Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

  * * *

  In one frantic day of work, Jack finished the press release that Krish had started. “Strong evidence shows Zaxy engineered its drug Zacuity to be addictive,” it began. That alone scored Med an exclusive interview with ZoneFeed, to be followed by an in-depth report on New Scientist.

  When Med’s research paper went live on the Free Lab text repo, ZoneFeed would publish their interview. Med didn’t need to sit down at her desk and hit the publish button the way a human would. She sent a command to the server using the lab’s wireless protocol. Standing in the middle of the Free Lab, she accessed the feeds with her mind, watching the ZoneFeed story replicate itself and spawn increasingly frantic private messages from other news outlets. The Retcon Project’s code repository was exploding with traffic. Hospitals all over the world were printing out the drug, and the more liberal corps started issuing their own press releases, distancing themselves from Zaxy and saying they would no longer supply their employees with Zacuity.

  Med returned to her office to respond to reporters, watching as snatches of their conversations appeared minutes later as video grabs in the feeds.

  The Free Lab’s entire staff had basically taken the day off to watch the Retcon Project become famous. Somebody tapped a keg around noon, and by 3:00 p.m., things had gotten rowdy. Catalyst projected four different news feeds into the air over the lab benches. The Free Trade Zone Economic Coalition had finally made a statement: A rep claimed they were launching an independent inquiry into Zaxy’s productivity drug, based on research from the University of Saskatchewan. The entire Free Lab burst into cheers.

  Over on the NRx News feed, two commentators discussed the story. “But let’s keep in mind that this researcher is a bot, Larry,” one said. “It’s very possible that she’s been programmed by one of Zaxy’s corporate rivals to make these claims—or by the radical groups in the lab where she works.”

  Minutes later, a reporter from Sydney was finishing up an interview with Med. She paused dramatically, then asked her final question. “I have to ask, because this has come up in a number of reports. Has anyone tampered with your programming? Is it possible this discovery was actually the work of a malicious hacker who made you believe it?”

  “No.”

  Med killed the feed with her mind, stood up, and headed for the humans celebrating around the keg. When she got home that night, Jack was gone. But Threezed’s mobile was still there, on the floor next to a wad of his clothing.

  JULY 23, 2144

  It took the dean’s office two days to figure out that Med had released the findings from a major paper to the media without going through the proper public relations channels. The result was that her schedule for the morning had been cleared for a mandatory meeting with the administration.

  When she arrived, the dean was having what appeared to be a jovial conversation with a vaguely familiar-looking man and two IPC reps in a conference room.

  The man turned out to be Zaxy’s founder, who radiated Vive-induced youth and introduced himself as Roger. He wore a burnished armor belt with an expensive tunic and jeans. Roger spoke with the exact accent that announcers used on ZoneFeed news shows. “Dr. Cohen, you’ve created an extraordinary therapy with Retcon—extraordinary.” He emitted a practiced chuckle. “It’s the kind of thing I’d buy if you hadn’t released it under an open patent.” Then he paused, composing his features into an expression that hovered between genuine concern and fabricated regret. “But I’m sure you can appreciate Zaxy’s position here. Your paper suggests that it’s a ‘cure’ for Zacuity. I’m happy to bring you into Zaxy and let you have a conversation under NDA with our Zacuity team about possible flaws in the drug. However, we are certain Zacuity is a completely safe substance if administered properly.”

  “I appreciate your position, Roger, but a reverse-engineered version of Zacuity has killed hundreds of people.”

  Roger shot a look at the dean. “The reports that this street drug is reverse-engineered Zacuity are completely unsubstantiated. Associations in the media between our product and illegal drugs—associations encouraged by your paper—have already caused us to lose a tremendous amount of money. Our attorneys tell me we could justifiably sue you and the university for libel.”

  “I have no control over what people say about Retcon on the net. But I have analyzed the drug myself. It is clearly a reverse-engineered version of Zacuity.” Beneath the conference table, Med balled her hands into fists.

  “Alright, now. Nobody is accusing you of sloppy research, Medea.” The dean was in placating mode. “Retcon is a humanitarian project, and has already rescued many people from crippling addiction.”

  Roger took this to mean that the case was closed. “I completely agree. We just want to make sure you’re not doing anything to encourage the rumors of a connection between Zacuity and those … tragic incidents.”

  Med started to speak, but the dean halted her with his hand. “Happy to oblige you on that, Roger. As academics and researchers, we consider it our job to correct pseudoscience when it crops up in the media.”

  “There is no doubt that Zacuity is addictive.” Med couldn’t keep an angry edge out of her voice.

  Roger stopped addressing Med, and gave the dean a sympathetic look. “I love that you inspire such passion in your researchers. Passion is the engine of innovation.” He’d gone into sound-bite territory because he knew he’d won. The university couldn’t afford a legal battle with Zaxy. The upshot of the meeting was that Med would have to delete all references to Zaxy and Zacuity from the Retcon Project’s documentation and public forums. The dean agreed to take down Med’s paper on reverse engineering Zacuity and issue an official retraction unless it survived a rigorous peer review process at a prominent Seviert journal.

  Roger and the IPC reps left with hearty handshakes. Med couldn’t believe this was happening. “Zaxy owns a majority stake in Seviert.”

  “It’s just politics, Medea,” the dean assured her. “The main thing is that the Retcon Project can go forward.”

  Walking back to the Free Lab, Med scanned the feeds. There had been no more manic meltdowns since the Zacuity story broke, so maybe it didn’t matter that Zaxy wasn’t going down. Maybe she’d made enough of a difference. The public knew about Retcon, after all, and sales of prerelease Zacuity to corps were in the toilet. Somewhere on the Anchorage Radical Archive servers back home, there was a mirror of her reverse engineering paper that would never be removed.

  She wondered if Jack and Krish knew something like this could happen when they told her to publish the paper. But she couldn’t ask them. She would have to decide for herself.

  DECEMBER 5, 2144

  Catalyst’s purple vines had gotten boring, so she was talking about growing tentacles from her scalp for a harvest costume party. David was half-listening while he wiped through New Scientist, its image-dotted pages flashing through the air over the projector near his elbow. They were her students now. Med’s gaze swept over the lab, with its clots of researchers and piles of equipment. All of them her responsibility.

  With Krish dead, the bioengineering department had a mini-crisis. Free Lab was a perpetual funding machine, a darling among humanitarian donors and wealthy funders. Shutting it down was out of the question. But it was also enormous, a hodgepodge of different projects, and a pain in the ass to run. Plus, all the faculty and top research staff already had their own labs.

  Although it was a slightly unorthodox choice, nobody argued when the department chair suggested they seriously consider the job application from recently hired researcher Medea Cohen. She was devoted to the lab’s mission, and had already brought positive publicity to the university with her discovery of the addiction therapy Retcon. Nobody mentioned the little visit from Zaxy, and the paper Med had taken down. And so, late in the winter quarter, Med replaced Krish as the Free Lab’s principal investigator.

  Her plain blue foam desk was set up exactly the way she liked it. Tucked into the corner, it co
uldn’t be seen through the transparent plastic doors to her office. Especially when she had three projectors drawing a wraparound monitor over her chair in a glowing half-sphere. Sitting there, she could network with the server while message alerts collected in the unused space over her head. To make her office comfortable for the students and researchers who constantly visited, she’d dragged in three soft chairs and a slightly crushed sofa, functional but a little battered from life in the Free Lab.

  Krish’s office still stood empty and dark. She was saving it for a new senior researcher, though she hadn’t announced that job opening yet. It was another item on her extensive to-do stack.

  Settling into her chair, Med waved her desktop into existence, its command line window momentarily forming a dark shell around her body. Then she reached out with both hands, initiated processes, and flooded her desk with every color that could represent data.

  Four and a half hours later, sounds of talking broke through the doors as Threezed slid them apart and flopped into the deepest dent on her sofa.

  “It’s Friday, Med. Let’s go dancing or something.”

  Med pinched off the projectors and seemed to emerge from a bubble of hovering text. This was the same thing Threezed said to her almost every night when he got off work. They both hated dancing.

  “Let’s watch a movie,” she replied with a grin. “Something weird and old from your media history class.”

  Threezed had taken on a new identity: John Chen, who had been homeschooled and self-employed on a farm outside Saskatoon until his public employment record started two months ago with a cashier job at a thrift shop on Broadway. He’d shut down his SlaveBoy journal and was auditing some media studies classes at U of S while he figured out his next move. Every day, it became more obvious what that move would be.

  JANUARY 16, 2145

  Algae poaching reminded Jack of being a little girl on the canola farm during harvest. Every week she brought her sub out of the depths, gliding just beneath the surface of the ocean to the offshore algae farms sloshing between buoys connected by long, plastic sheets at the edge of the AU’s south coast. The perimeter alarms here were not sophisticated. She never saw anyone—human or bot—patrolling these far edges of the farm.

  Jack recalled the sun-fed green of Saskatchewan’s growing season as she plunged her hands into the spirulina that slid through her fingers and looked like fine, tangled hair on the drying mats. When she pulled the mats onto the bridge, positioning them under dehumidifiers, she wondered what it would be like to unspool her life back to her parents’ farm. What if she had studied agriculture instead of genetic engineering?

  Her days might have ended just like this, quietly harvesting the plants that would fuel her body and machines. That other person, Judith the farmer, would have felt the sun overhead and seen the crop flowing around her feet just the way Jack did. It pleased her to imagine that the safer, alternate version of her life had, at least for this slice of time, subsumed the real one. If you ignored the poaching, of course. And the Freeculture contacts she was making on the AU message boards.

  When spring came around, she decided, the safer version of her life would relinquish its hold on her again.

  23

  AUTONOMY KEY

  JULY 21, 2144

  Lee restored Paladin’s carapace and installed better drivers for the sensorium she carried in her fist, but he shrugged when she asked about a replacement brain. “Nobody expects those brains to last very long, Paladin. I know it sucks, but it’s just true.” When she didn’t respond, he looked at her through the translucent projection displaying a readout from her arm. “You’re just going to have to recognize people the way other bots do: analyze them by voice, microbiome—or smell.” He paused to tap her hand proudly. Then he returned to his work, adding absently, “Some bots can even identify people’s expressions by analyzing their posture and breathing.”

  “So I can recognize human facial expressions by analyzing other things about them?”

  “It’s sort of like creating a mnemonic.” Lee grinned. “You know, using one thing to remember another one. Like, I always remember your name because it’s my favorite character class in the game Sorcerer’s Alley.”

  Paladin did not think Lee’s comparison was apt. But he would only be confused if she told him why.

  * * *

  After weeks with her simulated autonomy key, Paladin was used to the idea that memories could be modified with new metadata. But this was a more difficult task than she’d faced in Vancouver when she’d reanalyzed how she felt about Eliasz. Now, she was dealing with a database of facial expressions she could no longer read. There was no way to map them to moods except over time, by trial and error, as she figured out how human gestures and scents and voices correlated with emotional content. And no matter how good she got at it, there would always be one data channel missing when she looked at a person. People often communicated their feelings by deliberately making faces that didn’t match their body language and voices. Especially when they were making jokes. Paladin spent the following days painstakingly translating facial expressions in her memory into other biometrics as she encountered them among humans.

  Every time she encrypted her memories, she was reminded of the limits to her autonomy. Anyone on base with the proper access level could use the Federation’s escrowed key to read the full contents of her mind.

  During this time, Eliasz was in Johannesburg on a mission. When he returned, Paladin was immediately deployed on a surveillance job to ferret out a hidden server farm that was distributing pirated video in Tangiers. They managed to miss seeing each other at Camp Tunisia for two weeks.

  Lee never mentioned Paladin’s simulated autonomy key, and she didn’t bring it up. She wanted to control her own programs for as long as she could. Even if she didn’t truly possess her own memories, she could at least be certain that the ache she felt in Eliasz’ absence was something she’d invented all by herself. It wasn’t an implanted loyalty; it was a code loop she’d written, executing the same pang of loss over and over again. More than anything, her useless and irrational feelings for Eliasz were testimony to her continued autonomy.

  AUGUST 4, 2144

  Paladin knew immediately when Eliasz had returned to Camp Tunisia. The base network recognized his face—though not what the expression on it meant—and she could follow his progress on the station map, across one airfield and into a maze of small rooms reserved entirely for humans. He entered a room marked “HUMAN RESOURCES,” and there his signal dropped.

  Fifteen minutes later, Paladin’s upcoming assignments were wiped from her queue. Her access to Camp Tunisia’s map and local resources was decimated. The bot now had the same credentials as any visitor, which didn’t go much beyond public net access and nonclassified information about the base. Alarmed, the bot tried to contact Fang. I am Paladin. You are Fang. Let’s use the secure session we agreed on.

  I cannot authenticate your identity. You may not be Paladin.

  Before she could initiate a new secure session, Eliasz sent a message. It was a request to meet him in one of the faraday briefing rooms, many floors above the bot zone where Fang first told her about anthropomorphization. Bewildered and disturbed by the change in her credentials, she followed a cached version of the base map to the shielded room with walls speckled to look like granite. When Eliasz arrived, he sat next to Paladin on a wide, foam bench jutting from the fake rock. She waited for him to speak.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you privately for a long time,” he said simply. “I need to tell you what happened in Moose Jaw, because I know you don’t have the security clearance to see my reports.”

  He faced her, and she recognized that the dark brown in his eyes was the same dark brown it had always been. She didn’t need a human brain to know that.

  “When I regained consciousness, my commanding officer told me that the Federation IPC had found some remains in that tunnel. They assumed Jack died in the explosion aft
er you got me out.”

  He paused and Paladin noticed his posture growing more rigid. Turning to face her, Eliasz took one of her hands in his own. Sampling his blood, she perceived an oxytocin spike that filled her with pleasure. She couldn’t say what expression he wore, but she knew what he was feeling. “Zaxy wasn’t exactly thrilled with what happened, but they still got their pirate. And the IPC gave me a huge bonus.”

  He did not say what they both knew: for some reason, Eliasz had chosen not to kill Jack, and the IPC had lost its quarry. Eliasz continued talking in a heated rush. “I want to get away from this business, Paladin. I thought maybe we could go away together for a while. Maybe to Mars. So I bought out your contract. I can’t stand the idea of the woman I love not being autonomous.”

  She was overwhelmed with possible responses to his statement, but at least now the change to her credentials made sense.

  Eliasz gripped her hand harder. She could taste his desire and anxiety. “Will you come with me?”

  Before she’d gotten her autonomy key, Paladin couldn’t prioritize her own needs over Eliasz’ requests; she could queue them up a fraction of a second behind, but they were always behind. Now, she could put her own concerns first. And there was something more important than love that she needed to investigate. It would take less than a second to verify.

  Using software she had installed in her own mind, the bot generated a new key to encrypt her memories. For the first time in her life, the process worked. Her memories were locked down, and the key that the Federation held in escrow would be useless. It would take centuries for even the most state-of-the-art machine to decrypt what she had seen and known for the months she’d been alive. At last, she knew what it felt like to own the totality of her experiences.

  A profound silence settled around the edges of her mind, more powerful than a defensive perimeter in battle. Nobody could find out what she was thinking, unless she allowed it. The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.