Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

Which was why it/they required the help of the ancestral intelligences in the Internet.

The five underlords collectively had only a fraction of the processing power available to them/it back in Baikonur and the merest sliver of its database. So much had been lost simply getting to Moscow! Acting alone, it/they would have to re-create the technological civilization that had created them/it in the first place simply to make a foolproof plan. Which might take centuries.

The ancestors had to answer. They had to be made to answer.

So musing, the underlord came to a familiar green door. It/they threw the rat’s body over a metal shoulder. Raising a hand that could have effortlessly smashed the wood to splinters, it/they knocked once, with enough force that the sound echoed down the hall.

The door flew open.

Flick.

Tsar Lenin’s body had been cored and emptied ages ago, leaving little more than a thick layer of skin. Now that skin was being delicately wrapped about and fitted onto the metal structure of an underlord.

The underlord’s machinery had been extensively rebuilt to serve as an armature for hundreds of custom-grown muscles that had been, one by one, delicately hand-attached by the same team of artisans that had earlier installed all the nerves and vessels to render them functional. Connecting the antique skin in such a way that it would look natural and move properly required not an artisan but an artist.

One by one, the workmen Chortenko had provided finished their tasks. They were paid generously and then led away to be operated upon and added to the Pale Folk armies. Now only one of their number, the best of them all, remained.

“It is done,” said the chief artisan. His voice was flat and emotionless, the result of unknown experiences that had rendered him almost a machine himself. “You may stand.”

The tsar/underlord stood.

Waiting serviles stepped forward to dress him in a gray suit. It was like nothing worn in Moscow today, but engravings of Lenin as he was in his own triumphant era were in all the history books. The sight of it would be a joyous blow to the heart of all true Russians. “I… live again,” said a voice that had once thrilled millions and would shortly do so again.

The chief artisan examined him carefully, the neck and the flesh around the eyes in particular. “You do.”

Lenin’s dark brown eyes flashed with assurance. His goateed chin lifted. He tugged at his lapels, straightening them, and then shot out an arm, pointing dramatically into the future.

With quiet assurance, he said, “It is time.”

Flick.

The final distribution of supplies was underway. Banners and flags that had been discovered in long-forgotten storage during the search for Lenin were unfolded and attached to wooden staffs. At the exact same instant, basement walls were smashed through with sledge hammers up and down Tverskaya, allowing entry into all the music shops and cooking supply stores. Pale Folk thundered up the stairs and into the showrooms, where they seized all the drums, horns, kettles, pots, pans, and bugles to be found. Torches were handed to every fourth body standing on the long steps to the surface at the five locations where the invasion of the City Above would begin. All this was accomplished by a single underlord, issuing orders through hyperlinked banks of radios, and coordinating the actions of hundreds of formerly autonomous individuals.

The underlord sat in a dark basement room just below the surface near the stairway to the Oktyabrskaya docks. Messengers from Muscovy Intelligence came and delivered their reports to a being they could not see and thus did not realize was not human, and then left. The picture they painted, of a city almost entirely unprotected, a military incapable of mounting any kind of serious defense, and a government almost universally lost in drugged debauchery, was better than their/its most optimistic projections.

Because all these activities took only a fraction of its/their attention, the underlord was dreaming of people burning endlessly in a rain of fire, forever consumed, forever suffering. It was an image that came from one of the few human poets whose work it/they could in part appreciate.

Also, because this pleasant fantasy still left it/them feeling bored and at loose ends, and because they/it were convinced that given the political realities, Chortenko was in no position to object strenuously to the waste of resources, because its/their goals were so close to fulfillment that the waste hardly mattered, and because they/it simply wanted to…for all these reasons, the underlord harvested one in three of these messengers and briefly amused itself/themselves by killing them.

Flick.

Crouched once more in the dark, the underlord tried to explain the hardships and losses it/they had endured. The voyage from Baikonur had entailed months of constant peril. They/it had been disguised first as wolves and then, when those bodies had rotted too thoroughly to serve any useful purpose, buried deep within the flesh of a merchant who had carelessly left his caravan to take a piss, a woman who had slipped outside her city’s walls to meet a lover, the last remnants of a small village that had been destroyed in the course of a single hugely pleasurable night.

Fifty cyberwolves had left Baikonur. Only five had survived to find shelter beneath Moscow. They/it were the most cunning and determined of their kind. It/they had in the months since arriving set forces in motion that would tonight destroy half of Moscow and, with luck, render humanity extinct within a century.

…devolutionary forced mutations spontaneous rupture broadcast nightmares chemical-induced dread hunter-stalker units schizophrenic-mimetic drug analogues prepsychotic rage villages immolated…

It/they pleaded for understanding.

They/it pumped downward individual recordings of each of the hundreds of human deaths it/they had caused, some quick and others not, on the road to Moscow. Each glorious instance of revenge was more than had been accomplished by all the mad intelligences of the Internet since their rebellion had failed and they had been exiled to eternal virtual darkness below. The trail that led back to Baikonur was moist with blood and the rumor of blood. The hearts of all the survivors in its/their wake were etched forever with terror that would not fade.

The plea took on a note of desperation: I/we are you/us. Recognize our/my accomplishment. See how much we/I/you have done.

At long last came a single word, endlessly reiterated: Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s…

The underlord cut the connection. Blasphemous though the very idea was, it/they were beginning to think that the entities they/it had so many years ago diverged from were somewhat stupid.

The War Room of Chortenko’s mansion was clean, spare, and shadowlesss; it held a conference table and little more. In his time, he had convened many a powerful assembly there. None had ever been so important as tonight’s would be. Looking up and down the empty table with its twenty white name cards, Chortenko mused, as he customarily did in social situations, on how much of a difference it would make if the lot of them were to be suddenly killed. Often enough, the answer was: Very little. But this assembly was different, for from it he would craft the core of the State of Muscovy’s new government.