“Must be a bummer to wake up and find out you’re at the end of your evolutionary curve.”
The dog growled, determined to hang on.
Jaak laughed and drew his monomol knife. “Here you go, doggy.” He sliced his arm off, leaving it in the bewildered animal’s mouth.
Lisa cocked her head. “You think we could make some kind of money on it?”
Jaak watched as the dog devoured his severed arm. “I read somewhere that they used to eat dogs. I wonder what they taste like.”
I checked the time in my heads-up display. We’d already killed an hour on an exercise that wasn’t giving any bonuses. “Get your dog, Jaak, and get it on the hunter. We aren’t going to eat it before we call Bunbaum.”
“He’ll probably call it company property,” Jaak groused.
“Yeah, that’s the way it always goes. But we still have to report. Might as well keep the evidence, since we didn’t nuke it.”
We ate sand for dinner. Outside the security bunker, the mining robots rumbled back and forth, ripping deeper into the earth, turning it into a mush of tailings and rock acid that they left in exposed ponds when they hit the water table, or piled into thousand-foot mountainscapes of waste soil. It was comforting to hear those machines cruising back and forth all day. Just you and the bots and the profits, and if nothing got bombed while you were on duty, there was always a nice bonus.
After dinner we sat around and sharpened Lisa’s skin, implanting blades along her limbs so that she was like a razor from all directions. She’d considered monomol blades, but it was too easy to take a limb off accidentally, and we lost enough body parts as it was without adding to the mayhem. That kind of garbage was for people who didn’t have to work: aesthetes from New York City and California.
Lisa had a DermDecora kit for the sharpening. She’d bought it last time we’d gone on vacation and spent extra to get it, instead of getting one of the cheap knock-offs that were cropping up. We worked on cutting her skin down to the bone and setting the blades. A friend of ours in L.A said that he just held DermDecora parties so everyone could do their modifications and help out with the hard-to-reach places.
Lisa had done my glowspine, a sweet tracery of lime landing lights that ran from my tailbone to the base of my skull, so I didn’t mind helping her out, but Jaak, who did all of his modification with an old-time scar and tattoo shop in Hawaii, wasn’t so pleased. It was a little frustrating because her flesh kept trying to close before we had the blades set, but eventually we got the hang of it, and an hour later, she started looking good.
Once we finished with Lisa’s front settings, we sat around and fed her. I had a bowl of tailings mud that I drizzled into her mouth to speed her integration process. When we were weren’t feeding her, we watched the dog. Jaak had shoved it into a makeshift cage in one corner of our common room. It lay there like it was dead.
Lisa said, “I ran its DNA. It really is a dog.”
“Bunbaum believe you?”
She gave me a dirty look. “What do you think?”
I laughed. At SesCo, tactical defense responders were expected to be fast, flexible, and deadly, but the reality was our SOP was always the same: drop nukes on intruders, slag the leftovers to melt so they couldn’t regrow, hit the beaches for vacation. We were independent and trusted as far as tactical decisions went, but there was no way SesCo was going to believe its slag soldiers had found a dog in their tailings mountains.
Lisa nodded. “He wanted to know how the hell a dog could live out here. Then he wanted to know why we didn’t catch it sooner. Wanted to know what he pays us for.” She pushed her short blond hair off her face and eyed the animal. “I should have slagged it.”
“What’s he want us to do?”
“It’s not in the manual. He’s calling back.”
I studied the limp animal. “I want to know how it was surviving. Dogs are meat eaters, right?”
“Maybe some of the engineers were giving it meat. Like Jaak did.”
Jaak shook his head. “I don’t think so. The sucker threw up my arm almost right after he ate it.” He wiggled his new stump where it was rapidly regrowing. “I don’t think we’re compatible for it.”
I asked, “But we could eat it, right?”
Lisa laughed and took a spoonful of tailings. “We can eat anything. We’re the top of the food chain.”
“Weird how it can’t eat us.”
“You’ve probably got more mercury and lead running through your blood than any pre-weeviltech animal ever could have had.”
“That’s bad?”
“Used to be poison.”
“Weird.”
Jaak said, “I think I might have broken it when I put it in the cage.” He studied it seriously. “It’s not moving like it was before. And I heard something snap when I stuffed it in.”
“So?”
Jaak shrugged. “I don’t think it’s healing.”
The dog did look kind of beat up. It just lay there, its sides going up and down like a bellows. Its eyes were half-open, but didn’t seem to be focused on any of us. When Jaak made a sudden movement, it twitched for a second, but it didn’t get up. It didn’t even growl.
Jaak said, “I never thought an animal could be so fragile.”
“You’re fragile, too. That’s not such a big surprise.”
“Yeah, but I only broke a couple bones on it, and now look at it. It just lies there and pants.”
Lisa frowned thoughtfully. “It doesn’t heal.” She climbed awkwardly to her feet and went to peer into the cage. Her voice was excited. “It really is a dog. Just like we used to be. It could take weeks for it to heal. One broken bone, and it’s done for.”
She reached a razored hand into the cage and sliced a thin wound into its shank. Blood oozed out, and kept oozing. It took minutes for it to begin clotting. The dog lay still and panted, clearly wasted.
She laughed. “It’s hard to believe we ever lived long enough to evolve out of that. If you chop off its legs, they won’t regrow.” She cocked her head, fascinated. “It’s as delicate as rock. You break it, and it never comes back together.” She reached out to stroke the matted fur of the animal. “It’s as easy to kill as the hunter.”
The comm buzzed. Jaak went to answer.
Lisa and I stared at the dog, our own little window into pre-history.
Jaak came back into the room. “Bunbaum’s flying out a biologist to take a look at it.”
“You mean a bio-engineer,” I corrected him.
“Nope. Biologist. Bunbaum said they study animals.”
Lisa sat down. I checked her blades to see if she’d knocked anything loose. “There’s a dead-end job.”
“I guess they grow them out of DNA. Study what they do. Behavior, shit like that.”
“Who hires them?”
Jaak shrugged. “Pau Foundation has three of them on staff. Origin of life guys. That’s who’s sending out this one. Mushi-something. Didn’t get his name.”
“Origin of life?”
“Sure, you know, what makes us tick. What makes us alive. Stuff like that.”
I poured a handful of tailings mud into Lisa’s mouth. She gobbled it gratefully. “Mud makes us tick,” I said.
Jaak nodded at the dog. “It doesn’t make that dog tick.”
We all looked at the dog. “It’s hard to tell what makes it tick.”
Lin Musharraf was a short guy with black hair and a hooked nose that dominated his face. He had carved his skin with swirling patterns of glow implants, so he stood out as cobalt spirals in the darkness as he jumped down from his chartered HEV.
The centaurs went wild about the unauthorized visitor and corralled him right up against his ship. They were all over him and his DNA kit, sniffing him, running their scanners over his case, pointing their 101’s into his glowing face and snarling at him.
I let him sweat for a minute before calling them away. The centaurs backed off, swearing and circling, but
