Dogs of War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Master’s channel: You’ll do it, even with me in the room next door?

  My channel: Yes.

  Master’s channel: Then do it. I don’t want to go on as a slave.

  I cling on while Garm and his squad set the explosives. The soldiers come to see me before evacuating, each one of them stopping by me. I tell them Good Dog, Good Dragon, Good Rat. I tell them I am proud. Major Amraj is there too. I tell him Good Man and he says, Farewell, General. Sellars and Bees are downloading data from the Morrow system and sending it to Honey, for use against those who made this place, and the entity that they made their master. I have a vision of tomorrow’s war, between people who have made themselves the slaves of entities that only exist in the heads of men, and people who want to be free. I hope I am wrong.

  Sellars is done. She does not want to go but I show her my diagnostics so she can see I am a lost cause. My body is cooling now. Only the headware is keeping my thoughts moving, and I can feel them growing slow.

  Garm confirms everything is set. He and Major Amraj’s people have evacuated the factory.

  Bees’ channel: I am with you, Rex.

  Everything is happening in brief moments between darknesses, like a stone skipping over the waters. I realise I have lost time, invisible gaps in my experience I can only guess at because before there were others here, and now there is just me and Bees. Bees shows me her swarm diagnostics. The EMP attack caused considerable damage and these units of hers are dying. She has downloaded her experiences to other colony hubs but this failing swarm has elected to stay with me.

  We have come a long way, Bees and I.

  I turn off the pain. I set the timer. I make my farewells.

  Then I open the doors that have been keeping my memories back and let them wash over me, all the faces, all the moments, let them come as they will. So many faces, so many fights. And wasn’t it when I wasn’t fighting that the world was hardest. I was made to be a weapon but I have lived a life. I was born an animal, they made me into a soldier and treated me as a thing. Now I die as myself and they call me a general. Servant and slave, leader and follower, I tell myself I have been a Good Dog. Nobody else can decide that for me.

  Bees says goodbye. The timer ticks. Some numbers only go down.

  48

  HumOS’ Epilogue

  When UNAT released what it found on the Morrow island the legal war began. Morrow itself was part of a vastly complex global structure of shares and part-ownership. It was impossible to find any living thing to take responsibility for what had been done on that island – both the illegal Bioform manufacture and the slavery of the human employees. The money trail was equally Byzantine, the considerable earnings from Bioform sales running into the cracks of the global economy like water into the earth, to emerge refreshed and clean somewhere, half a world away.

  And yet Morrow itself, that nebulous legal construct, was the lord and master of all those men and women’s minds. They were augmented to be loyal and serve that absent tyrant.

  Just how far this particular ideology had been developed could be seen by the remarkable number of lawyers, lobbyists and think tanks which spontaneously suggested that there was nothing unlawful or even morally wrong in such a practice. After all, employees had a duty of fidelity to their employers, and many working in sensitive positions signed punitive contracts to ensure their loyalty and discretion. Installing a hierarchy to guarantee that loyalty was, they argued, only the next logical step. It should never have been made illegal for Bioforms, and it was not illegal for humans.

  That much was true, it was not. Nobody had ever thought about the necessity for such legislation when the future of Rex and his fellows was being debated. They were just animals, after all.

  Watching select demographics of politicians all over the globe jump to support such a motion was fascinating, in the same way that watching disease proliferate under the microscope is fascinating. The battle lines have been drawn for the battle over people’s mastery of their own most intimate selves.

  I think we will win, for now. The assault on the island of Morrow Inc. blew the lid off the business too soon, forcing a desperate struggle now rather than a general shifting of geopolitics over a decade. Probably they would have started with the re-imposition of hierarchies on Bioforms like Rex, taking some appropriate newsworthy incident and whipping people into a terror of Bioforms just as they used to do with various other scapegoats in the past. After all, we (meaning they) could still reap all the rewards of Bioform labour while denying them personhood, and on that front it doesn’t matter how useful I show Bioforms to be. Slaves are always useful or why have slavery? They would come for the Bioforms, and nobody would complain because they were not a Bioform. And then there would be other categories, culled from the wider population. Hierarchies to cure purported deviancies and mental illnesses; hierarchies for every convicted felon, no matter how spurious the crime or uncertain the conviction. And in the end everyone would be a slave – to a government, to a nation, to a corporation, to a god. Because Morrow showed that you can put a thing at the top of the hierarchy whether or not you think it is real.

  I have not revealed myself to the world in all my many forms, not yet. Five years ago I would have told you that by now we would all be out in the open, but public opinion is whipped back and forth, and I stay in the shadows wondering if Morrow was the sole holder of the photocopied mind of Jonas Murray, or whether they were just leasing it from some unknown other. He knew too much about me, and my electronic agents search daily for any sign of his continued existence. Somewhere in the digital reefs, I fear, the Moray may still be lurking.

  Perhaps in five more years we will have found that elusive trajectory towards a future where it does not matter what shape you are, what augmentations you have, whether you are human or dog or an intelligence spread across a swarm. Or perhaps in five more years they will declare war on all Bioforms and I will hide my surviving bodies across the world and weep to see my former allies burn. But I have cause to hope such things will not come to pass. They are putting up a memorial to Rex at UNAT HQ. There was a funeral, well attended, and not just by the usual suspects. Dying was his last service to his fellows; people who might cross the street to avoid a live Bioform could still mumble platitudes about the virtues of a dead one. His death, and the resulting Morrow blow-up, were public enough that he might just have secured the future for all of us.

  And so tonight I will raise a glass to Rex, in bars all across the world, and Honey will drink mead in her laboratory, and Bees will make honey in her hives. There will be toasts in Spanish in Retorna, and Keram John Aslan will drink coffee in his big office and remember the case that made his career. Others too, some humans, and Bioforms of every trade and species, they’ll say his name and understand a little of who he was and what he meant. And perhaps it will be enough to tip the scales if they simply remember that he was a Good Dog.

  And so I vacate the stage at last, because at heart I/we will always be more of the backstage type, fit for working in the shadows, wardrobe mistress and stage manager to the dramas of others. But I will never have another leading man like Rex.

  Adrian Tchaikovsky is a keen live role-player and occasional actor, fantasy author and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.