Chapter 1 #2
Skotch has broken Rule One, in his day. Sometimes you have to.
You just do it really politely, and actually it doesn’t explode in your face as much as you’d think, from something they literally call “Rule One” and practically hardwire into your genome.
But Gehirner who make a habit of it get kicked out, find themselves sans work or friends and, soon after, get dumb, and get dead, in that order.
Which is a problem for the aspiring freelancer, because a lot of the work that filters through the greenery down to Skotch’s shady little stratum tends to involve messing around the edges of Rule One, which is why the regular guilds don’t want it.
A weird side-effect of the Gehirner life. Put a few thoughts in an animal’s head and apparently one of the first things they invent for themselves is criminality.
Opportunity, Skotch tells himself. Was it criminal, to push the boundaries of what they’d given you?
Of what they’d literally built into you?
To explore the edges of the systems they’d set up, that are so perfect, and find where all the gaps were, where things didn’t quite fit together?
He isn’t the first animal to explore the grey area between expressly permitted and definitely forbidden.
He lowtails it out of the knotted tangle of roots that is his flophouse.
His neighbours, such of them as he can’t avoid seeing, make a big show of not seeing him.
A ragged motley of species they are, too.
Redcoats, rats, pigeons, a crow, a newt.
Native Gehirner Strains who’ve been cut loose from their guilds but haven’t fallen into utter penury yet, or who’ve made the bold decision to go freelance like Skotch and, like Skotch, are probably regretting it around now.
A scatter of other invasive Strains, brought in by one foreign company or another, or just slipped into town on their own paws.
A mongoose, a possum, a pair of belligerent parrots.
At the very back, holed up in the darkest corner of what passes for a common space in the Unterroot, Old Tekki the ratsnake rustles his coils together and looks death at everyone.
Hard to make friends when your Strain had been specifically designed to predate on other small animals, after all.
As far as Skotch knows, Tekki’s the only ratsnake who’s braved the European winters, and Skotch hopes against Jeff that it stays that way.
When the snake Strains go dumb, he’s heard, they let go of whatever’s in them that stops them just killing and eating every damn thing that comes within strike range.
Another reason not to be a lone freelancer in this green city. Down these mean streets a beast must walk … Or at least beneath them.
Outside of the Unterroots is still behind the scenes of the city, where Gehirner are supposed to be.
The shadowy walks between the organic roots and behind eco-crete walls.
The roads that go around the back of all the human spaces, the Gehirner thoroughfares leading to where the pipes and ducts are, the access hatches, the crawlspaces and ladders.
Crowded, even early morning like now. Everyone scurrying like they’ve got a job on, whether they have or not, because you don’t want to look down on your luck in this part of town.
There are Redcoats about in force, he sees.
Squads of them strutting about, tufty ears and tails high, maintaining a presence.
Scuttlebutt says this district might be changing hands soon, the fighting swinging close to home.
And theoretically it isn’t anyone else’s business, certainly not a loose nut like Skotch’s.
The truth is, though, when one of the big factions decides they are going to take over a services contract somewhere, everyone gets caught in the crossfire.
Unless you’ve a guild watching your back, it’s very easy to become just one more casualty of circumstance.
Maybe time to change address, Skotch thinks.
But that’s hard. Like a lot of Strains, the idea of a little span of territory that’s his is hard to shake.
Even if it’s a single nook in the Unterroots.
And besides, trouble for everyone means opportunity for some. Maybe this time he can be in that some.
You catch glimpses, sometimes, of how the other half live.
There’s a path that leads through a tunnel in the wall-cladding ivy, and you look out into the early morning sunlight and see the vast spaces that the city gives to its masters.
Tables outside a restaurant, all of that enormous scale that humans need.
People—people people—sitting and enjoying what Skotch’s nose tells him is good coffee.
And Gehirner aren’t supposed to have a taste for coffee, but when Skotch was on trash-panda detail for the company, he’d go around all those tables at night and slurp out the dregs from every cup.
Uzco’s marketing fluff proudly announces that its Assistant Strains are engineered not to process human-meant stuff.
No metabolising nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, cannabis.
They’re big on that kind of message back home, all very puritanical.
Of course, there are hacks. The caffeine hack is particularly popular.
Most of Uzco’s foreign deployment units laid out for it.
Skotch finds the buzz is even a short-term Plangent supplement if he’s desperate.
He’s snuck out and scavenged the last inch of prime Spanish bean blend more than once, when his tongue started feeling heavy.
Doesn’t actually fight off the dumb, just makes you think it has.
Right now, on his way to Rootspace Central 38, he’s passing by those tables.
Up close, the ivy clinging to the very café wall.
He can stop and sit up, and put a hand out to where the fibrous anchoring roots link into the building’s grid, the dark leaves harvesting the second-degree sunlight that filters through the upper canopy of the city.
He can take a noseful of that rich roasted aroma.
Wasted on humans, who can barely smell it.
Skotch, paused in his hustle, is in good company.
Half a dozen other Gehirner of various species, stopping to inhale as a human on the nearest table sips at his broad, shallow, biodegradable porcelain.
The stuff that’s like fine china for half a day and then sludges into crinkly cardboard for the trash-panda patrols to gather up and recycle.
Skotch shares a moment with his fellow caffeine addicts.
They let their keen noses drink it in, because that’s all they’re getting of the blend of the bean.
Nobody’s going to stroll out into the light of this fine autumnal morning and polish off the grounds, not in front of the humans. Not break Rule One so brazenly.
And Skotch has done that. Just the once.
Desperate. Just hopped out right in front of a woman working on her tablet.
A bold little nod through the haze of the virtual screen.
And the woman, bespectacled, huge, blond, actually nodded back to him.
Watched as he cleared away a half-full cup her colleague had abandoned when he got called away.
Assumed, doubtless, that Skotch being there was just the city’s service sector working as usual, and not an opportunistic raccoon caffeine-fiend.
Once was enough, though. When the jolt had brought him back to himself enough to understand just how he’d danced on the edge, he’d taken his last—then—ampoule in the eye and sworn never again.
It would only take one complaint to City Services.
He didn’t want anyone passing his name and a contract to Tekki the ratsnake or his peers.
Rootspace Central 38 is an example of a particular kind of space.
The people—the human people—who planned the city didn’t really intend for these little hubs to exist, but the radial way the infrastructure spreads out from the hubs of the big trees gives rise to little bubbles of hidden vacancy.
And when you leave that kind of opportunity, the animals move in.
It’s like the Jeffist mantra everyone parrots.
Up to and including the parrots themselves, in their raucous, aggressive, semi-sapient flocks, where the vast hubbub of talk is half meant and half just echo.
But what those Jeffist words mean is that where there’s an opportunity, someone’ll work out how to take it.
Where there’s a space, someone moves in.
Small spaces, single occupancy. Big spaces go one of two ways.
Mostly some faction takes over. One of the service guilds claims the space, or else one of the armies that run protection over them.
Sometimes it’s a personality, though. One of the Rattenkonig class, and these days that’s more than just rats.
More animals finding the cracks and prying until there’s a space for them.
Building their own niches on the backs of everyone else, just like the Jeffists are so keen on.
But Central 38 isn’t Rat King territory.
Instead, it’s Commons. Enough small local operators working in lockstep that it’s known as a safe place to go, buy, sell, deal, meet.
You wear big boots if you want to make trouble in Central 38, and since none of the Gehirner wear boots—or anything more than a toolbelt mostly—that means trouble stays away.
Skotch slouches down there and looks for a ready mark.
Finds his way to a rat who’s boiling up coffee and puts down a couple of buttons for a cup the size of an acorn cap.
Strong, vicious, artificial-tasting stuff that he’s not supposed to get the jolt out of.
There was that time he’d been flush, though.
Uzco-mint buttons stuffing out the pocket of his super.
Getting the caffeine hack had seemed a good use of his time.
Now it’s one more dependency he’s having trouble supporting.