you’d not be where you are today. Which is dead on Mars. Get to the point.”

  Honey sighs over the radio. “I think they’ve probably used the Southampton Method to test out a sort of instant Hierarchy, so that once you take a mass of people and simultaneously Collar them, they fall into a feudal structure, everyone knowing who’s above, who’s below. Gives you an immediately functioning set up. Instant fascism.”

  “Wait, wait, wait now,” I butt in. “Who’s this mass of people they’re doing all this Collaring to?”

  Sugar’s looking at me, and Marmalade’s looking at me. Brian’s driving, and Mariah and Judit went off in their own Loonie, but I can feel Honey looking at me even though she hasn’t got eyes any more, even though all she could see would be the inside of my skull.

  “Well,” she says at last, “given it’s Braintree that’s doing all this work, what if there were a whole load of people carrying a bunch of Braintree headware around, somewhere. Like, a closed-off community of them somewhere outside World Senate legal reach who’d make for a perfect experiment.”

  “Oh,” I say. I mean, what else is there?

  “And this is where it goes.” Honey’s holding forth now, like she’s talking to a room full of politicos or academics. “You let people reintroduce Hierarchies by inches, and then you’ve got this, and nobody would complain because, hell, Mars is all the way over there, not our backyard. And then, when the Mars test is satisfactorily wrapped up and Hell City gets built double time and no wage bill, someone looks at some big job they’ve got on Earth and says, wouldn’t it be great if we could do that here? And someone else looks at the bottom line and calculates the value of their share portfolio and says—”

  “All right, all right. Jesus,” I interrupt her. “So what, we just wake up and we’re zombies?”

  “You wake up and you can’t say no,” Honey tells me. “To anything. Ever. Maybe they refined the process and you don’t even want to say no, but there’s no reason for that. That means extra nuance that costs money. All they need is that you can’t. But it won’t come to that, now. If Bees does what she says she will. If the Braintree data is as incriminating as she says it is.”

  We go round the edge of the construction site. I mean, plenty of people see us, but we’re just a bunch of people in a Loonie and that’s not news. So maybe word gets back to Sheriff Rufus soon enough, but by then we’re in.

  “I’ve got somewhere we can hole up,” Sugar says. “See what kind of a stink’s still hanging about. Jimmy?”

  “Count me goddamn in. I ain’t got nowhere.” And I ain’t got so much Stringer left either, because I’ve been sneaking it in whenever Honey’s distracted. Right now my anxiety levels are trying to push branches up my throat and out the top of my head, but the Stringer’s keeping them under control, just about. Except I got four pills left and that doesn’t look like much to me.

  I can link to Hell City now, and as we’re on the move I figure I’m not tripping too many alarms if I check my balance. It’s still in credit; it’s not even frozen.

  So, hole up with Sugar, sure. Just for a very short while, maybe three pills’ worth. Because after that, Yours Truly is going to need to go shopping.

  “There’s news from Earth,” Sugar says. “Get on the news channels. Holy fuck.”

  Honey chuckles. And I don’t know how she does it, not really, not with her just being an upload in my head coming over our radios, but damn me if there ain’t a whole load of satisfaction in that sound.

  Takes about fifteen minutes for a signal to get from Mars to Earth, on average. But we’ve been bouncing about in the Loonie for a couple hours and all hell’s hit the fan while we were out of the loop.

  We got to assume Bees did her thing, and then this lawyer did his thing, because there’s basically one thing the entire planet is talking about, and that’s Braintree. Braintree experimenting, Braintree breaking laws. Videos of surgical operations; videos of weird experiments where lobotomised kids exchange complicated handshakes; videos of the goddamn crematoria under the place, where they got rid of what they’d made. There’s a picture of some skinny white guy who’s head Brainiac over there, and people are saying a modern Doctor Mengele, whatever that means. Nothing good, apparently.

  And Thompson, the guy who popped a cap in Honey’s bear ass and got her sent out here. We listen to anchors infuse every word of the news with urgency. Thompson funding links to Braintree. Thompson on the videos, giving the orders. Thompson’s lawyers denying, smear campaign, political opponents. They even mention Bees, say that the videos might be faked. I mean, might be faked. You’d figure someone’d remember whether they did all that or not.

  And they ain’t given up yet. Got to give them credit, that legal team is doing some real Olympic-grade weaselling, and you can tell they’re going to keep stonewalling until the money runs out. Sounds like nobody’s been let in Braintree either, you got a whole team of WS agents sitting outside while the lawyers barricade the place with paper.

  We’re in by then, snuck through an access hatch. Sugar and Marmalade are ahead, and we’re in old tunnels, set into the original foundations. Which means we’re actually super close to Admin, to Storage Nineteen, to my own goddamn nook and some real friendly purveyors of pharma for that matter. But then the liveable part of Hell City still ain’t all that big. And this is out of the way, and when we reach the hidey-hole, it’s down an accessway Marmalade can only just squeeze through, and then into a room that must be in the ventilation system ’cos there’s a constant current of dust from one end to the other, like an all-hours sandstorm that can’t quite be bothered.

  “It’s what I got,” Sugar says, to stave off any complaints. “Wasn’t planning to have to use it. So, when does Admin back down, Honey? When do they stop hunting Jimmy and stop caring about me?”

  “That’s based on local parameters I have no knowledge of, I’m afraid,” Honey says. “However, if it was purely being pushed from Earth, from Thompson, then I think he has bigger things to worry about than where I’ve gone.”

  We spend the next few hours watching the wheels grind over on Earth while Sugar tracks down Murder. Still alive, we find out. Locked up in the med wing of the cells the sheriff keeps handy. She feels the situation out in short bursts, careful as you like, not wanting to give any electronic surveillance the satisfaction. Sugar’s good at hiding her tracks, but Rufus is good at tracking, and we all reckon that goes for digital as well as the real.

  “Reckon they’ll make a deal?” I ask her, once she’s satisfied her henchbear hasn’t been turned into a rug for the sheriff. Right now she’s sitting with her back to the wall, head down to keep out of the dust flow, eyes screwed shut. I just got a little shut eye and now I sit down beside her, enough distance that she doesn’t punch me.

  “They better,” she replies. “I can make things real rough for them. I know things.” Sugar sounds desperate. That ain’t a Sugar I’m used to. She knows she might have some pull, but she’s a small operator. She can’t go head to head with Danny Boyd over in Admin, and while she could maybe survive a skirmish with Rufus while she had two bears to call on, she can’t win if he keeps gunning for her.

  “Least you care about your employees more than goddam Admin.” I am in the mood to grouse.

  She gives me a look. “It’s not like that.”

  “What’s not?”

  “Murder and Marmalade and me.” She looks worn out. I slept a bit on the Looni
e, on the way back. I don’t reckon she did. “We’re in it together. It’s just easier if people think I’m in charge. And now they’ve got her. And Admin’s being weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Slow. Whole system’s slow. I wonder if it’s this business Honey set off. If this Thompson’s been sending executive orders to Hell City then maybe Boyd and his clowns are busy shredding the files right about now.”

  “Why bother? We’re outside Earth law, you hear? They can do whatever shit they want to us.”

  She shrugs. “People send data here when they want it out of sight, but still around. I mean, that was my business, right? Maybe there’s a ton of shit over here they don’t want people to see. Even worse than what’s out already.”

  “Cheery fucking thought.”

  “I got a cheerier one.” It’s the worry, or it’s the tiredness, or what we’ve gone through in the last day, but she’s being almost pally with me right now. “You reckon you know, when they do it to you?”

  “Do what?”

  “Collar you. If we’re all set up for it, would we know if they turn it on? Or do you only find out the moment you try to do something they don’t want. Or… or is it that you don’t even think of it. You go through your life being the obedient drone and never realise you don’t get a choice any more.”

  “Jesus, you are just full of the happies, ain’t you.”

  She’s frowning. “I don’t get it, though. Hey, Honey, you in there?”

  “Where else’d she be?” I ask, but she’s done with me now.

  “Quiet, Jimbles, grown-ups talking. Honey, this Collaring, it ain’t exactly cutting edge experimental. So why all those damn tests. Why not just slap us with a Collar the moment we wake up on Mars. I mean me and mine have been fucking over the system since we got here, twisting it so we can make a buck. You going to tell me they could have us all like robot slaves working here, and they didn’t? Why hold off, if that’s their plan?”