Chapter 3
DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS
There’s supposed to be a piece of Gehirner brain chemistry that gives a little reward for work done, tasks completed.
A pat on the head, some piece of dog genetics spliced into the mix.
Except the mix is very complicated and to Skotch it just feels like he’s chasing his own tail sometimes.
And perhaps it’s that old wobbly raccoon Strain, that means he never feels as good belonging or doing what he’s told or indeed what he’s supposed to.
He’s taken the job. He’s got the down payment shoved into his super—that marsupial pouch they wedged into his genome because they knew the city’s little workers would need somewhere to put stuff.
He should be feeling a nice rush of optimism and determination right about now, biochemical motivation to see the task through.
If Skotch’s brain had been wired that way then probably he’d still be wearing the Uzco collar.
Gray turf, Red turf, right where the fur’s about to fly.
That, apparently, is where this mouse has gone to ground.
And who even cares about a mouse? About one mouse?
Literally and by definition the single smallest unit of value in the currency of mausgelt.
Even Skotch is worth multiple of mice, should it come to that.
Not that he’d be able to collect, by definition, but if anyone cared enough to press the issue, his pelt has a price that’s double figures in mice, at least. And Doctor Meece, fugitive country mouse, is worth precisely one.
And won’t see another summer, based on the birth date on the little piece of filmy also currently shoved into Skotch’s super. Mice are cheap in the big city because they don’t last. But then again, who does?
The main business of the Gray-Red turf war—into which every other army, guild, and sect in the city-behind-the-city is shoving its snout or beak—will be going on at elevation, but Skotch isn’t heading straight up the green roads to the canopy just yet.
He has calls to make, information to glean.
A favour to call in and a debt to pay off, with someone who keeps many, many ears to the ground.
The place the mouse has gone is more than just contested turf.
It’s up high, meaning not just the overarching green powerhouse of the city but fancy human turf too.
Hunting in those districts carries some seriously competing hazards.
The Gehirner who’ve holed up there aren’t the talkative sort.
Those who aren’t with one army or the other are there because they’ve got nowhere else or they’ve got a racket, and either way they’re not chatty about it.
Below them, in the penthouses and the elegant rooftop dining establishments, are the humans.
And you can’t bother the humans, obviously. Rule One.
Skotch knows someone who breaks Rule One on a regular basis, though, and gets away with it.
Exploits a peculiarly human gap in the ways things are supposed to be, between Gehirner and their makers.
Someone who has a unique information network that goes all over in the city and doesn’t care about staying beneath human notice. It’s time to go talk to Sly.
Sly was military, the story runs. Because, while the vast majority of Gehirner are civic infrastructure—while the tech was developed for that peacetime market before, contrary to traditional vectors, getting adopted for war—there is still a use case for animals as a martial asset.
To no animal’s particular benefit. Sly was a mine sniffer once.
A head full of complex detection electronics paired with a Gehirner’s augmented intelligence and thumbs.
Able to take orders, report, find explosives.
Disarm them every time except the last one.
The original models had been dogs but it turned out that a lot of soldiers got very sentimental about dogs, and upset when they didn’t quite get the mine disarmed properly.
The manufacturers looked for a useful model they could just port the dog-ware into, and that led to Sly, to Sylvester the fox.
Sylvester isn’t army anymore. The British Republics have formally dispensed with his services.
And usually, for a military model, that would mean decommissioning with extreme prejudice, but Sly had friends on the inside.
His squad-mates—human squad-mates—owed him.
Had a whip-round. Bought him and set him up.
Because there’s no room for Rule One in a foxhole.
In Sly’s case there wasn’t room for a whole fox, in the end.
The metal stilts he has for forelimbs mean he’s still mobile, but he won’t be disarming more mines any time soon.
His pelt is tatty and balding enough that, if he holds still, he looks like bad taxidermy.
And if it’s hard for Skotch to make a living on the streets of Neuwien, how much harder for Sylvester, 80 percent of an expat British fox.
Sly has a dodge, though, and it’s because he understands dogs.
There’s a dog at his door, when Skotch gets there.
A pit bull, that stares him down and growls furiously.
It wears a collar—not a guild collar like a Gehirner, but a regular dog collar.
On the collar is a little black disc. Not If found please return to because like all Sly’s pack this one’s a stray.
A mic and camera, in fact, through which Sly can see what the dog’s upset about. In this case, an intruding raccoon.
The pit bull bares its teeth, then Sly triggers its good boy switch and it wags its stump of a tail and sits down, suddenly entirely happy that a raccoon is just standing there within snap range.
A tinny little voice comes from the dog tag.
“Well hello there, Skotch. Are you still among the living then?”
“Just about,” Skotch says. “I’ve got what I owe you. I need a favour.”
“Amazing how those two things always seem to go together, with you,” the distant voice of Sly remarks. “Come on in, Skotch. Let’s open a can together and see what’s what.”
Sly’s workshop is a scrapyard of old electronics and newer biocable-ware.
He’s not an engineer any more, not since the accident, but he has the implants to assess it all, and sells it on now and then.
Mostly he just seems to collect it for the love of being surrounded by piles of junk tech.
At one wall there are a slew of water and food bowls, blankets and a few chew toys, but most of Sly’s pack are out on manoeuvres. He’s got them well trained.
The old fox taps out from amongst the scrap, the metal balls of his artificial forepaws making sharp rapping sounds on the ground.
At a word from him a small dog, some sort of mongrel terrier, goes to fetch a can, drags it over to a hook on the wall, and then wrestles with it until there’s a sharp crunch and a fizz of froth.
One of the things Sly’s squad-mates laid out for was an alcohol hack.
Apparently, to British squaddies, the idea of not being able to enjoy a pint was absolutely beyond the pale.
The terrier pushes a bowl in front of Sly and then leans the can so it starts glugging its contents out, mostly where they’re supposed to go.
Sly laps up a few mouthfuls and then cocks an eyebrow at Skotch.
He has an extra-expressive face, for a Gehirner.
The few intended to work direct with humans usually do.
Dogs aren’t Gehirner. For two reasons. Firstly, they’re not service animals, or not in that way.
Secondly, they don’t usually have the geneware.
Pet cats get the full treatment sometimes, and you’d think that a talking dog would be just the thing humans would be all over.
Not popular or functional, as it turned out.
The human-dog relationship already did a lot of uplift work the old-fashioned way, and that made dogs just so smart, and no smarter than that.
Messing with it the Gehirner way turned out a lot of very neurotic, existentially insecure animals.
Plus, being just so smart and no smarter turned out to be the way humans like their dogs.
Nobody wants a pooch that can beat them at chess, basically.
The hyperpet industry crashed two decades back in a welter of defective and unsatisfactory models.
Dogs were already too smart to be properly engineered any smarter.
But people still own dogs, of course, and even in a modern green city, some of those dogs fall between the cracks.
Get abandoned, owners die, get lost in the streets.
And a population of strays is a standard garnish to any human city, but in the green cities there’s also a population of Gehirner, all of whom look like they’d be fun to chase up a tree.
Pets are sacrosanct. You do not kill a human’s pet. That’s part of Rule One. Which is why outdoor-roaming cats fill basically the same sort of niche in Gehirner nightmares as giant sabre-tooth leopards did for early hominids. Sabre-tooth leopards explicitly protected by God.
Strays are not sacrosanct in any way. Strays usually live short, unhappy lives.
And honestly, green city or not, the life of a domestic animal severed from its domicile is hard.
Stray dogs don’t live long anywhere, cats likewise.
Mooching off humans is just about the only way to make ends meet, even without vengeful Gehirner looking to hunt you down.