Shine (27 page)

"You're shitting me. You bred this thing to
make music
?"

"He's got a way to go, obviously. And it doesn't stop with the fingers. You ever seen a motor homunculus, Fox? Map of human brain function, according to how much volume's given over to a specific task. Looks like a little man with huge fucking hands. Just operating a pair of hands takes up
way
more cells than you'd think. Well, there's no point giving a dinosaur four fingers and an opposable thumb if you don't give him the mental wiring to go along with it. So we're in there right from the start, manipulating brain development all the way, messing with the architecture when everything's nice and plastic. This baby's two weeks old and he already has thirty per cent more neural volume than a normal Rex. Starting to see some real hierarchical layering of brain modules, too. Your average lizard has a brain like a peanut, but this one's already got something like a mammalian limbic system. Hell, I'd be scared if it wasn't me doing this."

"And for such a noble purpose."

"Don't get all moral on me, buddy." Jake lowered the T-Rex back into the incubator. "We eat these things. We pay to go out into a big park and shoot them with anti-tank guns. I'm giving them the chance to
rock
. Is that so very wrong?"

"I guess it depends on how much choice the dinosaur has in the matter."

"When you force a five year old kid to take piano lessons, does the kid have a choice?"

"That's different."

"Yeah, because it's cruel and unusual to force someone to play the piano. I agree. But electric guitar? That's liberation, my friend. That's like handing someone the keys to the cosmos."

"It's a goddamned
reptile
, Jake."

"Right. And how is that different to making corpses or giant robots play music?"

He had me there, and from the look of quiet self-satisfaction on his face, he knew it.

"OK. I accept that you have a baby dinosaur that could, theoretically, play the guitar, if anyone made a guitar that small. But that's not the same thing as actually playing it. What are you going to do, just sit around and wait?"

"We train it," Jake said. "Just like training a dog to do tricks. Slowly, one element at a time. Little rewards. Building up the repertoire a part at a time. It doesn't need to understand music. It just needs to make a sequence of noises. You think we can't do this?"

"I'd need persuasion."

"You'll get it. Dinosaurs live for meat. It doesn't have to understand what it's doing, it just has to associate the one with the other. And this is heavy metal we're talking about here, not Rachmaninov. Not a big ask, even for a reptile."

"You've thought it all through."

"You think Gladius were going to get onboard if there wasn't a business plan? This is going to work, Fox. It's going to work and you're going to be a part of it. All the way down the line. We're going to promote a rock tour with an actual carnivorous theropod dinosaur on lead guitar and vocal."

I couldn't deny that Jake's enthusiasm was infectious. Always had been. But when I'd needed him--when I'd taken a big idea to him--he hadn't been there for me. Even now the pain of that betrayal still stung, and I wasn't sure I was ready to get over it that quickly.

"Maybe some other time," I said, shaking my head with a regretful smile. "After all, you've got a ways to go yet. I don't know how fast these things grow, but no one's going to be blown away by a knee-high rockstar, even if they are carnivorous. Maybe when Derek's a bit older, and he can actually play something"

Jake gave me an odd glance. "Dude, we need to clear something up. You haven't met Derek yet."

I looked into his eyes. "Then who--what--was that?"

"Part of the next wave. Same with the eggs. Aren't enough venues in the world for all the people who'll want to see Derek. So we make more Dereks. Until we hit market saturation."

"And you think Derek'll be cool with that?"

"It's not like Derek's ever going to have an opinion on the matter." Jake looked me up and down, maybe trying to judge exactly how much I could be trusted. "So: you ready to meet the big guy?"

I gave a noncommittal shrug. "Guess I've come this far."

Jake stopped at another white cabinet--this one turned out to be a fridge--and came out with a thigh-sized haunch of freezer-wrapped meat. "Carry this for me, buddy," he said.

I took the meat, cradling it in both arms.We went out of the laboratory by a different door, then walked down a short corridor until a second door opened out into a dark, echoey space, like the inside of an aircraft hangar.

"Wait here,' Jake said, and his footsteps veered off to one side. I heard a clunk, as of some huge trip-switch being thrown and, one by one, huge banks of suspended ceiling lights came on. Even as I had to squint against the glare, I mentally applauded the way Jake was managing the presentation. He'd known I was coming, so he could easily have left those lights on until now. But the impressario in him wouldn't be denied. These weren't simple spotlights, either. They were computer controlled, steerable, variable-colour stage lights. Jake had a whole routine programmed in. The lights gimballed and gyred, throwing shifting patterns across the walls, floor and ceiling of the vast space. Yet until the last moment they studiously avoided illuminating the thing in the middle. When they fell on it, I could almost imagine the crowd going apeshit.

This was how the show would open. This was how the show
had
to open.

I was looking at Derek.

Derek was in a bright yellow cage, about the size of four shipping containers arranged into a block. I was glad about the cage; glad too that it appeared to have been engineered to generous tolerances. Electrical cables snaked into it, thick as pythons. Orange strobe beacons had just come on, rotating on the top of the cage, for no obvious reason other than that it looked cool. And there was Derek, standing up in the middle.

I'd had a toy T-rex as a kid, handed down from my dad, and some part of me still expected them to look the way that toy did: standing with the body more or less vertical, forming a tripod with two legs and the tail taking the creature's weight. That wasn't how they worked, though. Derek--like every resurrected Rex that ever lived--stood with his body arranged in a horizontal line, with the tail counterbalancing the weight of his forebody and skull. Somehow that just never looked
right
to me. And the two little arms looked even more pathetic and useless in this posture.

Derek wasn't the same luminous green as the baby dinosaur; he was a more plausible dark muddy brown. I guess at some point Jake had decided that colouration wasn't spectacular enough for the second batch. In fact, apart from the human hands on the ends of his forearms, he didn't look in any way remarkable. Just another meat-eating dinosaur.

Derek was awake, too. He was looking at us and I could hear the rasp of his breathing, like an industrial bellows being worked very slowly. In proportion to his body, his eyes were much smaller than the baby's. Not so cute now. This was an instinctive predator, big enough to swallow me whole.

"He's pretty big."

"Actually he's pretty small," Jake said. "Rex development isn't a straight line thing. They grow fast from babies then stick at two tonnes until they're about fourteen. Then they get another growth spurt which can take them anywhere up to six tonnes. Of course with the newer Dereks we should be able to dial things up a bit." Then he took the haunch off me and whispered: "Watch the neural display. We've had implants in him since he hatched--we're gonna work the imaging into the live show." He raised his voice. "Hey! Meat-brain! Look what I got for you!"

Derek was visibly interested in the haunch. His head tracked it as Jake walked up to the cage, the little yellow-tinged eyes moving with the smooth vigilance of surveillance cameras. Saliva dribbled between his teeth. The forearms made a futile grabbing gesture, as if Derek somehow didn't fully comprehend that there was a cage and a quite a lot of air between the haunch and him.

I watched a pink blotch form on the neural display. "Hunter-killer mode kicking in," Jake said, grinning. "He's like a heat-seaking missile now. Nothing getting between him and his dinner except maybe another Rex."

"Maybe you should feed him more often."

"There's no such thing as a sated Rex. And I do feed him. How else do you think I get him to work for me?" He raised his voice again. "You know the deal, ain't no free lunches around here." He put the haunch down on the ground, then reached for something that I hadn't seen until then: a remote control unit hanging down from above. It was a grubby yellow box with a set of mushroom-sized buttons on it. Jake depressed one of the buttons and an overhead gantry clanked and whined into view, sliding along rails suspended from the ceiling. The gantry positioned itself over the cage, then began to lower its cargo. It was a flame red Gibson Flying V guitar, bolted to a telescopic frame from the rear of the body. The guitar came down from a gap in the top of the cage (too small for Derek to have escaped through), lowered until it was in front of him, then telescoped back until the guitar was suspended within reach of his arms. At the same time, a microphone had come down to just in front of Derek's mouth.

Jake released the remote control unit, then picked up the haunch again. "OK, buddy, you know what you need to do." Then he pressed one of the other buttons and fast, riffing heavy metal blasted out of speakers somewhere in the room. It wasn't stadium-level wattage--that, presumably, would have drawn too much attention--but it was still loud enough to impress, to give me some idea of how the show would work in reality.

And then Derek started playing. His hands were on that guitar, and they were making--well, you couldn't call it music, in the abolutely strict sense of the word. It was noise, basically. Squealing, agonising bursts of sheet-metal sound, none of which bore any kind of harmonic relationship to what had gone before. But the one thing I couldn't deny was that it
worked
. With the backing tape, and the light show, and the fact that this was an actual dinosaur playing a Gibson Flying V guitar, it was possible to make certain allowances.

Hell, I didn't even have to try. I was smitten. And that was before Derek opened his mouth and started singing. Actually it would be best described as a sustained, blood-curdling roar--but that was exactly what it needed to be, and it counterpointed the guitar perfectly. Different parts of his brain were lighting up now; the hunter-killer region was much less bright than it had been before he started playing.

And there was, now that I paid attention to it, more than just migraine-inducing squeals of guitar and monstrous interludes of gutteral roaring. Derek might not be playing specific notes and chords, and his vocalisations were no more structured or musical, but they were timed to fit in around the rest of the music, the bass runs and drum fills and second guitar solos. It wasn't completely random. Derek was playing along, judging his contributions, letting the rest of the band share the limelight.

As a front man, I'd seen a lot worse.

"OK, that'll do," Jake said, killing the music, pressing another button to retract the guitar and mike. "Way to go, Derek. Way to fucking go."

"He's good."

"Does that constitute your seal of approval?"

"He can rock. I'll give him that."

"He doesn't just rock," Jake said. "He is rock." Then he turned around and smiled. "So. Buddy. We back in business, or what?"

Yeah, I thought to myself. I guess we're back in business.

I'm making my way back down the Antonov, thinking of the long hours of subsonic cruising ahead. I pass Jake's desk again, and this time something on the ancient, battered, desert-sand camouflaged ex-military surplus laptop catches my eye.

The laptop's running some generic movie editing software, and in one of the windows is a freezeframe from tonight's show. Beneath the freezeframe is a timeline and soundtrack. I click the cursor and slide it back along to the left, watching Derek run in reverse on the window, hands whipping around the guitar in manic thrash overdrive. The set list is the same from night to night, so I know exactly when Extinction Event would have kicked in. I don't feel guilty about missing it--someone had to take care of the Budokan accounts--but now that we're airborne and there's time to kill, I'm at least semi-curious about hearing it properly. What exactly was so great about it tonight, compared to the previous show, and the one before that?

Why was it that Jake didn't want to hear that Extinction Event was even more awesome than usual?

I need earphones to hear anything over the six-engine drone of the Antonov. I'm reaching for them when Jake looms behind me.

"Thought you were checking on the big guy."

I look around. He's still got the bottle of JD with him.

"I was. Told him I heard he'd done a good job. Now I'm just checking it out for myself. If I can just find the point where..."

He reaches over and takes my hand off the laptop. "You don't need to. Got it all cued up already."

He hands me the JD, punches a few keys--they're so worn the numbers and letters are barely visible now--and up pops Derek again. From the purple-red tinge of the lighting, and the back-projection footage of crashing asteroids and erupting volcanos, I know we've hit the start of Extinction Event.

"So what's the big deal?" I ask.

"Put the phones on."

I put the phones on. Jake spools through the track until we hit the bridge between the second and third verse. He lets the movie play on at normal speed. Drums pounding like jackhammers, bass so heavy it could shatter bone, and then Derek lets rip on the Flying V, unleashing a squall of demented sound, arching his neck back as he plays, eyes narrowing to venomous slits, and then belching out a humungous, larynx-shredding roar of pure theropod rage.

We go into the third verse. Jake hits pause.

"So you see," he says.

I pull out the phones. "I'm not sure I do."

"Then you need to go back and listen to the previous performance. And the one before that. And every goddamned rendition of that song he's ever done before tonight."