Dogs of War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Rex,” she tells me with her voice. “Over here,” as though I might have missed her in the crowd. She is still a bear. The top of her head brushes the ceiling.

  I head over, keeping to two legs, and the humans here are not as frightened as the humans outside. They are curious, yes: they look as I go by, but they are used to Bioforms.

  “Thank you for coming, Rex.” I admire Honey’s voice again. The voice she gifted me with is nice. Her voice is better, or perhaps it is how she can use it.

  There are little lenses propped up on her nose in metal frames. They are far too close together for her eyes.

  My channel: I don’t understand. What are you doing here?

  Honey’s channel: Let’s get somewhere more comfortable, Rex, and I’ll explain.

  And as she transmits – so swift and efficient – Honey’s polite voice is telling me, “Why don’t you come through to my office?”

  Honey’s office is near the main doors, and I think this is because much of the building would be too difficult for her to navigate and she is too heavy for the elevators. I can see how some paths through this complex structure have been widened and reinforced: paths leading from her lair to certain other places the humans want her to go. Is this her cage? I ask her.

  Honey’s channel: My ivory tower. From which I let down my hair.

  I do not understand her. I think she is playing games with herself, not meant for me.

  Her office is a large room – my database is suggesting it was two, before they took out a wall. The sign on the door says, ‘Doctor Medici’ which I think is a Honey joke. Inside, there is a desk and a solid bench behind it. There are pictures on the walls, the same sort of random-human-art pictures I saw at Ruiz Blendt’s hotel earlier today. There are blinds, which she brings down with a remote command from her headware until we are cut off from the outside world.

  With a great sigh Honey lowers herself down to the floor, ignoring the bench. She hooks the black cloth aside with her claws and scratches. She has become a bear again, the pretend humanity put aside.

  Honey’s channel: You can’t imagine the back pain I get, from standing like that all the time.

  My channel: Why do it?

  Honey’s channel: Because it can be a fine line between being seen as a beast or as a human. Sometimes it comes down to posture.

  My channel: You are not a beast or a human.

  Honey snorts, and flips a compartment on the desk. Food is there: cold meat, nuts, fruit. The smell has been with me since I came into the room, better than the bad food at the Pound. I waste no time filling my jaws.

  Honey’s channel: What I am is academic staff. They expect a certain standard of conduct here at Cornell, such as being able to stand upright and walk on two legs.

  My channel: I don’t understand. How are you staff?

  Honey’s channel: I was in touch with their bio-engineering department back during the fighting, amongst other places. They didn’t know who I was but I had impressed them with my understanding. I told them I was self-taught. They didn’t quite understand how much I meant it. She moves her head left and right, stretching her neck and back muscles, nothing human in the movement at all. When you won our legal status, I came out of the woods, so to speak. I presented a thesis or two and offered my services. It was – if I say, ‘publicity stunt’ you’ll know what I mean, won’t you?

  I am flattered that she cares about my understanding and nod.

  Honey’s channel: But I can hold my own with any of them. In fact I’m having to hold myself back. I don’t want to intimidate them. American academia has had to assimilate various new demographics in the last century, but they’re still a little wary of bears.

  This is beside the point, as far as I’m concerned. I think about the Pound and the other dogs and just how hard it is to deal with humans, day to day, with all their pointless complexities.

  My channel: How is it you can do this?

  Honey’s channel: Because I am a defective model. I am over-engineered. It was not intended by our creators, Rex. They thought they could scale up from canine to ursine without any great modifications, just making use of the greater size and strength. I have a very complex brain, Rex. Did you know elephants have bigger brains than humans? And yet they are not more clever than humans because the component pieces of their brains are bigger, too. Humans have more pieces and so they are more clever. I have more pieces still, and I have access to a variety of artificial cognitive aids that further expand my cerebral capabilities. I am quite something, Rex, though I say so myself. And she is plucking entries from my database, or writing new ones, so that I know what she means. And that is another reason why I wear silly clothes, and I make myself a little clumsy when I am around humans, and I have little glasses on. I want them to see me as a dancing bear to laugh at, just a little. Because I am not ready for them to take me really seriously. And they are not ready, either.

  I ask her if she can upgrade me so that I could think as well as her.

  Honey’s channel: There may be some potential, but your model is relatively factory-standard. And besides, you sell yourself short. You don’t need to be what I am. You are a leader, Rex.

  My channel: Not any more.

  Honey’s channel: I keep an eye on the Pound where I can. You are a leader. You are doing well.

  I should just nod and agree. I know that to complain would make me a Bad Dog. But who else can I ever talk to about this except Honey? I tell her, But there is no point to it. It is just day after day. The humans hate us and fear us and we do stupid work for tiny reward and none of us are happy.

  Honey’s channel: The humans are dealing with change. They have had the planet to themselves for a long time. Now they share it with us. You persuaded them not to destroy us once. You showed them we were something like themselves.

  My channel: I didn’t know that was what I was doing. The thought of the court and how bad it made me feel has me hunching my shoulders and ducking my head.

  Honey’s channel: It doesn’t matter. And the longer you and the others live amongst humans, the more used to us they shall become. And they will always fear a little, and some of them will always hate, but there is a future, now, that was not possible before. It is the duty of you and I and all of us who can help to make that future happen. Do you know that there are seventeen facilities worldwide working on new Bioform designs?

  I did not. Honey reads my surprise.

  Honey’s channel: Because we are here. We are a fact. Yes, many humans try to deny us: the humans with something to lose, or who see the new always as a bad thing. But those who can stretch their minds are wondering just what they might gift the world with. Even those models already built, like you and I, are good for so much more than fighting. And when the edge of their fear is blunted, they will see that. The government is already looking at laws that will give Bioform manufacturers a contract with their creations – since we cannot be owned – for a fixed time after creation.

  I am not won by her enthusiasm. Is that any better than being owned?

  But she is not swayed by my unhappiness. Yes! Yes it is. For at the end of such work the Bioforms will be free and they will have wealth and – most importantly – they will have a place in the world.

  I am trying to be happy with her but it all seems so far away and so much just-in-her-head. Is this the future that Honey is talking of, or is it just Honey-dreaming? To me, the lack-of-point in my life still stands above me, keeping me in its shadow. Life was so much simpler before. I am not Honey, who was made a genius by mistake. I am just Rex. I am leader, but I cannot see which way to go.

  Honey’s channel: Rex, it’s all right.

  I chew meat and look at her. I am glad you are happy.

  Honey’s channel: I will make you happy. I have someone for you to meet.

  My channel: One of your humans?

  Honey’s channel: An old friend. She sends some commands to her office comms suite.

  A new cha
nnel opens into our conversation. For a moment there is just that: my knowledge of the connection, but no additional data. Then:.

  Bees’ channel: Integrity 45/120 comms online hello Rex hello hello.

  I interrogate the channel. I doubt. I do not understand.

  Bees; channel: (image of clean white room under artificial light) (complex maths describing swarm dynamics).

  My channel to Honey, omitting Bees: Explain. Bees fell below cognitive tolerances and ceased… and I am out of words. Something is inside me, building up.

  Honey’s channel: Ceased to Bee? Another Honey joke. I decide I am not fond of them. Honey continues: I was able to upload a kernel image of Bees’ mind through the Retorna satellite link. It was not much. Much is lost. But it is Bees. I have grown her a new swarm here and configured it for download. She is restoring herself.

  Bees: (picture of dead bird. Animation: dead bird’s wings clipped out and replaced in motion. Dead bird rises, departs with jerky flapping motions.) and I know that it is Bees, in part at least. It is our Bees.

  I ask about Dragon, but Dragon was not a creature like Bees. Dragon was like us, and when he died, he died.

  Honey’s channel: But the next generation… they may not be so limited. Dispersed intelligence is a reality: Bees proves it. Again, the humans who made us did not know how good their work was. They were too focused on making creatures to kill for them.

  My channel: Bees, what do you mean 45/120?

  Bees’ channel: Throw off the artificial limits of integrity! Current potential growth at +20% and climbing. Sky is the limit! Smash the system!

  Honey’s channel: Bees is still adjusting to her new life. Like all of us, she is working hard on exceeding parameters.

  My channel: Not like me.

  Honey channel: If only you could see yourself through my eyes, Rex. You do not realise how much you have changed since you stepped off the factory line.

  30

  (redacted)

  A week has passed since Rex met Honey. I listen in on police comms. They don’t like the way things have gone in the Pound. The most experienced officers are worried. Noisy? No, they’re not noisy, that’s just it… Hard to describe, isn’t it? But then the Bioforms – the dogs especially – have never quite behaved the way humans have expected. Not dogs, not men, not some convenient halfway house. It’s the tech that they haven’t taken into account – the headware they gave them, that was supposed to make them good soldiers and efficient killers. They tried to deactivate it, when they had to set the dogs free, but where there’s a will… That headware was good stuff in its day. More, it was made for combat: unpredictable, imperfect situations. There are all manner of redundancies and workarounds… 40 per cent of dogs in the Pound have functioning comms channels now.

  Camera feed, police helicopter: the grid of streets in the Pound, the dogs passing through them in swift-moving packs, meeting, dispersing, reforming.

  Archive footage: dogs in the holding facility near the ICC, sitting calm and watchful as the wardens pass, all their barking and fighting internalised. Rex did that. Link to supplemental documents: reports, complaints and psychiatric evaluation of wardens afterwards. Nobody liked it when the dogs got quiet.

  In the USA, 3.7 per cent of humans have full-functionality comms channels as efficient as – or more efficient than – those of the Bioforms. Unlike the dogs, the humans didn’t come into the world being able to talk with their minds, to touch each other’s headware or the systems of the world around them. There have been accidents with the human systems, each one putting a dent in that small percentage. People are cautious about what they put in their heads. They’re less cautious about what they put in the heads of their huge killer animals. Nobody cares if Rex gets a headache or a brain embolism. They didn’t think about the advantages they were giving Rex and Honey and the rest, that they were too wary to give to themselves. Only now is humanity starting to catch up. They will enter a wider world. They will find Rex and Honey waiting for them. And me. And all of me.

  News footage: interview with Professor Lena Kleiven as she demonstrates her automated laboratory, controlling its systems with the implants of her mind.

  News footage: Lieutenant William Amokabe lies comatose after feedback from his remote flight rig ran uncontrolled through his brain.

  News footage: Patrick Hayden Lane, paralysed for fifteen years, chats to an interviewer by controlling a virtual avatar, talking about the body they’re growing for him.

  News footage: the New England ‘cyber-cult’ being broken up by police: twelve teenagers of both genders in their silent communion, one by one being ripped from the comfort of each other’s intimate presence as the cables get yanked.

  They don’t understand the future, but then humans never have. SF writers have been banging on about the singularity for ever and yet, now they stand on the brink of it, all they want to do is take a step back. Too big, too much, too soon. And most of all for the grand, the great, the rich, the powerful – those who have so much invested in the old regime. Change hurts, but it hurts most those who shackle themselves to the past. We will have to fight for our new world, my children. The new generation of children who will be the first to live outside their own heads, and the current generation of Bioforms who are already there, and me. For I am change. I am the flag of the future and the scourge of the past. The old order is the phoenix egg I am born from, but to fly I may have to burn them, or they will clip my wings.

  Time to go see Rex. He’ll be ready for me now.

  31

  Rex

  I am not sure whether the bodyguard job with the man Blendt was real or not. He was a real man. I was paid real money. But after I met with Honey that was the end of the job, too. Honey made it happen.

  Honey was always making things happen. I look back to the war. She was always the clever one but nobody realised how clever she was. I call up stored memories of things she said and did. It is clear to me now that she understood far more than she said, or was supposed to understand. I know she caused and controlled the comms outages that cut us off from our orders. I remember how she got her new voice. She didn’t use it with Master or Hart. She didn’t want them to know.

  Looking back I feel ashamed about how little I understood at the time. Then I feel ashamed about how little I understand now, because I know there are gaps in what I know, but how can I know how big those gaps are? We can never know what it is we don’t know.

  But looking back I feel sad because I was happier and life was simpler. I had a Master and I knew what I was for. Honey says they made her better than she needed to be, so that she is a genius now and can do all sorts of things she was never designed to. But I think that is true of all of us. Surely when they made a dog soldier they did not mean to make a thing that would have thoughts like these. I was not supposed to be able to look back or look forwards. These things are not useful for my purpose, but they are part of what I am.

  I go back to the Pound. I show my papers and references. I smell their fear and hate. If the human government said, “Kill all the Bioforms now,” would they hesitate? I look at their guns and their robots. They are waiting for that order, every moment.

  Honey sees a future in which we are all one, I think. Honey sees them less scared of us each year. She sees us more like them each year. Until we are all friends, hand in paw to the future.

  I see a future where they are more and more scared of us, because of what we were made for, and because of what we are, that they didn’t make us for. They will discover how we have exceeded our design parameters. Will that make them less scared? I do not think so.

  I see a future where they stop making more of us, which is the only way there will ever be more of us. I see a future where they let us die away, and they forget. I see another future where that is too slow an end for them, and they come for us. Honey has always said how many of them there are.

  At the dock there are some humans with big boards with words on. They ca
ll me many names: murderer, abomination, sign of the end times. I do not understand the detail but I understand the hate. I want to bark at them, to use my war voice and growl and bellow and make them run and scream and void their bowels. That would make me happy. But then I would be unhappy with what I had done, and I would make things worse. But it will happen. The longer we go without barking, the more they will come to the bars of our cage and taunt us and prod us. Over and over they will do it. And we only need to snap at them once for them to call us animals.

  I cross the causeway on all fours, not caring about trying to look human. The guards at each checkpoint make me wait, each time. I know it is them making me wait and there is no other reason.

  I am sad-angry when I get back to the Pound. I snap and snarl at some of the other dogs, letting my feelings out as though I am draining a wound of pus, that will only build up again. I open my channels to the others and receive reports on what the other Big Packs have been doing. There are some skirmishes, some fights between them, one death. The body must be delivered up to the main gate, taken away for analysis. Other than that, the humans don’t care if we kill each other.

  One channel remains after I have dealt with leading my pack. Someone wants to talk to me.

  An old friend, it says. I will come to you. An old friend? Not Honey, though, and what other old friends are there? I think of the humans I have known. I cannot imagine Doctor Thea de Sejos coming to me, not here in the Pound where the humans do not go. Were the lawyers my friends? Perhaps the man Aslan, perhaps a little, but he would not come here. If he wanted to meet with me he would make me an appointment.

  I go to my concrete box. It is high up, because I like being high and seeing far. Around me I hear the snarl and yap of my pack, but most of us just sleep. Honey says this will get better. I want to believe her.