Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “But you see what’s going on here, Jimmy? You remember what I told you?” Impatient teacher with slow pupil. Except yes, this time Yours Truly passes with flying colours because actually I do.

  “It’s your prisoner’s doofus,” I say. “It’s the thing where they rigged it. Where they cheated.”

  “Well it wasn’t cheating per se—” she starts, in full teach mode, before reining herself in. “Yes. Exactly that. We’re seeing a hierarchy being established.”

  “Why not by headware?” Marmalade rumbles, when she’s been clued in.

  “I can barely get to you on a narrow comms channel right now, there’s so much system traffic,” Honey says. “So this is their alternative system. There must be recognition codes in the handshake, establishing where each… unit sits in the whole…” And by then we’re a district out from Admin, close enough for her to get a real good picture of what’s going on if the system will only give her room to get her claws in and open it up.

  “Jimmy!” It’s been a while since anyone shouted my name out loud. Only Maldoun, what with Sugar Jimbles-ing me all the time. I see someone shoving their way past a knot of gladhanding grinners: Indra, my old fellow penitent on the shit job rota, lover of soaps. Except she’s scared out of her wits right now, practically throwing her arms round me when she sees I’m not just gonna pump her mitt like some campaigning congressman.

  “What’s going on!” she wants to know, and I tell her I’m fucked if I know but that it’s bad. She doesn’t pass comment on Marmalade, staring down at her murderously, and I don’t mention Honey.

  “It’s all going away!” she tells me. “They’re taking everything! Why?” Utterly distraught. And that sounds like she’s become a poet in extremis, a real fancy way of describing the situation. Except a few words on I realise she means her library of goddamn South American soap episodes. Her headspace is packed jam full of cheap melodrama, and it’s all getting deleted, show by show. That’s what’s got her in a state.

  “Indra, listen to me,” but what am I going to say? That it’s worse. That first they came for the soap operas and I didn’t say anything because I don’t really like soap operas. “Indra, listen,” and still here’s me with nothing to actually tell her. “Honey, do something. Help her. Stop it.” Because there’s only one reason why they’d be stripping out her library. It’s ’cos they need the space.

  “I’m trying,” Honey says. “I’m not sure what’s… oh. Oh, wait.”

  Indra’s face has gone weird, like all the Indra is being yanked from it, pulled deep inside. I see the corners of her mouth stretch.

  “Honey, they’re Collaring her. They’re doing it right now. Stop them. Please, Honey.” I can hear my own voice shake.

  “It’s not a Collar,” Honey tells me. “You don’t need to shift that much data just to fit a Collar. It’s…”

  My whole body jerks, Honey in the driver’s seat for just a second, her reaction so great that it needs some kind of response beyond the virtual. “The fucker,” she says.

  This last is so unexpected I almost fall over. “Whoa, what?”

  “The next stage of Distributed Intelligence. The very damn thing he was campaigning against. Not because he was against it. Because he didn’t want the competition.” And Honey is absolutely furious, in her kind-of-still-polite way. And Indra is beaming at me, that same goddamn look as everyone else. Her hand almost knifes me under the ribs, she sticks it out so hard. I take it, feel her clench, her macho-man-ball-buster handshake, but the fingers moving like it’s a fraternity thing, a secret handshake inside the handshake. And of course I got no countersign to give her so she goes still for a second and takes a step back. Her smile goes away but no Indra bobs to the surface to replace it.

  “We should move,” I suggest.

  Indra’s backing off, and the lack of smile is catching, like a disease. Anyone she comes within a metre of is suddenly looking very cross indeed, and at Marmalade and me. The bear lets out a low growl. And they’re all just humans – no Bioforms here at all – and she’s a big bear, so if it comes to fisticuffs things are going to get nasty for everyone except her.

  “Honey?” I ask. “You got your goddamn analysis?”

  “I know what’s going on. I can’t quite believe the chutzpah of it, but I see it. I’m trying to work out what we can do about it,” Honey tells me. “Just let me work, if you would.”

  “Honey, we ain’t got time for you to write a thesis,” I tell her. And everyone is looking at us now, all just the same way, like one person’s staring out of all those eyes.

  Then the cavalry arrives, only it’s not our cavalry so it just makes everything worse. Some Bioforms come to see what the problem is, rounding the curve of the corridor and barging through the people there. Only it’s Rufus and two of his posse, a mottled dragon-form called Smaug and our old friend fat-cat Albedo, who’s still limping and bandaged-up where Murder tore her a new one a while back. They’ve got guns, and they look rattled as hell by what’s been going on. But all that changes when their gaze passes over the top of all those heads and sees Marmalade, and sees me. And I am very obviously the one single lone and only human who is not acting like everyone else. And in Rufus’s Big Book of Law Enforcement, which is large print and only has a handful of pages, that makes me Chief Suspect for the crime of the century.

  Marmalade is spoiling for a fight, but she is also short on guns and outnumbered, and Rufus can probably take on a bear solo, best of three.

  “Move!” I decide, and then I’m just going, hoping with every bounding leap that Honey won’t take my legs off me and faceplant me into the concrete of the floor. Marmalade’s right behind me, and then she’s right in front of me, down on all fours and just shunting through the crowd that was creeping up behind us, so that we’re clear of them and running back to our hidey-hole in moments.

  And I risk a look back, as we go, and I see an interesting thing, ’cos that big mob of no-longer-grinning grinners aren’t clearing to let Rufus through. He’s having to wade, to push and elbow, and so he doesn’t catch up with us and we lose him, for now. He’s on our trail, but he’s not part of whatever’s going on with everyone else.

  We end up in some other hole, that looks mostly like a socket for some big air pump that never got installed, because Sugar was apparently super-paranoid about needing places to hide up in. And obviously Sugar knows where this place is and Sugar ain’t necessarily our friend now. I don’t reckon we’ve got much time to catch our breath.

  And catching my breath is becoming a problem. I’m real anxious, and some of that is because what’s going on outside is real anxious-making. I mean, let’s face it, Hell City is a goddamn unnatural place. It takes a lot of looking after to make sure it all keeps working, what with the dust and the experimental tech and the goddamn being on Mars of it all. And the advantage we always had is that a blown seal, a misfiring airlock, a broken pump, they’re not going to kill us like they’d have killed us before the biomods. We don’t drop dead the moment the oxygen content drops or when the temperature plunges to way below zero. We’re Martians, as native as anything’s ever been to this godforsaken planet. But still, we need food, we need water. Enough breaks down then we are still fucked, is what I’m saying. And I don’t know yet if what’s going on out there, all this Collaring, is going to leave room for someone to keep the maintenance rota going. So anxious, sure; hyperventilating, heart racing, feelings of nausea, of despair, all that. Except it’s not just based on current affairs, because I didn’t score anything from Fergil Maldoun after all, and now I go in my pocket for my last hit of Stringer and the goddamn cheap blister has burst and the pill is who knows where.

  “I need to go for a walk,” I say, but I’m already thinking ahead, or trying to, and there’s a whole load of fun scenarios I can picture where this dealer or that dealer greets me with a grin and a handshake in just the wrong way.

  Except…

  “Say, you protecting Marmalade from hand
shake fever, Honey?”

  “I’m not, no,” she says, sounding preoccupied. “There’s no need. She’s not a target.”

  “Why so?”

  “Well you must know that the non-human Bioforms don’t have your headspace mods. The Braintree setup is only in humaniform models… I mean, only in the human crew. There simply isn’t virtual space in Marmalade’s head for the necessary download. You wouldn’t fit me into her head.” I wonder if she’d rather be in there, able to borrow a body more like the one she once owned.

  “That’s true for all the Bioforms?” I ask, because as far as I am concerned it’s not ‘non-human Bioforms’ because I am not a Bioform. I’m just modded. It’s not the same.

  “I would imagine so. I did remark on the remarkable overengineering of your headware at the start of our acquaintance, Jimmy. And I suppose now we know why. But the non-human crew were engineered by other contractors.”

  “Goddamn marvellous,” I decide, and then I’m off, and sending a signal to Stanky Greer that I want to score and I bet he’s short of other customers right now. Greer isn’t my favourite dealer by any means, but he’s a Weasel, and Weasels aren’t going to be doing that idiot grin any time soon. Honey doesn’t catch on until I’m well out of there and heading by the quietest ways possible over to the mustelid digs where Greer and his fellows live. I assume most of them will be out on site, but when I arrive every nook has a dark, pointy face poking out of it warily, staring at me. Not the nicest thing, to walk into a den of Weasels and find you’re the sole human there, centre of attention. They’re twitchy as I am, and with good reason. From their point of view all the humans have gone crazy, and they don’t have the context I have. Not that I feel my superior state of knowledge has brought me any goddamn happiness.

  “Hey, Greer, man.” And I almost try to shake his hand, just instinctively, ’cept that sort of thing can get misinterpreted real fast in today’s changing times. So I hang back. “Greer, I need you to set me up.”

  Stanky Greer is one of the smaller Weasels – bit like the dragons are all sorts of reptile, the Weasels are part wolverine, part badger, part ferret, all bundled together. Some of them are bigger than me, but Greer is thin and snaky and short-limbed, and he doesn’t stand on two legs as much as sit on his haunches. He’s wearing overalls cut for his frame, and a hazard vest with about a million pockets over that, and it’s the contents of those pockets I’m most interested in.

  “Jimmy,” Honey tells me, but then Greer is actually hugging me, or at least hugging my legs.

  “What the fuck, man?” I ask him, but he’s talking right over me.

  “Jimmy? It’s actually you, Jimmy, my man!” His voice is high, lisping, formed more with his animal lips than most Bioforms. “Does this mean it’s over? You’re back to normal?”

  “I was never not normal,” I tell him. “It didn’t get me. Everyone else is still fucked, man. Listen, set me up, will you. I cannot handle this right now, not straight.”

  “Jimmy, I know, I know.” And I reckon he’s probably been taking his own merchandise, and I do not blame him one bit. “Here you go.” And he’s fumbling out a whole fistful of strips, enough to keep me for a month, practically forcing the stuff on me. “Jimmy, you’re all right by me. I always liked you, Jimmy. Jimmy, you’re a real stand-up human guy.”

  “Jesus,” and he’s not even asked for scrip, and I take it, take a pill there and then. I kneel down and hug the little bastard back, and we kind of cling together, dealer and dealt, at this evidence of one damn thing working like it’s supposed to. And I sit there with him, among the Weasels, and wait for everything to feel a whole lot better.

  Except I don’t feel the calming, purposeful rush of the Stringer. I feel damn all, in fact, except unhappy.

  “Greer, what is this shit?” I demand. “You ripping me off now?” Except he hasn’t charged me for it, in which case it’s the most lame-ass con in narcotics history.

  “What d’you mean, Jimmy, man?” he asks. No sense of any overplayed innocence, either, and don’t believe the stories, Weasels tend to be rotten liars. “That’s my best. I cook that myself. Cordon fucking Blue, Jimmy.”

  “Greer, you…” I feel like crying, except my eyes don’t work that way, and then Honey says, “Jimmy,” again, with a certain slant and weight to the name, and I go sub-voc and say, “What did you do?”

  “I… made an executive decision,” she says, in my head.

  “Care to explain just what the fuck?”

  “You were suffering from withdrawal symptoms that were starting to impact on your neural pathways. As I’m at least partially reliant on those I decided it would be easiest to block them. I turned off your withdrawal, Jimmy. Which meant turning off the pathways by which the drug affects your brain.”

  “Honey, I feel like shit.”

  “I… think that’s just life, Jimmy.”

  “I. Know it’s just life.” I cannot quite get into words just how pissed I feel right now. “That’s what life’s like. That’s why I need ‘the drug’ to affect my brain. Because I’m on fucking Mars and it’s dark all day all year and it’s dusty and they did a hundred fucking invasive things to my head and my body so I can even be here and not just drop dead and when they do that to you, when they do all that to you and put you on this goddamn fucking planet then sometimes, just sometimes you need a little something extra to set your goddamn mind at ease, do you get me?”

  I realise that most of that got said at something more than sub-voc because all the Weasels are watching me like I’ve gone crazy, which given all the other humans they’ve seen have actually gone crazy is a very real problem for them.

  “Jimmy, man,” Greer says, putting some distance between us. “You… OK there? Maybe you should get going now.”

  “Maybe I should,” I agree, disgusted with drugs that don’t work and interfering bears.

  “No, wait,” Honey tells me. “I need to speak to them.”

  “Go find your own mouth to do it with,” I tell her and start off, but Honey’s playing hardball.

  “Tell them what I want or I’ll do it anyway,” she says. “Jimmy, big things are going on and I am not going to be crippled by your fits of pique.”

  I don’t even know what pique is, but the threat’s real enough, so I hear what Honey has to say and then stop in the doorway of the Weasel dorm to speak to Greer and pals.

  “Look, there’s something big going on, you spotted that. Something sent from Earth is fucking with us. With us humans. I’m trying to fix it.” Easier to say ‘I’ than ‘this dead bear I got in my head’. “But keep an open channel, Greer, man. Keep an ear ready. Because I might need help.”

  Greer’s body language says that helping me is way down his bucket list, but he wants me gone and so he’s all nods and smiles if it’ll get me out the door.

  22

  HONEY

  Not just a Collar.

  It would have been easy enough. You could have downloaded a Collar into Jimmy, before I came and took up all his headspace. This is something far more data-heavy, far more… ambitious. And for a moment I think of my assessment of the man and assume I must have got it wrong. For someone to have this range of vision, this insanely forward-thinking dream. Has Warner S. Thompson been an unacknowledged tech genius all this time? Has he been playing chess and the rest of us were just playing checkers?

  But then I think of the way that circle of ideas curves back to meet its origin. If you make an impossible thing happen then maybe it’s because you’re a supra-genius who finds the way to realise the impossible. Or maybe it’s because you’re the spoiled child just shouting until someone lets you have your way.

  I can’t know if this was precipitated by me and HumOS and Bees, but even if so, this must always have been the plan. The groundwork is right here in Jimmy’s head, the very reason I’m in a position to appreciate it is proof of concept. The medium is the message and I’m the message and Jimmy’s the medium.

  It’s
Thompson. In a very real way, it’s Thompson.

  All those people we saw, they weren’t being slapped with a Hierarchy and turned into slaves. They were getting a big old forced upload of data into their capacious headspace. And the upload was Thompson, his personality, sent all the cold kilometres over from Earth. All of them were Thompson, because apparently just dreaming of being undisputed king of Mars wasn’t enough for him. Just ruling over fellow mortals wasn’t the power trip he craved. Because they’re all Thompson. That smile, that handshake, every one of them a home for his personality. He’s made himself into a parasitic Distributed Intelligence network, one that doesn’t even need to grow its own bodies like HumOS does; one that doesn’t even allow its bodies autonomy like HumOS does. So where she’s a council of linked minds, he’s turned himself into a rigid feudal system. Because otherwise, how could it work? You can’t just turn the entire population into the same megalomaniacal archvillain and expect them to actually cooperate. You’d have too many hail-to-the-chiefs and nobody doing any work. And just as I’m sure Thompson Collared his closest staff back on Earth because he couldn’t trust them else, now he’s even Collaring himself. That handshake is your Southampton exchange, establishing who’s dominant over who, creating a hierarchy of Thompsons across the colony based on… who knows what? Random chance, or maybe attributes of each host. But sure as sure, they’ll organise into a pyramid with one Thompson on top and all the other instances of himself enforcedly subservient. Because he knows what a treacherous son of a bitch he is.

  On the way back Jimmy and I have a free and frank exchange of views about the evils of drug addiction, which I lose. I just don’t have the mental energy to save him from himself, what with just being a copy running in his head, and my moral authority is on shaky ground anyway. He’s obviously very unhappy, and I’m beginning to suspect that the likely widespread drug use on Mars is built into the system tolerances. You must get a killer Seasonal Affective Disorder this far out from the sun, where your only seasons are Winter and Very Winter. Jimmy’s depressed and anxious, and what I can glean of his bio-data is all red lights. And I have to literally take his hands off him to stop him overdosing by accident because he keeps trying to take more pills. So I release the block and let him enjoy what’s already in his system. We have a stern talk about not letting it get in the way and I suddenly feel I know what it’s like to be a parent of a sulky teenager.