Chapter 12
DOG-EAT-DOG WORLD
He goes upcity for Sly’s turf, that twisted little snarl of independence where the service contracts keep trading hands and the armies come and go.
And freelancers with particular dodges that keep them in buttons and favours hide out.
It’s a trip up in the lifts, because Skotch feels he’s had his exercise quota for the year honestly.
The whole cat-related shenanigans at Madparrot Alley took it out of him.
He’s not the young raccoon he once was. They say you get wiser as you get older, trade all that youthful vitality for valuable experience.
Right now Skotch isn’t convinced it’s as bad a deal as all the others a Gehirner ends up making.
The lift passes up within the walls of the human world.
Every so often, when it stops, there are little gaps he can look out of.
Look out one way, there’s the green sheath of the building and, across from it, the jungle wall of another, riotous with leaves drinking in all that free sunlight so that the city can have electricity.
Look out another way, you’re spying on the humans.
On this floor, an open plan office where some of them sit at desks and others kick back on sofas, talking, drinking coffee that starts Skotch’s saliva glands watering.
On another there’s some sort of entertainment or education going on, or maybe a presentation.
Projected screens in the air, people watching or ignoring as they prefer.
A third is just one of those big common areas, furnished with seating and flowering plants and a lot of light wells from outside.
Humans on their own, looking at little devices; in small groups talking.
There’s a child there, and she’s staring right back at Skotch, looking into the little gap in the green that is the lift’s window.
A jolt of that eye contact you get when a Gehirner with sufficiently binocular vision meets a human gaze.
Which you’re not supposed to do, and adult humans wouldn’t even be looking, most of them.
It takes a child to breach the line, make the invisible visible.
She waves. Hello Mister Raccoon. Skotch, feeling like the garbage removal guy pressed in at the last minute as a kids’ entertainer, waves back. Then the lift is moving again, after disgorging a trio of squirrels off to see why someone’s stove isn’t working properly.
Then he’s up at the best exit for Sly’s level, the floor between floors that doesn’t get a number in human notation.
If you were in a human lift you’d notice just a slightly longer gap between floors thirty-two and thirty-three.
If you were a human who’d ever thought about it, and was even slightly informed, you’d know it was infrastructure.
Space for the Little Helpers. You’d never know how the Gehirner had partitioned and repurposed it for all their multifarious little dodges.
He comes out of the lift and runs into a squad of Graycoats.
Freezes, but they’re just hanging about, sharing a dog-end of cigarette between them, passing it two-handed around the circle.
Popguns slung across their backs, though, in that high-cinched style that means the gun doesn’t throw their balance when they’re climbing.
Possibly they’re here because they’re meant to be keeping an eye on traffic from the lift, but whatever’s keeping the nicotine company has obviously put that out of their heads.
They’re a very relaxed trio of squirrels indeed.
Skotch almost hangs about to eavesdrop on their rambling conversation, but that would likely draw too much attention and he’s got places to be.
This is turf the armies do occasionally wash over, one or other of them.
A few months ago the place was all over pigeons, and wasn’t it the Reds a while before that?
Finding three armed Graycoats watching the lift isn’t unprecedented.
Skotch doesn’t like it, but if he was to start making a list of the things he doesn’t like then his raccoon lifespan would be up before he’d finished, artificially lengthened as it is.
He ducks past them and heads off into the little snarl of Gehirner concerns towards Sly’s den.
Except there are more of them, after that.
Not a full-scale occupation by any means, but look in any direction and you see a grey coat, the curl of a tail.
In twos and threes, and all armed. Sometimes they’re causing trouble for someone.
He sees a red squirrel on the ground getting a kicking—not a soldier of the Redcoats, just some freelance fixit squirrel or dodgy trader, and maybe the Grays didn’t like his prices.
Two turns later—and enough guns in sight that Skotch is feeling the fur on his back itch—and it’s a shouted argument with a crow who reckons they snatched some ratty piece of salvaged tech from her stand.
Elsewhere they’re just standing around, no actual menacing but the menaces very definitely implied.
A sense of time is something the Gehirner process gifts you.
The sort of gift most sane animals would rather return unopened, but there you go.
The innate day-night clock and the wheel of the seasons gets augmented by a very human awareness of sands running down, of there never being enough hours, of deadlines both looming and past. It’s a very human thing, Skotch knows.
It’s a very human thing from peak industrialisation, in particular.
It’s exactly the sort of vise that modern humans are trying to loosen in themselves.
Green city living is supposed to be less stressful—a guaranteed basic standard of living, light and air, the verdant spaces.
Healthy, happy and unstressed. Which means that a certain amount of that artificial urgency gets outsourced, and Skotch is where it gets outsourced to.
Or, rather, the Gehirner as a whole, but honestly, as he pushes on and sees more and more grey coats, it feels as though he’s shouldering way more than his share of it today.
He’s going to have to make a judgment call very soon, and it’s not something he was particularly engineered for.
He was intended to pick up the trash, basically.
Fix the bio-electrics, trace faults. Liaise with other Gehirner to the extent it’s necessary to make sure the wider human city functions.
Stay out of sight. Receive geneware updates and doses of Plangent and SLG rations.
Just a part of the green city workings, no more nor less integral than the vegetation cladding.
Everything else—meaning almost the whole of what’s important to Skotch and what his life revolves around—has been built by the Gehirner in the spaces in between.
So what, out of that mess of cobbled-together nonsense, is supposed to allow this lone raccoon to make decisions that could affect the whole city?
What the hell am I going to do about Meece?
The fugitive farmworker. The maverick genius. The mad scientist constantly trying to scrape together enough of a chemistry set to do … what? Does Skotch even want to know? Will he sleep easier, understanding the true scale of Meece’s madness?
The mouse had been in his hands. There, in Madparrot Alley, while Tybelle was dealing with the mob of angry, semi-sapient birds.
He’d made a choice then, when he could just have wrung the little squeaker’s neck.
And now he’s maybe regretting not doing just that and vastly simplifying his world.
Doing the one thing that just about everyone seemed to want someone to do.
Except the Maulers and the Baron, and who knew what their real priorities were.
And if you were the one to do it, to snap that brittle little neck, you got the buttons and the Plangent and the pat on the head.
Why not Skotch, getting rewarded as the great mousetrap of latter days?
Better that than let Tybelle or Szerky or some random mook take the credit, surely?
And certainly his trip to Gasthofmund hadn’t made him feel any better about not just ridding the world of Meece.
The Baron had well and truly given him the shudders about the whole business, intentionally or not.
Almost everyone else with any influence wanted Meece dead and that was a great deal of weight for a single mouse’s life to bear.
On the other side of the scales from the Rattenkonige and the farms and at least 50 percent of Benson’s thinking was basically just the feeble weight of Skotch’s conscience, a thing he hadn’t even been engineered to have.
And yet he hadn’t taken the step then and he wasn’t about to now, not until he actually understood what Meece’s deal was.
Perhaps it was some stray strand of diligence, the work ethic they’d wired into his neurology.
You’ve got a Little Helper who’s rated to fix your power grid, you don’t want it biting through wires until it’s absolutely sure it knows where they go—a piece of geneware that led to Skotch turning investigator when he left Uzco, and that’s still driving him now.
The Grays and the guns are putting him more and more on edge as he closes with Sly’s.
Right now, the least extra shock to his system might unleash the feral raccoon inside him that’s all wound up and ready to get primal on something.
Which means he just about jumps out of his skin when he’s ambushed by a pigeon.
“There you are!” Far too loud, drawing all eyes.
“You owe me a story!” Lulu descending on him from some rafter, veering down into his own personal space.
Landing right in arm’s reach and not ever knowing how close she came to getting raccoon teeth in her throat by sheer reflex.
“I’ve been looking all over! You left me in the Alley! ”