Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

“You should be. Do you really think the IPC has stopped tracking you after what happened with The Bilious Pills ? Especially now that you’re preaching the freedom to reverse engineer in Africa?”

That settled it. Jack was done with this weird bitch. “Fuck off, OK? I’m not doing anything illegal.”

“I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to help you and that rich girl from the Gulf figure out what it would really mean to bring free drugs to people who need them. That was always your problem at The Bilious Pills —you were so focused on your little legal arguments, and dressing up like pirates, that you forgot about the real crimes. Like murder.”

Suddenly Jack realized who she was talking to. Frankie was the woman behind the Bilious Pills byline Rosalind Franklin.

Rosalind Franklin had sent the autonomous drone fleet that liberated the pills from Halifax Harbor before Jack got arrested. But Jack had only known her as a pseudonym, a fiercely smart but mysterious writer from somewhere in the African Federation. Her first essay for The Bilious Pills began with an intensely personal story, unusual for an academic, in which she explained quite bluntly how her family had been murdered by Zaxy when they refused to license the antiviral Blense to a local manufacturer. It was an unforgettable essay, especially because it ended with an elegant little program—thirty lines of Adder—that perfectly reverse-engineered Blense. Nobody who worked on the text repo knew her real name.

“Are you Rosalind Franklin?”

The woman shrugged. “No, I’m her ghost, come to get revenge on the white dudes who stole the Nobel Prize from me.” Then she laughed, a loud bark that did not fit somebody who seemed so focused on hiding. Several faces in Lyle’s comet tail turned to look at them.

Jack felt like she’d passed a secret test. “I’m glad you came. We always wondered who you were.”

“I’m glad you’ve decided to do some real work instead of just scribbling in a text repo.” Frankie’s compliments were always insults. They had the disturbing effect of making people want to please her more.

“Do you live around here? Are you interested in starting a project at Signal?”

“I’m thinking of moving here.”

“Are you still working at a university?”

Frankie tilted her head to the side. “I never worked at a university.”

Jack and Krish had always assumed Rosalind Franklin was a university researcher—all of The Bilious Pills contributors they knew had been students or junior faculty. But Rosalind Franklin had never divulged where she worked. She just wrote beautiful code and angry, persuasive essays.

“Oh, are you in industry?”

“No. I’m a pirate.”

Before Jack could respond, Lyle joined them, putting her arm around Jack’s waist and kissing her. “Who’s your friend?”

Frankie frowned at Lyle. “Why do you want to draw attention to yourself with your clothes? Don’t you think you’re upsetting the social order enough without rubbing it in people’s faces?” And with that, Frankie went to wait by the elevator.

“That was Rosalind Franklin.”

“The woman who wrote for The Bilious Pills ?”

“Yeah. She said she might be moving here and wants to help us.” Jack felt off-balance as she watched the elevator doors close.

Nobody was more vulnerable to Frankie’s insults than Lyle. When Frankie became a regular at Signal, Lyle got itchy in her flamboyant clothing, picking holes in her stockings that flared into runs. She let her hair grow in, its natural, glossy black replacing the debugged tattoo. And then she started working with Frankie on a secret project that took a lot of her time.

Lyle said Frankie had ideas for a program that could help with rapid prototyping of flu vaccines. Mostly, however, the pirate would come to Signal empty-handed, leave with a sack of drugs, and return empty-handed. Of course, a lot of people used Signal to prototype drugs. That’s what everyone assumed Frankie was doing, too. And maybe it was.

Then Lyle started skipping work, supposedly to hammer on sequence with Frankie. Jack hunted her down at Signal one evening after she’d been MIA all day. “Where the fuck have you been? I keep having to make excuses for you at work, and it’s getting really old.”

“I told you, I was with Frankie—it’s been a really hard time for her, restarting her business.”

“She moved here months ago.”

“Look, there’s a lot about Frankie you don’t know.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know either—like her real name, for example.”

“You don’t need to know someone’s birth name to know they’re doing good work. She’s bringing flu vaccines and antivirals to people who can’t afford them, and she’s helping to set up a small manufacturing operation for this collective down in Fez so they can do it for themselves. Besides, you don’t go by your real name, either.”

Jack leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, feeling the raw insulation crinkling under her arm. This wasn’t the conversation she wanted to be having. Everybody knew her real name was Judith Chen. Jack was a nickname, not a pseudonym.

“So you’re helping her pirate drugs instead of going to work?”

“I hate that job—I’m quitting. Frankie’s going to help pay for the lab.”

This was turning into a serious what-the-fuck conversation. “You do understand that Frankie is breaking the law. Yes, she’s doing some good, but she’s also selling a lot of shit that’s just for fun, for parties. How does that help the people of Fez?”

Lyle shrugged, and grinned. “Since when do you care about patent piracy?”

“Since I’m trying to run a legitimate Free Lab. Everyone is welcome here, you know that. We’re not policing anyone. But if anyone found out we were funded by piracy, well…”

“What do you think would happen?”

“I think it would be worse than jail. And that was already bad enough.” Jack was going to cry, or throw up, or maybe punch Lyle in the face. She was jealous of Frankie, or scared of her—maybe both. So she walked away without saying anything.

Lyle caught up to her on the street, three blocks from their flat. She put an arm around Jack, and they walked without saying anything until they reached the door. Jack thought about how they’d met, how good the late summer air smelled in Saskatoon, and how she’d already lost both a continent and a calling.

Maybe there was some weird crap going on with Lyle and Frankie, but Jack was suddenly filled with certainty that she could deal with it. She didn’t want to lose another person she loved. Or another place. And Jack had to admit she wasn’t particularly worried about piracy.

Lyle was much happier after she quit her day job. Signal was flourishing, and she told Jack it was the first time she truly believed she wasn’t living out some twisted version of her mother’s dreams. For a few months, it felt like they were back in the Free Lab storage room again, madly in love with each other and the revolution.

Until one afternoon when Jack got a text from an unknown string of numbers, which usually meant Frankie. It read: We need to talk about Lyle. Meet me at the teahouse in an hour?

Frankie held court in a dim, red-curtained room at a teahouse in the biotechie ghetto. Sitting cross-legged at a low table surrounded by plump cushions, the pirate was playing with a handheld 3-D printer that was spitting out what looked like tiny chunks of cellulose.

She stood quickly when Jack arrived. “Thanks for coming.”

Frankie ordered another pot of tea and gave Jack a look that was entirely free of her usual sarcasm. “Have you talked to Lyle lately about her new project?”