The White Horse was bustling at the end of a busy day for the undergrounders. The main bar, of curving polished mahogany, was packed two deep with people ordering pints, their arms high, waving at the bartender. The plush carpeting underfoot smoothed the hubbub of voices, and overhead lighting reflected from polished brass banisters and the mirror-lined walls.
Sid was running background simulations of escape routes, creating ever-more-elaborate systems and models of the networks around him. “Whatever works for you,” he replied to Sibeal, shrugging. Most of his attention was on a simulation where he was uncorking beer kegs to hide a dramatic escape. It’d become more of a game than a serious undertaking, and Sibeal was forcing him to maintain his primary presence with her. Really, he was sulking.
“Doesn’t matter what name you attach to a thing,” rumbled the Grilla, sitting across from Sibeal. It lifted a tankard of beer as big as Sid’s midsection to its lips. “If it’s done badly, it’s responsible.”
Sid looked at him. “So if a lion eats an antelope, we should book it for murder?”
The Grilla slammed its drink down. “Want to start into the Africa jokes?”
Sid almost fell out of his chair. The Grilla’s nostrils flared, and anger seemed to swell it double in size. “No… I didn’t mean…”
The Grilla’s hackles eased down. It turned to Sibeal. “Still need me?”
She shook her head, and the Grilla gulped down the remains of its beer and stormed off.
Sid eased back to the table. “Testy.”
Sibeal watched the retreating Grilla. “That’s Furball, by the way. He’s cuddly when you get to know him.” She looked back at Sid. “Only his friends call him Furball. Best for you to stick to his name—Zoraster.”
“Zoraster? Seriously?”
Sibeal nodded. “So is it a deal?”
She wanted Sid to get Willy to talk to her. Sibeal’s glasscutter guild had tracking information on Willy’s body—there was a huge bounty—and she was offering to share it if he’d introduce her to Willy, get his primary subjective down for a chat. This was the reason the glasscutters had initially contacted Sid. She figured that if she could talk to Willy directly, she might be able to figure out where his body was.
Sid doubted it, but didn’t see it doing any harm. Despite the massive resources they exhausted, the only thing Sid and his friends had managed to confirm was that it was Willy’s proxxi that stole his body. Hearing that the glasscutters had a lead was the first real bright spot.
Sid wasn’t even sure what the mission was anymore. Bob had disappeared, was maybe captured, maybe worse, and the same for Vince. Sid had a very thin list of options. Throwing in with bounty hunters seemed morally questionable, but then Sid based decisions on what made sense to get to the objective, and not on the shifting sands of morality. And he didn’t have other options. Something was better than nothing. “Sure,” he replied. “I’ll get Willy down here.”
“And I want to see what’s in that data beacon, just me, strictly private,” Sibeal added.
Sid and Vicious were having trouble unpacking the data beacon Bob left for them. Bob had been careful, wrapping it in layers of shared-memetic encryption only Sid could decode, and it was taking a long time to unwrap. And why would he share whatever he found with her? At the very least, this was more leverage he could use later. He picked his beer up. “I don’t think so—”
Two giant metal hands crashed through the walls of the bar, ripping through brick and mortar, tearing a hole. Sid and Sibeal barely flinched. Bunky’s face appeared in the gaping ruin. “This here’s a workingman’s pub, none of this fancy-dancy stuff…”
The reality skin Sibeal and Sid were sharing slipped away like paint dropped in water. The rusting corrugated tin roof of the real White Horse appeared over them. Bunky was standing on one of the hands of his construction mechanoid, back from work. Shaky, of course, was next to him, and smiling just as goofily.
A serving bot slapped two beers down in front of Bunky and Shaky, and they roared in laughter. Beers from Sid had become something of a ritual. “I do like this guy,” Shaky said to Bunky. They picked up their pints, and Sibeal walked over to greet them.
Sid leaned back and looked around the cavern floor from his view from the White Horse two stories up. He noticed there was an Eleutherous meeting hall to one side, and more Grillas had arrived, working on the diggers and constructors in the pits below.
Before being abducted by one, he’d never seen a Grilla up close and personal before.
Animal-human chimeras, bred for combat in the Weather Wars, Grillas were yet another ill-considered ambition with unintended consequences. Animal-human chimeras had been around for a long time, starting with pigs grown with human organs for transplants. It was only a short step for some researchers, less averse to chimeric tinkering, to experiment with human voice boxes and frontal lobes in male silverbacks.
The world had been in a moral uproar until the first reports of the raging silverback battalions, in full battle armor, ripping their opposition to pieces in Weather War battles high in the Himalayas. After that, the moral tide turned into a debate about sending “our boys” into battle against them. Almost overnight, all sides had their own Grilla units.
Even unaided by an exoskeleton, a combat Grilla could dead lift two tons, scale forty-foot walls, and if all other weapons systems failed, rely on a fearsome set of fangs. They were famous for having bad tempers, but then again, if you sprang into existence to discover that your Creators were human assholes, you’d be pissed off, too.
In this high-speed-evolution world, after a few years robotics became cheaper than Grillas, especially when the larger costs—urban ghettos filled with creatures returned from the wars, half-accorded rights and civil unrest, long-term health and safety issues—became obvious. They’d now been banned from urban centers, an entire generation of a doomed race, and relegated to places like this.
But cost was only half the story.
The human mimicry of synthetics and bots was one thing, but looking into a Grilla’s eyes, you couldn’t help but feel like you were peering into your own soul—and humans reserved a special hatred for things that reminded them of themselves.
5
“Just be careful of him,” said one of the men.
Must be the one the old man called Toothface.
Cranial gene-mod therapy tended to induce hyperdontia when done badly. The man’s head was grotesquely mushroomed on one side and a second and third set of teeth had grown in over his first. He wiped drool from his mouth with the back of one hand. Making it worse, he had a shabby reality filter fixed over top of it all, a transparent overlay showing off the large brain that had grown inside the shell of his expanded skull.
Then again, part of what Bob was seeing might be an artifact of the sensory mapping.
He was struggling to make sense of the scarab beetle’s neural pathways, trying to wrest control of its six legs from the still-skittish owner. The beetle tried to scurry back under the door, but Bob held it firm, edging it forward.
Bob had a splinter working to correlate the view from the thousands of lens in its compound eye into something understandable to his own visual cortex, but the experience was unnerving. The image of the men in the room ballooned, as if he was looking into a carnival mirror, slowly coming into focus but then distorting again, the men glowing in the infrared-shifted spectrum of the insect’s vision.