“Until they follow you,” I say. “Bees. Until they follow you. In a hundred years. In a thousand. And sure, you’re dug in. You got the advantage. But you want to be dealing with them sending people after you, people all fired up about you? You’d not rather poke ’em with a stick now, while you got a chance? You’d not rather stack the deck so’s whoever’s brain gets sent over your ways isn’t already anti-Bees?”
Everyone’s looking at me. Even Honey and Bees, invisible as they are; I can feel their attention prickling at the edge of my mind.
“I mean, Mars for the Martians, like Sugar says,” I add hurriedly. “Yay Mars. But if my man Bri says truth, you ain’t gonna be alone out there forever.”
Bees’ channel: Because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.
My human voice: “You what now?”
Bees’ channel: Out of the mouths of babes, hmm, Honey? Just who might follow me. Unpleasant consideration.
Honey says, to me, What do you mean, Jimmy? and I can only say back, “I don’t think she means what I think I mean,” because it’s obvious Bees has leapfrogged my reasoning and is off somewhere else entirely.
Bees’ channel: Honey, this will have repercussions. If I help my human sister. If I release the information... Bad repercussions. A price. On Earth as it is on Mars. It will be up to you to mitigate the damage, Honey. I do not wish to have to take up arms against Hellas Planitia.
“Wait, what now?” I get out. Even Brian and company seem rattled by that one. “Did you just say you were going to war against Hell City?”
Bees’ channel: No, Jimmy, I said I didn’t want to have to.
I am far from fucking reassured, and if I could strangle Honey into silence right then I would, but she’s talking, just like she always is. Bees, HumOS needs this. Earth needs this. And then, Just give them what you’ve learned from Braintree. Let them choose what to do with it. Free will, but informed free will. Let them choose.
18
ASLAN
Keram John Aslan was an old man, now. Old enough to have retired wealthy, and then, after the world redrew the battle lines, old enough to have just retired. And, back then, he’d never have described himself as an idealist. He had been a career lawyer working for the United Nations, a specialist in human rights and violations of the same. And after the Campeche Insurgency, or rebellion, or civil war, his friend David Kahner had got the cushy job prosecuting obviously-guilty war criminal Jonas Murray, master of hounds for the private security firm Redmark. Aslan had drawn the short straw and been asked to prepare an advisory piece on whether the Bioforms that had loomed so large in that conflict, figuratively and literally, should be destroyed out of hand. Which had seemed as though it would be a foregone conclusion at the time.
And yet Murray had got off, the evidence impacting all around him without quite striking its target. And yet Aslan’s work had thrown up the star witness in the case, the chief dog of one of Murray’s squads. And all the world had seen that dog, Rex, as he whined and cringed and wouldn’t turn on his master, no matter how bad the master was. Hearts had gone out and the public had shifted – over four decades ago, this was. And Aslan’s advice that Bioforms were at least something approaching people too, drafted after he too had been won over by Rex, had been accepted rather than overruled. That had been the beginning of a long and tumultuous history of humans sharing the world with a new intelligence, one hybridised from human ingenuity and animal evolution.
Nobody had even heard of Bees back then, let alone the human Distributed Intelligence that called itself HumOS, though she had certainly been lurking in the wings, pulling strings and setting scenes.
A decade and a bit after that he’d been a prosperous middle-aged lawyer, no longer the fiery young Turk, so to speak. Rex had been an old dog when he’d led his team onto a private island owned by Morrow Incorporated, where they’d been following the same line of logic that had begun with the Hierarchies they’d installed into war-Bioforms like Rex back in Murray’s day, that had made them helplessly obedient to any order, no matter how bleak. Morrow had done the same with its human staff and Aslan had been right on the front lines of the subsequent legal battle, when an army of corporate lawyers had emerged full-formed from the woodwork, like litigious Athenas from the foreheads of a thousand well-monied Zeuses, to defend the right of an employer to the enforced loyalty of its employees. And Aslan and freedom had won that round, but over the last decade he’d watched that particular Overton window shifting. They called it Collaring now, not Hierarchies. It was legal if a Bioform consented to it, and there were whole sects and philosophies among them who did. It wasn’t legal for humans under any circumstances but the incoming political tide was eroding that position daily. Collaring for criminals, Collaring for positions of heavy responsibility, Collaring as an opt-in, with opting out a good reason for dismissal… And Aslan and his increasingly beleaguered peers fought the rearguard action every step of the way. But he’d always been a paper lawyer, really. He didn’t do the grand courtroom theatrics that Dave Kahner had been so good at. And so he just watched each interview and rally and speech of Warner S. Thompson and men like him, and felt the last forty years of progress crumbling around him.
Until now, he told himself, but he wasn’t quite sure he believed it.
Late evening, Aslan alone at work save for his secretary in the next room, save for the visitor just turned up on his doorstep. Gemima Gray – the HumOS member calling herself Gemima Gray – was back in his office. He felt the absence, the bear-shaped absence, like a yawning hole. He couldn’t quite believe it, didn’t quite believe it. How did he know that HumOS would be straight with him, when she needed his help? Could he really trust her when she said that Honey had been murdered by Thompson, murdered and disposed of, and her mind saved by HumOS in the taut interval between those two acts. It sounded grotesque, Gothic, something from a bad dream after reading too much Poe and Gibson. And yet here she was, the hard young woman in her beret, swearing to it. Swearing more than that. And here were the files, appearing like magic on his firm’s system. And they just kept coming.
“Bees is back.” That should have been a good thing, but Bees had been silent a long time after it had all kicked off between her and, to be frank, all the nations of the Earth. Aslan wasn’t sure where they all stood with Bees right now.
“I don’t know what game Bees is playing,” Gray said tersely. “I got her relay into Braintree, and then she went quiet on me. She was collecting this stuff, but not passing it on. I thought… But just when I thought we’d been cut off, she sends me a message. Just: Passed to Aslan. I don’t even know what it is.”
“A lot of video,” Aslan saw, as the compressed data kept shuttling in. He checked the system and flushed out anything unnecessary because there was a ridiculous flood of data incoming and it showed no signs of stopping. “Let’s see…”
Bees had been hurried, Aslan guessed. Bees had just taken everything, a burglar knowing she could be discovered at any moment, sweeping it all into her sack before making her escape. Except Bees was also Bees, and so every file that came to them was tagged with what Bees thought were salient labels for ease of use. And what Bees thought was salient didn’t necessarily jibe with what Aslan thought.
Search terms: Thompson.
And the list opened up. Thompson’s visits to Braintree. Not so shocking, matter of public record. Thompson gladhanding scientists and staff with his customary smile. Thompson sitting with the chief scientist, Marco Felorian, who’d been in on the Morrow business but come out of it as white and clean as his expensive suits. Thompson’s incoherent instructions, which his staff helpfully relayed in greater detail. Then gaps, because Felorian hadn’t recorded his own briefings to his staff, his own R&D. All that was in the other files, the numbers and the data Bees was still throwing at them.
Videos of experimental subjects in various stages of derangement, babbling, frothing, sudden haemorrhages, comatose. Flicking through t
hem was like watching a fast-forward of something growing, something that germinated in a human psyche. The later videos…
Aslan just stared. Gray just stared. She clocked it before he did, just what was going on. She was outraged in a different way. For him it was the flagrant breach of the law, even with felons, even if it had been the worst dregs of humanity, Death Row mass murderers. For him it was the implications that the work of Morrow Incorporated was not only not dead, but had sprung to terrible new life as something so much worse. For her it was fury at the hypocrisy, at the laziness, at the breach of a kind of ideological demarcation.
And then, because he had to, Search term: Lassi.
Terence Lassi, the son, undergoing treatment. Ruthanne Lassi attending at Braintree with all the right pieces of paper, demanding they restore her child to her. And the interview, that Aslan had been told about but never properly pictured before, all recorded and kept as experimental data, because Marco Felorian believed in keeping everything so he could learn from it.
Seeing what Ma Lassi’s son became, as she talked to him. Seeing something rise in him that Felorian obviously thought had been cored out, that slow, stumbling voice of a boy who’d been under the brain surgeon’s knife turned into something else entirely, Felorian rushing forwards to terminate the interview, the ranting Lassi Junior being hauled off by orderlies, the mother screaming, demanding to know what was going on. The lawyers descending, remind her of the NDA, more money on the table, let us never speak of this again. Keeping her locked in, denying her counsel – all of them individual outrages on Aslan’s professional ticket – wearing her down until she signed whatever they put in front of her. And then Thompson’s rage after, faithfully recorded by a wary Felorian, that they should have just got rid of her.
“Well?” Gray asked him, after that. There was more, still arriving. Felorian had hundreds of hours of recordings, more than Aslan’s system could securely store. “Well?” she asked again. “You’re the lawyer, John. What now?”
“The prudent legal route,” Aslan said slowly, “would be to hold this material very securely, and then indicate to the interested parties’ representatives that we had sight of it. That’s what we call leverage, in the trade. It’s what gets you the top dollar settlement deals.” Here’s the money. Let us never speak of this again.
“And that’s your answer, is it?” Gray asked. “John, pass this to me. It won’t work as well, coming from me. I don’t have an identity that’ll stand the testing. They’re already onto Gemima Gray as part of us. But I’ll do it. I’ll do what I can.”
Aslan realised he’d stood up, at some point during all the playback. Stood, to match the angry young woman on the other side of the desk. Stood, because he was so appalled he couldn’t just sit through it, fight-flight instincts kicking in and flooding his old bones with past-its-sell-by-date adrenaline. Now he carefully sat back down into that expensive chair with at least a dozen levers of uncertain purpose, and the massage function, and the seat warmer. David’s, it had been, and he clutched at the arms of it. Not that David had been an infallible moral compass in moments like these, but he could picture his old partner’s face now, that had never looked old even laid out.
Sometimes, KJ, you just have to make the play. A risk taker, David, not the pedestrian Aslan always had been at heart.
“That’s not my answer,” Aslan said hollowly. “This hasn’t come to me through a client. There’s no confidentiality to it, anything that doesn’t involve Ruthanne Lassi anyway. And I have a duty. And you’d better go now.”
“Why?” Gray’s eyes were narrow, not trusting.
“Because the download has been cut. Whatever Bees’ channel is, it’s no longer transmitting. And I suspect they’ll trace this quickly enough so I will need to work fast in case they isolate my system.”
“They won’t isolate any damn thing,” Gray said, hard-voiced. “I’m already in your system like rats, John. Unless they cut power to everywhere in three blocks from here, whatever you send is getting out. That much I can give you.”
Aslan nodded tiredly. “Then you get gone, Gemima, HumOS. You get clear of here and leave me to do what needs to be done. Because I’m about to do some unlawyerly things and I don’t want an audience.”
When Gray had left, he put in a call to Lassi, staying with her family halfway across the country.
“Ruthanne,” he told her quietly. “I’ve got it. I’ve got the recordings, of when you met up with your son. It’s all here. And I’ve got your deposition, everything you went through. It’s all here now, all ready to go.” He couldn’t believe how calm he was being. “Ruthanne, this is where you need to make the choice, and I’m sorry, I need you to say yay or nay fairly quickly. You signed their non-disclosure agreement. I know we can challenge the circumstances under which that happened, but they’ll still hold you to it, and I can’t give you good odds that a court would overturn it. And so… if you breach it, if you tell me to release this deposition, that footage… These are vengeful, petty people, Ruthanne. They will hunt you. They will try and hurt you. They will most definitely sue you. I don’t even know how far this goes, but we both know it goes as far as Warner Thompson and that’s quite far enough. So I need you to tell me, as my client, do we go ahead with this?”
He heard her answer and nodded dolorously. There was a great weight on his heart. I’ve always tried to be a good man. I got into the law to be a good man, if anyone would believe it. And he hadn’t been, always. Life was compromise, and compromise became a shell you could furnish very comfortably. Pushing himself from it now, he felt vulnerable as an emerging snail.
Right on time his secretary flagged up that he had a visitor. So soon. But he was dealing with people for whom money was no object, and it wasn’t exactly rocket science, the hunt always faster if you knew where your quarry was headed. And they had local operatives, of course they did. They’d snatched Honey from practically just down the road.
His visitor was a dog-Bioform, a big model wearing a tailored suit that probably hid a holster in there somewhere, superfluous amidst the boosted muscle and reinforced hide.
“Meli,” he told the secretary. “You can go home now. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be. You just head off.” How steady his voice was. David would have been proud.
The dog came in soon after. He expected a swagger but there was something hunched, something ashamed in the Bioform’s body language, something expecting the rolled up newspaper.
“Hello, I’m Keram John Aslan. I don’t think you have an appointment.”
“I’m Scout.” The dog fingered his Sons of Adam medallion. “I’m…” He whined deeply, eyes constantly turning to Aslan and flinching away from his gaze. “They sent me with a message.”
“I thought that might be it.” Aslan’s heart was hammering painfully, his breathing constantly trying to quicken. “Will you take a seat? It’ll take you. I have many Bioform clients.”
Scout looked for all the world like a dog not usually allowed on the furniture, but he lowered himself into the big chair, and that normalised the encounter for Aslan, just enough for him to get his racing metabolism under control.
“Coffee? I’ll have to make it myself, I’m afraid. Or biscuits maybe?” He kept a selection for all the more common species’ palates.
“The message is, don’t do anything stupid,” Scout told him flatly. “You know what I mean. You know who sent me. Don’t do stupid things, Mister Aslan. Don’t make my employers angry.” There was an odd note of pleading in his voice.
“Scout, if I told you I have a duty and that I have to act in accordance with it, you’d understand that, wouldn’t you?”
Scout nodded once, still trying not to look at him. Then there was a scuffle and a scrape and Aslan saw on the inset screen of his desk that another two dogs had come in through the front door, not bothering about knocking or that Meli had locked it behind her. They had Gray between them, and she struggled all the way until they’d got her i
nto his office without them being inconvenienced in any way.
“Mister Aslan,” Scout said. He could look at Gray readily enough, which Aslan didn’t like. “Don’t do anything stupid with what you’ve been sent. It was…” A moment for recollection of a memorised phrase, “an unintentional data breach that a responsible lawyer would not take advantage of. My employers are willing to come to terms, now. Perhaps you’ll tell us what your client wants.”
Aslan leant back in his chair, feeling the back shift to match his posture. “Scout, do you know how I got to where I am now?”
Scout nodded, the same single bob, not a natural dog motion but something learned for human convenience.
“You might say you’re sitting here in my office because of me. Back when I was with the UN, I did some solid work to make sure that people like you would be treated like people. And since then, I’ve added to that. I’ve done my best. To keep Bioforms free, to stop them being exploited.”
Another awkward nod.
“And I understand the meaning of that badge you wear. That you decided you’d rather be Collared. And that was your choice and, despite some work on my part, it was legally done.”
Not even a nod now, but the Bioform was looking at him intently. The other two, more big dogs in suits, still held Gray’s arms. They were looking at him, too, the same Rex-and-Cross displayed proudly on their lapels.
“Now it so happens that I have received, this very evening, a large consignment of data out of Braintree Penitentiary that highlights some alarming conduct from the staff there, and some alarming instructions from one of the controlling interests in particular. We all know who I mean,” Aslan went on. “I’m talking about experiments in human Collaring. Mass Collaring of humans, Scout, and worse. Very, very illegal.”
Scout cocked an ear, then his whole head. His master’s voice, Aslan thought.
“What’s your price?” the Bioform said, and there was something in the terse, brutal phrase that made Aslan think, Is it Thompson on the other end? Thompson himself?
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