Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

Eliasz decided to begin their practice on a hill, where they’d paid for a few targets: a concrete foam house that would offer them cover, and a couple of dummies set up in a wooded area opposite them.

“The air out here reminds me of Warsaw in fall.” Eliasz pulled off a shot from the house window as Paladin arranged his extra rounds on the floor. Somebody had left a pile of food wrappers to biodegrade in the corner; by now they had melted enough for the Nestlé logos to stretch into deformed versions of themselves. “It’s cold but it’s not too cold. And there’s a smell in the air like cut grass.”

Paladin still did not know how to respond when Eliasz told him things that had nothing to do with work. He tried to come up with a relevant comment, or perhaps another question. He could ask why Eliasz’ prints matched those of a Warsaw priest, but Eliasz might be upset that Paladin had been searching on his biometrics, compiling a small but growing list of facts that might be true. The bot wished he could talk easily to people the way Eliasz did, but that would never be possible. No matter how long he studied the art of human intelligence gathering, his massive, hardened body with its wing shields would make it difficult for humans to feel at ease with him.

Paladin let two light machine guns slide quietly out of his left and right chest compartments, legs bending to compensate as his center of gravity shifted slightly. He still couldn’t think of a way to ask Eliasz about Warsaw.

“Loaded and ready.” Those words would have to stand in for everything else he wanted to say. Paladin was in combat posture for the first time since their early days at Camp Tunisia.

“Go for it.”

Paladin released a spurt of bullets through the house window, aiming in the general direction of the dummies. They’d been implanted with an artificial heat signature that turned their plastic bodies a deep red. The bot altered his assault strategy, trying to be as accurate as possible. It was a last-minute decision, based on the high probability that Eliasz’ enthusiasm meant that Paladin should perform optimally rather than sticking with his damaged bot disguise. The dummies’ heads exploded spectacularly.

“Nice.” Eliasz laughed, and Paladin knew he had correctly guessed what Eliasz wanted. “Well, now that you’ve wrecked our bad guys, buddy, let’s go down there and see what it takes to blow this shack up. What do you think?”

They picked up the rest of the ammo and headed down to the piles of splinter and fluff that had once been humanoid figures hidden in trees. Now man and bot were also hidden. Paladin unfurled his dorsal shields, making himself invisible, just to add realism to the scenario. The experience was so similar to his early training that he reflexively began accessing his jumbled memories of startup back in the Federation. There were disconnected images of the Kagu factory whose timestamps showed gaps of hours and days; signals from a batch of biobots who had been fabbed with him; a jarring memory of the moment when his proprioceptive sense had given way to a feeling of kinetic possibilities; and finally his current self-awareness, tinged with compulsions whose origins he couldn’t access or control.

Many of those compulsions were tied directly to his targeting system, which yanked the bot back to the present. There hadn’t been any flowers or trees on the shooting ranges where he’d first learned to aim and fire.

“Can you let me aim for you?”

Paladin wasn’t sure what Eliasz meant. “Programmatic access to my real-time targeting systems is available only to Federation admins,” he vocalized at stealth volume, enjoying the feeling of camouflage mode.

“I’ve heard that bots like you can—” Eliasz paused awkwardly. “That you can carry a human on your back during combat and… let him drive, so to speak.”

Certainly Paladin could carry Eliasz’ weight on his back comfortably, his shields protecting the man during combat. But none of his training, and nothing he’d learned from other bots, suggested he could surrender control of his weapons to somebody who had no access privileges on his system. Still, he could understand how Eliasz might have gotten that idea. A few simple searches on public media servers returned millions of hours of footage where people rode the bodies of giant, tanklike bots, targeting their enemies.

At that moment, Paladin decided to test something he’d been contemplating for several minutes, based on what he’d learned from the sprinkler system. Perhaps human intelligence gathering was a version of network penetration, and he could better integrate into social situations by inviting humans to see an illusory version of himself. Instead of dispelling Eliasz’ misunderstanding, he would find a way to accommodate it.

“I can carry you on my back and let you guide the gun systems.”

Paladin knelt next to Eliasz, his right actuator crushing a dummy’s arm. He extended two ten-centimeter bars from his upper thighs. They were actually electroshock weapons, built to deliver deadly amounts of current, but they would do as foot pegs when powered down. Without prompting, Eliasz stepped onto them, leaning his torso against the sealed control panel in Paladin’s back.

“Now what do I do?” His cheek was against Paladin’s, his chin on Paladin’s shoulder.

The bot stood at full height, and Eliasz rested his hands on the guns that jutted from Paladin’s chest. Eliasz’ right hand began to move slowly, getting to know the whole barrel by feel.

“It’s wired into your nervous system, isn’t it? You can feel my hand.”

“Yes, though it’s not really what you would call a nervous system. But I can feel you.”

“That’s amazing. I wish I could feel my guns. It would make things a lot easier.”

With Eliasz’ entire body pressed against him, Paladin could read his galvanic skin response at a granular level and watch fluids flowing through his organs. Following the same impulse that made him search Eliasz’ background in the world’s databases, he began to scan Eliasz’ body for mutation, for contamination, for anything life-threatening.

“How do I make you shoot?”

“You can subvocalize directions and I will follow them.”

Shoot the entire roof off that house . Eliasz’ lips were pressed into Paladin’s carapace, moving slightly as he gave the vague order.

He continued to touch the exposed metal of Paladin’s guns, fingers wrapped around each slim barrel for a few seconds until they became too hot. Then he slid his fingers beneath them, to the cool carbon alloy of the bot’s chest, stretching his thumbs back until his hands formed two V shapes beneath the protruding weapons.

Paladin had a lot of ammo to burn, and he took his time with the roof. Spent shells wafted to the ground at their feet and began biodegrading. With each spurt of bullets, Paladin undermined the structural integrity of the roof very precisely—never quite hitting it, but blasting away the foam and beams that held it in place. Every hit knocked out just a few more centimeters on the eastern edge of the house, and Paladin registered a feeling of satisfaction as the roof began to tip and sag.

As he bent to retrieve a magazine and reload, Eliasz shifted his weight away from the bot’s back. The man’s posture radiated discomfort. He was trying to stay on the pegs while keeping his lower body from making contact with Paladin’s.

Paladin categorized the physiological changes in Eliasz’ body and reloaded his guns. The bot decided to continue his human social communication test by not communicating. It didn’t make sense to remind Eliasz that every single movement of his body, every rush of blood or spark of electricity, was completely transparent to Paladin. He would allow Eliasz to believe that he sensed nothing.