Chapter 16 #3
“A prodigy, Doctor Meece. Accelerated Encoded Learning Pattern Acquisition, plus geneware copying version error, resulting in neural linkage hypertrophy. One of a kind. Further amplified by personal self-experimentation using Farm Project facilities.” Nimoy frets at her whiskers, and all the rats there seem agitated at having it talked about.
Which would be a fine thing if Skotch understood a word that was just said, or even what it was.
“You’re gonna have to break it down for me here,” he mutters.
“Mouse that is born of mouse. Short time to live, yes? Rats only a little longer. Raccoons a little more. Few Strains live long, Skotch.”
“So sure, I know that.”
“Gehirner work, complex stuff. Infrastructure of a whole city. Menial tasks, technical, mechanical, diagnostic. The oil, between civic components. Green cities are built on our work. We are self-renewing, zero-carbon, eco-efficient. The idea of us. The reason of us. But the work, so complex, the lives, so short, yes? Your first day, serious work, how old?”
“Nine months.” At least that’s a question Skotch can understand. “Nine months old.”
“Nine months learning speech, socialisation, role, job skills. And more. Over-engineered, most of us. Nine months. Humans in nine months? Not much there. No talk, no walk, no operating heavy machinery. Accelerated Encoded Learning Pattern Acquisition. Inherent Gehirner engineering. Much learning, short time. From womb to work, quick as possible, yes?”
And for a rat it wouldn’t be nine months, maybe three or four tops.
For a mouse, even less. So that most of their available lifespan could be devoted to their purpose, in the Farm Projects, in the cities, wherever.
Whatever brought in the rations and the Plangent.
And, in what time was left, some side hustle for buttons and social capital.
The Gehirner life. Skotch had thought about it before, sure, but only as What Was.
“So Meece got a double dose of this malarky?” he asks.
“The greatest mind, the smallest skull, yes,” says Nimoy. “The farms. Breeding programmes. Accelerate womb-to-work,” Nimoy rattles off. “From birth to the factory line, five days now.”
Skotch winces. Not that his own time as a kit was a bed of roses but better that than be a mouse. Better anything than a mouse, probably.
“Experimental still,” Nimoy adds. “The failures, well.”
Honestly, Skotch can guess. Szerky and her fellows probably dine well at the Country Club.
“Functionality beyond expectations, sometimes. A prodigy, Meece. Learned too much, too fast. Made contact. The Baron. Us. Talking science.”
So now Meece is not just a maverick mouse with a head full of chemical formulae, he’s some sort of self-engineered super-rodent. “Like what sort?” Skotch asks, and if he had any more of a sinking feeling he’d be through the floor, honestly.
“Brain, mostly. Maximising neural architecture, outsourcing cognitive load to other body systems. Even we say, Too far! But Meece, without limits, yesno?”
“That why you want him? He’s smart and you like smarts round here?”
“That also,” she says.
“Also? Also than what?” And, because she’s plainly either not going to answer, or going to fob him off with some piece of flummery, “Damnit is nobody going to give me a straight answer?”
“What side, Skotch? A shifting stance, yesno? The farms, the company, the anarchists, the criminals? Whose raccoon are you?”
“None of the above,” Skotch says.
“If you knew, would you say? The where of Meece?”
“Everyone thinks I know,” he complains.
She actually jabs him in the hip. “You, the last to see him, yes. Then gone. Hunt here, hunt there. No sightings. No bones, no blood. No mouse-murder from Skotch, yes. But you are with him, then gone. A bolthole, yours, not known to any. There is Meece. Where only you know.”
He goes cold, staring at her. She’s not putting a “Yesno?” on the end of it. It’s not a question.
It isn’t that they worked out he has Meece—or knows where the mouse is, at least, given the squeaker wouldn’t fit in his pockets.
After all, Szerky reckoned he had a line on the fugitive, and the other hunters all followed Graycoat rumour and her lead to be there at the Separation Plant.
It’s just the way Nimoy laid it all out, the perfectly logical way.
Skotch has a place he knows, that nobody else does.
Meece is there. And maybe it’s a rat just getting a lucky turn of the maze, but he reckons not.
He reckons Ratlabs sat down with their big brains—with their brain-in-a-jar collection maybe—and just worked it out.
Which means that, give them a little longer, they’ll work out exactly where his bolthole is and not need his actual compliance any more.
“Even if it were true,” he says, the feeblest fig leaf of pretence. “Say I got Meece somewhere, what of it?”
“Trust us.”
“You’re asking if I trust you?”
“Trust us, Skotch. Trust someone, is necessary, yes? Trust us.”
“I ain’t got to trust anybody save myself, and you just messed with my head so maybe not even that,” he points out.
“You get this Meece, how do I know you’re not going to be crashing through the human city riding a four-hundred-foot cockroach and shouting out that they all called you mad?
Look, I appreciate you’re bending over backwards to be nice to me, or what you think is supposed to be nice, but maybe you ought to get out more cos you got a hell of a way of showing it.
Maybe just bring me back to where Lulu is.
Maybe just that, to show what nice guys you all are.
Do that and I’ll have a real good think about whether I trust you an inch. ”
An inch, to a rat, is perhaps more than to a raccoon. Nimoy exchanges twitches with her fellows.
They take him to where Lulu is, as patched up as she’s ever going to be.
One wing is heavily splinted. Unless Ratlabs are working on the science of turning mice into bats, maybe her flying days are done, which with most birds means no work, no rations, obsolescence coming at you hard.
Always exceptions, though. Uwe the data broker hasn’t flown in five years.
And Lulu has a safety net, a human hand spread to catch her.
Or so Skotch hopes. Because Lulu was never just a pet.
She was an employee. That ring on her ankle isn’t ownership so much as a token of a working relationship, that nobody’s ever supposed to have direct with a human.
Only he’s no regular human and she’s no regular pigeon.
She turns her head to look at him, one eye wide. “Skotch!” Her voice recovered a little from the rasp of before. “How’d I do?”
“Fine,” he says. “I want a bullet caught, you’re the first one I’ll call.
Don’t do that again, seriously. I hear as a career it’s got no prospects.
” Fighting down the desperate rush of positive reinforcement inside him, at how she seems like she’s maybe going to pull through.
Because it would make him feel beholden to the rats and that’s the last thing he wants.
“Look, I’m in a bind here, Lulu. I may need to leave you with the rats. And the bugs.”
She eyes the tubes of marching roaches overhead. “Fun décor they’ve got here, Skotch.”
“Sure, hot and cold running lamp-ass bugs in every room. Lulu, I need to go get Meece.”
“I figured that was what you’ve been trying to do all this time,” she gets out. “You need to get back to it, fine. I’ll be okay.”