Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  Through the looking-glass, iron-grey women goose-stepped down the boulevard in tight ranks, bullet-guns clutched to their shoulders. All their eyes were shrouded in black goggles, their hair in white caps, giving them the appearance of skeleton soldiers on their way to the front. Behind them rolled the tumbrels bearing prisoners to the scaffold. Men with their extremities ready-chained for the hydraulic stretch. Some of them searched the rooftops with eyes that were already dead; others stared down at their adversaries in a vain attempt to make some personal contact in the remaining moments before they ceased to live. Arrogant fylfots snapped in the breeze along the boulevard, anchored to the buildings like strange, alien conquerors.

  “The survival imperative is the strongest, and the most easily perverted, of the moralities ...”

  “Why do they always make the same mistakes?” Oshi protested. She stared at the screen as if it held the answer to her dreams, concealed somewhere among its nascent nightmares. “Why can't they, just for once, get it right?”

  “Because we aren't human,” Ivan said, his voice deepening: when she looked round at him she saw with a deepening sense of horror the tiny horns sprouting from his forehead. “And we assumed we could learn nothing from your species' mistakes, except to use you as our tools, our sheep-dogs, our little disposable scratch monkeys. And now you –”

  Oshi stopped him talking the only way she knew how. Then when she saw what she had done, the screaming started.

  I fainted. I fucking fainted!

  A sense of urgency dragged Oshi back to consciousness. That's wrong! I must be way out of condition – Her buttocks tensed. The fabric beneath them was rumpled, felt like cotton ... was cotton or something similar. She was lying on a bed, in a state of undress. Well that's not so bad. The bedding smelt unfamiliar. Her legs and ribs and back immediately decided to argue the point, setting off a cacophony of dull aches and bruises. Her left ankle was icy numb. It was so painful that Oshi tried to open her eyes. That didn't help. They were sore, too. Blistered patterns of random activity dotted across her visual field as nanorepair units re-tuned her quiescent retinas. Her wisdom link was a comfortable panoramic pressure between her eyes, waiting to be activated by a thought.

  It was the lack of noise which finally got her attention. It was too quiet. Her heart throbbed, sending blood racing through her ears in a susurration which she screened out instinctively. The cotton wadding in the bed beneath her bunched and rustled as she moved slightly. Her joints poppled and settled gently as she shifted. But there was nothing else: nothing outside her body. She wasn't deaf ... but she wasn't hearing anything. Damper field –

  She opened her eyes, overriding red hot protests to stare at the ceiling. Sitting up was a tremendous effort. Coarse fabric dropped soundlessly away from her, falling in sheets across her abdomen. Patterns of light and shade rippled across the wall opposite. A hand settled on her shoulder.

  “Awake? That's excellent! I was very worried about you.” It was Raisa. The medic wore a loose white shift that left her arms and legs bare and golden brown in the false sunlight from the corners of the ceiling. A hologram dragon, unwatched, rippled its fire in a tail-eating band around her left wrist. “What were you doing nosing around the boneyard?”

  “Looking for your people – what does it look like?” Oshi retorted. Her voice sounded curiously dead, as if it was being filtered. “Your sound damper system's too crude. Switch it off and try to avoid phrase-critical subjects; it's safer.”

  Raisa stood up abruptly. “No way!” Her voice got fainter rapidly when she was more than a metre away. Oshi didn't turn her head to follow her. “Anubis has limited tracking resources. If he was interested in you he wouldn't let you out at all. You'd be dead meat. It's happened before. But since you got away from him things have gone crazy. Goons everywhere, searching for warm meat. So this is, like, running a shell game with a couple of comrades who don't mind holeing out for a spell while we fake their ID's.”

  “You're well set up.”

  “We've got the drop on him. For now.”

  “Don't kid yourself; anyone who can make servants like the Goon Squad is just playing with you.” Unless he's senile. Oshi yawned: the sound damper was making her ears pop. Lousy design. She looked around. The floor was covered in reed mats, the walls whitewashed then inscribed with intricate designs. Oshi blinked and keyed a little-used service routine the Boss had given her.” Nothing like giving the peasants muskets while we keep the gatling guns ...” she transmitted.

  “What! You said ..?” Raisa glanced at Oshi.

  “You heard me,” Oshi replied via wisdom eyeface; Raisa nearly jumped, her head whipping round.

  “Hey, you just can't do –” she stopped. She looked at Oshi, a cross-eyed glare. “Well.” One hand on a hip. “I nearly shit myself! Do you mind? How'd you get a handle on the wisdom system?”

  Oshi grinned humourlessly and shoved the last of the bedding away. “We have ways of spoofing wetware you haven't dreamed of.” You wouldn't . Huh. Raisa looked extrovert, bright: maybe too much the former, not enough the latter. She sat up and bent forward, probing at her ankle. Swollen, but still ... firm. “Did you take a look at this?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Raisa was back to medical professionalism: “You dislocated it, nothing major but you'll be limping for a while so I planted a receptor block on the pain pathways and stiffed you a couple of things that should make it heal faster. You were a serious mess; you looked like a biosurvival failure until I figured none of the blood belonged to you. Anyway, I think we're safe here for a few hours. Long enough for your ankle to –”

  “Wait up.” Oshi cautiously slid her leg over the side of the bed, winced as her foot touched the floor. She hissed reflexively, then put her other foot down and levered herself up. “I told you yesterday, I've got things to do here. I met an interesting guy called Boris in Anubis' pleasure palace. Got him out of there. We need to move fast before Anubis's back-up systems figure out where we are and tell him. And I need to get access to a star-watcher.What's our situation?”

  Raisa shook her head rapidly, as if Oshi's candour annoyed her. “Boris's been missing for days! Where is he? What happened?”

  “Goons. I got him out of the castle but he told me to leave him in the forest. One of them was waiting for me before I came inside. Where are –”

  “– You left Boris outside?” Raisa came and stood up close, too close, focussing in like a small, hot-blooded predator.

  “Back off! I just told you that. Don't you listen?” She let her arms drop to her sides. A dull, gnawing pain between her ribs; “I'm hungry. Anything to eat? Why don't you switch off that screen? It's giving me earache.”

  Raisa moved back a pace, stared, looking agitated: “are you crazy? Leaving him? I'd better –”

  Oshi glared at her: “shut up! He told me to. He said the weapons factories are working. What do you want to know? We were in trouble. Goons coming after us. If we'd stayed together they'd have got both of us. What do you know?”

  Raisa glared at her. “Fuck off Oshi. Are you always this rude, or have I done something to offend you? Because if so –”

  “Neither. I'm just getting used to still being alive; it takes some doing.” Oshi stared back at her: something familiar tickled her, a sense of déja vu that wouldn't go away. Watching Raisa was like looking at an ancient image of herself. She felt an inexplicable longing that threatened to surface: a sudden sense of her own weakness and dependency. She put it away ruthlessly, but couldn't quite ignore it. “How anything keeps going here's a mystery.” She worked her jaws, swallowing spit. “So tell me. Are you part of the resistance?”

  Raisa turned away, shoulders shaking with what might have been silent laughter or nervous tension: “what resistance?”

  Oshi's words sounded harsh: “Don't think I don't know about the escape committee. Trying to develop some kind of weapon, are we, to destabilize Anubis. Figuring out how to crash his wetware and get control of the Gatecoder so
you can escape from here. Isn't that right?”

  Suddenly they were eyeball-to-eyeball, Raisa glaring at her with something like desperation: “don't you understand anything? You say you've got some job to do, well fine. Go figure. Nothing else ever changes in this shit-hole, so why should you make things any different for the rest of us? It's the death of a thousand tiny cuts.” Abruptly she wilted, the manic intensity leaving her expression. Oshi blinked. For an instant she caught a glimpse of something haunted about Raisa, some injured secret history trapped and bleeding behind the plastic glaçis plate of her public pose: “all I want is to know what's going down outside this place, in the real universe, while we've been left here to rot –”

  “Then let me tell you.” Oshi forced herself painfully upright. “Everything's fucked. You can't even bounce a message through three systems without it being eaten or held up by transceiver lag. The Dreamtime's fragmenting. Some kind of weird shit's taking out entire systems and the shock front's due in this system soon; Ultrabrights from the core, cutting up rough on the Superbrights.” she stared at Raisa. Sniffed. A very pecular memory welled to the surface, forming a question on the back of her tongue: “ever heard of a place called New Salazar?” she asked, voice catching on the last word. Heart suddenly pounding because the answer suddenly made so much sense that her spine was drenched in a cold perspiration ...

  “New what?” Raisa looked blank. Click. All very clear. Oshi stared at her, burning Raisa's face into her memory to match it up to other memories. A coif of spiky black hair and a sharp-cheeked face, brown eyes like drills, widening whenever she looked at anything. Lips like a stoma; small, plump and bruised-looking. She could just about superimpose Raisa's face on the other woman, even though she'd never seen her. Another woman with a coil of hair, only older and harsher. “Wasn't that were you came from?” I want you, Oshi realised. You look like Marat Hree would have looked. I want you. Something like rage sprouted in her; hot and sleek and unbearable that needed to quench itself in innocence. “How long have you been here?” she managed to ask, voice suddenly hoarse and soft, anything but combative.

  Those eyes, so intense in their cross-focussed stare: “years and fucking years!” Baffled ambition and incomprehension filled her face with an intensity that overflowed. Oshi circled round her. “Don't know why. Don't you understand?” Raisa demanded comprehension, clearly unaware of what she was saying: “we were a pathfinder mission! And that monster's shut off the receiver, refused to download the transmission. He murdered them!”

  “Be glad.” Closer. Oshi could feel it now; a certain lust. “You don't have to deal with the eaters of minds.” Need to smell that skin, feel that face beneath my fingers again. The warm slick skid of eyes, the crackle of vertebrae. Tears and blood and desire. While I'm still alive. Memories of the goon impaled and thrashing on her halberd wrapped around her mind.

  “What's with you?” Raisa tensed, abruptly rigid. “Hey, look, this isn't right, I've really got to let them know about Boris and you and your ankle is screwed and we really ought to be moving out of here and –”

  Oshi lowered her head to Raisa's collarbone, sniffed, one arm around her waist, around the other woman: “I want you,” she whispered. Hot and cold all over. Oshi finally smiled, a cat-wide grin of teeth and lips pulled back in feral emotion. “I need you.”

  “You do?” Raisa backed away from her. “Look, hey, no. Look, I don't know you. This is really sudden. I've got things to do.”

  Oshi paused, shook her head, clearing disturbing images from before her eyes. “Really?”

  “Not –” Raisa paused. “Not that there's anyone else. But. You're injured and I've got to tell them Boris –” she shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe we should talk later.”

  “Maybe.” They locked gazes: Oshi, predatory and clear-eyed, Raisa cross-focussed and wary. Why am I doing this? Oshi wondered. She felt incredibly, devestatingly alive – alive everywhere. “Maybe,” Oshi repeated.

  “I've got to go now,” Raisa said hurriedly. “Don't go anywhere: I'll

  be right back.”

  Before Oshi had time to say anything she ducked through a doorway. The lock clicked mechanically behind her. Oshi stared at it in surprised speculation. Too fast, too fast. What am I doing? It was like the time back on Miramor Dubrovnic, everything compressed into a screaming hole of emotions. The rest of the Dream Team gathering round afterwords, comforting ... Eri, bless her, trying to help. But nothing would make up for Ivan, may his grave stay undisturbed. (Remembering: the ragged limbs, grey and stringy with decay, nailed up alongside the stretch of urban motorway that curled like a tentacle as it entered the city. Bits and pieces of losers proclaimed treasonable beyond a shadow of a doubt, the ideology of the victors a sinister clownish lunacy.)

  Oshi lay down again and tried to think. Things turned sour on her. The air against her skin was cooling and she could feel the scratch-marks along her ribs beginning to burn. What have I set loose in my head? She stared blankly at the ceiling, feeling nothing but loss. It's not normal for me.Why did she make me feel that way –

  Hello Oshi. You forgot I was in here, did you?

  There's a lot that you've conveniently forgotten. Like the witnesses to your crimes, the insanity of your loves, and the horror to which you sold your soul half a lifetime ago. But I'm not going to let you forget about that, Oshi. You know what? I want you to remember. I am your Boss – as much of me as will fit in your crampled implants – and you'd better not forget me.

  Even in your sleep.

  The geometry of the Dreamtime is not intuitively obvious. Time flows at different rates in different domains of the sim-world, and the domains are separated by gulfs of light years. Most communications between the domains take place in the form of data packets transmitted by comlaser, acknowledged and decoded like the packets transmitted between your implants and the upload receivers, or between the clients and servers on any archaic computer network.

  There are many levels to the network. At the bottom are the dumb, unintelligent Gatecoder modules that endlessly send and receive checksum data, telling one another that they still exist. The next level up is environment data: common history transferred between the domains, to ensure that their realities are synchronized and that they appear to obey the same (virtual) physical laws. Then above that level, there are the people-transmissions. People are complex; not just data, but entities that can modify their surroundings, even modify the Gatecoder. People are human, or Superbright, and maybe even Ultrabright. You don't take risks when transmitting people between Gatecoders plugged into different Dreamtime domains. If they didn't come through okay, people would cease to travel and the whole sphere of interstellar commerce would fall apart. It would be a new dark age. So you send people through as data in labelled packets, passing return receipts; if you don't get a receipt you resend the packet, buffering it in memory until you know for sure that the traveller has gotten through. It slows things down, of course, but it saves lives. And this is the way you travelled to get here.

  But sometimes when the need is great, unacknowledged packets are transmitted; broadcast packets with no receipt, and no buffering. And these must be received and decoded immediately by any gatecoder in their path. It is a fundamental law, but Anubis appears to have forgotten it. Certainly when he learned why the pathfinders had beamed themselves out blindly, he refused to download the entire civilization that followed them. And so, it follows that Anubis is a rogue and a pariah.

  Your mission, which you chose to accept, was open ended. Now it requires you to kill Anubis. Then you must implement a defense of this star system against the attack that is coming. I will be watching you in your dreams, Oshi. Don't try to evade me – I am here in your skull and I can see everything you do.

  Good luck in your mission. You're going to need it.

  Raisa returned about an hour later. She slipped through the door while Oshi was dozing. Oshi opened her eyes instantly, but gave no sign of being awake. “Can you hear
me?” Raisa asked softly.

  “I hear you.” Oshi abandoned her sleeping subterfuge. She blinked, trying to clear the strands of disturbing dreams from her head. “What's going on?” She hadn't intended to sleep; but after shrugging on a loose robe exhaustion had dulled the edge of her anxiety, until the temptation to lie back and close her eyes had become too much. Not that she was safe – but if she wasn't, there was precious little that she could do to modify her condition.

  “We found Boris. He's safe. I – we owe you for rescuing him. Nobody's ever gotten out of the axial redoubt before – not by force.” Oshi rolled over and opened her eyes. Raisa looked concerned, but not afraid. “Got someone wants to talk to you.”

  “That's okay. You – what's your position here?”

  “I'm your minder.” Raisa leaned against the far wall. “Looks like I met you first so I'm responsible.” She didn't seem to like the idea. “Hence the security. Anubis is unhappy.”

  “This visitor. Who is it?”

  “Guy called Mik.” Oshi sat up. Raisa's expression – you don't like him, do you? she decided. “A specialist. In case we ran into trouble,” she added ingenuously.

  “I see.”

  “You will.” Raisa opened the door. “Come in.”

  Mik was short, bullet-headed, clad in scuffed overalls with too many odd pockets. He carried a case that bulged with odd protruberances. He matched it; time-worn and tough. “Boris says you know how to use a killing stick,” he said conversationally.

  “What's it to you?” asked Oshi.

  “Business. You got out of the axis tube. I'd like to know how.”