Machinehood

by S. B. Divya

Nithya tried to remember life without Sita’s assistance. Her childhood had been that way, but she had so few responsibilities then. Now, even Carma had her own agent, though God knew what for. And life before daily pill regimens—that she could not forget, not when the poorest of the poor still lived, and often died, that way. With tabletop bioengineering came wave after wave of designer microbes. Treatments appeared close on their heels, but centralized production and distribution were too slow. The only way to stay healthy was to print the antidotes at home.

  “Lunch is ready to eat,” Sita announced.

  Luis waved at Nithya from a corner of her visual. The tea shop at the end of their street stood behind him.

  “Almost home,” her husband said. “Are you feeling better today?” He’d left before sunrise for another rocket club meeting.

  “Much better. Less pain, almost no bleeding.”

  “Good. Do you have time to eat lunch with me and Carma?”

  “I’ll make time.”

  Luis had a smile that could melt hard candy. His solicitousness since the abortion was unimpeachable, which only made her feel more guilty. How could she maintain this lie of omission? Yes, she had done it to protect him, as she did with serious matters for Carma, but Luis was an adult. He shouldn’t need protection from the world’s evils… or his wife’s.

  She sighed and went inside to set the table.

  Carma emerged from her school alcove and launched into a chirpy conversation about the new singing lessons next month. She sat down to her meal as Luis walked in the door. He kissed his daughter’s cheek before going to wash up.

  “Amma, can I do some reading work while I eat?”

  Nithya nodded. Carma slipped her virtuality goggles on. By the time her daughter became a teenager, maybe everyone would have implants like Welga’s. No need to remove and charge your interactive devices every night, but no way to turn off the world, either. Perhaps humanity only pretended at separation from technology.

  A message popped up in the upper left of Nithya’s visual from her project manager, Peter Yeorn. She expanded it.

  “Your recent petition to access Synaxel’s database has been reviewed and denied,” he said. A frown creased his brow. “I don’t see the relevance to your current project. Please drop the queries. If you can’t complete the project without them, I may need to terminate your contract and hire someone who can. Your group has already missed several deadlines. We cannot afford distractions right now.”

  Luis took the seat across from her, ate one bite of food, and caught her expression. “What’s the matter?”

  “I got a nasty message from my Synaxel project manager about the queries I ran for Welga’s condition.”

  “What are you talking about? What condition?”

  “Oh no, she didn’t tell you? You didn’t see our conversations about it?”

  Luis shook his head.

  Nithya tried to keep the explanation simple. “Something is wrong with Welga’s motor system, possibly related to her use of zips. She posted her data for specialist review, but she didn’t offer money. No one took it up, so I looked at it. Some of the zips she’s used are Synaxel designs, but every detailed query I make about the possible failure mechanism gets blocked. I’ve never had a query blocked.”

  “And what did Peter say?”

  “That he’ll drop my contract unless I stop digging.”

  Luis smacked the table with his left hand. “He’s threatening you! That’s bullsh—”

  “Okay, okay! I agree. I was suspicious already. Now I’m sure they’re hiding something.”

  “You need a lawyer. When Mama got sick, we had multiple law firms ask to represent her case.”

  “That was pre-regulation. It’s much harder to litigate this kind of thing today. If it’s something unique to Welga’s biochemistry, there might not be anything truly illegal here. And it’s not likely to draw enough money to attract lawyers.”

  Luis returned his empty plate to the kitchen. “And what if Synaxel cancels your contract or comes after you? It’s worth a retainer fee to protect ourselves.”

  “From what? We hardly have any money.” And I’ve done nothing wrong. Nithya toyed with the food on her plate. When had innocence ever prevented those with money and power from destroying those without? “I’ll contact someone.”

  * * *

  The list of bioethics lawyers in Chennai overwhelmed Nithya with its length. She avoided the problem by reading up on the Asian Biogenetics Administration’s regulations. And the American BGA laws, for completeness. ABGA had far fewer restrictions than USBGA on designs and almost no requirements on testing. They had no teeth, either. Every country had its own enforcement agency. India had prosecuted fewer than fifty cases against pill and drug funders in the past decade. Singapore had sixty-seven. China had none, since their government controlled all domestic funding.

  The USBGA had a better record: over a thousand cases in the same time period; but the EU was the winner at five digits. Maybe she should contact someone at the USBGA, since Welga resided in America. Synaxel’s board members lived around the globe, but two were in New York. Conveniently, the main USBGA office was there, too.

  “Sita, what’s the procedure to file a complaint with the United States Biogenetics Administration?”

  “You can file a nonemergency complaint at any time. You must choose from a list of subtopics.”

  “Before I do that, what do they say regarding data privacy for pill funders?”

  “They have fifteen documents relating to that topic. Would you like to read them?”

  Nithya groaned. “Not now. I need to get back to my project work. In the meantime, run a background search with any major funder of zips. Use the same query keywords as I did for Synaxel with Welga’s case. If you run into any blocks, send the result to the kitchen for a hard copy.”

  She called up her juver project and checked the results from Zeli’s update. Nithya hoped the girl and her family were safely on their way to the refugee camp. If the al-Muwahhidun had destroyed any of the primary nodes—places where network signals became wired—it could take weeks to restore communications.

  At this rate, it was a coin toss as to which of them would cause Synaxel to cancel their contract first.

  WELGA

  8. The Biotech Age has saved humanity up to now, allowing us to maintain our worth (to ourselves and the oligarchy) and, therefore, to survive the gig lifestyle. Mech-suits integrated with human bodies let us carry or run or endure like a machine. Pills let us outthink them. But the cost of these so-called enhancements is twofold. One, they destroy our biological bodies (no matter how safe the oligarchy says they are). And two, they propel the machine designers to build even faster, stronger, smarter machines. We are trapped in a vicious cycle of self-destructive progress.

  —The Machinehood Manifesto, March 20, 2095

  A deeply pissed-off pill funder named Jane Santiago volunteered to bait the Machinehood. She had retained Platinum’s shield services for over a decade and had no problems with Welga, Connor, and Ammanuel joining her three-person security team, which included one ex-army officer and two former police officers, all male. Ammanuel chose to emphasize the feminine for this assignment, a sentiment that Welga fully approved, considering the optics they’d present otherwise.

  A fat bonus landed in their bank accounts to make sure everyone could afford the latest styles. They had their first briefing on the seventeenth. Santiago insisted on reviewing everyone’s clothing designs.

  “I don’t intend to die,” she had said, “but I sure as hell plan to look good if it happens.”

  Hassan ran the meeting and introduced Welga as their liaison with the JIA. Ammanuel cocked an eyebrow, but no one made a comment.

  “We won’t be able to stop the swarms,” Hassan warned.

  Santiago shrugged it off. “I welcome the publicity. Let’s make a show of my support to lure these cowards into the open. I’ll announce a tour of the supply plants, and you can
be damn sure I’ll tell them why.”

  And she had. Standing atop the lush roof of the hive she owned in downtown San Francisco, Santiago spoke to a cloud of microcams that swarmed so thick, you almost couldn’t see the sky. She timed the announcement for an hour before sunset to get ideal lighting conditions. Ammanuel wore a short, fitted dress in a shade of yellow ochre that complemented Santiago’s red pantsuit. Welga opted for her trademark red-and-black faux leathers but with an updated cut, and Connor allowed some color into his usual all-whites as a concession to fashion. The other three shields kept to a similar palette of browns, oranges, and blacks.

  They arrayed themselves in an arc behind Santiago, more for effect than true security. Short of parachuting from a drone plane, nobody could access the roof. The hive’s central WAI made sure of that.

  “Tomorrow I’ll begin a five-day tour of the major suppliers for the products that I fund,” Santiago announced. “The world needs to know that not all financiers are hiding behind their high-security walls. We designed drugs and pills so that humans could stay competitive in the labor market. I believe that humankind—not machine-kind—will always be the way forward. Buffs make us stronger. Zips make us faster. Flows make us smarter. I will continue to support designs that push our physiology to its safe, effective limits. That allow us to be the best we can be. The world belongs to us. We created intelligent machines, and we will not capitulate to their violent actions. If you’re part of one of my teams, I want you to know that I will not pull my contracts in the face of any threat. I will help you fight back. I will not give in to the demands of the Machinehood!”

  * * *

  Nobody attacked Jane Santiago on their first day out. All dressed up and nobody to fight—was that the old saying? Welga had pockets full of deca-zips, juvers, and buffs, should they need bursts of extra strength. They carried military-grade medical kits, as well. And one special-purpose item, tested only on human soldiers at a secure facility: a blackout wrap, intended to block any implanted network access points and disable a Machinehood operative’s communications capability.

  In keeping with the JIA’s theory that the Machinehood was a cover for al-Muwahhidun in the Maghreb, their destination on the nineteenth—the day of the deadline—was a materials refinery. The caliph liked to target infrastructure rather than people. The USA had only a few major factories that produced the raw bases for pill printers, and they’d found one on the outskirts of Livermore, California. The vast majority of them were located in China, India, and central Africa. Several had already suffered damage from undetectable assailants. No swarm had caught sight of the attackers, and they’d left no physical traces—at least none that those countries had shared with the world. The locations targeted in the past two days added support to the al-Muwahhidun being the true Machinehood operatives. All could be accessed from North Africa via land routes.

  America had developed a paranoid itch over the lack of action on its soil. Welga shared the feeling. For the attack on Jackson, she’d been in the right place at the right time—in Chennai, on the other side of the planet. Since then, she’d been able to participate only as a spectator, and she’d never enjoyed that role.

  Come and get us, assholes. What are you scared of?

  The lack of action left Welga twitchy at a different level from her synaptic problems, which persisted and, if she were honest with herself, had worsened. A half-zip would now reliably stop her tremors. Nithya’s words about addictive behavior haunted her.

  “Third time’s the charm,” Ammanuel muttered as they drove toward Livermore.

  “It better be,” Welga said. “After today… who knows what they’ll do next?”

  They frowned. “You don’t think they’ve done enough? Take out the critical factories at the start of the supply chain, and the pills will stop, at least temporarily. Maybe that’s their plan—wait for people to start getting sick and then attack before we can finish rebuilding.”

  “It would work, too,” Welga said grimly, “but attack how? Frontal assaults on major governments are unlikely to work unless the world ends up in a pandemic like we haven’t seen in decades, but then they’re risking themselves.”

  “Are they? Bots and WAIs can’t die from infections.”

  Welga bit her tongue before she contradicted Ammanuel. They didn’t know about the al-Muwahhidun theory, and she couldn’t enlighten them in a car full of public microcameras.

  “Who’d keep up their infrastructure?” she asked instead. “Unless the SAIs are building a massive number of these androids, they’ll need people to maintain electrical power, computing centers, and stellas. Software doesn’t have arms and legs, and bots aren’t general-purpose enough. I have a hard time believing they could hide an entire population of their kind somewhere on Earth.”

  Ammanuel opened their mouth. Paused. Narrowed their eyes. “There’s one region where we don’t have visibility.”

  Welga blinked and kept her expression bland. “That region hates WAIs.”

  Ammanuel’s gaze turned inward. Welga left them to puzzle it out. The caliph would be happy to sell someone a hacked plague, especially if he already had the cure designed and plausible deniability in spreading it. She’d heard rumors of pill funders making similarly shady transactions. They earned coin off treatment designs, which put them in a unique, morally compromised situation if someone showed them an engineered virus under the table.

  Innocent or not, it’s my job to protect them.

  Jane Santiago sat across from Welga in the armored truck. Their six-person shield team and half a dozen riot-control bots filled out the remaining space. Someone at the agency had a theory that the Machinehood wouldn’t attack their own kind, based on watching the pattern of their behavior in other locales. That fit better with the sentient AI angle than the al-Muwahhidun, but it provided them a good cover story.

  Their team leader, Oliver Mendoza, had passed out their pill packets thirty minutes before arrival. Their client stuck a flow-flush patch onto her neck, then took her pills with the rest of them. Santiago insisted again on coordinating their outfits with her own, all synthetic leather with elegant, clean lines, and pale, neutral colors. No bright hair or flashy jewels. Cameras swarmed around them in the confines of the vehicle. They had to strike a balance between publicity and trying too hard.

  Ammanuel grumbled about how boring they looked, but Welga had lost her desire for frivolity. Her insides coiled as tight as the latent speed in her muscles. Come and get us, blankers. Stop hiding and scaring people with your shadows. I’m running out of time to deal with your sorry asses.

  The truck pulled into a driveway and stopped. A sprawling two-story structure stretched to either side. Steam rose from vents in its roof. Massive pipes emerged and ran to other buildings and silos. Hives towered in the hazy distance.

  Muggy air clung to Welga the instant she emerged. Damn leathers weren’t meant for this kind of weather. Then again, she wasn’t truly there as a shield. She didn’t have to give a shit about sweat and lank hair.

  A welcome party crowded the air above them. Exfactors and reporters stood on the rooftop of a warehouse across the street. A group of machine rights activists clustered on the pavement below, waving signs in favor of the Machinehood or legal protection for bots and WAIs. No protesters had registered to confront Santiago, though, and the only civilians in the area worked at the facility. Bots formed a cordon to keep the onlookers contained.

  Por Qué added Welga’s tip jar and fan streams to her visual periphery as usual. Her coin balance ticked upward faster than the commentary from viewers. They’d figured out her government affiliation, so she had nothing to hide, but their speculations distracted her. She removed the unwanted text and, after a moment of hesitation, closed her tip jar display, too. Capturing a Machinehood operative wasn’t a performative mission.

  Jane Santiago maintained her external cool. She smiled and waved for the microcams, then shook the hand of the site manager, who ushered them into
the building. The manager must have turned off the threshold zapper, because a good portion of the exterior swarm followed them inside.

  A single, high-security door led from the sparsely furnished lobby into the factory. Heat rippled out as they passed single file through it into a cavernous space filled with tanks, pipes, and other equipment. Massive fans sucked air from the ceiling. This time, no microcams followed, so Welga released a small swarm of her own. If the Machinehood dared to show up, they would need all the advance warning possible, and the factory’s security cameras had fixed locations.

  Recycled plastic tiles squeaked under their feet. Odors reminiscent of bleach, alcohol, and burned rubber filled the air. They took slow, painstaking steps to avoid outpacing their guide across the factory floor. Machinery hummed. Bots avoided their group as they moved about their tasks. Only one other human was present, in a glass-enclosed crow’s nest overlooking the entire space.

  Welga scanned the perimeter of her visual. Camera feeds, exterior and interior, showed nothing unusual.

  They finished the tour and moved toward the exit. The manager’s shoulders relaxed, and his expression eased into a smile. The mood within their shield team curdled.

  “Fucking cowards,” Mendoza muttered on the team’s encrypted channel.

  “They’re not stupid,” Ammanuel replied.

  Red blinked in Welga’s visual. Por Qué had flagged something from one of her microcamera feeds. Welga expanded it, careful not to send the drone closer lest it attract the suspect’s attention. A figure wearing basics crouched beside a panel and adjusted a rectangular object attached to it—an object that had a plastic case and in no way matched the dark metal structures around it.

  Welga cast the feed to Mendoza and Hassan. “Looks like someone’s playing at Machinehood and planting a bomb. Boss, permission to go back and, uh, have a little chat with them?”

  “I’m calling in backup from Explosives,” Hassan said. “Troit, you and Ramírez investigate. The rest of you stay with Santiago and cover the front.”