Chapter 16 #2
“Lulu!” he spits out. The pigeon is there, laid out, wings spread, one whole, one mangled.
Eyes closed. “What—?” To his eyes, the three rats around her are scavengers, about to tear into this prime piece of meat he brought to them.
A moment later he sees they have gear, Gehirner-scale medical, which means big in rat hands but tiny by human standards.
“What we can, we do,” Nimoy says. “Bona fides, ours, see? No guarantees. Ill used, she was. Redcoats, barbarians. Grays and pigeons no better. Brigands, vandals, yahoos, extortionists.” Suggesting relations between Ratlabs and the armies are rocky right now.
“Let me guess,” Skotch says darkly. “You get hold of Meece’s secret, you’d show them all.”
“We would rid ourselves of their shadow, yes. Change the world,” she says, and so blithely it chills him. A rat world, perhaps. A plague world. All the old stereotypes of her Strain.
“Okay, so you’ve got her, and you’ll take care of her if I play along. I get the gameplan.”
“For her, we care. What can be done. For you, also. In return? What can be done for us. Come.” And she’s off again, but only a brief hop, then they’re in another roach-lit chamber.
Here, the tubes have gone mad like they were vines left to grow wild.
Knots of them reach into the space, twine around one another, meet, exchange complements of insects, part and fan out again.
A half-dozen rats are in here, apparently measuring or studying the activity of the roaches like they can see the future in it.
On one wall there’s a big Jeffist shrine, and that’s no surprise.
If there’s one thing Skotch has heard about the Ratlabs crowd it’s that they’re all massively into the Jeffist creed of self-improvement.
“City heart, yes?” Nimoy prompts him. “Way of the future. The work, yesno? See?”
“What?” He doesn’t see, or even really follow the broken patter of her speech. “I see a lot of bugs. This what you do when you’re not making the services run?”
She snickers at him, that high rat chitter that has always grated on his nerves. “The work, yes. This is the work. This that you see, yesno?”
“Listen, doc, you’re going to have to use more words. Small ones for preference. I’m just a dumb trash disposal boy from Uzco.”
“Hard work, that, yes?”
“Good work when I had it.” Right at this moment he’s almost nostalgic for the days when he wore a collar and cleaned the streets.
“They do that work,” she says. “Also fix wiring. Also diagnose faults. All in the brain-hacking.”
“They? They who? The bugs?” Ludicrous. She’s making a joke.
“Yes.” She isn’t. “Our work. Guild work. Our services. The bugs, yes, they do it. Gives us time to think, make, do. We made them. Hacking roach brains. Easy, really.”
“Wait, the bugs … do your work for you?”
“Do yours too, if you want.” She shrugs. “Only here, so far. Tomorrow, who knows? Whole city maybe, yesno?”
“You’re going to replace the other guilds with bugs?” Skotch demands, and she chitters derisively at him.
“Offer bugs to other guilds, yesno? Labour saving devices, green city style, yes.”
“But the work…” The basic reason for them, for Gehirner existing at all. That they maintain the infrastructure of the cities.
“Gets done,” she says, a twitch of her whiskers dismissing all such concerns.
“But you can’t just … not do the work!” He’s surprised to find how invested he is in the thought.
She leads him over to the shrine. The icon of Divine Jeff there, his holy motto arcing over him.
“See there, see him?” And it’s the usual depiction: a male human in his prime, lying back, chest bared, radiating confidence and virility.
Across the city—across the whole Gehirner world—he’s a symbol of success through endeavour, a promise that you can always better your lot.
That motto, the mantra that there’s always a path to where you want to go, if you work hard enough at it.
“So many of the faith,” Nimoy says, “believe it is just them, yes? Their rise, another’s fall, zero sum. Ratlabs, we see all boats lift, if the tide rises. We are the tide, not the boat, yesno?”
“That’s how people drown,” Skotch says.
“Look at him.” Nimoy sniffs at the shrine. “See how he is? Does he slave? Does he sweat? No. Relaxed, so handsome! Enjoying just rewards. Jeff wants our lives easier, better, yesno? He wants us to find ways—his holy words—to improve our lot. Sacred duty, always.”
It sounds like the kind of dogma that’s very convincing until it isn’t, Skotch reckons.
He’s still reeling from the idea that the rats have outsourced their actual work to bugs, leaving themselves free to …
do science, he supposes. The perfect hothouse for whatever Meece might cook up, if the little squeaker gets to them.
For a moment he teeters on an almost existential abyss, seeing Ratlabs devoid of walls and rules as much as the Mauler anarchists, but with so much more potential to do harm.
Or good? Maybe, but based on his experiences with any given sect or cult or faction of Gehirner, what are the odds?
Nimoy’s in something of a rodent rhapsody, though: turning on the spot as her hands, nose, and tail all point out random points of the great insect conurbation. “Skotch, raccoon, the future, yes? Ratlabs, yesno? It is not written that we must sweat with work. Only that the work must be done.”
“And so you made your own Gehirner’s Gehirner?
” he says. “Hack their brains and give ’em light-up asses and they just do?
” And of all the things humans never intended, this is surely the greatest sacrilege.
Humans never meant for their creations to follow in their footsteps and create in turn.
But here in Ratlabs a revolution is brewing that would knock all the rhetoric and plans of the Maulers aside.
Nimoy stares at him a moment, then her whiskers twitch and she adds, “Also, yes, you’re welcome. Don’t mention it. The service, all part of. Yes.”
It’s a helping of non sequitur and Skotch feels his plate is already groaning. “What now?” he demands, staring at the bugs going about their hacked business. Imagining, maybe, a city scoured down to skulls and bare organocrete by the insect tide.
“The update, yes, geneware, that,” Nimoy says.
“The roach update? You done them all up to light-up-ass-bug two point oh?”
“Raccoon OS 98.3.3.1,” Nimoy says precisely, “aka Evergreen 9 update.”
Skotch blinks slowly at her. And if he was feeling stuff clunk about in his neurology he’d put it down to the huge load of nonsense he’d been asked to swallow since Benson first called him in on the Meece case. Entirely understandable. But apparently it’s more than that. “I didn’t open a channel.”
“Ah, well,” says Nimoy.
“Did you just,” Skotch says, with admirable calm, “hack my goddamn brain?”
“A lone raccoon, no affiliation. A recent security update, small, important. Assumed, under the circumstances: your acquiescence. Simpler, just to do.” She stamps, a little rat habit of frustration. “We are showing, to you, Skotch, that we, the Ratlabs, the benevolence of us.”
“You hacked my head and showed me your bug collection because you’re the good guys?” Skotch demands.
Nimoy just nods. “And helped your friend.”
“I see her next, she’s going to have two heads cos you guys think that’s a look she’s gonna prefer?
” Skotch explodes. “Or she’s a brain in a jar cos it frees up so much energy she doesn’t have to give to, you know, breathing and stuff.
You got a brain collection to go with the bugs, maybe? You have any idea how crazy you sound?”
“Science is oft maligned,” Nimoy says sadly, as though she’s quoting.
It’s probably in the top ten on her “things my brain-in-jar collection says” list. “No offence. We try. So hard.” Some more rats are coming in, and Skotch braces for the rat-scale strong-arming, but these are apparently more of Nimoy’s stripe.
If they’re going to off him, it’ll be high-tech chicanery, not brute force.
Or maybe they stitched together a hundred squirrels into some patchwork monster, and it’ll get unveiled at the appropriate moment.
One of the rats has a tray, and the tray has a scatter of ampoules on it.
Skotch’s eyes twitch in sympathy. He’s only just had a shot, the one Nimoy gave him, but that doesn’t stop him wanting more the moment he sees it.
You attach that level of value to a thing and there’s no Strain can get the concept of “enough.”
“A gift,” Nimoy says, rather weakly. “Further the cause. Our bona fides. As it were.”
Skotch eyes the “gift” narrowly.
“Poison, you think,” the rat says, bitter. “No trust, in this world. Our goals, intentions, wishes. We only seek to do right by the Divine Jeff, find our way to a better life.”
“Yeah, well,” Skotch tells her, though his eyes are still on the ampoules, “it’s a rat-eat-rat world out there.”
“Unnecessarily so,” Nimoy suggests. Skotch’s hands, meanwhile, have made their decision and he grabs the four tabs and shoves them into his super.
Maybe he’ll ditch them later if he doesn’t trust them.
Though, now they’re in his pouch and nominally his, he can’t see that’s going to be a thing that ever happens.
And the Grays robbed him off his regular stash, his down payment from the employer he isn’t sure he’s still working for.
“So,” he says, on the basis that, if this goes south now, at least he’s got that, “you want the mouse. Just like everyone.”
“Correct, indeed. Yes,” Nimoy confirms.
“You want him alive, or just his little mousy body? Only there’s a difference of opinion on how live this mouse’s got to be, when he’s handed over. Dead’s interesting, cos I understand from quarters he’s one real smart mouse.”