Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  Unsettled, Jack gestured through a few more news stories. At least five people were dead, mostly from dehydration, and dozens hospitalized. The more she read, the more convinced she was that her reverse-engineered Zacuity was to blame. These reports were just from Calgary, so who knew what was going on in smaller cities like Iqaluit and Yellowknife? There could be dozens more people with these side effects, with far less access to medical help. This was the kind of pharmaceutical disaster she’d vowed to fight against, and now she’d caused one, for the exact same reason the corps did: money. Pharma deprivation death machine, indeed. Digging her nails into the palms of her hands, Jack forced herself to focus. She needed to stop this thing from getting a lot worse.

  But Jack didn’t have much time. Somebody was going to have to pay for those deaths, and a radical anti-patent activist who sold pirated drugs would be high on the IPC’s list of suspects. When Zaxy connected the dots and figured out her role in this shit show, she would be on their hit list. Not because they wanted justice, or even to make an example of her. Jack was the only person alive who knew it was Zaxy’s patented molecular structure for Zacuity that was killing people. The company had to cover up the connection between their new drug and these meltdowns. Killing her was by far the easiest way to do it.

  Threezed chose that moment to amble over, kneel at her feet, and squeeze her knee, his hand warm through the canvas of her coveralls. He looked up at her through the map projection that defined her future, his eyes wide with feigned innocence. The clean fluff of his hair framed the graceful lines of his face and neck, making him look like a yaoi character. “I’d like to repay you for what you’ve done for me,” he murmured.

  Threezed was a practiced flirt. Maybe he was trying to manipulate her, or maybe his indenture had trained him in this specific form of gratitude. Both options were depressing, but Jack hardly noticed through the distortion field of her own depression. Something cracked inside her, then broke. Wiping the display out of the air, Jack stared into Threezed’s almost-black eyes and wondered if Zaxy was actually going to assassinate her. Wondered if maybe she deserved it.

  The sub thrummed into motion, bringing them closer to Inuvik, second by second. Threezed leaned forward and gently brushed his cheek against her inner thigh. It was tempting to take the easy way out and just go into hiding with this coquettish young man for a few months, but the instant she thought about it, her unhappiness grew so acute that the temptation was over. Zacuity was coring out people’s minds, and she was responsible. There was no way she could live with herself if she didn’t warn people about how dangerous this drug really was. When Jack got to the mainland, she was going to call in a favor that might save hundreds of lives … but probably not her own.

  She ran her fingers through Threezed’s hair and thought about dying wishes. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  He bowed his head in an ambiguous gesture of obedience and consent.

  SUMMER 2114

  Thirty years ago, when Jack was Threezed’s age, she spent every afternoon in a climate-controlled wing of the university genetics lab. She had an internship that mostly involved organizing sample libraries of proteins and obscure bits of RNA. When she wasn’t tagging test tubes, she dreamed about becoming a synthetic biologist who could stop genetic diseases with perfectly engineered therapies. She knew without a doubt that one day she was going to do Good Science and save millions of lives. She just needed to find the right protein or DNA sequence that would undo whatever molecular typo made a mutated cell keep living when it should have died. That summer, Jack learned the art of apoptosis, or making cells extinguish themselves.

  In the fall, she matriculated into a PhD program at one of the top bioengineering departments in the Free Trade Zone. Franklin University was near an old port city and military base called Halifax, right on the North Atlantic. Jack had never lived near the ocean before, and she rented a tiny room whose advantages included a perfect line of sight to the local high-speed antenna array—better than the free mote net—plus, a tremendous sea view. She joined the well-funded Bendis Lab, designing custom viruses for drug delivery.

  But then something unexpected derailed her promising academic career.

  It happened on a warm Friday afternoon. Wandering down the wide foam road into town, Jack ran into a guy named Ari who was in her protein folding seminar.

  “What did you think of that last lab, eh?” she asked. He’d been pissed in class about something their professor had said about the direct relationship between proteins and human behavior.

  “Total garbage,” he snorted. “Hey, what are you up to tonight?”

  Jack perked up. Ari was pretty cute, and it had been a while since she’d hooked up with anybody.

  “Nothing much. I was thinking of grabbing some dinner and watching a movie. Want to hang out?”

  “I’m going to the Freeculture meeting. You should come.”

  Jack didn’t know that much about Freeculture, except for the fact that her lab’s principal investigator, Louise Bendis, had some kind of beef with them over a patent she’d filed. From that, and stories about Freeculture in science journals, she’d gotten the vague impression that they were the sort of people who threw a lot of technical terms around to justify selling “liberated” drugs.

  She must have looked dubious, because Ari laughed and said, “We’re not going to ply you with drugs or anything. But you should know more about the patent system if you’re going to be working on the Bendis Patent Farm.” He made a snarky face. Then he smiled again, and lightly touched Jack’s arm. “A bunch of us are going to get dinner after.”

  “Sold,” she pronounced. What the hell. She was at university to expand her mind, right? And maybe she’d get laid.

  The meeting was in an airy graduate student lounge down the hall from the Plant Biology Department. Years ago, some joker had tweaked a few genes in a plant designed to repair glass and set it free on the windows. Now the light was filtered by leaves whose molecular structure had bonded with the glass and remained stuck there in artful clumps long after the plant had died.

  About twenty-five students were sitting in a circle of chairs introducing themselves when Ari and Jack arrived. Most of them studied genetic engineering, with a few cognitive and neuroscience weirdos. The students were all surprisingly smart, and Jack was immediately charmed by the evening’s invited speaker, a young professor from Saskatchewan who was mired in a protracted legal battle with his university over whether he would be allowed to file an open patent on some simple antivirals he’d discovered. He had thick, shoulder-length black hair, and green eyes that were striking against his brown face. His name was Krish Patel, and he made Jack forget about all the idle hookup plans she’d had for Ari.

  Krish compared the patent system to the indenture system, which Jack thought was kind of a stretch. But she had to admit that the patent system did seem to be at the root of a lot of social problems. Only people with money could benefit from new medicine. Therefore, only the haves could remain physically healthy, while the have-nots couldn’t keep their minds sharp enough to work the good jobs, and didn’t generally live beyond a hundred. Plus, the cycle was passed down unfairly through families. The people who couldn’t afford patented meds were likely to have sickly, short-lived children who became indentured and never got out. Jack could see Krish’s point about how a lot of basic problems could be fixed if only patent licensing were reformed.

  Afterward, at the restaurant, Jack got into a huge debate with Krish about whether open-patent antivirals could really lead to more innovation in viral shell engineering. She liked how he calmly reasoned with every criticism she had, incorporating her ideas into a solution right there on the spot.

  He walked her home after dinner, and she came up with some incredibly lame excuse to invite him upstairs.

  Curled up on a sofa near the window, they shared some 420 and listened to the ocean in the distance. “So the politics of virus shells,” Jack said, exhaling. “Pretty
hot stuff. Pretty sexy.”

  Krish stared at her, his hand frozen in midair, the pipe in his fingers slowly bleeding smoke. He looked half-terrified, half-perplexed. She realized suddenly that he might not have understood she was bringing him here to have sex. Maybe he thought she’d really just wanted to talk sequence all night.

  “I am flirting with you,” she clarified.

  “Oh, good—that’s what I thought.” He laughed. “One can never be sure, though.”

  She liked the way he never made assumptions, even about basic things like fucking.

  When they kissed, she could taste the political analysis he’d described during the Freeculture meeting. His flavor, a mixture of smoke and fennel, was redolent of the Good Science she’d dreamed about doing when she was an undergraduate: the science that helped people, and gave them a chance to lead lives they could be proud of. Nothing made her want to strip a man naked more than knowing he had good ideas … and so she did. She could taste a nuanced ethical understanding of the patent system all over his body.

  Over the next few months, Jack divided her time between less-than-challenging work at the Bendis Patent Farm and extremely challenging reading about patents. Some of it was stuff that Krish recommended, but once she’d read the basic essays and books, she followed footnotes and references and struck out on her own. She became a regular at the Freeculture meetings, and even gave a demo one evening about a little program she’d written that could help reverse engineer certain classes of patented drugs. Though it was gray-area legal, she emphasized that the program was just for research purposes—or maybe for some kind of pandemic-style emergency when lots of drugs had to be fabbed right away.

  One of the CogSci guys asked why you couldn’t just visit the patent office and get the drug’s recipe directly from the publicly filed patents. She quoted from a recent article by a Freeculture legal scholar at Harvard, who had analyzed how much time and money it would take for an ordinary person to retain lawyers and experts who could actually navigate the expensive patent databases and figure out how a drug had been put together. Most drugs that made it out of trials were a confusing hodgepodge of licensed parts and processes, and it took corp money to figure out how it had been made. For an ordinary person who just wanted to copy a gene therapy, it was usually easier to amplify and sequence the drug fast, then analyze it with her little program.

  Some of the other students added to Jack’s program, and pretty soon it became a small but thriving open source project called reng, for “reverse engineer.” Krish gave reng to his students back in Saskatoon, they passed it along to Iqaluit engineers, and pretty soon Jack was getting patches from people in weird places she’d never heard of in the Asian Union and Brazilian States.

  When Jack wasn’t trying to figure out how to dismantle the patent system, she was busy being completely in love with Krish. Admittedly, she didn’t take love nearly as seriously as some of her classmates did, the ones who talked about “dating” and “getting married.” She viewed romance like any other biological process. It was the product of chemical and electrical signaling in her brain, inspired by input from the outside world. If she was deliriously happy around Krish and constantly yearning to have sex with him when he was away, that was just the ventral tegmental region of her brain and a bunch of neural pathways at work.

  Krish felt the same way about Jack. Even when he went back to Saskatoon for the quarter to teach, they talked every day. Then, they took things to the next level: They founded an anonymized text repo together, about practical ways to deliver drugs to the public domain. It was the most intense relationship Jack had ever had.

  JULY 5, 2144

  An input mechanism in Yellowknife triggered a query to a molecule database in Bern, seeking several specific strings in one data field. One hundred sixty milliseconds later, the query returned a set of pointers.

  The input mechanism in Yellowknife who had requested those pointers was a biobot named Med who had just watched a man die of organ failure. Three days before, the man had arrived at the emergency room nearly comatose. He’d been doing nothing but painting his flat for five straight days—not eating, barely drinking a few swallows of water, going out only to get more paint so he could keep adding more coats. The neurons in his midbrain were losing dopamine receptors in a familiar addiction pattern, the kind of thing you see after years of heroin use or gambling. No one had ever seen a person develop such a pattern in response to a week of painting.

  That’s why Med was running searches on the molecules that she’d found in the guy’s bloodstream. It matched perfectly to a patented drug called Zacuity, but there’s no way this snowboard instructor would have had the cash for that kind of scrip. He must have gotten it as a street drug, which meant somebody had done an impeccable job reverse engineering Zacuity.

  Med pushed a lock of blond hair out of her eyes and leaned her slight, flesh-covered frame against a desk. She was designed to look human, her face the replica of a woman whose image Med’s tissue engineer had licensed from an old Facebook database. Though technically indistinguishable from that long-dead human, Med’s features had a generic “pretty white girl” look that most humans recognized as a bot tell. Under Med’s pale skin, there was no disguising what she was. Her carbon alloy endoskeleton was braided with fibers and circuitry that would be obvious to anyone with sensors that reached beyond the visible spectrum. Med closed out her session with Bern, tuned the hospital’s motes with her embedded antennas, and filed her report about the molecule.

  The painting guy’s father was supposed to arrive from Calgary in a few hours, and it would be left to some doc to explain to the man why his son had died of “painting addiction.” Yet another reason why Med preferred to be on the research side of things. Less human drama.

  As Med crossed the hospital grounds back to her office, the data she’d just saved locally on the intranet was examined by a pattern recognition algorithm. This hidden algorithm came through a law-enforcement backdoor on the network, invisible to everyone except the person who initiated it. The algorithm flagged several strings in Med’s report. It was opened before it could be sent to anyone on the hospital staff, then promptly overwritten with junk.

  JULY 6, 2144

  Jack had seen Threezed naked before, when he first cleaned up, but never for hours on end. She was starting to get used to it. Now she alternated between staring at her desktop and glancing at his skinny flank, thrust out from under the counterpane in her cubby, where he was sleeping. From the easy chair near her desk, she could just make out the pale curve of his ass. Right now, though, the stream glittering beneath her fingers was more pressing.

  The news was bad. For once, the science text repos and media corps agreed on something, and it was that at least one hundred people had died in Calgary from drug-related complications. Addiction experts were rushing out case studies. Nobody mentioned that the culprit was reverse-engineered Zacuity.

  Once a decent reverse engineer took a hard look at her drug, its provenance would be pretty obvious. Either nobody had bothered to do that yet, or Zaxy was hushing up the results. None of her contacts in the Zone had posted their emergency signal, which would be steganographically hidden in an image and uploaded to a well-trafficked cat lovers’ forum. That meant that nobody had gotten a visit from the IPC. Or at least, nobody had lived to warn her about it.

  Jack wouldn’t be safe for long, but it seemed like she still had some time to make things right.

  If her sketchy calculations were right, Zacuity was getting people addicted after just one or two doses—something she’d only seen before in poorly designed party drugs or unmodded cocaine. She had no idea how many people had bought her pirated Zacuity, let alone who was eating it legally in beta. But it was clear that people susceptible to addiction were going to keep dying until somebody put a boot to Zaxy’s throat and forced the corp to admit they’d made a productivity drug that behaved like a crappy stimulant from the nineteenth century.

  The
problem was that she’d have to launder her discoveries through someone else—someone who was legally permitted to reverse engineer Zacuity. Plus, she had to manufacture and distribute an anti-addictive fast, before anyone else died. Jack knew just the lab to do all of it: the reverse engineering, the publicity, and the just-in-time fix for Zacuity’s addiction flaw. It was a long shot, though. Decades had passed since she’d worked there, and she might not be very welcome. Still, it was her only hope.

  With Threezed still sprawled out on her bed, she headed to the control room and checked their location. With luck, she could be in her truck and on the road in twenty-four hours, her payload stuffed safely in the back. It was a terrible plan, but not as terrible as the one that had gotten her into this overall moral fuckup in the first place.

  * * *

  The sub nosed its way into the Beaufort Sea, its waters hugged by an enormous chain of islands whose edges formed the maze of the Northwest Passages. She was aiming for a rather nondescript promontory known as Richards Island. With all their gear piled into a kayak, she could follow the island’s eastern shore, hit the broad curve of the Mackenzie River, and score a tow from a cargo ship all the way to the docks at Inuvik. She’d chuck Threezed in town, and drive south to the lab as fast as possible.

  Jack began scouting for places to park the sub.

  Even at the height of summer, there were still regions of the ocean where crumbled bergs and glaciers left the pale water stippled with ice. The white, reflective chunks provided good cover, and had the additional advantage of being packed with microcontrollers and mote trash that was still pingable. Her ship’s short-range signals would blend into the mumble of traffic emitted by dying chips and antennas.