Autonomous

10 ANTHROPOMORPHIZERS

JULY 10, 2144

Paladin had never approached Camp Tunisia with the access levels of a fully fledged agent. When he checked his maps now, he found directions to a small flight pad beside an arched, luminescent entrance into the facility beneath the dunes. A spider bot covered in tools greeted him.

Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using the AF protocol.

Paladin replied that he could use the latest AF protocol, version 7.7.

Let’s do it. I’m Blazer. Here are my identification credentials. Here comes my data. Please leave your vehicle here. You may continue inside. That is the end of my data.

For Eliasz, Blazer vocalized the standard greeting: “Welcome to Camp Tunisia.”

Already on the local network, Paladin started saving encrypted data to a directory devoted to the mission. Fang contacted him while he was still uploading some geotagged maps of Jack’s probable route out of Inuvik, with statistical likelihoods assigned to each route.

Hey, Paladin. Remember our secure session? Let’s keep using that. It’s Fang. Here comes my data. Meet at the attached coordinates for debriefing. Bring Eliasz. I have an IPC rep here who is not very happy. He wants to know why you almost burned down a valuable energy source for Iqaluit. That is the end of my data.

Paladin replied that he’d received Fang’s data.

Cradling his shattered right arm in his left, Paladin led Eliasz into the cool tunnel whose end was represented on his internal map as a block of garbage characters—encrypted, except for bots whose rank gave them the proper key. They arrived at their destination long before the encryption began, passing an icy server room and several radio frequency beacons before finding the conference area.

Fang was there with the IPC rep they’d met before their trip to Baffin Island. With the rep were two other humans, one in crisp corp casuals and another whom Eliasz must know based on the burst of electricity Paladin saw in the facial recognition area of Eliasz’ brain. The bot settled heavily into a chair, laying his mostly detached arm on the table. Next to him Eliasz nodded curtly at the man he’d recognized.

“Hello soldiers,” said the rep. “This is my colleague from the IPC, Senator Haldeman. I believe you know each other?” Paladin was not included in the question, and Eliasz nodded mutely again. “And this is Dr. Hernandez, Zaxy’s VP of public relations.”

Fang beamed a message to Paladin. You look a little worse for the wear.

Paladin desperately wanted to talk to somebody else about what he’d gone through, but he kept his answer curt. Some of this damage is deliberate, and some unavoidable.

“I understand you almost took down the solar power grid in Iqaluit, Eliasz,” the senator intoned in an accent that broadcast a life of educated privilege in the Free Trade Zone. “Luckily, it was very quickly contained, and hasn’t become an international property incident. But it’s going to be hard for me to keep this little problem with drug hooligans under wraps if you keep blowing up solar farms.” He paused, and Paladin watched the senator receive a small stream of data packets. He routed it from a neural hub to a device implanted in his right cornea, which he tried to check unobtrusively. “We’re always happy to help any large company stop criminals, of course.” The senator nodded at the Zaxy VP, who offered an empty smile. “Piracy undermines free trade, and punishes the most productive members of our society.” Having finished his speech, the senator checked his cornea feed again.

Eliasz stabilized his heart rate, then looked calmly at the senator, the IPC rep, and the silent Zaxy VP. “We were nearly killed by anti-patent terrorists on Baffin Island. You are lucky we made it out alive with our intel. We’ve narrowed our search down to Casablanca, and I can guarantee we’ll know where Jack is hiding in less than a week. Once we know that, it will be simple to stop the crime.”

Wrinkling his nose, the IPC rep waved his hand around as if he were wiping bugs out of the air. “Keep the damage to a minimum. Don’t create any messes you can’t clean up yourselves.”

The senator’s blood pressure spiked as he read new data arriving in his implant. “Eliasz has done excellent work for us before. I have full confidence in him.”

Fang sent data to Paladin again. Looks like the Senator has bigger things to worry about. Representatives from the Brazilian States are threatening an embargo on Zone biofuel. I predict this meeting is about to end and you’re going to have less than 24 hours for rehab before hitting Casablanca. Eliasz works fast.

How do you know that?

I am reading the Senator’s transmissions. And I have worked with Eliasz before.

The meeting did wind up rather quickly after the senator’s vague statement of approval. The VP remained silent and the rep’s eyes twitched nervously as Eliasz shook hands with all three men. They ignored Paladin, and as the senator and VP hurried out, the rep pulled Fang aside for a short conversation. Paladin and Eliasz were alone at the table.

“Looks like we can patch you up now, buddy,” Eliasz said, touching Paladin’s detached arm softly. “Let’s try to move out in twenty-four hours, OK?”

“I am going to find my botadmin.” Paladin had already located Lee in one of the labs below them, and exchanged messages. Lee was available any time in the next two hours.

“I should come with you.”

“I will go with him, Eliasz,” vocalized Fang, rejoining them as the delegate left. “Why don’t you get some sleep? You’re going to need it.”

Eliasz remained at the table studying his mobile as the two bots filled the doorway, then disappeared into Camp Tunisia’s maze of hallways lit by ubiquitous, low-power LEDs.

Paladin turned his main sensor array toward the bot. Fang’s morphology was insectile: He looked like a two-meter-tall mantis. His torso, balanced on six highly articulated legs attached to his chassis, was a block of circuitry and actuators, which themselves supported two massive arms fit for missile launch, industrial operations, and nanoscale machine repair. Right now, the arms were folded in half at his sides, and he regarded Paladin with dozens of sensors mounted in two fat, sinuous, segmented antennas curving from the top of his torso. Beside him, Paladin’s bipedal bulk looked almost human.

I read your mission report. Impressive work so far. Covert ops are always tough on a first assignment.

Well, I did manage to lose my arm again. :)

Fang echoed Paladin’s rueful humor emoji back to him. It was a relief to be communicating with someone who didn’t require any form of subterfuge. Paladin wondered what Fang would think about Eliasz’ use of the term “faggot.”

I’m worried about human intelligence gathering. I know how to respond to many forms of human behavior, but I have almost no information about how to react to sexual arousal.

:P :)

I don’t mean to be funny. Did you ever have sex with Eliasz when you worked with him?

No. Did you?

I’m not sure.

Impulsively, Paladin sent Fang a compressed burst of video files and signal data from Eliasz’ body that day at the shooting range. He appended his still-growing taxonomy of uses of the word “faggot.”

Fang expanded the data, emitting no signal for several seconds as the two bots rounded a corner and arrived at Lee’s lab. Then he replied. I think I understand.

Lee waved at them from his bench, and Fang vocalized politely for the human’s benefit. “Paladin, why don’t you join me later?” As the bot backed out of Lee’s lab, he beamed an extremely long number, which allowed Paladin to decrypt a space on his internal map. Now he perceived a massive warehouse, the shape of a flattened bubble, beneath Camp Tunisia. Until this second, he hadn’t known it was there.

“How the hell are you, Paladin? You look like shit.” Lee cheerfully turned to his bank of neurosoldering tools.

Paladin realized that the last time the two of them had met, he had known less about his own mind than Lee did. Now he knew a lot more, which Lee could discover easily enough. Until he was autonomous, the Federation would always hold a key to the memories he’d encrypted in the Federation cloud. Lee or any other botadmin could pore over everything he’d learned and thought, editing or changing it if they chose.

Knowing this didn’t bother Paladin. He trusted Lee, the same way he trusted Eliasz—and for the same reason. These feelings came from programs that ran in a part of his mind that he couldn’t access. He was a user of his own consciousness, but he did not have owner privileges. As a result, Paladin felt many things without knowing why.

After enduring two hours of tinkering, Paladin stepped out of an elevator into the base map’s decrypted room, which was bathed in ultraviolet light. Obviously not a human space. It was crawling with bots from many different Federation camps. Lightweight spiders, chameleons, and sleek drones gathered around the high, curved ceiling, while the floor was vast enough to accommodate even the biggest tanks. Charge pads were everywhere. Paladin tried to locate Fang on the base network, but only found something called RECnet. They were in a faraday cage that blocked signals from entering and leaving the room. There were no motes in the air. The RECnet was their only server.

But it was a good server, and it offered Paladin a highly granular map of every bot’s position in the room, along with a menu of open wares and pay-as-you-go apps.

Nobody really buys anything from the menu. Fang transmitted from a corner where the floor met the ceiling in a textured, parabolic curve. You can get everything you need in the open wares.

Paladin sat down on a battered bench next to Fang, who rested on his six actuators.

Nice arm upgrade.

Yeah, I even got new piezosystem drivers, and Lee upped the resolution on my neurochemical sensors.

Paladin ran his newly customized hand over the rough surface of the wall, reading its molecular composition and registering minute cracks. He sent a small burst of output from the experience to Fang, who laughed. It had taken Paladin no time to convince Lee to do the upgrades, but several minutes to vocalize his reasons for keeping the dents and scorch marks on his carapace. If they were going to Casablanca, it wasn’t a good idea to look like a brand-new military biobot.

You were right—we are shipping out to Casablanca in 22 hours.

Paladin was about to send more data when Fang interrupted him. I’ve been thinking about your experiences with Eliasz. Fang’s antennas slowly swept the room, drifting lazily in a default algorithm that scanned for security vulnerabilities. I think he’s anthropomorphizing you.

What do you mean by that? Treating me like a human?

Yes and no. He could treat you like a human by giving your survival the same priority he gives to the survival of a man. I’ve been in the field with Eliasz, and I know he would lay down his life for me. He’s a good soldier. But anthropomorphizing is something different. It’s when a human behaves as if you have a human physiology, with the same chemical and emotional signaling mechanisms. It can lead to misunderstandings in a best-case scenario, and death in the worst.

But we do have chemical and emotional signaling mechanisms. I can smile. :) I can analyze and transmit molecules better than a human can.

True. But sometimes humans transmit physiochemical signals unintentionally. He may not even realize that he wants to have sex with you.

Paladin quit their trusted connection for a second, and tuned the soothing hum of RECnet’s real-time location map. Hundreds of bots crisscrossed the room, floating or rolling or walking or lolling in a stupor after crashing on really good worms downloaded from the free wares menu. He understood what Fang was getting at—after all, he had done his own experiments that relied on Eliasz’ self-deception—but at some fundamental level he couldn’t believe that Eliasz was anthropomorphizing. Something else was going on. He wished he could signal the base network and check again for a response from Kagu Robotics Foundry about his brain. Maybe if he understood more about his one human part, his interaction with Eliasz would make more sense.

Finally, he reopened his secure session with Fang. I think he knows he wants sex.

How can you be sure?

Because I asked him about it, and he said he wasn’t a faggot. He classified our activities using a sexual term.

He didn’t. His use of that word is a clear example of anthropomorphization. Robots can’t be faggots. We don’t have gender, and therefore we can’t have same-sex desire. Sure, I let humans call me “he” because they get confused otherwise. But it’s meaningless. It’s just humans projecting their own biological categories onto my body. When Eliasz uses the word faggot, it’s because he thinks that you’re a man, just like a human. He doesn’t see you for who you really are.

Paladin could think of no response he cared to transmit. But after hours of crawling the public net, he had a few mental models that allowed him to predict the kinds of behaviors a human might expect from a robot faggot. Maybe it’s different for biobots.

That’s crap. Your brain is nothing more than a processing device for facial recognition. You can operate almost as effectively if it goes offline. It doesn’t reveal some essential gender identity any more than your arm reveals that you are secretly a squid.

Paladin once again found himself in a contradictory state, knowing Fang was right, but unable to feel the truth of it.

Fang sent more data: I’ve fought beside your model before, and the bad guys always take out the brain first. Why do you think Kagu advertises the location of the brain so much? It’s like camouflage. Malicious attackers expend their weapons on a useless target.

Paladin possessed a file time-stamped from the first few minutes of his life. In it, he’d stored a video of the arm bots on the Kagu factory floor explaining his physical capabilities. They’d used those exact words, “like camouflage.”

Talking to Fang was inflaming Paladin’s desire for data, not reducing it. He exited their session.

The more he analyzed what had happened with Eliasz on the shooting range, the more complicated it seemed. Paladin had accumulated entire days’ worth of memories, petabytes of data, about Eliasz. Unlike most humans, Eliasz didn’t treat Paladin like a thing, a tool to be deployed. He told the bot things that no other entity had ever shared with him. And Eliasz displayed desire for Paladin when the bot was at his least human, his body unfolded into a weapon. How could that be anthropomorphizing?

If Paladin used Fang’s logic to analyze the situation, however, it was hard to deny that other explanations were possible. He accessed his memory of Eliasz saying “I am not a faggot” for the seven hundred and sixteenth time. “Faggot” was a word for something that only humans cared about. Maybe Eliasz really was like the sprinkler system at Arcata Solar Farm, mistaking Paladin for something that he was not.

Finally Paladin considered the possibility that his own feelings were also an illusion. Every indentured bot knew that there were programs running in his mind that he could not access, nor control—and these programs were designed to inspire loyalty. But were they also supposed to make him care this much about small physiological changes in Eliasz’ body? Was this constant searching and data-gathering about Eliasz something that he would shut down if he were autonomous?

Fang addressed Paladin again: Remember our secure session? Let’s keep using it.

But Paladin didn’t want to talk to Fang anymore. Impulsively, he tuned the open wares menu on RECnet and downloaded a worm jammed inside an immersive combat simulator. The accompanying .txt file explained that just as the action got intense, a memory error would crash him. The program would also helpfully output the entire sequence to a log file so he could save and replay his half-destroyed memory of the experience.

Paladin found himself pouring bullets into an enemy tank, an injured human beside him. As the game’s code uncoiled, he knew his only goal was to destroy the tank and bring the man to safety. He chose to strap the human to his back and continued to fire. When the adversary’s ruined molecular bonds boiled with gas fires, when Paladin was just about to fulfill his mission, the man’s body fragile and alive against his back, he hit the malicious code. The bot’s whole body spasmed, his reflexes made useless by bogus and contradictory commands. A wave of ecstatic nonsense gripped him and the file ended.

The next morning, Paladin still hadn’t heard back from Kagu about his brain. He and Eliasz lifted off into the scalding blue of the sky, a light stealth jet buoying them over the sand. They landed in a Casablanca suburb called California, and hitched into town on a truck caravan. Their base of operations was a cheap hostel near Biotech Park, at the fringes of the old medina along the piers.

Biotech Park was a corporate incubator, but it was also a kind of city unto itself. Famous across the Maghreb, the campus looked like a massive wall of mirrored glass by the water, next to the equally massive Hassan II Mosque, whose rooftop lasers sought line of sight with Mecca during prayers. It held hundreds of startups locked in a frenzy of research and investment capital, all vying to be the next Zaxy. When ancient amplifiers broadcast the call to prayer, it got picked up and relayed by the mote network. Clumps of engineers would emerge from their workstations onto the vast, pale-orange plaza stones of the mosque—sometimes to pray, and sometimes to take pictures of other people praying.

The life sciences industry had remolded the landscape for miles along the coast, spawning smaller but still-glittering versions of itself devoted to housing genetic engineers and their families. Expensive condo developments advertised on giant billboards, offering private berths for residents’ yachts. The culture of Biotech Park spread everywhere, washing over the old medina walls across the street to flood its centuries-old narrow lanes with consumer biotech shops, game stores, and European fashion boutiques. Recently relocated engineers wandered like confused tourists through the medina’s spice markets, past stalls where slabs of real butchered lamb were for sale right next to outlets offering trellis-grown pork tissue wrapped in biodegradable polymers for half the price.

Though it dominated the skyline, Biotech Park did not create order or regimentation. Instead, it simply amplified the polyglot chaos that was Casablanca in summer.

Paladin and Eliasz adopted cover identities similar to what they’d used in Iqaluit: a down-on-his-luck engineer with his bot. They wandered through the medina’s tea shops, asking anyone who would talk to them whether they knew about good contract work in the Park. Somehow, Eliasz knew which tea shops would be packed with engineers grabbing a curved glass of tea between long stints of amplification, transcriptome modeling, and sequence analysis.

“Those teahouses are the kinds of places where Freeculture projects are born.” Eliasz explained his strategy to Paladin as he tossed his bag on a low bed back at the hostel. Outside, the afternoon prayers mixed with the sounds of traffic while two men shouted Darija and Russian. “You work all day for some company that doesn’t care about you, but you and your buddies still want to change the world. So you go out to tea and bitch about it. Then you start a project, you give it a name, start passing it around. Before you know it, you’ve either got the next blockbuster drug—or the next patent crime.”

Eliasz checked his weapons perimeter, passing his hands over his head and chest in solemn blessing. Paladin assessed the space: white walls covered in paint that repelled particulates and sealed its own cracks; a rectangular bed; a foam easy chair whose arms were sprayed with charge strips that gleamed dully. On one strip somebody had left a throwaway mobile which was now biodegrading into a lump of gray cellulose. There was enough room here for the bot to stand up comfortably, though he guessed he would have few opportunities to do it. He touched the bed with his new hand, where minute skin flakes reminded him of all the humans who had been here before.

“You’re going to have a speaking part in this operation, buddy,” Eliasz said, looking into Paladin’s face. “You’re my indentured lab assistant. I want you to get some HUMINT, too.”

Abruptly Eliasz sat down on the bed, dropping his bag into the place where a pillow might have been. “A couple of hours until people start getting out of work at Biotech Park. I’m going to get a little sleep. Keep watch.” The man rolled his whole body to face the wall, bending his knees in the semifetal position every soldier learns after sleeping in tight quarters for any length of time.

Paladin stood in the middle of the floor, his sensors in a default high-security mode. That mode was one of his deepest instincts, and he couldn’t conceive of resisting when asked to keep watch. Nothing seemed more natural. But high security did not prevent him from reopening the file that held his experiences after eating that worm.

He wanted to watch it now, while Eliasz lay vulnerable next to him. Reviewing his own crash made the bot sway slightly with pleasure, but didn’t disable him the way it had when the worm was executing. Still, he couldn’t allow himself to play it more than once. Too dangerous.

Paladin closed the file and focused his entire attention on monitoring the room, filling his sensors with the hum of Eliasz’ blood flow, the temperature of the air, the molecules cascading through his spectrometers. The electrical signature coming from Eliasz’ nervous system indicated he’d fallen into a deep sleep almost instantly. The bot monitored Eliasz’ breathing and wondered how his life would be different if he became unconscious for several hours every day.