Page 8 of Green City Wars
“Sounds like a good business to be in,” Skotch says.
“You won’t be the one to flush out the mouse, Herr Skotch.” That old-timey formality they still use in the country, along with a lot of other traditional ways of doing things. “Your American paymasters won’t be the ones to get their paws on him. But if he bolts into your hands … just remember who can reward you best.” She’s right up close, teeth practically at his throat, and he just wishes his biochemistry would decide whether it’s fight or flight or whatever the hell, honestly. Because right now there’s a riot going on in his head, because of the danger of her and the scent of her and the sheer proximity. He’s bristling all over and his instincts are shouting at him to do that tall stance, up on his hind legs, shoulders up to his ears like a cartoon gunfighter.
“Tell me why,” he says. Her ears go flat, eyes hard. Full-on obligate carnivores are supposed to freak you out. Another cross-species language. Disruptive enough that it’s why most of the Strains got discontinued, in the city. They do things different out in the sticks, though. Remind me never to go there. “Some mouse. Who even cares?” Except everyone apparently does.
“He’s a very bad mouse, Herr Skotch,” she says. She has a collar, he sees. She’s official, then. A farm employee from one of the Country Clubs, as they call them. It even has lettering on it, and he’s flush enough with Plangent that he can read her name there. Szerky, stamped onto the metal. Szerky the Stoatweasel.
“I could tell you that I represent very powerful concerns, Herr Skotch,” Szerky purrs. He can feel the buzz of her voice box, in her long throat. Like the turtles, stoatweasels don’t really make words much with their mouths. That’s the business end of the animal, the weaponised part. “I could tell you about how things will go, for a lone raccoon outside any guild or company, if he disappoints a lady.” And she nips him, just at the fur of his throat, and he jolts back, feeling a maelstrom of conflicting instincts and chemicals warring it out over his reactions. “But instead I’m going to tell you that you think the farms are food and vitamins and all good things, but you never gave a thought to just how much poison and mutagenics and contamination go on under that nice happy label of ‘agriculture.’ Just what a bad little country mouse might learn and, getting old and bitter, might decide to export to the big city.”
Skotch goes still, considering. Yes, you hear rumours. The farms, genetic mods, chem weapons, biohazards. The things that humans ban but, through the back door, also buy. Things supposed to stay under lock and key because of the colossal fallout there would be if anyone started playing with them in, say, an enormous and biologically underpinned conurbation.
“I don’t think you want to catch this mouse, Herr Skotch,” Szerky says. She coils back from him. Not grinning, because there isn’t a Gehirner in the city who thinks baring your teeth is a sign of good humour. Showing him her carnassials though. The specialised dentition of a carnivore.
For a moment, mouse had actually been off the menu. The very instant prior to her parting words, he was absolutely convinced that staying well clear of Doctor Meece was good for his health. But there’s that smug edge to her voice, the upper-class carnivore sneering down at Working Joe Trash Panda. His pride kicks.
When she’s gone, he looks up at Ikelos’ silent form, tucked into his polished shell, and thinks, You were some help. And Szerky is bad news, and he’d far rather be living in a city without her in it, but at the same time she’s told him something very important. Something he could have guessed, but it’s nice to have the confirmation. Because her turning up here and putting the frighteners on a poor raccoon means that Benson’s spiel about being contracted by the farms is baloney. Or else there are multiple farms after the same mouse, and last Skotch heard, the Country Clubs were all happy just to be rich together. Like the stoat said, the food trade is where the real profit margin is. Agriculture was one of the industries to get a big shakeup, during the deindustrialisation. Too much land, too many chemicals, inefficient, ecologically disastrous. The new Farm Projects just tick along, turning out enough to fill everyone’s cupboards plus enough luxury surplus for all Neuwien’s fancy restaurants. Human food, needless to say. What Skotch eats, the stuff most Gehirner eat, that’s the SLG from the Separation Plants. Guaranteed nutritious and that’s about the best you can say for it.
And if Szerky’s right in her insinuations, even more reason for Skotch to get to the mouse first. It’s his city too. It’s where he keeps his stuff and it’s most certainly where he drinks his water, which he’d prefer to be free of plague or toxins. Maybe the mouse has a head full of poisons, but he’ll need facilities before he can turn that into something tangible. Time enough for a resolute raccoon to track him down and find out what the hell his deal is. After which Skotch can decide whether he really wants Benson to get his scaly claws on whatever is in Meece’s head.
It’s time for Skotch to go onto the streets and just hope he can get where he needs to before Szerky gets there first. Or that he can get there without Szerky just using him as a stalking horse and following him in. When he finishes up at Ikelos’ terminal, there’s a dog waiting for him outside, the terrier mongrel, Sly’s messenger. Skotch takes the filmy paper message from its jaws, shakes off the slobber, and reads. Sly’s information network has come through for him. The last words: Careful, mate. It’s all about to blow.
4ONE 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?
Skotch looks at his fellow social climbers in the goods lift, on the way up. Always a good weathervane for how things are going, seeing who’s got the buttons to get to the top the easy way. He is decidedly the shabbiest critter in the room. There are a dozen Grays, sleek squirrels, soldiers high in the echelons of the army. The sort who are going to be giving the orders, rather than receiving them, when the next stage of the war kicks off. Any day now, Skotch reckons. Tonight isn’t out of the question. A distinct air of anticipation to them. There are a couple of rats, likewise glossy and well-fed, who are probably errand runners from some Rattenkönig, armoured by association against any squirrel-led persecution. There’s a badger. One, solitary. Another discontinued enforcer Strain kept going mostly because there’s some human amateur genehackers who keep putting out homegrown badger-ware updates. And the badger is three times Skotch’s height and around ten times his weight, and probably she’s hired on with the Grays as muscle. There is no Skelter in a badger. They are renowned for not running no matter what. Mad bastards, the lot of them, and their grasp of Rule One can be rudimentary. This one is drooling in a way that suggests her last update didn’t fix the problems it was intended to. Skotch keeps his distance. The Grays are welcome to her and woe betide everyone if some rich human gets a rabid badger falling in their lap during hostilities.
Up at the top of this particular tower there’s a club, a human club, Casa de Alphonse. Very fancy, very art deco. The green of the city grows through it, twining about the gilded moulding of the walls in a way that’s been designed with obsessive attention to detail to look as unplanned and natural as possible. It’s like being inside a Mucha painting. The interior décor changes automatically with the seasons. You need to visit at least four times over the year to get the full effect. It’s very exclusive. Waiting list a mile long. If you’re human. The Gehirner get to just walk in, of course. The club, and its neighbouring restaurant, they’re some of those weird interstitial spaces where Rule One works differently. Every table has a little access hatch, and the animals come in and out to clear the glasses, empty the ashtrays, take payment with their little data readers. They wear little waistcoats, even, to show that they’re on contract with Alphonse. To the human patrons they’re next to invisible. Every so often some wag tips them, but that’s considered gauche.
Behind the scenes, the Graycoat Army oversees every damn part of the operation. Because the service contract—controlled by the sort of conclave of old Neuwien guilds that Uzco is never going to break into—is to clear everything away and keep everywhere spotless. There’s nothing in there about what happens to anything left over. So when the glasses and the plates get loaded into the dishwashers, they’ve already been conscientiously emptied. The Grays have a whole bootlegging operation off of the dregs. They even have their own little barrels and a special Alphonse stamp to show just how high class these lees are. Even the ash from the ashtrays gets repurposed as Gehirner snuff for those who have the hacks to partake.
It’s Skotch’s misfortune to be recognised when he steps out of the lift. Gray squirrels live a long time, one reason their population exploded enough for them to fill out an army. At the top of the lift, there’s a patrol, and in charge of the patrol is a mean, scarred veteran who knew Skotch when they were both at Uzco.
