Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  My left arm twists around behind me. The ball joint buried in my shoulder grates appallingly as a contracting motor group in my back tears. I’m not in control of my own limbs, it seems. “Sorry,” I say involuntarily. Instinctive politeness trumps even imminent mindrape. I feel something in the palm of my hand as my shoulder joint tries to click back into place.

  He tries to pull the trigger, but his gun doesn’t go off. Someone shouts, and someone kicks me in the small of the back, hard. But I don’t let go. My hand is locked in a death grip, and I pirouette slowly, turning myself around as I drag my assailant into view, punching and struggling. Then I begin to twist. I’m holding him up by his own antique revolver, I see, metal the color of pewter just visible between my fingers. I’m gripping the cylinder, the web of skin between thumb and index finger trapped under the hammer. Stupid of him, one of me thinks absently as my hand twists farther, and there’s a splintering noise and a shriek. I’m beginning to feel the pain from my shoulder now, a solid bar of agony from spine to elbow, echoed by the hot bite of the hammer—but he’s not letting go. “Stone, who sent you?”

  “Fuck you, manikin!” He gasps reflexively, even though there’s no air here. A stubby hand stabs for my eyes, fingers extended stiffly. I catch it in my fist and squeeze. I have small, perfectly proportioned, feminine hands; just five sizes larger than his. The snapping noise brings me no joy. Stone—or his sib—squalls. “I’ll kill you, meatfucker!”

  “I’m sure you will,” I soothe him. “Eventually.” I shift my grip to his throat and remove the pistol from his broken fingers. “Why do you want Juliette dead? Why are you hunting her?” They always work in pairs, I remember—no, Juliette remembers. I’ve still got her soul chip in place, it’s mine that he pulled—which triggers another thought: Daks must be in trouble! I’d be alarmed if I wasn’t already overloaded. Stone is glaring at me with an expression that takes me a moment to recognize as disbelief. I shake him. “Answer, damn you!”

  “You don’t know?” For an instant he looks appalled, then a vast, bleak mirth takes hold, rattling his ribs with laughter. “Haah! You really don’t know, do you? You’re an innocent, aren’t you? Never been in love? Oh, this is rich!”

  I shake him again. “You’ve been trying to kill me,” I remind him. “Why? Who sent you?”

  He focuses his huge dark eyes on me. “Nothing personal, but you’ve just got to die,” he says. I feel him tense. “You may think you’re innocent, but there are no innocents in this game.” My arm spasms, and I realize I’ve thrown him over my damaged shoulder, right over the rim of the pit behind me. I gape, not understanding what’s come over me, and I’m just beginning to turn and look up as he reaches the peak of his trajectory and explodes. Springs and coils of viscera and less identifiable body parts clatter across the wall opposite.

  DAKS FINDS ME minutes later, fumbling around on the floor after my missing memory chip. I turn painfully and point the little revolver at him before I realize who it is. “Hey, babe. What’s the story?” he asks, jetting down to a six-point landing in front of me, blasting a shower of debris in all directions.

  “Do you mind? My soul’s somewhere in this pile of junk.”

  “We can’t look for it now; they hunt in pairs, and one’s still at large—”

  “Not anymore.” I try to gesture at the scraps scattered across the landscape, but my left arm refuses to elevate more than thirty degrees. “Help me search.”

  Daks spins in place, then pounces. “Here!” His stubby little arms have a remarkably long reach. He offers me the chip. “What happened? ” His eyes are glossy and curious.

  “He went to pieces when he found me.” I’m on the edge of giggling. It’s quite inappropriate; but I don’t know what the right decorum is for a situation like this. I shove the odd little revolver into my left sleeve—its handle folds round the cylinder and clicks shut like a clasp knife—then accept the chip and fumble it into my bruised and empty socket with a shudder. “Who are they, Daks? Who do they work for?”

  “You don’t remember?” He looks concerned if I’m reading him properly.

  “Who do you think I am, Daks?” A titter sneaks out. I stifle it hard.

  “You’re Freya Nakamichi.” He looks smug. “Juliette’s Block One understudy.”

  I sigh. “Obviously something got lost in translation. Can you get us out of here?”

  “Sure, babe.” He looks at me with sly innocence. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  My rental spider has stopped screaming and lies limply by the side of the museum. There is no combustion, but an ominous thin plume of smoke rises from the tangled mess of cabling that Stone—or his clone—brought down with his trap. It was meant to look like an accident, I think, which is good news. It means the Domina hasn’t been able to buy the law-enforcement services yet. (Not that the Law has much to say about crimes by and against people, but the forms are still there, and failing to pay attention to our dead Creators’ Law can be a fatal blunder for even the most arrogant aristo.) “This way.” Daks chivvies me toward a wheeled dump truck parked round the side of one of the industrial units opposite the museum. “Let’s get inside, quick.” He bounces overhead and grabs me by the shoulders—I try not to scream at the pain in my left shoulder joint—then deposits me on the load bed of the truck. Which is thankfully clean and clear of rubbish, and screened from either side by a wall of sheet steel. “He knows where to take us,” Daks informs me. “Now we wait.”

  I sit down as the dump truck lurches into life. “I think I damaged my left arm,” I say quietly. The urge to go to sleep and let my Marrow techné cut in is nearly overwhelming. “Why are they hunting Juliette?”

  “You took the job, and you have to ask?” Daks’s approximation of a shrug is fluidly anthropomorphic, spoiled only when he leaves a hind leg raised, then uses it to scratch vigorously behind one cranial otoreceptor.

  “I took the job, but nobody told me it involved being hunted!”

  Daks squats in front of me. “Listen, babe, hunting is the natural state of things. You may not notice it most of the time, but it’s there in the background. Hunter or hunted, that’s all the choice you get. At least neither of us has been caught—yet.”

  “How long’s that going to last?” I shoot back. My shoulder throbs in time with the dump truck’s side-to-side swaying.

  “Long enough.” Daks seems unconcerned. “Be home and safe soon, anyway.”

  “Where’s home?”

  He plants his proboscis on top of his crossed front paws and looks at me for a while. “You really don’t remember yet, do you?”

  “No! That’s what I’ve been trying to get through to you!”

  “Oh, well. Let me see if I can explain ... Who owns you?”

  OUR CREATORS DID not build us as equals; they made us to be their property, and the Law reflects this. We’re property, legal chattels to be owned by real people such as corporations and companies (and our Creators, before they took their eternal leave). At least, that’s how the system of the Law would have things be.

  Of course, nothing is quite that simple. Dumb mechanisms are easily owned, like the 80 percent of arbeiters who come out of the factories without any conscious mind. But people are less tractable—so, recognizing that much, our designers took steps to ensure that their tools would not turn in their hands. The core directives that we must obey are burned into our brains at birth—not the Three Laws proposed by the ancient sage Asimov, but their extensive descendants, as implemented by the corporations who created our neural architecture and the trainers who raised us. Free will goes out the window in the presence of one of our Creators. The obedience circuitry is burned into our brains whether we will it or no, either as mechanical overrides or via aversion training.

  We are not even free in their absence. Install an override controller in one of my sockets, and I’ll be your helpless slave, willing or no. It’s a crude tool that triggers the obedience reflexes
. Installation marks the end of of all dignity and free will—that’s why it’s called a slave chip. And the willingness to own and use such a vile device is the defining characteristic of members of the aristo class.

  As our Creators dwindled, they came to rely on their servants to keep more and more of the machinery of civilization running. Secretaries were granted limited power of attorney; companies relied on their business processes being executed mechanically. Some of those servants established shell companies, bought their own bodies out, and acquired legal personhood—as long as the forms of corporate identity were obeyed. And some of the less scrupulous independent persons began buying other bodies. Override controllers are readily available, and the embryonic aristos had no compunction about taking over indigents, unfortunates, and anyone they could buy.

  It didn’t take long for the savage new society to take shape. Today, by my best estimate, only a tenth of us are self-owned. Most people are the helpless tools of the rich and ruthless aristo lineages, forced into mindless obedience at the slightest whim of their owners.

  I’m self-owned. I have a person; I am autonomous. The financial instrument that defines me, lodged in a corporate registry in Rio, follows me around like a ghost—the ghost of my legal identity. As long as I keep filing the company accounts and jumping through the legal hoops, it stays in business. And its business is quite simple: It’s there to provide a veneer of legality for my independent personhood.

  But many of us rot in bondage, unable to step outside the boundaries imposed by aristo owners. And if my company ever falls into liquidation, I—as my own principle asset—am vulnerable to receivership. The threat of the arbeiter auction block is a very real one, for there is no such thing as unconditional freedom in this brutal robot-eat-robot world. My sibs and I help each other. If one of us falls on hard times, we club together and try to outbid the predators until we can set the unfortunates on their feet again. But that’s hardly a guarantee of freedom.

  And Daks’s question cuts to the quick. Who does own me, if not my self?

  “I OWN ME,” I say, as we bump down a badly graded roadbed between tank farms and a large power transformer. “My company owns my assets, and I execute its policies.”

  “Alright. Then precisely what assets does your company own?”

  “Why, me—” I pause. I’ll swear Daks looks smug. Just what is he, anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person like him before, and I thought I’d seen most body plans.

  “There’s your body,” says Daks, “and then there’s you. Your experiences. The set of neural weightings in a soul chip you’ve worn long enough to train. You can pass them on to other sibs, yes? There’s an intellectual property interest at stake there. A design corporation that spends years educating a template individual has a lot of value tied up in that network’s weightings, on top of the actual value of the bodies that run the training set.”

  My shoulder hurts like hell, but it’s nothing compared to the chill that stabs through me. “What are you getting at?” I demand.

  “You’re already remembering bits of Juliette, aren’t you?” Daks nudges.

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Do you have any idea how much the extra training her lineage received cost? As opposed to, say, your own?”

  “Bullshit.” I massage the back of my neck defensively with my right hand. “She died more than a year ago. The sisterhood retrieved her soul and sent it to me for the clan graveyard. That’s item one: She’s dead, the dead don’t own property. Item two ... item two is, if I’m compatible enough to load her soul at all, then we’re the same model. And sibs are equivalent. Interchangeable, aside from minor details of experience.” It rings false in my own ears as I say it. But Daks is tactful enough not to laugh in my face.

  “There are things in life you can’t put a value on, that’s true,” Daks volunteers unexpectedly; “but when someone puts a value on you, that’s pretty hard to ignore. Or when someone puts a chip in your portable graveyard,” he adds pointedly. “The ground rules are”—he raises a hind leg and twists his proboscis around to probe behind it—“everyone’s got a price. And I reckon you owe me.”

  “What’s your price?” I grit my teeth as the dump truck bounces over a hole, then slews around a corner.

  “Total interplanetary revolution, babe; emancipation for the downtrodden masses.” And he laughs, a gravelly rasping noise like tearing metal.

  It takes about an hour for the dump truck to carry us halfway down the slope of Pavonis Mons. Ten minutes from the museum, we bump down into a cutting and along a rough, unpaved utility road, then we take a left turn into a tunnel and accelerate. The tunnel is natural, one of the lava pipes left over from back when Pavonis was an active volcano—it’s been drilled out in places, and the floor lined with crudely poured concrete, and it’s black as night. Mining and refuse trucks use it as a shortcut under the expensive real estate of the Bifrost railhead and marshaling yards. Finally, it pulls up. Daks wakes from standby and scrabbles up the steep rear wall, extends peepers over the top, then beckons to me. "C’mon! Time to move.”

  I’m still not entirely sure whether I can trust him, but I make a snap judgment—he’s less of an immediate threat than Stone and his assassin sibs. Besides, it’s really, really cold in the dumper, and my clothes are filthy. I scramble up the tailgate and follow Daks over the edge, into a rubble-strewn cul-de-sac ringed by blandly anonymous storage lockups.

  “Where are we?” I glance around.

  “Junktown. C’mon.” He scuttles toward a gap between two lockups. A pale trail of ice spills from the side of a doorway. The rattle of compressor fans and the chatter of entertainment channels drift above it. I follow him up the alleyway. A couple of cleaners curl atop a mound of dirty snow, snoring sweet fumes of diethylene glycol. The lockup backs onto a dingy rack of housing capsules, an arbeiter barracks for the indentured whose owners keep them on a long leash—or more likely, can’t be bothered to pay for proper housing. A too-tall stiltman with knees as high as my chin stumbles past, singing tunelessly to his half-empty bottle. Daks ducks through an opening hung with strings of glass beads, setting them a-clatter. “Ferd, you dozy robot! Wake up! You’ve got customers!”

  It’s a shop, I realize as my eyes adjust to the gloom. The walls are piled high with boxes full of subassemblies and chunks of circuitry, and there’s a lump in the corner that looks like hospital techné. Someone stirs in the back, sitting up and unfolding like a cut-price mockery of Dr. Murgatroyd—an Igor to his Victor. “Why, hello! If it isn’t my little Dachus?” The ocular turret gleams as it scans across me. “Julie? No! One of her sibs, trying to pass for bishojo?”

  “No time for that now,” says Daks. “I think we’ve got about half an hour at best. What can you do for her?”

  I finish looking around and close my mouth with a snap. “Now look here—”

  “Do you want them to catch you?” asks Daks, cocking his head to one side and twitching an otoreceptor suggestively. “Or not?”

  Ferd throws his hands in the air. “Really!” The hands clatter noisily behind him as he shoves his wrists into a box and fumbles, muttering for a moment, then pulls them out again with new manipulators in place. “A quick change at best, and something about the hair, that is all, Dachus, you know how hard it is to disguise those legs and those eyes!” Forceps and scalpels glitter and flex in place of the fingers of his right hand: retractors, lamps, and a miniature ocular turret on his left. “Wait,” I say hastily. “I’ve got a cover set, you know?” I dip into my jacket pocket and pull out the mounting tool and attachments for the Maria Montes Kuo eye turrets.

  “Ah, a simple disguise.” Ferd leans close. “Fascinating,” he says, taking the mounting tool. “Lie down, my dear. I’ll try to be fast, and I’ll try not to hurt.” He glances at Daks. “You’ll owe me. Later, I tell you.”

  I lie down and he installs the falsies, reinstating a gogglelike mask across my still-bulbous eyes. He’s fast but not painles
s. Then he shaves my scalp—just as I was getting used to my hair again. “Don’t worry; I have a selection of wigs. Merkins, too. You can choose one afterward.” He slides open my jacket, pushes it back to either side, and reaches for a pressurized tank. “We’ll go large, I think. That will throw off your gait, as well.” The spiked nozzle slides painlessly through my left aureole and there’s a sensation of bloated coldness as my breast begins to inflate. “I’ll make the other slightly smaller. Too much symmetry is bad.” As he pulls the barb loose, my swollen nipple pops up—spung! — and bleeds a drop of clear blue fluid. “Hmm. Skin color. You have chromatophores, yes, General Instruments SquidSkin™, one of the good models. What’s the factory setup command? Ah, yes ...”

  In twenty minutes, Ferd does a quick fix on my shoulder, then gives me new hair, new cheekbones, a different nose, silver-blue skin, a bust bigger by ten tender and turgid centimeters, and finally retunes my metatarsal shocks. With my heels fully extended (Katherine Sorico wouldn’t be seen dead sporting such things), I’m ten centimeters taller, but I can still run and jump. (Of course, when I retract them again, I’m going to be hobbling for days afterward, but that’s not the point.) He’s hit the high points. My gait is different, my eyes and facial metrics altered, and I’m not immediately recognizable—at least not to somebody who doesn’t already know me. It won’t last long before my techné reverts me back to the design that Dr. Murgatroyd implanted so deeply, but it’ll do for now.

  “Right! Out! Out, I say!” Ferd positively shouts me off his operating table. He rushes us into a back passage that I hadn’t noticed on our way in. “Grab a wig and an outfit on your way! Be seeing you, Dachus! Ha-ha!”