Autonomous

11 FREE LAB

JULY 11, 2144

“That bot is a vicious bastard,” Krish spat in an angry whisper.

“You’d have to be to take down Blue and her crew.”

Jack and Krish sat at a worn thermoplastic table in the Free Lab’s kitchen. A coffee machine made from recycled lab equipment was slowly spitting out dark, rich liquid.

They stared numbly at a feed display on the surface between their hands, detailing the destruction of Arcata Solar Farm. Government reps explained that it had belonged to a pharma pirate ring whose cover was a remote solar operation on Baffin Island. Very little data survived the attack, but a few seconds of recovered security footage showed a bulky humanoid bot with wing shields crushing the skull of an armored guard. Physical evidence suggested that this bot had killed everyone and stolen a helicopter. Depending on the political bent of the feed source, it was being called an IPC conspiracy or a terrorist attack.

“I saw Blue just a few months ago.” Jack held her voice steady as she poured coffee into a Pyrex measuring cup. “I was supposed to bring her some of the Zacuity.”

“This is not good, Jack, not good. If this is part of the hunt for you, you are in serious danger. You need to get the hell out of here and let Med and I take care of developing the therapy.”

“No. You need my help. It will only take a couple of days.”

“He could be on his way here right now.”

“There’s no way. Blue had her shit together with security. Even if he got the servers, it would take him hundreds of years to decrypt them.”

“You don’t think they’ll come after me? After this lab? It’s not very hard to guess you might wind up here.”

Jack felt a flick of annoyance. Did Krish really think she hadn’t figured out a way to stay hidden? “There have been no connections between us on the public net for at least twenty-five years. And they won’t be able to follow my data trail here, either. I take a lot of precautions.” She patted her knife, which automatically routed all her communications through an anonymizing network that stretched across the Earth and through at least two research facilities on the Moon.

Krish looked dubious. She wanted to grab him by the spongy synthetic wool of his jacket and yell that she knew what she was doing. Couldn’t he respect that this project was so important that it was worth everything to her? No. He didn’t know what it was like to pay the price for doing something risky.

“Look—I poisoned those people with my drug. I need to fix it.”

Krish stared at Jack’s hands on the table through the hologram that rose out of a commercial break in the feed. It was the Zaxy logo, an anthropomorphized letter Z, dancing with a woman who had been liberated from sexual dysphoria by a new drug called Languidity. His face hardened into that ruthless expression she’d never seen when they were lovers. “Let’s get to work, then.”

When Krish and Jack emerged from the kitchen, Med was describing the project to a woman whose black hair grew in fluffy patches around purple vines rooted in her scalp. They were deeply involved in a debate about how already-existing addiction workarounds could be integrated into a therapy. More students arrived for morning lab, some drifting over to meet this new researcher, whose midnight arrival had become the subject of lab gossip.

Watching them, Jack had to admit that the Free Lab did resemble the ideal research space she and Krish had dreamed about back in the days of The Bilious Pills. Everything they produced was open and unpatented. All their schematics and research papers were on the public net. Almost anyone, even nonstudents, could use the Free Lab equipment if they had an interesting idea.

Of course, nobody here was pirating, at least not officially, even though sometimes that was the best way to save lives fast. And a lot of their open work was eventually absorbed into locked IP by the big patent holders. Companies like Zaxy and Fresser came here to recruit from the talent pool all the time.

Still, the lab was free enough to harbor a pirate whom the International Property Coalition would happily see murdered. That was no small thing.

SPRING 2119

In its early days, the Free Lab was located deep underground in a cavernous, dusty room whose doors had been stenciled a hundred years prior with the words “COMPUTING CENTER.” They were renetworking, repiping, and drywalling the place with the help of Krish’s grant, but slowly, so there were dozens of half-finished offices and cubbies where you could curl up and disappear.

One evening, after a particularly mind-numbing series of assays, Jack fabbed a thin futon, dragged it up a ladder to a skeletal loft over the sequence library fridges, and fell asleep behind some discarded shipping boxes for protein-folding devices. Up there, noises from the lab were muffled and everything had the comforting, grassy smell of packing foam. It was the first good night’s sleep she’d had since her arrest, and she never went back to Krish’s house after that. Everyone in the lab knew she was living in the loft, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary for researchers to do things like that when they got really involved in work.

For the next several months, boxes were her bedroom and 2-D movies were her nighttime entertainment. Krish left her alone, lost in his new role as manager of a well-funded lab, and she lost herself in the frosty, brittle quiet of a Saskatchewan winter. The simplicity of her job was a kind of GABA regulator, she realized, de-spiking her moods while she dealt with whatever the fuck was going to happen next.

Spring was transforming the prairies into ruffled grain fields when Jack met Lyle Al-Ajou. Lyle was Krish’s star postdoc and she had a buggy tattoo on her half-shaved head. It was supposed to move through a sequence of common flowers, but crashed every time it bloomed into a deep orange poppy. The static image on her light brown skin, its code unmended, gave Lyle an appealingly absentminded air.

It was 2:00 a.m. and Jack’s eyes were blurring over a line of code when Lyle poked her. “Can I crash with you tonight?” Lyle looked sheepish. “I’m about to fall over, and my clone sequence won’t be cooked until morning anyway. You have a bed up there, right?” Lyle pointed up, vaguely in the direction of Jack’s loft, and raised her eyebrows. Was it an innocent request, or something more? Jack hadn’t had sex since her awkward attempts with Krish after prison. It was as if her desires were as broken as her bones had been: She couldn’t figure out what she wanted, and was even more clueless when it came to other people.

“I’m not trying to hit on you, I swear.” Lyle grinned. “I’m just so tired I don’t think I can make it home.”

Everyone else had left around midnight. Jack shrugged. “Sure.”

In the semidarkness of the loft, surrounded by boxes emblazoned with corporate logos for scientific instruments, Jack and Lyle were suddenly wide-awake. They couldn’t stop talking. They rehashed the results of a recent patent infringement trial.

“I can’t believe they gave Thorton ten years in prison,” Lyle whispered fiercely. “What the hell? He wasn’t selling those drugs. He gave them away to his neighborhood because of a goddamn epidemic.”

“Ten years in prison makes my experience seem like a walk in the park.”

Lyle didn’t say anything. Eventually she spoke in an uncertain voice. “Is it OK for me to ask what that was like? I read The Bilious Pills and I’ve been trying to get up the courage to ask you, but it always seems tacky or weird or fannish or something.”

“It was mostly boring.” Jack pulled back before spilling anything more. This was Krish’s protégé. No sense launching into an entire diatribe about how Lyle’s beloved Freeculturist boss had sold out and abandoned the cause while Jack learned about bone engineering firsthand. Besides, there was something else that Jack suddenly, desperately needed to ask. “Were you serious about not hitting on me?”

“I don’t have to be serious about it. I could be sort of… exaggerating my lack of interest… a lot.”

Jack got up on one elbow and stared down at Lyle, trying to understand how the arch of her nose made every feature on her face more beautiful. A slice of light from the lab below illuminated the static petals of her tattoo and the half-smile on her lips. Then Jack couldn’t help it anymore. She grabbed Lyle harder than she intended, kissed her harder than she’d wanted to kiss anyone for the past year. Maybe she was being too intense, but it was intoxicating to be able to measure the strength of her desire again. Lyle didn’t mind. In the grip of Jack’s embrace, she thrashed with pleasure and moaned.

The two of them slept for only about an hour while Lyle’s clones were cooking, and the next day they were the happiest sleep-deprived zombies in the lab.

JULY 11, 2144

Jack put her beaker of coffee down on the lab bench next to Med and glanced up at the loft where Threezed was still sleeping. More than a quarter of a century had passed, and she was still crashing in lab storage rooms. And her future was more uncertain than ever.

“Here’s my hypothesis about a possible therapy,” Med announced. “We need to circumvent the reward patterns Zacuity created in the ODs, and we can only do that if we disable people’s memory of the addiction. Memory of the work reward is what keeps addicts coming back for more, even after they’ve detoxed. Every time they see a cue that reminds them of work—whether that’s a breadboard or a paintbrush—they’ll want to eat Zacuity again. Over time the dopamine receptors will grow back, and that’s helpful, but the main thing is to get rid of those reward memories.”

“Makes sense,” Krish mused. “What kind of memory blocker would you use?”

“Check this out.” Med allowed herself a quick grin, and showed them a molecular structure erupting into the air as a series of abstracted bonds. It was a collection of already-existing biological parts, along with a protein that Med had folded herself.

“I call it Retcon,” she said. Krish walked around the table, looking at the projection from every angle. “Essentially, what we’ll be doing is establishing retroactive continuity in the brain. We tweak the neurons to avoid the memory of the Zacuity-fueled reward, and we link the pre-addiction past to the present. You could say we create an alternate present for the brain, based on changing what it thinks has just happened.”

“Sounds easy.” Krish’s tone hovered between distracted and sarcastic, making Jack remember why she’d once loved him so much.

“What will be the experiential result for the person undergoing this therapy?” The question came from an undergraduate with a mass of curly red hair and a very serious expression on his face. “I mean, will they literally forget that they’ve ever taken the addictive substance before? Or just all the cues that make them want to do it again?”

“I am not sure,” Med admitted, looking at Jack for help. “I think they will forget some things, but I am not sure how much, or what that will feel like.”

“But won’t you be destroying years’ worth of memories?”

Jack could tell this kid was going to keep asking questions, and Med didn’t have much experience dealing with curious undergrads.

“Here’s the deal,” Jack interjected. “Retcon isn’t a cure-all for every kind of addiction. Nobody can make that. But it will work as a therapy for people who’ve taken Zacuity.” She had his attention now, and Med nodded gratefully. “Potentially, we can save thousands of lives.”

Seemingly mollified, the undergrad crooked his right index finger at Med’s simulation, downloading it to his goggles. The bot addressed the group again. “Anybody want to help out? We could divide up some of these simulations today, to model how different molecules might affect the brain.”

Jack raised her hand. “Sign me up.”

“Sure, I’ll do some.” This next volunteer was a postdoc who typed on the lab bench as she talked, her fingers’ movements captured by wrist sensors that translated them into keystrokes. Her coveralls were plastered with patches that seemed to be responding to the sound of her voice: When she spoke, they all turned red, then slowly faded through green into black again. The grad student with vines growing out of her head, who went by the nym Catalyst, volunteered, too. The serious undergraduate, who had no special adornments other than his grave facial expression, glanced through whatever he saw on his goggles, then focused on Med and Jack. “I’m intrigued,” he said. “I’ll put in some hours right now. I don’t have class until tomorrow.”

For a moment, Jack allowed herself to be charmed. These students loved their work at Free Lab so much that they came here when they weren’t in class, first thing in the morning, just to find something “intriguing” to research. It had been a long time since she’d worked on a drug project with people doing it for the thrill of discovery. Usually her lab teams were motivated by death or money, half-crazed with a desire to cure the former and bathe in giant tanks of the latter. She wasn’t sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.

Med organized the simulations quickly, parceling them out equally to everyone on the ad hoc Retcon Team.

Absorbed in analysis, the group lapsed into silence. Several meters above them, the Free Lab’s rectangular windows illuminated walls covered in shelves, revealing in dusty splotches of light the half-finished projects of dozens of genetic engineers. PCR machines the size of Jack’s fist lay in boxes with cables and self-cooling sample holders. A robotic arm inside a transparent shoebox was harvesting amplified sequence from minute cultures on a tray.

A long planter filled with moist dirt was bolted beneath one window, and out of it poked green stalks of modded wheat, its tender seeds rich in tumor suppressants. Below that, somebody had taken up an entire three-meter shelf with an experiment on repairing broken metal struts using new virus epoxies. One strut had grown back together nicely, but another was developing a strange, shiny tumor that was eating into the shelf below. Posted next to the bulbous strut was a note that read, “Please clean up. If not removed by 8/1/44, this will be THROWN AWAY.”

Jack stared at the tumor, and imagined molecules.

The trick with a therapy would be to disrupt or maybe just erase those hyper-rewarding memories of work. Which wasn’t exactly a small task. It wasn’t as if there was one memory center in the brain, any more than there was a single reward center. It was all molecular pathways, connections between different regions, conversations between neurotransmitters and receptors.

Med’s neck jerked slightly back from what she was looking at on the bench, just enough to register in the corner of Jack’s eye.

She messaged to Med from her tablet. What is it?

“Jack, can you come with me to Krish’s office?” Med asked casually. “I think we should run this by him.”

“Got something?” asked the serious student.

“Not yet, David,” Med replied. “But I want to see what Krish thinks of this.”

They angled their way between benches, pausing briefly at Krish’s door before he waved them in.

“My patient—the Zacuity OD—died a few days ago,” Med said. “Now there are six more people with similar symptoms at the hospital, and my supervisor is asking if I can come home early.”

“Just don’t answer,” Krish said. “Tell him you were off the grid for a few days.”

“She can’t hide the fact that she read the message, Krish,” Jack said. A sophisticated understanding of molecular networks in the brain hadn’t given Krish much insight into computer networks. He looked confused for a minute, then shrugged.

Jack turned to Med. “What do you want to do? We can take over here if you want to go back and work on Retcon remotely. We’ll create an anonymous code repository on a public server—just use good crypto when you update the data.”

Med looked at the mobile in her hands, then out at the Free Lab. The Retcon team had forgotten to eat lunch, but they’d taken a break for early tea. Steaming mugs sat next to half-eaten sandwiches on the bench. Catalyst was playfully poking David in the side, finally forcing a giggle out of him. The postdoc with sound-activated patches projected some kind of animation into the air over the table. Behind them, Threezed was coming down the ladder from the loft, wearing nothing but a towel as he headed to the showers.

“I want to stay,” the bot said, her eyes on Threezed. Then, glancing at Krish, she added, “If that is alright with you.”

“That’s fine with me. You’re the lead on this.”

“There’s something else, too,” Med continued. “I sent out a query about Zacuity to an addiction therapy research group last week. A few hours ago, somebody claiming to work at Zaxy mailed me from a temporary public account and said there are other problems, too. Apparently the casualties aren’t just on the street.”

Jack leaned against the glass and considered. “This has got to be pretty serious if somebody’s willing to whistle-blow.”

“How do you know this mail isn’t a trap?” Med’s obvious question pulled Jack up short. The IPC could easily trace that mail to the network where it landed.

“Oh, shit—did you receive it here?”

“No, I logged into the mail server at work remotely. They’ll only be able to get as far as Yellowknife if they’re snooping.”

Krish looked nauseated. This was exactly the kind of spy shit that Jack knew he feared most. She could just imagine him calculating the risk their project posed to his latest grant. Hell, for all she knew, he was partly funded by Zaxy. She cringed as he opened his mouth to speak, expecting him to order them out of his happy little bubble where radicalism grew only as far as corporate boundaries allowed.

“Do you think that your supervisor knows something?” Krish was unexpectedly calm. “That he’s asking you to come back because he got a nastygram from the Zone IPC office?”

“Could be.”

“Then you’re going to need a good reason to stay here. A reason nobody would question.” He gestured at his desk absentmindedly. It looked like he was flicking through the subject heads on his mail without reading them. “It would also have to be something that would justify why you’ve been a little secretive.”

A grin tugged at the side of his mouth. “Med, you’ve come to my lab highly recommended by one of the best genetic engineers I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.” He pointed at Jack. His voice was suddenly formal, as if he were addressing an audience at a conference. “I’m very pleased that you were willing to come out for a job interview at such short notice, since we unfortunately had our best pharma developer poached by University of British Columbia last week.”

He turned to Med, who was also starting to grin. “I think we can make you an offer that would be competitive with whatever they’re paying you over at Yellowknife, and as an associate researcher you’d get your own budget and research team. I realize you might want to think about this further, uh, Dr. Cohen, but we would love it if you could start work right away on a new project we’ve launched.”

“Why, thank you, Dr. Patel.” Med replied in a tone whose stagey formality matched Krish’s own. “But why don’t you call me Med, since we’ll be working together now. That’s what everybody calls me.”

This quiet exchange was a small thing, a trick to allay suspicion. But it was also huge, a real job doing the kind of work that Jack had once imagined for herself, in this very lab. Jack was gripped by vertigo as she considered how much time had passed since she’d wanted that job, and how many choices had torn her away from this place. Looking at Krish and Med, she was suddenly overwhelmed with an almost painful affection—not just for this smart young researcher, but also for the man who’d recognized Med as an excellent scientist. Coming to the Free Lab for help had turned out to be Jack’s first good decision after a string of incredibly bad ones.

She sidled up behind Krish, peeking over his shoulder at what was on his desk. He had Med’s staff page from Yellowknife beneath his fingertips. There was a black-and-white headshot of the bot floating above her name and title: Medea Cohen, PhD, Assistant Researcher. Areas of specialization: pharmaceutical testing and development, neurogenetics. Below that, a tidy list of publications, some with Med’s name listed first. A few professional affiliations, including membership in one progressive nonprofit that worked with Freeculture groups. It presented the perfect portrait of a young, ambitious, liberal-minded geneng researcher: no black marks, no holes in her employment record, no publications in anything but peer-reviewed journals.

Up until the past few days, Med had been a very good girl. And Krish had just rewarded her with the kind of job every assistant researcher dreams of. She would never need to go back to Yellowknife again.