Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

And she had time to watch her cellmate Molly visited by storms of violent dissociation. Molly was in for a series of minor assaults, all caused by untreatable manic depression. When she was on an even keel, she took Jack’s mind off the boredom by telling improbably lurid stories about a seemingly endless string of hot Quebecois lovers mired in a citywide sexual melodrama. But when Molly got manic, she decided Jack was a spy who had to be stopped at all costs.

The cabinet of glues and tissue-growing trellises in the infirmary became as familiar to Jack as the contours of her bed frame. Eventually Molly broke Jack’s pelvis in two places, and she spent a peaceful week recovering in a bed next to a man on a ventilator.

Jack thought the prison board, whose facility was partly funded by pharma giant Smaxo, might have deliberately paired her with a cellmate who was likely to beat the shit out of her every once in a while, but she never had any proof. During visiting hours, she asked Krish to investigate her suspicions, but he just shook his head and looked at his hands.

Eventually Krish confessed that he’d shut down The Bilious Pills . He was afraid that it was no longer anonymous enough, that more scientists’ careers would be destroyed if he kept it going. They had taken the wrong path, he told her. There were other ways, less confrontational ones, to reform the patent system. A well-endowed human rights org had given him a huge grant to do research that would generate high-quality public domain alternatives to pricey patented pharma, and he didn’t want to risk losing his lab when he’d just gotten enough money to hire more people. He’d even held a job open for her, under the intentionally low-profile title of research assistant.

Seated in the prison visitors’ room, the air around them occasionally glittering with surveillance motes, Jack couldn’t grab Krish by the shoulders and yell what she was feeling. Instead, she stood up wordlessly and walked back to the infirmary, even though they still had an hour of visiting time left. How could he have made this decision without her? She didn’t want to be a line item in Krish’s research budget. And without The Bilious Pills , she had no identity, no community of fellow travelers. Back in her narrow hospital bed, Jack curled into an aching ball and cried. Fisting tears out of her eyes, she realized she had no future, either—or at least, none she could recognize.

On subsequent visits, she tried to explain this to Krish, but her rhetorical powers had been fuzzed out by Smaxo painkillers. He was so focused on what his grant meant to him that he couldn’t understand what The Bilious Pills had meant to her.

And so for the next two months she focused on the smell of Saskatchewan in summer, on the feeling of being in the middle of a vast prairie populated only by plants, machines, and the occasional farm co-op. It was the place where she had first learned to love the idea of reshaping life. When she slept, and even sometimes awake, she watched the prison walls soften into tiny yellow canola flowers, and counted in her mind all the ways their genomes had been perfected by science.

When Jack got out of prison, all evidence of her broken bones erased by patented therapies, she felt more broken than ever. The man she loved, her partner in crime, had killed The Bilious Pills and her career. Everything she’d felt for Krish had been transfigured by her rage, then settled into melancholy numbness. None of her options seemed real or important anymore. She took the job at Krish’s lab in Saskatoon because it was better than starving.

Krish still didn’t seem to realize that their relationship had cratered. After picking her up from prison, he held her hand on the short bus ride to Quebec City, then the long train ride to Saskatoon. She pulled her hand away a few times, but finally could not resist. Her body needed affection, and a part of her still loved him. It was winter, and the train shot down a reconstituted twentieth-century track past boxy, abandoned grain elevators painted with the names of towns, and pale fields scattered with rolls of snow-whitened hay. Jack put her hand on the double-paned polymer of the window and tried to feel the cold. The transparent material was barely cool; it was designed to shield travelers from a temperature so low it could blacken hands with frostbite in minutes. She wanted to evaporate the window just to feel her fingers die.

Trying to rekindle things with Krish was absurd. This became clear after he calmly told Jack about his plans for her career, starting with the assistantship in his lab.

“If you keep publishing with me and my postdocs at the Free Lab, nobody is going to care about this thing with The Bilious Pills in five years.” They were finally alone in his flat, eating a late dinner that thankfully required Krish to stop gripping her hand insistently. “You just need to lay low, and work your way back up to a position where you can start applying for grants on your own.” His voice had that warm, rational tone that she’d fallen in love with, and his green eyes hadn’t become any less enticing.

But Krish didn’t understand who she was now. Maybe he hadn’t understood her for a long time. She didn’t want to work her way back up the academic ladder again. There was another path for her, and it wasn’t a tenure track. Her recent experiences—the beatings, the flowers blooming in prison walls, the lost joy of writing for a famous underground text repo—made this even more obvious. The problem was that Krish couldn’t conceive of a life outside university, and Jack was sick of sharing her feelings with someone with such a narrow vision.

She settled for telling Krish a truncated version of the truth. “I don’t know what I want to do now.”

“You have to keep doing genetic engineering. Look how successful reng is. You wrote that in just a weekend.”

When had he become so serenely oblivious to her desires? “Don’t worry,” she spat out. “I’ll take that gig in your Free Lab.”

Seemingly satisfied with that answer, Krish didn’t bring up his five-year plan for Jack’s future again.

JULY 10, 2144

“Are we here?” Threezed peered out the windows at a fat river curving beneath the bridge the truck had chosen for their crossing.

“Yes.”

Jack felt a punch of nostalgia that temporarily drove the air out of her lungs. Downtown Saskatoon, hugged by the South Saskatchewan River, was fed by four bridges built in the twentieth century. The sun was setting and the skyscrapers had become undulant shadows, their turbines cutting air with only a faint noise. By the time the truck passed the research fields and greenhouses of the university, the darkening sky was the color of burned meat.

It had been over twenty years since she’d been to the Free Lab. Over ten since the last stiff, vague “how are you I am fine” messages between Jack and Krish. They had broken up, then drifted apart, and Jack had no idea how he would react to seeing her again after all this time. From following Krish’s publications in the open science journals, she knew his passion for crushing the patent system was as strong as ever. That’s what she was counting on. Plus—he owed her for shutting down The Bilious Pills . Even now, she was still pissed about how he’d dealt with that.

Jack stashed the truck in a student garage out of satellite view, and registered using a forged identifier on the parking network. The campus hadn’t changed much, but the Free Lab had gotten an upgrade since the last time she was here. It now occupied a long, low building, formerly used as animal housing, and was tricked out for the twenty-second century. Still, the security was stuck in another era. Jack got all three of them through the doors with a simple RFID emulator.