Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  When he was on the verge of turning fourteen, a few weeks before Ajax showed Med the journal, the SlaveBoy feed had been linked all across the public net. He’d written a vivid, emotionless account of his school going bankrupt. All the kids’ contracts were sold, and SlaveBoy found himself indentured to a mechanical engineering shop that developed turbines.

  He wrote:

  Somehow, through a legal loophole I don’t understand, my contract has been reset to the state it was in when I was first indentured. I will work here until I’m 24, and I have two jobs. The first is to learn about engine design, which is so far all about transduction—the transformation of one kind of energy into another. And the second is, apparently, fucking. That’s right. My supervisor has made me a man. If the school hadn’t gone broke, I’d still be trading dinner for a public terminal. Now it’s blowjobs for a mobile and a private net connection. It’s not such a bad deal, and at least I get to eat dinner every night.

  Somehow his dispassionate retelling made it more upsetting than if he’d actually described weeping over his rape, or beating his hands against the bars on his dormitory window.

  All over the net, people were talking about how SlaveBoy’s story confirmed that indenture laws were being violated. Half-hearted, unsuccessful efforts were made to unmask his real identity, and some claimed he was a creation of anti-indenture radicals. Med had never doubted he was real. Nobody who was trying to drum up support for a political position would dare to be as sarcastic and ambivalent as SlaveBoy.

  And now, years later, she had proof that he existed. In Threezed she suddenly saw two people: the young man she knew, and the SlaveBoy she had imagined knowing. She didn’t ask him if all those things had really happened. She didn’t try to comfort him. She was only curious. “What happened to you in Vegas?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know what they say.” He shrugged, his tone as blank as his prose. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

  18

  VEGAS

  JULY 14, 2144

  The sky rained pixels and the market awnings expelled cool mist as fine as smoke. Under its climate-controlled bubble, Vegas never changed. Projectors painted the dome above them with fantastical weather. Today it was Jupiter’s diminishing megastorm depicted in a lurid red, its sluggish whorl of clouds filling the Strip with a surreal, ruddy light.

  Tourists pressed past Eliasz to the tram windows, eager to ogle the city’s monumental architecture. There were silver and gold buildings so narrow they looked like playing cards balanced on their edges; bulbous palaces; simulated cities, their landmarks rendered in caricature; transparent inverted pyramids; and, of course, the famous gardens whose sculptures were made of fire, fountains, music, wild animals, giant robots, and full-scale replica slave ships.

  Everywhere, on the moving sidewalks and hologram-infested streets, there were human resources for sale. Each market center had its specialty, from gardeners and domestics, to secretaries, engineers, and bookkeepers. The indentured with high levels of education were expensive, hidden from the crowds, stocked in display rooms with the tools of their trades. You found them, one per room, in the labyrinthine hallways of the market centers.

  But others were expensive because they were beautiful. They were not hidden away. These, led on show leashes, their skin glowing with cosmetics and hair piled in luxurious shapes, were what pulled murmurs from the throats of Eliasz’ fellow passengers. They sighed at the pretty things augmented to be prettier. They joked about being rich enough to afford one.

  At each stop, the tram disgorged more of its human contents, shoppers and gawkers alike, until Eliasz rode alone in the direction of Wynn Market. Through the windows he saw a woman in a matte rubber spray-on body suit. She looked almost robotic. Seeing his eyes on her, she spun slowly, her perfect lips forming a perfect kiss. A bored-looking sales rep held her leash. His button-down shirt rippled with an illegible logo for the company selling her.

  Eliasz thought of Paladin, autonomous on her mission in Vancouver, and promised himself that he would do everything in his power to prevent her from ever seeing this place. Then the tram reached Wynn and it was time to shut down all feelings but one: adrenaline-fueled attention.

  * * *

  Wynn Market was built around the ruins of a card-shaped palace. Once a luxury hotel, like most of the markets on the Strip, Wynn had suffered some kind of catastrophe in the twenty-first century that made melted skeletons of its penthouses. Only its intact lower floors were inside the dome, which curved sharply overhead. At the foot of the Wynn Market building was a vast bazaar of stalls, containers, and prefab sheds that spread confusingly down Wynn Lane, which bisected the Strip at this point. In truth, Vegas was not domed so much as tubed. From above, the Strip was like a long, gently curving cylinder. At one end, it was capped by a transport center. At the other, it radiated outward into a series of smaller tubes like tributaries. Many of these were little more than improvised tent shanties, filled with lukewarm, stale air. Wynn Market, where the cheapest contracts could be negotiated, stood at the nexus of all these branches.

  Eliasz was headed for the tributaries, which held wares whose contracts were often barely legal. He knew this part of Vegas better than he knew himself.

  If Frankie’s information was correct, and Jack’s companion was an AU boy with numbers for a name, there were only one or two places where the kid might have been sold. Eliasz ambled through the bazaar, affecting the casual walk of a shopper, pausing to peer into the interior of the Wynn building. All the indentured on the auction block lived for weeks or months in the city’s millions of market rooms, with their minimal beds and tiny bathrooms, meeting client after client until a contract was negotiated. Here the rooms were shabby, but elsewhere on the Strip they could be as posh as the homes and businesses where the indentured would serve out their contracts. Where Eliasz was headed, though, there were no rooms at all.

  Wynn Lane narrowed into a pedestrian walkway lined thickly with booths and big boxes. Inside, people stood listlessly on leashes or slept. Many had crude, mass-produced prosthetics—they came from military or maybe machinist jobs, too damaged to finish out their original contracts. A lot of the sales reps here specialized in buying up these kinds of contracts at a reduced rate and flipping them quickly.

  Eventually Eliasz reached an unnamed alley whose curved, tinted roof arched only a few meters above his head when he ducked inside. Narrow and dark, the alley was a covert rivulet of wealth, the air sweet and purified. Nondescript cargo containers hung with thick drapes gleamed in tidy rows on either side for roughly a kilometer before the alley terminated in a dead end. Some of these containers held property more valuable and coveted than anything you could get on the Strip. Others were packed with expendable refuse that was still young and fresh enough to fetch a decent price.

  You weren’t supposed to indenture kids in the Free Trade Zone, but it was done all the time. Sometimes covertly, sometimes accidentally, and always cruelly. This was the neighborhood where Eliasz had started his career in property law enforcement, rooting out the scum who sold under-sixteens. It was a tricky business. You couldn’t always tell the kids from the adults. Some of the children on offer had been doped with Vive when they were young—or they’d doped themselves—to look forever like vulnerable schoolboys and Lolitas. Twenty-year-olds who appeared to be thirteen were legal commodities. Eliasz believed that anyone willing to sell a fake kid would have no problem selling a real one, but the city wouldn’t let him go after anybody but the flagrant violators, the guys who imported goods from the economic coalitions where indenture schools and vague age-of-consent laws made it easy to buy ten-year-old roof cleaners and fourteen-year-old fetish objects.

  On this alley, there were few such extreme criminals. More common were the operations that managed to stay in the barely legal zone, the ones he’d been told to watch but not prioritize.

  He’d reached his first destination. The place looked exactly the same as when he’d seen i
t two years ago. A small red-and-gold sign over the door read “QUALITY IMPORTS.” Whether this was the shop’s name or an advertisement for its contents, Eliasz had never been sure. Inside, the air was cooled by an additional set of purifiers, one of which was aimed directly at the upper body of a man hidden behind a hazy projection that hovered over his desk.

  “Good to see you’re still here, Calvin,” Eliasz announced.

  The projection evaporated, revealing a small man with tidy gray hair sitting in front of a cabinet full of servers. To his right was a door that led into the showroom that took up most of the space in the container.

  “I can’t say the feeling is mutual,” the man replied crisply. “Back to hassling legitimate businesses with your child slavery scaremongering? Or are you just visiting?”

  “I’m looking for a kid named Threezed. Sounds like one of yours.” Eliasz beamed an authenticated ID to Calvin’s projector. “I’m not working for Vegas anymore—this is official IPC business. So look in those detailed records of yours and tell me if you sold a kid named Threezed to somebody who might have been working in the Arctic.”

  “Hey, hey, cool down. I keep my records open to all law enforcement during working hours, you know that. I’m clean.”

  “Lay off the bullshit and give me access.”

  The man twitched, then made a series of quick gestures over the table. A flat database page popped up and Calvin’s fingers jerked out a search for the string “30” under “DESIGNATION.” There was no field for “NAME.” Dozens of results piled in the air, going back fifteen years.

  Eliasz pulled them down to his mobile for safekeeping, then flicked through the list hovering in front of Calvin’s face. He guessed Threezed had been sold fairly recently—probably in the last year or two. Seventy-five percent of runaway crimes happened in the first year of indenture. That narrowed the list considerably. Six files remained: strips of text pinned to thumbnail headshots of AU and Federation boys, their expressions deliberately neutral. Nobody bought contracts for the indentured who looked too emotional.

  All of Calvin’s search results looked like they were under sixteen, but their records claimed otherwise.

  “Who bought these contracts?” Eliasz asked, jabbing his finger at the thumbnails. Calvin opened full files on each, spreading them out in the air with the palms of his hands.

  “These two went to a farm up north,” he muttered, scrolling through the data. “This one I sold just recently, to a molecular foundry.”

  Eliasz pointed at the “BUYER” field on the fourth result and spoke sharply. “You sold 45030 to somebody named Pseudo Nym who has no employment?”

  Calvin peered at the entry and narrowed his eyes. “The buyer was between jobs, and his ID and credit were good. Not every contract has to go to a specific job. People buy general assistants all the time. Plus, I was lucky to sell his contract at all. He was a snotty little shit.”

  Eliasz’ hand tightened on his perimeter control. “What do you mean by that?”

  “He was one of those indenture schoolers from the AU—thought he was smarter than everybody else. Kept saying he was a star on Memeland and that he needed to be placed somewhere with good net access. Where do these boys get that kind of entitlement? As far as I’m concerned, they’re lucky that somebody wants to pay to feed them for the next ten years.”

  Eliasz numbed his rage before it could control him. He needed more information, especially because this kid fit the profile perfectly. Somebody with a dubious employment background, buying from a guy like Calvin, might easily be crossing paths with smugglers. He snapped his fingers to open a window on his mobile, and started several searches running across Memeland: Threezed, indenture, slave, AU, Arctic, Jack, Jack Chen, Judith Chen, pirate, drugs, Bilious Pills. For good measure, he added: Quality Imports, Vegas. If this kid was writing about his life, at least some of those terms would surface in proximity to each other. Eliasz’ search, projected perpendicular to his waist, looked like a glowing white puddle hovering in the air under Calvin’s projection.

  “What made you think this Pseudo Nym was going to feed 45030 here?” He gestured at the thumbnail, which showed a brown-skinned boy, prettier than most, a fluffy thatch of black hair obscuring his forehead. His previous contract had been with an engine design shop in the AU.

  “I’m not doing anything wrong here, buddy. You checked my records—these are all legal sales, alright? This guy signed a contract agreeing to support this shit kid.”

  “What else do you remember about this buyer? Have you sold to him before?”

  “I don’t know anything, and even if I did I’m not legally obligated to tell you.”

  Eliasz reached over the counter to touch Calvin’s arm and abruptly pulsed his perimeter, enough to deliver a strong shock. With a scream, the sales rep spasmed out of his chair and landed with a crash on the floor.

  “Oh, sorry about that. Did that jog your memory?”

  “He … he had a submarine. Needed somebody who knew something about engines. That’s why he wanted the boy.”

  “Why the fuck are you protecting this scum? What’s his real name?” He kicked Calvin’s tailbone, shocking him again for good measure.

  “I don’t know!” Calvin choked, then spat blood. He’d bitten his tongue. “Why the fuck do you care so much?” He grinned nastily through the blood. “Somebody steal your slave boy once? Is that what turned you into the avenging angel of Vegas?”

  This was going nowhere. “This isn’t personal,” he said tonelessly, resisting the urge to turn Calvin’s brains into sludge on the wall.

  “Can I stand up now, or are you going to start beating me again? I don’t think the internal affairs department is going to like the way you’re treating a legitimate businessman.”

  “Feel free to file a complaint.” Eliasz grabbed a fistful of data out of the air and turned to leave.

  The drapes covering the door of Quality Imports swirled behind him in a perfect, velvety arc. Calvin wasn’t stupid enough to call attention to himself by filing a complaint, and besides, Eliasz wasn’t bound by the rules of this jurisdiction anymore. He answered to a higher authority: the IPC.

  The unnamed alley smelled like lavender. Across the street a man dressed in business casuals talked quietly to an adolescent girl with unnaturally blond ringlets. The man offered the girl an injection, then settled on a mahogany bench to show her something on his mobile. She snuggled into his arms, staring at a holographic blob, looking confused. Six meters away, a sales rep smiled at them from the doorway of a pink container called “The Alice Shop.” He was sending his goods out on a test drive, perhaps, or had just made a sale.

  Eliasz turned his back on the scene and walked back to Wynn Lane. At the intersection, he was enveloped in tendrils of warm, moist atmosphere that smelled of human bodies in various states of exhaustion or agitation. He found a slightly scabby plastic bench outside a drugstore hawking generics and sat down. To peruse the Memeland search results, Eliasz angled his projection so it was legible only to his eyes.

  The first few hits were garbage from people writing about politics and biohacking, quoting from a copy of The Bilious Pills hosted by a free text repo archive in Anchorage. Though these hits were useless for his search, he sent off a quick note to IPC intelligence flagging the archive. That kind of content shouldn’t be publicly available.

  He kept reading. More garbage results on various Judith Chens. And then he found a block of prose that looked promising, from an entry written just a few weeks ago by somebody called SlaveBoy.

  I am back. Things were a little worrying there for a while—I got slaved out of Vegas, repped by a sweaty, gropy little man who promises his customers “quality imports.” I won’t argue with the term. I’m nothing if not a quality import. But let’s just say that my recent adventures in the Arctic were a lot less pleasant than assfucking in a hot engine room. Luckily, I have a new master, who gave me food and a mobile in exchange for a little maid work. I’m sure s
he’ll eventually want more. They always do. I’m irresistible that way.

  It’s weird to be in the middle of the ocean again, but free. I don’t mean free in the way the autonomous are. I mean without being strapped into the holding pod on an export ship. This sub may be small, but it’s a fucking palace compared to the ship that took me to Vegas. And my new master has a seemingly endless supply of drugs, so my left arm won’t be rotting off after all. Long story. Let’s just say my last master thought salt water was an antiseptic because it stung.

  Below the post was a zigzagging field of almost five hundred nested comment threads. Most were one-liners, written in English and Chinese, welcoming SlaveBoy back and expressing relief that he hadn’t died. Others were long, personal stories that Eliasz flicked through disinterestedly.

  Another post, two days later:

  Every master loves to fuck a slave. It is a law of nature, or maybe culture. J isn’t bad in bed, even if her sub’s engines are tuned for shit. She won’t let me at them though, even after letting me inside what she calls her gotch. That’s the word for underwear where she grew up, somewhere in the Zone.

  And then, eight days ago:

  J fucked me until I screamed—yes, I screamed. Privacy does weird things to your libido. And then she burned out my chip. Told me we’re heading to the Zone and she’s cutting me loose. I’m free. You know, free to be a whore. Isn’t that what pretty boys with no work histories are good for?

  I guess she could have killed me on the night we met, but she didn’t. So that’s nice. And she let me use the network even before we were fucking. And that’s nice, too. But how the hell am I supposed to find a job when I have to hide my work experience?

  Anyway, I’m pretty sure I know where she’s going: Some lab in the Zone. For somebody so paranoid about security, J sure doesn’t cover her ass. Which, when you think about it from my perspective, is a good thing. I like her ass. And I like J too, even though she’s clueless. I think she’s trying to do the right thing. She just doesn’t grasp even the most basic things about property law.