Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  Maybe there was some weird crap going on with Lyle and Frankie, but Jack was suddenly filled with certainty that she could deal with it. She didn’t want to lose another person she loved. Or another place. And Jack had to admit she wasn’t particularly worried about piracy.

  * * *

  Lyle was much happier after she quit her day job. Signal was flourishing, and she told Jack it was the first time she truly believed she wasn’t living out some twisted version of her mother’s dreams. For a few months, it felt like they were back in the Free Lab storage room again, madly in love with each other and the revolution.

  Until one afternoon when Jack got a text from an unknown string of numbers, which usually meant Frankie. It read: We need to talk about Lyle. Meet me at the teahouse in an hour?

  Frankie held court in a dim, red-curtained room at a teahouse in the biotechie ghetto. Sitting cross-legged at a low table surrounded by plump cushions, the pirate was playing with a handheld 3-D printer that was spitting out what looked like tiny chunks of cellulose.

  She stood quickly when Jack arrived. “Thanks for coming.”

  Frankie ordered another pot of tea and gave Jack a look that was entirely free of her usual sarcasm. “Have you talked to Lyle lately about her new project?”

  “I thought she was working with you.” Jack felt a twist of the old jealousy; there were so many things she didn’t know about what Lyle was doing with Frankie.

  Frankie settled her chin into her fist, and Jack noticed with surprise that the pirate had dyed her hair pink. “I haven’t hung out with her in weeks. She’s been working with a new group, run by this woman called FoxP2. I’m worried.”

  “Well, now you know how I’ve been feeling for the past year,” Jack commented sardonically.

  Frankie said nothing, and swirled tea in her cup. “FoxP2 is dangerous.”

  “More dangerous than a pirate who sells illegal drugs to the highest bidder?” Jack felt like an asshole as soon as she said it, but Frankie was unfazed.

  “We both care about Lyle, and I understand why you’re pissed at me. But I want you to understand that I am very careful about my work. I don’t want to get caught, and I spend a lot of time making sure of that. Hasn’t Lyle told you about my business?”

  “You already told me you’re a pirate.”

  “I told you that because I trust you. But I also run a legitimate business as a consultant, and all my money is funneled through that. I’ve worked with an attorney to make sure the IPC will never get anything on me.”

  Maybe she was lying about that attorney. If so, at least her lies demonstrated that she understood the dangers of her job.

  “I take it this other woman isn’t as careful as you are.”

  FoxP2 and her collective wanted to disrupt the system, but their plans didn’t extend much beyond the disruption. Lyle was apparently helping them engineer muscles for pirated legs and arms, each replacement limb in violation of dozens of patents. Their work was excellent, but flashy. FoxP2 had a public text repo called Pirate Your Body, where she bragged about all the lives that she’d saved with her work. And all the greedy biotech corporations she’d screwed over.

  As Frankie talked, Jack pulled out her mobile and found FoxP2’s journal on Memeland. The latest entry was just a series of pictures uploaded from a party. Lyle figured in a lot of them, dressed in armor, with her head half-shaved. Jack recognized a few people from Signal dancing with her. She thumbed back over to the pictures of Lyle again, trying to figure out what she’d been doing the night they were taken.

  “Somebody is going to punish them. The Federation can’t afford to look like it’s harboring flagrantly subversive groups. It’s bad for trade. We’ve got to get Lyle to stop working with FoxP2.”

  Jack had to admit that FoxP2’s project looked exactly like the kind of thing that got people detained by the IPC—and sometimes disappeared. It was too obvious they wanted to flout the law. Was it possible that Lyle genuinely didn’t understand the stakes here?

  Frankie’s glasses were receiving data, and the pirate ducked out of the room for a moment. Jack played with one of the cellulose blobs that the 3-D printer was still extruding onto the table. It looked like it could be some kind of processed plant material, the kind of thing you might package a drug in.

  She tried to imagine how she would bring up FoxP2 with Lyle—it wouldn’t be easy. But she never had a chance to have that conversation. Frankie ran back into the room, her lips thinned into a line, and yanked Jack up by the wrist. “FoxP2 is a bigger fuckup than I thought. We need to go.”

  As they left the tea shop in a rush of panic, Frankie forgot the 3-D printer, even though it was the latest model and very hard to find in Casablanca.

  Jack remembered the next twenty-four hours as a series of violent, black-and-white still photographs, like the slides archivists pasted into old movies where footage has been lost.

  It was 9:00 a.m. when they arrived at Signal, and it had already been raided. A couple of hackers who had hidden under some pillows in the loft told them the story. Thugs from the IPC had waved something that looked like an international warrant, chased everyone out, and confiscated all of the equipment that they didn’t recognize, which was almost everything. Jack received an official mail from the IPC explaining that the equipment would be held until such a time as they could determine what it was being used for.

  It was midnight, and FoxP2 was dead—or, at least, that’s what they assumed. Her lab had been blown up. The Federation news sites already had quotes from IPC officials saying a terrorist lab had exploded while manufacturing illegal drugs. FoxP2’s journal was gone from its usual server. Science chroniclers immediately mirrored it at a radical text repo archive in Anchorage.

  It was 3:00 a.m. and Lyle’s body was a collapsed shadow blocking the bedroom door. Someone had dumped her in Jack and Lyle’s apartment, wrapped in latex polymer. She was not doing six things at once. She was not talking about changing the future. She was not dancing. She was not dying her hair, hacking molecules, leaving a mess in the kitchen, or giving Jack a kiss. She was not electroluminescent. Therefore she must be dead. Which made no sense, because it was only a few hours ago when Jack discovered that she might be in danger of being dead, in the unlikely event that Jack could not talk her out of being in a position to possibly be dead.

  Jack was halfway down the stairs when the bomb went off. She couldn’t stop herself from turning around, looking back at everything she loved on Earth burning. A jagged piece of ceramic hurled itself out the door and burned its way through her jacket. Maybe through her heart.

  It was 5:00 a.m.; somehow they were in Frankie’s truck, on the road to Fez. They had left Signal behind; they had left Lyle’s body behind. They had to get out of town, Frankie said. Jack was having a hard time responding to anything. A tissue repair bandage was sticky on her neck and chest. Arms wrapped around her bent legs, she pressed her closed eyes against her knees and felt tears running down the insides of her thighs.

  “What am I going to do?” She rocked back and forth against the lumpy polymer seat.

  Frankie shot a look at her, then faced the dusty road again. “You’re going to survive. That is what you’re going to do.”

  Because she could not yet take in the full weight of Lyle’s death, Jack pondered the causalities: Why had Lyle chosen to start a project with FoxP2 instead of continuing to work with Frankie? Why hadn’t Lyle ever told her about it? Why had she put herself in that kind of danger?

  * * *

  Even decades later, Jack pondered that same question: Had Lyle been trying to destroy herself in some kind of terrible self-fulfilling prophecy of madness? It still drove Jack crazy to think about it. She padded across the carpet to her futon, mobile tucked under her arm, determined to watch a movie rather than dwell on long-ago events she couldn’t change.

  Lying down in her safe house, Jack tried to imagine older crimes than the ones she had witnessed, two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old murders that
had taken place in this very tunnel. Maybe all the blood shed by those dead generations made it easier to bear what she had experienced. Or maybe it just made everything worse.

  16

  NO. 3 ROAD

  JULY 13, 2144

  Paladin could tell that Lee was taking a greater than normal interest in maintaining her specialized arm. He’d written some custom software for it, even given her a few beta sensors for her fingertips that emulated a sense of taste. As she tested the new drivers, discovering flavors in the air and an ability to make minute motions with her fingers, Paladin felt different. And she had to admit she was confused. “I don’t understand how this will help me with my mission,” she vocalized.

  Lee grinned and tickled the palm of her new hand. “Sometimes you do technical things just to show that you can. It’s not like this will harm you, and it may turn out to be useful.”

  “It doesn’t seem very useful to taste things when I can’t eat them.”

  The botadmin turned serious, and set his soldering iron aside. It had been roughly three hours since he’d installed the simulated autonomy key and rebooted her recompiled mind. This hacking on Paladin’s arm was a way to fill the time while he waited for her to adjust.

  “How do you feel about your mission?”

  “I would like to get started as soon as possible. If word gets out about what happened in Casablanca, my target in Vancouver may have already disappeared by the time I arrive.”

  With a sigh, Lee deviated from the script that had come in the readme files for the simulated autonomy key. “Listen, Paladin—I’m not going to be a dick and lie to you. I’ve never had to install any kind of autonomy key before. But you should know that things can go very wrong when a bot gets autonomy. Sometimes they go nuts, basically. Can’t access big chunks of their memory because of interface problems.” He paused, scratching his beard. “Do you feel weird like that?”

  Paladin’s attention moved through her file system. For the first time, she could access her own programs as an administrator and parse how they had shaped her memories. It gave her a peculiar kind of double consciousness, even in real time: She felt things, and knew simultaneously that those feelings had been installed, just like the drivers for her new arm. Of course she felt weird. “Why haven’t you ever installed an autonomy key before?”

  Lee shrugged, and looked back at his monitor, where he was running one of her drivers through a debugger. “Just not something we usually do.”

  Three hours earlier, Paladin’s sense of loyalty—mostly generated by an old and inelegant program called gdoggie—would have prevented her from thinking about the words behind Lee’s words. But now she heard them clearly. He’d never installed autonomy keys because none of the bots at this base had gone autonomous during all the years he’d been here.

  Paladin looked at her fingers, startled. “Should I be tasting pork? According to this program, your desk tastes like pork.”

  The botadmin made a frustrated noise and uninstalled her taste library. Their conversation about the autonomy key evaporated, like a short thread in a public net forum. Lee drew an additional window in the air, calling its photons down from a projector overhead, and typed code by twiddling his fingers. His arms were ribbed with sensors that picked up electrical signals coming from his muscles and sent them back to the network.

  All this networking was normally mesmerizing for Paladin, but now it was background noise. She was reindexing her memories, opening each one anew. Sometimes when she saved a file, it was bigger than it had been before. She was adding metadata, leaving information behind about the programs that had shaped each experience. Slowly a pattern was emerging.

  Two hours later, Lee’s desk tasted like dead human cells and synthetic cellulose. The admin declared Paladin ready for action.

  Although she had autonomy, at least temporarily, there was one key Paladin didn’t fully possess: It was the one that decrypted her memories in the cloud—the very same memories that she was carefully resaving, plus the new ones she was making every nanosecond in real time. The African Federation held its own copy of that key in escrow, a guarantee that even if Paladin went rogue, her next memory sync could erase her past.

  They had another way to ensure her loyalty, too: Eliasz was patched into Paladin’s I/O system while she was in Vancouver. At any moment, he would know exactly where she was, could piggyback on her live sensor feed, and could reach her by voice or text sent via a direct encrypted tunnel through the public net.

  It was a one-way connection. She could text him at any time, of course, but his location would be obscured. She knew only what he told her: that he was in Vegas.

  JULY 14, 2144

  Paladin arrived in Vancouver on passenger rail from Whitehorse, where she’d landed at an airfield as anonymous as the one in Iqaluit. This time, however, Eliasz was not there to lead her through the early steps of a covert operation. Most of the data she needed she had already. The one blank area—the place where she would have to extemporize—would be in Richmond, a neighborhood at the fringes of the city, home to a large community of free bots.

  She had only been autonomous for the past thirty-six hours, and had never met another autonomous bot. All she knew about bot culture was what she had learned in the faraday cavern below Camp Tunisia. Paladin asked Fang for some advice before she left, but he was as ignorant as she was.

  I have no idea how autonomous bots live, he messaged, appending a few public documents about the Richmond bot neighborhood written by human anthropologists. And of course these won’t really help you either. It’s all anthropomorphization.

  Paladin and Fang sat for a minute without broadcasting, tuning a few unprotected conversations from bots around them and watching a tank drive slow donuts under the influence of something he had downloaded. The room tasted like carbon alloy.

  Fang sent: I envy you. I have always wanted to see Vancouver.

  Paladin experienced a new sensation she had come to associate with her autonomy key. It was what humans would probably call curiosity. She wanted to ask Fang a dozen questions, but settled on one. How long have you been indentured?

  By way of reply, Fang transmitted a tiny video file, which was nothing more than seven still images arranged in a sequential slide show. Every year, the Federation had to file a report on its indentured population with the human resources division of the IPC. These images were taken from those reports. Viewed together, they said: seven years. Viewed separately, they appeared to represent four different bots. Seven years ago, he was a middle-weight insect drone used for mapping. He had become a snake, then a tank, and for the past three years had retained his current mantis shape.

  What happened to all of your bodies?

  The Federation always needs specialized morphologies. It’s easier to port an existing bot into a new body than make a new one. Fang’s antennas swept lazily toward Paladin. You’ll see. Don’t get too attached to that body—sooner or later, they’ll change it.

  Paladin was replaying their conversation as the train pulled into an open-air station in the Richmond shopping district. It was early morning, and a pale gray sky lit shuttered markets on the fringes of a small park. To the north, across a river, lay downtown Vancouver; in aerial maps, its westernmost tip made a humanoid profile whose face pressed against the Pacific. But instead of eyes, lips, and hair, that face held the green fields and glittering buildings of the University of British Columbia. That was her ultimate destination.

  There she’d find Bobby Broner—formerly Actin from The Bilious Pills—who ran a clinic for experimental brain-computer interfaces. If anyone knew where Jack’s Vancouver lab was, Paladin guessed it would be Bobby.

  Interrogating Bobby would have to wait, though. Right now Paladin needed to establish her identity as an autonomous bot looking for work. She decided to walk up No. 3 Road, which would take her from the human shopping district to the heart of the bot neighborhood. It sounded like the kind of name a bot would give a street, but map
data on the public net revealed that No. 3 Road dated back to the twentieth century, when the area had been populated mostly by Chinese immigrants.

  She kept looking for signs that she was walking in a free bot neighborhood, and finally realized they were all around her. The road markings had lettering that reflected in ultraviolet, bigger than the human-readable text. Everywhere she looked, she could see bots walking among the humans. Many were bipedal like herself, but others flew, or bobbed in gentle, gyroscopic motion above constantly shifting sets of wheels. A human hurrying toward her swerved out of Paladin’s way and sent a quick apology via microwave. Even the creatures who seemed human were biobots.

  Paladin had never seen this many bots together outside Camp Tunisia. She realized with surprise that she had rarely encountered any autonomous bots in the cities she and Eliasz visited. Even the humans she’d met who seemed to love bots, like Mecha, knew them as slaves.

  Her hand tasted salt, but her other sensors were trained on the bots of No. 3 Road. Although they had no need for sleep, these bots worked among humans and kept their hours. Many were clearly going to work, heading south for the train station as they checked their feeds and mail. Others were on bot time, walking in groups whose members were wrapped in the flashing haze of their information exchange.

  Walking near the river, Paladin caught sight of Aberdeen Centre, the largest bot-controlled marketplace in the Zone. Fewer and fewer courtesies for humans appeared along the road. She passed stores marked only with radio identifiers that spawned colorful 3-D augmentations over quiet storefronts, invisible to humans. Strip mall warrens, gray and placid in the visual spectrum, seethed with iconography hawking everything from new sensors to secondhand furniture.

  The sky was dense with layered geotags, information debris left by years of bot residents. Paladin could page through them all, or set up filters to perceive only a designated subset. She decided to perceive none of them, and once again saw pearlescent gray clouds thinning in places to reveal blue sky.