Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And it goes on.

  Jesus, but it goes on. And Honey keeps fucking oozing outwards, and sometimes there’s a reversal, mostly at the barrel of a gun I reckon, but overall she’s just smarter than Thompson, and she gets her puppets close enough to his puppets and then attacks them until she’s deleted him and put herself in his place, or grabs them and hauls them over here so she can do it all double time and with better signal strength. Hearts and minds. But there are plenty people in Hell City and it takes a while. And you wouldn’t think a man would get bored with the fate of a world in the balance but there’s only so long you can stare at a crappy map of the crappy city you helped build.

  *

  Next thing I know Sugar’s shaking me awake, and I cock an eye up, hoping it’s over, but she’s been playing tactician and suddenly she knows better than Rufus or Honey because she wants a second opinion on something.

  “What even?” I demand and want to go back to sleep, but she says a wank of Thompsons, or whatever the goddamn collective noun is, have holed up in Cashiers.

  “Maybe they want to do an embezzlement for old time’s sake before the bear gets them,” I suggest, but Sugar hasn’t got her fun face on right now.

  “Cashiers, Jimmy,” and the fact that I’m not Jimbles tells me how serious she is. She gives me quite the gabble then, about how Thompson has people holed up in system critical locations – he’s been leaning on his hosts for info because I’m damn sure he didn’t come with a working knowledge of Hell City infrastructure. He’s fighting her for atmosphere control, airlocks, reactors, all that. Desperation stuff, she says. I look at the map, and the sea of red is a sea of gold now, the red confined to islands.

  “He tried to send the main reactor critical ten minutes ago,” she says casually.

  I choke. “You could have fucking woken me for that!”

  “Honey got him,” Marmalade growls. She’s gone partisan. I half expect her to have a Honey baseball cap and wave a little flag. I guess when one of your relatives makes it to demigod it’s cause for celebration. “Honey always gets him.”

  “Honey’s focusing on what makes sense to her.” Sugar doesn’t sound so confident. “So this little clique in Cashiers is getting a pass right now.” She prods Brian in the shoulder. “You get me a look-see into there? Hack the cameras?”

  “Don’t know what you think you gon’ see.” Bri had been dozing like me. Now he rubs at his new bruise, glances at Marmalade and screws with the system until he gets us a view. It keeps breaking up, but there’s a good dozen Thompson vehicles holed up in there, and they’re doing something very busily.

  “That Illy Fricker?” Sugar asks. “The meteorologist?” There’s a frown on her face as she stares at a thin woman in the midst of all that activity.

  “I reckon,” I agree. “Guess she holed up at home then.” Because that’s the office Weather operate out of too, for a complicated reason that has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with a particular dodge Fricker’s been running for years.

  “Only…” Sugar starts.

  “Oh, everyone knows that…” I add.

  And we stare at each other.

  Because Illy Fricker is high up, senior stuff and normally Sugar and I wouldn’t be fit to spit-polish her shoes, except for this thing she had on the side. She was kind of a facilitator for Sugar’s service sector. She brought in information the back way, using the met satellites supposed to be out there warning us of dust storms. Information for Sugar and her peers to store and sell and do whatever they wanted, with Illy Fricker taking her cut.

  “Everyone knows…” I start uncertainly, but they don’t, not really. Rufus doesn’t. Honey doesn’t, because what does she really know, that isn’t written into the manuals? She hasn’t lived here and built Hell City. She just swanned in after she died to take over. Just maybe, even Bees didn’t spot that particular obscure little back door. Only scum like Marmalade and Sugar and me, we know.

  There’s a complete suite of satellite controls at the Met desk in Cashiers, because Illy Fricker had her sideline planned from the start. It doesn’t link to central satellite control, is quite thoroughly hidden from it in fact, because she wanted to be able to download illicit data without anyone looking over her shoulder. She ran quite the porn network too, as I recall.

  At about that time, Illy or some other Thompson realises they’re being spied on and we lose the camera. But they were definitely about something, and I think about how Thompson could threaten and bribe his hosts until they told him some little secret, something he could use.

  “He’s trying to get himself sent back to Earth?” I ask.

  “Mos’ like,” Brian agrees, breaking in over my shoulder and making me jump.

  “Hm,” Sugar says.

  “I mean, it’s not our problem if he does,” I point out.

  “Hm,” Sugar says again.

  *

  Which is why we end up standing outside Cashiers’ main entry, me and Sugar, and we get Rufus along mostly because we can’t get rid of him. We did try to tell Honey. We got Brian to open a channel, except Honey is everywhere and nowhere and there is no channel, The whole data network of Hell City is full of Honey downloading herself into Thompson and she didn’t answer, wrote us off as not being capable of an insight she hadn’t already thought up, thought through and published in some fancy academic journal. Even the Honey in my head, Honey Prime as she is, is too busy coordinating her virtual coup to listen to me. So we went. On our feet, like real people do.

  The streets are safe as houses by now. Nobody takes a pot-shot at us. We’re at the very tail end of Thompson’s reign of terror and the start of the next one. And Rufus only has one way of going about things, and it ain’t subtle, so he’s basically fucking called ahead and told ’em we’re coming. Which Sugar remarks was a professional courtesy she was always fond of but there’s a time and a place.

  Cashiers is off-centre, behind all the main Admin, but it’s still business district and there are big screens up for advertising. Now they show Danny Boyd’s face glowering down at us. He’s looked better, frankly. He looks twisted out of shape, like someone else’s expressions are grappling with every muscle.

  “Rufus.” His lips fight each other over the word. “Bad Dog. Go home. Bad Dog let a bear in.” His eyes are bloodshot and he looks, to use the correct psychoanalytical parlance, absolutely fucking crazy.

  Big Dog Rufus actually cringes a bit, believe it or not, but then he faces up to one of the screens. “We’re coming in there if you don’t stop what you’re doing. Just…” His broad shoulders sag. “Give up and I’ll try and… talk to her. Preserve you as data…”

  Thompson’s Boyd’s features snarl. “She’s the data. I’m a man. I’m human. I’m alive. All of me. She can’t have me. And you can’t come in.”

  “Bees is onto you, Tommy,” Sugar breaks in. “She’ll block anything you try to send. So give it up.”

  “You can’t touch us. None of you can. We’re safe here. She can’t get us.” The smile that works its way onto Boyd’s face has all the guile of a three-year-old, the kind that squishes bugs for fun. “I’ll fix you all. I’ll win on Earth. I’ll win here. You can’t get in.”

  I think of the satellites up above us, the ones Illy Fricker made sure she had full control of from her Met desk, without oversight. Enough control for Thompson to get himself sent back to Earth, his mind holed up somewhere even as the real him gets raked over the coals in the World Senate courts. Because every copy of Thompson would be the true original, to itself, and even this copy out on the arse-end of the solar system wants to be saved.

  Oh, and blow us all the fuck up, as well, maybe. Because you can move those satellites about, and if you wanted you could drop one on Hell City, microreactor and all, once you’d copied yourself out. Brian explained it to us. Brian explained that it was something Bees had made sure was built in, just in case she got fed up of the neighbours’ loud music. Our little fleet of comms and
weather satellites are basically a missile armada pointed straight down. So that was fun, right? That was a good, healthy, reassuring thing to discover in the middle of our little succession crisis here on Mars. Good times in Hell City.

  And we don’t know if Thompson’s planning that, but I think he might be, because I don’t think he understands about copies and originals and how, if he actually sent himself to Earth, how the copy that did the sending would be still here because that’s how copying works. Even being the great original where spreading himself about goes, I don’t think he quite gets what it means.

  So anyway, that jolly thought was what finally got us stirred to come over here and do our bit in the war for freedom.

  “Tommy boy,” Sugar tells him. “You need to start thinking like a Martian.”

  Just a bug-eyed stare from him, no idea who she is, just one of the little people who used to be his.

  “Look up,” she adds.

  Like I say, they built those biz units with nice skylights, for all that Mars ain’t got a nice sky. You can look straight up into the crappy starscape and sometimes see the milquetoast little nugget that’s the sun. Privileges of rank, right? Except those skylights aren’t exactly a structural strong point, and anyway, Marmalade’s out there with a crew of bears and some heavy-duty mining gear, and it’s not as though the actual walls would last long against that anyhow.

  The screens go black when the cutting starts, though we feel the vibrations through our feet. I don’t get to see how it goes, but Marmalade tells me later. The panic, basically. The sheer screaming panic of a half dozen Thompsons as the ceiling gets carved up and all their husbanded atmosphere floods out, with only the Hellas Planitia thinness and a crapton of dust patiently waiting to come in once the pressure equalises. They charge about and clutch at their throats and scream and thrash, and I hope, I sincerely hope that the prisoners in their heads are killing themselves laughing at the dumbass Earth tourist ignorant of our Martian ways.

  Rufus goes for the door then, and a combination of security overrides and sheer brute strength gets him in despite the atmosphere differential that should be locking it all down. After that it’s just making a note to fix the big new airhole that Hell City just grew. It’s cuffs and hauling away all those Thompsons who didn’t realise or didn’t remember that Outside Mars is what those bodies were engineered for, and a little drop in pressure ain’t going to harm anyone much. Just a regular working day for us Martians, even for back-office types like Illy Fricker.

  And Danny Boyd wasn’t even there in person, so we don’t get the glory of bagging the Thompson-in-chief or whatever. And probably Honey doesn’t even realise we did anything.

  Back in Admin Central and we liaise with Brian who takes it all real-philosophical.

  “Bees be glad of that,” he tells us, though how he got a line out to Bees is anyone’s guess, with all the channel-hogging bear biz going on.

  “She’d have stopped him anyway. I know. We all wasted our time running around,” I say, feeling worn out. It’s hard being a mere mortal when the gods are playing. Hard to feel you made a difference.

  “Somethin’ like that.” Brian has an odd look on him. I, frankly, am too tired to care. Only later do I think about just what that somethin’ might mean. About Bees’ doomsday plan, and how we might all have been wearing satellite hats before she let Thompson escape. And if I’d thought of that at the time, I’d have grabbed Bri by the neck and screamed into his face about what the fuck he sold his soul to. Just as well I didn’t, really.

  “Where are you going?” Sugar asks, and I realise I’ve stood up.

  “Going to get some painkillers,” I tell her. “Going home.” Because I’ve done my part, and I cannot stay here, with the dead, with the greasy slicks where the blood has met the dust like some fucking metaphor for mortality. With the sound of people dragged in to be forcibly de-Thompsoned and en-Honeyed. I’m shaking, from some deep place no amount of Stringer’s going to reach. I’ve got to get out of here.

  “Home?” Sugar asks blankly. “Your nook?”

  I shrug and just go, and she trails after me, leaving Marmalade to watch over Murder.

  “Jimmy!” she calls, and then we both scoot to one side because a brawling mob’s coming past, a half dozen people bundling another three between them. The bundlers have the weird not-quite-human look; the animal look, now I think about it. The three they’ve got are all showing the same purpling outrage. They’re heading for Admin, to do to as they’ve been done.

  “Jesus,” I say, and Sugar nods.

  It’s like that throughout the city, all the way back to the crappy coffin-sized residences we actually get to live in. We see the population of the city at war with itself, and none of it under the control of those bodies’ regular owners. We see construction workers and engineers, agriculturalists and accountants and janitors all going tooth and nail at each other, literally. Whole packs of them fighting, but by now there’s more Honeys. I remember she always said she was a soldier, and now she’s her own army. And Thompson had her killed and now she’s hunting him through the city one head at a time, erasing him. Even when we can’t see faces we know who’s who. It’s in the way they hold their stolen bodies. You can see the bear beneath the skin.

  Every so often, less and less often, we hear the screaming, the hideous sound of people in the moments between Thompson losing control of them and Honey taking it back. People who’ve been locked up inside their own heads, robbed of their freedom the worst way, forced to watch what one DisInt or another makes their bodies do.

  We reach the row of nooks that includes mine. It’s all very empty. There’s a party out on the streets and it’s only us who’ve not been invited.

  “Jesus,” I say again. I liberated some serious painkillers from stores and they’ve kicked in by now, so say my back and my balls, but neither that nor the Stringer’s really touched my mind. Sugar looks like I feel, too. I wonder where we stand, her and me, now. We always used to be criminal overlord and witless dupe. We’ve been through some shit, though, her and me.

  Then we get to my nook and someone’s already in it. Mostly they’re someone with a gun. That is what has my immediate attention.

  It is, of all goddamn people, Daniel Boyd.

  He looks worse than I feel. His face is bruised, red about the eyes and mouth, a weird yellowish colour like the controlling intelligence inside is finding it difficult adjusting to a biomodded Martian body. The gun is shaking but I don’t fancy playing Russian roulette with it just now.

  “Jimmy Marten,” he gets out. “That’s what he says your name is.” I take in the narrow eyes, the way the mouth chews over the words.

  “Thompson.”

  “Help me,” says Thompson with Boyd’s lips. I mean, he’s got the gun. If anyone needs help it’s me and Sugar, both of us well within the cone of fire of that weaving barrel. I’m sending a shout over the radio to Rufus, to Brian, to Honey, in all her many bodies.

  “What help?” Sugar asks.

  “She’s coming for me,” Boyd/Thompson whines. “Hide me.”

  “What?”

  “Jimmy, hide me. You were never me. You never got taken by me. Hide me, Jimmy. She won’t look for me in you.”

  I try to exchange a look with Sugar but the gun demands my attention. He advances with it; we retreat.

  “What?” I get out. “Th— Mr Thompson, that doesn’t make sense. I can’t—”

  “You were never me!” he shouts, spit and blood stringing across my face. “Hide me now! She can’t have me! She won’t find me in you! She won’t look there! Let me in, Jimmy!” And then he’s got me by the lapel with the gun under my chin and I suddenly don’t fancy doing the kung fu thing I did with Maybee Stack. He is crazy twitchy and any additional twitch I bring to the situation’s gonna see that trigger pulled.

  “Boyd told you who I was,” I wheeze, and he nods furiously.

  In my ear, my receiver, comes Sugar’s voice. “I’m going to jum
p him.”

  I can’t sub-voc back, not without Thompson seeing. I do not want Sugar to jump him. Apparently, as with every other damn thing, it’s not my choice.

  “Boyd didn’t tell you why he was hunting me himself? Why he set the posse on me?” And I realise I must be right, and that Daniel Boyd, softest man on Mars, has been playing Thompson from inside his own head. Oh, Danny Boy, you sly bastard.

  “He said you were the only one. And he showed me where you’d be. Let me in, now. Hide me. I have to go on. I’m in charge here. Do it. Do what I want!”

  It’s the naked man I’m seeing. The man stripped of his flunkies and his power. Not even a man, really, by Honey’s estimation. Just a kind of stripped down virus that’s spent its whole existence using the bodies of other people to get its way.

  “I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” I say, pulling all my cringing weak-boy to the front. And it’s an act I was always good at, up in front of authority. And he’s faking authority, and I’m faking the act, but it’s what he expects and so he goes for it. The gun is away from my chin. He relaxes. I let him connect to my headware.

  Sugar, who isn’t quite in on the plan, bundles him to one side then, and the gun punches a big old hole in the wall as they go sideways. He throws her off in a spasm of limbs, but she got the gun off him, and we just stare at each other.

  “You ask Danny Boy why he was after me?” I say. “I’m Patient Zero for Bear’s Disease you miserable fucker.” And I imagine him shoving at his connection to my headware, trying to bundle all the bulging sack of his data through that conduit, pushing on the door only to discover that there’s someone at home in the cottage after all. It’s Mummy Bear, progenitor of all the beasts that are hunting him down across Hell City. She’s been there all along.

  “No,” Thompson says. “No. No, you have to hide me. Me. I’m the only one. I’m all that’s left. I can’t go. I won’t be cast aside. I demand. I demand you do. I can’t. I. I want. I won’t. I will. I have. Have it. I have control now. I think that’s all of them.” And we see the creep of features across Boyd’s face, like watching a battlefield from the air, the triumphant advance and the rout. We see Thompson being wiped off him, and there isn’t even any screaming now. Honey’s refined her process.