Chapter 2
COMPANY TOWN
Literally made, in Skotch’s case. He’s first generation.
That isn’t the case for most Gehirner. Sustainability is the green city watchword, and that includes the service infrastructure, and all the Little Helpers.
Especially given that some Strains have quite the fleeting lifespan.
Animals breed, and the genetic augments get passed down.
Neuwien has seen generations of rats and squirrels and pigeons and the rest come and go within the half-a-human-lifetime the place has existed.
Breeding and multiplying and assiduously keeping out of sight.
Back in the States—barring those seven holdouts where augmented animals are still banned—there are whole clans of raccoons and possums and bluejays and the like, long genealogies stretching back decades.
When Uzco got the contract to provide corporate services for Neuwien’s new business enclave, though, they went in with all-new stock, and as they expanded over the next several years they kept bringing in new, rather than waiting for biological supply to catch up with demand.
Skotch came out of the factory just over two years ago, meaning he’s staring middle age in the mirror but hasn’t quite reached it yet, given that augmented strains live longer than their natural counterparts.
Longer doesn’t mean long though. Life can be cheap in the green cities.
For some strains it’s cheaper than others.
At least being a raccoon carries a decent weight of mausgelt should some dandy with a razor decide they want a Davy Crockett hat.
There was already a full ecosystem in the service sector before Uzco brought its invasive species into the mix, of course.
Because the business enclave was a new district of the city, built with international money, there wasn’t much the local guilds could do about it.
Uzco hasn’t sat idle since then, of course.
Oh, the actual human company is all about stock prices and the boardroom and all of that stuff that no Gehirner bats an eye at.
Behind the scenes, though, the service animals of Uzco are their own force within the walls and under the roots of Neuwien.
Since the company moved in, they’ve been expanding their reach, taking over services, pushing out from the business district wherever their pointy animal noses can make room.
Because more service territory means more resources from the city’s coffers.
Power, Plangent rations, food, all the good things.
Again, nobody ever planned for it to go that way.
Nobody, in those human planning sessions when the green cities were being designed, sat down and suggested that a cutthroat competitive economy should exist within the engineered animal populations.
It was all just a side effect of good intentions, the way things so often go.
The Gehirner, the Henge, the Little Helpers, whatever they’re called, wherever you are—they’re just a part of the system.
An eco-friendly, self-sustaining solution to the problem of How does all the work get done?
All the jobs that humans, with their leisure and their universal income and their expectations, don’t want to do.
The aspects of their lives they don’t want to be worrying about.
So, genetic engineering being what it was, why not just have an unseen population behind the scenes, making sure everything works and tidying everything away?
Originally the Gehirner weren’t even supposed to be language-capable, save that engineering them with speech centres meant their creators could have them use human-style interfaces rather than inventing something completely novel.
And, of course, that population of unseen service workers across each green city would need providing for: properly balanced food, geneware updates, and the like. All a part of the city budgeting.
Which meant, from the point of view of even the earliest first-generation animals, that the environment they found themselves in had a resource economy which could be manipulated, controlled and gamed.
Which meant whoever provided a particular service in a particular district got the goods, that they could consume or barter, and that might eventually filter down to a lowlife like Skotch.
Who does the work, gets the pay, basically.
Except there are always those who decide they’d rather just skim off the top with menaces, and that works too.
Skotch, who probably has a slightly more complex perspective on humans than the average Gehirner, is well aware that almost none of them have the faintest idea just how tangled and nasty things have become, behind the scenes.
Which is just as well. If humans became more aware of what they’d inadvertently created, that would be the biggest ever breach of Rule One.
They’d probably set fire to the whole system and hand things over to robots or something.
Uzco Towers, technically Das Uzcogeb?ude, is top-grade modern office space, a tower of balconies bursting with green, filled with airy spaces.
The porous bonded cob of the walls is run through with a living trellis of vines that’s cooling, power, and aesthetics all in one.
Every office is a glade. From the upper reaches, the view out over Neuwien is like looking over some ruined city that nature reclaimed centuries before.
Save that Neuwien is still a working city, and has only been in existence fifty years.
Of course, none of that’s where they bring Skotch.
The local community of Little Helpers doesn’t get the big offices.
Instead, Fitch and Maria haul him down beneath the earth, to where the roots lead.
The banks of indicators and access panels that let the building’s invisible workers keep tabs on all its many organic and artificial systems. Not exactly a good look for Uzco if its own HQ suffers an outage or a blight, after all.
Dark, down here, but Uzco’s Strains are all good with low light conditions.
Skotch spent the first year of his life based here, heading out into the city to where the friction was.
Hunting, prying, finding for the company.
Before deciding there was a better living to be made doing it on his own tab.
“I don’t know if you guys know it,” he tells Fitch and Maria as they jolly him through the maze of little winding spaces the roots make, “but I hung up my collar.”
“Still got your tag, though, ain’tcha,” Maria hisses through overlong teeth. “Big brave boy standing on your own feet, except you’ll still spend company credit.”
Her own tag hangs from her collar. Literally a collar, literally a little metal lozenge, a dog tag.
Property of the company. Skotch took his off, but it’s true he kept it stashed in his super.
Perhaps that’s just some errant magpie genetics, but maybe some part of him always knew he’d be back, willingly or otherwise.
They find a space where nobody’s working, plant him on the floor like he’s going to put down roots. Fitch, a beefier raccoon than Skotch is, tries to loom. Maria is smaller, but possums are nasty. Vicious bastards in a fight and you never know when they’re down.
“So what is it?” Skotch asks them. “You want to shake me down, you can’t do it in the street?”
“Like you’ve got anything we want,” Fitch throws at him, but obviously he has, or why’s he here?
Another thing humans probably didn’t plan was hierarchies, but they didn’t have to.
Humans think in hierarchies. They exist like ghosts within the systems humans make.
And even where the base animal species involved are just antisocial loners, the engineering required to bring them up to Little Helper spec imposes a certain social structure.
Hence, when the tank wheels itself in, Skotch understands he’s here to see the boss.
It’s not just that Fitch and Maria are going to rough him up for being a quitter, or lean on him for a cut of the nothing he’s been making recently. Things just got serious.
Animals come and animals go. Most of the original generation of Uzco Gehirner are already dead or getting old.
Benson, though, has run the place since the start, and supposedly he was in a Grunstadt in Mississippi before that, clambering his way up the ranks.
Slow and steady is Benson’s way. Slow and steady until something comes within strike range, when he goes for it faster than you can follow.
Skotch developed a healthy respect for Benson’s bite—physical and metaphorical—when he was working on the company tab.
Being up before the beak once again isn’t exactly a joy.
Benson’s tank is motorised—so something halfway between the fish-container and the military hardware.
Below there are all-terrain tracks. Up top is a clear plastic bowl in which the old turtle reclines, hooking onto the rim with his claws, wrinkled scaly head projecting over.
They tried otters at first, for aquatic work, but the Strain was faulty, went mouldy unless they dried themselves off properly.
These days it’s mostly amphibians doing the wetwork, but back in the States they worked up a stable snapping turtle Strain that proved adaptable and reliable.
Enough that, after a decade of sewers, drains, and canal clearance, Benson got moved up to manage the service side of the Neuwien operation.
Benson’s big, too. A hundred pounds of turtle, just about, because his Strain doesn’t stop growing. He’s already pushing the limits of his tank. They’ll need to build him a new one in a year or so. Right now it just emphasises his bulk. His authority.