Tidelands: I-One (2)
Naturals.
Squirrel has been right about the haul. Fogler flicks through the download from her implant, assessing the day’s sad detritus. A begrimed thumb absently mines a cavernous nostril as his head swivels left and right in a slowmo perpetual shake. Nothing. And certainly nothing off The List, that daily-tweaked catalogue of desirables that Fogler himself can utilise, fence profitably, or for which he has pre-orders.
She stands mutely by, alternating nervously between monitoring his reaction and scanning the skittering shadows above. Someday something will drop on her – one of his horrible little bio-automata, an escaped experiment that’s found its way up among the jury-rigged cables that festoon the ceiling like jungle vines. Her eye settles eventually on his little gaming tank, the match currently paused, his controller set aside, the two exquisitely brutish homunculi swaying and panting, still in fighting stance, awaiting the recommencement of battle.
“It’s OK, Squidge,” Lily had once tried to reassure her. “They don’t feel nothing.”
She’d been concerned, when first she saw them, felt sure they were being tortured purely for Fogler’s entertainment.
“Nah! It’s all just reflexes, honest. Little fleshy robots is all they are. Nothing up here!” Lily had pointed to her own head, tapped twice and grinned.
But Squirrel hadn’t been so sure, still isn’t, and so still hates it, despising most of all the dark amusement Fogler takes in it, and that of others like him; the sad little gaming league they’ve all got going, the players connecting up remotely, their battles mirrored in their own miniature arenas just like this one, wherever in the world that might be.
Fogler doesn’t need to say anything, merely hands back her data stick with a practised grimace of sympathetic disappointment. His is a face always on the verge of caricature, rubbery and over-expressive; a face for pantomime or farce, and now it hoists up a quizzical eyebrow visible from the back row of the gods.
“There a problem with the last one?”
She shrugs, avoids his eyes, looks down, thumbing the rosary of her fingers in front of her.
“Rumbled me,” she lies.
“Squirrel, my love,” she fails to stifle a flinch as the back of long, nail-bitten fingers trail across her cheek – not that he’s ever hit her, nor any of the others, that she knows of; with the perpetual shadow of Denton’s spot checks, he has no need. “We don’t get, we don’t sell; we don’t sell . . .”
We don’t eat – refusing to complete the rote-learnt call and response, another favoured maxim.
It was Fogler had christened her Squirrel. While sometimes he will go along with whatever nickname her fellow Denizens award a new intake, by unspoken consent only he can make it official, and still occasionally he takes proprietorial pride in bestowing his own mocking or erudite soubriquets; a tribute, in her case, to her precocious technical agility, her talent for nimbly squirrelling in, out and away, before a mark can even scratch his arse – well, on her good days, of which, as with the weather, there are few and getting fewer. But like all his praise, it is back-handed, a joke at the bearer’s expense, and so also a dig at her diminutive size, her (are they?) slightly protruding teeth, and the general twitchiness of her demeanour. The latter a quality she’s found especially exacerbated in the presence of Denton (but who, to be fair, has it in him to bring out the twitchiness in anyone). And it was with Denton, of course, where it had first happened – the same weird thing that had just happened at the bookstall.
They made an odd couple. Like a mismatched double act, two men of radically different stamp; both ill-made, but one by nature, the other by art. Fogler is a blasted tree of a man; tall, thin and twisted, his bulbous head lolling drunkenly off an overly slender neck, a too-thin branch bearing overripe, misshapen fruit. And whose threats, when they come, are thoughtful, measured, disguised as the calm and rational statement of apparently inevitable consequences; all of which, he would imply – violence, destitution, aggravated neglect – are sadly beyond his ability to influence. In contrast, as the executive arm of at least some of these consequences, Denton is shorter, disproportionately stocky, pumped up by the Bosses’ promotional gifts of unnatural muscle, his face tweaked to a leonine cast, his aura that of a graduate of the school of blunt and sudden action, of quick and messy necessity. And once you acquire this air, once those you deal with sense the lengths you’re more than happy to go – even just its potential, in the twitching bulge of gene-tweaked bicep through slim-fit t-shirt – a demonstration is seldom required; the faintest foretaste is enough.
“She’s getting on for a sweep,” he’d said one day to Fogler, talking as if she weren’t there – which she was more than happy to play along with, keeping her head down and focussed on her pizza.
“She’ll do another season or two,” Fogler had countered optimistically, his head bent over some technological trinket with an exquisitely tipped, sporadically sparking tool, his monocular headset like a watchmaker’s loupe, which would be splaying out a schematic of the trinket’s innards that only he could see. “Another few seasons at least, I’d say.” And it’s true, in a profession where the talent to go unnoticed is much prized, her diminutive size might buy her that – had already done so – but the clock on which is indeed ticking down.
Denton’s face had twisted in demur. “Sure you’re not soft on her? I think she’s already in season.”
At this indelicacy, a rare pun, she’d been surprised to register Fogler’s fist clench around the tool, his face, still pointed downward, flicker with displeasure. What a conundrum he could be.
But there is no conundrum about Denton. He’d eased up his off-the-shelf bulk, like vacuum-packed meat in his over-tight top, which until then had been sprawled lazily across the arms of the tattered armchair, and lumbered across the Den’s shabby little kitchen to the counter where she was sat at a stool, still eating. He’d reached out with his left hand, the fingers of his right tented beneath his half-eaten slice of Hawaiian, the sauce of which had spread beyond the corners of his mouth, extending its width in a grotesque blood-red smile. He’d taken her chin between forefinger and thumb and turned her head to face him.
“Not bad, you know,” to himself, almost.
She’d tried to look anywhere but his eyes, till the silent imperative of his hand had eventually forced her to return his gaze.
“Not bad at all.”
She saw it the moment their eyes connected – his rudimentary calculation of her desirability, his own even more rudimentary lust. But there was something beyond that, something almost like a door; a threshold of the mind. Instinctively, she’d pushed.
It was like the PoV from a game, a first-person shooter: the sudden focus-shifts, the way the hands come up in front of you, to grasp, to fight, to aim – though, again, not her hands, all action being out of her control.
She was in a room, barely lit. A man, lying on one elbow, his face broken and uneven, raising his other arm in petition and defence; to her left, what once might have been a dog, straining a length of thick-linked chain, kept barely at bay by the twin of the tattooed hand still holding her chin.
Denton had gradually released his hold, his chew slowing to a slack-jawed gape of half-masticated ham and pineapple, bread and sauce.
“She’s got time yet,” Fogler had countered again, mock brightly, still bent over his trinket. “She’s still one of my best sweeps – ain’t you, Squirrel?” He’d finally lifted his head to look at them, taking in the wordless exchange, his smile fading.
“You know, Fogler, I think her talents may be wasted on sweeping.”
Ever since, Denton has watched her closely, and she in return has done her best to frustrate his plodding suspicions, to duck his primitive radar, playing dumb and looking blank. Sure, he is a blunt instrument – they should have spliced his brain when they’d bulked his brawn – but not devoid of a certain animal shrewdness, and though he might yet half-doubt himself – had he imagined it, that brief moment of connection? – he must know about Naturals, know what they can do, and what that could mean for his career if he could deliver one to the Bosses.
“See, Naturals don’t need interfaces or implants,” Lily had once explained. “They just do it, without the tech.”
And Squirrel had gradually come to understand just how useful that could be. Useful in those places where that tech was forbidden or disabled. Useful, too, if they were also young and pretty – or could be made to be – and where they could then make the best, the most exclusive companions; not your common street girl, like Lily had been, but your proper high-end escort type. Which is perhaps what Lily had once wanted for herself: to be set up in her own pad, where she could entertain a more select clientele, those who traded in gifts not threats. But for all her natural qualities, Lily wasn’t a Natural; couldn’t read your interests, guess your moods, anticipate your desires, even reach in and take out those fantasies – making them flesh in front of you – that you didn’t even know you had. A girl like that (or boy, or any bespoke variation thereupon) could also be used in business or spook stuff, could draw out those things even pillow talk couldn’t, stuff even you didn’t know you knew.
Useful indeed.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi & fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. Part 1 is free to read, but you can keep up with the story by signing up for exclusive access, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments as they appear.