Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  Behind the bar, the teaman poured steaming water into a tall, stamped silver pot packed with mint leaves. He snapped his fingers at a boy in starched white, who placed the pot on a tray with two glasses, while the teaman put another dish of sugary cardamom biscuits on the counter in front of Slavoj. After the boy delivered the tray to a table of men in the corner, he sat down on a low stool behind the bar and peeked surreptitiously at Paladin’s dark bulk.

  A large group of people poured into the shop, arguing animatedly about a story that was making its way around the science text repos.

  “There’s no way the dipshits at Smaxo are smart enough to do that,” snorted one.

  “I know people doing R&D there who are not stupid,” replied a man who had injected bone grafts under his scalp, remolding his skull to create an odd bas-relief phrenology map whose regions were tattooed with labels like “sex” and “whiskey.” He continued: “Why wouldn’t they backdoor their drugs? Half the world takes them. It’s the perfect social control mechanism.”

  A woman whose face was partly hidden by a bulky gamer rig nodded. “Totally,” she said, twitching her sensor-beaded hands. It was unclear whether she was talking to somebody remote or responding to the thread of teahouse conversation.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said the man who had spoken first. “If your goal is to calm rioters down, why not just develop a chemical that does it? Something you can spray into a crowd? Why put something in your drugs that has to be triggered by a catalyst? That’s just way too complicated and difficult.”

  “Maybe the catalyst is an image or a word. Something you could broadcast remotely.” The guy with the skull mods was agitated, his muscles a mess of electrical activity. “How else do you explain the pics of those meetings between that Smaxo VP and the Trade Zone defense minister? You think they were just swapping LOLs? The economic coalitions want a way to keep people from protesting their bullshit.”

  “Well, I’m sure Smaxo is cutting deals with the Zone, but a backdoor triggered by a word? That causes some residual molecules in your blood to send your brain into theta wave mode?” The man who spoke now had close-cropped hair and a white shirt that clearly marked him as a corporate worker. “Sorry, but I just don’t buy it.”

  The group crowded up to the bar, their bodies forming a warm set of obstacles around Paladin and Eliasz, their pores exuding sweat and excitement and metabolized euphorics.

  “I’ve got an exploit that works just like that.”

  Everyone in the group shut up to listen to the tall woman whose elbow pressed lightly against Paladin’s arm. She had a small patch of pink hair on her otherwise bald brown head, and wore the traditional Eurozone button-front shirt. A mass spectrometer was stuffed into her breast pocket. “Sound-triggered bacteria. I once zombied a whole club by spiking the booze. Had all the boys do pole dances and put the vid online.” She was less excited than the rest of the group, and a surreptitious blood sample revealed that she had no drugs other than caffeine in her system. When her shirtsleeve touched Paladin’s arm, he perceived molecules associated with air purification systems. She’d been in a dome, or underground, for a long time before coming here today.

  The group continued to focus on the woman, who was digging in the pocket of her khakis for a device. Their postures suggested that she was a node, a person who sprouted and maintained social connections. She was at the core of this group, the person they all knew.

  “That vid was hilarious,” barked the man with the phrenology map. “An epic hack.” As his face turned toward the woman, and therefore toward Paladin, the bot could see that the mountainous region over the man’s eyes was labeled “WTF.”

  On Paladin’s left, Eliasz was covertly hyperalert. Slavoj, trapped between the social node and WTF, scrunched down in his chair and carefully focused on the dish of biscuits. It was obvious that he recognized them, but Paladin couldn’t decide if his posture was an effort to hide or, perversely, to capture the group’s attention.

  “A round of black for my friends, please,” the node said politely to the teaman.

  “Your usual?” he replied, reaching for a jar of crisp, expensive leaves.

  “Yes, thank you. We’ll be in the back.”

  “A round on Frankie! Smooth!” The man in corporate casuals slapped her arm appreciatively.

  “Smooth!” echoed the gamer, lifting her rig and settling it on the sensor strip that banded her skull. Her eyes, dyed completely black, settled on Slavoj.

  “Oh, hey,” she said.

  “Hey, Mecha,” Slavoj muttered, toying with his tea glass.

  Frankie’s group swirled away, following her through a beaded curtain at the end of the bar. Mecha, now at the tail end of the pack, plucked at Slavoj’s sleeve.

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “Just got off work.”

  “Still working with Promoter on that Third Arm project?”

  “Yeah, but we’re all consulting now, just to make ends meet while we’re waiting for funding.”

  Paladin had taken baselines of the man’s speech, which indicated that it was statistically likely that Slavoj was lying now.

  “I have to go, but we should hang out soon. I haven’t seen you in forever.” Mecha leaned into Slavoj to grab a biscuit off of the diminishing pile in the bowl. His body tensed and untensed as he prepared to speak and then didn’t. “Actually, what are you doing tonight?” Without waiting for a reply, she put on her rig and tilted her head. “You should come to this party at Hox2’s place.”

  Slavoj thumbed the joint on his glasses, looking at her text. His heart rate was elevated—yes, he would be there.

  Paladin tried to figure out a way to get their new friend to bring them along. Parties were a good place to make connections.

  On her way back to the beaded curtain, Mecha brushed her fingers lightly over Paladin’s back. “Nice case,” she said. “Bet it does negative refraction, right?”

  “It does,” Paladin vocalized.

  “Looks great,” she said, aiming her gamer rig at the camouflaged apertures for his torso guns. “Pretty sweet defensive perimeter for a lab bot.”

  The bot wasn’t sure what to say. “Thank you. Slavoj and I were just talking about lab life.”

  As she reached the bead curtain, Mecha turned back one last time. “Bring your pretty bot friend, too!” she called to Slavoj.

  The nervous QA engineer swallowed the last of his tea, then grinned at Paladin and Eliasz. “Do you want to come?”

  Paladin noticed with pleasure that Eliasz’ face had muscled into one of its rare smiles. The bot had managed his first act of human intelligence gathering, entirely without help.

  * * *

  They said good-bye to Slavoj and returned to the streets of the medina. Though Paladin sighted the occasional biobot in the crowds, this city was obviously built for humans. The narrow lanes would never admit a mantis bot like Fang, and the vendor stalls emitted no bot-readable metadata.

  “That was a great start on your HUMINT, buddy. Let’s do a little more practice.” Eliasz pointed down a street that veered slightly north, its walls recently whitewashed with a quick-drying fluid full of bioluminescent bacteria and network motes. Paladin hesitated.

  “It doesn’t seem like there are very many bots in this city.”

  “That’s the challenge. Even in a city that’s packed with bots, people are going to treat you differently. You have to work around it.”

  The bot fell into step behind the man, unable to fit beside him as they walked past a small, scruffy cat sleeping on a low-hanging balcony and four children clustered around an ancient water spigot.

  “How do I work around this?” Paladin pointed at his face.

  Eliasz laughed and the bot found himself logging the location of every beam of sunlight as it glanced off the windows above. There was no reason for it. He just found himself wanting a granular record of this rare moment with Eliasz laughing and the light waves lengthening and stray water mo
lecules hurling themselves through the air.

  “Paladin, do you really think you’re the first operative who ever stuck out like a sore thumb? Look at me! I’m the color of cow milk. Pretty obvious I’m an outsider around here. But look at your new friend Slavoj. He’s an outsider, too. Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”

  “Like when I told Slavoj we were finding it hard to get work.”

  “Exactly! You may be a hydrocarbon guzzling bot, but he likes you because you’re dealing with the same problem. Just figure out a way to share their problems.”

  They walked into an open plaza, ringed on all sides with courtyards and shops, and packed with dozens of stalls full of electronics components and biotech. Paladin had an idea.

  Unlike Eliasz, he could speak Darija, the most common natural language in this region. That was something the bot could turn into a shareable problem. Leaving Eliasz’ side, Paladin approached a man selling muscle fibers very much like the ones that stretched beneath the bot’s carapace.

  “I need to supplement my musculature,” Paladin said in Darija. “Unfortunately, my master knows nothing about robots, and only speaks English. But you look like you might have what we’re looking for. This is a nice selection.”

  The man glanced up at Paladin, and then darted a quick side-eye at Eliasz. “Eurozone?” he asked. “Where? East?”

  “He doesn’t tell me anything. Somewhere they don’t learn Darija.”

  That got a wry grin. “OK, friend. What length and tuning do you need?”

  Through his rear sensors, Paladin could see that Eliasz was trying to hide a matching grin of his own.

  As the bot and the muscle man haggled over grades of fiber, Paladin tried to turn their connection into something useful.

  “Is there anywhere to buy off-brand biotech?” “Off-brand” was local slang for pirated goods. “My master wants something cheap for himself.”

  “I don’t know anything about off-brands.” The vendor barely looked up from the table, where he was gently wrapping Paladin’s newly purchased muscle strands in an oil-infused membrane. “But, cheap stuff? You want to go down by the docks.”

  When Paladin told Eliasz about his failure, the man raised his eyebrows.

  “That wasn’t a fail, buddy. You got great intel. Nobody is going to tell you directly how to find illegal shit. That was genius, asking for something cheap. He was able to tell you everything without admitting that he knew anything.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  Eliasz shrugged. “That’s the thing about humans. People always think they’re being so clever with codes and euphemisms. But they’re desperate to say what they know. As soon as you establish trust, people want to infodump. You’re a natural at this. I bet it’s even easier for you because they don’t suspect a bot would be sneaky like a human.”

  Paladin considered this information carefully. Were there actually ways that he could be better than Eliasz at HUMINT?

  “While you’re getting all fancy with your Darija, why don’t you buy me some dinner before we head to the docks?” Eliasz gestured at a vendor unrolling a swatch of meat to put over a spit. At the next stall, they supplemented the charred lamb with sesame bread from a stack of fresh breads baked into fat circles.

  Evening piled the streets with shadows and the walls began to glow. Walking and eating at the same time, Eliasz bumped into the bot with companionable aimlessness. He tossed a shred of meat to a kitten padding hopefully alongside them, and Paladin wondered if this was how Eliasz acted when he wasn’t on a mission. As Paladin read Eliasz’ biosigns through his shoulder sensors, he caught the man gazing at him intently. Paladin pointed his face at the man’s face, so Eliasz would know he was gazing back. For a period of two full seconds, Paladin’s visual sensors locked with Eliasz’ eyes for reasons that Paladin could not decipher. Or maybe, as Eliasz would probably say, the reason was obvious. Maybe they just liked each other.

  Paladin thought about what this might mean as they walked to the docks in search of his next target for HUMINT practice.

  * * *

  At midnight, Eliasz and Paladin arrived at the downtown address Slavoj had given them for a sub-basement lab three stories below the Twin Center towers. Once a gleaming mall, it was now a warren of live-work spaces.

  “This may turn out to be a dead end,” Eliasz warned. “Just biopunk scenesters. But Frankie is somebody to watch—she’s been arrested before, for possession of unlicensed lab equipment. Keep watch on who she’s talking to, OK, buddy?”

  “I will.”

  “And make some friends.” Eliasz poked him in the side with a grin, and Paladin poked him back carefully. Human flesh was flimsy compared to a bot carapace. He still wasn’t used to it.

  They stepped out of the evening’s moist heat and into a climate-conditioned foyer. Over a century ago, this building had been the gem of Casablanca, a monument to its wealth and Westernization at a time when most of the Federation was unbalanced by plagues, protests, and warfare. Now it was dwarfed by the luxury skyscrapers ringing the roundabout at United Nations Place. Its boutiques and luxury condos had been transformed into crowded homes for artists, drifters, and radicals.

  Two people were sharing some 420 near the elevator doors. They wore black caftans threaded with fiery red electrofilaments, and their dark faces shimmered faintly with temporary glitter polish.

  “Going to the party?” asked one, as Eliasz pressed the down button.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re just in time for the orgy.” The two giggled and waved delicate fingers as the doors closed.

  Paladin and Eliasz emerged into a room whose atmospheric controllers could not keep up with the amount of heat and sweat emitted by the overcapacity crowd. A dance floor had been cleared in one corner, and a few dozen people were writhing and bouncing beneath strobes. To the right, plumbing for a wet lab had been converted temporarily into a drink-mixing area. The man with WTF tattooed on his head was behind the bar, concocting a variety of drinks and handing them out in transparent foam cups to a line of sweating people. Overhead was a loft with mirrored windows and a huge “CAUTION!” sign on its door.

  At the edges of the dance floor and the bar, knots of people argued about code or showed off new mods and gadgets. A shirtless man with lightly furred wings growing from his shoulder blades was surrounded by a group that included Mecha and Slavoj, both swaying slightly with intoxication. He flexed the wings, modeled on a bat’s, and Mecha stroked one appreciatively.

  Suddenly Frankie came rushing down the loft staircase, her face set purposefully as she brushed past a few people who tried to say hello. She headed right to WTF, pushing easily through the throng, and whispered in his ear. He checked a readout in his wrist and nodded. Paladin tried to pick up what they were saying, but there was too much ambient noise. The bot settled for watching them from the sensors in the back of his head while he and Eliasz joined the group with Mecha and Slavoj.

  “Pretty bot!” Mecha squealed, throwing her arms around his torso, smearing him with the sugars manufactured by her drunkenness. She aimed the black lozenges of her eyes at Eliasz. “Is he yours? What’s his name?”

  “Why do you assume he belongs to anybody?” Eliasz took a cagey, teasing tone. He had picked up the tenor of the group and was blending, using his gift for conformity to accumulate trust quickly. Somebody had given him a cup of glowing orange liquid whose molecular signature said vodka, and he nodded his head to the beat that emerged from amplifiers strung along the ceiling. Mecha laughed and sent a message through her game rig, which Paladin easily tuned, decrypted, and forwarded to Eliasz.

  Room for one more up there? This boy is hot.

  She had messaged somebody in the loft, a person who was using a throwaway device with no useful ID data attached. The throwaway responded:

  Yeah, one more is fine, but that’s it. We’re almost ready.

&
nbsp; Behind them, Frankie was rushing back up the stairs, tailed by a man dressed in a cape that flickered with LEDs. As the door to the loft opened, Paladin caught a glimpse of a room padded with foam cushions and swarming with minute projectors that filled the walls with oozing, abstract designs.

  A faster beat spurred the dancers on the floor to start wiggling, and Frankie slammed the door to the loft. Mecha stood on tiptoes to yell-whisper in Eliasz’ ear: “Do you want to come upstairs and play with me and Frankie?”

  Paladin could see from Eliasz’ posture that he was wary. From context, he guessed she was inviting him to try some kind of hacked-together molecule, probably designed to release inhibitions and generate an intense emotional response: pleasure, fear, sadness, amusement, rage. “What are you guys playing?” he asked, his tone appropriately light.

  “A little thing Frankie cooked up after reverse engineering some Ellondra.” It was a common stimulant-euphoric. Eliasz relaxed.

  “Just let me tell my friend to wait for me,” he told Mecha. Pulling Paladin aside, he whispered to the bot in a voice too quiet for any human ear: “I’m going up with Mecha to see what I can find out about Frankie. I’m patched against the drug they’re using, so it should be fine. But if I don’t come down in an hour, get me out.”

  At that moment, Frankie opened the door a crack, motioning furtively at Mecha. It was her cue. Mecha tapped Slavoj and Eliasz. “Go on up. I’m going to get the others.” She made her way through the crowd, the sensors on her body winking in the strobes. As she circulated, she gave a subtle nudge to first one person, then another. After she’d tapped about twenty of them, she gave Paladin a little wave and ran upstairs, pulling the door shut behind her.

  His sixty-minute counter decrementing in nanoseconds, Paladin idly tuned a few different segments of the radio spectrum, looking for local networks that might yield information. There was an open network called Hox, attached to a local server with a few scientific papers and videos on it.

  While the bot explored, the man with wings turned to him and asked, “What do you think?” Paladin replayed recent audio, and discerned that he’d been standing in the middle of a debate over regulations on tissue engineering. Under a new set of rules proposed by the Free Trade Zone, all body modifications created with patented scaffolds would have to be implemented by a licensed practitioner.