Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  At last, the woman spoke. “I need to talk to you about the schematics for Zacuity. Now.”

  8

  BRAINS

  JULY 9, 2144

  It was time to try a new experiment. Over the past day, Paladin had discovered that including “military bot” or “military robot” in pretty much any search related to sex got him petabytes of fictional representations, and nothing about reality. The lack of data only made his desire more urgent. Maybe it was a quirk of his programming as a reconnaissance bot, designed to gather intelligence where nothing was known.

  Or maybe it was something about Eliasz.

  Paladin faced the man in their tiny hotel room, and tried for the first time to initiate a conversation. He modeled it on what he’d learned from Eliasz.

  “This reminds me of waiting for my first assignment,” Paladin vocalized.

  Eliasz looked up from a map of the northern Zone he’d been studying. His muscles were tense; Paladin had startled him. He said nothing. The bot tried again. “I didn’t learn much about human intelligence gathering. But some of the bots got paired with humans who gave them intensive training.”

  Eliasz was nodding. “Yeah, they don’t always give you the training you need. When I was in Warsaw I had to learn a lot on the job—just like you are now, buddy.”

  Paladin was getting somewhere. To retrieve personal information, he had to share personal information first. This was his chance to get the answers he wanted, by stretching his truths into strategic lies.

  “Some of the robots said they were learning about human sexuality. Do you think military robots need to do that?”

  Blood rushed to Eliasz’ face and electricity arced over his skin. “I don’t know anything about that. I’m not a faggot.”

  It was not the first time that Eliasz had said something orthogonal as if it were relevant. This was clearly a conversation whose progress Paladin would only understand after accessing more information on the public net. He began searching on uses of the word “faggot.”

  But before Paladin could analyze what he found, Eliasz received a message from Thomasie on his mobile. The man glanced at it and stood up, his posture suggesting he’d already purged their strange exchange from his mind.

  “OK, this is our last chance to squeeze any final bits of data from our friends at the Arcata Solar Farm,” he told Paladin, his hands feeling their way through his perimeter check ritual—head, belt, both shoulders. The sign of the cross. “We’re going to go in there and get as much as we can about where Jack might be headed. I’ll give them our final piece of IP and see if they’ll leak anything on their manufacturer in the Federation. You see if there’s anything else you can get out of the network.”

  He reached over and touched the curved shell of Paladin’s shoulder unnecessarily. “You got that, buddy?”

  “Yes.”

  When the bot stood, he could see the complicated pattern of electrical impulses emerging like a fungible map on the crown of Eliasz’ head. But there were no answers in it. He could read anxiety there, and nothing more.

  Thomasie picked them up outside their hotel in a worn, multi-use truck of the sort preferred by local farmers. It could seat four comfortably in the cab, but Paladin’s bulk relegated him to the cargo area. He could still hear and see everything that happened inside, but nobody would try to engage him in any part of the exchange.

  With a novel feeling of surprise, the bot realized he preferred it that way. Paladin was developing a small repertoire of highly granular desires for random things, like riding in the back of a truck. They coexisted easily with mission-critical desires like preventing Eliasz from dying.

  He scanned the public net for patterns in the use of “faggot,” analyzed the Arcata network for appearances by Jack, and wondered about personal preferences. His desire to survive, and to protect friendlies like Eliasz, were programmed into him at a deep level. He had not come upon those desires by discovering them over time. But a preference for riding in the backs of trucks? That was something no botadmin had implanted in him.

  Overhead, the dome gave way to sky, and Paladin watched the pale bubble of Iqaluit recede slowly into rocks, grass, and farms.

  When they arrived at Arcata Solar Farm, Roopa met them at the door in a state of complete alert. There were no feeds playing in the background, and there was an unfamiliar truck parked in the driveway. Thomasie looked as unruffled as ever, except for his artfully mussed hair, and said nothing as they passed the energy signature of Roopa’s weapons.

  Inside they found a rapidly drying layer of water over everything: The sprinkler system had just watered the furniture. Youssef was there, his posture far more relaxed than yesterday, wiping a chair before sitting down with Bluebeard and Redbeard at a table whose legs grew thick, soft ivy.

  “You’ve come back so soon,” said Bluebeard, offering Eliasz another slightly damp chair. Paladin stood behind Eliasz, continuing his search of the network and logging emotions in the small group.

  “I realized I needed a bit more cash, after all,” Eliasz said, his heart rate and breathing carefully even. “Since I know that you’re good for the money, and you know I’m good for the IP, I thought you might be interested in a slightly different deal.”

  Bluebeard gestured over a projector box at the edge of the table, which drew a black window into the air.

  “Do tell,” she said.

  “I’ve got a small molecule here that could be worth a lot of money. Basically, it’s a euphoric.” He thumbed his wrist a few times, and a white vector drawing of a molecular structure appeared in the floating window. Bluebeard looked at it, her eyes narrowing.

  “I don’t want a flat fee. Let me help you distribute it, and cut me in on a percentage of the earnings. I really think all of us could get rich here.”

  Bluebeard’s attention was wandering. “Interesting idea,” she lied, looking at the black window.

  Beside her, Redbeard’s body told another story. He was intrigued. “It just so happens that we might have an opening for a distributor.” Redbeard looked sideways at his partner.

  “Locally? Or would I need to travel somewhere to get this done?” Eliasz was looking for any geographical data he could get. But at the mention of travel, both pirates stiffened.

  “What does that mean?” Redbeard’s heart rate elevated.

  “Well, I’ll be honest with you,” Eliasz replied. “I’m not crazy about Iqaluit. Reminds me too much of … Las Vegas.” Selective truth-telling kept his biosigns even. “I wouldn’t mind going somewhere outside the domes for a little while. If there were some money in it for me, you know.”

  “This is the kind of thing we’d normally fab down in Casablanca,” Redbeard said thoughtfully. “And I think if we did this—though that’s a big if—you would have to fetch it yourself.”

  Bluebeard sighed. “Yes, our usual contact seems to have run into a bit of trouble.”

  Now they had a lead on where Jack worked in the Federation. And apparently word had gotten around that she was a target, too. Eliasz must have let this information distract him, because his next move felt clumsy even to a HUMINT neophyte like Paladin.

  “Where do you go if you get into that sort of trouble?”

  It was a weird question, and the pirates were clearly puzzling over it when Paladin saw an encrypted message arrive. Bluebeard glanced at her watch, unable to control a brief spike in blood pressure. At that moment, Paladin’s access to the network was shut down. Somebody had found his backdoor. They might only have a few seconds before he had to go into full autonomic defense mode.

  He partitioned his mind: 80 percent for combat, 20 percent for searches on faggots.

  “This conversation is fucking over.” Bluebeard stood abruptly and aimed a blaster at Eliasz, while Roopa ran for Paladin from behind, her guns scoring his already-spread shields with fire.

  Time was no more distorted than it always was: In one movement Paladin shoved Eliasz under the table and shot Bluebeard i
n the face with his chest weapon. She staggered back in a spray of cauterized tissue and guttering neuroelectrical impulses. Redbeard screamed, his blood-soaked body at last in harmony with his pseudonym.

  Enough data had come in from Paladin’s search that he could start to build a taxonomy. Each use of “faggot” could be categorized, and he began assigning them to subcategories tagged with exemplary, recurring sentences.

  Suck my cock, you faggot.

  Eliasz bunched himself into a defensive posture under the table, metal glinting in his fists and a snap of electricity showing his perimeter was active.

  At the sight of her boss going down, Roopa scrambled up a particularly thick tree trunk to Paladin’s left and shot at his head, trying to take out some of his sensors. The wet wood protecting Eliasz started to smoke under her steady shots. Redbeard ran toward the stairs and Youssef scrambled after him, terror distorting his gait. More feet rang on the steps: Two men were coming down, their faces shielded and guns bared. A tiny red triangle logo stood out on their chests, marking them as indentured to a private security company in the Zone. These men belonged to the pirates in the same way Paladin belonged to the Federation.

  Paladin covered Eliasz, his shields spread around the man like sheltering wings, and Roopa took out one of the sensors on his back. Now he had to shift to catch her movements, and of course more trouble was coming. Those men on the stairs had guns that Paladin’s armor could withstand for only so long. From his position beneath the table near Paladin’s knees, Eliasz reached out and cut a horizontal line of light into the air, slicing one of the armored men’s legs off at the ankles. The man’s detached feet smoked in a tidy pile next to his writhing body, but his partner just stepped over him and kept coming. With a well-aimed shot to the bot’s right shoulder, he shattered Paladin’s carapace.

  That faggot tried to touch me.

  Roopa worked on the break in Paladin’s armor with her gun, trying to sever the arm that the bot had already lost once. Eliasz didn’t have enough charge for another laser shot like the last one, but he had a tiny smart grenade for Roopa’s tree. She hit the floor without ever vocalizing, charred wood lodged in her ripped throat and gut.

  Even with some of his sensors ruined, Paladin could see Redbeard’s distress signal shoot over the network. And hear Youssef screaming about a helicopter on the roof. The pirates were trying to escape.

  Eliasz signaled to Paladin. To stop Redbeard and Youssef, they would have to take out the remaining guard, whose footless partner was scrabbling for a weapon through his pain. Paladin ran toward the spiral staircase first, squirting a last stream of bullets from his chest, throwing his weight to the left just in time to land his fist in the footless guard’s chest. The man’s alloy armor—the same material that made up the bot’s carapace—kept Paladin from penetrating. But Paladin felt the reassuring vibration of shattering bone radiate up his arm. The guard wouldn’t die right away, but he wouldn’t be reaching for a weapon again, either.

  “Faggot” is generally a pejorative term for a homosexual man. It is classified as hate speech in most regions where homosexuality is legal.

  Eliasz threw his last grenade and missed—something about the remaining guard’s perimeter threw it off. But the blast had him off-balance long enough that Paladin was able to put his body between Eliasz and the other man, clearing the stairs.

  “They’re on the roof trying to escape in a helicopter, Eliasz.” Paladin said in a damage-distorted voice. “Get them and I’ll hold this one off.”

  It was going to come down to hand-to-hand combat, and his opponent was an indentured guard whose life depended on the survival of his clients. He would never stop fighting. Paladin didn’t want Eliasz down here, in case things went badly.

  As Eliasz disappeared up the stairs, the guard turned his face shield to Paladin. He was nearly as tall as the bot, and armor made him just as bulky.

  “I know your model, biobot. You’ve got a human brain under that armor.”

  Paladin kicked the man in the thigh, hoping to short out the power source for his perimeter field. He did no damage, and the man punched Paladin low on his chest carapace, clearly aiming to damage the human brain inside. The man did know his way around Paladin’s model, but like most humans, he made the mistake of assuming the brain was what controlled the bot.

  As Paladin smashed his fist into the man’s shielded face, he realized why Eliasz had used the word “faggot.” He thought the bot’s body parts were just like a human’s, and that a heavily armored body signified manhood. Sex with a military bot would be what one branch in his taxonomy called “shit for faggots.” This also explained why Eliasz had been so curious about the origin of the bot’s brain. He assumed it was the seat of Paladin’s identity.

  The guard staggered, recovered, and slammed his body against Paladin’s wounded arm. As Paladin felt his limb go numb, he delivered a killing blow to the guard’s perimeter power source. Then he grabbed the man’s head in his nearly disabled hand and cradled it against his chest for a minute.

  “My brain is just an advertising gimmick,” Paladin vocalized, echoing what the bots had told him in the Kagu Robotics Foundry. “It’s to make humans think I’m vulnerable. But it has no real functionality.” Then he ripped the man’s face shield off and crushed his skull against his breastplate. For an instant, there were useless chunks of brain inside and outside his carapace, inches away from each other.

  As Paladin ascended the spiral stairs, he sent out a query to the Kagu Robotics Foundry network where he’d been assembled. He wanted to know everything he could about the history of his brain.

  Paladin found Eliasz at the top of the stairs in a room that had obviously been the pirates’ data center and private meeting area. A curved glass wall looked out over rows of solar panels, the farthest away blurring into a dark, choppy texture almost indistinguishable from the rocky ground. Another wall was lined with server cabinets, most devoted to the legit solar operation. Just a few contained the farm’s real business, and those were currently being reduced to blobs of drooling fire by some well-placed bowls of thermite. Redbeard was crumpled next to the flames, his body partially consumed by them.

  On a sturdy living-wood ladder that led up through a door in the ceiling, Youssef was frozen in the sights of Eliasz’ blaster. A helicopter was warming up on the roof over their heads, wind from its propeller agitating the smoke in the room.

  Youssef was crying, his body going into shock. “Why are you doing this? Are you IPC agents?”

  “Yes.” Eliasz squeezed off a shot. “And that makes you a dead pirate.”

  Youssef’s body jerked once and fell, a clean, charred hole in his head emitting only the tiniest amount of matter. With a tight gesture, Eliasz motioned Paladin to the helicopter on the roof. The self-piloting vehicle was easy to commandeer with their IPC credentials.

  As they rose over photovoltaic fields, Paladin found that he could communicate with the sprinkler system again. He turned it on. At least the energy grid would be preserved.

  Just as Paladin was returning to other data-analysis tasks, Eliasz reached over and gripped his arm—the one that wasn’t dangling in a useless, agonizing wreck at his right side. The man’s heart was pounding, though his excitement had spiked and was diminishing.

  “You did good back there, buddy.”

  “I’m glad we both made it out.”

  “Let’s hope our luck holds in Casablanca.”

  “We’re going back to the Federation?” That seemed like the wrong way to follow Jack’s trail out of Iqaluit.

  “Best way to stay hot on the trail is sometimes to backtrack, Paladin.” Eliasz steered the helicopter back to the airfield where they’d landed two days ago. “Somebody in Casablanca will know where Jack goes when she wants to hide. We’ll find her faster that way than trying to trace her through highway surveillance.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Human networks are the most vulnerable,” Eliasz replied. Th
ey landed just as the red sunset was transforming Iqaluit’s dome into a blood blister.

  9

  PRISON

  JULY 9, 2144

  Jack put the knife down. She carefully wiped her thumb over the hilt, and a slight shiver ran down her spine as her energy shield powered down.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Jack yanked on her thermals. Before she even had her coveralls zipped, Med had explained her hypothesis about how to reverse the effects of Zacuity. It sounded fairly plausible, but she’d hit a snag. She couldn’t finish her research at the hospital, because all her queries disappeared as soon as they were routed outside the Yellowknife cloud.

  Now that she wasn’t in fight-or-flight mode, Jack realized the medic with Threezed was a bot. It wasn’t just that her name, Med, sounded like the kind of thing a hospital would name its bot. It was also that her skin tone and face had an uncanny regularity.

  “I have to finish this work, and Threezed said you knew a place.” Med spoke with the kind of urgency that Jack recognized from countless nights with engineers in the lab. The bot wanted to fix this problem, and she wouldn’t stop until she’d tried every possible solution. Even if that meant running away with a pirate and a hospital gofer she’d just met an hour ago.

  “Won’t the hospital notice when their property goes missing?”

  Med crossed her arms. “I’m autonomous. No one can track me unless I allow it.”

  Jack weighed her options. Just from their brief conversation, she could tell Med was an excellent engineer. It seemed wildly unlikely that Zaxy would have sent this particular bot to assassinate her. Med had a hard-to-fake blob of half-finished molecular simulation data and a hypothesis about an addiction therapy that worked by selectively erasing memories in the brain. More to the point, Med could have killed her already if that was her plan.