Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

“It doesn’t seem very useful to taste things when I can’t eat them.”

The botadmin turned serious, and set his soldering iron aside. It had been roughly three hours since he’d installed the simulated autonomy key and rebooted her recompiled mind. This hacking on Paladin’s arm was a way to fill the time while he waited for her to adjust.

“How do you feel about your mission?”

“I would like to get started as soon as possible. If word gets out about what happened in Casablanca, my target in Vancouver may have already disappeared by the time I arrive.”

With a sigh, Lee deviated from the script that had come in the readme files for the simulated autonomy key. “Listen, Paladin—I’m not going to be a dick and lie to you. I’ve never had to install any kind of autonomy key before. But you should know that things can go very wrong when a bot gets autonomy. Sometimes they go nuts, basically. Can’t access big chunks of their memory because of interface problems.” He paused, scratching his beard. “Do you feel weird like that?”

Paladin’s attention moved through her file system. For the first time, she could access her own programs as an administrator and parse how they had shaped her memories. It gave her a peculiar kind of double consciousness, even in real time: She felt things, and knew simultaneously that those feelings had been installed, just like the drivers for her new arm. Of course she felt weird. “Why haven’t you ever installed an autonomy key before?”

Lee shrugged, and looked back at his monitor, where he was running one of her drivers through a debugger. “Just not something we usually do.”

Three hours earlier, Paladin’s sense of loyalty—mostly generated by an old and inelegant program called gdoggie—would have prevented her from thinking about the words behind Lee’s words. But now she heard them clearly. He’d never installed autonomy keys because none of the bots at this base had gone autonomous during all the years he’d been here.

Paladin looked at her fingers, startled. “Should I be tasting pork? According to this program, your desk tastes like pork.”

The botadmin made a frustrated noise and uninstalled her taste library. Their conversation about the autonomy key evaporated, like a short thread in a public net forum. Lee drew an additional window in the air, calling its photons down from a projector overhead, and typed code by twiddling his fingers. His arms were ribbed with sensors that picked up electrical signals coming from his muscles and sent them back to the network.

All this networking was normally mesmerizing for Paladin, but now it was background noise. She was reindexing her memories, opening each one anew. Sometimes when she saved a file, it was bigger than it had been before. She was adding metadata, leaving information behind about the programs that had shaped each experience. Slowly a pattern was emerging.

Two hours later, Lee’s desk tasted like dead human cells and synthetic cellulose. The admin declared Paladin ready for action.

Although she had autonomy, at least temporarily, there was one key Paladin didn’t fully possess: It was the one that decrypted her memories in the cloud—the very same memories that she was carefully resaving, plus the new ones she was making every nanosecond in real time. The African Federation held its own copy of that key in escrow, a guarantee that even if Paladin went rogue, her next memory sync could erase her past.

They had another way to ensure her loyalty, too: Eliasz was patched into Paladin’s I/O system while she was in Vancouver. At any moment, he would know exactly where she was, could piggyback on her live sensor feed, and could reach her by voice or text sent via a direct encrypted tunnel through the public net.

It was a one-way connection. She could text him at any time, of course, but his location would be obscured. She knew only what he told her: that he was in Vegas.

JULY 14, 2144

Paladin arrived in Vancouver on passenger rail from Whitehorse, where she’d landed at an airfield as anonymous as the one in Iqaluit. This time, however, Eliasz was not there to lead her through the early steps of a covert operation. Most of the data she needed she had already. The one blank area—the place where she would have to extemporize—would be in Richmond, a neighborhood at the fringes of the city, home to a large community of free bots.

She had only been autonomous for the past thirty-six hours, and had never met another autonomous bot. All she knew about bot culture was what she had learned in the faraday cavern below Camp Tunisia. Paladin asked Fang for some advice before she left, but he was as ignorant as she was.

I have no idea how autonomous bots live, he messaged, appending a few public documents about the Richmond bot neighborhood written by human anthropologists. And of course these won’t really help you either. It’s all anthropomorphization.

Paladin and Fang sat for a minute without broadcasting, tuning a few unprotected conversations from bots around them and watching a tank drive slow donuts under the influence of something he had downloaded. The room tasted like carbon alloy.

Fang sent: I envy you. I have always wanted to see Vancouver.

Paladin experienced a new sensation she had come to associate with her autonomy key. It was what humans would probably call curiosity. She wanted to ask Fang a dozen questions, but settled on one. How long have you been indentured?

By way of reply, Fang transmitted a tiny video file, which was nothing more than seven still images arranged in a sequential slide show. Every year, the Federation had to file a report on its indentured population with the human resources division of the IPC. These images were taken from those reports. Viewed together, they said: seven years. Viewed separately, they appeared to represent four different bots. Seven years ago, he was a middle-weight insect drone used for mapping. He had become a snake, then a tank, and for the past three years had retained his current mantis shape.

What happened to all of your bodies?

The Federation always needs specialized morphologies. It’s easier to port an existing bot into a new body than make a new one. Fang’s antennas swept lazily toward Paladin. You’ll see. Don’t get too attached to that body—sooner or later, they’ll change it.

Paladin was replaying their conversation as the train pulled into an open-air station in the Richmond shopping district. It was early morning, and a pale gray sky lit shuttered markets on the fringes of a small park. To the north, across a river, lay downtown Vancouver; in aerial maps, its westernmost tip made a humanoid profile whose face pressed against the Pacific. But instead of eyes, lips, and hair, that face held the green fields and glittering buildings of the University of British Columbia. That was her ultimate destination.

There she’d find Bobby Broner—formerly Actin from The Bilious Pills —who ran a clinic for experimental brain-computer interfaces. If anyone knew where Jack’s Vancouver lab was, Paladin guessed it would be Bobby.

Interrogating Bobby would have to wait, though. Right now Paladin needed to establish her identity as an autonomous bot looking for work. She decided to walk up No. 3 Road, which would take her from the human shopping district to the heart of the bot neighborhood. It sounded like the kind of name a bot would give a street, but map data on the public net revealed that No. 3 Road dated back to the twentieth century, when the area had been populated mostly by Chinese immigrants.