Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  I’m in the barn, Threezed sent from his mobile. With the antibiotic cows. Are you OK?

  Over a mile away from the Free Lab, a joint project between the synbio and animal husbandry departments had resulted in a warm, oat-scented barn full of cows whose milk was rich with various antibacterials and antivirals. It was where Med liked to walk to get away from humans.

  Her network search turned up some relevant data—most likely the same thing Paladin had found. Over thirty years ago, the archaeology department had offered a summer class that resulted in the excavation of smugglers’ tunnels in Moose Jaw. An undergraduate named Judith Chen had been on that dig. No subsequent work was done on the excavation, but it remained accessible via a storage room under a new condo development. It would be a good place to hide, with all Jack’s activity and energy use masked by people living in the building above.

  Med signaled Threezed’s mobile. The agents are gone. I am slightly damaged. We need to get to Moose Jaw NOW.

  On my way. We can take the lab truck.

  As Med booted up the truck and waited for Threezed to arrive, she sent a warning to Jack, using the protocols they’d agreed on less than a week ago. She used a regulator to trim and cauterize the torn tissue on her stump. Full repairs would have to wait until later.

  21

  MOOSE JAW

  JULY 18, 2144, 0648

  Eliasz took his hands off the steering wheel as the truck entered autonomous mode on the highway to Moose Jaw. Outside, low hills merged with each other in the darkness.

  “Are you going to be OK?” The man’s voice was carefully neutral, and Paladin could not read the expression on his face.

  In fact, she could no longer see Eliasz’ face at all. Certainly the man had a face, and she could perceive that it possessed the usual group of sensory organs, but nothing about it was recognizable as Eliasz. She knew him by his voice, his bearing, and the cloud of molecules hovering around his body, but his face was merely a concatenation of muscle movements.

  Her inability to classify the data provided by Eliasz’ expression filled Paladin with panic, which only intensified when she thought about how much her brain meant to him. The arms in Kagu Robotics Foundry had lied. Fang didn’t know what he was talking about. She was crippled without her brain, unable to tell the difference between wrath and laughter, or between a hostile face and a familiar one. How could she possibly aid Eliasz in combat?

  “I believe I may be too damaged to function in a combat situation.”

  Eliasz faced her, reaching out a tentative hand to touch the patch over Paladin’s empty brain socket. His face flickered with activity that meant nothing.

  JULY 18, 2144, 0700

  Jack got Med’s message in time to lay a decent trap. She’d seen that blurry footage of the bot chasing her, so she had some ideas what she was up against. She guessed the human agent would be standard-issue IPC: highly trained, on fire with righteous belief in property, as likely to kill her as anything else. All she had on her side was Med’s bit of intel, and hopefully the element of surprise.

  A hidden compartment in the ceiling over her lab bench was the only place she could hide. It was little more than a crawl space lined with slightly springy foam, just tall enough that she could bunch into a crouching position from which she could hurl herself at the agents. As she waited, her knife in the relaxed fingers of her right hand, her perimeter feeding images to her goggles from security cameras outside, there was nothing to do but think about Krish.

  Based on Med’s brief message, Jack guessed Krish had managed to betray her again before dying. Even as she formed that thought, a nauseating spasm of grief contradicted it. Nobody could withstand the kind of interrogation drugs an IPC agent would use—not without intensive training and modification. She and Frankie had spent years trying to patch themselves against pharma weapons. The most Krish had ever done was smoke 420 for fun.

  In the clarity that comes with existential threat, Jack realized she’d held a grudge against Krish all these years for what amounted to a petty academic squabble over a text repo. Yes, it was terrible that he shut down The Bilious Pills. But now she could see how Free Lab was an extension of what the Pills started, a community that didn’t just protest property law but actually built alternatives to it. Krish had welcomed her and the Retcon Project, even after their decades of chilly silence. He must have known it might get him killed.

  Suppressing something more bitter than a sob, Jack recalled the first essay Krish wrote for The Bilious Pills. He’d published it in the middle of the quarter, during one of their long, agonizing separations. Krish wrote:

  Over a century ago, scientists first began to argue that the patent system and scientific data should be opened up. Back then, it was popular for conservatives to claim that putting geneng into the hands of the public would result in mega-viruses or total species collapse. Open data would be the gateway to a runaway synthetic biology apocalypse. But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.

  Reading that decades ago, her chest had fizzed with deferred sexual desire and hope. She and Krish were collaborating on a project that was more exciting than anything she’d ever tackled in school. With their text repo, they would reach millions of people and bring Good Science to everyone. She’d known with absolute certainty that they were about to change the world.

  But now Krish’s essay had been deleted from the public net, and the Freeculture movement they loved was being murdered in IPC interrogations, in burning Casablanca apartments, in drugs pirated for profit rather than freedom, and probably soon in this smuggler’s tunnel with the ghosts of her lovers.

  An explosion sent a fine haze of dust through the permeable foam of her hiding place. Jack flexed her legs. This was no time to go maudlin over the demise of youthful dreams. The IPC agents had arrived.

  JULY 18, 2144, 0705

  Threezed’s eyes widened perceptibly when he bounced into the truck and saw the bot’s shredded arm.

  “Holy shit, Med, that is not what I’d call ‘slightly damaged.’ Where’s Krish?”

  “Krish is dead. My arm can be repaired.”

  They drove in silence for almost an hour. Threezed twitched and checked his mobile, while Med tried to figure out how she would publicize the paper about reverse engineering Zacuity now that everything had gone wrong. She pushed the truck to the limits of its speed. At least if they got to Moose Jaw quickly, she might be able to prevent the agents from killing another one of her friends.

  “What are we going to do?” Threezed’s voice was reedy with tension.

  Med had no answer to his question, so she changed the subject. “Do you know how the agents figured out where Jack was? They read your journal on Memeland.”

  “What?” Threezed let go of his mobile and it slid to rest between his legs, parted slightly on the seat. “How did they do that? My journal is anonymous! Plus, I never use anybody’s real names.”

  Med glared at him, funneling her hopelessness into anger. “What the hell did you think would happen when you wrote about fucking somebody named ‘J’ who is from the prairies? When you wrote that you were going to follow her to the Free Lab? The IPC is full of intelligence agents. They specialize in tracking down slaves who have broken contract, and you didn’t exactly make it difficult for them.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything before? You were reading my journal and you didn’t say anything!” In the darkness of the cab, the heat from Threezed’s tears looked like glowing tracks of blood on his face.

  The bot’s anguish reached a crescendo that she didn’t have the option to express in tears. She slammed her remaining arm as hard as she could into the door and screamed, “I didn’t think of it, OK? I didn’t think of it!” She’d bruised her arm and opened a wound in the door. The truck emitted a soft warning noise.

  “Alright—I get it! We’re totally fucked and it’s my fault!” Threezed
scrambled across the bench seat to grab Med’s shoulders and shake her. “Now that we know we’re fucked, what are we going to do to help Jack?”

  “I’ve brought some items from the lab that I think we can weaponize.”

  “What have we got?” Threezed left his right hand on her shoulder and she realized that he’d grown incredibly calm. It wasn’t the blankness of hysteria in remission, either. It was the calm of someone who had been through much worse things, and knew how to survive.

  She’d brought viral sealant pastes, packed into fat marbles you could shoot from air pressure guns. They were designed for cheap, rapid repair of industrial machines and vehicles. Shoot your boat’s hull with a paste pellet and the viruses would start duplicating, their shells turning into a metal patch for any damage. Med theorized that the paste would also seal up openings on the bot’s carapace, in essence gluing Paladin’s sensors and weapons apertures shut.

  “Sounds good. Now what do we have that will kill that bastard who murdered Krish?”

  “There’s nothing even remotely deadly to humans at Free Lab. But I do have something that will make it a lot harder for him to fight.”

  JULY 18, 2144, 0805

  Jack waited, breathing shallowly. Her body heat was masked by the electronics and atmosphere ducts running through the ceiling. As she’d hoped, the agent and the bot headed for the lab bench beneath her hiding place as soon as they realized she wasn’t in the tunnel. The man was covering the bot with his weapons stance, which was unusual. But then Jack saw the hastily patched wound in the bot’s abdomen, and the odd way she kept training her sensor arrays away from the man’s face. Something had gone wrong, though the bot was still deadly enough. And crafty. The bot was scanning Jack’s network for vulns in her power system, without much luck.

  “What do you make of this?” The man gestured at Jack’s fabber and small collection of low-power sequencers.

  The bot vocalized, “I think she was just here. We should sweep for hiding places and other exits.”

  Jack had to move now. She slid open the doors and threw her knife expertly, burying it deep in the bot’s chest, where it delivered an EMP. Then she swung down, feet first, into the IPC agent’s face. She felt her feet connect with his skull, just as his perimeter delivered a powerful electric shock. Spasming, she fell to the floor next to him.

  Adrenaline doused Jack’s vision and made her see the room in jagged, fast-forward detail. The barrier between her tunnel and the trash heap that obscured it lay in a pile of boulders and dust. A swath of the ceiling LEDs had gone out, and her attack had knocked a sequencer to the floor. Her feet felt warm, and she observed that the agent’s perimeter had partly melted the soles of her shoes. The man was knocked out, his forehead already starting to swell from Jack’s kick. His bot stood motionless from the EMP. She needed to disable the agent’s perimeter before he came to, so there would be no record of this encounter. Struggling though the pain of locked, burning muscles, she got up.

  Jack yanked her knife out of the bot, jammed it into her belt, and assessed the situation. Beneath the agent’s skin, his perimeter mesh was routing data and electricity into possibly hundreds of devices all over his body. But usually there was some kind of controller near the waist. To make her getaway complete, she just needed a few seconds to dig around in this bastard’s pants.

  Pulling up the agent’s jacket, Jack exposed the pale skin of his stomach. She pressed her hand to his skin, producing a tiny grid pattern as the threads of his weapons system dug into flesh. With her other hand she tore open the binding on his pants, exposing the fur on his lower belly. Where was the controller? She pushed the man onto his side, at last exposing a donut-shaped device about the size of a bottlecap low on his hip.

  As Jack’s fingers closed around the controller, the bot spoke. “If you continue to touch him, I will kill you.”

  Jack put her hands in the air. Obviously the EMP hadn’t kept the bot down for very long.

  “Keep your back to me and stand up.” The bot used an entirely inflectionless voice. Jack obeyed, trying to assess whether she could still run. Or, failing that, draw her knife and throw. She decided to stall.

  “Who sent the IPC after me? Was it Zaxy?”

  “Put your hands behind you.”

  She complied, and felt the bot’s grip, warm and smooth, stronger than handcuffs. The man was starting to groan and stir on the floor at her feet.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “You know very well why we are here. Your terrorist activities have killed over a hundred people.”

  “If that’s so, why all the subterfuge? Why did the IPC only send the two of you?” Jack was playing for time, but she also wanted to know. “Is Zaxy trying to cover up the fact that Zacuity is driving people insane? I didn’t invent the drug that killed those people, you know—it was Zaxy’s. I just reverse engineered it.”

  The bot said nothing until the man muttered. “Paladin.”

  “I’m here, and I have the prisoner.”

  “Just kill her, then.” The man opened dark brown eyes and looked directly at Jack.

  Suddenly Jack heard a series of pops and Paladin’s body shuddered. The bot released Jack’s hands and the agent, struggling to stand up, went down again. Whirling in the direction of the noise, Jack saw her rescuers. Threezed and Med stood in piles of garbage, bright yellow air pressure guns in their hands, shooting what looked like jumbo-size hard candies at Paladin and Eliasz.

  Blotches of virus paste spread over Paladin’s torso, sealing the bot’s guns inside her chest. The pink goo was a novel, experimental substance, and the bot had never been hardened against it. She tore at the spreading patches, but they swarmed onto her fingers, making mittens out of her digits.

  Med stepped forward, strands of metal twitching in her stump while her undamaged arm fired off another round at the man, who had started to scream. Everywhere the virus marbles hit him, bizarre forests of fine hair seemed to spring out of his skin. His face was growing a riot of glassy curls, and his eyelashes tangled shut. Eliasz gasped through his mouth as his nasal passages filled with tiny stalks. Somehow, the viruses had wriggled under Eliasz’ skin and eaten through his bio-glass perimeter wires. All those millions of microscopic fibers, kept under constant tension, had sprung out of his skin and formed a disabling tangle of fiber-optic fur. He and his bot wouldn’t be chasing anyone for several minutes at least.

  “It turns out Catalyst’s recipe for removing the plants growing on her head is good for something other than fashion,” Med vocalized, a new chord of sarcasm in her voice. “Maybe we should give her a postdoc.”

  Jack stumbled forward, her muscles still wracked with pain. Threezed looped her arm around his shoulder, dragged her through the rubble, out the trap door, and into what passed for safety.

  JULY 18, 2144, 0810

  Eliasz’ head throbbed, and he could barely see through the wool of his shredded perimeter system. But he still had one weapon running, a dumb gun he kept strapped to his ankle. Behind him, Paladin emitted a noise that sounded like tearing metal.

  Jack was limping toward the trap door, supported by a boy whose face unmistakably matched the one from the database at Quality Imports. Except he didn’t look like SlaveBoy anymore. He was strong and well fed, with a new chip that broadcast his enfranchisement as a citizen of Saskatoon. Jack had been taking care of him. In the seconds it took for Eliasz to reach for the gun, his memory strobed with hundreds of faces—all the children he hadn’t saved in Vegas, his sisters, the boys he’d beaten up in the church robot factory. Even the worst of them didn’t deserve the hand they’d been dealt. They were just unlucky to be born without franchises. For a hallucinatory moment, as Eliasz felt his skin crisping with wire, he wondered whether it was some kind of perverse miracle that Jack had found Threezed.

  Eliasz’ finger rested on the trigger, and his hand aimed. But then he heard a howl of metal eating metal behind him and realized Paladin might be fatally wounded. He co
uld check on the bot, or he could kill the pirate. He had a choice.

  Or maybe he didn’t.

  With an agonizing crackle of his neck, Eliasz turned to find the bot freeing virus-coated fingers from her torso. She was recovering, not dying. By the time Eliasz aimed his gun again, eyelids nearly sewn shut with wire, the pirate and her friends were gone. Everything he’d recorded with his perimeter systems had been destroyed by a graduate student’s depilation experiment.

  22

  BIG PHARMA

  JULY 21, 2144

  Med stood in a mote-speckled beam of sunlight that fell from one of the Free Lab’s high windows. She was absorbing energy through the photovoltaic patches knitted invisibly into the tissue of her skin. Absently, she held her hands out in front of her, as if examining her nails. For the hundred and forty-seventh time, she assessed the slight differences in skin texture between her original arm and the new one she’d installed yesterday.

  The paramedics were long gone, and Krish’s mother had returned to Vancouver with his remains. You couldn’t always predict strokes with annual medical exams, the docs said, and Krish was never an avid self-quantifier. The lab’s camera network was so glitchy that nobody questioned why it just so happened that he died during a period of down time. Meanwhile, according to the feeds, the notorious pirate Judith “Jack” Chen—jailed once for terrorism in the ’teens, and wanted by the IPC—had been killed in a firefight in her Moose Jaw hideout.

  In reality, Jack was hiding behind a haze of bogus mote data in Med’s apartment, recovering from her injuries and grafting purple and black extensions to the stubble on her head. In the cat lovers’ forum, she found a gif of a bot petting a kitten with an encrypted message from Frankie knitted steganographically into it: “Not dead yet.” Jack’s relief was like a hit of Ellondra. She left a picture of a cat sprawled on her back, pink sliver of tongue sticking out, with a reply for Frankie secreted into the code: “Still breathing.”