Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  Paladin could think of no response he cared to transmit. But after hours of crawling the public net, he had a few mental models that allowed him to predict the kinds of behaviors a human might expect from a robot faggot. Maybe it’s different for biobots.

  That’s crap. Your brain is nothing more than a processing device for facial recognition. You can operate almost as effectively if it goes offline. It doesn’t reveal some essential gender identity any more than your arm reveals that you are secretly a squid.

  Paladin once again found himself in a contradictory state, knowing Fang was right, but unable to feel the truth of it.

  Fang sent more data: I’ve fought beside your model before, and the bad guys always take out the brain first. Why do you think Kagu advertises the location of the brain so much? It’s like camouflage. Malicious attackers expend their weapons on a useless target.

  Paladin possessed a file time-stamped from the first few minutes of his life. In it, he’d stored a video of the arm bots on the Kagu factory floor explaining his physical capabilities. They’d used those exact words, “like camouflage.”

  Talking to Fang was inflaming Paladin’s desire for data, not reducing it. He exited their session.

  The more he analyzed what had happened with Eliasz on the shooting range, the more complicated it seemed. Paladin had accumulated entire days’ worth of memories, petabytes of data, about Eliasz. Unlike most humans, Eliasz didn’t treat Paladin like a thing, a tool to be deployed. He told the bot things that no other entity had ever shared with him. And Eliasz displayed desire for Paladin when the bot was at his least human, his body unfolded into a weapon. How could that be anthropomorphizing?

  If Paladin used Fang’s logic to analyze the situation, however, it was hard to deny that other explanations were possible. He accessed his memory of Eliasz saying “I am not a faggot” for the seven hundred and sixteenth time. “Faggot” was a word for something that only humans cared about. Maybe Eliasz really was like the sprinkler system at Arcata Solar Farm, mistaking Paladin for something that he was not.

  Finally Paladin considered the possibility that his own feelings were also an illusion. Every indentured bot knew that there were programs running in his mind that he could not access, nor control—and these programs were designed to inspire loyalty. But were they also supposed to make him care this much about small physiological changes in Eliasz’ body? Was this constant searching and data-gathering about Eliasz something that he would shut down if he were autonomous?

  Fang addressed Paladin again: Remember our secure session? Let’s keep using it.

  But Paladin didn’t want to talk to Fang anymore. Impulsively, he tuned the open wares menu on RECnet and downloaded a worm jammed inside an immersive combat simulator. The accompanying .txt file explained that just as the action got intense, a memory error would crash him. The program would also helpfully output the entire sequence to a log file so he could save and replay his half-destroyed memory of the experience.

  Paladin found himself pouring bullets into an enemy tank, an injured human beside him. As the game’s code uncoiled, he knew his only goal was to destroy the tank and bring the man to safety. He chose to strap the human to his back and continued to fire. When the adversary’s ruined molecular bonds boiled with gas fires, when Paladin was just about to fulfill his mission, the man’s body fragile and alive against his back, he hit the malicious code. The bot’s whole body spasmed, his reflexes made useless by bogus and contradictory commands. A wave of ecstatic nonsense gripped him and the file ended.

  * * *

  The next morning, Paladin still hadn’t heard back from Kagu about his brain. He and Eliasz lifted off into the scalding blue of the sky, a light stealth jet buoying them over the sand. They landed in a Casablanca suburb called California, and hitched into town on a truck caravan. Their base of operations was a cheap hostel near Biotech Park, at the fringes of the old medina along the piers.

  Biotech Park was a corporate incubator, but it was also a kind of city unto itself. Famous across the Maghreb, the campus looked like a massive wall of mirrored glass by the water, next to the equally massive Hassan II Mosque, whose rooftop lasers sought line of sight with Mecca during prayers. It held hundreds of startups locked in a frenzy of research and investment capital, all vying to be the next Zaxy. When ancient amplifiers broadcast the call to prayer, it got picked up and relayed by the mote network. Clumps of engineers would emerge from their workstations onto the vast, pale-orange plaza stones of the mosque—sometimes to pray, and sometimes to take pictures of other people praying.

  The life sciences industry had remolded the landscape for miles along the coast, spawning smaller but still-glittering versions of itself devoted to housing genetic engineers and their families. Expensive condo developments advertised on giant billboards, offering private berths for residents’ yachts. The culture of Biotech Park spread everywhere, washing over the old medina walls across the street to flood its centuries-old narrow lanes with consumer biotech shops, game stores, and European fashion boutiques. Recently relocated engineers wandered like confused tourists through the medina’s spice markets, past stalls where slabs of real butchered lamb were for sale right next to outlets offering trellis-grown pork tissue wrapped in biodegradable polymers for half the price.

  Though it dominated the skyline, Biotech Park did not create order or regimentation. Instead, it simply amplified the polyglot chaos that was Casablanca in summer.

  Paladin and Eliasz adopted cover identities similar to what they’d used in Iqaluit: a down-on-his-luck engineer with his bot. They wandered through the medina’s tea shops, asking anyone who would talk to them whether they knew about good contract work in the Park. Somehow, Eliasz knew which tea shops would be packed with engineers grabbing a curved glass of tea between long stints of amplification, transcriptome modeling, and sequence analysis.

  “Those teahouses are the kinds of places where Freeculture projects are born.” Eliasz explained his strategy to Paladin as he tossed his bag on a low bed back at the hostel. Outside, the afternoon prayers mixed with the sounds of traffic while two men shouted Darija and Russian. “You work all day for some company that doesn’t care about you, but you and your buddies still want to change the world. So you go out to tea and bitch about it. Then you start a project, you give it a name, start passing it around. Before you know it, you’ve either got the next blockbuster drug—or the next patent crime.”

  Eliasz checked his weapons perimeter, passing his hands over his head and chest in solemn blessing. Paladin assessed the space: white walls covered in paint that repelled particulates and sealed its own cracks; a rectangular bed; a foam easy chair whose arms were sprayed with charge strips that gleamed dully. On one strip somebody had left a throwaway mobile which was now biodegrading into a lump of gray cellulose. There was enough room here for the bot to stand up comfortably, though he guessed he would have few opportunities to do it. He touched the bed with his new hand, where minute skin flakes reminded him of all the humans who had been here before.

  “You’re going to have a speaking part in this operation, buddy,” Eliasz said, looking into Paladin’s face. “You’re my indentured lab assistant. I want you to get some HUMINT, too.”

  Abruptly Eliasz sat down on the bed, dropping his bag into the place where a pillow might have been. “A couple of hours until people start getting out of work at Biotech Park. I’m going to get a little sleep. Keep watch.” The man rolled his whole body to face the wall, bending his knees in the semifetal position every soldier learns after sleeping in tight quarters for any length of time.

  Paladin stood in the middle of the floor, his sensors in a default high-security mode. That mode was one of his deepest instincts, and he couldn’t conceive of resisting when asked to keep watch. Nothing seemed more natural. But high security did not prevent him from reopening the file that held his experiences after eating that worm.

  He wanted to watch it now, while Eliasz lay vulnerable ne
xt to him. Reviewing his own crash made the bot sway slightly with pleasure, but didn’t disable him the way it had when the worm was executing. Still, he couldn’t allow himself to play it more than once. Too dangerous.

  Paladin closed the file and focused his entire attention on monitoring the room, filling his sensors with the hum of Eliasz’ blood flow, the temperature of the air, the molecules cascading through his spectrometers. The electrical signature coming from Eliasz’ nervous system indicated he’d fallen into a deep sleep almost instantly. The bot monitored Eliasz’ breathing and wondered how his life would be different if he became unconscious for several hours every day.

  11

  FREE LAB

  JULY 11, 2144

  “That bot is a vicious bastard,” Krish spat in an angry whisper.

  “You’d have to be to take down Blue and her crew.”

  Jack and Krish sat at a worn thermoplastic table in the Free Lab’s kitchen. A coffee machine made from recycled lab equipment was slowly spitting out dark, rich liquid.

  They stared numbly at a feed display on the surface between their hands, detailing the destruction of Arcata Solar Farm. Government reps explained that it had belonged to a pharma pirate ring whose cover was a remote solar operation on Baffin Island. Very little data survived the attack, but a few seconds of recovered security footage showed a bulky humanoid bot with wing shields crushing the skull of an armored guard. Physical evidence suggested that this bot had killed everyone and stolen a helicopter. Depending on the political bent of the feed source, it was being called an IPC conspiracy or a terrorist attack.

  “I saw Blue just a few months ago.” Jack held her voice steady as she poured coffee into a Pyrex measuring cup. “I was supposed to bring her some of the Zacuity.”

  “This is not good, Jack, not good. If this is part of the hunt for you, you are in serious danger. You need to get the hell out of here and let Med and I take care of developing the therapy.”

  “No. You need my help. It will only take a couple of days.”

  “He could be on his way here right now.”

  “There’s no way. Blue had her shit together with security. Even if he got the servers, it would take him hundreds of years to decrypt them.”

  “You don’t think they’ll come after me? After this lab? It’s not very hard to guess you might wind up here.”

  Jack felt a flick of annoyance. Did Krish really think she hadn’t figured out a way to stay hidden? “There have been no connections between us on the public net for at least twenty-five years. And they won’t be able to follow my data trail here, either. I take a lot of precautions.” She patted her knife, which automatically routed all her communications through an anonymizing network that stretched across the Earth and through at least two research facilities on the Moon.

  Krish looked dubious. She wanted to grab him by the spongy synthetic wool of his jacket and yell that she knew what she was doing. Couldn’t he respect that this project was so important that it was worth everything to her? No. He didn’t know what it was like to pay the price for doing something risky.

  “Look—I poisoned those people with my drug. I need to fix it.”

  Krish stared at Jack’s hands on the table through the hologram that rose out of a commercial break in the feed. It was the Zaxy logo, an anthropomorphized letter Z, dancing with a woman who had been liberated from sexual dysphoria by a new drug called Languidity. His face hardened into that ruthless expression she’d never seen when they were lovers. “Let’s get to work, then.”

  When Krish and Jack emerged from the kitchen, Med was describing the project to a woman whose black hair grew in fluffy patches around purple vines rooted in her scalp. They were deeply involved in a debate about how already-existing addiction workarounds could be integrated into a therapy. More students arrived for morning lab, some drifting over to meet this new researcher, whose midnight arrival had become the subject of lab gossip.

  Watching them, Jack had to admit that the Free Lab did resemble the ideal research space she and Krish had dreamed about back in the days of The Bilious Pills. Everything they produced was open and unpatented. All their schematics and research papers were on the public net. Almost anyone, even nonstudents, could use the Free Lab equipment if they had an interesting idea.

  Of course, nobody here was pirating, at least not officially, even though sometimes that was the best way to save lives fast. And a lot of their open work was eventually absorbed into locked IP by the big patent holders. Companies like Zaxy and Fresser came here to recruit from the talent pool all the time.

  Still, the lab was free enough to harbor a pirate whom the International Property Coalition would happily see murdered. That was no small thing.

  SPRING 2119

  In its early days, the Free Lab was located deep underground in a cavernous, dusty room whose doors had been stenciled a hundred years prior with the words “COMPUTING CENTER.” They were renetworking, repiping, and drywalling the place with the help of Krish’s grant, but slowly, so there were dozens of half-finished offices and cubbies where you could curl up and disappear.

  One evening, after a particularly mind-numbing series of assays, Jack fabbed a thin futon, dragged it up a ladder to a skeletal loft over the sequence library fridges, and fell asleep behind some discarded shipping boxes for protein-folding devices. Up there, noises from the lab were muffled and everything had the comforting, grassy smell of packing foam. It was the first good night’s sleep she’d had since her arrest, and she never went back to Krish’s house after that. Everyone in the lab knew she was living in the loft, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary for researchers to do things like that when they got really involved in work.

  For the next several months, boxes were her bedroom and 2-D movies were her nighttime entertainment. Krish left her alone, lost in his new role as manager of a well-funded lab, and she lost herself in the frosty, brittle quiet of a Saskatchewan winter. The simplicity of her job was a kind of GABA regulator, she realized, de-spiking her moods while she dealt with whatever the fuck was going to happen next.

  Spring was transforming the prairies into ruffled grain fields when Jack met Lyle Al-Ajou. Lyle was Krish’s star postdoc and she had a buggy tattoo on her half-shaved head. It was supposed to move through a sequence of common flowers, but crashed every time it bloomed into a deep orange poppy. The static image on her light brown skin, its code unmended, gave Lyle an appealingly absentminded air.

  It was 2:00 a.m. and Jack’s eyes were blurring over a line of code when Lyle poked her. “Can I crash with you tonight?” Lyle looked sheepish. “I’m about to fall over, and my clone sequence won’t be cooked until morning anyway. You have a bed up there, right?” Lyle pointed up, vaguely in the direction of Jack’s loft, and raised her eyebrows. Was it an innocent request, or something more? Jack hadn’t had sex since her awkward attempts with Krish after prison. It was as if her desires were as broken as her bones had been: She couldn’t figure out what she wanted, and was even more clueless when it came to other people.

  “I’m not trying to hit on you, I swear.” Lyle grinned. “I’m just so tired I don’t think I can make it home.”

  Everyone else had left around midnight. Jack shrugged. “Sure.”

  In the semidarkness of the loft, surrounded by boxes emblazoned with corporate logos for scientific instruments, Jack and Lyle were suddenly wide-awake. They couldn’t stop talking. They rehashed the results of a recent patent infringement trial.

  “I can’t believe they gave Thorton ten years in prison,” Lyle whispered fiercely. “What the hell? He wasn’t selling those drugs. He gave them away to his neighborhood because of a goddamn epidemic.”

  “Ten years in prison makes my experience seem like a walk in the park.”

  Lyle didn’t say anything. Eventually she spoke in an uncertain voice. “Is it OK for me to ask what that was like? I read The Bilious Pills and I’ve been trying to get up the courage to ask you, but it always seems tacky or
weird or fannish or something.”

  “It was mostly boring.” Jack pulled back before spilling anything more. This was Krish’s protégé. No sense launching into an entire diatribe about how Lyle’s beloved Freeculturist boss had sold out and abandoned the cause while Jack learned about bone engineering firsthand. Besides, there was something else that Jack suddenly, desperately needed to ask. “Were you serious about not hitting on me?”

  “I don’t have to be serious about it. I could be sort of … exaggerating my lack of interest … a lot.”

  Jack got up on one elbow and stared down at Lyle, trying to understand how the arch of her nose made every feature on her face more beautiful. A slice of light from the lab below illuminated the static petals of her tattoo and the half-smile on her lips. Then Jack couldn’t help it anymore. She grabbed Lyle harder than she intended, kissed her harder than she’d wanted to kiss anyone for the past year. Maybe she was being too intense, but it was intoxicating to be able to measure the strength of her desire again. Lyle didn’t mind. In the grip of Jack’s embrace, she thrashed with pleasure and moaned.

  The two of them slept for only about an hour while Lyle’s clones were cooking, and the next day they were the happiest sleep-deprived zombies in the lab.

  JULY 11, 2144

  Jack put her beaker of coffee down on the lab bench next to Med and glanced up at the loft where Threezed was still sleeping. More than a quarter of a century had passed, and she was still crashing in lab storage rooms. And her future was more uncertain than ever.

  “Here’s my hypothesis about a possible therapy,” Med announced. “We need to circumvent the reward patterns Zacuity created in the ODs, and we can only do that if we disable people’s memory of the addiction. Memory of the work reward is what keeps addicts coming back for more, even after they’ve detoxed. Every time they see a cue that reminds them of work—whether that’s a breadboard or a paintbrush—they’ll want to eat Zacuity again. Over time the dopamine receptors will grow back, and that’s helpful, but the main thing is to get rid of those reward memories.”