Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

Baffin Heights Range was vast and rocky, its walled-in acres carpeted with purple summer flowers and planted with non-native trees to provide cover. There were hills and half-built forts, a cement bunker, and even some trenches dug by a local group of World War I reenactors. At this time of day, the place was nearly empty. It was dinnertime in Iqaluit, and the rich gun lovers who frequented this range all had meals waiting for them at home.

  Eliasz beamed credits to a woman in a parka and toque at the gate, who barely glanced up from her display. Paladin watched the camstrips plastered to every surface, careful to move less smoothly than he could have. He’d have to hide his target accuracy when they hit the range, too.

  Eliasz decided to begin their practice on a hill, where they’d paid for a few targets: a concrete foam house that would offer them cover, and a couple of dummies set up in a wooded area opposite them.

  “The air out here reminds me of Warsaw in fall.” Eliasz pulled off a shot from the house window as Paladin arranged his extra rounds on the floor. Somebody had left a pile of food wrappers to biodegrade in the corner; by now they had melted enough for the Nestlé logos to stretch into deformed versions of themselves. “It’s cold but it’s not too cold. And there’s a smell in the air like cut grass.”

  Paladin still did not know how to respond when Eliasz told him things that had nothing to do with work. He tried to come up with a relevant comment, or perhaps another question. He could ask why Eliasz’ prints matched those of a Warsaw priest, but Eliasz might be upset that Paladin had been searching on his biometrics, compiling a small but growing list of facts that might be true. The bot wished he could talk easily to people the way Eliasz did, but that would never be possible. No matter how long he studied the art of human intelligence gathering, his massive, hardened body with its wing shields would make it difficult for humans to feel at ease with him.

  Paladin let two light machine guns slide quietly out of his left and right chest compartments, legs bending to compensate as his center of gravity shifted slightly. He still couldn’t think of a way to ask Eliasz about Warsaw.

  “Loaded and ready.” Those words would have to stand in for everything else he wanted to say. Paladin was in combat posture for the first time since their early days at Camp Tunisia.

  “Go for it.”

  Paladin released a spurt of bullets through the house window, aiming in the general direction of the dummies. They’d been implanted with an artificial heat signature that turned their plastic bodies a deep red. The bot altered his assault strategy, trying to be as accurate as possible. It was a last-minute decision, based on the high probability that Eliasz’ enthusiasm meant that Paladin should perform optimally rather than sticking with his damaged bot disguise. The dummies’ heads exploded spectacularly.

  “Nice.” Eliasz laughed, and Paladin knew he had correctly guessed what Eliasz wanted. “Well, now that you’ve wrecked our bad guys, buddy, let’s go down there and see what it takes to blow this shack up. What do you think?”

  They picked up the rest of the ammo and headed down to the piles of splinter and fluff that had once been humanoid figures hidden in trees. Now man and bot were also hidden. Paladin unfurled his dorsal shields, making himself invisible, just to add realism to the scenario. The experience was so similar to his early training that he reflexively began accessing his jumbled memories of startup back in the Federation. There were disconnected images of the Kagu factory whose timestamps showed gaps of hours and days; signals from a batch of biobots who had been fabbed with him; a jarring memory of the moment when his proprioceptive sense had given way to a feeling of kinetic possibilities; and finally his current self-awareness, tinged with compulsions whose origins he couldn’t access or control.

  Many of those compulsions were tied directly to his targeting system, which yanked the bot back to the present. There hadn’t been any flowers or trees on the shooting ranges where he’d first learned to aim and fire.

  “Can you let me aim for you?”

  Paladin wasn’t sure what Eliasz meant. “Programmatic access to my real-time targeting systems is available only to Federation admins,” he vocalized at stealth volume, enjoying the feeling of camouflage mode.

  “I’ve heard that bots like you can—” Eliasz paused awkwardly. “That you can carry a human on your back during combat and … let him drive, so to speak.”

  Certainly Paladin could carry Eliasz’ weight on his back comfortably, his shields protecting the man during combat. But none of his training, and nothing he’d learned from other bots, suggested he could surrender control of his weapons to somebody who had no access privileges on his system. Still, he could understand how Eliasz might have gotten that idea. A few simple searches on public media servers returned millions of hours of footage where people rode the bodies of giant, tanklike bots, targeting their enemies.

  At that moment, Paladin decided to test something he’d been contemplating for several minutes, based on what he’d learned from the sprinkler system. Perhaps human intelligence gathering was a version of network penetration, and he could better integrate into social situations by inviting humans to see an illusory version of himself. Instead of dispelling Eliasz’ misunderstanding, he would find a way to accommodate it.

  “I can carry you on my back and let you guide the gun systems.”

  Paladin knelt next to Eliasz, his right actuator crushing a dummy’s arm. He extended two ten-centimeter bars from his upper thighs. They were actually electroshock weapons, built to deliver deadly amounts of current, but they would do as foot pegs when powered down. Without prompting, Eliasz stepped onto them, leaning his torso against the sealed control panel in Paladin’s back.

  “Now what do I do?” His cheek was against Paladin’s, his chin on Paladin’s shoulder.

  The bot stood at full height, and Eliasz rested his hands on the guns that jutted from Paladin’s chest. Eliasz’ right hand began to move slowly, getting to know the whole barrel by feel.

  “It’s wired into your nervous system, isn’t it? You can feel my hand.”

  “Yes, though it’s not really what you would call a nervous system. But I can feel you.”

  “That’s amazing. I wish I could feel my guns. It would make things a lot easier.”

  With Eliasz’ entire body pressed against him, Paladin could read his galvanic skin response at a granular level and watch fluids flowing through his organs. Following the same impulse that made him search Eliasz’ background in the world’s databases, he began to scan Eliasz’ body for mutation, for contamination, for anything life-threatening.

  “How do I make you shoot?”

  “You can subvocalize directions and I will follow them.”

  Shoot the entire roof off that house. Eliasz’ lips were pressed into Paladin’s carapace, moving slightly as he gave the vague order.

  He continued to touch the exposed metal of Paladin’s guns, fingers wrapped around each slim barrel for a few seconds until they became too hot. Then he slid his fingers beneath them, to the cool carbon alloy of the bot’s chest, stretching his thumbs back until his hands formed two V shapes beneath the protruding weapons.

  Paladin had a lot of ammo to burn, and he took his time with the roof. Spent shells wafted to the ground at their feet and began biodegrading. With each spurt of bullets, Paladin undermined the structural integrity of the roof very precisely—never quite hitting it, but blasting away the foam and beams that held it in place. Every hit knocked out just a few more centimeters on the eastern edge of the house, and Paladin registered a feeling of satisfaction as the roof began to tip and sag.

  As he bent to retrieve a magazine and reload, Eliasz shifted his weight away from the bot’s back. The man’s posture radiated discomfort. He was trying to stay on the pegs while keeping his lower body from making contact with Paladin’s.

  Paladin categorized the physiological changes in Eliasz’ body and reloaded his guns. The bot decided to continue his human social communication test by not communicating. It
didn’t make sense to remind Eliasz that every single movement of his body, every rush of blood or spark of electricity, was completely transparent to Paladin. He would allow Eliasz to believe that he sensed nothing.

  Eliasz’ heart was beating fast, his skin slightly damp. The man’s reproductive organ, whose functioning Paladin understood only from military anatomy training, was engorged with blood. The transformation registered on his heat, pressure, and movement sensors. The physiological pattern was something like the flush on a person’s face, and signaled the same kind of excitement. But obviously it was not the same.

  “Tell me where I should aim next,” Paladin vocalized directly into the whorls of Eliasz’ ear, pressed against the streamlined curve of the bot’s jawline.

  “Keep shooting.” In his discomfort, Eliasz forgot to subvocalize. “Just shoot the roof off like I told you.”

  Paladin shot, but his sensorium was focused entirely on Eliasz’ body. The man was struggling to stabilize his breathing and heart rate. His muscles were trying to disavow their own reactions. The bot kept shooting, transducing the man’s conflicted pleasure into his own, feeling each shot as more than just the ecstasy of a target hit. When the roof collapsed, he shot the crumbling walls.

  Eliasz’ pulse slowed and returned to normal ranges. But Paladin kept going, shooting and reloading until every magazine was reduced to pale petals of biodegrading material around his feet and the house was nothing more than scorched chunks of foam.

  Military bots like Paladin were programmed with basic sexual information about humans that was entirely clinical. If he’d been designed for sex, Paladin would have been given emo-cognitive training on the topic. His carapace would have been skin and muscle, fitted with genitals. His admins would have implanted him with perversions and erotic desires and programs to emulate a sexual response cycle that would match the neurochemical cascades of his human counterparts. Built as he was, however, he had few tools to interpret or contextualize what had just transpired.

  Paladin knelt and Eliasz slid from his back to the ground. Standing side by side, the human and the bot surveyed the damage they had done. Pieces of foam had hurled themselves to the ground everywhere among the flowers. Destroying that house had eaten up nearly all their credits.

  A car brought them back inside the dome and dropped them at the hotel. Eliasz spoke for the first time since the shooting range. “Wait for me in the lobby, Paladin. I’m going to have a shower and then we’ll go back to the Lex for dinner. Maybe we’ll see our protein hacker friends again.” The man kept his eyes on the now invisible gun apertures in Paladin’s chest. Though his intent was to avoid the bot’s eyes, he failed: Paladin had visual sensors all over his body, including in the exact place where Eliasz sought to hide from them.

  And so Paladin was looking straight into Eliasz’ dilated pupils when he replied, “I’ll check my data drip from Arcata Solar Farm and see what we’ve got.”

  By the time Eliasz returned forty-five minutes later, the bot knew a lot about the Arcata Solar Farm. He had also done some public net searches and learned a small amount about sexual relationships between humans and robots. He was not going to talk about the latter, so he told Eliasz about the former as they walked a few blocks to the Lex. It was late evening and the sun hovered above the horizon. Darkness would only last about one hundred eighty minutes once it went down.

  “The Arcata pirates have definitely bought drugs from Jack before—life extenders and anti-inflammatants, mostly. She’s their only source in the Federation who is also a buyer. From what I could tell, she’s buying their black IP, fabbing the drugs somewhere, and shipping them back for distribution. Not at high volumes, though. We’re talking small batches—generally a thousand doses per delivery. So I’m guessing Arcata Solar Farm isn’t her main client.”

  “Makes sense,” Eliasz replied. “When was the last time they dealt with her, according to the security cams?”

  “Just a month ago. They bought anti-inflammatants, which they’ve already sold.”

  “Shit. Based on what the Federation knows about her patterns, there’s no way she’ll be back here for at least a few more months. She must have ported at Inuvik instead of here. Well, we’re fucked in one way, but not in another.”

  “How are we fucked?”

  “We’re fucked because there are dozens of routes south out of Inuvik, especially if she has good transportation, which she no doubt does. She’s not an amateur.” Eliasz paused at the mouth of the street that led to the Lex. Already, the bot was picking up molecules from the chili-laced steam that seeped out of the restaurant’s door two hundred meters away. “We’re also fucked because we have no idea where she’s heading—could be Calgary, where she obviously sold that Zacuity … or, hell, it could be Montreal. My guess, though, is that she’s already heard what’s happening in Calgary and is heading for a safe house in one of the smaller cities.”

  “So how are we not fucked?”

  “No matter what, we’re leaving Iqaluit in twenty-four hours. Hopefully sooner. We’ve got to get on Jack’s trail fast. Why don’t you start sifting surveillance from Inuvik, see if anything Jack-shaped pops up?”

  They trudged up the street to the Lex, where Eliasz found Gertrude eating spicy bok choy with a group of neurolinguistics students who were more interested in vowel shifts than patent injustice. Eliasz struck up a conversation, maintaining their cover identities, trying not to create any anomalous patterns in their behavior.

  Paladin ignored the humans. He was busy communicating over the private bot network, where conversations were soothingly unambiguous. Nobody asked him to overlook fundamental realities as he exchanged surveillance information with Inuvik agents about several suspicious incidents over the past forty-eight hours. They gave him a wealth of data: he had images, audio, and radio communications to sift through for clues.

  On the public net, the subject of bots and human sexuality also revealed a wealth of data. But when Paladin eliminated representations from fiction and the sex industry, he found himself with almost no information. Military bots were not designed to have sex with humans, and therefore his situation was largely undocumented. The indentured were not permitted to post on the public net—they were usually barred by NDAs, but also by social convention. Plus, so few military bots became autonomous that their text repo commits were sparse. None of them dealt with human eroticism.

  At last, one of Paladin’s searches related to Jack yielded a bot report whose contents looked promising. Two Inuvik reps had gone into deep maintenance mode for no reason after a routine pharma infringement bust at a cafe near the river. They were questioning two humans near the arrest, but hadn’t yet scanned their full biometrics. Before they shut down, however, one of them had logged the barebones encounter:

  1530 suspect in custody, initiating arrest

  1537 statements from all witnesses in cafe, coordinates attached, data attached

  1539 questioning two individuals exiting cafe

  1540 female and male no broadcast identifiers

  1541 maintenance check

  1542 maintenance check

  1543 maintenance check

  1544 resuming arrest

  Something weird had obviously happened there. Why would bots begin interrogating two people, then suddenly go into maintenance mode? Though records showed that Jack usually traveled alone, Paladin thought this male and female with no broadcast IDs, connected with a pharma bust in Inuvik, might be a possible lead. He saved a copy of the file locally to show Eliasz later.

  As for his other search, he was going to have to do a little human intelligence gathering.

  7

  THE BILIOUS PILLS

  JULY 7, 2144

  The truck was its own driver, and that driver was a high-functioning paranoid. It kept to low-traffic roads under light surveillance. At this time of year, tourist season, that meant the least scenic routes. Jack couldn’t distract herself with lovely views of the Mackenzie, glittering with m
inerals and pale boats. While Threezed watched a silent movie on one of the truck’s terminals next to her, she tracked satellite positions overhead and cars in visual range on the road around her.

  The fastest route to the lab was through Yellowknife. Her old friend Mali lived there, working as a GP at a public hospital. Maybe she could get Threezed some kind of entry-level job swabbing cheeks or mopping up. It was the least she could do after he’d saved her ass back there in Inuvik.

  Yellowknife was a city of slender skyscrapers and centuries-old, real-wood homes that hugged the shores of Slave Lake, a popular resort in the northern Zone. At this time of year it was packed with tourists and college kids who’d indentured themselves for the summer to work as servants and guides at vacation lodges. The crowds would also make it easy for Mali to sell a big part of Jack’s stash. Though Mali was hardly a radical anymore, she was unbending in her belief that everyone should be able to afford the treatments she prescribed. When they couldn’t pay for patented pharma, she sold them Jack’s pirated goods. All the money Mali earned went right back into Jack’s next delivery.

  The knife on Jack’s belt pulsed gently: Her perimeter had picked up some local news of interest. Somebody in an off-the-record Yellowknife pirate forum wanted to warn people about a batch of bad drugs going around. A guy had taken this stuff called Zacuity to pull an all-nighter processing a giant pile of health insurance claims for unemployed patients. Claims processing was mostly automated, but in unusual cases, a human had to step in and sort things out. In short, it was the most boring job in the world. A perfect pairing with Zacuity.

  At first, the guy seemed weird but OK. He worked longer hours. He had awkward conversations with his friends where he would suddenly start listing dozens of numerical codes for medical conditions that were only covered if you had full employment with a corp. Then he started working twenty-four-hour shifts, eating Zacuity instead of food, and getting no sleep. That’s when he told his friends that every claim had to be processed by human hands—and if that meant people didn’t get their surgeries on time, that was just the price they had to pay for good service. He’d gone completely nuts, printing out claim forms on reams of extremely expensive paper, which he stacked a meter high around his desk like a defensive wall. His manager finally called the police, but it was too late. At least one patient had died while waiting for meds that should have been authorized by a simple insurance algorithm. The insurance processor himself died of massive organ failure, probably from dehydration, behind a pillar of unfulfilled requests for pediatric anti-autism therapies.