Dogs of War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “This is all your fault, you soldier dogs!” he tells me. “I was a Good Dog. I had a good mistress. I went with her everywhere. I kept her safe. Now I am in a cage because you soldier dogs were bad. You killed people in your wars and now all of us are in a cage!”

  He is not telling me anything I do not already know, and so we fight, and although he is bigger, and my wounds are still tender, I am faster and more skilled. I tear his ear and rip up his back before the humans shoot me with their tasers and fill me with pain.

  Back in my little cage, I open my channel like I used to, listening for the voices of my squad-mates. I miss Honey. I miss Dragon and Bees too, but they are gone. All my thoughts of them are tagged with sadness. I was a bad leader just like I was a Bad Dog.

  I play back my memories of them, in my little cage. I remember Honey telling me to trust her. I remember Dragon catching fish. I remember Bees saying goodbye.

  Then there are humans in the corridor between the cages. There are many of them, and they have tasers, and they stop outside my little cage. They have restraints strong enough to hold even me.

  I think they want to punish me for fighting, and that is only fair. They command me to step out and I do so. They hate me and fear me, but they are all the master I have.

  When the restraints are on, and the muzzle has closed my jaws, one of them is brave enough to jab me with his stick.

  “Special treat for you, Fido,” he tells me. “Your lawyer wants to see you.”

  And now I am sitting before Keram John Aslan. I am unhappy and trying to work out what any of this is about.

  Aslan says he is a ‘lawyer’, but what is that? My database gives incomplete and unhelpful answers. I don’t think this is something I was supposed to have to worry about. I dig deep through all the references: lawyers are supposed to protect the intellectual property inherent in my design. There are database sections that have warnings about action by lawyers if the information is disseminated. I understand none of it, but it makes lawyers seem like something frightening. I am not frightened by Aslan. I cannot smell him through the barrier, but I can see he is frightened of me from the small movements of his body.

  “So…” The lawyer fidgets with his hand-held computer. I try to connect with it idly but it is not accepting unsecured comms. “If I ask you questions,” the lawyer says, “you can answer them, right?”

  I shift, pushing forwards a little, and he leans back without knowing he is doing it. I am very, very tired of people being afraid of me. It makes me think they are enemies. I do not want any more enemies.

  I do not know what I want. I think of Honey saying, There is no future in killing humans. But what else is there?

  Or maybe this is what she meant. The lawyer Keram John Aslan is hiding something from me: a big something that he is unhappy about, and that is something to do with me, and why he is here. He wants to ask me questions. Can I ask him questions?

  I try. “Why are you here?”

  He jumps, and then he says, “I…” and consults his tablet again. “It’s quite a war record you have there, Rex.”

  I say nothing. In saying nothing, it is like I am asking my question again. It is still in the air between us, like a scent. So long as I say nothing it will not disperse, and eventually the lawyer must answer.

  “I… OK, let’s take this carefully. You were in Mexico, you were one of Redmark’s combat assets when they were brought in to fight the Anarchistas, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I want to ask you about how the fighting went, and we’ll get onto that later.” He is relaxing a little bit. “But from a human point of view, things went very badly wrong. There are a lot of people facing a lot of questions right now about that, and some of them are going to be punished.”

  I cannot help flinching at the word. In my experience, if there is punishment then I am getting it.

  “But one of the big questions that’s come up is the use of Bioforms. I mean, we had this before with autonomous combat robots, and so on and so forth all the way back to the use of chemical agents… which is kind of relevant right now, in fact. But one thing the Campeche war brought up was the use of Bioforms. People are not… look, you’re a Bioform, right? You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you know what I mean when I say, ‘scapegoat’?”

  I search my database. “Yes,” I say.

  Keram John Aslan nods jerkily. He is trying not to look at me, but his eyes keep drifting back. I recognise this eventually as guilt. “It looks as though a lot of what went on in the war is going to come back to use of Bioforms. Right now, the majority of your people—” He shakes his head. “Your… kind? I don’t even have the vocabulary. The majority of Bioforms, worldwide, are being held in camps – in institutions like yours here. A lot of people want you destroyed. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” It is the first thing he has said that I feel I completely understand.

  “And I’m sorry. I’m on the team that’s presenting the case that you shouldn’t be. That you should have rights.”

  I pass over what ‘rights’ means because what he is saying is, I am your friend, and that means I can ask, “Why?”

  The question makes him twitch again. “I… Well, there are people who think that you’re… that you’re human. Not actually human, but that what we’ve made, with Bioforms like you, it’s something that thinks and feels like a human, so deserves some sort of recognition, some sort of basic rights. I mean, I don’t think you’re likely to get the vote, no matter how well this goes, but… just the right not to be destroyed out of hand, you know?”

  “Why?”

  Now he is confused. “You’re… you’re going to have to tell me what you mean, Rex. Why what?”

  “Why you?” I cannot deal with his ‘people’ who want this, and ‘people’ who want that. This is one man in front of me. I cannot smell him but I need to know him.

  “Well, I…” He rubs at his face: he is still sweating and I can see how uncomfortable be is to be in the same room as me. “I always found Bioforms fascinating. I could see this would happen, way back when the first of your – when the first of you was the article at the end of the news: talking dog, man’s best friend. That’s a legal question waiting to be asked, I told myself. And it was being asked from the start, don’t get me wrong. Plenty of people who didn’t want you to happen at all – against God, against nature, whatever. And on the other side there were the people who were building you, who were saying: It’s just a tool, just a thing we made and own. Yes, it can talk, but so can your phone. And right from the start I was thinking, there’s going to come a point when this gets tested in law. What are you, Rex? A man or a dog or a machine? Or a menace.”

  “I don’t know.” My words surprise him; he was not expecting an answer. He looks back at his computer, moves things around. I crane forwards until my nose is against the barrier, feeling it flex slightly.

  “I’ve been given a mountain of tech specs, science articles, reports. I’m still working through them…” I see the images from his screen reflected in his eyes. Amongst them is a face I know: a woman; a friend.

  “Doctor Thea de Sejos,” I state.

  He twitches and stares at me. “What?”

  I say nothing. He frowns and moves back through the pictures. “That’s… she’s one of the prosecution witnesses in the… I haven’t got to those statements yet. I was figuring they weren’t exactly going to be helping our side.” He stops, and I can almost see him catch up with his own thoughts. I know how that is. “How do you know her name?”

  “She was at Retorna. I was at Retorna,” I explain.

  “Seriously?” He twists his face about. “Yet another record that’s somehow gone missing. And something else that isn’t going to help us, probably.” And again he is thinking. “But how do you know her name?”

  I cannot understand why this is so extraordinary to him. “She told me.”

  “She spoke to
you. In the fighting?”

  “Yes. No.” It is difficult to say what I mean. “Before. We were at Retorna. My squad were. We were friends with the resident humans including Doctor Thea de Sejos.”

  A change has come over him. He is abruptly less open, holding himself more still. “Rex, if someone had questions about what happened at Retorna, would you answer them?”

  I say nothing. I know by now that the silence will make him talk more.

  “Only… there’s a colleague of mine who might…” He shakes his head. I think he had a lot of questions prepared before he came here. I think he had a plan of how this was going to go. It is a plan that has not survived contact with me.

  “I want to speak with Honey,” I tell him.

  “Honey…? Oh, the bear-form from your squad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be possible. It’s – she’s in…” More looking at the tablet, and now he is more confused. “Actually I don’t know, there’s no record here. I’ll chase that up. But there are only your regular dog-Bioforms held locally.”

  I call out on my channel, but I am calling into a great silence. No Honey, no Dragon, no Bees. There is no Hart and no Master. There is nobody at all except the lawyer and the guards and all the other angry, miserable dogs.

  They want to destroy us, I think. Right then I cannot see any other future.

  22

  Aslan

  “You look like a man who’s picked a fight he can’t win.” Kahner was irritatingly cheerful as he dropped down into his accustomed seat in the booth.

  Aslan shook his head angrily. “You ever met a Bioform?” Kahner shrugged. “Seen videos, maybe a couple shuffling around carrying some CEO’s wife’s bags over in LA. I take it you’ve had a conference with some of the accused?”

  “You’ve got no idea how scary they are, until you’ve been up close. I mean – not just that it’s a very big, fierce animal, but you know it’s got just enough brains to know what it’s doing, if it wanted to kill you.”

  The other lawyer frowned. “This doesn’t sound like a man on the defence team.”

  “But it’s how they’re seen,” Aslan explained. “Monsters, basically. And that’s a real problem because my case is frankly not going to be fought on legal technicality, it’s going to be fought on public opinion. Right now, everyone’s busy acting all shocked about how things went down in Mexico, and where better to point the finger than at an eight-foot-tall killing machine with blood on its fangs?”

  “KJ, you ever stop to think that maybe they are just unnatural monsters that we should get shot of as soon as we can?” Kahner asked carefully. “It’s not like we’ve discovered them or they came from outer space or something – we made them. And let’s face it, we’ve made mistakes before.”

  Aslan sighed. “Except they’re not.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I’ve been meeting my clients. One in particular, a highprofile offender, you might say. And I was scared, David, I really was. Even with it shackled and behind glass, I was scared. But when I talked to it – to him, to Rex… Well, he’s not going to be winning any public speaking awards any time soon, but I could tell there was something there, a thinking, emotional being. One that needs to be protected from flavourof-the-month public outrage.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. And it’s not going to happen, because they’re basically keeping these creatures penned up elbow to elbow, and they fight each other, and they stink… it’s like, let’s say you kept your murder suspects – and they’re mentally handicapped, socially maladjusted already – then you put them in an asylum where you beat them and hosed them and… and then one day you drag them out before everyone and say, ‘Hey, look at this half-mad, filthy animal! Do you think he did it? Are your children safe until this monster gets a humane injection?’”

  Kahner grimaced. “So, are my children safe, KJ?”

  “They have a right not to be summarily executed.”

  “And the dogs?”

  “David, you know what I mean!”

  “Then build your case, and good luck to you. I’ve got my own worries.”

  Aslan nodded. “Murray causing you problems?”

  “He’s an evasive bastard, I’ll give him that. Redmark knew they’d crossed the line. They had complete oversight over the war in the Campeche, and they did a lot of cleaning up before they were stopped.” Kahner shook his head disgustedly. “In the end, we’ve got plenty of evidence of what was done – it’s pretty much undisputed that various chemical agents were deployed by the corporate Reconquista, civilian leaders were assassinated, all of that. But pinning these things on any actual individual – actually bringing people like Murray to justice, well…”

  Aslan nodded unhappily. Now or never. “David… you’ve got a witness called…” he checked his tablet, “de Sejos, that doctor from Retorna?”

  “Yeah, but she’s not much use. Advance Investigations is still monopolising her, and what’s she going to know about command structure, anyway?”

  “I want to speak with her.”

  “Well take it up with them – wait, in connection with your case?”

  “Yes.”

  “From what I hear about Retorna, she’s hardly going to be happy about…” Something visible clicked into place in Kahner’s expression. “Hold that thought. There is some weird stuff about Bioforms in the summary that got released to me. I’ve been trying to get the full picture for a while now. Hellene in Investigations is sitting on a lot of it. I’ve been on at her to give me full access.”

  “Murray’s Multiform pack was there,” Aslan supplied. “Not that you’d know it from Redmark’s records.”

  “They were? Well, that’s sure as hell not in the paperwork. Didn’t… weren’t they rogue, by that time? Off the grid? Or that’s the story. Can’t pin anything they did on Murray, just like everything else.”

  “I met their, what, squad leader, top dog.”

  “No shit?” Kahner opened his mouth to follow that up, and then the implications hit him. “So you were talking about pooling our resources?”

  “I thought you’d see it that way. I want to get the full picture on Retorna, and I think you do too,” Aslan offered. “So how about we both make a nuisance of ourselves with Agent Hellene?”

  His phone was bleeping at him when he woke, fumbling in a pitch dark room for the bedside table. Every time this happened he promised himself he’d get some comms hardware implanted, which everyone said was the way forward. Almost nobody was using external devices to talk to their fellow human beings any more.

  “Aslan,” he slurred into it. For a moment there was just silence, but the loaded silence of someone listening.

  Then the voice came, and it shocked him upright. It was a woman’s voice, a pleasant and comforting one, but just imperfect enough in its mimicry to let him know it was fake. The diction was too regular, the pronunciation not varied enough as it said, “Hello Mr Aslan. Thank you for taking my call,”.

  “Who is this?” he hissed.

  “I am someone with a deep interest in your case, Mr Aslan.”

  “How did you get my number?”

  “Is that really your priority right now?” the voice asked him – still so very perfectly warm and reassuring that it was sending chills down his spine.

  “Who are you?” he demanded again.

  “Will you have Rex give evidence, Mr Aslan?”

  “Will I…” He swallowed the words. An idea was starting to form, and he didn’t like it one bit. “You know Rex, do you?”

  “We’re old friends, Mr Aslan.”

  “The committee I’m preparing my report for isn’t looking for any of its… subjects to come testify,” he told the voice.

  “No,” it agreed, with a touch of regret. “It just wants to know that Rex and his peers are dangerous military hardware, and not thinking creatures. Actually meeting one might shake their prejudice.”

/>   Aslan sighed and held his peace.

  “Or is there more to it, Mr Aslan?”

  He said nothing.

  “I thought perhaps you might say that the committee will feel itself beholden to the current wider prejudice against Bioforms arising out of the Campeche campaign, a prejudice currently being fanned by media bias funded by various alternative weapons industries. And if you had said that, I thought you might then go on to say that destroying the Bioforms is not like decommissioning stockpiles of nuclear weapons or dismantling automata. You might say that it was murder.”

  Aslan’s throat was dry. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” “Yes, Mr Aslan.”

  “Well…” He stared into the dark of his room. “Why don’t you come over here and talk to them yourself, because you seem more than up to holding your own.”

  “You’ve spoken to Rex, Mr Aslan. Do I sound like him, would you say?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that.You sound like a college professor simulator.”

  It actually laughed, a very good facsimile of a human sound, but a facsimile all the same. “That’s very good, Mr Aslan. But that is the problem. You can probably guess that no combat Bioform was intended to be able to speak as I speak or do what I do. I very much want to help Rex. He is my oldest friend. But if I were to come forward they would either fear me, or covet me, and either way I would give up my freedom. I am afraid I would not help your case. But Rex can, Mr Aslan. Rex is a Good Dog.”

  My oldest friend… Aslan took a deep breath. “Honey…?”

  “Well done, Mr Aslan. Get Rex to testify.”

  “I don’t – look, seriously, they don’t want to meet any Bioforms. That’s why they have me and the rest of the team.”

  “I don’t mean in your case, Mr Aslan. You’ve already started on this path. I know you met with Mr Kahner of the prosecution team, and you have an appointment to meet Ms Hellene tomorrow. But you can go further. Rex saw it all. He can be your star witness.”

  “I… I don’t even know if the court would accept a Bioform witness.”