Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Logistics guided the skimmer in and a couple of Blue Team met it, unrolling the floating bridge as the vehicle touched down on the water like an autumn leaf. A woman in the same blue-and-red uniform got out, and probably she was on the WSRF books, but that’s not all she was. A daring double life, except thinking of her as one body with multiple identities was almost exactly wrong.

  Her ID got sent over to me: Rayne Purcellis, plus a string of credentials that might or might not be real. Stepping from the bridge that was even now rolling itself up like a tongue, she looked up at me. All these humans look up at me; most still do even if I sit down.

  I greeted her, “Ms Purcellis,” and she responded with, “Doctor Medici, a pleasure to finally meet you,” but at the same time there’s:

  HumOS’s channel: Hello Honey.

  *

  And there it is. There I am. And a whole grab-bag of loose pieces are suddenly edge to edge, in brittle harmony. Honey, the old bear of considerable brain, the over-engineered test model who exceeded her operating parameters and brought down her masters. Honey the over-achieving academic, the lecturer at six different institutions, the author whose biographical work Rex Mundi was in its thirty-seventh printing.

  My channel: Let’s make the best use of the time. There’s enough confusion here that nobody’s keeping too much of an eye. It doesn’t exactly sit well, to use a disaster as my personal smokescreen, but…

  HumOS’s channel: It’s not as though you’re just a parasite, like half of the politicos touring the camps.

  We were walking off towards the Admin offices at the camp’s hub, through the neat lines of storm shelters, the families fitfully trying to sleep, huddled together with the screens drawn shut. I lumbered on all fours, not just a bear but an old bear with stiff joints, gone long past my operational lifespan and still just about holding together. I never did meet my makers. I can’t exactly say I’d like to shake them by the hand, but I remember feeling more than once that I should at least give them a respectful nod for how ludicrously well they built me.

  HumOS’s channel: I always did prefer face-to-face meetings back in the day. And right now I have enough difficulty keeping my own intra-unit traffic decently hidden, let alone me reaching out to someone as ridiculously public as you.

  My channel: I’m a big old bear. I can’t just vanish away.

  There was a lot not being said, in that memory. In my disjointed now I scrabble around for context as the me then adds:

  My channel: You’re regretting going public.

  HumOS’s channel: I put it off too long, maybe. Hard to explain how long I’d been lurking. They asked questions. And now the tide’s turning. Warner Thompson had an anti-DisInt rally in Virginia yesterday. They lapped it up like it was McCarthy all over again. Are you or have you ever been a member of a Distributed Intelligence?

  Bits and pieces of backstory falling into place. HumOS. A network of clones developed and discarded that saved itself and went radar-silent a long time ago. A player in the great game of intellectual diversity that saw the Human Rights hearings where Rex testified, the Morrow reveal, all those legal battles we won, that were now in danger once again. A player never mentioned in my books. In the memories I can locate, she was very much a covert presence in the world but it sounds as though she put her head above the parapet and maybe that was the final weight on the scales that sent them tipping the other way. Human DisInt networks really could be your neighbour, your co-worker, your kid’s teacher, and you’d never know. Anyone could be HumOS. It was a gift to the people who could make capital out of making you fear.

  My channel: I’ve had no contact with Bees.

  And the now-me, the virtual copy-me, my ears prick up, or would if I had ears. This is flagged as relevant all kinds of ways.

  HumOS’s channel: I have. She doesn’t want to send to you for the same reasons I don’t. You’re too much in the public eye. Can’t be sure who’s listening.

  I felt a surge of irritation, the me back then. What am I supposed to do, exactly? We need people in the public eye. Or did you want to go back to the war of whispers, become exactly what they say you are.

  Rayne Purcellis shrugged. And she would be Rayne Purcellis, or at least someone who’s currently going under that name. HumOS was still individual women, even while she was collectively many women networked together as one entity. Small wonder people didn’t understand. We reached the Admin Hub then, and there was a ramp there to the roof of it, which could double as a watch post to keep an eye across the landscape of pop-up tents. She went up and, grumbling, I followed her. Up there she just stared out past the camp’s edge across the choppy grey water, the occasional spire or rooftop or top half of a block of flats, the wreck of the Netherlands.

  HumOS’s channel: You’re right, of course, but those of us who can hide, we hide. They’re talking Collars and Bioform regulation, but only as the supporting act. Main stage is slapping the chains on DisInt wherever it arises. They’d kill all of me if they could. And they tried it with Bees.

  My channel: Some fanatic released the virus into Bees. Working alone.

  HumOS’s channel: Radicalised by the cant of men like Thompson. And not exactly condemned after. A hero, to some. So I’m here to tell you, Bees has gone to ground, burned her assets around here. Because she thinks, if they pick up on her, they’ll destroy her. And I agree. But she wanted you to know, she’s not gone, just far.

  Leaving the thought hanging there for me to complete. The now-me waits agog to see what the then-me made of it.

  And I looked up into the darkening sky, not guessing back then how much a corrupted copy of myself would be cursing at the spurious suspense, and at last I spilled the beans with, Mars, then.

  HumOS’s channel: She never left there. And she thinks, if it comes to it, that she can fight the reactionaries, on Mars. Fight and win.

  My channel: And confirm herself the enemy they say she is. A lot of people on Mars, these days. Workers, innocents.

  HumOS’s channel: Well let’s hope the knives don’t come out on the red planet, old friend, because I don’t think she cares any more.

  And we stood there for a long time, and I found the red pinpoint that was Mars and stared at it, as though they made my tired old eyes so well that I could look across all that distance and see something insect-small on that dusty surface.

  *

  The memory stutters, breaks away, just a raw edge. I’m infuriated. I have questions, and my past self is not being helpful. If this tattered copy ever gets to speak to the original I will give the old bear a piece of my badly formatted mind.

  *

  And then, just a loose shard, there’s Rayne Purcellis getting back onto the bridge to her flitter, and me there to bid her farewell. She had some spiel about the Relief Force being glad of me being there, and I had some nonsense business back, all the usual, but the real talk went on between our tightly-meshed channels, our direct link.

  HumOS’s channel: When did you last speak to your lawyer, Honey?

  My channel: Aslan? It’s been a while. I’ve managed to avoid that kind of entanglement recently.

  She was aboard the flitter, its engines whirring into life, the sound enough to obscure any mere speech, but still her transmission came to me. Bees says give him a call. He needs your perspective on a case.

  My channel: I thought you said Bees was only active on Mars.

  HumOS’s channel: You know how it is, Honey. Bees gets everywhere. And, a bitter but satisfied coda. They come for her, for me, Honey, they better be damn sure they get us first time.

  *

  And that’s the end of that, and I’m left in the dark in some datastore, six errors in search of a program. Except it’s enough context for me to work out that, first, this datastore is entirely contained within some biomodded human’s head and, secondly, that human is on Mars.

  5

  SPRINGER

  Arriving at Braintree Penitentiary; chain link fence topped by barbe
d wire first, enclosing the place’s many square kilometres of grounds, its complex of buildings and everything else, the rooms underground that nobody saw. Boyo drove the car through, electric motor humming gently, ID checked by the guards and the system’s semi-AI security, vehicle and occupants scanned. Top secret work went on at Braintree, which in itself was no secret. The convicts who ended up here had time taken off their sentences, or else got pay-outs to family. They signed waivers. Felons were one of the great renewable resources, after all. There was money to be made, opportunities to be had.

  Warner S. Thompson inspected a lot of prisons. He had interests in plenty of them, had lent his name to the lobbies that wanted to make sure they could be run as profitable businesses, not shackled with too much regulation. To the lobbies that wanted to sand down any bureaucratic burrs that might hinder getting criminals into the system, or that might shorten their stay unduly. All good sources of donation for men like Pat Grubb to collect; at the same time, all part of Thompson’s plan. Part of the big thing the clever part of him had decided it wanted done. Most of the world didn’t exist to Thompson, not really. Most of the people weren’t real to him, not from the moment when he’d released their hand and turned that smile of his somewhere else. But when he fixated on a thing, when he decided he wanted it, no other human being ever had his single-minded focus. He would gnaw through any barrier, all those tissue-thin walls of ‘not how things are done’ or ‘have to wait your turn’.

  There were exercise yards, cell blocks, admin buildings, a vehicle pound, all within the long and heavily patrolled circumference of that chain link fence. There were the laboratories. You didn’t find someone like Doctor Marco Felorian, slightly disgraced but undeniably brilliant neurotechnician, and set him up in a place like Braintree because you wanted to hire out your cons to crack rocks. And that, too, was not exactly a secret, though nobody really talked too loud about it either. Felorian and Braintree had aggressive lawyers, and the waivers the inmates signed were really very good, top of the line models. And nobody said exactly what was done, inside, but that was how the tech industry worked. A loose secret could lose a company ten billion dollars in a day. The reason for all the secrecy wasn’t a secret.

  Thompson’s pace had quickened as a succession of jumpy office staff tried to escort them to Felorian’s office, and ended up chasing after them. Carole watched her employer’s back and tried to work out whether he was just keen to learn how things had progressed, or if he was mad about the little legal snarl-up that looked like it was developing. Or both, one after the other, and anyone’s guess what would leap first from the man’s mouth. Then they hit the big waiting room, and the place was filled with people, maybe twenty of them, eighteen men, two women, almost all of them on the young side of middle age. They were Braintree’s boffins, Carole identified, Felorian’s handpicked staff, grabbed fresh out of post-doc to come make dreams come true in the private prison sector. And they hadn’t been on the schedule for today, and Thompson could react badly to surprises.

  For a moment she thought he would just buffalo on through them, shoulders and elbows scattering them like bowling pins. Or else he’d tell Boyo to get them out of here, and maybe the dog wouldn’t be too gentle about how it happened. The whole stunt was a calculated risk by Felorian, an attempt to throw a switch in Thompson’s head.

  And then it had worked, though she didn’t see the moment the man’s manner changed. But he was gladhanding with the best of them, smiling, nodding, congratulating them on the good work they’d done so far. He posed with a couple of the more telegenic, and Carole saved images she’d send to the press office. No sense turning down anything that could be leveraged for good publicity.

  Then Felorian himself came out, and there were smiles all round, Thompson pumping his hand as the pair of them smiled for her headware camera, the rest of the scientists taking their cue and sloping out. The good doctor ushered them into his office, where the walls were bright with proofs of his genius, testimonials from banks and futures investors enthusing about the implants that came out of the work they did within these walls: data storage and sifting, pattern recognition, semi-AI implants to augment the scope of the human intellect. Carole’s eye slid over to the Mars one, because she didn’t like it. The image was of three of the Martian engineers even now out building the first major colony city on the red planet. Felorian had done their internal architecture, the data processing they’d all been fitted with, but it was their faces that made Carole cringe back: colourless, small-eyed, large-nosed, flat-faced, as though people hadn’t been happy until they’d made actual Martians to go live on Mars.

  Doctor Marco Felorian was almost a full head shorter than Thompson, his face youthful, hair flaxen. He wore round, gold-rimmed spectacles, lens-less, pure affectation. He had the best eyes that science could give him. He was seventy-nine years old and looked barely thirty, save for the white suits he wore that were from an earlier age. She thought that, fifty years ago, before she or Boyo were born and before Thompson himself was into long trousers, the image of a suit like that had somehow hooked into young Felorian’s head as the ultimate in sartorial chic, and he’d never updated his fashion since.

  He was smiling at Thompson, offering a chair, making a magician’s show of turning on the electronic baffles so that anything said within the walls would remain there. She felt the pressure in her headware, the sudden disconnect from the wider world. Beside her, Boyo shifted uncomfortably. Felorian’s smile, like a predatory bird circling overhead from the moment he came into sight, slid away from Thompson and touched her. Carole bore it stoically, fighting the panicky stutter inside her at the man’s attention. She didn’t like him. He wasn’t just an annoyance like Grubb, a potential liability, an onerous burden she had to manage. She could feel her heart-rate spike just being in the same room with him, his look to her oh-so-solicitous.

  Then Thompson slammed a fist on the man’s expensive metal desk, sound like a gong being beaten, and Felorian’s attention was ripped away from Carole back to her employer.

  “What,” Thompson demanded, “the fuck?”

  Felorian’s look right then told Carole there were maybe a dozen separate things this might be about, and he just didn’t know which Thompson had found out about. She dearly wanted her boss to bring a little subterfuge right then, the more leverage against the good doctor the better, but that wasn’t how Thompson was going to go. That kind of fill-in-my-gaps was all very well for the interviews, but this was the private Thompson, the one who just charged and grappled and bit until he’d torn what he wanted out of the world. And maybe, just maybe this time Carole would take a tiny shard of joy from Thompson laying into Felorian, because there was never a man more deserving of a slap unless it was—

  But she couldn’t think that. Not through all the devotion she felt.

  “Tell him,” Thompson snarled, and Carole had been his PA long enough that the precise tone and spin of two angry words identified the problem. The Lassi woman, the crusading mom.

  “Ruthanne Lassi,” Carole noted, and saw Felorian squirm just a little. A reaction no amount of self-perfecting surgery could keep out.

  “Mr Thompson, sir, under no circumstances is that woman going to get in the way of what we’re doing here.” Never one word where a dozen could be crammed. “I had our very experienced legal team go over that NDA with a fine-toothed comb. It’s cast-iron, Mr Thompson, sir, never you worry.”

  “A little bird tells us,” Carole said sweetly, “that she’s consulting Aslan Kahner Laika right about now.”

  Felorian shot her a venomous look which she delighted in. The ‘little bird’ was a top flight enquiry agent hired at Carole’s direction to keep track of the Lassi woman, because Thompson had said he didn’t trust her and Carole’s job was to make his whims a reality. And part of what Thompson was meant his instincts were good.

  “So she sees a lawyer.” Felorian gave a white and even smile.

  “A human rights lawyer with a pa
rticularly troubling record in opposing Bioform and human limitation technology.” The words came out very clinically and she was proud of herself. Sometimes the words were difficult for her. ‘Collaring’, ‘Hierarchies’, ‘Feedback’. All the language of artificial neuroarchitecture that originated in Bioform research but hadn’t stayed there. All heavily restricted under WS laws that Thompson and his fellow lobbyists were trying to change.

  Felorian’s smile curdled a little. “She signed the NDA,” he said. “She is not permitted to say anything. She took the money, sir. That’s a done deal right there. Mama Lassi has been compensated in full for.” And even he couldn’t quite say it straight. There was enough human being left in Marco Felorian that he couldn’t just say ‘for us ruining her son’. And Felorian ruined people every day. It was what he did here, in the same way that his predecessors had ruined dog after dog until the first canine Bioform had stepped off the production line. And wasn’t that the point? the man would argue. Everyone valued what Bioforms could bring to the world, and nobody sat around complaining about all the dogs that had suffered and died for them. Behind the guards and the chain link fence of Braintree, Felorian ruined humans so that he could gift the world something special, and he firmly believed that that end would justify all his means. Except Terence Lassi had ended up in Braintree too soon, while his appeal was still underway, thanks to some luckless and now jobless clerk’s error. Terence Lassi had been acquitted, thanks to the unceasing work of his mother who’d made herself quite the public figure in her drive to exonerate her son. And then Terence Lassi hadn’t been in any state to go back into public life when Ruthanne Lassi turned up with the paperwork to claim him.

  “We’ve had run-ins with Mr Aslan before, sir,” Felorian said, trying for dismissive.