Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  “That would be really nice of you.” Eliasz feigned uncertainty as he fiddled with his chopsticks.

  “Yeah, you should come.” Gertrude confirmed the invitation as if they had already been persuaded. “Sound good to you, Xiu?”

  Paladin said nothing.

  A group of five students led Eliasz and Paladin through streets illuminated by the long-wavelength light of a late-night sunset. At last they reached an arched sign covered in Inuktitut and English words welcoming them to University of the Arctic’s Iqaluit campus. It was the region’s wealthiest university and a feeder school for dozens of top biocoms and pharma corps. At this time of night it was fairly quiet, although as they neared the science buildings, Paladin picked out more and more windows radiating visible light.

  Eliasz was describing his imaginary job at PharmPraxis with what sounded like genuine bitterness. The story was calculated to bring out sympathies in his audience. “I took a job in chem admin right out of university,” he said, “and they put me on a drug that died in trials. Took a year, but they wound up sacking my whole team. If your drug doesn’t get to market, well…” Eliasz trailed off.

  “What do you work on?” asked Gertrude. “There are tons of jobs for chem admins around here.”

  “I design algorithms that look for interesting emergent properties in organic molecules.”

  A tall man with cheap glasses was walking in step with them. “Not my area, but I bet we could find you something, Ivan,” he said. His accent definitely wasn’t local—Paladin did a quick comparison between the tall man’s vowels and those of four hundred other regional accents in English. The best approximation was northern Federation, where Paladin and Eliasz had just been stationed.

  “Thanks, um…”

  “Youssef,” said the man. He easily met Paladin’s face sensors with his eyes; the bot and the man were the same height. “Pleased to meet you both,” he added.

  They reached the Life Sciences complex and Gertrude dug through her pocket for what turned out to be a rather archaic password management device. She waved the tiny lump of plastic in the air when they reached an ash cement building, and the building’s network replied by opening a set of double doors.

  Paladin noticed Youssef glance quickly at the sensor-flecked paint of the interior hallway, reflecting the gang of gradually sobering students dully as they passed through and began shedding their jackets. Gertrude, Youssef, and their friends worked on a theoretical and underfunded subject related to protein mutation and aesthetic decision-making. Their lab was in the basement, its equipment at least two generations behind current models. The walls were covered in signs and stickers stolen from other labs. “DANGER! DO NOT TOUCH THE MAGNET!” read a particularly large one over their sequencing cluster. “LIVE CRICKETS” read another.

  “Here we are,” Gertrude said, gesturing for light. “Xiu, there’s our printer. The network is called PolarBunnies and it’s open.” She gestured again. “Help yourself to whatever.” Paladin walked carefully around several tables laden with cooling units and test tubes. He printed up some chips while Eliasz made small talk.

  As the printer spat out nanoscopic threads, Eliasz managed to bring the conversation back around to those goddamn patent hoarders whom he really had a mind to fuck over somehow.

  Youssef was tense with excitement, his body radiating identification with Eliasz’ tale. It was obvious he was about to speak several seconds before he did. “So how would you get back at a company like PharmPraxis for what they did?” Youssef asked. “I mean, how far would you be willing to go?”

  “You really want to know? This doesn’t go outside this lab, OK?” Eliasz asked. Everybody was staring at him.

  “Absolutely,” enthused Gertrude.

  “I’ve got the formula for this patent-pending drug they’re in trials with right now. If somebody else brings it to market first, they’d never be able to claim prior art, because they based it on a molecule they got gray market from some unlicensed lab in the Brazilian States.” Eliasz paused, then gave his best shaky laugh. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t do anything with it, but I could. I really did take the formula.” He patted his hip pocket as if he’d saved the data in a physical medium and stashed it in his pants.

  Youssef couldn’t take his eyes off the imaginary data in Eliasz’ pants. Paladin was getting weird readings off his brain: The guy was too excited, almost like he was on drugs or suffering a neurological aberration.

  “You should do it,” he blurted out.

  “Shut up, Youssef,” said Gertrude, who was checking a box full of samples with a small mass spectrometer. “That’s a serious fucking crime. Not like reverse engineering some old drug that’s about to go public domain anyway.”

  It was Eliasz’ opening and he took it. “You’ve reverse engineered drugs before?”

  Gertrude snorted. “Barely. He decompiled some Glizmer freshman year and sold copies of it to half our dorm.”

  “That Glizmer worked.” Youssef looked angry. “And you know it’s more than that, Gertrude.”

  Paladin watched anxiety push blood into Gertrude’s cheeks. Youssef’s lips tensed up. The tall man with the North Federation accent was taking a serious risk talking about this in front of a stranger. Paladin was impressed: Eliasz knew how to make people trust him. Would Youssef spill some serious intel? Apparently, yes.

  “If you’re serious, you should meet some friends of mine whose labs aren’t funded by Big Pharma.” Youssef’s voice broke on the word “friends,” and Paladin realized the man’s body was still passing through the final stages of puberty.

  Gertrude broke in, her heart rate elevated. “You know, Youssef, not everybody wants to break the law to prove a point.”

  Eliasz shrugged like he hadn’t noticed any tension. “I don’t have anything against meeting new people,” he said to Youssef.

  JULY 6, 2144

  The next day, Paladin and Eliasz returned to the Lex in the late afternoon, long enough before happy hour that the crowds were thin. A few groups of students were quietly studying on their goggles, and a lonely farmer was nursing vodkas at the bar. Across the table from Eliasz and Paladin, his face slightly obscured by soup steam, was Youssef’s friend Thomasie, who wasn’t funded by Big Pharma.

  He certainly looked the part. Thomasie’s black hair was gelled into a stylish tangle around his face, and certain fibers of his shirt glowed with the faded logo of a Freeculture org that had died in the 2120s. It was hard to say if he’d kept the shirt for twenty-five years, or simply bought an item artfully frayed and faded to look authentic. Thomasie had a way of leaning in when he talked, as if everything he was saying brought you into his confidence. Unlike Youssef, he had control of his flush responses and heart rate. It was hard to tell when he was lying, though the very evenness of his readings gave something away. He was masking emotional reactions to everything around him.

  “Youssef tells me you worked at PharmPraxis and are looking for something new.” Thomasie looked straight at Eliasz, then glanced at Paladin. “That’s a pretty sweet bot you got on a chem admin’s salary.”

  “I inherited him from my mother when she died.”

  “I see. So what exactly is it that you did at PharmPraxis?”

  “Algorithms.”

  “And you had access to patent-pending designs, eh?”

  Eliasz and Paladin stared at Thomasie and said nothing.

  “Youssef told me you were interested in talking to me about some designs you saw.”

  Silence was a good way to get additional information, to make the other person commit to the transaction first.

  Thomasie tapped his index finger on the table slowly and continued. “My colleagues and I would be interested in taking a look at any designs you might have. We pay for good IP, no questions asked.”

  At last Eliasz prepared to speak. Paladin measured the seconds it took for him to ramp up, heard him stabilize his breathing and blood pressure.

  “I have the file on me. W
hen do you want to see it?”

  Paladin noticed that Eliasz failed to talk specific prices. He was trying to sound like a newbie at this. Perfect for a disgruntled ex-employee.

  Thomasie caught the naïveté, and relaxed. He figured he had this one well in hand.

  “We can go right now. My car is outside.”

  * * *

  They drove fifty kilometers outside city limits, the solar farms of South Baffin whipping past like vast regattas of smooth black sails. Youssef was drumming on the window and ignoring Paladin while Thomasie and Eliasz sat up front and talked.

  After turning on several dirt roads, they reached a newish farm in the middle of a solar field. Its main building was an arched wall of thick glass set deeply into a grassy hill that rose like a green bubble out of a sea of dark, boxy solar antennas dribbling hydrocarbons into underground tanks. A woman stepped out of a door cut into the glass wall, releasing a blast of sound. Someone inside was listening to a loud news feed. The woman’s arms tensed as two overclocked matter cutters powered up beneath her sleeves.

  Based on the pattern broadcast by Youssef’s eye movements as he scanned the area, Paladin considered it statistically unlikely that he’d been here before. This would be a test for Youssef as well as Eliasz.

  “Thomasie.” Though the woman greeted Thomasie, she continued to block the door as they approached. Paladin noticed the driveway was fabbed to be impossibly smooth and warm; suspended inside its foam were long strands of nearly invisible wire that would radiate a gentle heat when the weather turned.

  “Hi, Roopa.”

  As Thomasie led them past Roopa’s barely concealed weapons, she gave Paladin a long look, eyes lingering on his shields. The room beyond her was illuminated by carefully reflected natural light, and trees grew out of the moss-covered floor. Nearly every piece of furniture was a living bonsai. One red light from a small industrial fabber blinked in the corner, exchanging data in a system encrypted so well that Paladin could only access information about the house climate. Somebody had burned serious money on this little farmhouse.

  Thomasie led them to a round room with a conference table that grew out of the floor, its surface a carefully engineered weave of branches. The ceiling was perforated by a spiral staircase whose fabbed metal skeleton clanged and shook as three people came down to meet them. Like Thomasie, the others wore their expensive clothing carefully disheveled.

  Iqaluit was a big town, but it wasn’t that big. If Jack was smuggling pharma through here, she was probably dealing with these guys in some way. They might be outsourcing the production of black pharma to her Federation labs, or selling her wares through their connections in the north. Even if they weren’t directly doing business, these people surely existed at the center of a local social network that brought together anti-patent radicals, pirates, and millions of people desperate for cheap drugs. If he and Eliasz could gain access to that network, they’d find Jack.

  “Call me Bluebeard,” said one of the people who had just descended the stairs. She was wearing blue waterproofs and no shoes. Her dark hair fell in a wavy tangle across her face, nearly obscuring the fabric sensor patch that covered her left eye socket. From the tension in her shoulders and back, it was clear she’d been working with her hands for several hours—though whether it was at a gesture console or in the fields, Paladin couldn’t tell. “These are my colleagues, Blackbeard and Redbeard.” She pointed at two pale-skinned men whose clothing did not match their nyms. “Welcome to Arcata Solar Farm. Let’s all sit down.” Bluebeard’s tone was neither welcoming nor inviting. She had just issued an order.

  Redbeard cooked espresso using an antique steam-driven machine while Bluebeard stared at the data Eliasz was beaming to her eyepatch. It was the formula for an attention stabilizer that the IPC had acquired for just this purpose, after it failed out of clinical trials. At least 50 percent of the people taking it had developed debilitating migraines that lasted for days. But there was no way to know that from the formula; it had all the appearance of legitimacy.

  “You say you got this from PharmPraxis?” Bluebeard asked, her single-eyed gaze taking in both Eliasz and Paladin, who sat at the bonsai table across from her.

  Eliasz nodded.

  Trying to maintain the illusion that he was mentally damaged, Paladin forced himself to train his front visual sensors on some water molecules traveling through the tree whose body comprised the table, leaning his head close to the grain and microscoping in on it. His other sensors were taking in as much data as he could without tripping any alarms.

  “This is very interesting,” she continued, flicking the data to a holo display in front of Blackbeard. “I’m going to have to ask you to stay here while we do more analysis.” She sent a burst of network traffic to Roopa, who appeared several seconds later at the door to the conference room. “Make yourself comfortable,” Bluebeard said to Eliasz. “You can use our gaming system if you want.”

  Eliasz gripped Paladin’s arm. “That’s fine, but the bot stays with me.”

  Bluebeard shrugged. “No problem.” Then she turned to the tall Federation man who hated Big Pharma. “Youssef, you come with us.”

  Roopa loomed above them. When Paladin tuned her perimeter network it was just another unreadable haze of encrypted traffic.

  5

  GOOD SCIENCE

  JULY 5, 2144

  “That was seriously fucked up,” Threezed said enthusiastically.

  Jack had taken the sub deep below the surface. The portals in the control room looked like dark ellipses from an enormous text message. Jack and Threezed were watching Taxi Driver, a mid-twentieth-century movie about a man who goes insane and tries to free an indentured sex worker in New York City.

  Threezed scratched his face, where the last of his scabs was flaking off. He’d cleaned up pretty well after that first night when they’d introduced themselves. He refused to talk about what had happened, and Jack didn’t push. The fact was, she didn’t want to think about what she’d done to Threezed’s client any more than he did.

  After sleeping for nearly twenty-four hours, Threezed had awakened with a sardonic personality and the kind of youthful energy that every Vive addict was chasing. First he offered to tune her engines—he claimed he knew his way around sub mechanics—but Jack wasn’t prepared to have some stranger without a past going that deep into her systems. She was perfectly willing to put him on homemaker duty, though. He couldn’t do much damage scrubbing.

  When he wasn’t tidying something, Threezed focused his attention on the mobile she’d loaned him. His only implant was an indenture tracker, so he’d been relying on these flimsy, foldable devices his whole life. Mobiles weren’t exactly durable, or powerful. But they could access plenty of bandwidth from the free mote network, whose microscopic data relays were sprayed into the atmosphere by drones in most of the economic coalitions.

  Jack kept the free motes in range stunned with a signal jammer, and she didn’t want Threezed using the sub’s comms, so he was left with nothing to do but stream her locally stored movies from the motes in her ventilation system. He started with movies from the twenty-first century, where the English accents were easier to understand and the resolution was pretty good. Then he moved on to silent movies of the 1910s and ’20s, their worlds rendered in abstract grayscale, like engineering diagrams. He said it was easier for him to read the English intertitles than understand the weird accents in movies from later decades.

  Tonight, however, he was pretty impressed with this full-color Martin Scorsese movie from 1976. They watched it with subtitles. “It’s strange how they were dealing with the same shit we are,” Threezed remarked, picking at a scab on his knee. “You always hear about how people were so diseased back then, and everything was really slow and backward, but I’ve totally known guys like that. I mean, I’ve totally known cab drivers like that.”

  “Yeah, I guess people don’t change that much from century to century.” Jack shrugged. Now that the movie h
ad him in a decent mood, it seemed like a good time to bring up their next move. “So, we’re going to get to Inuvik in a day or two,” she said. “I can drop you off there.” A bustling port town on the Arctic coast, Inuvik was the perfect place to get lost. Threezed could catch a fast train from there to dozens of big cities in the Zone.

  “Inuvik? What am I supposed to do there?”

  “Don’t worry—I’ll give you some credits to get you on your feet.”

  “But how am I supposed to get on my feet when I’ve got this chip in my arm?” Threezed passed his hand over the fleshy part of his left upper arm, where the indenture tag was implanted.

  “I killed your tag a couple of days ago. Nobody will be able to tell it’s there.”

  “You killed my tag … without telling me?”

  “It’s not safe for you to be trackable after what happened. Did you really want to be broadcasting your identity to the world?”

  “Well, I…” Threezed trailed off. His hand tightened over the place where his dead tag would probably live forever in its teardrop of surgical glass.

  Jack was about to suggest that he catch a train to Vancouver when her perimeter fizzed under the skin of her right hand. She had a message.

  “Sorry … I’ve got to check this.” Jack shot Threezed an apologetic look. She crossed the bridge to her chair near the control consoles and gestured up a window that only she could see. Its dark rectangle perfectly blocked the angry expression that was slowly distorting the shapes of Threezed’s mouth and eyes.

  One of her search programs had found an uptick in news about drug-related accidents and crimes.

  It seemed that the homework fiend was part of a small epidemic of workaholism. First came an elderly man who refused to stop mowing his lawn. Doctors restrained him, but he kept roaring and twitching, demanding the mower controls. Next was a woman who only wanted to walk dogs. There was a city worker who had unleashed a fleet of autonomous road foamers with orders to spray new sidewalks in seemingly random locations downtown, during rush hour. The vehicles injured several people, cementing their feet and legs, before her supervisor was able to shut down the fleet. Then came a nanny, weeping and incoherent, nearly arrested after spending ten hours in the park just to push children on the swings.