Page 4 of Green City Wars

Her own tag hangs from her collar. Literally a collar, literally a little metal lozenge, a dog tag. Property of the company. Skotch took his off, but it’s true he kept it stashed in his super. Perhaps that’s just some errant magpie genetics, but maybe some part of him always knew he’d be back, willingly or otherwise.

They find a space where nobody’s working, plant him on the floor like he’s going to put down roots. Fitch, a beefier raccoon than Skotch is, tries to loom. Maria is smaller, but possums are nasty. Vicious bastards in a fight and you never know when they’re down.

“So what is it?” Skotch asks them. “You want to shake me down, you can’t do it in the street?”

“Like you’ve got anything we want,” Fitch throws at him, but obviously he has, or why’s he here?

Another thing humans probably didn’t plan was hierarchies, but they didn’t have to. Humans think in hierarchies. They exist like ghosts within the systems humans make. And even where the base animal species involved are just antisocial loners, the engineering required to bring them up to Little Helper spec imposes a certain social structure. Hence, when the tank wheels itself in, Skotch understands he’s here to see the boss. It’s not just that Fitch and Maria are going to rough him up for being a quitter, or lean on him for a cut of the nothing he’s been making recently. Things just got serious.

Animals come and animals go. Most of the original generation of Uzco Gehirner are already dead or getting old. Benson, though, has run the place since the start, and supposedly he was in a Grunstadt in Mississippi before that, clambering his way up the ranks. Slow and steady is Benson’s way. Slow and steady until something comes within strike range, when he goes for it faster than you can follow. Skotch developed a healthy respect for Benson’s bite—physical and metaphorical—when he was working on the company tab. Being up before the beak once again isn’t exactly a joy.

Benson’s tank is motorised—so something halfway between the fish-container and the military hardware. Below there are all-terrain tracks. Up top is a clear plastic bowl in which the old turtle reclines, hooking onto the rim with his claws, wrinkled scaly head projecting over. They tried otters at first, for aquatic work, but the Strain was faulty, went mouldy unless they dried themselves off properly. These days it’s mostly amphibians doing the wetwork, but back in the States they worked up a stable snapping turtle Strain that proved adaptable and reliable. Enough that, after a decade of sewers, drains, and canal clearance, Benson got moved up to manage the service side of the Neuwien operation.

Benson’s big, too. A hundred pounds of turtle, just about, because his Strain doesn’t stop growing. He’s already pushing the limits of his tank. They’ll need to build him a new one in a year or so. Right now it just emphasises his bulk. His authority.

“Skotch,” says Benson. “Look at you, back in the fold. Lean, you are. Plenty of exercise out in the wilderness, hm?” Watching a turtle speak Furze is a fascinating lesson in how animals aren’t really supposed to speak anything at all. With the mammal strains there’s just enough lip and tongue mobility that the mouth movements sort of sync with the words. Benson just opens the blade-edged beak of his mouth and the words come out. Further down his wrinkled throat there’s a judder and a quiver which is at the actual place they’re made, the specialised organ coded into his genes, that lets a turtle create complex sounds that a similarly engineered part of Skotch’s brain can decode. The argot of the Americas, designed and created by some Berkeley linguist for maximum task-related efficiency and now set loose across the world to mix and mingle with its overseas counterparts, gone feral and pushing boundaries just like the animals that use it.

“What’s up, chief?” Skotch asks. “Someone forget how the hydroponics controls work? Or maybe you got that back pay you owe me?” He’s down on his haunches, relaxed, puddling up the way that racoons and cats and other flexible animals do. Inside he wants to be standing as tall as he can in a futile attempt at intimidation, but included in his augmented intelligence and implanted socialisation is enough Theory of Mind to know when that’s not going to wash.

There isn’t any back pay, needless to say, and the hydroponics basically run themselves. But Skotch is damned if he’s going to be all penitent about going freelance. The old turtle wants to tear a strip off him, he’s going to have to at least reach out past the edge of his bowl.

“How’s your geneware, Skotch?” Benson asks. “Latest updates for raccoons are in. Addresses some late-lifespan instability. You feeling glitchy, Skotch?”

“No more than usual,” Skotch says, though there’s a little worm of unease in him. Raccoons are a bit less stable than some breeds, a fact that Uzco does its best to play down in the human brochures. Existential crisis isn’t something you want in your service infrastructure. Goes with the territory of being smart, Skotch likes to think. When your base stock is already a clever son of a bitch, small wonder you get a little excess personality out of the upgrade and augment procedure. Except maybe it’s just shoddy workmanship. That is, after all, what the geneware upgrades are for. Fine-tuning. And he’s definitely a patch or two behind since he lost access to the company network.

“How about you open a channel,” says Benson. “We’ll bring you up to standard.”

That seems a suspiciously generous offer. Skotch’s body language speaks eloquently of his scepticism.

Benson makes a gravelly sound that indicates reptilian amusement. “Can’t have you being a bad advertisement for our product line now, can we?”

Skotch reckons if that were ever a danger, the solution would be swift action to remove him from the equation, rather than handing out freebies. Uzco’s human operation doesn’t exactly work off open-handedness and charity, and that ethos has very definitely filtered down into its service sector. Still, if there’s a freebie being handed out, he’s enough of a bandit to grab it, and run later if needed. He links to the Uzco service network, that familiar tickle at the back of his head that he’s not known for a while. Runs his anti-malware routines, gets the green light, and then the data loads in. Biological connections shift in his memory centres, taking up temporary space now, ready to make permanent alterations to his brain chemistry the next time he sleeps. Patching vulnerabilities and staving off whatever raccoon-specific issues have turned up in the last year or so. Maybe tomorrow he’ll wake up and that word he could never quite remember will be there in the forefront of his mind, or he’ll find dealing with Tiersprech easier, or his sense of direction won’t crap out when he’s tired. Or maybe some specific combination of stimuli won’t send him into fatal epileptic fits or a rabid frenzy. Little quality of life stuff like that.

Benson raps on the side of the bowl. His forelimbs are hand-like, same as most Gehirner, and back when he was doing the grunt work he’d have kept his claws clipped. Right now they’re nasty, long and sharp like curved daggers. The luxuries of someone who has other people to do the manual labour for him.

Maria comes forwards. It’s time for Benson to show off his vices. The human foibles he can afford to indulge. She holds out a human-scale cigarette for him, lights it when the turtle has it pincered in his beak like a big stogie. The habit made a big comeback among humans after they got lung cancer licked, and since tobacco grows way more northerly than it used to. Benson had himself hacked to get a hit from the stuff, maybe, but it’s mostly status. He can afford the ridiculous business, and that tells everyone just what a big turtle he is. After that, the little printed glasses come out, the size of thimbles, and Fitch decants a measure into each. And maybe that’s also just showing off. Certainly Skotch, despite the name, still has the old fruit-fly-derived markers in his genome that mean bourbon is just nasty-tasting water to him.

Benson knocks his back. “Now I’m going to explain we’ve got a job for you,” say the vibrations of his throat, even as the liquor goes down, “and you’re going to tell me you don’t work for us anymore, so let’s just put all that behind us so we can get to the meat.” His beak clicks shut on the last word. And Benson, the de facto Grand Old Man of Uzco’s service sector, has not actually had to engage in serious physical violence in living memory—anyone’s living memory save the old turtle himself. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t shear a digit off with those cutting edges, so Skotch keeps still and retains his casual, unthreatening attitude.

“Consider it said, chief.”

“How’s the freelancing business, Skotch?”

“Ups and downs, chief.”

Another gravel chuckle. “More downs than ups, maybe?”

“Something always turns up,” Skotch says. “Hey, chief, so it’s been grand catching up but—”

Fitch’s hand is pushing him back down the moment he tries to get up. Skotch snaps at the other raccoon, a instinctive instant that all the augmentation in the world can’t iron out. A cospecific in his personal space, intruding on him. A challenge. Fitch snickers contemptuously. Then Benson’s tank grinds forwards another segment of track and they separate and pretend they were playing nicely.

“You’ve got contacts in the Graycoats, Skotch?”

Skotch has, though he’s loath to call on them. He wants to tweak the company nose about them, too, because the only reason there’s an army of the bastards fighting battles across the upper reaches of Neuwien right now is that Uzco brought them in. Benson’s cold stare suggests nose-tweaking is contraindicated right about now.

“And the Redcoats, they talk to you?” the turtle presses.

“A little,” Skotch admits. More than they talk to anyone from Uzco, certainly, and this is all obviously feeding into why the company has suddenly recalled its errant prodigy.