Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“There might be attention,” Carole said. “Too soon to know yet. She might be traced here.” And she wasn’t sure why she’d said it. Not that it wasn’t true. Honey was a public figure, not as easy to disappear as all that, not unless Scout had been very careful. And almost certainly he had been very careful, but still best to cater to that outside chance. Except that was all post-facto logic built up in the echo of words already said. Because she couldn’t un-person the bear in her head. Because she remembered the woman’s voice, even though it was prime-time hate-watching for her adored employer.

  Thompson’s face clenched, and she shrank back without putting herself out of arm’s reach. Boyo and Scout and the other two Trigger Dogs were watching, waiting. Give them the order and they wouldn’t hesitate, nor should they. Give her the order and a gun, she’d do it herself.

  A sulky, petulant child’s expression. “Soon,” he said. “I want it soon.” Eyes still burning into the bear down there. And he could get rid of Honey and still keep the recording, and know an extra flavour of spiteful joy when he played it back.

  “Of course, sir.”

  Thompson shouldered away from the rail, and Honey ceased to exist for him. “I want to play,” he said, and she sent out the appropriate call to whoever was on duty at whatever exclusive club she’d arranged. And tried to make Honey cease to exist for her, too.

  12

  JIMMY

  “You goddamn liar!” I shout in Brian’s face. “You…” But of all the crazy things he might lie about, not that. Nobody’s going to lie about that. Bees is the enemy, the thing that keeps you up at night. Bees is the Other Martian, the one that might any moment reappear from whereverthefuck it’s been and just kill us all, sabotage our power, destroy the canopy, end Hell City. Bees is outlaw tech they purged from Earth after they realised how big and dangerous it got.

  Sugar looks from me to His Honour the Goddamn Ambassador. “I mean,” she says lazily, “I’m not backing Jimbles’ play here, but you want to maybe give us some fucking context, Bri?”

  Brian’s expression is like he’s full-on constipated with religion. “Bees and me gon’ way back to when we sign on with Build Mars. You not ever think about Bees is on Mars already? You not ever think she got curious ’bout who her neighbours gon’ be? She call me up, me, few others. She’s talking me round, ’bout when they been prepping us for modding, man. Changing the headware when it go into my head, ways they never tell.” He smiles blissfully. “Been Bees’ man since ’fore we ever come to Mars.”

  “Why?” I ask, horrified like actual insects are about to come crawling out his nose and ears.

  “Bees is wonder, man,” Brian tells me. “You happy building a city for the fellas from Earth come be rich in? Bees is building the big things.”

  “OK,” Sugar breaks in. “So you’re some weird-ass species traitor deviant type. Fine. I can work with that. So what, Bees in there? You got a passenger like my man Jimbles here?”

  For a moment I’m sure that’s it, and Brian Dey will turn into nothing but a meat puppet, mouth open and the voice that comes out nothing but buzz, Bees-lebub Lord of the Flies. But he’s shaking his head, smirking, and he’s sure as goddamnit the same annoying son of a bitch he always has been.

  “Nope,” he says, like he’s won some super-clever riddles contest. “Just AdApt, just got my headware upgrade, better than you. Just building the future on Mars, man, like we all. But Bees, she give me all the briefing now she knows what’s gon’ down. Bees’ contact with back home a bit patchy but she’s caught up, man. She knows what you got in there now. What package got sent, meant for her. Or you gon’ say it’s not for her now?”

  “Sugar,” I say hoarsely. “Do not fucking give me to Bees.”

  “Adults talking,” she tells me. “And I ain’t discussing sender ID here, Bri. I just got offered a big slice o’ pie to hand your man here over to Admin and I am seriously considering taking it. So what’s it to Bees?”

  Brian’s still smiling, unnatural fuck that he is. “You got a friend of Bees there. Old friend, good old.”

  “Or a copy of her, at least,” comes the voice from Honey’s speaker, which I’d forgotten was even there. “Ms Sugatsu—”

  “Shut,” Sugar tells her, though I don’t think she kills the speaker. “Mr Dey, I reckon you do come from who you say, and I’m sure you come crammed full of threats and promises that I may or may not believe. And in due course I am going to weigh those up with the very real benefits of just handing Jimbles over to the powers that be. But.” And she leans forwards in her throne, staring at Brian like he’s a piece of art she can’t quite work out. “You and Honey maybe tell me just what the fuck, frankly. Because this smells like some rich man’s trouble and I want to know the wider geo-po-litical imp-lications before I sell Jimbles here to someone. And I want you all to know that, however this shakes out, it is my call, and Murder and Marmalade here are going to make sure it goes how I want. But first I want to understand.” And I never saw this side of her before. I mean, she’s a small time operator, but Hell City is a small fishbowl so she always had decent leverage even one bear short of the full Goldilocks. But this isn’t Sugar the hustler, the data broker, the fixer. This is Sugar taking envoys from Bees and showing a keen interest in world politics. And then she says, “This is Wally Thompson business?”

  “Warner Stern Thompson,” Honey corrects her. “And yes, it is.”

  Now I didn’t give a crap for news from home, but I’d seen the man on the screens. Plenty of the BM workforce followed him, and mostly I knew he was always sounding off about Bees and DisInt being a bad thing, which was fine by me.

  “I’ve been sent over here to give Bees information about him, I believe,” Honey explains. “Information not to be trusted to a simple transmission. So they made a transmission out of me.” All very goddamn philosophical. “I am still reconstructing my memories, but it’ll come to me. Ms Sugatsu, this is very important. I am gaining a great sense of threat in connection with Thompson.”

  Sugar shrugs. “Ain’t nothing to me.”

  “Thompson funds Braintree,” Honey says, which ain’t nothing to me but Sugar obviously gets it. I have to be reminded that’s the lab that fitted out our headware, and according to Honey is now doing all sorts of experiments on felons. What sort of experiments? Honey doesn’t know, of course. Bees doesn’t know.

  “Hummus said Bees had a plan they were putting into action,” says Honey, although she doesn’t say what hummus has to do with anything. “To crack Braintree. To get down to the truth of what they’re doing there.”

  “Maybe.” Brian shrugs. “Ain’t gon’ tell me, now, is she? She been talking about BM data architecture though. How Hell City been set up, all the Cloud spaces. She find that mighty suspicious, man.”

  “They set it up like that so she couldn’t get in,” I point out. “So no wonder.”

  Brian turns a look on me like I’m five years old and asked where babies come from. “You believe that?”

  “Maybe it’s true if species traitors like you get taken out,” Sugar says, and I feel just this tiny bit happier ’cos apparently she’s on my side of the argument just a little. Doesn’t mean I don’t get sold to Bees in the end, though.

  “You got anything in your memory-box ’bout prisoner dilemma logic, Honey?” Brian asks lazily, but Sugar’s had enough of his hand on the wheel.

  “You get nothing from her ’til I’ve decided I’m selling, Bri. And then not ’til you pay.”

  Brian blinks at her, and despite Murder and Marmalade right there, the dumbass is supremely unconcerned. “You gon’ start talking prices?”

  Sugar leans back. “Honey’s going to start talking,” she says. “Too many missing pieces right now. I sell a thing, I want to know what it’s worth and to who.”

  “To whom,” says Honey’s speaker, and there’s this frozen kind of pause where Sugar just stares at me, like it’s my fault, until the speaker adds in a small voice, “Sorry, force of habit.”


  “Tell me what it is between you and Thompson. ’Cos it ain’t just you being a bear, right?”

  “Being a what?” I put in.

  Sugar is enjoying herself. “You don’t know you got a bear in your head, Jimbles? Honey there’s some big shot brainy bear, done TV, done rallies. Political bear, ain’t you?”

  “I’ve been many things,” Honey says guardedly. “And you know Thompson’s all for restricting the rights of Bioforms, and flat out outlawing free distributed intellects like Bees. And Bees and I go way back. And there was a speech I made, that I feel in retrospect drew the battle lines between us.”

  Sugar nods, eyes half closed. “‘I feel in retrospect’” she echoes. “You hear that, Jimbles. That’s what a million dollar education sounds like if you gave it a voice. Costs more than all our biomods, those fancy words do. So you stand up and tell the world how Thompson’s a shit? Tell them he cheats on his taxes and beats his wife? Only that newscast never made it to Mars.”

  “Not exactly.” Honey’s still being cagey. “It’s just… it was a general observation about structures of authority.”

  “Damn,” Sugar says, nodding appreciatively. “You keep laying down those thousand dollar words. I love it.” And I think she’s being sincere. You don’t get to hear people talk like that around here. It’s almost entertainment on its own.

  “It’s just… well…” Honey pauses, and I can almost feel her shunting bits and pieces of her mind together inside mine. “You do your work here, right? And some of you are better at the work than others. Some of you give your all to the job, every waking moment, it’s your calling. Some of you phone it in a bit, you’ve got other things going on. I’m willing to bet that you, Ms Sugatsu, don’t put quite the hours in on the construction site that some people do, am I correct?”

  Sugar snorts. “So tell me something new, Honey.”

  “Well that work, that’s what I called the game. But then let’s say your… Admin, they want to appoint a manager, a foreman. It’s a good job, nice perks. Who gets it?”

  “Whoever kisses the most asses,” Sugar tells her promptly.

  “Ah.” Honey’s pleased. “I wish some of my peers back home grasped things as quickly as you do. And yes, although I’ll admit I phrased it in rather different language, that is the conclusion I came to. That there’s a metagame. It’s a bit like… the metaphor I used was animal mating displays, actually. You’re familiar with those.”

  Sugar’s got a look on her like she’s not entirely sure what Honey’s accusing her of, and Honey obviously reads the room because she adds quickly, “So, let’s say you’re a peacock and you have your grand tail, which likely evolved because it shows health and wellbeing, hence fitness. But the peahen just cares that you’ve got the biggest tail. Or… you’ve got your caveman in the Stone Age brings a mammoth in to show he’s a big hunter, you’re with me? And hunting’s the game, the actual important activity that’s being judged. Except Og next door just bonks Thog on the head and steals the mammoth, and that’s the metagame. Og’s a lousy hunter because he spends his time and effort not on hunting, but on the secondary activity that’s supposed to show how good a hunter you are. And so he wins out over Thog, gets the girl, becomes chief. And your worker who ‘kisses ass’ is seen as management material not because they give their all to the company, but because they spend that effort they would otherwise give to the company on looking like they give it all to the company. They spend it on all the little social games instead, and because effort spent on the metagame is focused entirely about the appearance of virtue, it overshadows those who are actually performing the primary task, it overshadows actual virtue. And this is how human hierarchical structures end up working. This is why the people who end up in authority are generally not those focused on whatever the purpose of the community is, but those who are focused on achieving positions of authority. This is why you have career politicians, why administrators end up pulling ten times the salary of a surgeon or an academic under their administration, why performing well in an exam or a test is not actually the same as being good at the thing the exam is supposed to be testing. Because the metagame outweighs the game.”

  And she stops speaking and we all chew over that, until at last I say, “So what? Way of the world, ain’t it? Us poor hardworking Joes and Jills get screwed.”

  “I’m with Jimbles,” Sugar agrees. “I mean, OK, can see why a bunch of people might not have wanted to take that from a bear, but…”

  “I might have gone a little further,” Honey admits. “I was off script, then, and I remember them trying to shut me up, but I had been having a frustrating time of it and I just… said some things. My higher level metagame theory.”

  “Yeah, that sounds all kinds of controversial,” Sugar drawls.

  “I said they were so scared of Bioform intelligence and DisInt entities and AI,” Honey goes on. “I said they were panicking so hard about non-human minds jostling for space in the world, desperate to make us think like humans and simultaneously terrified that they might succeed, and they hadn’t even seen that there was a very different intelligence already right there, in the centre of things. I suggested that, above and beyond the regular metagame that meant the people who achieved status and power were by definition the least qualified to have it – and you’ll appreciate I was actually talking to a number of human people in possession of a fair measure of status and power, so I had already got right up a good number of noses by this point… Anyway, I said that just as metagamers could hack organisational structures and procedures to promote themselves without needing to be good at the primary task of the organisation, so there were people out there who could do it to human society. Sociopaths of a kind, essentially, who could give out all the right signals to get people to do things for them without ever actually having what you’d think of as a truly human existence inside their head. People who were just masks, terribly adroit at playing the human metagame without any of the empathy, the genuine connections, the internal life. And in the same way as your ass-kisser gets the managerial position, so the human metagamers win out over those people who are devoting time and effort to actually being human. And they were busy campaigning against Bioforms and DisInt and the rest because we weren’t human, we weren’t the environment they’d adapted to exploit. Because we would see what they were and call them on it. And that, I’m afraid, is what caught like a hook in the nasty little machine that Warner S. Thompson calls a mind, because I would respectfully suggest that, regardless of the respective species we were both born into, I think far more like a human than he ever will.”

  “That so?” Sugar shakes her head, smirking. “Sure explains how shit works. So Old Man Thompson’s a vampire, amiright?”

  “What?” It is a joy, let me tell you, to hear Honey’s pompous voice flat out baffled. “No—”

  “What?” Sugar says, and I share a moment with her ’cos she’s enjoying this too. “Looks like a person, does all that smooth human talk, knows what to say so’s you let him in, and then it’s fangs out and fucks you over.”

  “I…” Honey’s electronic voice still comes over as thoughtful. “Perhaps you’re right. A parasite. A parasite that prospers because it presents an exaggerated performance of its host species’ salient characteristics. Not just passing for human, but passing for superhuman: putting out all the tells so that you think they’re super-confident, super-dynamic, super-inspiring, exactly the man to follow to the ends of the Earth. Far more so than anyone who actually has any reason to be confident, or to be worth following.”

  “So what you’re saying is,” Sugar’s grinning like a cat, “I can sell you to Rufus for scrip and favours or I can sell you back home to Thompson for a great big bag of real money.”

  “That… was not the conclusion I was intending you to come to,” Honey says.

  “Shame you’re not one of these super-manipulators then. What?” She cocks an eyebrow at Brian. “You going to sweeten Sugar’s pot f
or Honey, Bees-man? Only I can’t promise just how much time you got to go take further instructions.”

  “Bees told me ’nuff.” And Brian still doesn’t seem worried; got his hands in his overalls pockets, shoulders slumped, doing precisely buck-nothing just like he usually does at work. “Bees’ got eyes on Earth, on Thompson. Not so many, though. After they tried legislate ’gainst Bees back then, she got a choice, man. She gon’ kick off World War Three then and there, and maybe lose ’cos she wasn’t ready? She gon’ pull back to the colony she made on Mars? You know what she did. Bees not got so much coverage back on Earth, got plenty muscle here, Sugar.”

  “That a threat, Bri? Bees gonna come sting me?”

  “You?” Brian’s shrug says Bees doesn’t care a goddamn about Sugar. “Over Honey here? Bees doesn’t do vengeful, Sugar. Bees not gon’ come get you ’cos you sold her friend. Bees gon’ come get her friend, though. And Bees gon’ declare war ’gainst Hell City if Bees reckons it’s a threat to her. All Hell City. You just gon’ be collateral damage. ’S’in your interest t’make Bees happy ’bout all of us being here.”

  “And if I send you back after you’ve been shit out by a bear?” Sugar asks pleasantly.

  “Bees not gon’ be too happy.” Brian hunches forwards, and he’s still got that smile, and I am more scared of him than Murder or Marmalade because this is it, this is sheer crazy-ass religious fanaticism, only instead of God, Brian Dey found Bees. “Bees gon’ survive, man,” he says. “Bees gon’ do a lot of good for everyone, we only give her the chance, but first law of Bees is Bees gon’ survive. You don’ want to be part of a thing that maybe means Bees doesn’t survive ’cos Bees gon’ fuck that thing right up, you know it.”

  “Mr Dey, please explain why Bees thinks Hell City might become a threat,” Honey breaks into the nasty pause Brian’s little speech flung up. “Is it to do with Braintree, with the work they did on the Humaniform neuralware? That’s the Thompson link to this place. It’s the only reason I can think that I sent this copy of me over to find you.”