Page 3 of Green City Wars

None of it was meant, of course. All the whole system was for was to make sure everything worked behind the scenes. Keep the lights on and the water clean and the streets free from trash in these, the new green cities humans were building for themselves. The utopian cities that lived off the sun and had the carbon footprint of an ant wearing tight shoes. And for all that to work, for the green city residents to get the full futurist experience, nobody wanted to have to go unclog the sewers or go up a pole to fix the telecoms transmission box. It all had to go on seamlessly, unseen, like magic. And, like magic, the solution was having a dove up your sleeve and a rabbit in your hat. Or a pigeon and a rat, respectively.

Nowhere in this plan did it say Freelance Raccoon Investigator, but the problem is, when you put a bunch of animals in a system, and engineer them with a load of complexities and a bunch of extra needs, they start to push the boundaries. And if Freelance Raccoon Investigator was on your bingo card for where those boundaries might extend, then you should mark it now.

Embassy Plaza is not in the rootways. It is in the centre of human Neuwien-Grunstadt, overlooking the marina and the blue, blue waters of the lake. Blue blue, because of all the decontamination work they did last decade, when the corner got turned on the whole deindustrialisation wars. This is where the city’s human governance goes on, and where a handful of foreign interests are, and—because all of those humans are wealthy even above the universal provisions of the green cities—a lot of restaurants and theatres and other fancy places. Most of the foreign interests—not actual political embassies but the holdings of various major tech corporations—have their own in-house Gehirner staff, and the Bärenhaus is a unique place where they can go, that’s upstairs, in sight, revealed to the sun and to human gaze. Here, a handful of extremely well-behaved animals can have teddy bears’ picnics, sitting on the floor at low human-style tables, drinking tea from little cups. Human tourists from less green places love it.

The Bärenhaus belongs to HengZeico, a Japanese group specialising in Gehirner design—Henge as they call them, over there. HengZeico were a major partner in green city projects across the world, and part of the price was a permanent embassy building in the best part of town. In Neuwien this includes the Bärenhaus and, in the Bärenhaus, Skotch spots his good old friend Shojen. Shojen probably doesn’t have any work for an itinerant racoon, but Shojen owes Skotch for extrication from a spot of bother. A foreign model getting lost in the wrong part of town, a pack of leery locals. Skotch turning up and the regular Gehirner assuming that the raccoon and the tanuki were pals because they had the same face markings. An association that was rather less complimentary to Shojen than to Skotch, honestly, but they’d come out of it on good terms. And Shojen owes him—and also, somehow, is something like a friend—and if Skotch gets a temping contract with HengZeico that would keep the company off his back.

He doesn’t know how late he is. Not by much, certainly. If he’d got the lowdown from Uwe an hour beforehand, maybe it would have made all the difference. The truth is in Shojen’s body language, though. The stiffness to the tanuki. That stare—the black-banded eyes that every other Gehirner species sees as identical, but to Skotch and Shojen both are worlds apart. Get out, those eyes say. Not hostile, warning. But Skotch is at least three-quarters away in his own head and he only registers the unspoken caution as he’s on the point of joining Shojen at the little low table. The human thing, fit for humans to see their Little Helpers at, like the animals are playing dress-up here in the front window of the Bärenhaus.

Skotch turns on his heels, front and rear, then rises to his haunches, feeling resigned. They’re right there, a raccoon and a possum with collars on, their tags showing the Uzco logo just as Shojen’s shows the spiral of HengZeico.

“If it isn’t our old pal Skotch,” says the other raccoon, the company raccoon, whose name is Fitch. The possum, designated Maria, nods and bares a lot of sharp teeth, though that’s par for the course with possums. The speech is the US argot, which some human joker somehow got away with calling Furze.

Shojen stands up—tanuki are bigger, so that’s a lot of up. The two American animals aren’t intimidated.

“Siddown, Tom,” says Fitch, the talker. The old slur name for tanuki models, coined by some recidivist human way back when and passed into animal parlance because no human really watches what they say in front of the Gehirner.

Shojen is maybe about to make a scene, because he’s a good sort and takes debts seriously. And the last thing Skotch needs is to be cause célèbre for some sort of international incident here in green city turf, because Uzco and HengZeico are commercial rivals, and the boardroom and stock price friction tends to filter down to hackles and scraps here at the animal level.

“It’s cool,” Skotch tells Shojen. “I reckon these two gents just want to talk about outstanding paperwork.”

“Sure,” says Fitch.

“Something like that,” snickers Maria, because apparently she can talk too. Lispy, because possum dentition screws with the diction.

“I’ll be back for that meeting we talked about,” Skotch says, in the hope that a sudden absence of Skotch in the world now has a stink attached to it, and maybe that’ll stay someone’s paw if the question of whether or not to off him reaches edge-case status.

“I will look forward to it,” Shojen says in precise Furze, giving Fitch and Maria the hard look, which they return in spades.

The pair don’t quite frog-march Skotch out of the Bärenhaus. But then, given that a whole class of Gehirner models are amphibians, the phrase is reckoned bad taste. There’s a definite impression that, even though Skotch’s four feet are taking him the right way, his consent is not being asked for.

This is how Skotch returns to the bosom of the company that made him.

2COMPANY TOWN

Literally made, in Skotch’s case. He’s first generation. That isn’t the case for most Gehirner. Sustainability is the green city watchword, and that includes the service infrastructure, and all the Little Helpers. Especially given that some Strains have quite the fleeting lifespan. Animals breed, and the genetic augments get passed down. Neuwien has seen generations of rats and squirrels and pigeons and the rest come and go within the half-a-human-lifetime the place has existed. Breeding and multiplying and assiduously keeping out of sight.

Back in the States—barring those seven holdouts where augmented animals are still banned—there are whole clans of raccoons and possums and bluejays and the like, long genealogies stretching back decades. When Uzco got the contract to provide corporate services for Neuwien’s new business enclave, though, they went in with all-new stock, and as they expanded over the next several years they kept bringing in new, rather than waiting for biological supply to catch up with demand. Skotch came out of the factory just over two years ago, meaning he’s staring middle age in the mirror but hasn’t quite reached it yet, given that augmented strains live longer than their natural counterparts. Longer doesn’t mean long though. Life can be cheap in the green cities. For some strains it’s cheaper than others. At least being a raccoon carries a decent weight of mausgelt should some dandy with a razor decide they want a Davy Crockett hat.

There was already a full ecosystem in the service sector before Uzco brought its invasive species into the mix, of course. Because the business enclave was a new district of the city, built with international money, there wasn’t much the local guilds could do about it. Uzco hasn’t sat idle since then, of course. Oh, the actual human company is all about stock prices and the boardroom and all of that stuff that no Gehirner bats an eye at. Behind the scenes, though, the service animals of Uzco are their own force within the walls and under the roots of Neuwien. Since the company moved in, they’ve been expanding their reach, taking over services, pushing out from the business district wherever their pointy animal noses can make room. Because more service territory means more resources from the city’s coffers. Power, Plangent rations, food, all the good things.

Again, nobody ever planned for it to go that way. Nobody, in those human planning sessions when the green cities were being designed, sat down and suggested that a cutthroat competitive economy should exist within the engineered animal populations. It was all just a side effect of good intentions, the way things so often go.

The Gehirner, the Henge, the Little Helpers, whatever they’re called, wherever you are—they’re just a part of the system. An eco-friendly, self-sustaining solution to the problem of How does all the work get done? All the jobs that humans, with their leisure and their universal income and their expectations, don’t want to do. The aspects of their lives they don’t want to be worrying about. So, genetic engineering being what it was, why not just have an unseen population behind the scenes, making sure everything works and tidying everything away? Originally the Gehirner weren’t even supposed to be language-capable, save that engineering them with speech centres meant their creators could have them use human-style interfaces rather than inventing something completely novel. And, of course, that population of unseen service workers across each green city would need providing for: properly balanced food, geneware updates, and the like. All a part of the city budgeting.

Which meant, from the point of view of even the earliest first-generation animals, that the environment they found themselves in had a resource economy which could be manipulated, controlled and gamed. Which meant whoever provided a particular service in a particular district got the goods, that they could consume or barter, and that might eventually filter down to a lowlife like Skotch. Who does the work, gets the pay, basically. Except there are always those who decide they’d rather just skim off the top with menaces, and that works too.

Skotch, who probably has a slightly more complex perspective on humans than the average Gehirner, is well aware that almost none of them have the faintest idea just how tangled and nasty things have become, behind the scenes. Which is just as well. If humans became more aware of what they’d inadvertently created, that would be the biggest ever breach of Rule One. They’d probably set fire to the whole system and hand things over to robots or something.

Uzco Towers, technically Das Uzcogebäude, is top-grade modern office space, a tower of balconies bursting with green, filled with airy spaces. The porous bonded cob of the walls is run through with a living trellis of vines that’s cooling, power, and aesthetics all in one. Every office is a glade. From the upper reaches, the view out over Neuwien is like looking over some ruined city that nature reclaimed centuries before. Save that Neuwien is still a working city, and has only been in existence fifty years.

Of course, none of that’s where they bring Skotch. The local community of Little Helpers doesn’t get the big offices. Instead, Fitch and Maria haul him down beneath the earth, to where the roots lead. The banks of indicators and access panels that let the building’s invisible workers keep tabs on all its many organic and artificial systems. Not exactly a good look for Uzco if its own HQ suffers an outage or a blight, after all.

Dark, down here, but Uzco’s Strains are all good with low light conditions. Skotch spent the first year of his life based here, heading out into the city to where the friction was. Hunting, prying, finding for the company. Before deciding there was a better living to be made doing it on his own tab.

“I don’t know if you guys know it,” he tells Fitch and Maria as they jolly him through the maze of little winding spaces the roots make, “but I hung up my collar.”

“Still got your tag, though, ain’tcha,” Maria hisses through overlong teeth. “Big brave boy standing on your own feet, except you’ll still spend company credit.”