Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  Eliasz paused. This was obviously Threezed, and the “J” was Jack.

  There were two more entries, one from yesterday, but they didn’t indicate where Threezed was. “J” had disappeared from the journal, and the boy was writing a lot about robots and autonomy.

  Still, it seemed Paladin was right: Jack was still in touch with contributors to The Bilious Pills, including the anti-patent agitators running this free lab. Probably funded by a noneconomic organization trying to undermine the IPC.

  He patched into Paladin’s data feed. The bot was at Broner’s office, talking to the scientist about brain interfaces. He sent an order for her to interrogate the man now, appending coordinates for an extraction point.

  It was time to close in. Eliasz and Paladin would rendezvous on Vancouver Island, and from there … Eliasz started a search on free labs in the northern Zone. The results were all references to one place: the Free Lab at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. If Jack wasn’t there, he was willing to bet they would know where to find her.

  With a couple of hours to kill before extraction, Eliasz bought himself a soda and strolled back toward Wynn Market. Idle times were dangerous. Things he’d seen when he worked here, and back home in Warsaw, writhed at the corners of his vision.

  * * *

  When Eliasz came of age, over a decade ago, he’d been lucky. His father had bought a limited franchise that allowed Eliasz to work in Warsaw, as long as he was employed by the church. His sisters were not so lucky. They left home one by one, indentured to corps overseas.

  Eliasz’ first job was as a guard in the church dormitories for the Boys Manufacturing Internship Program. Mostly he was there to catch runaways. He spent his days watching the boys assemble bodies in the church robotics factory, troubleshooting algorithms and studying bot anatomy. Supposedly it was so they would learn basic technical skills and land better clients when they entered contract. At night, he worked shifts in the church dormitory, listening to the boys crying themselves to sleep or getting into pointless fights over nothing.

  It was during one of these long nights that he discovered what happens when you force adolescent boys to spend all day with robots whose chests are laser etched with the sign of the cross. There weren’t a lot of functional video sensors left in the factory, but one of them picked up some motion in infrared and sent an alert to Eliasz.

  Hidden behind a rubbish pile of arms and legs, he found two of the interns with an unprogrammed biobot. She’d obviously been cobbled together out of castoff parts, with her skin applied patchily and her mind left unformatted. As soon as the boys saw Eliasz, they tossed her back on the pile of limbs and hurled themselves out a window to race back to the dormitories. Knowing what the priests would do to the boys if he reported them, Eliasz decided to keep their indiscretions to himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do with the bot.

  She looked uncannily like an unconscious teenage girl—until he peered more closely. The boys had been more careful with her lingerie than her chassis. One of her arms was longer than the other, and the tissue on her inner thighs needed nutrients. She had no mind installed, but her hair was slicked into curls and her face covered in makeup. They had modeled her on a common sex worker bot, popular on the pay feeds. Eliasz picked her up gently, unsure what to do. Her carbon fiber body was light in his arms. The more he saw of what the boys had done to her, the more mesmerized and revolted he was.

  He decided disassembly was the best option, and spent a painstaking hour reducing the bot to a pile of limbs, torso slices, a head emptied of its sensors, and a lumpy roll of tissue that was too damaged to recycle. Her endoskeleton would be useful, though. He carried her in pieces to the parts bin.

  “Thank you.”

  The voice came from behind him, in the same rubbish pile where he’d found the boys with their bot.

  When he turned, Eliasz saw an unfinished bot standing with arms akimbo. The bot’s exposed metal-and-fabric muscles must have camouflaged him in the garbage. His battered chest carapace—his only external casing—bore a detailed laser etching of a fantastically muscled Christ on the cross.

  For the second time that night, Eliasz wasn’t sure what to do.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  The bot stared at him. “I can’t leave. I keep watch here, but tonight I decided to do something.”

  “Are you indentured to the church?”

  “I am Scrappy. You are Eliasz. I belong to Piotr.”

  Eliasz moved closer. Was this bot talking about Father Piotr? Eliasz’ mind was muddy with exhaustion and he was still unsettled by what he’d done to the sexbot. Images of her inert body parts kept erupting into his mind. Standing beside Scrappy, Eliasz found himself wondering what it would be like to do what the boys had done with a bot.

  Scrappy thrummed with life, and had no repulsive layer of makeup over wads of damaged tissue. As he spoke, he gestured by moving his arms in a perfect, graceful ellipse. There was something undeniably beautiful about him. Eliasz tried not to look at the matte black of his bones, threaded with soft fabric stronger than anything on Earth.

  The bot pointed at a heap of hands. “I keep watch over this. But I do not have orders to watch everything that happens. That’s why I sent the alert.”

  Eliasz tried to think of something else to say, to chase away the ideas coalescing in his mind. “Why can’t you leave?”

  “My legs.” Scrappy pointed down, to show Eliasz that he’d been bonded to the floor. Eliasz wasn’t sure about all the laws of indenture, but he knew one thing: The indentured could not be permanently bound. He knelt to examine the seam between the bot’s legs and the floor, wondering where the molecule regulators were kept. It would only take a few minutes to free Scrappy, though he’d have to build some feet for him.

  Looking up, Eliasz could see the braided fibers in Scrappy’s neck and caught a glimpse of actuators where the bot’s carapace settled against his hips.

  Scrappy spoke. “Humans are coming.”

  There was scrabbling outside the window, and Eliasz saw three of the older boys, almost at the age of contract. They were only a few months younger than Eliasz. He froze, his face only centimeters from the slick ball joint between Scrappy’s thighbone and pelvis.

  “Look—it’s the guard!” One of the boys let out a bark of laughter.

  “He’s sucking off Scrappy!”

  “Faggot!” More laughter.

  “Suck it, faggot!”

  Eliasz rose up, putting his body between the bot and the boys. His face was hot with blood and rage. His only weapon was a baton, but Eliasz had always been good with weapons, and he moved fast. At least one of the boys wouldn’t be able to say the word “faggot” again for a long time. For people without franchises, there was a three-month wait period to access Warsaw’s bone printer, unless it was a life-threatening scenario. Which it wasn’t. The boy could live with a shattered lower jaw, as long as the church had wire and straws.

  * * *

  Eliasz had a lot of practice erasing this cognitive marginalia from his mind, but it reemerged when he had nothing to occupy his attention.

  So he focused on a good memory, consciously strengthening its vividness as if he were running it through an image processor. It was Paladin’s beautiful, angular, armored body—the way it looked when she was shivering in his arms that afternoon in Casablanca. Just as Paladin crashed, her shields glitched and she flickered into invisibility and back out again. Other bodies, other missions, other countries tried to crowd out the picture of her face in his mind, but he overwrote them with the feeling of her carapace against his naked skin.

  Eliasz was suffused with a feeling more powerful than any humiliation his long-ago experiences could possibly supply. He had no trouble identifying it as love.

  19

  A DISTURBING WORKPLACE ACCIDENT

  JULY 17, 2144

  Med pushed an update of the Retcon Project to the Free Lab servers and went for a walk across Universi
ty Bridge. Early morning light turned the river from black to blue, and she spotted the V-shaped wake of a beaver carrying a last mouthful of reeds to its lodge before retiring for the day. Word about the therapy was already boiling up on forums for doctors, especially in the north where most patients had limited franchises. Open drugs were often the only option they had.

  Med checked the project forums once per second, but it would be days before she had enough data to analyze. To distract herself, she tuned some feeds while the forum checks ran in the background of her mind. Hundreds of millions of people were watching a new comedy series about bumbling robots. Record harvests on Mars meant immigration there was getting cheaper. A disturbing workplace accident had left New York City flooded, and police blamed drugs.

  Even before she watched, Med knew it was a Zacuity breakdown, probably the worst so far. This time it was a young engineer, just out of university, whose job it was to troubleshoot the software controls on an elaborate set of viaducts, pumps, and valves that kept the rising waters of the Atlantic from seeping into downtown Manhattan. After days without sleep, she’d decided to rethink the fundamental principles underlying the artificial marshland that acted as a massive sponge between the city and its waterways. She began to experiment, taking notes the entire time.

  Unfortunately, as the engineer explained in a meticulously footnoted, fifteen-thousand-word document posted on Memeland, she also needed a control for her experiment. Which meant she’d have to look at New York City in its most natural state, saturated with water. Before anyone could stop her, the engineer flooded the subways and streets in downtown Manhattan, drowning dozens of people in underground housing, and forcing a huge evacuation. Many people were still missing. The engineer had been arrested, but it was impossible to undo her work without days of cleanup. Free Trade Zone leaders had declared a state of emergency.

  Racing back to the lab, Med ran through decision trees and modeled options.

  News about Retcon wasn’t getting out fast enough to stop the damage that Zacuity was causing. They couldn’t afford to rely on the Freeculture text repos and research forums as their only means to circulate information, hoping that somehow the entire Zone would hear about it. It was time to publish a paper showing that the dangerous pirate drug causing so many deaths was actually a reverse-engineered Zaxy pill. Once Zaxy’s name was involved, all the feeds would be on it. And then, even docs in New York City would know about Retcon.

  Med burst into Krish’s office and smacked his desk to activate the feed from New York. “We have to go public with what we know about Zacuity.”

  She could see Krish’s anxiety stitching a pattern of electricity across his scalp as he watched the video of subway entrances disgorging gray water and worse.

  “This is horrifying, but I don’t know if we’re ready to accuse one of the biggest corps in the Zone of breaking the law.”

  “It’s the only way we’re going to get enough publicity to stop more of these manic episodes. We’ve got Jack’s schematics of the reverse-engineered Zacuity.”

  “Yes, we have the schematics for Zacuity. Yes, we have a therapy for a street drug that a pirate claims is Zacuity—”

  “But it’s the exact same drug! We have proof!”

  Krish sighed. “We have proof that scientists will believe, if they are so inclined. But IPC representatives, the public, the media—they can’t read a schematic, and all they’ll hear is that some anti-patent activist is shitting on Zaxy, which provides them with all the blockbuster drugs they know and love.” Krish wiped the feeds and documentation out of the air and sighed. “Without something the media can understand, going public now could blow up in our faces.”

  The bot shook her head. “We have to do it. This is Zaxy’s fault, and people need to know they’re making illegal addictives with horrifying side effects.”

  “I know, and I wish I could do something about that. But for now we’ve made Retcon available, and it’s already doing some good.”

  Angrier than she’d ever been in her life, Med slammed the door shut on Krish’s office, enjoying the sting of reverberation in the air. She was going to find the proof he wanted.

  * * *

  Six hours later, Med realized she had no idea what she was looking for. Combing the forums and medical text repos turned up nothing. Contacting her old colleagues yielded more preliminary data that she couldn’t put into a scientific article, let alone release to the public net. Med was so busy being frustrated that she didn’t notice anyone was behind her until someone put hands on her shoulders and shouted “Boo!” Threezed had dropped down from the loft and crept up behind her.

  Startled, she looked at him with the back of her head, reading his biosigns with sensor motes built into the dead cells of her hair. His muscles were more relaxed than she’d ever perceived them; his hypervigilance seemed to be ebbing.

  “What are you working on? You look kind of pissed off.” Apparently Threezed could perceive things about Med’s psychological state that she wasn’t aware she was broadcasting.

  She signaled the network to disengage gesture controls and shrugged. “I’m trying to find some way to explain to the media that Zaxy made Zacuity. Something that anyone could understand.”

  Threezed sat beside her on the bench. “Have you looked on Memeland?”

  “For what? This is the kind of thing that only scientists would know about.”

  “People talk about drugs all the time on Memeland. Just search for … I dunno, Zacuity, Retcon, addiction, mania, freak-out, worker drug … Just see if anyone is talking about it.”

  Med was nonplussed. “I don’t see how that will help, and that’s a lot to sort through. I need something now.”

  “I’ll do some searches for you. I have some time before work.” Threezed pulled out his mobile and yanked a projection from its display into the air. Med noticed that his collar covered up the number on his neck. He’d used an embroidery machine at the store to adorn the pocket with a nametag that said “John.”

  * * *

  Med was lost in a forum conversation sixteen threads deep when Threezed swiped a file into her shared workspace. It was a post from a developer at Quick Build Wares in Vancouver who was part of a recovery group for people suffering from depression after Zacuity runs. She wrote about “this underground drug called Retcon,” which was the first therapy she’d tried that actually eased her symptoms. At her urging, other Quick Build employees took it, too. In the discussion below her post, they talked about what happened next.

  The weirdest part was that they couldn’t remember ever wanting to work at Quick Build. Yes, they recalled getting their jobs and doing them well. They still had the skills required to design circuits and modify molecules. But the idea of using those skills, especially for Quick Build, filled them with repulsion. Some even reported vomiting when they tried to go to work that morning.

  This was a new wrinkle. Unlike people who had taken the pirated Zacuity over the past couple of weeks, Quick Build employees had been using the drug for at least a year. They took Zacuity under the supervision of licensed physicians, and always for the same thing: completing difficult work projects. But then they started to feel like nothing in their lives mattered except Zacuity-enhanced work. Because this was in some sense how the drug was supposed to work, it was hard for the employees to get diagnosed as anything other than complainers.

  When these complainers took Retcon, however, their yearning for the addictive process—in this case, working at Quick Build—shriveled up as quickly as their dopamine receptors bloomed, and the new receptors sipped dopamine generated by all kinds of pleasurable activities. Suddenly the Quick Build workers wanted to go bicycling, play with their kids, watch videos, or develop software for personal projects. But they didn’t want to work at Quick Build anymore.

  It was still too early to tell if these were temporary symptoms of withdrawal, but Med suspected they weren’t. The pirated Zacuity users had recovered quickly, but corporate users
suddenly found themselves with months of memories that made no sense. They were unable to bounce back. Maybe they would never be able to do their jobs again without throwing up.

  The economic outcome for people who had taken the legal version of Zacuity was potentially catastrophic. It wasn’t ideal, but now Med had proof that Retcon worked on those people. And that was something even the media could understand.

  * * *

  Med sent the data to Krish. As she crossed the room to his office, his fingers were already twitching out a message on the desk. “Great work finding that group from Quick Build,” he said, without looking up. “I’m going to talk to my friend at the Pharma Justice Clinic. He’ll have some ideas about how we should frame this. You should finish our paper.”

  The bot thought again about the people who had taken the drug for a prolonged period. “These Zacuity users are going to have to build up new memories of enjoying their jobs. I think Zaxy is going to be responsible for a lot of unemployment. Zacuity users might even be able to sue for damages.”

  Threezed listened to their conversation and smirked. “Good job, Med. You gave those people autonomy, and now they can’t work.” Then, seeing something in Med’s face that she didn’t realize was there, he stopped. When Threezed spoke again, his tone was gentler, no longer spiked with sarcasm. “But I guess it’s good that they finally know what work really feels like.”

  20

  MARKETING GIMMICK

  JULY 16, 2144

  When Eliasz arrived at Vancouver Island, he hadn’t tapped into Paladin’s real-time feed for several hours. She didn’t offer him any video or audio files from the time between her interrogation of Bobby and her discovery of the Scarface server at the University of Saskatoon. Eliasz could have requisitioned her memories and appended them to the report he filed from Vancouver Island, but he didn’t.