Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

Med’s neck jerked slightly back from what she was looking at on the bench, just enough to register in the corner of Jack’s eye.

She messaged to Med from her tablet. What is it?

“Jack, can you come with me to Krish’s office?” Med asked casually. “I think we should run this by him.”

“Got something?” asked the serious student.

“Not yet, David,” Med replied. “But I want to see what Krish thinks of this.”

They angled their way between benches, pausing briefly at Krish’s door before he waved them in.

“My patient—the Zacuity OD—died a few days ago,” Med said. “Now there are six more people with similar symptoms at the hospital, and my supervisor is asking if I can come home early.”

“Just don’t answer,” Krish said. “Tell him you were off the grid for a few days.”

“She can’t hide the fact that she read the message, Krish,” Jack said. A sophisticated understanding of molecular networks in the brain hadn’t given Krish much insight into computer networks. He looked confused for a minute, then shrugged.

Jack turned to Med. “What do you want to do? We can take over here if you want to go back and work on Retcon remotely. We’ll create an anonymous code repository on a public server—just use good crypto when you update the data.”

Med looked at the mobile in her hands, then out at the Free Lab. The Retcon team had forgotten to eat lunch, but they’d taken a break for early tea. Steaming mugs sat next to half-eaten sandwiches on the bench. Catalyst was playfully poking David in the side, finally forcing a giggle out of him. The postdoc with sound-activated patches projected some kind of animation into the air over the table. Behind them, Threezed was coming down the ladder from the loft, wearing nothing but a towel as he headed to the showers.

“I want to stay,” the bot said, her eyes on Threezed. Then, glancing at Krish, she added, “If that is alright with you.”

“That’s fine with me. You’re the lead on this.”

“There’s something else, too,” Med continued. “I sent out a query about Zacuity to an addiction therapy research group last week. A few hours ago, somebody claiming to work at Zaxy mailed me from a temporary public account and said there are other problems, too. Apparently the casualties aren’t just on the street.”

Jack leaned against the glass and considered. “This has got to be pretty serious if somebody’s willing to whistle-blow.”

“How do you know this mail isn’t a trap?” Med’s obvious question pulled Jack up short. The IPC could easily trace that mail to the network where it landed.

“Oh, shit—did you receive it here?”

“No, I logged into the mail server at work remotely. They’ll only be able to get as far as Yellowknife if they’re snooping.”

Krish looked nauseated. This was exactly the kind of spy shit that Jack knew he feared most. She could just imagine him calculating the risk their project posed to his latest grant. Hell, for all she knew, he was partly funded by Zaxy. She cringed as he opened his mouth to speak, expecting him to order them out of his happy little bubble where radicalism grew only as far as corporate boundaries allowed.

“Do you think that your supervisor knows something?” Krish was unexpectedly calm. “That he’s asking you to come back because he got a nastygram from the Zone IPC office?”

“Could be.”

“Then you’re going to need a good reason to stay here. A reason nobody would question.” He gestured at his desk absentmindedly. It looked like he was flicking through the subject heads on his mail without reading them. “It would also have to be something that would justify why you’ve been a little secretive.”

A grin tugged at the side of his mouth. “Med, you’ve come to my lab highly recommended by one of the best genetic engineers I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.” He pointed at Jack. His voice was suddenly formal, as if he were addressing an audience at a conference. “I’m very pleased that you were willing to come out for a job interview at such short notice, since we unfortunately had our best pharma developer poached by University of British Columbia last week.”

He turned to Med, who was also starting to grin. “I think we can make you an offer that would be competitive with whatever they’re paying you over at Yellowknife, and as an associate researcher you’d get your own budget and research team. I realize you might want to think about this further, uh, Dr. Cohen, but we would love it if you could start work right away on a new project we’ve launched.”

“Why, thank you, Dr. Patel.” Med replied in a tone whose stagey formality matched Krish’s own. “But why don’t you call me Med, since we’ll be working together now. That’s what everybody calls me.”

This quiet exchange was a small thing, a trick to allay suspicion. But it was also huge, a real job doing the kind of work that Jack had once imagined for herself, in this very lab. Jack was gripped by vertigo as she considered how much time had passed since she’d wanted that job, and how many choices had torn her away from this place. Looking at Krish and Med, she was suddenly overwhelmed with an almost painful affection—not just for this smart young researcher, but also for the man who’d recognized Med as an excellent scientist. Coming to the Free Lab for help had turned out to be Jack’s first good decision after a string of incredibly bad ones.

She sidled up behind Krish, peeking over his shoulder at what was on his desk. He had Med’s staff page from Yellowknife beneath his fingertips. There was a black-and-white headshot of the bot floating above her name and title: Medea Cohen, PhD, Assistant Researcher. Areas of specialization: pharmaceutical testing and development, neurogenetics. Below that, a tidy list of publications, some with Med’s name listed first. A few professional affiliations, including membership in one progressive nonprofit that worked with Freeculture groups. It presented the perfect portrait of a young, ambitious, liberal-minded geneng researcher: no black marks, no holes in her employment record, no publications in anything but peer-reviewed journals.

Up until the past few days, Med had been a very good girl. And Krish had just rewarded her with the kind of job every assistant researcher dreams of. She would never need to go back to Yellowknife again.

JULY 11, 2144

As the sun sank, every surface in the medina continued to radiate heat. But the teahouse remained cool beneath reflective paint, and water-cooled air kept patrons from sweating. Eliasz ordered some fragrant oolong at the end of a long bar made from polished wood edged with a Moorish pattern of elaborately interpenetrating polygons. Through the dusky gray windows, they could see a tiny alley, one of the many canopy-shaded streets that twisted through the oldest neighborhood in Casablanca. An archway across the street, edged with blue tile, led into a barely visible courtyard. Next door, a woman filled jugs with water from a public fountain whose gracefully arranged stones dated back to when this was a nation called Morocco. Now Casablanca was one of the African Federation’s key port cities, flush with international capital. In a seam where the crumbling foam walls of an apartment building met the street, a boy arranged some wares to sell: a small wagon piled with long, arrow-shaped fish, and a cage of buzzing, cheaply fabbed perimeter drones.

The after-work crowd began to flow into the pathways of the medina, disgorged from air-conditioned jitneys that ran every five minutes from Biotech Park. It was easy to spot their business-ready fashions among the locals. Some wore spotless white thawbs or embroidered caftans flowing over their khakis; some had colorful hijabs over their hair or the tails of saris over their shoulders; some sported Zone jeans and button shirts; some went retro in western suits of linen and seersucker; some bared their upper thighs and chests with transparent fabrics that suggested their skills were too important for employers to worry about modesty. All chattered with each other or the network via ear clips, goggles, perimeters, implants, and specialized, invisible devices.