Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

The ship with the open network was hailing her now, or at least a person calling himself CanadaDoug2120 had opened an encrypted channel to offer her a tow line in exchange for twenty vials of five hundred milligram Vive shots. Probably a local: Up here in the north, people still called themselves Canadians sometimes.

You got it, she messaged back, changing course to come up invisibly behind CanadaDoug2120’s rig and connect with the tungsten fabric line he claimed to be playing out for her. Now she could clearly see the outline of his dull gray and blue hybrid solar barge, currently running fast on gas. Other ships became visible as they closed on the hybrid, some stacked high with cargo containers, all of them moving toward the deepest parts of the water as they navigated for the Mackenzie. Some parts of the delta were little more than marsh between islands, and the waters were stained with the red and brown churn of silt.

The line started pinging her perimeter from five hundred meters away. She loaded its exact coordinates into the sail, setting up an intercept course that would take her dangerously close to a police hydrofoil painted with the green, red, and blue of the Free Trade Zone. Her invisible little kayak wouldn’t register on the police vessel’s visual sensors, but the police might pick up her network traffic if she maintained her connection with the line. She would normally spurt bits of chaff traffic to hide her real packets, but a data wake full of transmissions that were too carefully anonymized for your garden-variety trading ship would be even more suspicious.

Jack killed the network and smothered her long-range signals. She’d have to do this thing manually. They should intercept the rope at a predictable set of coordinates. She’d just extrapolate from its last location, taking into account the heading and speed of the ship itself. Which was looming large in her unaided visual range, its bulk partly obscured by the police hydrofoil coming between them.

The insectile vessel in its garish Zone colors skated past. Her goggles chattered silently to their own loopback interface, sending no data beyond the device itself.

The rope should be off to the right of the bow.

“Threezed, lie as low as possible,” she growled, pulling reinforced waterproofs onto her hands and ripping away just enough of the dome to get her torso out, hands extended. The air needled her face with cold, finding its way under her hood. The water was a smooth gray, feathered with the brown of delta mud. At last, she saw the rope’s glittering terminus cutting a tiny wake through the water. At the same moment, its short-range signals became sniffable. The rope and ship initiated a secure handshake. Pulling herself all the way outside the dome, Jack grabbed the line with gloved hands and connected it to the kayak’s hauling port. Twisting around, she cut lines to the sail and felt a small pulse of relief.

Without that piece of fabric floating overhead, she would be even harder to track. As quickly as she could, she withdrew into the invisibility of the dome, nearly kicking the balled-up Threezed as she jammed herself back into the front seat.

No matter the circumstances, she’d never failed to hitch a ride down the Mackenzie when she offered Vive. Even if her pills were killing people in Calgary, Jack reflected, she could at least give a sailor a good deal on a few more years of life.

They reached the dockyards, converted the drug sacks to backpacks, and left the kayak with a pile of other biodegradables, spinning in a slow vortex of foamy water beneath an abandoned pier. Silent beneath his pack, Threezed followed her to the espresso shop where CanadaDoug2120 waited.

“When this is over, I can drive you to the train station.” Jack tried to sound kind. “Best place to go if you want to disappear.”

“I have nowhere to go.”

“Well, I’ll buy you a ticket anywhere. No problem.”

“I want to stay with you.”

There was no way to explain to him all the reasons why that couldn’t happen. Her eyes wandered to an alley between brightly colored apartment buildings, their hydraulic lifters dating back a century to when this whole city was built on permafrost. Her truck was parked there, in a garage below a crazy, patched snarl of utilidors that once connected the buildings like a psychotic catwalk, routing the city’s water, waste, and power through heated pipes above the frost-hardened ground. Most of Inuvik’s utilidors were long gone, but preservationists had gotten this bunch declared a landmark, some kind of memorial to pre-Anthropocene times.

“I’m sorry, Threezed, but I can’t bring you where I’m going. Where would you rather go? Vancouver? Yellowknife? Anchorage?” She reeled off the names of three cities that were big enough to get lost in. “If you really do know your way around a motor, I’ll bet you can find work somewhere.”

He frowned. “Where? Who is going to hire some guy with no work history? The only way I can work is to get slaved again.”

“That’s not true.” She tried to think of examples that would prove her point, and came up with nothing.

One block ahead, the cafe sign announced “Hot Espresso and Fresh Bannock.” CanadaDoug2120 was a big guy wearing a bright orange toque, sitting in a battered foam booth with a steaming latte between his hands. Jack gave him a hearty sailor hug, slid the Vive into the side pocket on his parka, and made a big show of chumming around for the security feeds. Threezed picked up a little food and caffeine. Then they made for her truck, walking casually, juggling two lattes and an oily bag of bannock.

Several minutes later, two bots fell into step with them. From their hardened carapaces, she guessed police or military. Judging from the green insignias on their chests, they were definitely indentured to the Zone.

One of them spoke, voice emerging from a mouth-shaped grille in his headless chest. “I am Representative Slag. Did you come in on a boat today?”

Being questioned about travel by Representative anythings was not good. Jack maintained her loose-limbed walk, keeping things casual.

“Nope, I’m just getting my truck actually. Can I help you with something?”

Reaching into the deep vents of her coveralls, Jack thumbed her knife, remotely starting her truck and unlocking the storage space. She wanted an exit route, and fast.

“We noticed you talking with this man,” Slag continued, his broad chest momentarily obfuscated by a grainy projected image of CanadaDoug2120, his head topped by a bright orange spray of pixels. “Is he a friend of yours?”

Jack paused for a moment, considering her options. It didn’t seem like these bots were from any kind of patent authority. But if her association with CanadaDoug2120 had tripped some kind of social network alarm, she wasn’t about to get into a long conversation with them—especially when she had no idea how many alerts her biometrics would trigger once they started looking.

Moving her fingers as unobtrusively as possible, she raised the doorway on her storage space and backed the truck out. The vehicle was only a few meters away.

Before she could delay Slag any further, she caught a blur in her peripheral vision that rapidly resolved itself into Threezed, swerving behind the bots. He snapped open the control panels on their backs. In an instant, the bots were staring at her silently, their minds occupied by whatever Threezed was doing to their command interfaces.

“Ha! Nobody ever resets the defaults.” Threezed stood between the two bots with his arms buried in their bodies like some weird puppeteer.

“…the fuck?” she got out.

“They’ll just sit like that for a few minutes and then start up again. A friend of mine taught me the command—works great on cheap bots like these. Just hit the panel button, type in the string, and they stop moving for a while.”