Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

The painting guy’s father was supposed to arrive from Calgary in a few hours, and it would be left to some doc to explain to the man why his son had died of “painting addiction.” Yet another reason why Med preferred to be on the research side of things. Less human drama.

As Med crossed the hospital grounds back to her office, the data she’d just saved locally on the intranet was examined by a pattern recognition algorithm. This hidden algorithm came through a law-enforcement backdoor on the network, invisible to everyone except the person who initiated it. The algorithm flagged several strings in Med’s report. It was opened before it could be sent to anyone on the hospital staff, then promptly overwritten with junk.

JULY 6, 2144

Jack had seen Threezed naked before, when he first cleaned up, but never for hours on end. She was starting to get used to it. Now she alternated between staring at her desktop and glancing at his skinny flank, thrust out from under the counterpane in her cubby, where he was sleeping. From the easy chair near her desk, she could just make out the pale curve of his ass. Right now, though, the stream glittering beneath her fingers was more pressing.

The news was bad. For once, the science text repos and media corps agreed on something, and it was that at least one hundred people had died in Calgary from drug-related complications. Addiction experts were rushing out case studies. Nobody mentioned that the culprit was reverse-engineered Zacuity.

Once a decent reverse engineer took a hard look at her drug, its provenance would be pretty obvious. Either nobody had bothered to do that yet, or Zaxy was hushing up the results. None of her contacts in the Zone had posted their emergency signal, which would be steganographically hidden in an image and uploaded to a well-trafficked cat lovers’ forum. That meant that nobody had gotten a visit from the IPC. Or at least, nobody had lived to warn her about it.

Jack wouldn’t be safe for long, but it seemed like she still had some time to make things right.

If her sketchy calculations were right, Zacuity was getting people addicted after just one or two doses—something she’d only seen before in poorly designed party drugs or unmodded cocaine. She had no idea how many people had bought her pirated Zacuity, let alone who was eating it legally in beta. But it was clear that people susceptible to addiction were going to keep dying until somebody put a boot to Zaxy’s throat and forced the corp to admit they’d made a productivity drug that behaved like a crappy stimulant from the nineteenth century.

The problem was that she’d have to launder her discoveries through someone else—someone who was legally permitted to reverse engineer Zacuity. Plus, she had to manufacture and distribute an anti-addictive fast, before anyone else died. Jack knew just the lab to do all of it: the reverse engineering, the publicity, and the just-in-time fix for Zacuity’s addiction flaw. It was a long shot, though. Decades had passed since she’d worked there, and she might not be very welcome. Still, it was her only hope.

With Threezed still sprawled out on her bed, she headed to the control room and checked their location. With luck, she could be in her truck and on the road in twenty-four hours, her payload stuffed safely in the back. It was a terrible plan, but not as terrible as the one that had gotten her into this overall moral fuckup in the first place.

The sub nosed its way into the Beaufort Sea, its waters hugged by an enormous chain of islands whose edges formed the maze of the Northwest Passages. She was aiming for a rather nondescript promontory known as Richards Island. With all their gear piled into a kayak, she could follow the island’s eastern shore, hit the broad curve of the Mackenzie River, and score a tow from a cargo ship all the way to the docks at Inuvik. She’d chuck Threezed in town, and drive south to the lab as fast as possible.

Jack began scouting for places to park the sub.

Even at the height of summer, there were still regions of the ocean where crumbled bergs and glaciers left the pale water stippled with ice. The white, reflective chunks provided good cover, and had the additional advantage of being packed with microcontrollers and mote trash that was still pingable. Her ship’s short-range signals would blend into the mumble of traffic emitted by dying chips and antennas.

In the hold, she and Threezed put the last of her payload into stretchy, thin waterproof sacks. The pills and tiny vials were packaged in brightly colored perfume and aromatherapy boxes with swirly, bright pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses on them. Abruptly, Threezed stopped gathering up the boxes and stared at one, featuring a fat, bejeweled Ganesh beaming over the curl of his trunk.

Jack was impatient. “Let’s hurry up, Threezed. Time to go.”

“Can I stay here and hide with the ship? I can fab stuff I need. I’ll keep everything clean and just watch movies.”

“Look, I like you, but that’s not gonna happen. I don’t know you well enough to let you take charge of my sub.”

“You could lock me out of the nav system.”

“For all I know you’re a master cryptographer and systems expert who can smash my security setup in five minutes if you want.” She made a swiping motion that said, discussion over .

“Wouldn’t I have done that already if I could?”

“Not necessarily.” Jack unconsciously reached for the handle of the knife she kept jammed in her belt, resting her open palm on it. Custom controls near the blade activated her perimeter system. “Close up those sacks and help me get the kayak ready.”

Maybe if she kept Threezed busy, he would stop asking her to trust him more than she wanted to trust anyone—including herself.

As they surfaced, sun saturated the control room. Jack glanced at the place where the thief’s bloodstain had been just three weeks ago. She hefted one of the sacks over her shoulder. It was about the size and weight of a man’s body.

Threezed was already on the deck, using heat bulbs to catalyze a reaction that made the kayak unfold and go rigid. Under his ministrations, the soft mound of rubbery cloth seemed to grow a skeleton beneath its skin, and finally took on the shape of a long, thin craft with two passenger seats.

Jack fastened her sack to the stern and shoved it into the water, where ice floated like clumps of dirty, curdling cream. There, the kayak stretched out further, taking its final shape. It could support a light, rigid negative-refraction dome—perfect for hiding from satellite sweeps—and would self-power with a nearly invisible kite sail, already unfurled overhead. After three days, the whole vessel would biodegrade into protein foam, becoming fodder for the Mackenzie River’s bacterial ecosystem.

With the dome secured over their heads, Jack and Threezed settled into the kayak’s uncomfortable seats. The sail came online, its system making micro-adjustments in the lines to keep the vessel stable. As long as the wind stayed with them, they’d make pretty good time. Jack put on goggles to do one last sweep of her security systems, then accessed her sub’s controls from a menu that appeared to hover a foot from her eyes. With a nod, she submerged the sub below a dirty, ragged iceberg that stretched its massive fingers ten meters below the surface.

Cheap heating elements kept the kayak livable, but hardly warm. Jack peered anxiously ahead, the hood of her parka thrown back, waiting for the first glimpse of hundreds of little islands covered in pine trees and scrub that marked the end of the Beaufort Sea and the beginning of the delta.

Her perimeter started picking up stray data packets from local networks on ships she couldn’t see. In her goggles, she saw a tiny flag hovering over one with a completely open network. It looked potentially friendly. She started poking around in its directories, querying a few accounts with a carefully worded request. Lots of little boats bartered for a tug down the Mackenzie River and into town—it was standard Arctic business and a local gray-market tradition.