Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  With a slight tremor, Eliasz withdrew his hands from Paladin’s neck and powered down the weapon. “Fuck, I’m so sorry, buddy,” he whispered. “I knew something like that might happen, and I should have warned you about it.” He sat up, leaning his damp back against the wall, keeping himself carefully positioned behind Paladin’s still-reclining form. “I really need some water.”

  The bot took only a second to drop to the floor and achieve a standing position next to the bed. He walked to the small potable water faucet, its shiny spout positioned beneath the gray water showerhead. On a washing stand drilled into the wall over a drain, there was one foam cup. As he filled the cup, he watched Eliasz covering his chest with a light shirt. Paladin decided that he would retain, but rarely access, the file he’d saved of the words Eliasz used to describe Paladin’s always-uncovered body.

  “I know it seems counterintuitive, but it was actually a good thing I was unpatched against Frankie’s drug.” He took a long drink, draining the cup. “She was hazing us, and it would have looked suspicious if I’d been too invulnerable.”

  Eliasz placed a now steady hand on the bot’s shoulder when Paladin sat on the cot next to him. “We did good last night. Did you get any intel?”

  “Actually, I believe I did.” Paladin told Eliasz about Frankie’s connection with The Bilious Pills, the publication whose terrorist activities had landed Jack in prison. Everyone who had committed to the group’s text repo had used pseudonyms, but the IPC had data files on most of them. Though The Bilious Pills had been officially disbanded after Jack’s arrest, the pirates behind it appeared to have maintained close connections over the years.

  Bluebeard had been part of the group along with Frankie and Jack. So had a human-computer interface engineer in Vancouver called Actin, real name Bobby Broner. Krish Patel, a renowned biomedical researcher in Saskatoon, was known as Captain Nemo. Another former contributor was a doctor in Yellowknife, called Posthuman, real name Malika Ellul. Two more were dead.

  “It’s possible Jack is still working with the Pills, and one of them is harboring her,” Paladin finished.

  Eliasz looked dubious. “She may be a pirate, but Jack’s not stupid. By now she knows we’re onto her, and she’ll be focused entirely on saving her ass. Staying with somebody whose name is so publicly connected to hers would be foolish.”

  “I don’t believe they are publicly connected,” Paladin explained. “Nearly all information about The Bilious Pills has been removed from the public net. I had to get my data from IPC intelligence.”

  Eliasz’ hand still rested absently on Paladin’s shoulder. “OK, good to know. Let’s work on Frankie for now, and keep our options open with the others.”

  It was still early, and after last night’s party, none of their potential sources would likely be awake. Eliasz was famished, and announced that they’d kill two birds with one stone by going to a breakfast hangout near the Twin Center. It was a postparty spot in the neighborhood, a place where they could continue exploiting the connections they’d begun making the night before. Eliasz sponged off in the shower, and they headed downtown. The air was filled with pollen, along with stray molecules from the sea.

  Paladin was thinking about his brain.

  Early that morning he had discovered a small chunk of data from Kagu Robotics Foundry waiting for him on the Camp Tunisia servers. Apparently his request was so unusual that it had been assigned to a botadmin, who appended a note:

  We don’t normally give out personal information about organ donors to our biobots program. But because you are a recipient of the organ, we have determined that we can release some information to you, provided you accept this property management wrapper that will prevent you from sharing sensitive data with anyone else.

  Attached was a file, accessible only inside an app designed to contain rights-protected media and trade secrets. Paladin opened it, and discovered that the more he knew, the less he could tell anyone.

  His brain had once belonged to a soldier named Dikeledi [Last Name Withheld]. Like Paladin, she had been indentured to the African Federation. The file said she had died in the line of duty, but did not say how. Obviously by some method that had spared her brain, which had been removed from her body the day Paladin was completed. He had no memory of Dikeledi’s brain being installed, only that he could recognize the difference between thousands of human faces, and instantly read the emotional content of their expressions when they flashed before his sensors in tests.

  At the time of his construction, a Kagu botadmin told Paladin the brain allowed him to do all that facial-recognition processing. But the bot arms at the foundry told him that the brain was unnecessary—just an advertising gimmick. A line that Fang had repeated. Paladin was left unsure what this brain really meant to him, and why he needed it.

  Paladin poked at the software wrapper containing his knowledge, trying to determine what he could tell Eliasz about it. Depending on how he phrased it, he might be able to convey more information than the rights management software intended.

  “I have some personal news I would like your opinion about,” Paladin vocalized experimentally. “I have received information from the Kagu Robotics Foundry about my brain. It came from a person in the Federation.” That much was public information. He could not say whose brain it was, but he could assign a pronoun to her. “She gave me this brain, but I am not sure if it matters. Other bots say it’s just an advertising gimmick.”

  “She? Who is she?” Eliasz stopped beneath a palm tree, his hair thumbed by a hot breeze.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “But do you know?”

  “Yes.”

  Eliasz grinned and rapped on Paladin’s carapace over the brain, as he had done before. “That’s so fantastic! Now you know who you really are!” He paused, his face a chaos of emotion that passed quickly into one of his rare grins. “Who would have guessed you were a woman?”

  The two began to walk again, Eliasz occasionally looking at Paladin and refraining from saying something.

  From endlessly researching the word “faggot,” and finally reaching an approximate understanding, Paladin knew that human gender was part of sexual desire. But he was starting to perceive that gender was a way of seeing the world, too. Military bots, especially ones with armored bodies like Paladin’s, were almost always called “he.” People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition.

  That’s why humans had given him a gender before he even had a name.

  As they approached the breakfast shop, Paladin perceived trace elements of seared meat borne by the wind. It came from an imitation British pub, complete with a sign announcing “THE KINDS OF BREAKFASTS AUTHENTIC ENGLISH WOULD EAT IN THE DAYS OF QUEEN VICTORIA.” This early in the morning, the patrons were sparse, but there were a few families and a big group of disheveled partygoers, their bodies still thrumming with the drugs and hormones they’d processed the night before.

  Before they entered, Eliasz turned to Paladin and gazed upward into the bot’s face. The man was searching, the bot realized, for the kinds of expressions Paladin always looked for in human faces.

  “Should I start calling you ‘she’?”

  As a robot, he didn’t care what pronoun people used; as Fang had pointed out, gender was something humans projected onto robots. Changing his pronoun would make absolutely no difference at all. It would merely substitute one signifier for another. But then Paladin considered the implications of Eliasz’ facial expression, which at that moment hovered between desire and fear. Of course: If Paladin were female, Eliasz would not be a faggot. And maybe then Eliasz could touch Paladin again, the way he had last night, giving and receiving pleasure in an undocumented form of emotional feedback loop.

  Paladin realized that this was the first time he’d been given a choice about something that might change his life. He thought about it for many seconds before replying.

  “Yes,” th
e bot vocalized.

  Their arms pressed together as they entered the pub, and Paladin took a microsample of the man’s blood. Eliasz’ oxytocin levels had risen slightly—this time, without pharmaceutical intervention.

  They found the partygoers inside. Some of them had been high on pirated Ellondra when Frankie dosed Eliasz.

  “Hey, it’s Aleksy!” A man with pale skin doffed his bright red hat theatrically. He turned to the group. “Last night was so epic. Aleksy was patched against Ellondra, so Frankie owned him up with a custom chemical! Oh, man.” Then he grinned at Eliasz. “Your bot had to carry you home!”

  Eliasz gave a sheepish shrug. “Yeah, I was really out of it. But at least I wasn’t knocked over by something as simple as Ellondra.”

  Red Hat warbled a laugh and gestured for them to come over. “I’ll tell you a little secret: None of us is actually concerned about being vulnerable to Ellondra. That stuff is great.”

  Eliasz and Paladin dragged up some chairs, pushing into the group next to Mecha and Slavoj, who didn’t mind having more excuses to bump into each other and giggle.

  Red Hat turned out to be Hox2, the person who ran the space in the Twin Center where they’d gone last night. Another group of bleary-looking people in transparent armor arrived, and Hox2 retold the story of his night, with more flourishes at the moment of the drugging. Hox2 finally ended his tale by gesturing at Paladin.

  “Does he always carry you home from parties?”

  “She,” replied Eliasz, around a mouthful of eggs.

  “What?” Hox2 and the people in transparent armor looked confused, while Slavoj and Mecha started to kiss.

  “She’s a she,” Eliasz explained. “And I believe this is the first time she’s ever carried me home. So, do you live in that place where you had the party?”

  That managed to change the subject. The basement space was obviously one of Hox2’s favorite subjects, maybe even more than coercive drugging. “Technically, it’s a space for doing lab work, so I can’t live there, right?” He raised his eyebrows conspiratorially. “It used to be an official free lab, but now we let people develop under mixed licenses. People have to make money on what they’re doing, right?”

  This comment set off what sounded like a well-worn debate at the table, with some people arguing that a free lab would be better for social progress, and others taking the view that nobody would have any incentive to invent things without patents. Breakfast wore on, and Mecha got up to leave. Hox2 stood with her, straightening his hat, and announced that he had to get back to the space and clean up.

  “You should come by later this afternoon,” he said to Eliasz. “Frankie is doing a presentation on some free tools for analyzing protein functions.” As Hox2 walked away, he patted Paladin’s head. “Yes, you can bring him too!”

  “Her,” Eliasz muttered to his cold cup of tea.

  Presently, Eliasz tapped his wrist and beamed some cash to one of the people in transparent armor, who was collecting everybody’s money for the meal. Then he stood up, too. “I’m gonna catch a nap and then go check out Frankie’s presentation.”

  Slavoj waved at both of them. “Bye, Aleksy and Pack! See you later!”

  They walked back to the hotel in silence, avoiding the egg-shaped electric cars that taxied people through the streets, and threaded their way through sidewalks crowded with shoppers.

  As soon as they entered their room, Eliasz turned to Paladin and grabbed her body with an urgency the bot now recognized. She wrapped her arms gently around him and bent her head so that he could kiss the fine mesh over her voice synthesizer. There were no piezosensors on the place Eliasz would know as her mouth, so she felt nothing of his kisses except a kind of light pressure in the structural frame of her head. But her arms and legs could smell molecules on the man’s body that came from salt and sexual arousal.

  “I knew there was a reason I wanted you, Paladin,” he whispered. “I must have somehow sensed that you were a woman.”

  There it was: the anthropomorphization. But did it really matter if Eliasz didn’t understand that bots had no gender? If Eliasz saw her as a woman, Paladin could have what she’d been wanting for days on end. It would make things easier for both of them, even if the truth was more complicated than Eliasz realized.

  Eliasz ran his hands over her carapace, finding the edges of her armor plates and trying to reach between them to feel the woven fibers of Paladin’s muscles. “You feel so good.” Pressing his body against hers, he powered down his entire defense perimeter. The sensation made Paladin ache with fear and protectiveness; she was the only thing that kept him from danger now.

  Eliasz’ pulse elevated and he pulled away from her. “Come to bed with me, Paladin,” he said, grabbing her hand. As he stumbled into the main room, she followed, watching him remove all his clothes and a translucent web of sensors, which he left in an invisible tangle on the floor.

  He led her to the bed. She allowed him to push her down on it and climb on top of her, his chest blocking the apertures for her guns. His flushed face pressed against the curve of her neck. It was the first time she had felt him completely naked against her, and she placed her hand against the knotted muscles of his lower back as he strained and sighed in a pleasure she knew she’d induced as surely as Frankie’s drug had.

  When at last Eliasz’ heartbeat slowed, he lay sweating in the crook of her arm, running his fingers across her other hand, the one Lee had modded.

  “What does that feel like to you?” he asked sleepily.

  “It feels like … pressure and movement. I can sample your blood and see that there’s prolactin in it.”

  “Does it feel good?”

  “Knowing that it is you, and that I am keeping you safe, makes me feel good.”

  He sat up a little more, looking at her face. “Is there a way that bots can … come? Have an orgasm?”

  Paladin thought for a while, considering what Eliasz meant by “orgasm,” and trying to find some kind of equivalent experience.

  “I am only a few months old, so my knowledge of undocumented functions is incomplete. But I have a program that I downloaded from the bot server at Camp Tunisia that causes some of the same physical symptoms as an orgasm.”

  Eliasz’ heartbeats came faster again. “Can I watch you while you play it?” He pressed his body against hers the way he had earlier, growing aroused.

  “It would not be safe while your weapons are off. The file forces me to reboot.”

  The man jumped up and settled the light net of sensors over his head, waiting for it to weave itself tightly across his skin, connecting with his subcutaneous network. “Lie on your side and I can cover you,” he whispered, curling around her torso and head, protecting most of her legs with his own. She checked to be sure that his perimeter was on a secure setting, though it was not armed against her.

  “I will play it now,” she vocalized. She opened the original executable and it began to run, the worm rapidly replicating a few pieces of nonsense data inside her as she watched the scene stolen from a game world, of herself rescuing a man on the battlefield. She felt Eliasz’ hands and body moving against her carapace distantly, adding to the general sense of wrong inputs flooding her sensors. At last she was overwhelmed: Her mind filled with errors, and a pleasurable confusion raced through her before she crashed in his arms.

  When she rebooted, Eliasz was still in a defensive posture around her, stroking the shielding around her brain.

  “Awake now?” He kissed the back of her head.

  “Yes.”

  “Great, because I really do have to sleep.”

  “It is safe now.”

  His grip on her relaxed, and she stole away from the bed to stand guard at the center of the room.

  * * *

  As the day began to cool, Eliasz woke up, checked his messages, and took another sponge bath before they headed out to Frankie’s presentation.

  “Pay attention to anything Frankie does on the network, and lo
ok for a way to access her messages on it,” he said. “We just need positive confirmation that she’s been communicating with Jack recently. If so, we’ll proceed to a full interrogation.”

  When they arrived at Hox2’s place, it looked like it was transitioning between trashed party spot and community lab. The wet lab was still partly a wet bar, and people were helping themselves to last night’s beer. Frankie was uploading data to a projector cube in the center of a long lab bench that bisected the dance floor. She laughed when she looked up and saw Eliasz and Paladin arriving. “Feeling a little hung over, Aleksy?”

  “Not so much that I wasn’t able to get over here to see if you can do anything other than dose unwary engineers.”

  “I’m flattered.” She returned to gesturing at the projector.

  Paladin tuned local radio wave transmissions, looking for any signs that Frankie’s projector was networked in a way that would give the bot access to whatever server she was using. Just as Frankie’s audience started plunking down cups of beer on the bench, Paladin found her opportunity. Frankie was networking her glasses with a protein synthesizer she’d pulled down from a shelf. Monitoring the exchange, Paladin managed to capture the authentication sequence the synthesizer used to connect with the glasses.

  Presently, Frankie reached a point in the presentation when she no longer needed to use the synthesizer. She severed the connection. Now Paladin could send the authentication code to Frankie’s glasses, which had already been set up to receive connections from the synthesizer without question. Paladin was in. Jumping through directories quickly, she located a batch of recent messages stored on the device and encrypted with a very old algorithm that took only seconds to break. One of the messages was clearly from Jack, though its origins had been obscured—it had been routed through a server located in a research lab on the Moon.

  Stop manufacturing that Zacuity shit until I get back. Very dangerous. Lots of fatal side effects in the Zone. Also, don’t expect me in fall—I may have to lie low for a while.