Аннали Ньюиц - Autonomous

“I suppose I am from the Kagu Robotics Foundry in Cape Town,” he vocalized.

“No, no, no,” Eliasz shook his head violently, then rapped his knuckles on Paladin’s lower back. “I mean, where are you from originally? Where is your brain from?”

Under its layers of abdominal shielding, Paladin’s biobrain floated in a thick mixture of shock gel and cerebrospinal fluid. There was a fat interface wire between it and the physical substrate of his mind. The brain took care of his facial recognition functions, assigning each person he met a unique identifier based on the edges and shadows of their expressions, but its file system was largely incompatible with his own. He used it mostly like a graphics processor. He certainly had no idea where it was from, beyond the fact that a dead human working for the Federation military had donated it.

Eliasz spoke again. “Isn’t it important to you to know who you really are? Why you feel what you do?”

None of Paladin’s emotions or ethics were processed in his human brain. But then Eliasz looked right into the sensor array mounted on Paladin’s face, his eyes dark and attentive. Suddenly Paladin didn’t want to explain his file system architecture anymore.

“I don’t know where my brain is from,” he replied simply. “I can’t access its memories.”

He could sense the tension mounting in Eliasz’ body. Electricity skipped across the surface of his skin. Over the thousands of seconds they’d spent together, Paladin had noticed that Eliasz tended to vacillate between these intense, emotional conversations and total silence.

“They should let you remember,” he growled. “They should let you.”

If Eliasz couldn’t get that wish granted, at least he did get something else he wanted. It came in the form of an incoming message for Paladin, part of a securely encrypted session.

You are Paladin. I am Fang. Remember the secure session we created before? Let’s use it again. Here comes my data. Final mission meeting is at 0900. Bring Eliasz.

I agree to use our already-established secure session. I am Paladin. Where are we going?

Balmy shores of the Arctic, looks like. You’ll be tracking down some of Jack’s connections there, trying to figure out where she hides her stash.

I am prepared to meet you in 30 minutes with Eliasz. This is the end of my data.

The two bots closed out their session after an exchange of map coordinates, which were for the same room they had used over the past two days for mission planning.

“Good news,” Paladin vocalized to Eliasz, who was still staring at him. “We are about to leave for the northern Free Trade Zone, where the temperature is much lower.” Eliasz said nothing, but his heart rate had slowed down. The two set off across the dune tops to find a portal and receive their orders.

Though the mission was fairly small-scale and routine, it held a special significance for Paladin because it meant he’d crossed over from development to deployment. Today marked the first day of his indenture to the African Federation. International law mandated that his service could last no more than ten years, a period deemed more than enough time to make the Federation’s investment in creating a new life-form worthwhile.

Though he was just beginning his term of indenture, Paladin had heard enough around the factory to know that the Federation interpreted the law fairly liberally. He might be waiting to receive his autonomy key for twenty years. More likely, he would die before ever getting it. But he wanted to survive—that urge was part of his programming. It was what defined him as human-equivalent and therefore deserving autonomy. The bot had no choice but to fight for his life. Still, to Paladin, it didn’t feel like a lack of choice. It felt like hope.

JULY 5, 2144

The bulbous, fisted forearms of the Baffin Island skyline came into view from kilometers away as the jet shot over the Arctic Sea. Even at this distance, Paladin could see the movement of thousands of wind turbines, making the outlines of each building shimmer slightly. Soon, he could pick out the chemical signature of the lush farms that rose in tiered spirals around each complex. Northern cities ringing the Arctic spent all summer absorbing as much solar as possible, taking their farms through two crop seasons while the days were long. The whole city was deep into growing season.

By the time they’d passed over the outer islands and hit the airspace over Baffin, Eliasz was wide-awake. Paladin heard the change in Eliasz’ breathing and knew he must have ordered a wake-up signal from his perimeter when they were arriving at Iqaluit. Now the city was sprawled beneath them, its domes a glittering crust at the vertex of an acutely angled bay that cut deeply into the huge island.

“Iqaluit is an ugly city,” Eliasz grunted, joining Paladin at the window. “Its domes are modeled on the ones in Vegas—you know it?”

“A domed city in the western desert of the Free Trade Zone,” Paladin vocalized.

“It’s the center of the human resources industry. A lot of bad guys there. Black-market slave shit. People there don’t value human life so they build with this cheap crap that lets in way too much ultraviolet. Iqaluit looks exactly the same—except a lot cleaner and newer.”

Paladin wondered if Eliasz was opposed to the system of indenture. There were entire text repositories that focused on eliminating the indenture of humans. Their pundits argued that humans should not be owned like bots because nobody paid to make them. Bots, who cost money, required a period of indenture to make their manufacture worthwhile. No such incentive was required for humans to make other humans.

Regardless of what pundits thought, the vast majority of cities and economic zones had some system of human indenture. And Vegas was where the humans sold themselves. Its domed complexes were almost entirely devoted to processing, training, and contracting human resources. Like Vegas, Iqaluit had been built fast; it was all skyscrapers and domes. But a cursory data scan revealed few commonalities between the two cities beyond that.

“There are very few indentured humans here,” Paladin pointed out.

“Sure. The bad guys are different, but there are still bad guys,” Eliasz said, his elevated blood pressure appearing to Paladin like a reddish haze around the outline of his body. “The place is crawling with pirates. Everything here is stolen.”

They skimmed the runway and Eliasz stood up, instinctively touching his forehead, shoulders, and belt to verify his perimeter and its local network of weapons. “I always feel like I’m crossing myself when I do that,” he growled, heart speeding up in agitation. “You know what I mean?”

“The gestures are similar,” Paladin replied.

“My father was a true believer,” Eliasz said, his voice so low that only a bot could have heard it. Then, suddenly, his demeanor shifted; the man forced his breathing into a regular rhythm and it was no longer easy to read his emotional state from a distance.

“Where are we going first, Paladin?” Eliasz grinned, his eyes seeking out the five visual sensors on the robot’s head, set above diagonal planes that framed his face like an abstract version of human cheeks. They had about three dozen possible destinations, including addresses for several alleged associates of Jack’s and a few of her favorite restaurants.

“We should begin with the closest home addresses, question the people there, and then attempt to corner Jack based on the information they provide. As a last resort, we could monitor the restaurant secfeeds for Jack’s biometrics.”