Chapter 2 #2
“Skotch,” says Benson. “Look at you, back in the fold. Lean, you are. Plenty of exercise out in the wilderness, hm?” Watching a turtle speak Furze is a fascinating lesson in how animals aren’t really supposed to speak anything at all.
With the mammal strains there’s just enough lip and tongue mobility that the mouth movements sort of sync with the words.
Benson just opens the blade-edged beak of his mouth and the words come out.
Further down his wrinkled throat there’s a judder and a quiver which is at the actual place they’re made, the specialised organ coded into his genes, that lets a turtle create complex sounds that a similarly engineered part of Skotch’s brain can decode.
The argot of the Americas, designed and created by some Berkeley linguist for maximum task-related efficiency and now set loose across the world to mix and mingle with its overseas counterparts, gone feral and pushing boundaries just like the animals that use it.
“What’s up, chief?” Skotch asks. “Someone forget how the hydroponics controls work? Or maybe you got that back pay you owe me?” He’s down on his haunches, relaxed, puddling up the way that racoons and cats and other flexible animals do.
Inside he wants to be standing as tall as he can in a futile attempt at intimidation, but included in his augmented intelligence and implanted socialisation is enough Theory of Mind to know when that’s not going to wash.
There isn’t any back pay, needless to say, and the hydroponics basically run themselves. But Skotch is damned if he’s going to be all penitent about going freelance. The old turtle wants to tear a strip off him, he’s going to have to at least reach out past the edge of his bowl.
“How’s your geneware, Skotch?” Benson asks. “Latest updates for raccoons are in. Addresses some late-lifespan instability. You feeling glitchy, Skotch?”
“No more than usual,” Skotch says, though there’s a little worm of unease in him.
Raccoons are a bit less stable than some breeds, a fact that Uzco does its best to play down in the human brochures.
Existential crisis isn’t something you want in your service infrastructure.
Goes with the territory of being smart, Skotch likes to think.
When your base stock is already a clever son of a bitch, small wonder you get a little excess personality out of the upgrade and augment procedure.
Except maybe it’s just shoddy workmanship.
That is, after all, what the geneware upgrades are for.
Fine-tuning. And he’s definitely a patch or two behind since he lost access to the company network.
“How about you open a channel,” says Benson. “We’ll bring you up to standard.”
That seems a suspiciously generous offer. Skotch’s body language speaks eloquently of his scepticism.
Benson makes a gravelly sound that indicates reptilian amusement. “Can’t have you being a bad advertisement for our product line now, can we?”
Skotch reckons if that were ever a danger, the solution would be swift action to remove him from the equation, rather than handing out freebies.
Uzco’s human operation doesn’t exactly work off open-handedness and charity, and that ethos has very definitely filtered down into its service sector.
Still, if there’s a freebie being handed out, he’s enough of a bandit to grab it, and run later if needed.
He links to the Uzco service network, that familiar tickle at the back of his head that he’s not known for a while.
Runs his anti-malware routines, gets the green light, and then the data loads in.
Biological connections shift in his memory centres, taking up temporary space now, ready to make permanent alterations to his brain chemistry the next time he sleeps.
Patching vulnerabilities and staving off whatever raccoon-specific issues have turned up in the last year or so.
Maybe tomorrow he’ll wake up and that word he could never quite remember will be there in the forefront of his mind, or he’ll find dealing with Tiersprech easier, or his sense of direction won’t crap out when he’s tired.
Or maybe some specific combination of stimuli won’t send him into fatal epileptic fits or a rabid frenzy. Little quality of life stuff like that.
Benson raps on the side of the bowl. His forelimbs are hand-like, same as most Gehirner, and back when he was doing the grunt work he’d have kept his claws clipped.
Right now they’re nasty, long and sharp like curved daggers.
The luxuries of someone who has other people to do the manual labour for him.
Maria comes forwards. It’s time for Benson to show off his vices.
The human foibles he can afford to indulge.
She holds out a human-scale cigarette for him, lights it when the turtle has it pincered in his beak like a big stogie.
The habit made a big comeback among humans after they got lung cancer licked, and since tobacco grows way more northerly than it used to.
Benson had himself hacked to get a hit from the stuff, maybe, but it’s mostly status.
He can afford the ridiculous business, and that tells everyone just what a big turtle he is.
After that, the little printed glasses come out, the size of thimbles, and Fitch decants a measure into each.
And maybe that’s also just showing off. Certainly Skotch, despite the name, still has the old fruit-fly-derived markers in his genome that mean bourbon is just nasty-tasting water to him.
Benson knocks his back. “Now I’m going to explain we’ve got a job for you,” say the vibrations of his throat, even as the liquor goes down, “and you’re going to tell me you don’t work for us anymore, so let’s just put all that behind us so we can get to the meat.
” His beak clicks shut on the last word.
And Benson, the de facto Grand Old Man of Uzco’s service sector, has not actually had to engage in serious physical violence in living memory—anyone’s living memory save the old turtle himself.
But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t shear a digit off with those cutting edges, so Skotch keeps still and retains his casual, unthreatening attitude.
“Consider it said, chief.”
“How’s the freelancing business, Skotch?”
“Ups and downs, chief.”
Another gravel chuckle. “More downs than ups, maybe?”
“Something always turns up,” Skotch says. “Hey, chief, so it’s been grand catching up but—”
Fitch’s hand is pushing him back down the moment he tries to get up.
Skotch snaps at the other raccoon, a instinctive instant that all the augmentation in the world can’t iron out.
A cospecific in his personal space, intruding on him.
A challenge. Fitch snickers contemptuously.
Then Benson’s tank grinds forwards another segment of track and they separate and pretend they were playing nicely.
“You’ve got contacts in the Graycoats, Skotch?”
Skotch has, though he’s loath to call on them.
He wants to tweak the company nose about them, too, because the only reason there’s an army of the bastards fighting battles across the upper reaches of Neuwien right now is that Uzco brought them in.
Benson’s cold stare suggests nose-tweaking is contraindicated right about now.
“And the Redcoats, they talk to you?” the turtle presses.
“A little,” Skotch admits. More than they talk to anyone from Uzco, certainly, and this is all obviously feeding into why the company has suddenly recalled its errant prodigy.
“Son,” says the turtle, a human Americanism inferring a familial connection that they’d have to go three hundred million years back in time to recover, “the company remembers its own.” A promise, a threat, nothing in the grating tones to suggest which. “When we let you go—”
“Chief.” Because that’s wider than a raccoon’s throat can swallow.
“I recall when I went. I recall dodging this joker’s forebears for a month before the company cut its losses.
” A scowl at Fitch, the latest in a long line of enforcers who go down on the ledger as Animal Resources rather than doing the useful work.
“Skotch,” says Benson, the long-lived, “a month’s nothing.
A month’s hassle is just … severance. Think of it like your farewell party from all your happy colleagues.
We let you go. That’s why you’re still out there, constantly pissing your little markers on our good name.
We let you go because sometimes it’s useful to have someone who’s out there, but who’s still ours at heart.
You’re ours at heart, aren’t you, Skotch? ”
Skotch’s augmented language centres absolutely bubble with defiant words right then. His augmented sense of self preservation, vis-à-vis difficult social situations, puts a stopper in them.
“We need a favour, Skotch,” Benson says. “Just a little one. Well within your capabilities. I understand you took all those skills the company trained you up in and you’ve been spying and prying, hunting and finding.”
“Someone’s always lost something,” Skotch says. “Someone always wants to know something that’s not written down. It’s a living.” Sometimes it was, at least.
“You’re going to find something for us, Skotch,” Benson says. “As a freelancer, and also as a good son of the company. Find someone.”
Skotch thinks he has it, then. Some other Uzco asset has gone on the lam. Set a bandit to catch a bandit. He decides he doesn’t like it. He decides he’s not going to do it. Whether he says he’s going to do it is another matter.
Benson’s rheumy old eyes read every bristle of his fur. Some animals, they can smell the mood on you, the lie. Hard as hell to fool a fox or a rat to their face, to their nose. Benson’s just old and cynical to just about the same effect. “Fitch,” he says.