Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Back at the ranch with Marmalade, I tell them what’s going on. Thompson, Braintree, the whole picture. At the same time I’m working out a way to get a signal to Bees because I’m out of my league here and any help’s going to be welcome.

  There’s a pause from both of them, and the finger I’m keeping on the pulse of Jimmy’s mental state tells me of another drop in motivation, so that he’s about to pop another pill before I stop him.

  “Look, I appreciate this isn’t an ideal situation,” I say, “but I’m trying to think of what we can do. I need to—”

  “Is that it then?” Jimmy asks. He sounds… really low, actually.

  “No, I told you, I’m trying—” I start, but he doesn’t mean that.

  “Is that the point of us? Is that what we’ve been for, all this time?” He’s sat on the hard floor, not looking at Marmalade or focusing on anything much. “They brought us to build a city on Mars, man,” he says quietly, not his usual whine at all. “And I know it’s shit up here, but still. We’re building a city on Mars. When I volunteered, I needed the work. I had nothing but some tech skills, my family home was under eight feet of sea in a dead city. I lived in a camp. But they said, come to Mars. We’ll have to rebuild you, but still, it’s Mars. I mean, building the first city on another planet. Something to be proud of, right? But now it’s all a joke. Now it’s all so’s some sonofabitch can take over our heads and set up Circle-Jerk City using our hands and our bodies? Fuck, man. That’s…”

  I hadn’t realised he was proud of what he did. I don’t think he realised, until just now. That being here, doing this, actually meant something, gave him self-esteem his life had lacked. And I’m not saying it makes me like Jimmy Marten, exactly, but I have to re-evaluate him a little. And at least I can tell him, “No, Jimmy.”

  “What now?”

  “Braintree fit you with the makings of this, it’s true, but you were already biomodded before you went to them for the headware. For what it’s worth, the Hell City project is bona fide. Because Thompson never built a damn thing of his own, only suckered onto whatever someone else made, that was going in the right direction. So no, Jimmy, it wasn’t just for this. It’s been hijacked, that’s all.”

  He’s looking up now, though there’s no ‘me’ there to look at. “That right?”

  “I promise, Jimmy. Now stop reaching for the drugs or I swear I will slap you with your own hand.”

  Marmalade snickers, but that’s given Jimmy another bleak thought. “Do they know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the fucker takes them over. Are they still in there? Only, I remember what it was like when you did it to me. Trapped in my own head, can’t talk, can’t move. Prisoner’s dilemma, you said? How’s that for a fucking dilemma? And that was just for a little bit. What you’re saying, he’s here for good. I mean, he won’t keep them awake in here forever while he does his thing, right? He’ll… put them to sleep, won’t he? They won’t be…”

  It is said that Charles Darwin lost his faith in God over wasps and caterpillars.

  There are wasps that paralyse caterpillars and lay their eggs on them, bury the whole horrible bundle in a burrow, and then the eggs hatch and the grubs feed and, eventually, the caterpillar dies. And Darwin really, really wanted to believe that God, in His infinite mercy, would gift the caterpillars with a mechanism to turn off the pain and the awareness of what was happening to them; to not be present when the egg case was split open by those questing, hungry jaws. And yet his budding theory of evolution had no room for mercy. If the caterpillar had been taken by the wasp, it wasn’t going to become a butterfly and make more caterpillars. Nothing would inherit any part of it, save for the wasp inheriting its proteins. There was no evolutionary pressure to grant doomed caterpillars an anaesthetic because only the undoomed ones would contribute to the next generation.

  And in just the same way, there is absolutely no reason for Warner S. Thompson or any of his people to have spared a moment or spent a cent to lessen the plight of all the people whose bodies they planned to usurp, and I have nothing comforting to say to Jimmy.

  At around that time, a signal from Bees reaches me, coming in across a tangle of relays from some cultist den in Hell City.

  Bees’ channel: I warned you that action might make things worse.

  My channel: Aslan is dead. I thought you meant worse like that. Except maybe where Bees is now, she doesn’t, or even can’t, care about something like that.

  Bees’ channel: Worse is worse. I am having to move up my own plans. The human presence on this planet is likely to be more problematic to me from here on in.

  My channel: Bees, I need your help.

  Bees’ channel: I am no longer inclined to busy myself in the affairs of others.

  And she very nearly means it, but I think there’s just enough left of the Bees I revived after Campeche, the Bees I grew from recorded memories and dumb insects at Cornell. Because all Bees are one Bees and it’s that Bees, the Bees who was with Rex and Dragon and me, all those decades ago.

  My channel: Bees, it’s me, Honey.

  A long pause, but I know Bees well enough that it’s one for effect. She never needed that much thinking time.

  Bees’ channel: I have preserved my AdApts. The humans I have suborned for my purposes. I will direct them to you. They will assist. That is all, Honey. I am no tame hive any more. I do not make sweetness and light for humans or for bears.

  Any help is good help, right now. Thank you, Bees.

  Then Marmalade lets out a grunt. She’s been quiet, but apparently that means she’s been busy rather than just brooding. Like any good bear she’s been in the system, scavenging for signal strength as the great data download starts to ebb, as everyone who’s going to become Warner S. Thompson gets taken over and the torrent slows to a trickle. Marmalade has access to some cameras and she’s found where Sugar is.

  “You can fix her.” Her voice is like Rex’s voice once was, before I found him a better one, all roar and rumble. I get a spike from Jimmy’s brain chemistry, pure fear just from hearing it.

  “Fix her, as in remove the Thompson download?”

  “Fix her as in give her back to herself,” Marmalade says, looming. “You’re so clever, make it more than words. Do something,” and Jimmy’s telling me will I just fucking do it because Marmalade scares the hell out of him.

  And I should try. Not only because there’s a fellow bear here, some distant kin who wants me to rescue her friend. Because if I can do it, maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I will weed this garden of Thompsons until there are none left. If his roots don’t go too deep.

  I see where Sugar is, looks like some sort of work crew, some job lot of low status Thompsons all getting back to the business of keeping Hell City running. There’s still a lot of traffic in the system, and I don’t fancy my chances of achieving anything at a distance. Time to go walkabout and get close.

  “Let’s do it,” I tell Marmalade, to everyone’s relief.

  Skulking across the city is eerie. We dodge groups whenever we see them. Human, because they’re all bands of men, and some women, with Thompson’s damnable smile, just walking about looking at the walls of Hell City as though everything is unfamiliar and not up to standard. One man stood using a screen as a mirror, poking at his own face, examining the work the biomod surgeons had put in place. His eye was red where he’d put a finger in it and there were bruises all over, but he didn’t stop, and he didn’t stop smiling.

  We dodge the Bioforms as well, because right now we don’t know where we stand with them. They might be Collared somehow, or just obeying human instructions because that’s what they’re used to. They might be attacking humans on sight out of a revulsion I can absolutely understand. And we don’t see many; Jimmy reckons they’re outside at the works, most of them. And we see absolutely no mixing between the two groups.

  Halfway down the service corridors and back alleys to where Marmalade says Sugar is, we
run into a little motorised cart, skewed across the corridor so Jimmy has to drive it sideways before we can get past.

  “Ain’t good,” he says.

  “Well there isn’t much in this situation that I’d characterise as good,” because I am, frankly, rattled.

  “No, who’s doing the work? The fixing work? This Thompson guy, he took a course in how to keep stuff running on Mars, did he?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “Shit.” Jimmy shakes his head, which is always annoying when I’m trying to use his eyes. “I mean, you ain’t got access to my memories, right? You’re in my head and you can steal my body, but you ain’t got me. Not unless I decide to tell you shit.”

  I stop – or rather, if it had been my body, I’d have been stopped by the thought, but of course Jimmy just carries me along. I suspect this is a part of the plan that Thompson and his people didn’t think through. Unless each instance of him can coerce his host into cooperating, all that technical knowledge required to keep Hell City a going concern is going to be lost, or…

  “They’ll get the Bioforms to do it,” I decide. “He will, I mean. I assume that’s feasible? The humans, meaning the Great Society of Thompsons, will put their feet up, and they’ll make the Bioforms keep everything running. If they can.”

  “Don’t reckon we’ll take to that,” Marmalade grumbles.

  But I don’t think the plan went that far. And even as we’re coming into the upper layer of Hell City, the residential layer of streets under a semi-transparent roof where the weak sunlight creeps in down broad thoroughfares, I begin to realise just how screwed up this whole business is. Thompson has made himself the sole human being on the planet, Jimmy and the AdApts excepted. Everyone is Thompson: he’s made himself into a colony organism that can expand forever and yet will always only ever be him: one human face stretched without limits, the Big I Am. And yet, just as he didn’t want to bother with the wills of other people, not even Collared people, he couldn’t even countenance having to share the planet with himself. He’s made sure that all his selves are slaved to his other selves, all the way up the line to some head Thompson with the power of life or death over Mars. And for a moment I wonder if it’s that easy: kill the top dog and it all falls apart. Except the Southampton protocols will deal with that. There’ll always be a new chief so long as there’s a Thompson left. The snake is all head.

  Up here there aren’t the places to skulk properly, and Marmalade’s not a small bear to start with. And we keep ducking into doorways and behind buildings because there are more Thompsons up here. Jimmy tells me this is where they, the crew, didn’t get to go. These are places set aside for the regular colonists of the future, big homes and business premises built and then mothballed. Except they’re all being opened up now. The Thompsons are choosing their new real estate, tearing off the wrappers and moving in.

  And then we see a bunch of them with guns. Big guns, heavy bore long arms. Elephant guns, as I’d think of them. And from their reaction Jimmy and Marmalade both never knew such things existed up here in Hell City, but Thompson did. And that’s their lever against the Bioforms, I’d guess. I remember very personally just how much Thompson enjoys shooting animals.

  When they’ve gone by, we slip into the next building. There are people moving above us, in the section that reaches past the roof of Hell City, the penthouse suite that has its own skylight and its own feeble strip of day. There are lights on up there, all tinted a blue that’s meant to recall the skies of Earth, and people are shifting heavy objects.

  We creep up the stairs, or Jimmy and Marmalade do. There are maybe six Thompsons up there, all in women’s bodies, and they’re… moving furniture. They’re dusting. They’re doing housework. For a moment I can’t quite work out what’s going on, but no – these must be the lowest tier Thompsons, the ones who got the thin end of the Southampton protocols. Because Thompson doesn’t know how to keep the air pumps or the extractor fans working but he sure as hell knows what he wants his rooms to look like.

  From Jimmy’s panicky glance up through the stairwell, I know one of them’s Sugar. Now he and Marmalade are looking at each other, and really both of them are looking at me.

  The network traffic has calmed a lot now the downloads are finished, and I have room to sneak into the system and then link to her headware. It’s busy in there, but then there’s a whole extra obnoxious personality taking up the room. And if it catches wind that there’s a dead digital bear trying to undo its work then there’s a whole city of its siblings who will come and express an opinion, some of them out of the barrel of a gun.

  And so I tell Jimmy and Marmalade that they better find somewhere out of the way to hide, because this could take a while – if I can do it at all, though I don’t tell them that bit. They go lurk in the storage closet while I set to work trying to find subliminal access points to Sugar’s headware.

  It’s not quick, and there are self-monitoring routines built into the implant that exist to track down unauthorised tampering. I don’t think Thompson – the Thompson riding Sugar – is likely to consciously pick me up, because I doubt he’s that introspective or has the relevant skillset. I do think that, if he gets an alarm to say someone’s poking where they’re not wanted, he will reach the right conclusion very quickly. I think he’s very sharp in a very limited way, but understanding threats to himself is definitely in there.

  And so I pick. I send messages, I spoof traffic. I isolate an ingoing connection the Hell City system uses to track biometrics and activate it, and alter its protocols until it can accept incoming data as legitimate. I falsify authorities and identity codes and sneak my fingers into Sugar’s head disguised as routine queries. And because I have no body and no sensory feedback, I imagine all this as a physical thing, with the great pulsating cyst that is Thompson’s mind hanging from the ceiling above as I inch in and start to dismantle him.

  I’m at it for over two hours. Long enough that the home improvements crowd actually move on to another building, and we shadow them, because this is close work, piggybacking on the building’s own internal system. I am very leery about interposing more nodes in the process, because response time is key and because it might trip some alarm in the middle that I’m not aware of. And it’s a little like the Gordian knot if Alexander only had a tiny pen knife instead of his mighty sword. I can’t just cut Thompson’s mind in half with one mighty sweep, and I can’t let him know what’s going on at any point before the end. So think of it as though I’m approaching that big old ball of string and severing each strand while leaving the shape of the ball intact. A death of a thousand invisible virtual cuts, one after another, while Thompson just squats there believing himself unchallenged and in control. And then, with the final whisk of my little blade, the entire thing unravels, falls into a thousand severed inches of string, and he’s gone from her headspace entirely, nothing but a mist of ones and zeros dissipating into the electronic ether.

  I message Sugar immediately, telling her not to panic but to come downstairs in a calm and orderly manner, but she takes the stairs two at a time anyway. When she sees us, her eyes are wide, and for a moment I think that the enforced captivity in her own head has been too much for her. Then she throws herself at Marmalade and hugs her fiercely, and she’s fine, she’s herself. And she’s furious.

  “Do it to the others,” she demands. “Whatever you did.” Because she has no idea just how hard that was, just how laborious. There’s no way I can go through the complement of Hell City one by one, even if somehow Thompson didn’t notice what I was doing.

  Speaking of which…

  We hear feet coming down the stairs, the rest of the furniture squad chasing their errant comrade. The smile is gone, but I know the nasty piggy look in all of their eyes. The idiot outrage of someone for whom the whole of creation exists to be their extended body, to do things for them, to make their will a reality. And woe betide anything that doesn’t play its part.

  J
immy’s already moving, and the three of us bolt into the street, where groups of Thompsons are turning to stare, all that imperious fury magnified across fifty faces. None of the firearms squads are immediately in view, thankfully, and we’re already running. Jimmy has a fair turn of speed for such a weaselly man, and Sugar… is riding Marmalade like something out of a children’s story, bareback, if you’ll excuse the pun, fingers dug into her pelt.

  Thompsons are trying to get in the way, but Marmalade scatters them like skittles, and for a moment nobody’s actually chasing us because running after things is a task that Warner S. Thompson has people for. He doesn’t put in the legwork himself.

  Then there are bears up ahead. And these aren’t like Marmalade, not sentient Bioforms. These are like the ones that nearly got Jimmy earlier, the ones he calls Bad News Bears, just part-uplifted animals slaved to Hell City Admin. Meaning slaved to Thompson.

  Sugar drops from Marmalade’s back as she rears up, and there are three of the Bad News Brigade right there, as big as she is.

  “Go!” I tell everyone. “Just go!” and I attack the enemy systems, fighting Admin for comms channels, sending Denial of Service attacks into the Bad News Bioware, starting feedback loops in their Collaring software. And it’s all stuff I knew back on Earth, because I used to mess with Collars for a pastime. For a moment I’ve got all three of them, and they’re lurching sideways, pawing at their muzzles, attacking the walls, moaning because the poor dumb brutes have no idea what’s going on. Then we’re past and gone, even as Admin reasserts its rightful dominion. We’re gone and away before they can chase us, but they’ll be hunting us now, and even Sugar and Marmalade only have so many places they can hide.