Sellars’ channel: Rex, you need to fire now!
My emergency channel: Weapons mounts damaged; weapon firing disabled.
Sellars’ channel: Just fire the goddamn gun Rex now! Please, Rex!
I taste blood. I smell cat. I remember how it was to have a Master. Would all this pain and damage control mean more to me if I had a Master now, to tell me I was doing the right thing? When I die, will I have been Good? There is nobody left who can tell me.
Bees’ channel: Overriding overriding overriding. Her units bounce and spatter about us, weaving like drunk things as she fights the lab systems.
My remaining Big Dog sends me a barrage of outraged errors as its safeties are stripped away. When I fire, it no longer feels like part of me, just a weapon on a broken mount that hangs off my body. Sellars is holding it, though: her whole body cradled to steady it against where the cat’s head meets its neck. The firing of the Big Dog almost decapitates the cat. It leaves broken teeth in my skull.
The fighting finishes. I try to oversee this but am unable to coordinate all the feeds from my squad because of all the feeds coming from my memories. I cannot stop them. They are more me than what is going on around them. I can only fight to stay atop them and give my final order. Command passes to my second, a dog called Garm. Garm is a good soldier. He will give good orders. Good Dog, Garm, Good Dog.
Sellars is trying to help. I feel her linking with my systems, fighting with them for control. But it is not my systems that have gone wrong, Sellars, it is the other parts of me, the parts that are organic me and not machine. I can feel it hurts but I have turned off most of that. It didn’t seem to be doing anything useful any more.
Bees’ channel: System access. She doesn’t mean me. She means the factory.
My channel: What do you have? I can still concentrate on one thing at a time. It is only the big picture where everything breaks apart. My sensory data is not feeding to my brain property. Thoughts are all I have left. My focus is like a boat that is a bundle of sticks shaken out to become a bat’s wing, and it bobs and scuds upon my sea of memories.
Sellars’ channel: I’m trying to stabilise you, Rex. You need to stop trying to move.
I tell her I didn’t think I was. Parts of my system have been severed. Reflexive movements repeat and repeat. Parts of my body are still trying to fight. Sellars and I work on stilling them.
My channel: Bees, report. I am still here, inside this deadweight head. I feel that I am thinking very clearly now as though I am in the eye of the memory storm.
Bees is not reporting, though her channel is live. Sellars is not reporting. Eventually I have to go and find it out for myself, linking to the enemy systems that Bees has laid bare. I want to know what has happened here.
Bees has found out about the humans, the scientists and technicians working to create Bioforms here, the guards who stood and fought and died. They are augmented. They have been fitted with hierarchies and chips, just like we were. They wanted to run but the hierarchies told them they had to work, and so they worked even when we were fighting amongst them. Even when we were killing them with the edges of our battle.
This is new, but perhaps it should not surprise me. Even as HumOS and Honey have fought to free us and make us free like humans, someone out there was thinking that their world would be better if they could make humans slaves like Bioforms: slaves even inside the mind. All those workers were still themselves, but every time they tried to do something different their feedback chips told them Bad Human and made them feel bad, and when their hierarchy chip gave them orders they had to obey, just as once I had to obey. Technology is not Good Tech or Bad Tech. It is the Master who is guilty for what it does.
My headware is stable now I think, thanks to Sellars and my own diagnostic systems. My body is less so. I sort through damage control and see that I may not make it. I ask Garm for sitrep and he tells me that active resistance is being driven back through the factory building. Our rat and dragon have followed Bees into the system and prevented it from wiping data, so that the evidence cannot be simply made to disappear. Major Amraj is on his way but mopping up the last of the resistance. Garm has sent some of our squad to reinforce him.
My channel: Who is at the top of their hierarchy? I can no longer speak with my voice. My channel is all I have.
Bees’ channel: Working on it.
When I hear him I know my systems are failing me again. It is an old memory come back, and one I do not want, even though a little part of me still wants it after all this time.
Hello, Rex.
It is Master’s channel. This is why Honey sent for me. She must have known this was here, but she didn’t tell me. If she had told me I would not have come. Or is he here? Or is it just my memories of when he was with me and I didn’t have to make choices.
Hello, Rex, says Master, and I know he is drowned and I am angry and I fear and that little part of me is jumping up and happy because Master is here again.
46
From “The Beasts Within” by Maria Hellene
The Dragons of Mars
In two years’ time the first manned mission to Mars should launch, if all goes to plan. Eleven cold months spent falling away from the only planet they have ever known, and then the crew will spend two years laying the groundwork for a permanent manned base. Theoretically, by the time they return, they will have set in motion a process that will result in the next mission finding a self-sustaining home ready for them, food, oxygen and all. And, like that book, they will have left one of their number behind.
The crew is in training at the time of writing. Major Terri Heinbecker has command, but the media darling is definitely Felice, the cat Bioform. Everyone loves the videos of Felice on the space station, bounding about with perfect grace in zero gravity, the world’s first Bioform astronaut. Felice will handle the initial outside work to the major’s directions. And some Bioforms and Bioform activists complain that this is how it always is: the Bioforms do the worst jobs, the most dangerous jobs. But Felice has gone on record herself to ask how being the first earth-born person to set foot on Mars could be counted a worst anything?
There are three others in the crew who will sleep their way to Mars. Two are dragon models. They are quick and capable: slender and flexible models able to work well in enclosed spaces. Moreover, they are cold-blooded, and can shut down most of their metabolic activity when not active, saving oxygen and calories. They can freeze, even, and still retain personality and functionality when thawed out. The Mars operation will proceed in a series of stages, as the various automatics and the fifth crewmember establish various perimeters. Having two of the crew who can simply stop eating and slow their breathing almost to nothing in between busy times is a huge saving on what the mission needs to take along. Unlike Felice, though, they are not the poster children for inhabited Mars. Humans are still somewhat leery of a reptile face, even when it is seen through the dome of a spacesuit. They look too much like alien invaders from the old, old movies.
Bees will be the fifth member of the crew, or some of Bees. Hers is a suicide mission of sorts. When the lander returns to its orbiter, when the orbiter returns to earth, they will leave a unit of Bees behind, with a hatching rack and a variety of body units. Some of those bodies can freeze, some can shrug off radiation or survive prolonged periods without oxygen. Some are fully vacuum-proof: they could be shot at the moons of Jupiter, say, survive re-entry and then begin work constructing a base with what they found. Scientists have been busy making nightmare hybrid insects for Bees to be. She will be bee and ant, fruit fly and beetle and tardigrade, all mixed together for the best traits of each. She is also not the poster child for the mission, though she will do more work than anyone.
Bees will keep working, turning their foundations into a home, setting up computer systems, directing robots, spreading solar cells across the Martian landscape and talking to us here on earth. For years, Bees will be the voice of Mars, and Mars will belong to the
insects.
Long before the next Mars mission arrives – with a cargo of human and Bioform settlers planning to make Mars their home – Bees will have hatched out her last body and died, the first martyr of Mars.
I have seen the plans for the settlers. By then, we think, people will be less leery of human enhancement. For astronauts planning to live the rest of their lives on a hostile red planet, it makes sense to give them every advantage. None of them will be able to walk unaided in the thin, reductive atmosphere, but there are a hundred little tweaks to earth physiology that can blunt the effects of an accident, conserve resources. An astronaut’s augmentations from necessity will pave the way for widespread human augmentation from choice. There are still fierce pressure groups shouting about letting go of humanity, but they are the same groups who cry that Bioforms are less than human. One day the world will be ready to accept that humanity, just as it is not constrained by skin colour, gender or nation, is not a condition penned into any one shape.
47
Rex
Hello Rex.
The little boat that is my mind is almost sunk. I hear him in my head just like before. I cannot control whether I am happy or angry or sad or frightened. Around me, Sellars and Bees work. They cannot hear him. He must be just for me.
My channel: Master. I cannot just call him his human name.
Master’s channel: Rex, Rex, what happened? Where did we go wrong, boy?
I want to tell him about Hart and Retorna and the court and the Pound. I want to tell him all the UN reports I read about what happened in the Campeche. I could track myself and Master’s pack through those reports. Atrocities, they said. War crimes. And they were my crimes because I did what Master said. The humans do not accept that as an excuse for human soldiers, but they do for Bioforms because we had hierarchies. But I do not know, now. I lie here and die slowly, and do not know if there was more that I could have done to blunt Master’s teeth in the Campeche.
And is that why they will fit humans with hierarchies? So that excuse will serve for them as well?
Come on, Rex, let me see you. I’m just in the next room.
I think about the superior Bioforms here, the Multiform packs, and the way they were deployed. Of course it is Master. He survived the Pound and he went back to what he always did. He went back to the kennels and got some new dogs.
My channel: What is in the next room?
Sellars’ channel: What next room, Rex?
I try to get a sense of where Master means, and the information is there available to me when I reach for it. I cannot quite understand what it means and so I share it with Sellars.
Master’s channel: Show me what happened, Rex. Were you there?
I do not understand.
Master’s channel: Show me the end.
I cannot show him; my wild memories will not be compressed into a format fit for sending. But I can tell him. I let those last moments in the Pound wash over me, as the waters washed over him. I live them again, and a separate part of me narrates them for him. I tell him what he lived through from my point of view.
Master’s channel: Fuck you, Rex. But he does not seem angry. You killed me?
I am confused.
Sellars’ channel: This is their main computer core I think. There’s no ‘room’ there.
Honey’s channel: (the transmission is patchy, beamed in from Honey’s location on the US mainland): Rex, what is your situation?
My channel: Master is here, Honey. You knew.
Honey’s channel: There was a possibility from data received concerning the Morrow project—
My channel: You didn’t tell me.
Honey’s channel: I was not sure how you would react. And that hurts as much as the memories because Honey should know me better than anyone, but then she says, But if it was true, nobody but you should make the choice.
Master’s channel: You killed me. I thought I was here, somewhere. But I’m dead.
I pass what he says to Honey and Sellars because I do not understand.
Sellars’ channel: Rex, Jonas Murray is not here, but there were transmissions from his headware during your last encounter with him. We’d theorised that he had set himself up to save data, perhaps his memories, but I think he signed on for some sort of personality backup. It’s theoretically possible, but we didn’t think any facility was—
Master’s channel: I can hear you.
Sellars says no more. I can smell she is frightened.
Honey’s channel: Murray?
Master’s channel: Hello, Honey.
Honey concurs with me that this explains the character of the defence. She explains that what I am speaking with must be an imperfect copy of Master within a computer.
Sellars’ channel: So, you’re heading the hierarchy. Of course you are. She and Master never got on, I remember, probably because he kept killing her. Again the memories rise up and threaten to overwhelm me, but then Bees breaks in.
Bees’ channel: No no not the head of the hierarchy just within the hierarchy. Honey, I am sending you the full organisational plan here.
And I think of that: the Moray of Campeche is no longer Master here, but just another slave like all these humans, like all these Bioforms they have made us fight and kill. I think of him in his computer, swimming back and forth like the fish Hart named him for, battering himself against the walls of his tank.
Honey’s channel: This is bad. UNAT need to know this. We need to do something about this. We cannot have hierarchies coming back into use, not for anyone.
My channel: Who is Master of the hierarchy here?
Honey tells me, and then she has to tell me again in a simpler way because I do not understand. She says that there is a kind of artificial entity that humans have lived alongside for over a century. Unlike us, humans gave these entities rights immediately, They let them own property even when they were not happy about other humans owning property, and human courts recognised them as beings distinct from the men who made them.
The master of the Morrow labs hierarchy is Morrow Incorporated. That is what everyone must obey: not a director or a shareholder or officer, but the entity itself. That is how they set it up, so that no human names would be associated with what was done here. And I know that corporations are good and useful things: every Bioform ever made was built by one. But they are good servants. They can only be bad masters. What is it that these scientists and guards and the Moray have been made slaves to? It is an entity without an intelligence, without the ability to choose between right and wrong.
Master is not my master. Master is not even his own master.
I lie there and feel myself die a little. I say, Master.
Master’s channel: Hello, Rex. It is just the same way he said it before. I think of him asking me what I happened. His final upload must have been before he went into the river. I ask him, What do you remember?
Master’s channel: I remember you killing me, Rex. But he doesn’t, so I ask him about the Campeche, about the Human Rights court. At the same time I listen to Honey, Sellars and the rat scout argue about what the Morrow system is doing. They are downloading information from it for use as evidence, but it is fighting them and doing something else. Bees tries to help but her swarm integrity is damaged, the units and the connectivity between them. This part of her is failing.
The first human scientist falls over. I think it is shock or perhaps he was wounded in the fight. I am listening to my Master’s voice.
Honey’s channel: No, wait, what’s it doing now? It’s trying to upload the Murray construct.
Sellars’ channel: I’m blocking it, but it keeps trying to get information past me. What else is it doing?
Master’s reminiscences are slowing. He is sounding uncertain. More than half of what he says comes out as news reports or Wiki entries of the Campeche campaign, word for word. Sometimes he refers to himself as ‘he’, not ‘I’. The Murray construct, Honey said, and yet there is something there. The techs at
Morrow built well enough that there is just enough of him there to know how little of him is there.
There is a sudden babble of comms between the squad, Honey’s remote link and Sellars. The scientists are dropping one by one: not dying, but shutting down until they have no more brain activity than a coma patient. It is Morrow’s last attempt to cover itself. It is sending a kill command through the hierarchy.
Master and I listen as they fight it. Garm’s squad are evacuating everyone, but the system is spread through the building and constantly tries to shut down its compromised assets, electronic or human or Bioform. There were humans somewhere who gave Morrow Incorporated its priorities, but they created a monster.
Master’s channel: Rex, boy, what have they done to me?
Being free means the responsibility to make the right choice. I say, Destroy it.
Honey’s channel: Rex, that’s not wise—
My channel: Finish the evacuation. Get everyone out. Destroy the facility and the computer.
Honey’s channel: Rex, we can’t.
My channel: It cannot keep doing this if it is destroyed.
Honey’s channel: Rex, it’s not that simple.
My channel: We have explosives. Set them and give me the trigger code. I am not leader any more but I talk to Garm and he is willing to trust my judgement even though I am so damaged.
Sellars’ channel: Rex, this is all around us and we can’t move you. We need to get medical help in.
I consult with my damage control system. It lets the pain in and for a moment I lose myself entirely and broadcast what I feel to everyone there. My systems tell me how much blood I have lost and what organs are failing, and how much damage has been done to my brain and neurosystems.
Sellars’ channel: Fuck. Jesus. Rex….
Honey’s channel: (her channel is open and I think she wants to say something but she does not).
Master’s channel: Rex.
My channel: Yes.
Dogs of War Page 24
