Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

  Chapter 2

  Lou stared, trying to blink; only her left eyelid was working.

  Sheb looked around, trying to see who, behind the dog, was doing the talking. “What the hell?” he muttered, lifting the flap in the counter.

  The beagle came fully into the shop. The door closed behind him. He said, “Please excuse my walking in like this. I’m fairly clean. I just need to speak to Ms. Meagher on a matter of some urgency.”

  Sheb turned and looked at Lou, surprised. Even he could see it was the dog doing the talking, except the voice was coming from something attached to the dog’s collar. The voice was warm and male, and there was something about it that, to Lou, suggested melancholy, of all things.

  Lou put her espresso down behind her. “I’m Lou Meagher. Um, what can I do for you?” It seemed the right sort of question to ask, even though she felt odd asking it. She figured this was one of those things where, if you just went along with it, all would become clear later.

  “The dog’s talking!” Sheb blurted, once he’d figured it out. “It’s talking, Lou!”

  The beagle glanced at Sheb, and Lou thought she saw the dog roll his eyes, but she could not be sure. She told Sheb to shut up.

  The dog approached Lou, but stopped when he got within two meters of her, and wrinkled his nose. He looked shocked, and scooted backwards a short way, tail down, ears twitching. Lou felt her cheeks trying to blush. “I’m sorta dead, pooch. Sorry. Can’t help it. And, believe me, this is how I smell after I take a bath!”

  “Oh. Oh. All right.” He looked like he was trying to decide something. “I have been informed that you work as a private investigator. I’ve heard that you’ve helped a number of the homeless and unemployed people, is that right?”

  Lou shrugged. “Sure, I do a bit of that. I’m not licensed, though. There’s limits to what I can do, legally. Anyway, why would, um, you want to know about that?”

  “I need your assistance.”

  Surprised, she couldn’t help but smile. “What, you mean, like a case? You want to hire me?”

  The dog looked sad again. “I have no one else to ask. All the other investigators in town have gone upStalk. You’re the only one left.”

  She shook her head, astonished. “I knew that if I waited and waited, I could outlast the competition!” She managed a dull laugh over this development.

  The dog stared at her, tail down, ears low, not laughing. Actually, he was in very bad shape, now that she could get a good look at him. He hadn’t eaten well in a long while; his ribs stuck out harshly beneath his mangy tricolor coat. As she looked down at him, he chewed on a bit of flank, worrying at fleas. He had ragged-looking ears and scarring around the snout and left flank. Yet, with nine days remaining until the Bastard hit, this lost and battered pet wanted her to come out of what she laughingly called her semi-retirement.

  She wondered how to respond to this unique request. “Who put you on to me?”

  “A couple of other, ah, dead people named Cal and Brigitta. They reported that you helped them once.”

  Lou remembered Cal and Brigitta only patchily. Something about Cal’s lost wallet and a government agency here in town giving them a rough time when they tried to apply for … what was it? Emergency housing? Only about a year ago, she thought. Her brain was rotting faster than she realized. And here she was with no money.

  “Okay,” she said. “Suppose I help you. What’s in it for me?”

  The dog sat and scratched some more. “I’ve got no money, obviously. But I’m worth a lot of money. I know that, because of my head machines. And I can do tricks, and I’m good company—”

  Lou interrupted. “Yeah, and?” She knew he had more to say.

  “I can pay you with myself,” Dog said.

  “What? What did you just say?”

  “I’ll give myself to you. I’ll be your dog. You’ll be my master.” He wagged his tail and looked hopeful.

  Lou hardly noticed. She was panicking at the thought of missing her next nano-tink treatment, and found herself contemplating the value of an augmented pet in the markets on the Orbital. Somebody would be bound to pay a lot for such a tricked-out pet. That would arrest the rot for a while.

  She glanced at Sheb, who raised his eyebrows, and looked to her like he thought this was a crazy situation that was only getting crazier.

  She looked back at the pooch. “If I take your case, you’ll just give yourself to me? Just like that?”

  “That’s what I said, Ms. Meagher. It’s all I have.”

  The simple earnestness of his offer was affecting. Lou found she needed a moment to catch her breath and she took a long pull on her cooling espresso. She felt ashamed of herself. You don’t treat animals like that, she thought.

  Lou looked down at the dog, still trying to regain her composure. “Okay, so, let’s see, you’re probably looking to find the folks who lost you, right? Probably up in the Orbital, God knows. Could be anywhere.” She felt bleak at the prospect.

  The dog shook his head. “No.”

  “No?” Lou said. “What about—?”

  The dog interrupted. “I need to find Kid.” And, saying that, he stared off, as if at something only he could see.

  Lou frowned, but decided to go along with this for a while yet. “Kid?”

  “Kid is my … partner. He is a … what you people call ‘disposable’.”

  “I see. Damn.”

  “You’re familiar with disposables?”

  She nodded her head, annoyed, thinking. Disposables were mass-produced, customizable biological humanoid androids whose appeal lay in their ability to do all the jobs that regular human beings hated to do. They were usually programmed to perform specific functions, without question, concern or emotion. And, there were only a handful of companies producing them. Disposables gave Lou the creeps. “Okay,” she said. “Enhanced dog meets disposable kid. What’s the angle?”

  “Kid is a defective disposable. He’s nearly braindead. His owner dumped him out in the bush when medical problems began showing up in him at age five. That was about a year ago. Kid wandered off and made it into town. He got sicker. Now he’s a cripple, dying of multiple cancers.” That was another charming aspect of disposables: they were prone to DNA coding errors that led to varieties of cancer never encountered in nature.

  Lou was pinching the bridge of her nose, fighting a headache. God, what a mess this is going to be. “This kid, was he loaded?” When one ordered a disposable, one selected from a range of brain-mounted data subsystems, depending on the job for which you wanted it. Some disposables carried very sophisticated gear, all of it cheap nano stuff, no real loss if the unit got recycled.

  “Data and the like? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think his owner would have erased anything he might have been carrying before dumping him.”

  “You sure? Nothing encrypted in his genome-lock? No graphics, no incriminating sound files, documents, hot alpha software, nothing like that?” Kid, Lou knew, would not be the first disposable used as a courier for data or software, encrypted into the junk DNA of specific cells, or sometimes into well-hidden artificial cells.

  The dog peered at Lou. “How would I know, even if there was?”

  “Kid might have told you.”

  The dog tilted his head to one side. “No. And anyway, he can’t speak, or at least, not the way…”

  Lou got down and squatted near the dog. Pain shot through her bad joints. Going to pay for that later. She stroked the poor animal’s head and tried to soothe him. She saw that he had a small synth-box mounted on his collar. It looked like expensive gear. Seeing it up close, she figured he had implants in his brain, sending signals by radio to the box. The collar itself was red, with chrome spikes.

  He was cold to the touch. “What happened to you? Huh?” She tried to rub
down his back, but he growled, which surprised her. Then he quickly looked, to Lou’s surprise, embarrassed at having growled.

  “Excuse me, Ms. Meagher. I appreciate the help, but your smell is…” He sneezed, backing away.

  She sighed, feeling a little rejected. “Right. Of course,” Lou said, trying to think about it all.

  “So, are you going to take my case?”

  “The case of the missing disposable boy?”

  “Kid is very important to me. He’s been my only friend for a long time.”

  She looked more closely at the dog; he was looking away, towards the door. “You said he was nearly braindead.”

  “He is now. But he speaks to me from somewhere deep inside himself. In pictures, feelings, and memories, after a fashion.”

  Lou stood up, muttering at the joint pain, feeling dizzy, vision spinning. After a moment, she looked down at the dog, hands on her hips. “Are you saying there’s some weird psychic thingy going on between you two?”

  The dog sat, and peered up at her. He looked embarrassed. “I suspected you would not react well to this part of it.”

  “This kid, with just about no mental function, is able to communicate with you. That’s what you’re saying?”

  The dog ducked his head. “That is indeed what I’m saying.”

  “Does this kid have hardware for that kind of thing?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s how I found him, the first time. He was broadcasting. Lying in a heap in an alley behind the Allied Farms Freight Terminal, dying, and sending out images and feelings.”

  Lou frowned, and gently scratched her cheek, not wanting a chunk of skin to come off. “And you followed these images and stuff to the source, and found this kid?”

  “I had other problems at the time, and I didn’t get to Kid immediately. But when I did…” He lowered his head and put his tail between his legs, and shivered. He looked desolate.

  “You okay, little guy?”

  He whimpered. Lou winced in sympathy.

  She crouched again, and stuck her hand out. “Okay, I’ll do it. I’m gonna regret this, I just know it. And this is entirely the wrong reason for accepting a case, but hell, what have I got to live for, eh? So, pooch, put your paw there…”

  He wagged his tail. “Please, call me Dog. When he used words at all, Kid called me Dog.”

  “Okay, Dog.” She flashed an uneasy smile. “But you know, I’m leaving town in a week’s time, and if you’re my dog, you’re coming with me. Plus, where I’m going, I probably won’t live all that long, you know?”

  “I understand all that, Ms. Meagher.” He looked at her with surprising gravity.

  “You do understand, don’t you, Dog?”

  Dog said, “I know Kid is still alive. I’m still getting signals. Images. He’s afraid.”

  Lou frowned. “Can you home in on these … signals?”

  “I can home in on electromagnetic signals, yes. Kid’s transmissions, though…” He looked sad, at a loss.

  “I see. Right. Well, let’s just do what we can. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Dog said, sticking out a front paw. Lou solemnly took the offered paw. The grave yet somehow hopeful look in Dog’s eyes, as she went through the strange gesture of shaking the paw, told her that there was no way in hell she could afford to screw up this job. His life was in her hands. That’s what the gesture meant, she saw that. It suddenly felt like too great a load. She looked at him again, and saw his eyes. Did he know she was thinking this way? It looked to her like he understood the human world only too well.

  She pulled herself to her feet once more, eyes wide in fresh surprise at the joint pain. “I have got to stop that crouching business.” she said and promptly sat down on one of Sheb’s bar stools.

  Dog looked thoughtful, though still sad. He said, “Now what? What happens now?”

  Lou looked at Sheb, who shrugged. “You know as much as I do, kid.”

  “You will take my case, won’t you? I mean, we just shook on it—”

  “Oh, yes, yes, of course. I’m just, I’m just not used to cases like this.” Or clients like this, she thought.

  “How about,” Dog opened, “I tell you a bit about Kid and me and how we got separated? Would that help?”

  Lou snapped back into on-the-case mode. It was kind of exciting. She said, “Sure. Excellent. Hey, Sheb, have you got some notepaper or something I can scribble on?”

  Sheb found some old wrapping paper and pulled a stub of pencil, with the end badly chewed, from his apron pocket. “It’s me lucky crossword pencil, Lou. Break it and I’ll kill you.”

  “Bit late for that, eh, Sheb?” She managed a laugh, and he flashed his big teeth.

  “I’ll just go and have a sit for a bit. Let me know how it goes.” He went back to his apartment, leaving Lou alone with Dog.

  Dog wasted no time. He said, “Well, Kid and I were living inside the StalkPlex. We—”

  Lou stopped him. “You were inside the Plex?”

  Dog nodded and looked away. “The refugees were exhausting what little scrap food was available on the city streets, so I got us into the StalkPlex. The people who live and work in there throw out great quantities of edible food every day. We lived fairly well.”

  Lou got up from the stool and tried walking back and forth around the diner, keeping her circulation working. “You say Kid was, or is, pretty well a basket case.”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “So why go to the trouble of keeping him with you? You must have had to carry him, or drag him along.”

  Dog chewed at some fleas. The synth-voice continued, “I teleoperated him. Like a puppet.”

  Lou said, still trying to go along with it, “What? You were driving this kid?”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Ms. Meagher.”

  Lou shrugged, and decided to follow this story where it led. “Fine. So how did you … was it, like, your head machinery?” She struggled, trying to find a tactful way to refer to what had been done to the pooch.

  Dog nodded, not looking happy, tail down. “But also the link we have, the mental bridge we use to communicate. I can make his limbs move. In time, I learned to make him walk around. It was hard, too, getting used to two-legged balance. And his leg muscles weren’t in great condition, either, but I made him work on that.”

  Lou took this in and thought about it. Who knew what kind of gear had been wired into this animal’s brain? For that matter, with the kid being disposable, who knew what his owner might have wanted built into the kid’s body? Lou had heard of all kinds of creepy stuff involving disposables: units were designed to explode, or to melt down via nanobots, making nerve-toxins out of the host’s tissues. The things one could do with disposables! She shuddered. Anyone could get away with anything since, by law, disposables were not designed to function as ordinary people; they did not have high-level conscious awareness: no introspection, nor much sense of pain. Philosophers argued about whether or not disposables should be included in the “moral community”. Were they human beings or not? The popular consensus said — and the corporations supplying them agreed — that disposables lacked souls; they were perfect organic slave-machines.

  Then again, the same was said about people like Lou, who lived beyond their clinical deaths.

  “That doesn’t answer the question, though,” Lou said. “What was in it for you, to put all this effort into learning how to teleop the kid?”

  The dog said, “Safety in numbers. On my own, with all the refugees around this city, I was going to be somebody’s dinner. I got caught a few times. And there are worse things than getting killed for somebody’s dinner.” Dog went over to the wall and curled up there, head resting on front paws, looking lost, sad — and, Lou thought, haunted.

  “So there’s you and the
Kid. And you both get inside the StalkPlex…”

  “There are various gates in the wall used only by staff. We waited near one, and a worker came along. I got Kid to talk to the woman, and I did some tricks, making it look like Kid was making me do the tricks. The worker could see we were hungry, and I did my routine with the big brown eyes…” Dog demonstrated for Lou. She had to admit those were the biggest, wettest, most sympathetic looking brown eyes she’d seen in a long time. If a cute dog flashed them at me, I’d do just about anything, she reckoned.

  Dog continued, “And we were in, following the worker around. I got Kid to get the worker, a nice lady, to give us some scraps because Kid said he had lost his parents and he thought maybe they had gone upStalk and he’d never see them again and he was so upset and he had no money and his dog was starving to death. We got scraps. Eventually, looking around, we found dumpsters behind the big passenger terminal buildings, behind the restaurants and cafés. They were usually overflowing, and the City didn’t often empty them.” Dog licked his chops, thinking about that memory.

  “How did you make the kid talk, though?”

  Dog yawned, but the synth-voice carried on. “That was me. I made Kid’s lips move a bit. People thought he was disabled or something, the way he moved. But he sent me feelings, Ms. Meagher. He was happy to be used this way, to be part of what his child mind thought of as a great game.”

  “Hmm,” Lou said.

  Outside, in the street, she saw groups of tired refugees standing, surrounded by their possessions, protected by their make-do fortresses. Their animals, from vibrantly colored parrots in ornate cages to skinny, weary horses with bulging saddlebags, were there, too. It was obvious that they had made their way to the StalkPlex for Red Cross refugee processing earlier in the day and were now waiting their turn to go upStalk. She heard, from far off, bad steel drum music and then, nearer, the sound of kids running, chasing each other around the abandoned shopfronts; where the shop window signs proclaimed BASTARD IMPACT SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! FREE STUFF! And even closer, a baby screamed and a tired woman yelled at it to shut up.