Autonomous

12 THE HUMAN NETWORK

JULY 11, 2144

As the sun sank, every surface in the medina continued to radiate heat. But the teahouse remained cool beneath reflective paint, and water-cooled air kept patrons from sweating. Eliasz ordered some fragrant oolong at the end of a long bar made from polished wood edged with a Moorish pattern of elaborately interpenetrating polygons. Through the dusky gray windows, they could see a tiny alley, one of the many canopy-shaded streets that twisted through the oldest neighborhood in Casablanca. An archway across the street, edged with blue tile, led into a barely visible courtyard. Next door, a woman filled jugs with water from a public fountain whose gracefully arranged stones dated back to when this was a nation called Morocco. Now Casablanca was one of the African Federation’s key port cities, flush with international capital. In a seam where the crumbling foam walls of an apartment building met the street, a boy arranged some wares to sell: a small wagon piled with long, arrow-shaped fish, and a cage of buzzing, cheaply fabbed perimeter drones.

The after-work crowd began to flow into the pathways of the medina, disgorged from air-conditioned jitneys that ran every five minutes from Biotech Park. It was easy to spot their business-ready fashions among the locals. Some wore spotless white thawbs or embroidered caftans flowing over their khakis; some had colorful hijabs over their hair or the tails of saris over their shoulders; some sported Zone jeans and button shirts; some went retro in western suits of linen and seersucker; some bared their upper thighs and chests with transparent fabrics that suggested their skills were too important for employers to worry about modesty. All chattered with each other or the network via ear clips, goggles, perimeters, implants, and specialized, invisible devices.

Many of them would be stopping at one of the dozens of Prague-style secret teahouses that had sprung up here over the sixty years since the late twenty-first century Collapse, which left populations and farms ravaged by plagues. Afterwards, the newly formed African Federation hatched a ten-year plan from their headquarters in Johannesburg. They promised the Federation’s three hundred million surviving citizens that they would build the most high-tech agricultural economy in the world.

A sweeping reform bill allowed the Federation government to transform virtually the entire continent into a special economic zone with no regulations on research into anything that could make farming lucrative again. Eurozone and Asian Union companies flocked to the cosmopolitan Federation cities to research transgenic animals that secreted drugs; synthetic fast-growing organisms; metagenetic topsoil engineering; and exo-agriculture that could thrive offworld for export to the Moon and Mars colonies. Recent advances in molecular engineering had been ruled unsafe and ethically questionable in other economic coalitions. But not in the African Federation.

Among the most successful businesses to come out of that regulatory free-for-all were outfits founded by engineers from Prague, Budapest, and Tallinn. Those companies attracted more people from the central Eurozone, and with them came a secret teahouse culture: cool, dark little rooms with unmarked doors where the customers had to know the bouncer, or to whisper a password. Usually the “secret” was just a meaningless formality. You could get loosely guarded passwords on the net, or come to know the bouncer by beaming him a little crypto cash. These Eurozone quirks were easily merged into the casual teahouse culture that had existed for centuries in the medina.

Still, a few teahouses took their secrets seriously. Like the nameless one where Paladin stood, analyzing highly diffuse airborne chemicals produced by dozens of varieties of tea leaf, dried and steeped in precisely heated water. One of the Federation’s covert operatives from the IPC had given them the secret password. The place was known to attract hackers and pirates. To Paladin, however, the customers were indistinguishable from the business class deluge outside. That’s probably why Eliasz had given him a HUMINT exercise to work on for the next few hours. The bot needed to hone his social skills, and there was no better place to do it than in a teahouse where they were trying to meet as many people as possible.

Eliasz poked Paladin, gesturing almost imperceptibly at the man next to him. After ordering tea, the man slouched so far over the bar that Paladin could see a pale stripe of skin showing above the waistband of his pants. It was time to try his opening gambit. Offer a piece of personal information, and humans will be sure to offer some of their own.

“I have never been here before, and it is not what I expected,” Paladin vocalized, turning his torso and face toward the man, who looked up with an expression of vague surprise. He hadn’t expected anyone to talk to him, least of all a giant robot.

“Yeah? Did you expect there would be hydrocarbons to drink?”

Through his back sensors, Paladin could see Eliasz rolling his eyes. The joke about bots looking for hydrocarbons to drink in bars was stale forty years ago, and came across as extremely condescending now. But the man was just old enough to have grown a tiny mustache that looked like two dark hyphens in the middle of his face.

Paladin powered on, vowing to succeed somehow with this interaction. “I’m Pack, and this is Aleksy.” He gestured to Eliasz. Pack was a very common name for lab assistant bots.

“I’m Slavoj.” The man extended his hand, grasping the light alloy of Paladin’s in his fingers. Blood samples revealed high levels of caffeine. That was a good sign. It could lead to an infodump with minimal prompting.

Paladin chose a conversational gambit that always seemed to yield results.

“Where are you from?”

Slavoj spilled his whole story out to them, virtually unbidden, in a stimulant-enabled rush. He’d come from somewhere in the central Eurozone to work with his friends at a tissue engineering startup, but they ran out of money. Now he was doing QA on muscle trellises for meat factories. Slavoj shook his head mournfully at Paladin and Eliasz. “I guess what I’m saying is that this place is no happy hunting ground for jobs right now. They tell you it’s easy to get rich here, but what that really means is that it’s not as hard to be poor.”

Paladin tilted his head to indicate sympathy and extemporized. “We keep hearing the same thing from other people.”

This was enough to elicit another diatribe from Slavoj about various jobs he’d tried to get but hadn’t, through no fault of his own.

Eliasz pressed a warm hand against Paladin’s lower back. The bot had actually succeeded in making a connection with Slavoj. For an instant, Paladin felt a flash of something that went beyond the usual programmed pleasure at completing a task and pleasing Eliasz. He was having fun. Impulsively, he sent a smiley emoji to Eliasz’ perimeter. When the man received it, he tapped his thumb lightly on the bot’s back with a kind of aimless, amiable rhythm.

Behind the bar, the teaman poured steaming water into a tall, stamped silver pot packed with mint leaves. He snapped his fingers at a boy in starched white, who placed the pot on a tray with two glasses, while the teaman put another dish of sugary cardamom biscuits on the counter in front of Slavoj. After the boy delivered the tray to a table of men in the corner, he sat down on a low stool behind the bar and peeked surreptitiously at Paladin’s dark bulk.

A large group of people poured into the shop, arguing animatedly about a story that was making its way around the science text repos.

“There’s no way the dipshits at Smaxo are smart enough to do that,” snorted one.

“I know people doing R&D there who are not stupid,” replied a man who had injected bone grafts under his scalp, remolding his skull to create an odd bas-relief phrenology map whose regions were tattooed with labels like “sex” and “whiskey.” He continued: “Why wouldn’t they backdoor their drugs? Half the world takes them. It’s the perfect social control mechanism.”

A woman whose face was partly hidden by a bulky gamer rig nodded. “Totally,” she said, twitching her sensor-beaded hands. It was unclear whether she was talking to somebody remote or responding to the thread of teahouse conversation.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said the man who had spoken first. “If your goal is to calm rioters down, why not just develop a chemical that does it? Something you can spray into a crowd? Why put something in your drugs that has to be triggered by a catalyst? That’s just way too complicated and difficult.”

“Maybe the catalyst is an image or a word. Something you could broadcast remotely.” The guy with the skull mods was agitated, his muscles a mess of electrical activity. “How else do you explain the pics of those meetings between that Smaxo VP and the Trade Zone defense minister? You think they were just swapping LOLs? The economic coalitions want a way to keep people from protesting their bullshit.”

“Well, I’m sure Smaxo is cutting deals with the Zone, but a backdoor triggered by a word? That causes some residual molecules in your blood to send your brain into theta wave mode?” The man who spoke now had close-cropped hair and a white shirt that clearly marked him as a corporate worker. “Sorry, but I just don’t buy it.”

The group crowded up to the bar, their bodies forming a warm set of obstacles around Paladin and Eliasz, their pores exuding sweat and excitement and metabolized euphorics.

“I’ve got an exploit that works just like that.”

Everyone in the group shut up to listen to the tall woman whose elbow pressed lightly against Paladin’s arm. She had a small patch of pink hair on her otherwise bald brown head, and wore the traditional Eurozone button-front shirt. A mass spectrometer was stuffed into her breast pocket. “Sound-triggered bacteria. I once zombied a whole club by spiking the booze. Had all the boys do pole dances and put the vid online.” She was less excited than the rest of the group, and a surreptitious blood sample revealed that she had no drugs other than caffeine in her system. When her shirtsleeve touched Paladin’s arm, he perceived molecules associated with air purification systems. She’d been in a dome, or underground, for a long time before coming here today.

The group continued to focus on the woman, who was digging in the pocket of her khakis for a device. Their postures suggested that she was a node, a person who sprouted and maintained social connections. She was at the core of this group, the person they all knew.

“That vid was hilarious,” barked the man with the phrenology map. “An epic hack.” As his face turned toward the woman, and therefore toward Paladin, the bot could see that the mountainous region over the man’s eyes was labeled “WTF.”

On Paladin’s left, Eliasz was covertly hyperalert. Slavoj, trapped between the social node and WTF, scrunched down in his chair and carefully focused on the dish of biscuits. It was obvious that he recognized them, but Paladin couldn’t decide if his posture was an effort to hide or, perversely, to capture the group’s attention.

“A round of black for my friends, please,” the node said politely to the teaman.

“Your usual?” he replied, reaching for a jar of crisp, expensive leaves.

“Yes, thank you. We’ll be in the back.”

“A round on Frankie! Smooth!” The man in corporate casuals slapped her arm appreciatively.

“Smooth!” echoed the gamer, lifting her rig and settling it on the sensor strip that banded her skull. Her eyes, dyed completely black, settled on Slavoj.

“Oh, hey,” she said.

“Hey, Mecha,” Slavoj muttered, toying with his tea glass.

Frankie’s group swirled away, following her through a beaded curtain at the end of the bar. Mecha, now at the tail end of the pack, plucked at Slavoj’s sleeve.

“What are you up to?” she asked.

“Just got off work.”

“Still working with Promoter on that Third Arm project?”

“Yeah, but we’re all consulting now, just to make ends meet while we’re waiting for funding.”

Paladin had taken baselines of the man’s speech, which indicated that it was statistically likely that Slavoj was lying now.

“I have to go, but we should hang out soon. I haven’t seen you in forever.” Mecha leaned into Slavoj to grab a biscuit off of the diminishing pile in the bowl. His body tensed and untensed as he prepared to speak and then didn’t. “Actually, what are you doing tonight?” Without waiting for a reply, she put on her rig and tilted her head. “You should come to this party at Hox2’s place.”

Slavoj thumbed the joint on his glasses, looking at her text. His heart rate was elevated—yes, he would be there.

Paladin tried to figure out a way to get their new friend to bring them along. Parties were a good place to make connections.

On her way back to the beaded curtain, Mecha brushed her fingers lightly over Paladin’s back. “Nice case,” she said. “Bet it does negative refraction, right?”

“It does,” Paladin vocalized.

“Looks great,” she said, aiming her gamer rig at the camouflaged apertures for his torso guns. “Pretty sweet defensive perimeter for a lab bot.”

The bot wasn’t sure what to say. “Thank you. Slavoj and I were just talking about lab life.”

As she reached the bead curtain, Mecha turned back one last time. “Bring your pretty bot friend, too!” she called to Slavoj.

The nervous QA engineer swallowed the last of his tea, then grinned at Paladin and Eliasz. “Do you want to come?”

Paladin noticed with pleasure that Eliasz’ face had muscled into one of its rare smiles. The bot had managed his first act of human intelligence gathering, entirely without help.

They said good-bye to Slavoj and returned to the streets of the medina. Though Paladin sighted the occasional biobot in the crowds, this city was obviously built for humans. The narrow lanes would never admit a mantis bot like Fang, and the vendor stalls emitted no bot-readable metadata.

“That was a great start on your HUMINT, buddy. Let’s do a little more practice.” Eliasz pointed down a street that veered slightly north, its walls recently whitewashed with a quick-drying fluid full of bioluminescent bacteria and network motes. Paladin hesitated.

“It doesn’t seem like there are very many bots in this city.”

“That’s the challenge. Even in a city that’s packed with bots, people are going to treat you differently. You have to work around it.”

The bot fell into step behind the man, unable to fit beside him as they walked past a small, scruffy cat sleeping on a low-hanging balcony and four children clustered around an ancient water spigot.

“How do I work around this?” Paladin pointed at his face.

Eliasz laughed and the bot found himself logging the location of every beam of sunlight as it glanced off the windows above. There was no reason for it. He just found himself wanting a granular record of this rare moment with Eliasz laughing and the light waves lengthening and stray water molecules hurling themselves through the air.

“Paladin, do you really think you’re the first operative who ever stuck out like a sore thumb? Look at me! I’m the color of cow milk. Pretty obvious I’m an outsider around here. But look at your new friend Slavoj. He’s an outsider, too. Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”

“Like when I told Slavoj we were finding it hard to get work.”

“Exactly! You may be a hydrocarbon guzzling bot, but he likes you because you’re dealing with the same problem. Just figure out a way to share their problems.”

They walked into an open plaza, ringed on all sides with courtyards and shops, and packed with dozens of stalls full of electronics components and biotech. Paladin had an idea.

Unlike Eliasz, he could speak Darija, the most common natural language in this region. That was something the bot could turn into a shareable problem. Leaving Eliasz’ side, Paladin approached a man selling muscle fibers very much like the ones that stretched beneath the bot’s carapace.

“I need to supplement my musculature,” Paladin said in Darija. “Unfortunately, my master knows nothing about robots, and only speaks English. But you look like you might have what we’re looking for. This is a nice selection.”

The man glanced up at Paladin, and then darted a quick side-eye at Eliasz. “Eurozone?” he asked. “Where? East?”

“He doesn’t tell me anything. Somewhere they don’t learn Darija.”

That got a wry grin. “OK, friend. What length and tuning do you need?”

Through his rear sensors, Paladin could see that Eliasz was trying to hide a matching grin of his own.

As the bot and the muscle man haggled over grades of fiber, Paladin tried to turn their connection into something useful.

“Is there anywhere to buy off-brand biotech?” “Off-brand” was local slang for pirated goods. “My master wants something cheap for himself.”

“I don’t know anything about off-brands.” The vendor barely looked up from the table, where he was gently wrapping Paladin’s newly purchased muscle strands in an oil-infused membrane. “But, cheap stuff? You want to go down by the docks.”

When Paladin told Eliasz about his failure, the man raised his eyebrows.

“That wasn’t a fail, buddy. You got great intel. Nobody is going to tell you directly how to find illegal shit. That was genius, asking for something cheap. He was able to tell you everything without admitting that he knew anything.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

Eliasz shrugged. “That’s the thing about humans. People always think they’re being so clever with codes and euphemisms. But they’re desperate to say what they know. As soon as you establish trust, people want to infodump. You’re a natural at this. I bet it’s even easier for you because they don’t suspect a bot would be sneaky like a human.”

Paladin considered this information carefully. Were there actually ways that he could be better than Eliasz at HUMINT?

“While you’re getting all fancy with your Darija, why don’t you buy me some dinner before we head to the docks?” Eliasz gestured at a vendor unrolling a swatch of meat to put over a spit. At the next stall, they supplemented the charred lamb with sesame bread from a stack of fresh breads baked into fat circles.

Evening piled the streets with shadows and the walls began to glow. Walking and eating at the same time, Eliasz bumped into the bot with companionable aimlessness. He tossed a shred of meat to a kitten padding hopefully alongside them, and Paladin wondered if this was how Eliasz acted when he wasn’t on a mission. As Paladin read Eliasz’ biosigns through his shoulder sensors, he caught the man gazing at him intently. Paladin pointed his face at the man’s face, so Eliasz would know he was gazing back. For a period of two full seconds, Paladin’s visual sensors locked with Eliasz’ eyes for reasons that Paladin could not decipher. Or maybe, as Eliasz would probably say, the reason was obvious. Maybe they just liked each other.

Paladin thought about what this might mean as they walked to the docks in search of his next target for HUMINT practice.

At midnight, Eliasz and Paladin arrived at the downtown address Slavoj had given them for a sub-basement lab three stories below the Twin Center towers. Once a gleaming mall, it was now a warren of live-work spaces.

“This may turn out to be a dead end,” Eliasz warned. “Just biopunk scenesters. But Frankie is somebody to watch—she’s been arrested before, for possession of unlicensed lab equipment. Keep watch on who she’s talking to, OK, buddy?”

“I will.”

“And make some friends.” Eliasz poked him in the side with a grin, and Paladin poked him back carefully. Human flesh was flimsy compared to a bot carapace. He still wasn’t used to it.

They stepped out of the evening’s moist heat and into a climate-conditioned foyer. Over a century ago, this building had been the gem of Casablanca, a monument to its wealth and Westernization at a time when most of the Federation was unbalanced by plagues, protests, and warfare. Now it was dwarfed by the luxury skyscrapers ringing the roundabout at United Nations Place. Its boutiques and luxury condos had been transformed into crowded homes for artists, drifters, and radicals.

Two people were sharing some 420 near the elevator doors. They wore black caftans threaded with fiery red electrofilaments, and their dark faces shimmered faintly with temporary glitter polish.

“Going to the party?” asked one, as Eliasz pressed the down button.

“Yeah.”

“You’re just in time for the orgy.” The two giggled and waved delicate fingers as the doors closed.

Paladin and Eliasz emerged into a room whose atmospheric controllers could not keep up with the amount of heat and sweat emitted by the overcapacity crowd. A dance floor had been cleared in one corner, and a few dozen people were writhing and bouncing beneath strobes. To the right, plumbing for a wet lab had been converted temporarily into a drink-mixing area. The man with WTF tattooed on his head was behind the bar, concocting a variety of drinks and handing them out in transparent foam cups to a line of sweating people. Overhead was a loft with mirrored windows and a huge “CAUTION!” sign on its door.

At the edges of the dance floor and the bar, knots of people argued about code or showed off new mods and gadgets. A shirtless man with lightly furred wings growing from his shoulder blades was surrounded by a group that included Mecha and Slavoj, both swaying slightly with intoxication. He flexed the wings, modeled on a bat’s, and Mecha stroked one appreciatively.

Suddenly Frankie came rushing down the loft staircase, her face set purposefully as she brushed past a few people who tried to say hello. She headed right to WTF, pushing easily through the throng, and whispered in his ear. He checked a readout in his wrist and nodded. Paladin tried to pick up what they were saying, but there was too much ambient noise. The bot settled for watching them from the sensors in the back of his head while he and Eliasz joined the group with Mecha and Slavoj.

“Pretty bot!” Mecha squealed, throwing her arms around his torso, smearing him with the sugars manufactured by her drunkenness. She aimed the black lozenges of her eyes at Eliasz. “Is he yours? What’s his name?”

“Why do you assume he belongs to anybody?” Eliasz took a cagey, teasing tone. He had picked up the tenor of the group and was blending, using his gift for conformity to accumulate trust quickly. Somebody had given him a cup of glowing orange liquid whose molecular signature said vodka, and he nodded his head to the beat that emerged from amplifiers strung along the ceiling. Mecha laughed and sent a message through her game rig, which Paladin easily tuned, decrypted, and forwarded to Eliasz.

Room for one more up there? This boy is hot.

She had messaged somebody in the loft, a person who was using a throwaway device with no useful ID data attached. The throwaway responded:

Yeah, one more is fine, but that’s it. We’re almost ready.

Behind them, Frankie was rushing back up the stairs, tailed by a man dressed in a cape that flickered with LEDs. As the door to the loft opened, Paladin caught a glimpse of a room padded with foam cushions and swarming with minute projectors that filled the walls with oozing, abstract designs.

A faster beat spurred the dancers on the floor to start wiggling, and Frankie slammed the door to the loft. Mecha stood on tiptoes to yell-whisper in Eliasz’ ear: “Do you want to come upstairs and play with me and Frankie?”

Paladin could see from Eliasz’ posture that he was wary. From context, he guessed she was inviting him to try some kind of hacked-together molecule, probably designed to release inhibitions and generate an intense emotional response: pleasure, fear, sadness, amusement, rage. “What are you guys playing?” he asked, his tone appropriately light.

“A little thing Frankie cooked up after reverse engineering some Ellondra.” It was a common stimulant-euphoric. Eliasz relaxed.

“Just let me tell my friend to wait for me,” he told Mecha. Pulling Paladin aside, he whispered to the bot in a voice too quiet for any human ear: “I’m going up with Mecha to see what I can find out about Frankie. I’m patched against the drug they’re using, so it should be fine. But if I don’t come down in an hour, get me out.”

At that moment, Frankie opened the door a crack, motioning furtively at Mecha. It was her cue. Mecha tapped Slavoj and Eliasz. “Go on up. I’m going to get the others.” She made her way through the crowd, the sensors on her body winking in the strobes. As she circulated, she gave a subtle nudge to first one person, then another. After she’d tapped about twenty of them, she gave Paladin a little wave and ran upstairs, pulling the door shut behind her.

His sixty-minute counter decrementing in nanoseconds, Paladin idly tuned a few different segments of the radio spectrum, looking for local networks that might yield information. There was an open network called Hox, attached to a local server with a few scientific papers and videos on it.

While the bot explored, the man with wings turned to him and asked, “What do you think?” Paladin replayed recent audio, and discerned that he’d been standing in the middle of a debate over regulations on tissue engineering. Under a new set of rules proposed by the Free Trade Zone, all body modifications created with patented scaffolds would have to be implemented by a licensed practitioner.

Paladin knew that ownership regulations weren’t exactly valued in this crowd. “It will give patent holders more control over what you can do with your body,” he said, quoting verbatim from an anti-patent text repo whose feed he’d quickly plundered.

“Exactly! Do you think I could have these wings if the Zone pushed the other economic coalitions to bend to its puritanical will?” The man stretched the beautiful but useless wings over his head. “I’m Casey, by the way.”

“I’m Pack.”

“What do you do, Pack? You don’t look much like a lab assistant.” Casey tapped Paladin’s carapace. “Feels military grade.”

“I am indentured to Aleksy. We’re looking for gene development work.”

“Oh, you’re slaved to that guy who went off with Mecha?”

Paladin had nothing to say to that, so he decided to pry. “What do you do?”

“I make custom penises.” Casey tapped the palm of his hand, beaming Paladin the address of a server packed with information on how to design and order the sex organs you’d always wanted. “Good money in that. But now I’m thinking I might get into consulting with companies that want to implement open tissue scaffolds. You know, to get around this new regulation.”

“Interesting,” Paladin vocalized, scanning the room. Eliasz had been gone for almost half an hour already.

“Actually, you look like you could use my services, friend,” Casey laughed, patting the smooth alloy between the bot’s legs. “Why didn’t they build you with a dick?”

“Are you completely stupid?” giggled Mecha, who had been slinking down the stairs behind them. When she arrived, she clung heavily on Paladin’s arm. “Don’t you know anything about bots, Casey? This pretty bot here…” she paused, her skin profoundly flushed and her body trembling with a wave of chemically induced pleasure. “This pretty bot has something better than one of your dicks. He’s got a brain right here.” She tapped Paladin’s carapace over the chamber where his human brain quietly processed facial recognition data.

Before Mecha swooned again, she wriggled hotly against the bot’s left side, her thumb drawing a streak of sweat down his torso, moving from one covert weapons system to another. “I’ve been inside your model,” she whispered. “In RoboCity.” As she named the popular game world, her knees began to buckle. Paladin knelt slightly, lifted her quivering, ecstatic body, and carried her up the stairs to the loft. She would fare better on the cushions there, among other people who had been drugged.

Paladin was beginning to feel a strange dread in this human network, where everyone seemed to know he was military issue. Pretty soon, somebody would actually care. It was very possible that he and Eliasz were about to have their covers blown. This party could get dangerous.

As Paladin shouldered into the loft with Mecha, he immediately perceived Eliasz and Frankie talking in the corner, behind a puddle of bodies filled with blood that bore molecular traces of Ellondra.

As he let Mecha down, she briefly achieved lucidity and pointed across the room at Frankie. “See her? I love her.” Mecha addressed herself to Paladin’s upper arm, focusing on an area that contained a small constellation of sensors. “Did you know she named herself after Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA? That was her pseudonym when she wrote for The Bilious Pills, too.”

By the time Mecha sank into the pillows, Paladin was accessing fragments of saved and cached versions of The Bilious Pills. “Frankie is just so… amazing. You should talk to her.” And then Slavoj reached an arm out from the edge of the human drug puddle, and Mecha flowed back into it.

Frankie and Eliasz walked over to where Paladin stood in the doorway, skirting the pillowed area.

“Aleksy has been telling me about your gene-hacking skills,” Frankie said, looking at the hollows in Paladin’s face that most humans perceived as eyes. “He said the two of you always work together.”

“We do.”

“He also explained to me how he’s patched against Ellondra. Very impressive.”

“That’s just a taste of what we can do,” Eliasz replied, a calculated boast.

“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea of just how smart you are.” Frankie grinned and slapped a dermal injector on Eliasz’ neck before he could react. She winked at Paladin as Eliasz’ pupils dilated. He reached out an unsteady arm to the bot. “Looks like your master isn’t patched against this.”

Eliasz sagged against the bot’s frame. Paladin lifted him the way he had Mecha, quickly sending a command that disabled part of Eliasz’ perimeter system. The man’s skin temperature had risen, and a quick blood sample revealed what Paladin had suspected: serotonin cascade, dopamine levels rising. Eliasz writhed, senses focused inward on some kind of hallucination that his brain processed as pleasure.

Frankie opened the door and barked a laugh. “See you later, kiddies.”

Paladin held the man and stepped lightly down the stairs, powering up his head-mounted lasers as he crossed in front of the bar to the elevator. He didn’t bother with the buttons, relaying a command directly to the building’s systems that overrode all other requests and brought the elevator down to Basement 3. He was in high-defense mode as he entered the car. Had anyone interfered, he would have shot to kill.

Luckily, all the revelers were focused on who was arriving rather than who was leaving. And nobody paid attention to a bot carrying his master, moaning and sighing with obvious intoxication, through the warm streets of early morning. A molecule lookup revealed the drug wasn’t deadly, but Eliasz would be incapacitated for hours.

At their hotel, Paladin laid Eliasz on the cot and stood at full alert in the center of the room. The problem was that the man wouldn’t stay still. Frankie’s drug had filled him with restless energy. He crept from the bed to curl around the cool, segmented carapace of Paladin’s legs, breathing raggedly around half-formed sentences. Then his entire body tensed up and he lapsed into a soft groan, hostage to an enforced gratification.

Paladin knelt next to Eliasz, now curled into a fetal position on the rug.

“Come to bed with me, Paladin,” Eliasz whispered. “It will be OK this once.” He trailed off, and Paladin used his new hand to feel the stuttering flashes of arousal that passed through the man’s body.

“I will carry you to bed.”

“Lie down next to me.” He gripped Paladin’s leg, staring at him with drug-stretched pupils. “You are so beautiful. Let me feel you next to me.”

For the second time that day, they looked into each other’s faces. But now, unlike in the medina, the sight of Eliasz’ dark eyes was like a worm filling Paladin’s mind with junk characters and overriding his action priorities. It was hard to set Eliasz’ words aside and follow protocols. “It is not safe,” the bot said quietly. “We are in danger. Frankie drugged you.”

Sweating and shaking, Eliasz pulled himself to his feet by clinging to Paladin, then wrapped his arms around the bot’s torso and pressed his face against one armored shoulder. “Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay,” he chanted in a whisper.

It was not safe. But Paladin wanted to lie down beside Eliasz on the narrow cot, to train his sensors on the man’s drug-amped desire, to recognize in the man’s face a possible representation of his own chaotic feelings. And so he found a compromise between his desires and his programming.

Laying Eliasz on the bed again, he lay down, too. His carapace, balanced at the edge of the mattress via tiny movements of his actuators, became a shield for the man’s vulnerable body. He faced Eliasz and faced away from him simultaneously, scanning for danger. He rested his hand on the man’s flank, the tiny needles in his palm sipping minute samples of Eliasz’ blood. The bot could read each molecular change in Eliasz’ body as the man’s euphoria grew and subsided. He wished there was some other way he could touch Eliasz that would give him an even more intimate understanding of what was happening.

“Why did you say this was wrong?” Eliasz was shivering through one of the highs that bunched his muscles into spasms. He stared into Paladin’s face and his fingers pressed urgently against the bot’s chest.

“What we are doing is not wrong. I was worried that you weren’t safe, but I can keep watch.”

“But you said it was wrong. Two men cannot lie together.” Eliasz was gasping, his heart rate spiking as he hallucinated, talking to someone who wasn’t there.

Paladin tried to reorient Eliasz in reality. “It’s Paladin. I am not a man. I am a bot. I belong to the African Federation.”

Eliasz started to cry, the salt of his tears indistinguishable from the salt of his sweat. Paladin didn’t know what to say. It was unlikely the man would remember any of this in a few hours. Eliasz had already gone rigid with ecstasy again, his mouth slack and wordless. The bot did not resist when the man faced him, hooking one arm and one leg over his carapace, clinging as hard as he could. It felt good, as if Eliasz were finally telling Paladin everything he wanted to know.