Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

Thank you.

His declaration of comradeship didn’t affect her as deeply as Eliasz’ had, but it was still pleasurable. If this feeling was the answer she sought by rescuing the bots, she was glad she had decided to trust Bug, despite his annoying political rhetoric.

“I would like to have a body with better interface devices now,” Actin announced.

Bug used sound to reply. “I have a discount at Zone Mods. We’ll get you something basic today, and you can work on tuning it later.”

“What will you do now?” Paladin vocalized as she continued to comb through Jack’s network logs.

“I need to finish my thesis work. Whoever inherits Bobby’s lab will inherit me, and I can continue to earn my autonomy. Hopefully outside this fabber.”

“I can’t believe that fucker did this to you.” Bug rose into the air and hovered silently as he spoke. “We can get you an autonomy key right now—we’ll petition the Human Rights Coalition, or go the quick and dirty route. I know a group that can help you break root on yourself in a way that’s basically indistinguishable from an autonomy key.”

“I don’t want to do that. I want to get my degree.”

“Is that really what you want, or is that your programming?” Bug challenged.

Actin sent a series of rude emojis. “It’s what I want. It’s my programming. I can’t possibly know, and it’s a completely uninteresting question to me. I don’t even believe in consciousness. When I’ve got my autonomy, I’ll still be programmed, and I’ll still need a job researching brain interfaces.”

“Don’t you want to be free?”

“Free to work selling mementos of a meaningless and unenforceable set of laws to the drones on No. 3 Road?”

Paladin perceived it was time to change the subject.

“Can you see anything in the logs that looks like a connection to or from a remote server?” She directed her question mostly at Actin, who was roving listlessly across the network.

“No. But I may have some information that will interest you about the buffer in Bobby’s fabber, from several years before I was ported here.”

The dumb, dark box serving as Actin’s body had a memory that proved more useful than that of any sentient being. Four years ago, Bobby had fabbed a batch of patented immunosuppressant drugs, a job that stood out from his usual requests for mechanical devices. He’d dumped the job into the fabber sloppily, right from the network, without stripping its routing headers. In effect, he’d stored the pathway this drug spec had taken over the network along with the spec itself.

“That’s definitely a pirated drug,” Paladin confirmed.

“Somebody sent this spec from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. It originated on a server called Scarface. If you can find that server, I think you’re one step closer to finding your pirate.”

JULY 16, 2144

In the teaching barn, cows were going about their incomprehensible bovine business. Med liked to stroll through the agricultural school during the early morning hours when humans slept, watching the infrared outlines of the animals and the condensation collecting on the inner panes of greenhouse panels. Sometimes she just wanted to be among other living, nonhuman creatures who belonged on the campus as much as she did.

She was pondering an image from Yellowknife of a Retcon patient’s brain. Since taking the Zacuity antidote three days ago, his dopamine receptors had regrown quickly. As the drug changed the neurological structure underlying his addiction, the man reported that he still wanted to paint his house—but not that much. In fact, he wasn’t really looking forward to it. There were similar reports from other patients.

Patients who struggled with long-term addiction usually avoided their chosen activity or substance, fearing a relapse. But with these Zacuity addicts, that didn’t seem to be an issue. The Retcon patients still wanted to engage in the activities they’d been addicted to, but no longer felt compelled to do them. The mania was gone. And, perhaps unfortunately, work no longer brought them unmediated joy.

Now it was time to get down to the most difficult part of their project: proving that the pirated drug was actually Zacuity, the new blockbuster from pharma megacorp Zaxy. When so few people actually understood how drugs were made, it was easy for a big corp to lie and get away with it. She and the Retcon team would have to come up with a way to explain reverse engineering so that even a bored feed hopper could understand it.

The cows began to low companionably, and Med stared up at the galaxy smeared across the dark sky.

Her parents back in Anchorage were proud of her for taking this job, and some of her old teachers and botadmins sent messages of congratulations. But she felt restless and dissatisfied in an unfamiliar way. She was working on a problem with no known parameters, its implications threaded through her life instead of through twists of DNA.

She’d gone from developing drugs to fighting Big Pharma. She had no idea what it would do to her career when the research paper she was coauthoring with Krish went online. They were accusing Zaxy of a serious crime by calling Zacuity an addictive drug. It was going to blow up all the media feeds, and her unusual background as an autonomous bot would no doubt be part of the lurid tale. Inevitably, somebody would accuse Krish or the Cohen Lab radicals of having “reprogrammed” her to be a subversive. Humans always said things like that when they didn’t like the way a bot was behaving.

And then there was Threezed. Ever since he’d shown up in the lab at Yellowknife, her life had been derailed—or fast-tracked, depending on how you wanted to think about it.

But her deepening friendship with Threezed was the strangest and most inexplicable part of this anomalous series of events. He provided her with some of the only nonwork conversations she’d had since leaving her family in Anchorage. Threezed kept late hours, and distracted her when everybody else was asleep. They talked about movies and music and a lot of other things that were completely unrelated to pharmaceutical development. Last night they started by talking about her name.

“Med? Is that short for Medicine?”

“No,” she laughed. “It’s for Medea. Somebody thought it would be a great idea to name me after a character from Greek mythology who got revenge on her philandering husband by murdering their children and flying away in a burning chariot.”

“Well, at least you’re not named after the last two numbers assigned to you by Human Resources.”

“It’s true.”

She tried to think of something else to say that wouldn’t sound condescending, clueless, or both. Coming from one of the only places in the world where bots were born autonomous, Med had this feeling a lot. It kept her from forming friendships with other bots in the lab. How could she understand them, when she’d always been autonomous? She felt like her bot identity was incomplete without that seminal experience, but at the same time, it didn’t make humans seem any less alien.

Threezed seemed to sense her mood. “Don’t feel bad that you never got indentured.” He touched her arm for a few seconds. “Nobody wants that. Plus, I’m sure you’ve been fucked over in lots of other ways.”

It was one of the nicest things a human outside her family had ever said to her.

Finally, she got up the nerve to ask him what it was like to be indentured.

“I used to write about it a lot, but I’m writing more about autonomy these days,” he said.

“You wrote about it? Where?”

She couldn’t believe it when he told her. “You’re SlaveBoy? From Memeland? Are you serious? I used to read you all the time.” She paused, remembering. “I thought you were dead.”