Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  Paladin knew that ownership regulations weren’t exactly valued in this crowd. “It will give patent holders more control over what you can do with your body,” he said, quoting verbatim from an anti-patent text repo whose feed he’d quickly plundered.

  “Exactly! Do you think I could have these wings if the Zone pushed the other economic coalitions to bend to its puritanical will?” The man stretched the beautiful but useless wings over his head. “I’m Casey, by the way.”

  “I’m Pack.”

  “What do you do, Pack? You don’t look much like a lab assistant.” Casey tapped Paladin’s carapace. “Feels military grade.”

  “I am indentured to Aleksy. We’re looking for gene development work.”

  “Oh, you’re slaved to that guy who went off with Mecha?”

  Paladin had nothing to say to that, so he decided to pry. “What do you do?”

  “I make custom penises.” Casey tapped the palm of his hand, beaming Paladin the address of a server packed with information on how to design and order the sex organs you’d always wanted. “Good money in that. But now I’m thinking I might get into consulting with companies that want to implement open tissue scaffolds. You know, to get around this new regulation.”

  “Interesting,” Paladin vocalized, scanning the room. Eliasz had been gone for almost half an hour already.

  “Actually, you look like you could use my services, friend,” Casey laughed, patting the smooth alloy between the bot’s legs. “Why didn’t they build you with a dick?”

  “Are you completely stupid?” giggled Mecha, who had been slinking down the stairs behind them. When she arrived, she clung heavily on Paladin’s arm. “Don’t you know anything about bots, Casey? This pretty bot here…” she paused, her skin profoundly flushed and her body trembling with a wave of chemically induced pleasure. “This pretty bot has something better than one of your dicks. He’s got a brain right here.” She tapped Paladin’s carapace over the chamber where his human brain quietly processed facial recognition data.

  Before Mecha swooned again, she wriggled hotly against the bot’s left side, her thumb drawing a streak of sweat down his torso, moving from one covert weapons system to another. “I’ve been inside your model,” she whispered. “In RoboCity.” As she named the popular game world, her knees began to buckle. Paladin knelt slightly, lifted her quivering, ecstatic body, and carried her up the stairs to the loft. She would fare better on the cushions there, among other people who had been drugged.

  Paladin was beginning to feel a strange dread in this human network, where everyone seemed to know he was military issue. Pretty soon, somebody would actually care. It was very possible that he and Eliasz were about to have their covers blown. This party could get dangerous.

  As Paladin shouldered into the loft with Mecha, he immediately perceived Eliasz and Frankie talking in the corner, behind a puddle of bodies filled with blood that bore molecular traces of Ellondra.

  As he let Mecha down, she briefly achieved lucidity and pointed across the room at Frankie. “See her? I love her.” Mecha addressed herself to Paladin’s upper arm, focusing on an area that contained a small constellation of sensors. “Did you know she named herself after Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA? That was her pseudonym when she wrote for The Bilious Pills, too.”

  By the time Mecha sank into the pillows, Paladin was accessing fragments of saved and cached versions of The Bilious Pills. “Frankie is just so … amazing. You should talk to her.” And then Slavoj reached an arm out from the edge of the human drug puddle, and Mecha flowed back into it.

  Frankie and Eliasz walked over to where Paladin stood in the doorway, skirting the pillowed area.

  “Aleksy has been telling me about your gene-hacking skills,” Frankie said, looking at the hollows in Paladin’s face that most humans perceived as eyes. “He said the two of you always work together.”

  “We do.”

  “He also explained to me how he’s patched against Ellondra. Very impressive.”

  “That’s just a taste of what we can do,” Eliasz replied, a calculated boast.

  “Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea of just how smart you are.” Frankie grinned and slapped a dermal injector on Eliasz’ neck before he could react. She winked at Paladin as Eliasz’ pupils dilated. He reached out an unsteady arm to the bot. “Looks like your master isn’t patched against this.”

  Eliasz sagged against the bot’s frame. Paladin lifted him the way he had Mecha, quickly sending a command that disabled part of Eliasz’ perimeter system. The man’s skin temperature had risen, and a quick blood sample revealed what Paladin had suspected: serotonin cascade, dopamine levels rising. Eliasz writhed, senses focused inward on some kind of hallucination that his brain processed as pleasure.

  Frankie opened the door and barked a laugh. “See you later, kiddies.”

  Paladin held the man and stepped lightly down the stairs, powering up his head-mounted lasers as he crossed in front of the bar to the elevator. He didn’t bother with the buttons, relaying a command directly to the building’s systems that overrode all other requests and brought the elevator down to Basement 3. He was in high-defense mode as he entered the car. Had anyone interfered, he would have shot to kill.

  Luckily, all the revelers were focused on who was arriving rather than who was leaving. And nobody paid attention to a bot carrying his master, moaning and sighing with obvious intoxication, through the warm streets of early morning. A molecule lookup revealed the drug wasn’t deadly, but Eliasz would be incapacitated for hours.

  At their hotel, Paladin laid Eliasz on the cot and stood at full alert in the center of the room. The problem was that the man wouldn’t stay still. Frankie’s drug had filled him with restless energy. He crept from the bed to curl around the cool, segmented carapace of Paladin’s legs, breathing raggedly around half-formed sentences. Then his entire body tensed up and he lapsed into a soft groan, hostage to an enforced gratification.

  Paladin knelt next to Eliasz, now curled into a fetal position on the rug.

  “Come to bed with me, Paladin,” Eliasz whispered. “It will be OK this once.” He trailed off, and Paladin used his new hand to feel the stuttering flashes of arousal that passed through the man’s body.

  “I will carry you to bed.”

  “Lie down next to me.” He gripped Paladin’s leg, staring at him with drug-stretched pupils. “You are so beautiful. Let me feel you next to me.”

  For the second time that day, they looked into each other’s faces. But now, unlike in the medina, the sight of Eliasz’ dark eyes was like a worm filling Paladin’s mind with junk characters and overriding his action priorities. It was hard to set Eliasz’ words aside and follow protocols. “It is not safe,” the bot said quietly. “We are in danger. Frankie drugged you.”

  Sweating and shaking, Eliasz pulled himself to his feet by clinging to Paladin, then wrapped his arms around the bot’s torso and pressed his face against one armored shoulder. “Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay,” he chanted in a whisper.

  It was not safe. But Paladin wanted to lie down beside Eliasz on the narrow cot, to train his sensors on the man’s drug-amped desire, to recognize in the man’s face a possible representation of his own chaotic feelings. And so he found a compromise between his desires and his programming.

  Laying Eliasz on the bed again, he lay down, too. His carapace, balanced at the edge of the mattress via tiny movements of his actuators, became a shield for the man’s vulnerable body. He faced Eliasz and faced away from him simultaneously, scanning for danger. He rested his hand on the man’s flank, the tiny needles in his palm sipping minute samples of Eliasz’ blood. The bot could read each molecular change in Eliasz’ body as the man’s euphoria grew and subsided. He wished there was some other way he could touch Eliasz that would give him an even more intimate understanding of what was happening.

  “Why did you say this was wrong?” Eliasz was shivering through one of t
he highs that bunched his muscles into spasms. He stared into Paladin’s face and his fingers pressed urgently against the bot’s chest.

  “What we are doing is not wrong. I was worried that you weren’t safe, but I can keep watch.”

  “But you said it was wrong. Two men cannot lie together.” Eliasz was gasping, his heart rate spiking as he hallucinated, talking to someone who wasn’t there.

  Paladin tried to reorient Eliasz in reality. “It’s Paladin. I am not a man. I am a bot. I belong to the African Federation.”

  Eliasz started to cry, the salt of his tears indistinguishable from the salt of his sweat. Paladin didn’t know what to say. It was unlikely the man would remember any of this in a few hours. Eliasz had already gone rigid with ecstasy again, his mouth slack and wordless. The bot did not resist when the man faced him, hooking one arm and one leg over his carapace, clinging as hard as he could. It felt good, as if Eliasz were finally telling Paladin everything he wanted to know.

  13

  RETCON

  JULY 13, 2144

  “When are we going to run away together … master?” Threezed whispered hotly in Jack’s ear, appending the client’s honorific with a sharp dip in his voice. They were naked and her thighs formed a cradle for his slim hips. Though her thoughts had been vagued out by postorgasmic pleasure, Jack was instantly alert and dismayed.

  She rolled on her side to dislodge him. “What is your goddamn problem, Threezed?”

  “I just don’t want you to leave me here when you guys figure out that mesolimbic pathway thing.” Threezed traced one puckered curve of the scar between Jack’s breasts. She was still slightly damp with his sweat. “What am I supposed to do here?”

  They lay on an unfurled sofa bed next to stacks of old servers and fabbers. After two straight days of coding and testing, Jack was exhausted. She should have been sleeping instead of fucking. She twisted around in Threezed’s embrace and groped through her sack for an attention-focuser. Finding a blister pack, she popped out a shiny silver bead of pirated Vigilizer—that would clear her mind so she could start working again.

  But when the drug kicked in, she found that all her ideas were about Threezed.

  “What if I bought you a franchise here? I have enough to pay for a basic citizenship package that would let you work and go to school in Saskatoon. And if you wanted to move somewhere else in the Zone, it’s a pretty cheap upgrade.”

  Threezed propped himself up on his elbows and looked thoughtful. “Do you have a franchise here, too?”

  “I had one when I lived here. Now I have an international business franchise that gives me rights in five economic coalitions. I’m covered pretty much anywhere I go.”

  Although she’d broken many laws in her time, Jack had never lived without a franchise. Her parents bought her one the moment she was born. They had a family package that guaranteed all the Chen children could own property, apply for jobs, go to school, and move to another city if they wanted. Though Lucky Lake was small, it was still incorporated—the city used money from local enfranchisement deals to pay for police and emergency responders, as well as regular mote net dusting to keep all their devices robustly connected.

  If the Chens hadn’t had a successful farm, Jack would have turned eighteen with no franchise, and no hope of working unless she entered contract. She’d known a few kids at school in that situation, mostly Natives who got indentured to jobs in habitat management or mining up north. For the first time in decades, she recalled how her school principal had described this arrangement as “cultural enrichment.” The kids under contract would live in dorms near historic Native communities, earning their franchises while immersed in the traditional landscapes of their ancestors. Jack hadn’t thought about her old high school classmates in years. As the principal’s words echoed in her memory and she looked into Threezed’s face, she realized how much bullshit that had been. Some of those kids had probably died up on the Arctic coast without ever owning anything, even themselves. She wondered whether the indenture system had its own version of piracy, and tried to imagine what that would be.

  Threezed had rolled on his back and was looking at the electroluminescent threads knit into the stiff panels of the ceiling.

  “Think about it, OK?” Jack sat up and sealed the vent on her coveralls. “Saskatoon’s a pretty nice city. Not a bad place to be enfranchised.” Before Threezed could reply, she dropped down the loft ladder.

  Med was at her bench, fabbers and sample fridges scattered around her. The bot appeared to be talking to a tiny white mouse cupped in her hands while David watched with his usual serious expression. It was 5:45 a.m.

  When Med and David ignored her, Jack made a stab at conversation. “Why are you talking to the mouse?”

  “Trying to see if we’ve erased the right memory.” David gestured up a projection of the mouse’s brain. It hovered over the table, slowly rotating, swollen to the size of a basketball and crackling with colors signifying neural pathways and molecular transformations. “We used Zacuity to get Beady addicted to Professor Cohen’s voice, and now we’re exposing him to the addictive process while dosed with Retcon.”

  The Vigilizer felt good, but Jack was still grateful when Catalyst arrived with a thermos of coffee and steaming buns from the co-op bakery on Broadway. Nobody else was working in the lab at this hour, but somehow the Retcon team had gotten the idea that this project was special. It had snared Med a coveted job in the lab, for one thing. And there was also the matter of Jack’s mysterious presence, as well as Krish’s involvement. The situation clearly merited all-nighters.

  “Don’t you ever eat or sleep, Med?” Catalyst asked with a grin.

  Med returned Beady to a small cage next to her. “No.” Her voice was casual. “I’m a robot.” Something about the formal way she said “robot” made it immediately clear she wasn’t joking.

  Catalyst was about to stuff a hunk of warm, cinnamon-coated bread into her mouth, and suddenly stopped. “You are? How did you get to be a professor?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of the Cohen Lab at Anchorage?” David asked archly, pleased to show he knew more than a grad student. “They make biobots that are raised autonomous, just like humans.”

  Threezed had come down from the loft. He reached for a bun from the bag, pushing past David in a way that seemed deliberately calculated to be rude. “Really?” he asked sarcastically, finding Jack’s eyes with his own. “Is that how humans are raised? Autonomous?”

  David looked confused, but obviously felt that he should put this question to rest, especially since it had been posed by a person who was clearly not part of the lab hierarchy. “Yes,” he said in a slightly condescending tone. “Humans do not require the same financial investment to reproduce as robots, and therefore they are only indentured as adults, by choice.”

  “Thanks for the little property lesson, sweetie.” Threezed rolled his eyes. Swiping an unused mobile off the table, he ambled out of the lab.

  “Sometimes you are a complete fuckwit, David,” Catalyst muttered.

  “Well, sometimes you are, too!” he shot back.

  Med shrugged and analyzed the real-time images she was receiving from the local network, where data was coming from a haze of microscopic devices spreading like fluid through Beady’s brain, analyzing what it was doing under the influence of Retcon. She shared the whole thing out to a holo desktop they’d created, creating a 3-D image that she sliced with a clipped motion of her hand.

  Beady made scrabbling noises in his cage.

  Presently Krish arrived, also bearing coffee and buns. He sat down with the group like a student, unpacking his breakfast and tapping out a few commands on the desktop. “How’s it going? Looks like we’ve got some new data.”

  Jack wiped her hand through the air, pushing some unanalyzed brain slices to Krish.

  “I saw Threezed leaving with one of our lab mobiles. What is he doing?”

  “I believe that he is learning about autonomy,” Med repl
ied.

  * * *

  Threezed returned in the early afternoon, wearing a faded University of Saskatchewan hoodie and looking a lot less sullen. Jack nodded at Threezed and he nodded back: fight over. Their conversation that morning had changed the connection between them, made the whole thing feel less desperate.

  Beady was feeling better, too. It appeared they’d edited out the memory that made him seek Med’s voice at all costs, even his own life. His dopamine receptors were growing back nicely, too.

  Jack addressed the group. “I think we’re ready to soft launch now. Let’s publish the Retcon repository and get some feedback.”

  Med looked up. “I’ve never pushed a drug out like this—without trials.”

  “We already know Retcon works in simulations and on Beady here.” Jack patted the roof of the mouse cage. “That’s a good start. Next we’ll get results from docs testing it on subjects who are already at risk of death.”

  “So it’s an informal Phase I drug trial, where you test to see whether it’s deadly to humans,” Med mused.

  “That’s true. There is a very small chance it could kill people.”

  Catalyst interrupted. “That’s a risk with any drug, and we all know companies like Zaxy push shit out on the market all the time without taking them through trials. They get an exemption for drugs administered by a licensed Zaxy provider.”

  “But our providers won’t have access to the kinds of medical facilities Zaxy would have,” Med said.

  “This is pretty much how open pharma works, Med,” Krish said gently. “And I think you already know a group of subjects who are at risk of death.”

  Everybody was looking at the bot now, waiting. She was lead on the Retcon project, and they wouldn’t do anything without her final approval.