Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  Somehow, Threezed had found the perfect researcher to work with Jack on a therapy. Jack caught him glancing at her, looking for a reaction.

  “Med, you are welcome to join us. Let’s get in the truck.”

  Jack liked watching the smile break over Threezed’s face.

  * * *

  Night was becoming a more meaningful category as the truck drove south, away from the Arctic perma-light. Med sat rigidly next to Jack and watched as the road lost its infrared glow in the day’s dwindling heat. Threezed slept in the back, the mobile folded up on his chest. It flickered occasionally with light as it tried and failed to sync over the mote net.

  Jack swiped through the non-news sections on ZoneFeed, one of the biggest corp media streams. But a local alert grabbed control of her display, painting the windshield with an urgent report about a bizarre crime underway at the train control center in Calgary. Though trains ran autonomously throughout the Free Trade Zone, human operators still made decisions about schedules and changes in service. That afternoon, one of the operators had suddenly started making a lot more decisions than she should have. She completely revised the northern Zone’s train schedules, sending out hundreds of notices and updates, flooding the system with contradictory commands. When her colleagues tried to stop her, she barred herself in the operations room and isolated the train software code from the rest of the net.

  It was impossible to prevent the operator’s updates from going through, and impossible to shut the trains down instantly. Commuters were being warned to stay off the trains until the situation was under control. Drones were lifting people out of cars that had shifted to new tracks and destinations. So far nobody had been hurt, but at least one empty train had derailed into a twisted ruin when it took a sharp curve in the tracks at high speed.

  ZoneFeed had ripped a video from some bystander’s social feed, which captured a blurry image of the woman behind the control room window.

  “I am doing my job! I am making decisions!” she screamed.

  A black-market drug was rumored to be involved, but ZoneFeed was unable to confirm more. Updates would be ongoing.

  Jack and Med looked at each other as the alert drained out of the glass. Her pirated Zacuity was spreading everywhere, and the results were getting a lot worse.

  “Where are you from?” Med broke the silence abruptly. Even awkward small talk was better than dwelling on news of the spreading disaster.

  “A little town south of Saskatoon called Lucky Lake.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “Nobody does.” Jack shrugged. “It’s sort of northwest from Moose Jaw, if you know that area.”

  “My parents took me to Moose Jaw once.”

  Parents weren’t the sort of thing a bot normally had. Jack couldn’t help but look sideways at Med.

  “I was raised by humans. They’re roboticists down at University of Alaska. I’ve always been autonomous.”

  Threezed woke up and crawled forward to join the conversation. “I thought robots just came online and that’s it. Why would you need to grow up anywhere?”

  Med had the look of somebody who was tired of explaining herself.

  “Most bots are built like that, yes. Especially ones whose manufacturers need them for a specific task, and who aren’t planning to let them mature to autonomy anyway. But a lot of roboticists believe that successful autonomous bots need kinship ties, and a period of childhood where they can experiment with different identities. That’s what they’re doing at the lab where my parents work, and at a couple of other research institutes.”

  “So you’re basically an experimental model.” Threezed looked at her appraisingly.

  “Well, there are a lot of us now. After twenty years, you stop being an experiment and just become a model.”

  “Oh, are you twenty?” Med nodded and Threezed grinned. “Me too.”

  Jack struggled to add something that wouldn’t sound clueless. “I’ve read about bots who were built autonomous. But I didn’t realize you were…”

  “Out in the world, being autonomous?” Med laughed.

  “Yeah.” Jack laughed with her. “Robotics isn’t really my area. I’m more on the genomics end of things.”

  “Me too,” the bot replied.

  * * *

  The road was smooth, probably from a recent refoaming. Lakes tended to move around up here, depending on precipitation, so the local towns preferred roads that would biodegrade quickly. When a lake ate the road, they just sprayed a different route around its new banks.

  As Jack’s truck passed through Uranium City, early dawn silhouetted the monument there: a row of twentieth-century miners, their metal bodies climbing out of a massive pit mine whose contours resembled a meteorite hit. Kilometers of undeveloped boreal forest and lakes stretched ahead of them. Scalloped dunes swerved across the land, their dark sand milled under glaciers in the last ice age. They’d hit the northern edge of Saskatchewan.

  Eventually the pines and birches gave way to fields of wheat and rye; in the distance, the cement cylinders of grain terminals looked like missiles lined up and ready to launch.

  Watching the tree-rimmed edge of a lake go by, Jack thought she could smell the musk of metabolized grass. Built into the rolling swells of the prairies were hundreds of small organic farms and co-ops that fed each other and exported to the cities. The car must have passed a herd of cows, hidden behind a rise in the land.

  It was this landscape she’d held in her mind to kill the pain when she was in prison.

  FALL 2118

  The Zone failed to stop dozens of drones from making off with its drugs, but Jack and seven other Pills were held on charges of theft and property damage. Dubbed “the Halifax Pharma Eight” online, their arrest was covered in granular detail by patent reformists, and pretty much nobody else.

  Then stories started coming out of the Federation about all the kids whose lives they’d saved with those drugs. Suddenly they were in all the big media feeds, too, and Jack was dubbed “the Robin Hood of the anti-patent movement.”

  Krish attended the trial, along with the usual gang of ragtag reformists and tenured radicals. Stripped of their broadcast tech in the courtroom, they took notes on dumb notepads and raced out during breaks to upload and publish. Jack felt fierce and self-righteous until the prosecution pushed hard on a conspiracy charge. If the Halifax Pharma Eight were found guilty of conspiracy, that meant potential jail time. Given that Halifax got most of its wealth from pharma, the jurors might be in the mood to make an example of anti-patent radicals who destroyed private property.

  Indeed, they were. After a very short deliberation, the jury found the group guilty of conspiracy to commit theft, as well as trespassing. The judge gave Jack three months in prison for her role as ringleader. Her coconspirators got a week each, plus damages.

  The court prohibited network access and written materials during her sentence, so Jack had plenty of time to memorize every crack in the paint next to her bed and follow the curves of the fluorescent ceiling wires over and over again with her gaze. She had time to consider what would or wouldn’t happen next.

  And she had time to watch her cellmate Molly visited by storms of violent dissociation. Molly was in for a series of minor assaults, all caused by untreatable manic depression. When she was on an even keel, she took Jack’s mind off the boredom by telling improbably lurid stories about a seemingly endless string of hot Quebecois lovers mired in a citywide sexual melodrama. But when Molly got manic, she decided Jack was a spy who had to be stopped at all costs.

  The cabinet of glues and tissue-growing trellises in the infirmary became as familiar to Jack as the contours of her bed frame. Eventually Molly broke Jack’s pelvis in two places, and she spent a peaceful week recovering in a bed next to a man on a ventilator.

  Jack thought the prison board, whose facility was partly funded by pharma giant Smaxo, might have deliberately paired her with a cellmate who was likely to beat the shit out of her every
once in a while, but she never had any proof. During visiting hours, she asked Krish to investigate her suspicions, but he just shook his head and looked at his hands.

  Eventually Krish confessed that he’d shut down The Bilious Pills. He was afraid that it was no longer anonymous enough, that more scientists’ careers would be destroyed if he kept it going. They had taken the wrong path, he told her. There were other ways, less confrontational ones, to reform the patent system. A well-endowed human rights org had given him a huge grant to do research that would generate high-quality public domain alternatives to pricey patented pharma, and he didn’t want to risk losing his lab when he’d just gotten enough money to hire more people. He’d even held a job open for her, under the intentionally low-profile title of research assistant.

  Seated in the prison visitors’ room, the air around them occasionally glittering with surveillance motes, Jack couldn’t grab Krish by the shoulders and yell what she was feeling. Instead, she stood up wordlessly and walked back to the infirmary, even though they still had an hour of visiting time left. How could he have made this decision without her? She didn’t want to be a line item in Krish’s research budget. And without The Bilious Pills, she had no identity, no community of fellow travelers. Back in her narrow hospital bed, Jack curled into an aching ball and cried. Fisting tears out of her eyes, she realized she had no future, either—or at least, none she could recognize.

  On subsequent visits, she tried to explain this to Krish, but her rhetorical powers had been fuzzed out by Smaxo painkillers. He was so focused on what his grant meant to him that he couldn’t understand what The Bilious Pills had meant to her.

  And so for the next two months she focused on the smell of Saskatchewan in summer, on the feeling of being in the middle of a vast prairie populated only by plants, machines, and the occasional farm co-op. It was the place where she had first learned to love the idea of reshaping life. When she slept, and even sometimes awake, she watched the prison walls soften into tiny yellow canola flowers, and counted in her mind all the ways their genomes had been perfected by science.

  When Jack got out of prison, all evidence of her broken bones erased by patented therapies, she felt more broken than ever. The man she loved, her partner in crime, had killed The Bilious Pills and her career. Everything she’d felt for Krish had been transfigured by her rage, then settled into melancholy numbness. None of her options seemed real or important anymore. She took the job at Krish’s lab in Saskatoon because it was better than starving.

  Krish still didn’t seem to realize that their relationship had cratered. After picking her up from prison, he held her hand on the short bus ride to Quebec City, then the long train ride to Saskatoon. She pulled her hand away a few times, but finally could not resist. Her body needed affection, and a part of her still loved him. It was winter, and the train shot down a reconstituted twentieth-century track past boxy, abandoned grain elevators painted with the names of towns, and pale fields scattered with rolls of snow-whitened hay. Jack put her hand on the double-paned polymer of the window and tried to feel the cold. The transparent material was barely cool; it was designed to shield travelers from a temperature so low it could blacken hands with frostbite in minutes. She wanted to evaporate the window just to feel her fingers die.

  Trying to rekindle things with Krish was absurd. This became clear after he calmly told Jack about his plans for her career, starting with the assistantship in his lab.

  “If you keep publishing with me and my postdocs at the Free Lab, nobody is going to care about this thing with The Bilious Pills in five years.” They were finally alone in his flat, eating a late dinner that thankfully required Krish to stop gripping her hand insistently. “You just need to lay low, and work your way back up to a position where you can start applying for grants on your own.” His voice had that warm, rational tone that she’d fallen in love with, and his green eyes hadn’t become any less enticing.

  But Krish didn’t understand who she was now. Maybe he hadn’t understood her for a long time. She didn’t want to work her way back up the academic ladder again. There was another path for her, and it wasn’t a tenure track. Her recent experiences—the beatings, the flowers blooming in prison walls, the lost joy of writing for a famous underground text repo—made this even more obvious. The problem was that Krish couldn’t conceive of a life outside university, and Jack was sick of sharing her feelings with someone with such a narrow vision.

  She settled for telling Krish a truncated version of the truth. “I don’t know what I want to do now.”

  “You have to keep doing genetic engineering. Look how successful reng is. You wrote that in just a weekend.”

  When had he become so serenely oblivious to her desires? “Don’t worry,” she spat out. “I’ll take that gig in your Free Lab.”

  Seemingly satisfied with that answer, Krish didn’t bring up his five-year plan for Jack’s future again.

  JULY 10, 2144

  “Are we here?” Threezed peered out the windows at a fat river curving beneath the bridge the truck had chosen for their crossing.

  “Yes.”

  Jack felt a punch of nostalgia that temporarily drove the air out of her lungs. Downtown Saskatoon, hugged by the South Saskatchewan River, was fed by four bridges built in the twentieth century. The sun was setting and the skyscrapers had become undulant shadows, their turbines cutting air with only a faint noise. By the time the truck passed the research fields and greenhouses of the university, the darkening sky was the color of burned meat.

  It had been over twenty years since she’d been to the Free Lab. Over ten since the last stiff, vague “how are you I am fine” messages between Jack and Krish. They had broken up, then drifted apart, and Jack had no idea how he would react to seeing her again after all this time. From following Krish’s publications in the open science journals, she knew his passion for crushing the patent system was as strong as ever. That’s what she was counting on. Plus—he owed her for shutting down The Bilious Pills. Even now, she was still pissed about how he’d dealt with that.

  Jack stashed the truck in a student garage out of satellite view, and registered using a forged identifier on the parking network. The campus hadn’t changed much, but the Free Lab had gotten an upgrade since the last time she was here. It now occupied a long, low building, formerly used as animal housing, and was tricked out for the twenty-second century. Still, the security was stuck in another era. Jack got all three of them through the doors with a simple RFID emulator.

  They emerged into a space that looked exactly like a barn spliced with a wet lab. The high ceiling peaked over a vast, open room full of tables, sequencers, printers, amplifiers, and dozens of colorful plastic tablets. Somebody had etched the words “FREE LAB” on the wall across from the door, using viruses that ate paint down to the plaster and extruded a thin crust of gold. It was late enough that almost everyone had left for supper, but Jack could hear two people talking over the hum of a printer in one of the offices off the shared room. One of them laughed, and immediately Jack knew that it was Krish. All at once, she felt nauseous: This was going to be weird.

  “Come with me,” Jack addressed Threezed and Med, hoping she sounded authoritative. She gestured toward the office.

  Krish was still laughing and talking with one of his students when she stepped through the doorway. His hair showed a few streaks of gray, and the brown skin of his face had lost enough collagen that a few lines framed his eyes and mouth. But he still looked very much like the man she’d known decades ago.

  “Hey, Krish,” Jack said with deliberate casualness. “Got a few minutes to discuss addiction therapies?”

  He stared at her, a pirate in coveralls with silvery-black stubble on her head and a knife on her belt, flanked by a runaway slave and a robot scientist. His eyes widened, but Jack had to admit that Krish was doing a pretty good job of masking his shock.

  The student seemed to sense that this situation was way above her pay grade, and qui
ckly showed herself out. Jack didn’t know how to start, so she got down to business. “I know it’s been awhile, but there’s a big problem with a reverse-engineered drug. And we need your help.”

  Silently, Krish walked to one of the empty workbenches outside his office. He pushed aside a humming sequencer and gestured a 2-D black screen into the air, a cursor blinking in the upper left corner. At last, he spoke to them. “Show me.”

  Jack and Med interrupted each other with details about the Zacuity side effects, supplemented with several hastily designed simulations of brain activity that hovered over the table’s projector. It was like they were visiting scholars sharing important new data. Nothing like work to fill in where personal history has left a smoking hole. But Jack kept getting distracted by Krish’s physical proximity. She had so many vivid memories of Krish that it was hard not to compare this man, almost a stranger, to the one who had helped her found a movement—and then killed it when she was locked up.

  Med continued to talk, oblivious to what was going on between Jack and Krish. “Zacuity is designed as a simple work drug, right? So you get sharper focus while you work, longer attention spans. But what makes Zacuity really popular is that it gets deep into the reward center and gives the user a serious dopamine rush when he does his work, or whatever he’s doing when he takes the drug. My patient decided to take a double dose to make house painting more fun.”

  Med twisted her lips, concentrating on something. The projector played a 3-D video of dopamine receptors, looking a bit like blooming tulips. Particles sparkled around the edges of their petals.

  “Now, as you can see, the drug is stimulating his dopamine receptors. There’s your pleasure bang. But just watch, because the drug is doing something else, too.”

  The tulips began to wither and shrink. Soon, there were half as many dopamine receptors on screen.

  “Zacuity is reducing the number of dopamine receptors on the neurons in the midbrain and prefrontal cortex. And this is really the key. Doing this interferes with decision-making, and makes the brain extremely vulnerable to addiction. As he loses more and more of those receptors, he gets more addicted to the specific thing he did while taking the drug—in this case, painting. He’s going to be in withdrawal from a painting addiction for years, if he survives at all. The Zacuity has basically rewritten the neurological history of his brain. Now he’s got a powerful, long-term addiction that he wants more than anything to feed.”