Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  23

  JIMMY

  Not long after and we get the Three Stooges turning up like before: Brian, Mariah and Judit, all of them their usual fun-to-be-with selves. Except right now I will take any help I can get.

  “What can Bees give us?” Honey asks them, all businesslike.

  “You lookin’ at it, man,” Brian says. “We the cavalry.”

  “Bees is very concerned by this development,” Judit adds. Her voice is high and short on inflection. “She calculates the eventual result of Thompson’s cerebral landgrab will be the end of Hell City as a functioning entity.” Which is a lot of words when all you’re saying is we’re fucked.

  “So what’s that to her?” I say sourly. “She’s got her escape plan already, right? Got you all loaded on the rockets? It’s all fun and games for the interplanetary explorer division?”

  “Interstellar,” Judit corrects me, and Mariah butts in.

  “Bees still wants to preserve herself here. We still want to preserve ourselves here. Just because there’s a copy doesn’t mean the original goes anywhere.”

  Brian sends a guilty look at me, which makes no sense until I realise it’s actually at Honey, because of course when they made a copy of her, the original did go somewhere, namely to whatever final reward dead cyborg bears get.

  “Right now, Bees’ lyin’ low,” Brian explains. “The man here go for her, she gon’ fight back. She don’ want to bring that any sooner than need be. Got rockets to prepare, like the man say.”

  “But no army of giant robot bees come to liberate Hell City,” I finish for him.

  “We on our own,” agrees Brian.

  “So what good are you?” Sugar demands.

  “Bees stopped the download and immunised us,” Mariah tells her. “And with everyone else taken over, we three represent about 95 per cent of the technical expertise in Hell City.” Which shows how little she rates Sugar, Marmalade and me.

  “But right now… I mean what the fuck do we even do?”

  “Go get supplies. Go to one of the science stations. Abandon ship,” Judit suggests flatly.

  “What about the Bioforms?” I put in. Everyone looks at me like they were about to have an adult conversation and I’m demanding a biscuit, and I am getting really tired of that. “He ain’t in the Bioforms, and, well, there are more humans and they got guns, but there’s a whole load of bears and dogs and weasels and dragons in Hell City.”

  “So you want some expendable troops?” Mariah asks.

  “It’s their city too,” I point out. “I mean, why aren’t they up in arms already? I would be.”

  “They working,” Brian says. “They still digging. They know something happen, but not what. They doin’ what they told, man.”

  “More than that,” Mariah adds. “They’re doing what Rufus tells them.”

  “Sheriff Rufus?” Sugar’s eyes go mean and narrow. He’s still got her friend.

  “We seen it on the way over,” Brian agrees. “Posse gon’ around giving orders. Posse still loyal to Admin, way I see it. You know how ol’ Rufus get about keeping order.”

  “I reckon he’ll kill them off.” Mariah eyes up Marmalade. “Send them on dangerous missions, send them out to the edge. Maybe not let them back in when they’ve pushed their mods to the limit. He knows he can’t hack them. That makes them a threat even if they never turn on him.”

  “I reckon an angry bear’s gonna get in no matter what you do,” is my contribution. “Don’t reckon that goes well for Thompson.” Although it doesn’t go well for anyone, in my imagination. I see the guns going off as the desperate Bioform work crews try to break through the very walls they built. I see irreparable damage done to the city. Irreparable because there’s nobody left with the skills to repair it. Do the Thompsons turn inwards then, try to cajole their crazy mind-prisoners to come up with solutions? Does each one become a jailer who needs their solitary confinement prisoner’s cooperation, and what a fucking dilemma that’ll be.

  Honey’s been silent for a while, and now she chimes in over the speakers. “There’s been a development on Earth.”

  “Don’t see that exactly matters right now,” Sugar decides.

  “It might affect just how extreme the Thompson DisInt here on Mars will become, given how little the man ever brooked a challenge to his authority. He’s fallen. He’s done.”

  “Meaning?”

  “New testimony has come in, backed by headware records. Thompson’s assistant, apparently. She was Collared, but she got out of it somehow. She’s witness to… he gave the order to kill Aslan and the other two who were found with him. And some scientist at Braintree. And more, a lot more. She’s been living in Thompson’s shadow for years. Everything went through her. She’s in protective custody and it’s all coming out. I see people who were defending the man to the hilt just a few hours ago turning on him, denouncing him. He’s done. On Earth, he’s done.”

  “On Mars, he’s gonna be pissed,” I say.

  “Unless the Thompson here is glad to be free of the parent Thompson on Earth,” Judit suggests. “Honey, you shouldn’t call him a DisInt. True Distributed Intelligence doesn’t need to keep its units in line. HumOS never did. Bees doesn’t. Thompson knows himself well enough to know he’d stab himself in the back first chance he got, and you can bet the Earth Thompson reserved management privileges for himself.”

  “So what, the United States of Thompson up here declares independence?” Sugar demands. “Where does that get us?”

  “Gives us leverage, maybe?” Brian puts in. “This all he got, he gon’ want to keep it running.”

  “You can’t cut a deal with the man.” Honey again. “I honestly don’t think he has it in him to keep to an agreement the moment he gains anything from breaking it. I think that his personality went right into pathological liar and out the other side. You cannot engage in regular human interactions with a human metagamer. We have to destroy him.”

  And we all wait for her to unveil her grand plan for how to do that, but apparently the old bear ain’t got that far, so fat lot of use she is. She and the three Bee cultists fall to technical discussion then, and I’m tired and pop some Stringer and Sugar’s waving me over. Her and Marmalade have gone to the other corner of the hidey-hole, where she’s set up a link and a little screen no bigger than her hand. And admittedly I’m taking Honey with me, but with her voice coming out of the speaker over with Brian and co, it feels like I’m leaving her over there.

  “What’s doing?” I ask, and Sugar says, “I’ve got Rufus.”

  A beat. “As in, ‘by the short and curlies?’” from me.

  “Got a line to him. Spoofed and re-routed every two minutes, and it’s not as though he wouldn’t find us anyway. But he’d put a call out in the public announcement space. For me.”

  “’Cos he’s got Murder,” I finish and she nods grimly, fingers of one hand buried in Marmalade’s fur.

  I cast a nervous look at the three cultists, still in deep discussion, which is dumb because Honey is likely listening to us even as she argues with them.

  “So what’s he saying? Rufus, I mean.”

  “Nothing yet. Haven’t opened voice, just pinged him to say I saw his card on the mat.”

  “And you need me for this, why?”

  “We are about to open negotiations with the new management, Jimbles. Or at least its bitch. And screw the dead bear and screw the Bees traitors. You and me and Marmalade, we’re the people, right? We get to ask the dog-man just what the fuck.”

  The look she gives me… I get a real complicated reaction to it. This isn’t Sugar lounging on her crate throne being all pixie-girl while her killer bears loom over you. This is Sugar with her back to the wall, but also Sugar realising she’s a part of something. A part of the Hell City dream we all somehow bought into back on Earth, all those years ago. And it’s her making me a part of that too, her making me someone that’s part of ‘us’ in her book, rather than just the ‘them’ I always wa
s before. And I want to scoff. I want to tell her that being ‘us’ right now is a death sentence because we are literally all the ‘us’ there is on the whole planet. I want, basically, to be that self-same Jimmy Marten who slouched through his working life on Mars pissing on everyone’s parades because he never had one of his own. And I can’t. Right here, right now, I realise Hell City was my parade. So long as I was part of the project, and no matter it was all for the rich folks and the investors and not for me, it was something I was proud of. I never knew until the fuckers took it away from me.

  “Let’s talk dog,” I say, and that gets me about nought point three of a grin; better than nothing.

  “Finally.” Sugar puts Rufus through to my receiver so we’re sharing the familiar roughness of his voice.

  “Wotcher, Sheriff,” Sugar tells him. “If it’s about that parking ticket, I got the money.”

  “Dana, you are in a world of trouble right now,” Rufus tells her. “I always cut you slack, back in the day. You know that, right?”

  “Sure, Sheriff Rufus. Practically business partners. You need some data shifted? I hear that’s whiz biz these days.”

  An awkward pause, and then: “I’m going to find you, Sugar. There just aren’t enough places to hide in Hell City.”

  “You just close your eyes and start counting then,” Sugar says, and I can see her shaking, and if they hadn’t modded it out of us she’d be bucketing sweat, but her voice is oh-so-cool. “Was that what you wanted to ask me about? Because I say just count to a hundred. Or you can do twenty five times, if that’s gonna tax you.”

  Rufus growls, but he’s not mad. Sounds sad even. “Dana, I have Murder here. Still with us despite some fairly serious wounds. I do not want to do anything we’ll all regret.”

  “Hey, Sheriff,” I break in, mostly to give Sugar time to process. “You, ah, not notice anything weird about the place today. Only seems to me that we’ve been invaded by some serious crazy. You seeing any of that, over your ways?”

  “Jimmy Marten,” he names me, and I fight down the instinctive shiver.

  “That ain’t an answer, Sheriff.”

  And for a long few heartbeats there isn’t an answer, and Sugar and I eye each other, because it’s not like Dog-with-a-badge to pussyfoot around.

  “We are under new management,” Rufus tells us at last. “Yes. Things have changed. But that doesn’t mean Admin isn’t still in charge. It doesn’t mean I don’t keep order. And right now there’s only one threat to public order and that’s you three and whatever the fuck’s in Jimmy’s head. If you surrender yourselves peaceably then I will guarantee nothing will happen to you. And Murder will be fine too, Dana.”

  “They Collar you, Sheriff?” I ask idly.

  “No they did not Collar me,” and I hit a nerve there, sure enough. “You think a dog only does his duty when he’s got no choice? Hell City needs stability, order, Jimmy. That is what I do. And I do it because it’s the right thing. If people like you were left to run the show we’d all have no air in three weeks. Now I’m giving you an ultimatum, kids. I got myself set up here at the gates of Admin, and I’ve got Murder here with me, and some of my people. I want you to come over and say hello. Because I have orders to bring you in by whatever means necessary. I do not want to have to use the means available to me. But I will, because right now you are threat number one to peace and order in my city.”

  “We’re really not,” Sugar says quietly, but Rufus cuts her off.

  “I don’t want to hear it. You’ve got an hour to show your faces, you two clowns and Marmalade.” And then the line cuts and that’s all we get.

  “I’m guessing you caught that?” I say to thin air, and sure enough Honey’s not been so deep in negotiations with the cult that she wasn’t keeping an ear open. Even now I see Brian, Mariah and Judit heading out on some mission of their own and I wonder just what the hell Bees and bear have cooked up between them.

  “You going to be able to pull any magic out your ass?” I ask her. “Turn Rufus’s brains to mush or something?”

  “He’s not like your Bad News Bears,” Honey says. “Their software is much simpler than a full Bioform, and they come pre-Collared, without free will. But I can help. I can reason with him.”

  “Oh, right.” I can barely contain my enthusiasm. “Sure, that’ll work.”

  “Let’s just go, shall we?” She sounds insulted by my scepticism but I reckon that, what with her being dead and all, she’s not the talker she thinks she is.

  It’s hard to go the back ways right through to Admin’s airlocked front door, on account of how when you get to that part of Hell City it’s all front ways. Sugar and I have a confab and our best bet is the monorail system, which is all put in except for there not being any trains yet, but it is a road all over town and maybe the bad guys – the bad guy – isn’t thinking of it. Anyway, we see a whole load of people all marching around looking over their new domain, but they’re all below us, under the arches of the tracks, or else above us on higher levels. And so we get quite far towards Admin before all the big billboards suddenly turn on. At first I think, They’ve found us, but it’s all over Hell City, every single damn one. Information boards, advert boards, every public screen is showing the same face.

  “Oh, Danny Boyd,” I murmur, feeling suddenly wretched for a man who until now was doing way better in life than me. It’s his face but not his expression, and I guess we just found out who’s Thompson Prime at the moment. Daniel Boyd got to run Admin back in the old regime, and I guess they got lazy with all that handshaking because it’s his body in the driving seat still, and so I guess his instance of Thompson sitting on the sharp end of the pyramid.

  And he looks out with that weird smile, uncomfortable on a face never built for it, and says, “You’re there, Honey the bear. I worked it out. I know they sent you here. I’m hunting you, Honey. Say something. I’m going to find you.”

  24

  HONEY

  I wait for the emotional rush, because I still remember staring down the barrel of the gun. And of course there’s no surge of fear because all the parts of me that might produce the relevant hormones are no longer within my portfolio. I feel… a healthy caution, is probably the best way to put it. Thompson on Earth was someone it was easy for me to underestimate, given the weighting I gave to a particular kind of intellectual prowess. Martian Thompson has a great deal more, relatively, at his disposal. Right now, aside from our little band, he is Hell City and every human in it.

  “Honey.” The voice new to me but I think I can hear the thread of a familiar inflection running through it, coming to me over Jimmy’s radio and as a wash of deadened sound through the thin city air. “I know you can hear. I know you’re there. I’ll find you.”

  And by then I’ve set up a string of relays and blinds within the system and can send right back to him so that I can at least stave off any such finding as long as possible. “Hello, Warner.”

  “Mr Thompson.” The face on all the screens looks surly and sour. The features are Chief Administrator Daniel Boyd’s, according to Jimmy. The expression is pure Thompson. “Senator Thompson.”

  “You never won the election. From the news back home, your name won’t be on the ballot.” But enough of that. There’s no point simply bandying provocations with him.

  “I worked it out. My friend here told me. They were looking for you before you even arrived. My people set them on it. After they found what your friends did with your body. But I got your friends.”

  “What did you work out, precisely?” He worked nothing out, I suspect. He just bullied poor trapped Boyd into telling him what they’d been doing.

  “You’re here, somewhere. In some head. Some head I don’t own. You can’t have them, Honey. They’re all mine. And I’ll kill the one you’ve got. You’ve only got one. I’ll kill him. I’ll have the dogs eat him.” With the face so big, up on the screens, I can see spittle string and bubble as Thompson tries to use Boyd’s lips like
he would his own. He looks like each word only comes out after being thoroughly chewed. There’s blood in that spittle and I guess he’s bitten his borrowed tongue more than once.

  “There’s no room for you,” he growls, staring out, eyes darting, as though he can actually see through the screens themselves, rather than just the cameras. “No room for a bear in a man suit. No room for not being me.” And that smile again, insufferably pleased with itself. “They made this for me. What they put in these heads. Filed patents. They’ll make it back home. I’ll go back home. They’ll prepare a house for me.”

  And that, as far as I’m concerned, is a pipe dream, but I reckon maybe it would have been the plan if Thompson hadn’t just come crashing down back on Earth. Maybe the next generation of headware would have been released with the mother of all security vulnerabilities.

  Jimmy is frantic, feeling all the adrenal fear that I don’t. “This is good,” I tell him.

  “Good? How the fuck is any of this good?”

  “He didn’t mention you, for one thing. That sheriff certainly knows who you are, and probably your man Boyd did too, but I think nobody’s told Thompson, or they told him and he hasn’t processed the information. I’m damn sure he’d have threatened you by name if he was in full command of the facts.”

  “So what now?” Jimmy, Sugar and Marmalade are crouched in the shadow of a part-completed section of monorail station and I take the opportunity to stretch my virtual legs and creep out the system some more. By now there are a whole set of pathways I can use to syphon off information and access systems in a way that won’t immediately trip any alarms. There are some presences in the system hunting about, but I reckon Thompson himself hasn’t got the skills, so either he’s coerced some of his hosts to talk him through it or there are some Bioform operators on the payroll, perhaps run through the sheriff. Right now they’re not a threat but they’re going to start seeing signs of my tampering soon enough.