Fearful Symmetries

The Jaguar sliced into the water like an arrow. It slammed to a stop under the surface, blowing an air bag across Nohar’s face. The inductors blew with a hydraulic explosion that twisted the Jaguar on its side as water shot into the cabin from the bullet holes in the windshield.

The aircar was tumbling, the air in the cabin not anywhere near enough to keep the fans afloat. Nohar scrambled as the aircar turned completely upside down, the cabin already half-filled with water. He took a few deep gasps of what remained of the air, and kicked at the windshield.

With the car upside down, the windshield was already completely underwater, and it gave with a single kick. Nohar ducked and pushed himself out the window just as the Jaguar nosed into the mud at the bottom of the reservoir.

Nohar swam blindly, the water dark and blurred with sediment. His head throbbed with the dull sound of machinery. He pushed himself to clear as much distance between him and the wreck as possible. He stayed under until his lungs burned with lack of air, then he pushed through the inch-thick scum of algae on the surface.

When his head hit the air, he sucked in several deep breaths as he spun around to see the nearest harvesting pylon. He dove under again, heading for the pylon. He had to break the surface twice more before he reached it. The second time he broke the surface right in the path of one of the pylon’s three-meter-wide skimming arms; he had to dive under as the rotating boom swept over his head.

Then he made it to the side of the pylon and held himself against it, his head barely above the surface. The shafts of the swimming arms didn’t descend below the surface this close to the pylon, but they swept by only centimeters above him. He sucked in deep breaths and watched the sky.

The copters ran a search pattern over the water. They hadn’t seen him yet. Nohar hoped that they wouldn’t. The machinery running the pylon he clung to should hide his own heat, as should the water and the algae. He held on, his arms going numb and his head throbbing with the rhythm of the pylon as the twenty-meter arms swept a circle in the algae.

They flew low enough for the rotors to ripple holes in the algae, incidentally hiding the scars he’d made when he’d broken the surface. One buzzed the harvesting pylons, the rotor’s backwash spilling green water over him. He was sure that they had him then, but the copter kept flying down the line of pylons, oblivious.

The helicopters searched for what seemed like hours. Long enough for Nohar to get a good look at both of them. One was an LAPD chopper, the other was completely unmarked.

Fed involvement meant the situation was screwed beyond belief. It could have been a Fed black-ops unit that attacked him in the cabin. The whole scene at Royd’s could have been a setup. They knew he wasn’t taken at the cabin, all they’d need to do was stake out Royd’s corpse and wait for their lost morey to show. . . .

Both copters eventually stopped the search pattern and hovered over opposite ends of the reservoir. They were waiting for a search party. They weren’t about to give him any breaks. He was going to have to get to shore under the cover of the harvesting pylons.

Nohar unclenched his arms from the side of the pylon and reached up, grabbing the swimming boom as it passed overhead. As it spun, pulling him in circles around the pylon, he pulled himself hand over hand through the foaming muck the arm pushed ahead of itself. The handholds were slick, and once he was a few meters away from the pylon itself, the arm’s mechanism opened up a gaping maw in front of him. Algae foam rose above his head, and slipped past his body into the screens built into the harvesting arm. He tried to get a foothold on the underwater portion of the arm. He had to kick off his shoes, so he could grip with his claws.

It would be easier, and safer, if he grabbed on the trailing end. But the froth on the leading edge offered more cover than the arm’s wake.

Nohar made it all the way to the edge of the arm, three meters away from the arc of the neighboring pylon. Then he let go, dived, and came up in front of the rushing wall of foam at the edge of the next pylon. The impact stunned him, and he had to grip for two rotations before he felt up to doing it again. Then he had to spin around once more so he could pick out the pylon closest to shore and farthest from the helicopters.

Somehow he managed to make it all the way to the shoreline without alerting the helicopters. He had hitched a ride on three or four of the skimming booms, and his nose had gone numb from the smell of engineered algae. He had turned a color somewhere between shit brown and bile green from the algae stuck to him and his suit. During his ride to shore, some government boys had shown up. He saw them working the shoreline near where the Jaguar had gone down.

He ducked into the woods in the opposite direction. Once out of sight he ran, getting himself as deep in the woods as he could. Living in this kind of terrain for the past seven years made it easy. He kept moving until the sun had gone out of the sky and his body refused to go on anymore.

Sometime after dark he collapsed against a tree and went through his pockets. The Vind had survived. He did his best to clean it. Out of the extra magazines he carried, he was able to find five shells that were dry enough to be trusted to reload the thing. When he was done, he set it down next to him.

His portable comm was a total loss, which didn’t really matter, since the Fed could trace his movements using that comm’s account. It was better off fried.

The itch of algae being sun-dried onto his body finally woke him up. Nohar could feel the dried slime caking his fur in clumps all over his body. His tail had fallen asleep and had stuck to the outside of his right thigh. He had to reach up and help his eyelids to open against the gunk holding them together. Even that little movement sent aches up and down his arm.

He wiped his nose as his eyes focused, trying to get the smell of algae out of it. He stopped because he realized he was being watched. Nohar saw the dog before he heard or smelled it, and that made it sink in exactly how close he’d been driving himself. It stood about four meters away, a gray mutt that looked for all the world like a natural unengineered canine. It sat on its haunches, looking at Nohar and panting.

The dog noticed Nohar move, and it let loose an odd staccato yip. When Nohar had been an LA native, he had heard stories about the feral dogs that populated the Hollywood hills, especially around the old reservoirs. He’d never really thought that much about it, until now—

He never thought of a dog as a potential threat. But as he stared at the gray dog, he realized that dogs were naturally pack hunters, and in his state he’d probably have trouble with one fifty-kilo animal. He couldn’t even tell how many were out there. His sense of smell was still overwhelmed by algae.

From the woods around him, he heard more staccato barking. Two, three, four, five others at least. Nohar nodded, doing his best not to show teeth as he forced his engineered lips into a facsimile of a smile.

Nohar heard a low growl next to him. He turned to face it and saw a black dog, somewhere between a Doberman and a Rottweiler, about three meters away from his outstretched arm. Its forepaws were placed squarely on top of Nohar’s gun.

Nohar looked from Blackie to Gray, and back again. Gray was still yipping, the rhythm of it much more complex than normal. Nohar began to look at the structure of the dogs’ skulls. It was hard to notice at first, since the proportions were similar to any other dog’s skull, but the forehead was slightly higher, the skull slightly wider, and the whole head larger in proportion to the body.

The first moreaus, the first examples of macro gene-engineering that were used for warfare, were a species of dogs with enhanced intelligence designed by the South during the war of Korean unification. Almost all of the moreaus since were based in part from those Korean Dogs. Since the U.N. banned the use of the human genome after the Korean Dogs were designed, the countries that built intelligent moreaus all started with the specs from those enhanced dog brains rather than the human—

That was all history to Nohar. As far as he knew, all those first efforts were destroyed in the labs of the gene-techs or died in the war once the Chinese-backed North overwhelmed the South.

The tableau remained like that as Nohar tried to get an impression of how many canines were out in the woods beyond where he sat. His senses were too dull at the moment to give a specific number, but he began to realize that there were a lot of them.

As he sat up, a large brown dog walked out of the woods and cocked its head at him. Around its neck it wore a collar, and an electronic device was attached to the collar with silvery-gray duct tape. The electronic voice came from the device. “who are you. why are you here.”

The brown dog paced in front of him, close enough that Nohar could finally make out the smell of agitation and fear off of him. The box spoke without emotion, but everything in the dog’s posture carried tension that the words didn’t contain. “men follow you here. men look for you. why.”

Nohar looked around him. He was surrounded. Canine eyes seemed to peer from around every tree, every rock, every bush. He could sense that he was just one move shy of a deadly confrontation. He couldn’t do anything to spook them.

Nohar decided to rein in his own tension, and tell the truth, If they sensed him relaxing, the whole situation might calm down a few notches. . . .

Brown stopped pacing and looked at him. One eye was clouded, and Nohar finally realized how old Brown was. He could see scars on his side, and one of his ears was ragged.

The pack around him erupted in a chorus of the odd staccato barking. Nohar realized that they had to be talking to each other. He was at a disadvantage. They could understand him, but the only one he could understand was the one-eyed leader with the salvaged electronic voicebox.

Even without understanding them, Nohar could pretty much figure out what they were debating. They were arguing whether or not to kill him.

Nohar looked at the barking crowd and had an uncomfortable realization. Most of these dogs were sick. Many had crusts around their eyes and noses, many seemed unsteady on their feet.

“why would you help us.” The old dog with the electronic voicebox stared at him. When he blinked, Nohar noticed with a little unease that the eyelid on the leader’s clouded eye traveled more slowly than the other.

Nohar slowly pushed himself to his feet. There were a chorus of barks. This time Nohar noticed that a few seemed weak. Blackie growled at him and pulled the Vind farther away. “I don’t want to see those pink bastards again.”

The old dog’s gaze followed him. When Nohar was fully upright, the old dog was dwarfed, despite being large for his species. The dog’s posture didn’t change, even as he tilted up so his good eye could follow Nohar’s movement. “a deal.”

“A deal,” Nohar said. He turned around slowly. A fine dust of dried algae drifted off of him as he moved. It made him want to sneeze. “How many of you are sick? Half?”

Around him came a chorus of agitated barking. It was as if the woods around him had suddenly come alive. From the sound, he had struck a nerve. The barking went on while the canines debated. Nohar kept moving slowly, trying to look nonthreatening. He stretched overused muscles, and tried to work the stiffness out of his bad knee and shoulder.

The barking became loud, aggressive. Nohar stopped moving. He had struck another nerve. “no men. no doctors. if that is the help you offer, it is no help.”

Nohar swore quietly under his breath. He had no love of doctors and hospitals himself, but the canine pack around him looked at him as if he had suggested mass euthanasia.

Nohar was tempted to say he’d cure all of them if they let him go. But he doubted they were that gullible, or that he could pull off that kind of fabrication. “I’m not a doctor,” he said. “I don’t know what’s the matter. But I could bring back antibiotics, antivirals, at the very least something to help with the symptoms—decongestants, aspirin.”

More barking, subdued this time. Nohar hoped that they were considering this seriously. Looking at them, he could tell that they did a lot of scavenging. Some of them wore jury-rigged backpacks across their backs. A few wore collars with items hooked or taped to them. Nohar even saw a watch strapped to a dog’s foreleg.

“no-har.” The hesitation over the syllable was the first time there’d been a disruption in the voicebox’s smooth monotone. “we survive here because men do not know of us. if we make this deal with you, you must tell no one of us, of where we live. no men. no doctors.”

Nohar felt a weight lift from his chest. He looked down at himself and said, “Can I clean up somewhere?” Walking into a pharmacy covered in algae was probably going to attract attention.

As Elijah’s voicebox spoke, Blackie picked up the Vind in his mouth and slipped it into a neighboring canine’s backpack. That answered a nagging question that had been bothering Nohar, how these dogs could get along without hands. He supposed it was only natural, especially in a pack, for the dogs to team together to do things like loading a backpack, or even putting one on.

Elijah shook his head in a gesture the humans seemed to have bequeathed on all their engineered brethren. “we will return your possessions when you do what you’ve said.”

“prepare as you wish. but return with what you’ve gathered before the sky darkens. you will be watched. you will be followed.” Somehow, the one-eyed pack leader managed to instill the toneless voice with a sense of threat.

He wasn’t alone. A fluctuating number of canines paced him on the way out of the woods. They stayed out of sight, but Nohar could smell them, and occasionally hear them.

He did get his chance to clean up. He passed a small creek on his way down toward Hollywood where he managed to wash most of the algae out of his fur and out of his clothes. He continued the remainder of his journey toward Hollywood dripping wet.

He was still trying to figure out how he was going to keep his promise to the dogs. He was tempted just to skip, letting them keep his gun and his wallet—

Nohar doubted he’d get far pulling that. However he matched up one on one, he wasn’t about to win a fight with a whole pack of angry, engineered canines. And when it came down to it, they could have overpowered him, could have fed him to the cops and whatever Fed agency wanted his hide. He was going to keep his promise.

He got his bearings when he saw the Hollywood Freeway. He stopped next to it, standing amidst the trash that heaped next to the road. He hunted in the midst of car parts and rubbish until he found what he was looking for, a length of old blackened PVC pipe about one-and-a-half meters long.

Carrying the pipe, dripping wet, his suit wrinkled, streaked with green, and smelling of dead plants, Nohar walked into Hollywood.

The dirty streets had a few moreys in the midst of the prostitutes and hustlers, but even they stepped aside to let Nohar by. The pinks turned away from him and tried to fade into doorways or behind lamp-posts. Nohar didn’t pay much attention. He was keeping his eyes out for cops.

He stopped at the first pharmacy he came to. It was an automated storefront, open twenty-four hours a day. Behind a thick window, a large holo displayed an image of a smiling, white-coated druggist, and in front stood a small kiosk where someone could place an order for whatever they needed.

Nohar ducked into a trash-strewn alley next to the store. The drugstore had a few windows back here, set into the looming brick wall. They were small and covered by a steel latticework set into the wall as a security measure. There also was a side door to the pharmacy, armored, flat, featureless, and locked with a cardkey panel.

Nohar was looking for a weak point, and after a moment of looking, he found it. The doorframe was old, contemporary with the century-old building. Above the new armored door was a flat panel where an old-fashioned air-conditioning unit would have fitted. That area was only so much plywood.

Nohar rammed his pipe at the flat space above the door. The plywood splintered, bowing inward. Nohar withdrew the pipe and rammed the panel again. The pipe hit with a crack, breaking the plywood almost in half. When he withdrew the pipe this time, he had to step back as the panel fell from the wall, revealing a small opening above the door.

Nohar could see another security grate over the hole, on the other side. He rammed it with the pipe a few times, and it clattered to the floor inside the building.

Nohar looked around a few times, and when he was sure no one was watching from the street, he tossed the pipe through the hole and heaved himself up and through. His suit caught and tore on splintered wood, but Nohar didn’t pay it much attention.

The rear hallway was dark, but he was almost certain to be on someone’s security video. All sorts of alarms were going off right now. He had five minutes, ten at the most.

He raced through the narrow hallway until he found a storage area. It was through an open doorway at the end of the hall. Motion sensors turned on the lights as soon as he stepped through the threshold. In the cavernous room, boxes sat on plastic shipping pallets, waiting for the owners to come feed the items into the automated bowels of the store.

He stripped off his jacket and started going from pallet to pallet, looking for what he needed. When he saw a label that indicated an antibiotic or antiviral drug, he tore into the top with his claws and grabbed two handfuls, tossing them into his jacket.

He went from pallet to pallet, tearing open boxes until he felt he had pushed the limit of his time here. He ran back to the rear door as he began hearing sirens in the distance. He tied his jacket in a bundle and tossed it through the opening above the door. Then he raised his foot and kicked at the crash bar on the door, twice. It didn’t want to give, but on the second kick something in the mechanism gave and the door swung outward into the alley.

The jacket wasn’t there. Instead, lying on the ground in front of the door, was his wallet, the comm, the camera, and his Vind. Elijah had been as good as his word, the dogs had followed him all the way, watching his every move. Nohar found it disconcerting that he didn’t know where the dogs were, worse was the thought that he had missed them when they were right outside the door. He never knew how close they’d been.