Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  “Do you want some water?” she asked. “You look like you could use it.”

  He scrambled up suddenly, grabbing the edge of a crate to keep his balance, and she realized he was actually rather tall—taller than she was, though so malnourished that his height made him seem even more fragile. If things got dicey, it would be no trouble for her to overpower him, snap his neck, and toss him into the airlock.

  “Please,” he said. “And food, too, if you can spare it.” His English accent was pure middle-class Asian Union, which wasn’t exactly what you expected from a kid with a brand on his neck.

  “Come on, then.” Jack touched his shirtsleeve lightly, careful not to hit exposed skin. She led him down the spiral staircase from the control room into the wet lab/kitchen, where she booted up the cooker and gestured for broth and bread. He sagged into her chair at the tiny table, the wings of his shoulder blades showing through his thin shirt as he hunched over and stared at his hands.

  She put the food in front of him. “I’m Jack.”

  He ignored her, taking a sip from the bowl, then dunking the bread in and biting off a chunk. Jack leaned on the counter and watched, wondering if the kid even had a name. Families with nothing would sometimes sell their toddlers to indenture schools, where managers trained them to be submissive just like they were programming a bot. At least bots could earn their way out of ownership after a while, be upgraded, and go fully autonomous. Humans might earn their way out, but there was no autonomy key that could undo a childhood like that.

  “I’m Threezed,” he responded finally, breaking Jack out of her spaced reverie. He’d swallowed about half the broth and his face didn’t look quite as blank as it had before. It was hard to miss the fact that the last two numbers branded onto his neck were three and zed. That scar was his name, too. Jack folded her arms over the sudden stab of sympathy in her chest.

  “Nice to meet you, Threezed.”

  4

  IQALUIT

  JULY 4, 2144

  Their bodies would have to work together, even when they were far apart. That was Eliasz’ rationale for climbing sand dunes with Paladin for two days while the IPC liaison drank endless cups of sweet milk tea and gestured in mute frustration, swiping through all the messages materializing from the projectors on his glasses.

  Doing exercises alongside someone else was a new sensation for Paladin. He had always been in radio contact with Lee or another botadmin, but their voices were more like programs that guided him from inside his instincts. His botadmins never stopped, looked at him, and talked about how they missed the weather in Europe.

  “I hate the weather here,” Eliasz muttered, crouching down at the top of a dune. He glanced at Paladin and then settled into a sitting position. It was 0800, and Paladin was testing his reflexes in sand again, learning to keep the bulk of his carapace low and his sensors moving across a wide spectrum. He was in that position now, squirming on his elbows and knees, listening to Eliasz talk and tuning the public botnet.

  You are all. I am Raptor. Here comes my data. I am leaving on a mission at 1300. Going to Congo for a plague intervention. Wish me luck. Back in 48 hours.

  “I’d rather have cold and wet, like in the central Eurozone,” Eliasz continued, pushing sweat from his forehead into his hair with an outspread hand. “People say they can’t stand Warsaw because it’s so cold, but I guess you always love the weather where you grew up—even if you never want to go back. Where are you from, Paladin?”

  You are all. I am Cldr. Here comes my data. I need three bots to help with weapons cargo drop-off. Location attached.

  Paladin paused in his squirming, his head nearly touching Eliasz’ leg where it rested in red sand. He wasn’t sure what the appropriate answer to that question would be, since he hadn’t really been alive long enough to be from anywhere in particular.

  “I suppose I am from the Kagu Robotics Foundry in Cape Town,” he vocalized.

  “No, no, no,” Eliasz shook his head violently, then rapped his knuckles on Paladin’s lower back. “I mean, where are you from originally? Where is your brain from?”

  Under its layers of abdominal shielding, Paladin’s biobrain floated in a thick mixture of shock gel and cerebrospinal fluid. There was a fat interface wire between it and the physical substrate of his mind. The brain took care of his facial recognition functions, assigning each person he met a unique identifier based on the edges and shadows of their expressions, but its file system was largely incompatible with his own. He used it mostly like a graphics processor. He certainly had no idea where it was from, beyond the fact that a dead human working for the Federation military had donated it.

  Eliasz spoke again. “Isn’t it important to you to know who you really are? Why you feel what you do?”

  None of Paladin’s emotions or ethics were processed in his human brain. But then Eliasz looked right into the sensor array mounted on Paladin’s face, his eyes dark and attentive. Suddenly Paladin didn’t want to explain his file system architecture anymore.

  “I don’t know where my brain is from,” he replied simply. “I can’t access its memories.”

  He could sense the tension mounting in Eliasz’ body. Electricity skipped across the surface of his skin. Over the thousands of seconds they’d spent together, Paladin had noticed that Eliasz tended to vacillate between these intense, emotional conversations and total silence.

  “They should let you remember,” he growled. “They should let you.”

  If Eliasz couldn’t get that wish granted, at least he did get something else he wanted. It came in the form of an incoming message for Paladin, part of a securely encrypted session.

  You are Paladin. I am Fang. Remember the secure session we created before? Let’s use it again. Here comes my data. Final mission meeting is at 0900. Bring Eliasz.

  I agree to use our already-established secure session. I am Paladin. Where are we going?

  Balmy shores of the Arctic, looks like. You’ll be tracking down some of Jack’s connections there, trying to figure out where she hides her stash.

  I am prepared to meet you in 30 minutes with Eliasz. This is the end of my data.

  The two bots closed out their session after an exchange of map coordinates, which were for the same room they had used over the past two days for mission planning.

  “Good news,” Paladin vocalized to Eliasz, who was still staring at him. “We are about to leave for the northern Free Trade Zone, where the temperature is much lower.” Eliasz said nothing, but his heart rate had slowed down. The two set off across the dune tops to find a portal and receive their orders.

  Though the mission was fairly small-scale and routine, it held a special significance for Paladin because it meant he’d crossed over from development to deployment. Today marked the first day of his indenture to the African Federation. International law mandated that his service could last no more than ten years, a period deemed more than enough time to make the Federation’s investment in creating a new life-form worthwhile.

  Though he was just beginning his term of indenture, Paladin had heard enough around the factory to know that the Federation interpreted the law fairly liberally. He might be waiting to receive his autonomy key for twenty years. More likely, he would die before ever getting it. But he wanted to survive—that urge was part of his programming. It was what defined him as human-equivalent and therefore deserving autonomy. The bot had no choice but to fight for his life. Still, to Paladin, it didn’t feel like a lack of choice. It felt like hope.

  JULY 5, 2144

  The bulbous, fisted forearms of the Baffin Island skyline came into view from kilometers away as the jet shot over the Arctic Sea. Even at this distance, Paladin could see the movement of thousands of wind turbines, making the outlines of each building shimmer slightly. Soon, he could pick out the chemical signature of the lush farms that rose in tiered spirals around each complex. Northern cities ringing the Arctic spent all summer absorbing as much solar as possible, taking their fa
rms through two crop seasons while the days were long. The whole city was deep into growing season.

  By the time they’d passed over the outer islands and hit the airspace over Baffin, Eliasz was wide-awake. Paladin heard the change in Eliasz’ breathing and knew he must have ordered a wake-up signal from his perimeter when they were arriving at Iqaluit. Now the city was sprawled beneath them, its domes a glittering crust at the vertex of an acutely angled bay that cut deeply into the huge island.

  “Iqaluit is an ugly city,” Eliasz grunted, joining Paladin at the window. “Its domes are modeled on the ones in Vegas—you know it?”

  “A domed city in the western desert of the Free Trade Zone,” Paladin vocalized.

  “It’s the center of the human resources industry. A lot of bad guys there. Black-market slave shit. People there don’t value human life so they build with this cheap crap that lets in way too much ultraviolet. Iqaluit looks exactly the same—except a lot cleaner and newer.”

  Paladin wondered if Eliasz was opposed to the system of indenture. There were entire text repositories that focused on eliminating the indenture of humans. Their pundits argued that humans should not be owned like bots because nobody paid to make them. Bots, who cost money, required a period of indenture to make their manufacture worthwhile. No such incentive was required for humans to make other humans.

  Regardless of what pundits thought, the vast majority of cities and economic zones had some system of human indenture. And Vegas was where the humans sold themselves. Its domed complexes were almost entirely devoted to processing, training, and contracting human resources. Like Vegas, Iqaluit had been built fast; it was all skyscrapers and domes. But a cursory data scan revealed few commonalities between the two cities beyond that.

  “There are very few indentured humans here,” Paladin pointed out.

  “Sure. The bad guys are different, but there are still bad guys,” Eliasz said, his elevated blood pressure appearing to Paladin like a reddish haze around the outline of his body. “The place is crawling with pirates. Everything here is stolen.”

  They skimmed the runway and Eliasz stood up, instinctively touching his forehead, shoulders, and belt to verify his perimeter and its local network of weapons. “I always feel like I’m crossing myself when I do that,” he growled, heart speeding up in agitation. “You know what I mean?”

  “The gestures are similar,” Paladin replied.

  “My father was a true believer,” Eliasz said, his voice so low that only a bot could have heard it. Then, suddenly, his demeanor shifted; the man forced his breathing into a regular rhythm and it was no longer easy to read his emotional state from a distance.

  “Where are we going first, Paladin?” Eliasz grinned, his eyes seeking out the five visual sensors on the robot’s head, set above diagonal planes that framed his face like an abstract version of human cheeks. They had about three dozen possible destinations, including addresses for several alleged associates of Jack’s and a few of her favorite restaurants.

  “We should begin with the closest home addresses, question the people there, and then attempt to corner Jack based on the information they provide. As a last resort, we could monitor the restaurant secfeeds for Jack’s biometrics.”

  Eliasz barked a laugh. “You don’t know much about HUMINT, do you, Paladin?”

  Human intelligence gathering was not a priority during Paladin’s training. When the bot did not respond, Eliasz stopped laughing. “Sorry, buddy. It’s better to start with the restaurants. But first, we need some gear.”

  Near the frayed landing strips of the airfield was a junk shop, its corrugated steel exterior at least a hundred years old. Low and long, it was designed to withstand the weather and retain heat. Inside, molecules associated with cotton fibers, bleach, and fuel floated through Paladin’s sensors. Eliasz talked to a man behind the counter with a cybernetic chest and arms, who started downloading a local map and intel upgrades into Eliasz’ geosystems. Paladin stepped closer and tuned the signal connecting the two men’s devices, decrypting and copying the data to his own memory.

  “This is my partner, Paladin,” Eliasz said suddenly, throwing a warm arm around Paladin’s carapace. His fingers gripped the bot’s shoulder blade where his shields emerged. Paladin could feel each whorl of Eliasz’ prints. He unconsciously mapped them to several databases, most of which were swollen with information noise that hid Eliasz’ real identity. The prints matched a dead professor in Brussels, a small-time entrepreneur in Nairobi, a priest in Warsaw, and an indentured woman who belonged to Monsanto in the Free Trade Zone. There were dozens of other matches, spinning outward into a vast snarl of false social network connections and contradictory government records.

  “Paladin, I’m Yardley,” the man said, extending his fabricated hand to meet Paladin’s.

  “We’re going undercover and I need to look a little less pro,” Eliasz said, glancing at Paladin. “And he needs to look a little less shiny.”

  Ten minutes later, Eliasz had stripped down to the glittering nodes of his perimeter system and was pulling jeans and a cotton shirt over the invisible network of nanowire that connected to the perimeter below his skin. Paladin put his pressure sensors back online experimentally, testing to see where he could still feel the sting of the dents and scratches Yardley and Eliasz had administered.

  “We need to get some information on Jack, and the only way to do that is to look like the kinds of guys who would work with her,” Eliasz said. “You can keep quiet most of the time, but try to make errors once in a while, like your brain is damaged or something.”

  Paladin said nothing as he finished restarting the processes that made up his sensorium.

  “OK,” Eliasz muttered, then went over their story again. “I’m a chem admin who got laid off from PharmPraxis; you’re my indentured assistant. I’m willing to sell some of PharmPraxis’ formulas for the right price. You watch everything, man—do what you’re made for.”

  “I will,” said Paladin. He wanted to please Eliasz. Paladin was sure that wasn’t just some indenture algorithm weighting his decision matrix; it was his true desire.

  The sea winds maintained Iqaluit’s outdoor temperature at a steady twenty degrees Celsius and lifted a hank of Eliasz’ hair as Paladin tread quietly beside him. The sun was low enough on the horizon to signal evening, though it was still bright outside. Arctic summer meant there would be only an hour without sunlight this evening. By then, Eliasz hoped to be feigning drunkenness at the Lex, a noodle-and-beer joint that was one of Jack’s regular hangouts. Footage showed that she met up with some of her local connections there.

  Paladin pushed the doors inward and ducked into a steamy room filled with molecules released by ginger and other crushed spices. He catalogued them for later analysis. You never knew when the distinct chemical signature of a place would turn out to be useful information. Crowded benches bowed under the weight of local fish farmers and students from the university chattering loudly about proteomics. Everybody was flushed from alcohol and bowls of scalding-hot noodle soup that teetered on every scarred and uneven foam table.

  It would be an easy crowd to disappear in, Eliasz subvocalized to Paladin, especially if you looked like a farmer but your politics matched those of the radical students. Paladin accessed an image of Jack he’d stored in memory. She didn’t look exactly like a farmer, but he could see how she might blend if she wore waterproofs.

  They sat down at the edge of a table full of extremely drunk students who were playing some kind of game with their goggles that involved a lot of footage-sharing and shots of Saskatchewan vodka. Eliasz ordered seafood noodles and Paladin made sure his right leg trembled as he hunkered down, as if he were desperately in need of a firmware upgrade. It caught the attention of one of the students right away.

  “Need some help with that?” A jovial woman with dark eyes and bobbed black hair gestured vaguely at his leg. “We’ve got a free botware archive on the university servers.”

  P
aladin said nothing.

  “We haven’t had much money for repairs.” Eliasz shrugged. “I’m just looking for work after the layoffs at PharmPraxis down south.” That caught the attention of more students at the table.

  “More layoffs, eh?” asked one with a prairie lilt in his voice.

  “Damn patent hoarders,” Eliasz said, his voice low. He was taking a risk, trying to suss out whether these students were the kinds of radicals who ran with pirates. Paladin noticed that Eliasz had changed his posture subtly, slouching and pulling his bangs over his eyes in a way that made him seem younger. He could pass for a postgraduate, and it was clear these drunk bio hackers were already responding to him as a peer. Paladin briefly admired this bit of HUMINT artistry, then considered that some of the records associated with Eliasz’ prints placed him at twenty-nine years old. Perhaps those records were accurate, at least in respect to the man’s age.

  “Seriously,” said the woman who had offered Paladin access to her fabbers. “They rake in so much cash from all that IP and then treat their developers and admins like shit. It’s patent-farm bullshit. I’m Gertrude, by the way.”

  “Ivan,” said Eliasz, “and this is my bot Xiu. He’s having a little trouble with his speakers.” Eliasz had picked a nym for Paladin that was more commonly given to women, but gender designations meant very little among bots. Most would respond to whatever pronoun their human admins hailed them with, though some autonomous bots preferred to pick their own pronouns. Regardless, no human would think twice about calling a bot named Xiu “he.” Especially a bot built like Paladin, whose hulking body, with dorsal shields spread wide over his back, took up the space of two large humans.

  “Want me to hook you guys up with some fixes for Xiu?” Gertrude asked. Eliasz pretended to ponder, as he slurped his noodles.

  “These are spicy,” he said, ignoring the fact that several of Gertrude’s friends were now looking at him and Paladin.

  “We’re heading back to the lab after dinner, to check on a few processes we need to run overnight,” said the guy from the prairies.