Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

The bot signaled to Med on an open channel. I am Paladin. You are unknown. Here comes my data. We want information about a pirate named Judith Chen. She goes by Jack. She is a terrorist, and has already killed hundreds of people with her pirated drugs. We have good reason to believe that she has been here during the last week. That is the end of my data.

Paladin and Eliasz’ credentials, packed into a data ball, were appended. The signatures on them were good. No doubt that these agents really were with the IPC.

I am Medea Cohen. You are Paladin. Here comes my data. I have no information for you. That is the end of my data.

For the benefit of the humans, she vocalized, “I have just seen their credentials, and these are agents from the IPC.”

“What can I do for you folks?” Krish asked, still keeping himself behind the bot. “I’m happy to talk if you’ll stop shooting at us.”

Eliasz stepped forward. His face and voice were relaxed. “I’m Agent Eliasz Wójcik, with the African Federation IPC. I just want to talk about your friend Jack. We have evidence that she’s been here, possibly with a fugitive.”

“I’m sure you know that Jack and I used to be very close,” Krish said reasonably, stepping out from behind Med. He had also modulated his voice to sound relaxed. Both men were practiced at being on opposite sides in this kind of conversation. “But you probably also know that I haven’t seen her in over twenty-five years, since she stopped working here and moved to the Federation.”

“We know that she sent data about pirated drugs to Bobby Broner through a server called Scarface here at the university.”

Paladin added, “A server that I have verified is here in your lab.”

“Do you still want to stick to your story that you haven’t seen Jack in the past twenty-five years?” Eliasz sounded as though he were asking a question about the weather.

“I have no control over who sends data through the servers in my lab,” Krish replied in the same tone. “The university network is open.”

Med watched this exchange beyond the visible spectrum, and perceived from microwave transmissions that Paladin was accessing their lab cameras. Whatever happened next would be impossible for anybody to piece together from the lab’s media feeds. She began dumping video of what she was watching to a tiny, shielded backup in her chest that was impervious to EMPs, radiation, and fire.

“We also have reason to believe that Jack was headed here based on what her friend Threezed has been posting in his journal on Memeland.”

With a mix of rage and sadness, Med realized that Threezed’s SlaveBoy journal had given them away. The agents seemed to know nothing about the Retcon Project. Of course, given the rate at which Paladin was sweeping their network, this gap in their knowledge was likely to close quickly. And it would only make them look more guilty.

Med’s state of alarm grew when she checked the net for the name “Bobby Broner” and discovered it belonged—at least in one instance—to a professor who had been found murdered in his lab two days ago. Gambling debts, the story said. She had to assume these agents would stop at nothing to discover where Jack was.

Their only hope was to get to a public place where they couldn’t be murdered outright. Even if they were taken into custody, they would have witnesses. This might or might not protect them, but their odds would be better than if they stayed here. There was a student bar just a few buildings away. The place was always packed, even at this time of night.

Act fast. Distract their attackers. Get away. Med palmed the molecule regulator she kept tucked into her pocket.

“I’m sure you won’t mind us looking around here, then,” Eliasz said. Med watched the agent’s thumb, flicking through the settings on his perimeter weapon.

Krish prided himself on being good at stalling in these situations. “I’d like to see your warrant. You can’t search this place without proving you’ve gotten judicial oversight.”

“I can write my own warrants,” Eliasz replied. “And I have, in this case. You’ll find it in your queued messages.”

Med made a decision. Defense was not her expertise, but she hoped her strategy would buy Krish some time.

“Run, Krish!” she screamed. “Get somewhere public before they detain you!”

The bot’s body blurred into motion, her torn lab coat streaming behind her like wings as she launched herself at the military bot. The regulator’s beam was set to decompose metal alloys. It was eating through her right hand, drawing a glowing red streak through the air as she flew.

A defensive stance and perimeter shield were not enough to prevent Med’s fist from connecting with Paladin’s carapace. Med’s melting fingers sank into Paladin’s armor at forty-five kilometers per hour, still holding the tuner. It took less than a second for the device to disintegrate its way through layers of shielding and a small amount of cerebrospinal fluid. By the time Paladin’s shield had overloaded Med’s system with a possibly fatal EMP, her arm was buried past its elbow in Paladin’s brain cavity.

Whitish gray slime bubbled out of Paladin’s wound and globbed on the floor along with strips of skin torn from the steel and polymers in Med’s arm. The pulse had forced Med to shut down midblow. Her body slumped to the floor at Paladin’s feet, dragging her arm partly out of the hole in Paladin’s carapace along with another slurry of gore.

Krish was too shocked to move. Only when the bot doubled over, clutching the hole in her abdomen, did he realize he needed to get out of the lab. As he turned to run, Krish heard Eliasz roaring.

Krish’s neck stung. He dimly realized Eliasz had shot him with a syringe. Everything took on a hallucinatory brightness. His heart pounded with something that might have been pleasure or fear. What had they dosed him with? It made his face hurt, but then he realized he’d fallen to the floor and split the skin on his cheek. Another hiccup of the pleasure-fear shook him, and he watched with dissociated intensity as Paladin snapped Med’s arm in half. He was supposed to do something. Med’s arm was wet and broken. It was an arm, or it was something else. He thought of Jack and started to cry.

When Eliasz lifted Krish into a chair and slapped him into attentiveness, he discerned that tears had mixed with the blood on the scientist’s face. This was going to be easy.

Eliasz asked gentle questions and Krish babbled the answers as Paladin fabbed a swatch of new carapace to patch the hole over her ruined brain. Three meters away, Med’s eyes were still open, dumb cameras recording to the tiny, shielded device in her chest.

JULY 18, 2144, 0600

A hard reboot, followed by an initialization process, followed by another. After a certain point, these automated events could pass for consciousness. Med’s visual sensors came online and she could see her detached and slightly pulverized right arm lying in a puddle of drying brain. She was in more pain than she’d ever experienced in her life, though her suffering lessened as she progressed through recovery mode. Most of her body was intact, except for the shredded steel and flesh stump where her arm had been. She perceived that the drivers for her legs and remaining arm were undamaged.

The bot sat up and tuned the local network. It had been two hours since Paladin knocked her flat with that EMP, and she’d started a slow recovery from her shielded backup. There were no signs of her adversaries. Where was Krish? She retrieved video from the past two hours. When she tried to stand, her feet skidded out from under her, scoring tracks through the brown, half-congealed blood on the floor. Her own blood, she realized, from the soft layer of tissue that covered her endoskeleton.