Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

This was going nowhere. “This isn’t personal,” he said tonelessly, resisting the urge to turn Calvin’s brains into sludge on the wall.

“Can I stand up now, or are you going to start beating me again? I don’t think the internal affairs department is going to like the way you’re treating a legitimate businessman.”

“Feel free to file a complaint.” Eliasz grabbed a fistful of data out of the air and turned to leave.

The drapes covering the door of Quality Imports swirled behind him in a perfect, velvety arc. Calvin wasn’t stupid enough to call attention to himself by filing a complaint, and besides, Eliasz wasn’t bound by the rules of this jurisdiction anymore. He answered to a higher authority: the IPC.

The unnamed alley smelled like lavender. Across the street a man dressed in business casuals talked quietly to an adolescent girl with unnaturally blond ringlets. The man offered the girl an injection, then settled on a mahogany bench to show her something on his mobile. She snuggled into his arms, staring at a holographic blob, looking confused. Six meters away, a sales rep smiled at them from the doorway of a pink container called “The Alice Shop.” He was sending his goods out on a test drive, perhaps, or had just made a sale.

Eliasz turned his back on the scene and walked back to Wynn Lane. At the intersection, he was enveloped in tendrils of warm, moist atmosphere that smelled of human bodies in various states of exhaustion or agitation. He found a slightly scabby plastic bench outside a drugstore hawking generics and sat down. To peruse the Memeland search results, Eliasz angled his projection so it was legible only to his eyes.

The first few hits were garbage from people writing about politics and biohacking, quoting from a copy of The Bilious Pills hosted by a free text repo archive in Anchorage. Though these hits were useless for his search, he sent off a quick note to IPC intelligence flagging the archive. That kind of content shouldn’t be publicly available.

He kept reading. More garbage results on various Judith Chens. And then he found a block of prose that looked promising, from an entry written just a few weeks ago by somebody called SlaveBoy.

I am back. Things were a little worrying there for a while—I got slaved out of Vegas, repped by a sweaty, gropy little man who promises his customers “quality imports.” I won’t argue with the term. I’m nothing if not a quality import. But let’s just say that my recent adventures in the Arctic were a lot less pleasant than assfucking in a hot engine room. Luckily, I have a new master, who gave me food and a mobile in exchange for a little maid work. I’m sure she’ll eventually want more. They always do. I’m irresistible that way.

It’s weird to be in the middle of the ocean again, but free. I don’t mean free in the way the autonomous are. I mean without being strapped into the holding pod on an export ship. This sub may be small, but it’s a fucking palace compared to the ship that took me to Vegas. And my new master has a seemingly endless supply of drugs, so my left arm won’t be rotting off after all. Long story. Let’s just say my last master thought salt water was an antiseptic because it stung.

Below the post was a zigzagging field of almost five hundred nested comment threads. Most were one-liners, written in English and Chinese, welcoming SlaveBoy back and expressing relief that he hadn’t died. Others were long, personal stories that Eliasz flicked through disinterestedly.

Another post, two days later:

Every master loves to fuck a slave. It is a law of nature, or maybe culture. J isn’t bad in bed, even if her sub’s engines are tuned for shit. She won’t let me at them though, even after letting me inside what she calls her gotch. That’s the word for underwear where she grew up, somewhere in the Zone.

And then, eight days ago:

J fucked me until I screamed—yes, I screamed. Privacy does weird things to your libido. And then she burned out my chip. Told me we’re heading to the Zone and she’s cutting me loose. I’m free. You know, free to be a whore. Isn’t that what pretty boys with no work histories are good for?

I guess she could have killed me on the night we met, but she didn’t. So that’s nice. And she let me use the network even before we were fucking. And that’s nice, too. But how the hell am I supposed to find a job when I have to hide my work experience?

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I know where she’s going: Some lab in the Zone. For somebody so paranoid about security, J sure doesn’t cover her ass. Which, when you think about it from my perspective, is a good thing. I like her ass. And I like J too, even though she’s clueless. I think she’s trying to do the right thing. She just doesn’t grasp even the most basic things about property law.

Eliasz paused. This was obviously Threezed, and the “J” was Jack.

There were two more entries, one from yesterday, but they didn’t indicate where Threezed was. “J” had disappeared from the journal, and the boy was writing a lot about robots and autonomy.

Still, it seemed Paladin was right: Jack was still in touch with contributors to The Bilious Pills , including the anti-patent agitators running this free lab. Probably funded by a noneconomic organization trying to undermine the IPC.

He patched into Paladin’s data feed. The bot was at Broner’s office, talking to the scientist about brain interfaces. He sent an order for her to interrogate the man now, appending coordinates for an extraction point.

It was time to close in. Eliasz and Paladin would rendezvous on Vancouver Island, and from there… Eliasz started a search on free labs in the northern Zone. The results were all references to one place: the Free Lab at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. If Jack wasn’t there, he was willing to bet they would know where to find her.

With a couple of hours to kill before extraction, Eliasz bought himself a soda and strolled back toward Wynn Market. Idle times were dangerous. Things he’d seen when he worked here, and back home in Warsaw, writhed at the corners of his vision.

When Eliasz came of age, over a decade ago, he’d been lucky. His father had bought a limited franchise that allowed Eliasz to work in Warsaw, as long as he was employed by the church. His sisters were not so lucky. They left home one by one, indentured to corps overseas.

Eliasz’ first job was as a guard in the church dormitories for the Boys Manufacturing Internship Program. Mostly he was there to catch runaways. He spent his days watching the boys assemble bodies in the church robotics factory, troubleshooting algorithms and studying bot anatomy. Supposedly it was so they would learn basic technical skills and land better clients when they entered contract. At night, he worked shifts in the church dormitory, listening to the boys crying themselves to sleep or getting into pointless fights over nothing.

It was during one of these long nights that he discovered what happens when you force adolescent boys to spend all day with robots whose chests are laser etched with the sign of the cross. There weren’t a lot of functional video sensors left in the factory, but one of them picked up some motion in infrared and sent an alert to Eliasz.

Hidden behind a rubbish pile of arms and legs, he found two of the interns with an unprogrammed biobot. She’d obviously been cobbled together out of castoff parts, with her skin applied patchily and her mind left unformatted. As soon as the boys saw Eliasz, they tossed her back on the pile of limbs and hurled themselves out a window to race back to the dormitories. Knowing what the priests would do to the boys if he reported them, Eliasz decided to keep their indiscretions to himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do with the bot.