Page 1 of Green City Wars
PART
ONEGRAYCOAT TURF
1SKOTCH ON HIS UPPERS
Skotch wakes up feeling dumb. That oddly numb sensation about his jaw and tongue. You’d think you’d feel it in the head, like a shrinking of the brain within the skull. Like a fog. But it’s the teeth, the mouthfeel of it, that tells him he’s jonesing in that worst way, the animal way. And he knows that if someone sat him down right now, put him through his paces in a citizenship test of the wider Gehirner community, then his metrics would be down. He’d pass, but they’d be down. He’d have lost the long words, the more complex associations.
He feels around in his super until his hands—the clever little things they hadn’t had to change much, honestly, not like some Gehirner Strains—find a strip of ampoules. Just tiny plastic tabs with a mil of fluid in them and a breakable top. Most of which are broken, but, bringing them out, he sees three intact. That isn’t much more life.
Oh, he’s being dramatic. His Strain is prone to it, a little instability in the engineering that the updates haven’t ironed out yet. Not life. Just the sort of life that can know itself.
He should save it. He should live with feeling that dumbness at the back of his throat, laying a weight on his tongue, stifling the big words, slurring his speech like he’s been at the fermenter. Backseating the finer judgements and letting instinct go wild. But right now Skotch is a freelancer without a job and, in the fine city of Neuwien-Grunstadt, that can be a death sentence.
A specific death. The death of the mind and the voice. Maulkrankeit. The mouth-sickness, the locals call it. And back in the US where Skotch had been made, they’re sensible about things and talked about brain-dampening and other terms that locate the problem properly in the augmented grey matter packing out his low and narrow skull. Here over the pond, in the local argot, everything is located in the mouth. Skotch can appreciate that, honestly. That’s how it communicates itself to you, the fact that you’re falling back into the hole your ancestors were dragged out of.
The more that dumbness grows, the harder it will be to find work. Try to sell yourself as a finder of things and of secrets when you can’t string words together: It’s never a good look. He cracks an ampoule and rolls onto his back because it’s easier to tilt an eye skywards like that. It’s not true that raccoons can’t look up. That’s just the joke. But still.
The drops, into his eye. One, two, three. Fighting the reflex to just blink and shake all the precious stuff away. And most Strains just neck the stuff. Even put it in a drink to wash it down. But for arcane reasons of their own, the Strain engineers over in the US used tear ducts as the ingress point to get Plangent to his augmented neutral centres, so he has to go through this rigamarole. The locals, discreetly sipping their own, find the sight awkward, painful, or hilarious. He’s learned to go somewhere private to dose himself up.
Not that topping up on Plangent is exactly a prized social activity. Unless you’re a pigeon or a squirrel or something—he’d heard they do major bonding sessions over it, swearing allegiance and siblinghood and all that as they shoot their brains full of the good stuff. But for most sensible and civilized animals it’s a little shameful. An admission that you’re on the downward curve of dumbness. Returning to the beast.
He feels better, after all that. The rather dangerous complacency you get after a hit, when your brain is doing cartwheels; when it can do the hard sums and learn a dozen languages and even maybe read some human words, but doesn’t actually want to do any of that hard work. Just wants to revel in the potential. And, left to its own devices, will squander all that sharpness before it can be put to work. So it’s up to Skotch to wriggle out of his nook and go scrounge for business.
Nook is just about all he has. For those still on the company payroll—or the guilds, as the locals have—accommodation is usually laid on. Either it’s built into the city structure, part of the way that the Grunstadts are designed so their invisible workforce can tuck itself neatly away and not get in eyeline of the actual human residents—or else the incomer guilds and companies provide for their employees. Back when he was on the payroll, Skotch had a little cubby he could call his own, rent-free, up in the eaves of Uzco Towers.
Right now he lives in Unterroot 93. Which means a nook within the tangle of roots, ducts, and cabling that leads from the city’s green ceiling down to below the bridges and boulevards. Down into the dark warren of irregular spaces created inadvertently by the organic nature of Grunstadt infrastructure. A host of little gaps an animal can call its own, where you can curl up and grab some shut-eye. Warmed by the minimal lost heat and energy that gets out where living plants meet the inorganic conduits that feed photoelectricity to the city. Neuwien winters can be harsh, even in these latter, warmer days. The lake itself hasn’t frozen for the best part of a century, but the streets get cold. Many of the luckless, the foolish, and especially the dumbed-down die every year because they can’t find shelter. A fraction of the amount who die due to territorial squabbles, of course, but Skotch doesn’t plan on joining either contingent of the deceased just yet. And even a nook in the roots needs rent—or at least the heavy mob who claim this turf come round every so often and demand landlord rights from all the wretched refugees and rogues and freelancers who call the place home. And he has to eat, and he’s going to need to haggle for some more ampoules soon.
Work. He needs work. When he parted company from the company, the city had seemed full of jobs needing doing, and Skotch felt as though he could just reach his clever little hands up and pluck gainful employment from the air like fruit from trees. And like the fruit on the trees, it turns out everything in Neuwien is parcelled out and claimed by a competing network of guilds, syndicates, foreign companies, and just ornery individuals. A poor raccoon could starve, or worse.
It beats working for the company. He tells himself that on the regular. It keeps him from going back to Uzco Towers, notional cap in hand, asking for a job that doubtless has long since been filled.
And it does beat working for the company, because the problem with being a bunch of foreign nationals trying to drive a wedge into a city already tightly parcelled up between competing packs of locals is that you end up cutting a lot of very dodgy deals to make space for your people in the ecosystem. Invasive species, basically. One of the things that comes with not being just a dumb beast is a sense of doing the wrong thing, or doing a thing wrong. It’s a mandated piece of Gehirner mental architecture, because humans need to rely on their little partners to make sure the city runs right. And in the end Skotch decided that working on the company tab conflicted too much with the nagging little voice in his head that tells him he’s being bad. It’s a voice most animals learn to tune out. He wishes he had, most days.
It’s also a voice that will go silent with the rest of him if he runs out of ampoules, so time to get hustling.
The Grunstadts—or whatever label they go by, wherever they’re built—are spacious, open. Parks and leisure spaces, broad boulevards, pedestrians, cycles. The effortless coordination of electric trams and metro trains, clean and soundless, linking every district. A citywide communications web invisibly connecting everyone to everyone, via device or implant. Augmented reality overlays so you’re never lost or alone or short of something to spend your money on. Outer rings of electric vehicles, segueing smoothly from driver-controlled to city-slaved as they cross from district to district. Shaded avenues, sunlight filtering down through an interlaced ceiling of greenery that cools and refreshes and generates carbon-neutral power. Not a fossil set on fire, nothing more ecologically damaging than a scented candle burned. A city sufficient unto itself, spotless streets and gleaming buildings. A forest that is also a town, as though humans have, in these latter days, become the elves of past fictions. A balance with creation. An equilibrium. The turning point of the end of the world into something new, strange and sustainable.
All of that was in the stuff Skotch sat through, after he left the creche and was inducted into the company. Pictures of cities in China, France, Kentucky, Canada. Sometimes old-style architecture greened over, more often brand-new places set up right next door to the old because it’s literally more efficient to build new eco houses, offices, and infrastructure designed for the green to grow around.
Of course, that’s for the humans. Skotch has, on occasion, seen it. Mostly at night. One of Uzco’s prime selling points, when it’s scrounging for contracts outside the US, is that its workforce is capable of day and night work. Because any kind of major works tend to go on after dark to avoid breaking Rule One.
Skotch has broken Rule One, in his day. Sometimes you have to. You just do it really politely, and actually it doesn’t explode in your face as much as you’d think, from something they literally call “Rule One” and practically hardwire into your genome. But Gehirner who make a habit of it get kicked out, find themselves sans work or friends and, soon after, get dumb, and get dead, in that order.
Which is a problem for the aspiring freelancer, because a lot of the work that filters through the greenery down to Skotch’s shady little stratum tends to involve messing around the edges of Rule One, which is why the regular guilds don’t want it.
A weird side-effect of the Gehirner life. Put a few thoughts in an animal’s head and apparently one of the first things they invent for themselves is criminality.
Opportunity, Skotch tells himself. Was it criminal, to push the boundaries of what they’d given you? Of what they’d literally built into you? To explore the edges of the systems they’d set up, that are so perfect, and find where all the gaps were, where things didn’t quite fit together? He isn’t the first animal to explore the grey area between expressly permitted and definitely forbidden.
He lowtails it out of the knotted tangle of roots that is his flophouse. His neighbours, such of them as he can’t avoid seeing, make a big show of not seeing him. A ragged motley of species they are, too. Redcoats, rats, pigeons, a crow, a newt. Native Gehirner Strains who’ve been cut loose from their guilds but haven’t fallen into utter penury yet, or who’ve made the bold decision to go freelance like Skotch and, like Skotch, are probably regretting it around now. A scatter of other invasive Strains, brought in by one foreign company or another, or just slipped into town on their own paws. A mongoose, a possum, a pair of belligerent parrots. At the very back, holed up in the darkest corner of what passes for a common space in the Unterroot, Old Tekki the ratsnake rustles his coils together and looks death at everyone. Hard to make friends when your Strain had been specifically designed to predate on other small animals, after all. As far as Skotch knows, Tekki’s the only ratsnake who’s braved the European winters, and Skotch hopes against Jeff that it stays that way. When the snake Strains go dumb, he’s heard, they let go of whatever’s in them that stops them just killing and eating every damn thing that comes within strike range.
Another reason not to be a lone freelancer in this green city. Down these mean streets a beast must walk … Or at least beneath them.
Outside of the Unterroots is still behind the scenes of the city, where Gehirner are supposed to be. The shadowy walks between the organic roots and behind eco-crete walls. The roads that go around the back of all the human spaces, the Gehirner thoroughfares leading to where the pipes and ducts are, the access hatches, the crawlspaces and ladders. Crowded, even early morning like now. Everyone scurrying like they’ve got a job on, whether they have or not, because you don’t want to look down on your luck in this part of town. There are Redcoats about in force, he sees. Squads of them strutting about, tufty ears and tails high, maintaining a presence. Scuttlebutt says this district might be changing hands soon, the fighting swinging close to home. And theoretically it isn’t anyone else’s business, certainly not a loose nut like Skotch’s. The truth is, though, when one of the big factions decides they are going to take over a services contract somewhere, everyone gets caught in the crossfire. Unless you’ve a guild watching your back, it’s very easy to become just one more casualty of circumstance.
Maybe time to change address, Skotch thinks. But that’s hard. Like a lot of Strains, the idea of a little span of territory that’s his is hard to shake. Even if it’s a single nook in the Unterroots. And besides, trouble for everyone means opportunity for some. Maybe this time he can be in that some.
You catch glimpses, sometimes, of how the other half live. There’s a path that leads through a tunnel in the wall-cladding ivy, and you look out into the early morning sunlight and see the vast spaces that the city gives to its masters. Tables outside a restaurant, all of that enormous scale that humans need. People—people people—sitting and enjoying what Skotch’s nose tells him is good coffee. And Gehirner aren’t supposed to have a taste for coffee, but when Skotch was on trash-panda detail for the company, he’d go around all those tables at night and slurp out the dregs from every cup. Uzco’s marketing fluff proudly announces that its Assistant Strains are engineered not to process human-meant stuff. No metabolising nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, cannabis. They’re big on that kind of message back home, all very puritanical. Of course, there are hacks. The caffeine hack is particularly popular. Most of Uzco’s foreign deployment units laid out for it. Skotch finds the buzz is even a short-term Plangent supplement if he’s desperate. He’s snuck out and scavenged the last inch of prime Spanish bean blend more than once, when his tongue started feeling heavy. Doesn’t actually fight off the dumb, just makes you think it has.
