Where is Jack’s laboratory?
The scientist sent even more slowly, his concentration frayed by pain. Done nothing wrong.
She has killed dozens of people. She is a terrorist. By helping her, you became a terrorist, too.
The pain was interfering with Bobby’s ability to stand. Paladin dragged him to his office and slowly lowered him into a chair. He was no longer struggling to vocalize, so she removed her hand.
If you scream I will dislocate both of your shoulders.
Bobby looked at her blankly, his hands a useless, deformed jumble in his lap. “I haven’t seen Jack in over a year,” he said through teeth gritted in pain. “We’ve never worked together. She’s just a friend from grad school.”
Where is her laboratory? I know she has one here in Vancouver.
“I won’t tell you IPC bastards anything.”
Paladin ripped one cotton sleeve off Bobby’s shirt and balled it into his mouth. Gripping Bobby’s partially visible collarbone in one hand, she felt the shape of his skeleton’s edge under her fingers. With her other hand, she grabbed his upper arm, tugging just hard enough to jerk it from the socket. His scream was muffled, but his pain response wasn’t. Tears ringed the professor’s eyes as the bot released his limp arm.
Where is Jack’s laboratory?
Bobby was sending very slowly, weeping and choking on mucus. But Paladin would not take the fabric from his mouth. Somehow, he managed to transmit map coordinates.
For the first time during her mission, Paladin perceived that Eliasz wasn’t patched into her system. She would have to decide on her own how to clean up here and get to Jack’s lab in time for extraction.
She couldn’t afford to have Bobby alerting people to her existence, which he most certainly would when he was discovered. Her best hope was to make Bobby appear to be the victim of some kind of crime, rather than an interrogation. In one visible and invisible motion, she beamed garbage data to his implant, laced his personal drive with messages that suggested gambling debts, and slit his throat like a human would. Paladin’s carapace repelled the liquids from Bobby’s body, giving the brief impression that her arms and chest were weeping blood. She didn’t remain long enough to recognize Bobby’s new facial expression. It was time to go.
As she passed through Bobby’s frosted glass office door and into the central lab, Paladin had the peculiar sensation that the unpowered bodies of Actin and Bug were asking her something she needed to answer. They wanted something from her—or maybe she wanted something from herself. Paladin paused uncertainly in front of the fabber that contained Actin’s frozen mind. As if under the control of an unknown algorithm, she found herself holding the fabber gently under one arm, then stooping down to pick up Bug’s slender, unlit body.
Cradling the two disabled bots, she exited the lab, the building, and finally passed beyond the geometrically shaped swatches of grass that characterized the campus grounds. Nobody asked her any questions. With her two senseless companions, she was clearly on bot business, and this was a human neighborhood.
Jack’s lab was only two train stops from UBC, in a colorful cube of prefab wet labs for small entrepreneurs and consultants. A tightly coiled spiral staircase wound up one side of the cube. Paladin reached the lab by traversing a short catwalk whose ribbed floor shook slightly with her footsteps.
It took little effort to force the door, which surprised Paladin, until she realized that Jack had left nothing behind except generic equipment. Booting up the network, she searched for any telltale data that could help her. Unfortunately, Jack had been careful. The file system on her server was nicely encrypted and there would be no way to decode it, at least not in the next million years. And the buffers on her fabber and sequencer had been purged and overwritten with garbage characters so many times that forensics would be useless.
This, however, was just the first sweep. Even the most paranoid terrorists could leave clues behind. While she continued to prod the network, Paladin felt Eliasz’ absence in her mind.
Now, with seconds to burn, she decided to do what she had been avoiding for hours. She touched her memories of Eliasz, opening them in a flurry of commands, analyzing what had gone into making her feel … whatever it was. Yes, there was gdoggie, guiding her reactions to Eliasz. And much worse. There was a buggy app called masterluv, probably named by some twenty-first-century botadmin who thought the name was hilarious. Then she found a huge, memory-hogging chunk of code called objeta that seemed to be triggering her desire. Her love. As that word came to her, Paladin felt a sudden and overwhelming wave of disappointment.
Of course she had been programmed to take Eliasz’ orders, to trust and even love him. That much she had expected. But she hadn’t been prepared for how it would feel to think about Eliasz without idealizing him. As Fang had told her long ago, Eliasz was truly an anthropomorphizer; he saw Paladin’s human brain as her most vital part, especially because he believed it made her female. Even though she’d known that about him, she hadn’t been able to feel it. Until now.
Paladin indexed memory after memory, unraveling verifiable data from objeta and masterluv and gdoggie. Eventually she began to detect a pattern that had nothing to do with the apps that came preinstalled from the Kagu Robotics Foundry in Cape Town. At first, it was simple repetition: she remembered all the times that Eliasz had called her “buddy,” long before that day on the shooting range. And there was the way he looked at her when they talked. But it was more than that.
She didn’t have many choices as a bot indentured to the African Federation, and, by extension, to Eliasz himself. But he had tried to let her choose, as best he could, hobbled as he was by neurochemical and cultural priming whose effects she couldn’t even begin to fathom. She’d repeatedly examined her memories of that day in Casablanca when he’d asked Paladin whether he should call her “she.” It’s true that he was asking the wrong question, but if she listened to the words behind the words … he was asking her consent.
As she added metadata to the memory, Paladin realized something else. Precisely because he’d asked her consent so indirectly, his query hadn’t activated any of her emotional control programs. She’d been able to make a decision that went beyond factory settings, probably because no botadmin ever imagined a human would ask a bot about preferred gender pronouns. Nothing in her programming prevented her from saying no to Eliasz, so she had chosen to say yes.
Bug would no doubt say that there are no choices in slavery, nor true love in a mind running apps like gdoggie and masterluv. But they were all that Paladin had.
* * *
It was easy to reboot Actin after she’d powered him up, complete with a driver for his antenna. He was quiet for a while as Paladin set to work on Bug, hoping that she hadn’t damaged the insectoid’s memory.
Finally, Actin spoke, using speakers attached to the lab’s sensor network. “Who are you?”
Paladin beamed back a ball of information encased in a copy-protection shell that would prevent him from ever sharing it. She didn’t tell him the whole truth, just an extremely pared-down version of it. But he would understand she was on a mission to find a pirate who had been associated with Bobby.
Actin didn’t respond for almost a minute. Then she perceived that he was fabbing a wing patch for Bug, who had been slightly damaged when Paladin shut him down in midair.
“I took the liberty,” he vocalized though the speakers again. Actin seemed to prefer sound waves to microwaves. “It will be less traumatic for him to boot up with undamaged wings. Bug is well known for his opinions about how morphology shapes selfhood. They are not scientifically informed opinions, however. He is merely a historian.”
“I am worried his memory may be damaged,” she vocalized in return. “I killed several processes very abruptly.”
“You also killed my adviser. That will make it more difficult for me to finish my thesis, although possibly more pleasant.”
Clearly, Bobby wasn’t going to be missed by a
nyone he worked with, except maybe Jack and the other Bilious Pills. Paladin used a molecular adhesive from Jack’s workbench to attach Bug’s patch, and was startled to discern that he was already booted.
I rebooted a few minutes ago, he sent, his wings blurring into motion as his dark thorax slowly paled to deep purple. Nice little failsafe I installed right after I achieved autonomy—don’t want anybody keeping me shut down without permission, you know?
That could have been dangerous, Paladin replied.
More dangerous than whatever you’re doing here? Who do you work for?
She beamed him the same data ball she’d sent to Actin.
Well, I don’t give a shit about patent pirates. But I do know that you probably saved Actin’s life and killed a man who has destroyed dozens of bots during his tenure. So you can count me as a friend, whoever you are.
Thank you.
His declaration of comradeship didn’t affect her as deeply as Eliasz’ had, but it was still pleasurable. If this feeling was the answer she sought by rescuing the bots, she was glad she had decided to trust Bug, despite his annoying political rhetoric.
“I would like to have a body with better interface devices now,” Actin announced.
Bug used sound to reply. “I have a discount at Zone Mods. We’ll get you something basic today, and you can work on tuning it later.”
“What will you do now?” Paladin vocalized as she continued to comb through Jack’s network logs.
“I need to finish my thesis work. Whoever inherits Bobby’s lab will inherit me, and I can continue to earn my autonomy. Hopefully outside this fabber.”
“I can’t believe that fucker did this to you.” Bug rose into the air and hovered silently as he spoke. “We can get you an autonomy key right now—we’ll petition the Human Rights Coalition, or go the quick and dirty route. I know a group that can help you break root on yourself in a way that’s basically indistinguishable from an autonomy key.”
“I don’t want to do that. I want to get my degree.”
“Is that really what you want, or is that your programming?” Bug challenged.
Actin sent a series of rude emojis. “It’s what I want. It’s my programming. I can’t possibly know, and it’s a completely uninteresting question to me. I don’t even believe in consciousness. When I’ve got my autonomy, I’ll still be programmed, and I’ll still need a job researching brain interfaces.”
“Don’t you want to be free?”
“Free to work selling mementos of a meaningless and unenforceable set of laws to the drones on No. 3 Road?”
Paladin perceived it was time to change the subject.
“Can you see anything in the logs that looks like a connection to or from a remote server?” She directed her question mostly at Actin, who was roving listlessly across the network.
“No. But I may have some information that will interest you about the buffer in Bobby’s fabber, from several years before I was ported here.”
The dumb, dark box serving as Actin’s body had a memory that proved more useful than that of any sentient being. Four years ago, Bobby had fabbed a batch of patented immunosuppressant drugs, a job that stood out from his usual requests for mechanical devices. He’d dumped the job into the fabber sloppily, right from the network, without stripping its routing headers. In effect, he’d stored the pathway this drug spec had taken over the network along with the spec itself.
“That’s definitely a pirated drug,” Paladin confirmed.
“Somebody sent this spec from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. It originated on a server called Scarface. If you can find that server, I think you’re one step closer to finding your pirate.”
17
SLAVEBOY
JULY 16, 2144
In the teaching barn, cows were going about their incomprehensible bovine business. Med liked to stroll through the agricultural school during the early morning hours when humans slept, watching the infrared outlines of the animals and the condensation collecting on the inner panes of greenhouse panels. Sometimes she just wanted to be among other living, nonhuman creatures who belonged on the campus as much as she did.
She was pondering an image from Yellowknife of a Retcon patient’s brain. Since taking the Zacuity antidote three days ago, his dopamine receptors had regrown quickly. As the drug changed the neurological structure underlying his addiction, the man reported that he still wanted to paint his house—but not that much. In fact, he wasn’t really looking forward to it. There were similar reports from other patients.
Patients who struggled with long-term addiction usually avoided their chosen activity or substance, fearing a relapse. But with these Zacuity addicts, that didn’t seem to be an issue. The Retcon patients still wanted to engage in the activities they’d been addicted to, but no longer felt compelled to do them. The mania was gone. And, perhaps unfortunately, work no longer brought them unmediated joy.
Now it was time to get down to the most difficult part of their project: proving that the pirated drug was actually Zacuity, the new blockbuster from pharma megacorp Zaxy. When so few people actually understood how drugs were made, it was easy for a big corp to lie and get away with it. She and the Retcon team would have to come up with a way to explain reverse engineering so that even a bored feed hopper could understand it.
The cows began to low companionably, and Med stared up at the galaxy smeared across the dark sky.
Her parents back in Anchorage were proud of her for taking this job, and some of her old teachers and botadmins sent messages of congratulations. But she felt restless and dissatisfied in an unfamiliar way. She was working on a problem with no known parameters, its implications threaded through her life instead of through twists of DNA.
She’d gone from developing drugs to fighting Big Pharma. She had no idea what it would do to her career when the research paper she was coauthoring with Krish went online. They were accusing Zaxy of a serious crime by calling Zacuity an addictive drug. It was going to blow up all the media feeds, and her unusual background as an autonomous bot would no doubt be part of the lurid tale. Inevitably, somebody would accuse Krish or the Cohen Lab radicals of having “reprogrammed” her to be a subversive. Humans always said things like that when they didn’t like the way a bot was behaving.
And then there was Threezed. Ever since he’d shown up in the lab at Yellowknife, her life had been derailed—or fast-tracked, depending on how you wanted to think about it.
But her deepening friendship with Threezed was the strangest and most inexplicable part of this anomalous series of events. He provided her with some of the only nonwork conversations she’d had since leaving her family in Anchorage. Threezed kept late hours, and distracted her when everybody else was asleep. They talked about movies and music and a lot of other things that were completely unrelated to pharmaceutical development. Last night they started by talking about her name.
“Med? Is that short for Medicine?”
“No,” she laughed. “It’s for Medea. Somebody thought it would be a great idea to name me after a character from Greek mythology who got revenge on her philandering husband by murdering their children and flying away in a burning chariot.”
“Well, at least you’re not named after the last two numbers assigned to you by Human Resources.”
“It’s true.”
She tried to think of something else to say that wouldn’t sound condescending, clueless, or both. Coming from one of the only places in the world where bots were born autonomous, Med had this feeling a lot. It kept her from forming friendships with other bots in the lab. How could she understand them, when she’d always been autonomous? She felt like her bot identity was incomplete without that seminal experience, but at the same time, it didn’t make humans seem any less alien.
Threezed seemed to sense her mood. “Don’t feel bad that you never got indentured.” He touched her arm for a few seconds. “Nobody wants that. Plus, I’m sure you’ve been fucked over in lots of
other ways.”
It was one of the nicest things a human outside her family had ever said to her.
Finally, she got up the nerve to ask him what it was like to be indentured.
“I used to write about it a lot, but I’m writing more about autonomy these days,” he said.
“You wrote about it? Where?”
She couldn’t believe it when he told her. “You’re SlaveBoy? From Memeland? Are you serious? I used to read you all the time.” She paused, remembering. “I thought you were dead.”
“Yeah, I know a lot of people thought that after I stopped posting a couple of years ago. I got sold in Vegas and didn’t have access to the net. But I’ve started updating again—look!”
He showed her the SlaveBoy journal on his mobile. Sure enough, there were new entries starting a couple of weeks back. She began to scan through them and stopped abruptly at a detailed description of sex with “J.” She might be Threezed’s friend, but there were some things she didn’t want to know.
SlaveBoy was one of those underground sensations on the net that flashed in and out of public awareness. Most of his posts were read only by his subscribers, but sometimes he wrote something so raw and bizarre that it bubbled up into the commercial text repos. Med’s sibling Ajax had introduced her to SlaveBoy’s journal six years ago, during the anxious summer in Anchorage before she started graduate school.
“You want to know what it’s like to be indentured?” Ajax asked Med. “You should check out SlaveBoy’s feed. He’s this kid in the AU who grew up in an indenture school. He says he’s like a bot because he doesn’t remember anything before indenture.”
She’d read through the whole thing that night, mainlining SlaveBoy’s prickly, grotesquely truthful story. He’d started posting when he was ten, describing his schoolwork and friends. But as he’d grown older, he began to chronicle the injuries, both small and enormous, that were a part of indenture. At the age of twelve, he changed his handle from SchoolBoy to SlaveBoy.
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