Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  Sometimes Jack stayed here for weeks, letting her trail go cold. Maybe her ancestors had never lived in these tunnels, but they felt like a legitimate inheritance.

  Slipping into an old routine calmed her down. She paid untraceable cash for a month’s rent on a parking spot at one of the spas, shrugging a faraday bag over her truck. It also contained a perimeter alarm. If anybody tried to get into the vehicle, it would alert her and start a video feed that she could pick up in her tunnel. Then she bought a little fresh fruit and pepperoni—she kept a cooker down there, but she had a craving for comfort food.

  At last she arrived at the service entrance to the now-aging apartment building. Jack blasted the surveillance cameras with an infrared beam, creating what looked like a few seconds of glitch while she eased down through the basement hatch.

  “Light,” she said to the dusty air, waiting for the old fluorescents to turn heaps of wood and shattered solar cells into more than piles of shadow. This dirty room was another way of covering her tracks. Anyone who managed to find the nearly invisible hatch would be met with what looked like a pile of last century’s trash.

  Her safe house was in the main portion of the tunnel, but she’d blocked access to it with a thick spray of concrete foam, leaving only a small hole near the floor that could be plugged with a perfectly shaped hunk of the same stuff the wall was made of. She pulled this plug in behind her, worming backward into the main tunnel, scraping her arms, belly, and back on the rough material as she passed through.

  “Light and air,” she coughed. The bootleggers’ haven began to glow with yellow light, and a fan hummed.

  The tunnel had a low, curved roof reinforced with thermoplastic beams and strung with LED wires. Shallow nooks carved into the walls had once held smugglers’ weapons and loot, but might actually date back to the immigrants who needed to stow household items. Down the center of the tunnel was a lab bench she’d cobbled together from a cheap door made of processed seed hulls, nailed to polymer stumps discarded from a printer factory. That bench contained her whole life: a fabber, a sequencer, and a projector, all built from generic, nougat-colored parts. These were networked to an antenna that snaked up into the walls of the apartment building above, sending signals that hopped between frequencies, masquerading as a variety of devices.

  At the far end of the room, under the air purifier box, was her futon. Atop the chilly floor, she’d unrolled a soft, colorful carpet from Fez, a city south of Casablanca. This place was like her sub, hidden below the surface but wired to the outside world.

  Leaning back against the wall she’d just tunneled through, legs splayed in front of her, Jack sighed. Safety. For a little while.

  Although she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days, she wasn’t ready to be unconscious. Jack scrolled idly through the feeds on her mobile, projecting a few into the air, wondering whether Retcon could outrace the damage Zacuity was doing.

  All the news feeds were reporting on another workplace meltdown incident. The major feeds covered it with the usual splash of decontextualized horror, but reporters at the investigative text repo Internecine said it sounded more like the Zacuity rampage at the Calgary train control center.

  A botadmin at the Toronto branch of Timmo’s had one job: to keep the machines making donut holes, squirting blob after blob of fatty dough out of their cannulated needle fingers and into the simmering oil. He began requesting overtime and skipping meal breaks. His coworkers said he developed a “creepy” relationship with one of the donut bots.

  And then, just today, the admin decided everything was a potential donut hole. Pieces of garbage. A stray cat. The hands of his unfortunate customers. Eventually, his own legs. Anything that could be mashed up and forced through a tube, to be extruded in perfect, mouth-sized blobs. The Timmo’s was a bloodbath, with at least two dead.

  Internecine showed some clips they’d somehow ripped from a police bodyfeed.

  “We’re just making donuts!” the admin screamed, holding up a ball of gore. “Why don’t you let us make donuts! Timmo’s bots make … the … best … donuts!”

  Jack stared at the pepperoni she had been about to eat, feeling ill.

  FALL 2120

  At first, Casablanca was everything that Lyle had promised. The African Federation was still young, and the government worried very little about enforcing intellectual property laws, as long as the economy was expanding.

  Jack and Lyle rented a flat in the biotech ghetto, a neighborhood whose nickname was self-explanatory. It was near the high, ocean-facing wall around the old medina. Always a middle-class neighborhood, the area had been tended and upgraded over the centuries to retain its traditional Moorish architecture of colorful tiles and hidden courtyards, while also growing a new surface of photovoltaic paint over semipermeable walls that absorbed water and strobed with glowing algae at night. The winding streets looked ancient, but they had been paved with foam. Even the crumbling seams in the walls came from bioconcrete, a mash of water-activated bacteria and epoxies that healed itself as cracks formed.

  They took lucrative jobs at a startup that built custom proteins for other businesses, and swore that they would save their best ideas for after-work projects. But so far, they’d been working such long hours that the ideas hadn’t come. That’s when Lyle decided it was time to take an evening off. She brought an expensive red-and-brown blanket home and swirled it around her body. “Let’s get under it together and swear to do something very, very important.”

  Most of their clothes were already on the floor by the time Lyle pulled the blanket completely over their heads. They kissed fiercely, yanking each other’s underwear off. The space beneath the caftan grew hot and close with their breathing.

  Jack looked into her lover’s eyes, which had gone nearly black in the caftan’s shadow. Lyle’s fingers moved inside her, and Jack kept staring into those eyes, her body swollen with pleasure, thinking that she had never loved anyone this much in her entire life. And then she could no longer focus on anything other than her own pleasure.

  Lyle wasn’t much for postorgasm cuddling these days. She threw off the caftan and started talking.

  “I’m serious, we can really shake things up here. We should start our own Free Lab, but make it really radical, much more radical than Krish’s.”

  Jack didn’t say anything. She was still trying to savor their closeness, pulling Lyle’s thigh between her legs. Lyle rewarded her by throwing her other leg over Jack’s hip, squeezing their bodies together in a pleasurable tangle.

  “Don’t you want to do that, Jack?”

  Lyle was moving in a way that was increasingly distracting. “Yes,” Jack whispered.

  * * *

  The first planning meeting for the Casablanca Free Lab, held at a teahouse, was a lot less pleasant than the undercover meeting that had spawned it. Somehow Jack’s call for participation on a couple of local biotech hacker forums had gotten reposted to an artists’ mailing list, and a bunch of poets showed up to argue with them about the true meaning of anarchy. Instead of a practical conversation about renting a space where they could build a wet lab, they had a three-hour shouting match about liberty and recolonialism.

  Casablanca had grown wealthy on biotech, but local artists and subversives considered scientific progress equivalent to gentrification. They had a very hard time grasping the idea that science could be radical, and a laboratory could be free.

  It took Jack and Lyle a full year of argument, on the net and in person, before they reached the pragmatic stage of renting a space. By that time, they had a pretty good grasp of Darija, and a core group of five people who were willing to put in money and time to set up the lab.

  The Twin Center had just been converted into cheap live-work spaces, and the Casablanca Free Lab moved into one of its subbasements. They did this partly because it was a large space with running water, but partly to appease the poets who lived in the upper floors. It was the right move. The poets still liked to remind th
e engineers gleefully that culture stomped on the head of science, but they had stopped calling them recolonizers—at least, to their faces.

  Krish was ecstatic to hear that they had set up the first satellite Free Lab, and tried to help with grant applications.

  “Fuck his grants,” grumbled Jack, reading his messages. “We don’t want to be beholden to some economic coalition.” The rest of the collective agreed with her. To distance themselves from Krish’s Free Lab, they would need a new name. They called themselves Signaling Pathway—Signal for short.

  “We still need a way to make money,” Lyle pointed out, after they’d spent some time sketching a logo.

  “We could charge for memberships,” suggested a volunteer.

  “That doesn’t sound very free. What would the poets say?”

  Everybody laughed. But it was true: They couldn’t ask for money and call themselves liberators. Subversives were already suspicious enough of science in this town, and you couldn’t very well charge admission to the revolution.

  For the first few months at Signal, they deferred the money question. The collective had ponied up enough cash for at least six months’ rent. Plus, they were having fun. Jack was teaching a basic synbio class, showing other residents in the building how to reverse engineer simple organisms. One teenager figured out a way to grow mint in his family’s tiny garden by engineering the plant to use nitrogen more efficiently.

  As Signal-related projects flourished, people came from all over the Maghreb to see their space. Local companies donated old fabbers, sequencers, and tissue trellises. Lyle ran weekly meetings where regulars and visitors could mingle to discuss the Free Lab’s mission. It was at one of these weekly meetings that they met Frankie.

  Lyle had finally debugged her tattoo, and a sequence of flowers danced on her freshly shorn head, matching the illuminated flowers that crawled up and down her dress. Meetings always began with beer and a foul-tasting drink called Club-Mate, an old tradition that went back to hackerspaces of the twenty-first century. Clumped around the bench were kids and retirees, rich biotech professionals and info anarchists who lived in squats. Each person introduced themselves, using a real name or pseudonym as they wished.

  Frankie looked like a typical engineer in her starched shirt and casual khakis. Her brown skin and black hair made it more likely that she was local, but she could just as easily be from the AU or the Zone. She said she built things with Adder.

  After the meeting, Lyle gave the newbies a tour of the lab. Jack checked on some sequence, while across the room Lyle’s bright dress grew a comet tail of admiring hackers. When Jack looked up from her readout, Frankie was standing next to her. “I need to talk to you in private,” she said.

  “It’s private here.”

  Frankie just looked at her. “Do you have a faraday room?”

  Jack was beginning to wonder if this woman was one of the occasional crazies they got at Signal, a person gone paranoid in the pursuit of ambiguously legal science.

  “No,” she said gently. “But we are several floors underground. I’m not sure what you’re worried about, but the people here are pretty cool.”

  “I’m worried that the IPC has bugged your shit.” She waved her hand at the churning sequencers, then brought it to rest on the tablet Jack had folded up and strapped to her belt. “Do you know how easy it is to turn this thing into a bug?”

  Definitely crazy. Jack tried to be nonchalant. “I’m not worried about it.”

  “You should be. Do you really think the IPC has stopped tracking you after what happened with The Bilious Pills? Especially now that you’re preaching the freedom to reverse engineer in Africa?”

  That settled it. Jack was done with this weird bitch. “Fuck off, OK? I’m not doing anything illegal.”

  “I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to help you and that rich girl from the Gulf figure out what it would really mean to bring free drugs to people who need them. That was always your problem at The Bilious Pills—you were so focused on your little legal arguments, and dressing up like pirates, that you forgot about the real crimes. Like murder.”

  Suddenly Jack realized who she was talking to. Frankie was the woman behind the Bilious Pills byline Rosalind Franklin.

  Rosalind Franklin had sent the autonomous drone fleet that liberated the pills from Halifax Harbor before Jack got arrested. But Jack had only known her as a pseudonym, a fiercely smart but mysterious writer from somewhere in the African Federation. Her first essay for The Bilious Pills began with an intensely personal story, unusual for an academic, in which she explained quite bluntly how her family had been murdered by Zaxy when they refused to license the antiviral Blense to a local manufacturer. It was an unforgettable essay, especially because it ended with an elegant little program—thirty lines of Adder—that perfectly reverse-engineered Blense. Nobody who worked on the text repo knew her real name.

  “Are you Rosalind Franklin?”

  The woman shrugged. “No, I’m her ghost, come to get revenge on the white dudes who stole the Nobel Prize from me.” Then she laughed, a loud bark that did not fit somebody who seemed so focused on hiding. Several faces in Lyle’s comet tail turned to look at them.

  Jack felt like she’d passed a secret test. “I’m glad you came. We always wondered who you were.”

  “I’m glad you’ve decided to do some real work instead of just scribbling in a text repo.” Frankie’s compliments were always insults. They had the disturbing effect of making people want to please her more.

  “Do you live around here? Are you interested in starting a project at Signal?”

  “I’m thinking of moving here.”

  “Are you still working at a university?”

  Frankie tilted her head to the side. “I never worked at a university.”

  Jack and Krish had always assumed Rosalind Franklin was a university researcher—all of The Bilious Pills contributors they knew had been students or junior faculty. But Rosalind Franklin had never divulged where she worked. She just wrote beautiful code and angry, persuasive essays.

  “Oh, are you in industry?”

  “No. I’m a pirate.”

  Before Jack could respond, Lyle joined them, putting her arm around Jack’s waist and kissing her. “Who’s your friend?”

  Frankie frowned at Lyle. “Why do you want to draw attention to yourself with your clothes? Don’t you think you’re upsetting the social order enough without rubbing it in people’s faces?” And with that, Frankie went to wait by the elevator.

  “That was Rosalind Franklin.”

  “The woman who wrote for The Bilious Pills?”

  “Yeah. She said she might be moving here and wants to help us.” Jack felt off-balance as she watched the elevator doors close.

  Nobody was more vulnerable to Frankie’s insults than Lyle. When Frankie became a regular at Signal, Lyle got itchy in her flamboyant clothing, picking holes in her stockings that flared into runs. She let her hair grow in, its natural, glossy black replacing the debugged tattoo. And then she started working with Frankie on a secret project that took a lot of her time.

  Lyle said Frankie had ideas for a program that could help with rapid prototyping of flu vaccines. Mostly, however, the pirate would come to Signal empty-handed, leave with a sack of drugs, and return empty-handed. Of course, a lot of people used Signal to prototype drugs. That’s what everyone assumed Frankie was doing, too. And maybe it was.

  Then Lyle started skipping work, supposedly to hammer on sequence with Frankie. Jack hunted her down at Signal one evening after she’d been MIA all day. “Where the fuck have you been? I keep having to make excuses for you at work, and it’s getting really old.”

  “I told you, I was with Frankie—it’s been a really hard time for her, restarting her business.”

  “She moved here months ago.”

  “Look, there’s a lot about Frankie you don’t know.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know either—like her real nam
e, for example.”

  “You don’t need to know someone’s birth name to know they’re doing good work. She’s bringing flu vaccines and antivirals to people who can’t afford them, and she’s helping to set up a small manufacturing operation for this collective down in Fez so they can do it for themselves. Besides, you don’t go by your real name, either.”

  Jack leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, feeling the raw insulation crinkling under her arm. This wasn’t the conversation she wanted to be having. Everybody knew her real name was Judith Chen. Jack was a nickname, not a pseudonym.

  “So you’re helping her pirate drugs instead of going to work?”

  “I hate that job—I’m quitting. Frankie’s going to help pay for the lab.”

  This was turning into a serious what-the-fuck conversation. “You do understand that Frankie is breaking the law. Yes, she’s doing some good, but she’s also selling a lot of shit that’s just for fun, for parties. How does that help the people of Fez?”

  Lyle shrugged, and grinned. “Since when do you care about patent piracy?”

  “Since I’m trying to run a legitimate Free Lab. Everyone is welcome here, you know that. We’re not policing anyone. But if anyone found out we were funded by piracy, well…”

  “What do you think would happen?”

  “I think it would be worse than jail. And that was already bad enough.” Jack was going to cry, or throw up, or maybe punch Lyle in the face. She was jealous of Frankie, or scared of her—maybe both. So she walked away without saying anything.

  Lyle caught up to her on the street, three blocks from their flat. She put an arm around Jack, and they walked without saying anything until they reached the door. Jack thought about how they’d met, how good the late summer air smelled in Saskatoon, and how she’d already lost both a continent and a calling.