Chapter 2 #3
The other raccoon steps over, and Skotch tenses, waiting for the tussle, the slap down, the teeth at his hackles to show who owns who. But Fitch has something in his hands, like he’s offering Skotch a cigarette. An ampoule. Plangent.
“I’m good,” Skotch says through gritted teeth. He’s not good. He has two tabs in his super and then he’s out, and the problem with Plangent withdrawal is that it gets progressively harder to make the smart decisions that might see you secure a new supply.
Fitch nonchalantly sets the tab on the rim of Benson’s bowl, and then another, and then another, producing them from his pouch like a magician doing a trick. Lines up six, and then takes a seventh and decants it into his own eye with a luxurious shiver.
“The company looks after all its errant children,” Benson says. “Down payment, Skotch.”
Skotch swallows. Six tabs is a good lease of life. “And the balance?” he says.
“A line of company credit. Five hundred buttons back on that tag I know you still have,” Benson says.
“A full box of these fry.” Mobile neck making his bullet head into a pointer at the ampoules balanced there.
“Twenty. Set you up for a good slice of what time you’ve got left.
Never say Uzco isn’t a generous employer, even to those who’ve left.
Or tell me no to my face, Skotch. Tell me no and walk away. ”
Skotch constructs the short string of Furze sounds that would tell Benson no.
The Plangent ampoules twinkle in the corner of his vision.
That final supplement every Gehirner needs.
The precise mix of heavily engineered chemistry that lets the augmented neurons work as intended.
Go too long without, and it’s the maulkrankeit for you.
Your mouth stops working. Your mind stops working.
Plangent is the Chemistry of Doctor Moreau, finishing the work of the gene engineers to make not-quite-men out of not-quite-beasts.
What do the humans know, in their green towers?
They put Plangent in and get services out.
It’s just another part of the green cities’ running costs.
Plangent, manufactured at modest expense in complex biochem works, shipped in, distributed to every company and guild that’s actually contributing to the running of the system.
Simple, clean, efficient, and almost none of those humans ever need to think anything more about it.
They have no conception that there’s a whole turbulent market for the stuff, extorted by the armies and the Rattenkonige; bartered between the guilds, tithed to the churches, scrounged by freelancers like Skotch living from day to day.
Not the system working as intended, but still, the system works.
You can buy Skotch’s services for electronic credit on a company tag.
You can buy them for the sequin-like tokens various guilds and companies mint, the buttons that exist in a constant shift of currency values depending on who’s up and who’s down.
You can buy them for favours and hacks and illicit geneware tweaks.
But you can most certainly buy them for Plangent, because without Plangent none of the rest of it matters worth a damn.
“Who,” says Skotch with a dry throat, with dry eyes, “do you want me to find?”
It’s Maria who has the dossier: the filmy, plasticky paper that biodegrades to nothing.
More energy efficient than powering electronic media with devices that, themselves, are less recyclable.
Skotch glances at it, and his ears twitch in surprise.
Not some luckless Uzco deserter, no brother-in-arms he’d be predisposed to feel bad about turning in.
“You sure, chief?” he asks. “A mouse? A country mouse?”
He hadn’t heard that Uzco was expanding its services to skip-tracing fugitive animals.
This doesn’t seem like company business.
There’s a moment, between him and Benson, where they both acknowledge that there’s something out of the ordinary going on, and accept that the ampoules of Plangent there in Skotch’s eyeline are sufficient inducement that he’s not going to mention it.
“We’re not the only ones fussy about our reputation,” is the gloss Benson puts on it. “A good relationship with the farms is always useful. And when some defective mouse model does a flit to the big city, they’d rather he found the trap than started causing trouble.”
Which makes some tissue-thin sense on the surface, none at all once you start rummaging.
Skotch looks at the picture there. It’s a mouse, and to a human that would be all, but animal eyes see a handful of distinctive markers that at least narrow it down to mouse-clan.
There’s an ampoule hanging off the dossier—not a Plangent ampoule—and Skotch snaps off the end and sniffs.
Mouse-scent, a precise identifier, more individual than a fingerprint if you’ve got the nose for it, which raccoon Strains have.
All of which is a lot of effort to go through for a mouse who, the dossier suggests, doesn’t have more than maybe nine months left. No stripling, this mouse. This—he checks the name and snorts—Doctor Meece.
“Seriously, this is what they’re calling them now?”
Benson can’t actually roll his eyes, so he rolls his whole head on that snake of a neck. “You in, Skotch? One last favour for your old pals.”
There’s not much in the dossier about where this Meece is, but transcribed rumour says Redcoat turf.
Specifically Redcoat turf right in the path of the Gray advance.
A volatile place to go to ground, but then the country mouse probably doesn’t have a handle on city politics.
A place that Uzco can’t just send good company servants with collars and tags, though, because the Reds flat out hate them, and the Grays are basically company deserters grown strong enough that Fitch and Maria aren’t going to be hauling them before Benson for threats and menaces.
But Skotch has people on both sides who’ll talk to him.
He has indeed become the useful servant of the company, and it’s worked out so well for Benson that for a moment he wonders whether everything he’s ever done has been to the turtle’s plan.
He’s about to say no. That streak of raccoon independence, the unstable wobble to his genome, is going to throw it all in Benson’s scaly face.
But that would involve throwing that Plangent down payment as well, and Skotch needs that.
Or will, very soon. If he wants to remain Skotch.
Plenty of dumb animals die in the green cities every day and winter’s coming.
“Chief, it would be a pleasure,” he says, and he’s sold his animal soul, and knows it.