Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  In the hold, she and Threezed put the last of her payload into stretchy, thin waterproof sacks. The pills and tiny vials were packaged in brightly colored perfume and aromatherapy boxes with swirly, bright pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses on them. Abruptly, Threezed stopped gathering up the boxes and stared at one, featuring a fat, bejeweled Ganesh beaming over the curl of his trunk.

  Jack was impatient. “Let’s hurry up, Threezed. Time to go.”

  “Can I stay here and hide with the ship? I can fab stuff I need. I’ll keep everything clean and just watch movies.”

  “Look, I like you, but that’s not gonna happen. I don’t know you well enough to let you take charge of my sub.”

  “You could lock me out of the nav system.”

  “For all I know you’re a master cryptographer and systems expert who can smash my security setup in five minutes if you want.” She made a swiping motion that said, discussion over.

  “Wouldn’t I have done that already if I could?”

  “Not necessarily.” Jack unconsciously reached for the handle of the knife she kept jammed in her belt, resting her open palm on it. Custom controls near the blade activated her perimeter system. “Close up those sacks and help me get the kayak ready.”

  Maybe if she kept Threezed busy, he would stop asking her to trust him more than she wanted to trust anyone—including herself.

  * * *

  As they surfaced, sun saturated the control room. Jack glanced at the place where the thief’s bloodstain had been just three weeks ago. She hefted one of the sacks over her shoulder. It was about the size and weight of a man’s body.

  Threezed was already on the deck, using heat bulbs to catalyze a reaction that made the kayak unfold and go rigid. Under his ministrations, the soft mound of rubbery cloth seemed to grow a skeleton beneath its skin, and finally took on the shape of a long, thin craft with two passenger seats.

  Jack fastened her sack to the stern and shoved it into the water, where ice floated like clumps of dirty, curdling cream. There, the kayak stretched out further, taking its final shape. It could support a light, rigid negative-refraction dome—perfect for hiding from satellite sweeps—and would self-power with a nearly invisible kite sail, already unfurled overhead. After three days, the whole vessel would biodegrade into protein foam, becoming fodder for the Mackenzie River’s bacterial ecosystem.

  With the dome secured over their heads, Jack and Threezed settled into the kayak’s uncomfortable seats. The sail came online, its system making micro-adjustments in the lines to keep the vessel stable. As long as the wind stayed with them, they’d make pretty good time. Jack put on goggles to do one last sweep of her security systems, then accessed her sub’s controls from a menu that appeared to hover a foot from her eyes. With a nod, she submerged the sub below a dirty, ragged iceberg that stretched its massive fingers ten meters below the surface.

  Cheap heating elements kept the kayak livable, but hardly warm. Jack peered anxiously ahead, the hood of her parka thrown back, waiting for the first glimpse of hundreds of little islands covered in pine trees and scrub that marked the end of the Beaufort Sea and the beginning of the delta.

  Her perimeter started picking up stray data packets from local networks on ships she couldn’t see. In her goggles, she saw a tiny flag hovering over one with a completely open network. It looked potentially friendly. She started poking around in its directories, querying a few accounts with a carefully worded request. Lots of little boats bartered for a tug down the Mackenzie River and into town—it was standard Arctic business and a local gray-market tradition.

  The ship with the open network was hailing her now, or at least a person calling himself CanadaDoug2120 had opened an encrypted channel to offer her a tow line in exchange for twenty vials of five hundred milligram Vive shots. Probably a local: Up here in the north, people still called themselves Canadians sometimes.

  You got it, she messaged back, changing course to come up invisibly behind CanadaDoug2120’s rig and connect with the tungsten fabric line he claimed to be playing out for her. Now she could clearly see the outline of his dull gray and blue hybrid solar barge, currently running fast on gas. Other ships became visible as they closed on the hybrid, some stacked high with cargo containers, all of them moving toward the deepest parts of the water as they navigated for the Mackenzie. Some parts of the delta were little more than marsh between islands, and the waters were stained with the red and brown churn of silt.

  The line started pinging her perimeter from five hundred meters away. She loaded its exact coordinates into the sail, setting up an intercept course that would take her dangerously close to a police hydrofoil painted with the green, red, and blue of the Free Trade Zone. Her invisible little kayak wouldn’t register on the police vessel’s visual sensors, but the police might pick up her network traffic if she maintained her connection with the line. She would normally spurt bits of chaff traffic to hide her real packets, but a data wake full of transmissions that were too carefully anonymized for your garden-variety trading ship would be even more suspicious.

  Jack killed the network and smothered her long-range signals. She’d have to do this thing manually. They should intercept the rope at a predictable set of coordinates. She’d just extrapolate from its last location, taking into account the heading and speed of the ship itself. Which was looming large in her unaided visual range, its bulk partly obscured by the police hydrofoil coming between them.

  The insectile vessel in its garish Zone colors skated past. Her goggles chattered silently to their own loopback interface, sending no data beyond the device itself.

  The rope should be off to the right of the bow.

  “Threezed, lie as low as possible,” she growled, pulling reinforced waterproofs onto her hands and ripping away just enough of the dome to get her torso out, hands extended. The air needled her face with cold, finding its way under her hood. The water was a smooth gray, feathered with the brown of delta mud. At last, she saw the rope’s glittering terminus cutting a tiny wake through the water. At the same moment, its short-range signals became sniffable. The rope and ship initiated a secure handshake. Pulling herself all the way outside the dome, Jack grabbed the line with gloved hands and connected it to the kayak’s hauling port. Twisting around, she cut lines to the sail and felt a small pulse of relief.

  Without that piece of fabric floating overhead, she would be even harder to track. As quickly as she could, she withdrew into the invisibility of the dome, nearly kicking the balled-up Threezed as she jammed herself back into the front seat.

  No matter the circumstances, she’d never failed to hitch a ride down the Mackenzie when she offered Vive. Even if her pills were killing people in Calgary, Jack reflected, she could at least give a sailor a good deal on a few more years of life.

  They reached the dockyards, converted the drug sacks to backpacks, and left the kayak with a pile of other biodegradables, spinning in a slow vortex of foamy water beneath an abandoned pier. Silent beneath his pack, Threezed followed her to the espresso shop where CanadaDoug2120 waited.

  “When this is over, I can drive you to the train station.” Jack tried to sound kind. “Best place to go if you want to disappear.”

  “I have nowhere to go.”

  “Well, I’ll buy you a ticket anywhere. No problem.”

  “I want to stay with you.”

  There was no way to explain to him all the reasons why that couldn’t happen. Her eyes wandered to an alley between brightly colored apartment buildings, their hydraulic lifters dating back a century to when this whole city was built on permafrost. Her truck was parked there, in a garage below a crazy, patched snarl of utilidors that once connected the buildings like a psychotic catwalk, routing the city’s water, waste, and power through heated pipes above the frost-hardened ground. Most of Inuvik’s utilidors were long gone, but preservationists had gotten this bunch declared a landmark, some kind of memorial to pre-Anthropocene times.

  “I’m sorry,
Threezed, but I can’t bring you where I’m going. Where would you rather go? Vancouver? Yellowknife? Anchorage?” She reeled off the names of three cities that were big enough to get lost in. “If you really do know your way around a motor, I’ll bet you can find work somewhere.”

  He frowned. “Where? Who is going to hire some guy with no work history? The only way I can work is to get slaved again.”

  “That’s not true.” She tried to think of examples that would prove her point, and came up with nothing.

  One block ahead, the cafe sign announced “Hot Espresso and Fresh Bannock.” CanadaDoug2120 was a big guy wearing a bright orange toque, sitting in a battered foam booth with a steaming latte between his hands. Jack gave him a hearty sailor hug, slid the Vive into the side pocket on his parka, and made a big show of chumming around for the security feeds. Threezed picked up a little food and caffeine. Then they made for her truck, walking casually, juggling two lattes and an oily bag of bannock.

  Several minutes later, two bots fell into step with them. From their hardened carapaces, she guessed police or military. Judging from the green insignias on their chests, they were definitely indentured to the Zone.

  One of them spoke, voice emerging from a mouth-shaped grille in his headless chest. “I am Representative Slag. Did you come in on a boat today?”

  Being questioned about travel by Representative anythings was not good. Jack maintained her loose-limbed walk, keeping things casual.

  “Nope, I’m just getting my truck actually. Can I help you with something?”

  Reaching into the deep vents of her coveralls, Jack thumbed her knife, remotely starting her truck and unlocking the storage space. She wanted an exit route, and fast.

  “We noticed you talking with this man,” Slag continued, his broad chest momentarily obfuscated by a grainy projected image of CanadaDoug2120, his head topped by a bright orange spray of pixels. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  Jack paused for a moment, considering her options. It didn’t seem like these bots were from any kind of patent authority. But if her association with CanadaDoug2120 had tripped some kind of social network alarm, she wasn’t about to get into a long conversation with them—especially when she had no idea how many alerts her biometrics would trigger once they started looking.

  Moving her fingers as unobtrusively as possible, she raised the doorway on her storage space and backed the truck out. The vehicle was only a few meters away.

  Before she could delay Slag any further, she caught a blur in her peripheral vision that rapidly resolved itself into Threezed, swerving behind the bots. He snapped open the control panels on their backs. In an instant, the bots were staring at her silently, their minds occupied by whatever Threezed was doing to their command interfaces.

  “Ha! Nobody ever resets the defaults.” Threezed stood between the two bots with his arms buried in their bodies like some weird puppeteer.

  “… the fuck?” she got out.

  “They’ll just sit like that for a few minutes and then start up again. A friend of mine taught me the command—works great on cheap bots like these. Just hit the panel button, type in the string, and they stop moving for a while.”

  Her truck was waiting silently in the street ahead of them.

  Jack looked Threezed square in the face and gave him a nod of respect. “Get in the truck,” she said. “We’re going to Yellowknife.”

  6

  SIDE EFFECTS

  JULY 6, 2144

  Paladin and Eliasz were sitting under a tree in the main room of the Arcata Solar Farm house when Bluebeard and her cohort clattered back down the stairs. The bot could tell Bluebeard was pleased. It was written into her relaxed gait and expressed through the pattern of her breathing.

  Across the room, listening to her feed on full blast, Roopa glared at them and curled her fingers to touch the weapon trigger pads in her palms. Three hours of sitting in peaceful immobility, and the security guard was still treating them like adversaries. The house network, though—not so much. Paladin was making some headway there. He carefully scanned devices around the room, from the atmosphere sensors to the kitchen appliances, and got lucky with the sprinkler system. The device sat on the network waiting for requests from tiny sensors peppered throughout the soil floor. Once in a while, those sensors would signal that it was dry enough to start watering the furniture.

  But the sprinkler system was also waiting for requests from other devices. Somebody careless had set it up to pair with any new device that looked like a moisture sensor.

  So Paladin came up with a plan. He initiated a pairing sequence with the sprinklers by disguising himself as a really old sensor model. Because the sprinkler system wanted to pair with sensors, it agreed to download some ancient, unpatched drivers so it could take requests from its new, elderly friend. Now it was a simple matter of exploiting a security vulnerability in those unpatched drivers, and Paladin was soon on the network, running with all the privileges of the sprinkler system. Which had access to quite a lot, including house layout and camera footage. After all, you wouldn’t want to start watering a room with people in it.

  That camera footage would tell them everything they needed to know about who had been here and when. Paladin felt a rush of pride. Maybe he couldn’t do social engineering on humans yet, but he could still fool most machines.

  He’d gotten access just in time. Bluebeard sealed their deal with a credit transfer, while Eliasz dropped hints that he might be able to get more IP from the same source. The pattern of heat in her face said she was interested, though her response was carefully neutral. “You have Thomasie’s contact information, eh?”

  “Actually, no.” Eliasz looked over at Thomasie.

  The two men exchanged a beam of data.

  “Contact him if you want to set up another meeting,” Bluebeard said. Then she crouched down next to Paladin, still seated awkwardly beneath the tree, and looked right into the abstract, matte black planes of his face.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him.

  “Sorry, his vocalizer’s broken,” Eliasz spoke quickly. “He’s called Xiu.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk more, Xiu. Can you shake hands?” She held out her hand, tiny and calloused with an age her face didn’t show. Paladin extended his arm, allowing the scuffed metal of his fingers to curl around the pale pink of hers. She pressed her fingertips into his alloy, which yielded slightly and recorded the whorls embedded in each.

  They matched nothing in the databases he had access to. Either Bluebeard had a completely unregistered identity, or age had degraded her prints so much that she was effectively untraceable. When their hands broke apart, she looked at the cluster of sensors on his face again, far longer than most humans ever did.

  Bluebeard wanted him to know that she was unknown. She wanted him to explain to Eliasz later that this group of pirates was not to be fucked with. And that’s exactly what he did.

  * * *

  Flush with credits, Paladin and Eliasz rented a cheap room near the university, in a hotel that Gertrude had recommended. It was packed with visiting researchers and their families. The local mote network kept slowing down because everybody on it was downloading and uploading files that were far too media-rich to be scientific data.

  “This city really is full of pirates,” Paladin remarked as Eliasz lay on the tiny futon and stared at the ceiling. “Almost everybody on this network is infringing copyrights.”

  “That’s Iqaluit for you. As soon as we’ve got a handle on where Jack might be, we’re out of here.”

  “I’ve got a backdoor into Arcata’s network, Eliasz, so we can analyze security footage from their cams. But I’m going to have to access it either really slowly or for really short periods of time. Otherwise it will be obvious that somebody is messing around in there.”

  Paladin explained about Bluebeard’s extreme anonymity, and the relative sophistication of the Arcata Solar Farm operation. “I’m not sure how long we have bef
ore they figure out that we’re agents.”

  “I’ve thought about that, too.” Eliasz sighed. “They’re not idiots. We’ve got to do this thing fast. You work on the network—look for Jack’s face in the footage, or references to Zacuity. Or even references to Federation business contacts.” He paused and sat up, putting a warm hand on Paladin’s lower back. “Let’s blow all this credit tonight so we’ve got a good excuse to do another sale tomorrow.”

  That evening, they had two missions. Paladin would sip from the Arcata network, and Eliasz would hemorrhage cash in the most obvious way possible.

  They walked along the dome’s edge, its massive vents rendered translucent and tilted open to admit the warm summer air. In winter the dome would seal shut, the meager hours of sunlight extended with an artificial glow that kept the suicide rate down to a statistically average level. Spiraling above them were dozens of towers whose trellises erupted with fruits and grains, and the air drifted with birds and shimmering tendrils of plant material. When Paladin zoomed in on the topmost farm levels, he could see humans and bots fertilizing the plants with tiny paintbrushes full of pollen.

  “Let’s go to the ammo store,” Eliasz said. “The bullets are trackable, and the shooting range has a public feed for gun fans.” Then he grinned, and for once Eliasz’ facial expression perfectly matched the emotions indicated by the flow of blood in his cheeks and the dilation of his pupils. “Plus, we could use some shooting practice, right, Paladin?”

  Twenty minutes later, Paladin was fully loaded and carrying a dozen thick, heavy bandoliers across his chest. Just for good measure, Eliasz printed out a couple of snap-together sniper rifles and socked away enough biodegradable bullets to take a serious bite out of their credit. Next, they would blow another huge amount of credits renting time at the shooting range, rumored to be the best in the Arctic. They took a car several kilometers outside the dome, whose soaring membrane walls swam with synthetic chloroplasts that sucked down the sunlight.