Chapter 4
ONE MAN'S TRASH
Or, rather, human trash is Gehirner treasure, sure enough.
The high reaches of the city are a peculiar habitat with their own specific niches.
Back in the old days—the polluted, oil-burning, plastic-heavy days that the world is still trying to shrug off like a stinking dirty coat—humans built upwards.
Cramming as many people as they could one over the top of another.
Piling them high, maximum population density, living in one another’s armpits and paying a fortune for each square foot.
And, honestly, not that much has changed.
It’s just what the towers are made of, how they’re powered, the quality of the air, the view, the aesthetics and health benefits of it all.
It’s that, these days, the new cities are designed to house not only the people who can afford it, but the people who are actually needed to keep them running—and to provide for them all, no questions asked.
Sustainable society, as well as just sustainable living.
And the fact that, to facilitate all this utopian new deal, there’s an army of Little Helpers operating unseen in every wall and underfoot to keep it all ticking along.
So Neuwien is still a city of towers, all the Grunstadt projects are.
But the towers wear green, bioengineered foliage from the ground to the apex of every building, curving gracefully around each expansive window, forming an interlaced canopy overhead.
A dozen layers of vines and trees and epiphytes, a hundred species, all carefully calibrated to work together, to produce a robust and healthy urban ecosystem, varied and mutually reinforcing, resistant to blights, even yielding some fruit and veg for everyone’s little windowbox gardens.
A little bioengineered expense paid back tenfold by a healthier population taking the pressure off the healthcare system.
Getting back to nature, the way humans always talked about but never did, before.
The tower tops remain places of status. A world above the world.
Important humans live there. Swanky eateries have their rooftop gardens spread out right under the canopy.
There are pools and boulevards. Semi-organic bridges arch like fairy spans from one tower to the next.
Just … absurd beauty, really. Go compare to the derelict inner city landscapes of unregenerated London or Berlin or the BosWash Conurbation.
You’ll soon see why the human money has fled to the Grunstadt projects and settled itself where it can be lord of all it surveys.
And why they built the Grunstadts vertically, to fit in as many people of all social strata as possible.
And why it’s worth the extra mile and the Euros to have a raccoon taking out the trash when you’re not looking.
The Gehirner guilds and companies and armies operate citywide, of course.
There’s always work, and where there’s work there’s wages, meaning food, Plangent, and access to regular updates.
All the basic support that humans thought the Little Helpers would be happy with.
But the posh places where the human money concentrates, that’s where the best contracts are.
The high-rise residents’ associations, the exclusive clubs and gyms. The establishments like San-Germaine’s and Wessenhaus and Legacie de Blumenthal where the CEOs and film stars go on the regular and everyone else saves up and books a year in advance.
Those places pay more for spotless service, and that’s all the deal they’re interested in.
No mess, no fuss, no disturbing the diners.
At the same time the sweepings from their tables are gold dust to the acquisitive animal, even when the haute cuisine portions are very small.
Like a gratuity to all those busy little workers. Always tip your service staff!
What this translates to, behind the scenes, is that the areas that are the absolute shiniest and best-heeled in all of Neuwien are, to a Gehirner, the most brutal, the harshest to live in, the most viciously fought over.
Because they fight, the service animals.
It wasn’t in the design specs, but there’s some healthy Darwinian competition going on up there.
Skotch has had plenty of experience of it, after going freelance.
Two out of three jobs send him somewhere where the teeth are meeting the fur.
By the time Uzco moved into the new business district with its own invasive service contracts, there was amongst the company’s human bioengineers at least a fuzzy understanding—no pun intended—that you had to protect your investment.
Actually almost a complete misunderstanding, but they budgeted extra animals for redundancy, essentially.
A greater headcount and a faster-breeding population than was necessary.
A vague idea that Uzco would be expanding (true) and that there was no harm in coding for an excess of little bodies just in case (false).
There are still some squirrels working on the books at Uzco.
The American Gray was an early Strain—lots of innate potential in the baseline stock for them to work with.
Smart, dexterous, and mobile, what’s not to love in a service animal?
Nobody particularly coded for them to be clannish and aggressive, and most likely almost no human ever notices that they are.
If you’re another Gehirner, though, you damn well know it.
When the Grays of Uzco saw Neuwien-Grunstadt they saw opportunity. The existing guild structure of the place was a nut they could crack. Within a couple of years the vast majority of Uzco’s squirrel workforce had gone freelance.
Or, rather, had set up its own army.
Skotch can climb. Most Gehirner species can, the ones that don’t fly.
For the conscientious working animal there’s a whole commuter ascent, avenues of vines up the sides of buildings, tunnels at the back of the green.
Routes to scurry upwards before dawn every morning, nose to tail with all your co-workers, the rat race made literal.
From rootspace dens to their workspaces up in the gods.
Or you can take the goods lift. Which is strictly forbidden, but the lifts work automatically and Skotch has credit on his Uzco tag and so decides to spare his poor legs.
At the great yawning doors of the lift there are a couple of Grays.
Big, beefy squirrels, not actually that much smaller than a skinny raccoon like Skotch.
And if it comes to a throwdown then, pound for pound there’s more fight in his Strain, more Skelter in theirs, meaning an innate readiness to run.
That Skelter gets diluted when you get more than a few squirrels together, though.
And Skotch isn’t interested in making trouble, so he touches his tag to the clumsy reader one of the Grays has on a strap, and pays a couple of buttons for the ride.
This is how armies function, because no matter how bloody the action nobody’s interested in breaking Rule One.
The work always gets done, and the humans always get looked after and never have to know just how many diminutive throats are getting slit behind the scenes.
But everything else is fair game. There are many ways that an animal’s life can be easier.
There are plenty of off-the-books pleasures a Little Helper can access, when the working shift is done.
Every one of them is operated by some industrious freelancer who’s making their food and Plangent off other Gehirner, rather than direct from a civic contract.
And every one of them is in the territory of one army or other who’s leaning on them for protection.
And sometimes there really is protection.
Got a mad stray dog on your patch, or some bunch of low-down dirty rats trying to squeeze you out or any of a hundred little inconveniences?
Your local militia is only too glad to help.
And if you haven’t got those problems then you have your local militia, which can make itself a problem all its own if you don’t keep up payments.
Mobsters, yes. Because organised crime is just one more thing that can evolve through Darwinian methods once you make animals smart enough.
The Jeffist monks mumble their mantra and nod and tell you it’s the wicked way of the world, and no sense fighting it.
Why not gather a pack of stout bruisers and start your own racket, find your own way?