Autonomous

13 RETCON

JULY 13, 2144

“When are we going to run away together… master?” Threezed whispered hotly in Jack’s ear, appending the client’s honorific with a sharp dip in his voice. They were naked and her thighs formed a cradle for his slim hips. Though her thoughts had been vagued out by postorgasmic pleasure, Jack was instantly alert and dismayed.

She rolled on her side to dislodge him. “What is your goddamn problem, Threezed?”

“I just don’t want you to leave me here when you guys figure out that mesolimbic pathway thing.” Threezed traced one puckered curve of the scar between Jack’s breasts. She was still slightly damp with his sweat. “What am I supposed to do here?”

They lay on an unfurled sofa bed next to stacks of old servers and fabbers. After two straight days of coding and testing, Jack was exhausted. She should have been sleeping instead of fucking. She twisted around in Threezed’s embrace and groped through her sack for an attention-focuser. Finding a blister pack, she popped out a shiny silver bead of pirated Vigilizer—that would clear her mind so she could start working again.

But when the drug kicked in, she found that all her ideas were about Threezed.

“What if I bought you a franchise here? I have enough to pay for a basic citizenship package that would let you work and go to school in Saskatoon. And if you wanted to move somewhere else in the Zone, it’s a pretty cheap upgrade.”

Threezed propped himself up on his elbows and looked thoughtful. “Do you have a franchise here, too?”

“I had one when I lived here. Now I have an international business franchise that gives me rights in five economic coalitions. I’m covered pretty much anywhere I go.”

Although she’d broken many laws in her time, Jack had never lived without a franchise. Her parents bought her one the moment she was born. They had a family package that guaranteed all the Chen children could own property, apply for jobs, go to school, and move to another city if they wanted. Though Lucky Lake was small, it was still incorporated—the city used money from local enfranchisement deals to pay for police and emergency responders, as well as regular mote net dusting to keep all their devices robustly connected.

If the Chens hadn’t had a successful farm, Jack would have turned eighteen with no franchise, and no hope of working unless she entered contract. She’d known a few kids at school in that situation, mostly Natives who got indentured to jobs in habitat management or mining up north. For the first time in decades, she recalled how her school principal had described this arrangement as “cultural enrichment.” The kids under contract would live in dorms near historic Native communities, earning their franchises while immersed in the traditional landscapes of their ancestors. Jack hadn’t thought about her old high school classmates in years. As the principal’s words echoed in her memory and she looked into Threezed’s face, she realized how much bullshit that had been. Some of those kids had probably died up on the Arctic coast without ever owning anything, even themselves. She wondered whether the indenture system had its own version of piracy, and tried to imagine what that would be.

Threezed had rolled on his back and was looking at the electroluminescent threads knit into the stiff panels of the ceiling.

“Think about it, OK?” Jack sat up and sealed the vent on her coveralls. “Saskatoon’s a pretty nice city. Not a bad place to be enfranchised.” Before Threezed could reply, she dropped down the loft ladder.

Med was at her bench, fabbers and sample fridges scattered around her. The bot appeared to be talking to a tiny white mouse cupped in her hands while David watched with his usual serious expression. It was 5:45 a.m.

When Med and David ignored her, Jack made a stab at conversation. “Why are you talking to the mouse?”

“Trying to see if we’ve erased the right memory.” David gestured up a projection of the mouse’s brain. It hovered over the table, slowly rotating, swollen to the size of a basketball and crackling with colors signifying neural pathways and molecular transformations. “We used Zacuity to get Beady addicted to Professor Cohen’s voice, and now we’re exposing him to the addictive process while dosed with Retcon.”

The Vigilizer felt good, but Jack was still grateful when Catalyst arrived with a thermos of coffee and steaming buns from the co-op bakery on Broadway. Nobody else was working in the lab at this hour, but somehow the Retcon team had gotten the idea that this project was special. It had snared Med a coveted job in the lab, for one thing. And there was also the matter of Jack’s mysterious presence, as well as Krish’s involvement. The situation clearly merited all-nighters.

“Don’t you ever eat or sleep, Med?” Catalyst asked with a grin.

Med returned Beady to a small cage next to her. “No.” Her voice was casual. “I’m a robot.” Something about the formal way she said “robot” made it immediately clear she wasn’t joking.

Catalyst was about to stuff a hunk of warm, cinnamon-coated bread into her mouth, and suddenly stopped. “You are? How did you get to be a professor?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of the Cohen Lab at Anchorage?” David asked archly, pleased to show he knew more than a grad student. “They make biobots that are raised autonomous, just like humans.”

Threezed had come down from the loft. He reached for a bun from the bag, pushing past David in a way that seemed deliberately calculated to be rude. “Really?” he asked sarcastically, finding Jack’s eyes with his own. “Is that how humans are raised? Autonomous?”

David looked confused, but obviously felt that he should put this question to rest, especially since it had been posed by a person who was clearly not part of the lab hierarchy. “Yes,” he said in a slightly condescending tone. “Humans do not require the same financial investment to reproduce as robots, and therefore they are only indentured as adults, by choice.”

“Thanks for the little property lesson, sweetie.” Threezed rolled his eyes. Swiping an unused mobile off the table, he ambled out of the lab.

“Sometimes you are a complete fuckwit, David,” Catalyst muttered.

“Well, sometimes you are, too!” he shot back.

Med shrugged and analyzed the real-time images she was receiving from the local network, where data was coming from a haze of microscopic devices spreading like fluid through Beady’s brain, analyzing what it was doing under the influence of Retcon. She shared the whole thing out to a holo desktop they’d created, creating a 3-D image that she sliced with a clipped motion of her hand.

Beady made scrabbling noises in his cage.

Presently Krish arrived, also bearing coffee and buns. He sat down with the group like a student, unpacking his breakfast and tapping out a few commands on the desktop. “How’s it going? Looks like we’ve got some new data.”

Jack wiped her hand through the air, pushing some unanalyzed brain slices to Krish.

“I saw Threezed leaving with one of our lab mobiles. What is he doing?”

“I believe that he is learning about autonomy,” Med replied.

Threezed returned in the early afternoon, wearing a faded University of Saskatchewan hoodie and looking a lot less sullen. Jack nodded at Threezed and he nodded back: fight over. Their conversation that morning had changed the connection between them, made the whole thing feel less desperate.

Beady was feeling better, too. It appeared they’d edited out the memory that made him seek Med’s voice at all costs, even his own life. His dopamine receptors were growing back nicely, too.

Jack addressed the group. “I think we’re ready to soft launch now. Let’s publish the Retcon repository and get some feedback.”

Med looked up. “I’ve never pushed a drug out like this—without trials.”

“We already know Retcon works in simulations and on Beady here.” Jack patted the roof of the mouse cage. “That’s a good start. Next we’ll get results from docs testing it on subjects who are already at risk of death.”

“So it’s an informal Phase I drug trial, where you test to see whether it’s deadly to humans,” Med mused.

“That’s true. There is a very small chance it could kill people.”

Catalyst interrupted. “That’s a risk with any drug, and we all know companies like Zaxy push shit out on the market all the time without taking them through trials. They get an exemption for drugs administered by a licensed Zaxy provider.”

“But our providers won’t have access to the kinds of medical facilities Zaxy would have,” Med said.

“This is pretty much how open pharma works, Med,” Krish said gently. “And I think you already know a group of subjects who are at risk of death.”

Everybody was looking at the bot now, waiting. She was lead on the Retcon project, and they wouldn’t do anything without her final approval.

“Alright.”

A muted cheer went up from the group.

“Now, who volunteers to write the documentation?” The cheers turned into groans and laughter. Eventually David offered his services, and Catalyst said she’d put together a list of Freeculture groups to contact about the specs. Med and Jack retired to Krish’s office to message Med’s former colleagues in Yellowknife about that informal Phase I.

A reply came back in under a minute: There were still six patients in Yellowknife with crippling urges to clean houses, enter data, even unload boxes from trucks. The doctors wanted the specs and documentation for Retcon, and Med’s former supervisor promised he’d send all the results to Free Lab.

At that moment, Catalyst tapped hesitantly on the glass doors. “Sorry to interrupt, but I just saw a really weird message on the Iqaluit geneng server.”

Jack and Krish looked at each other.

“What do you mean?” asked Med.

“There was an article about how that solar farm explosion was actually part of an IPC witch hunt for suspected patent pirates in the northern Zone.” She paused, looking guiltily at Jack. “Including one named Jack, whose picture looked a little like you.”

Nobody said anything, so finally the grad student spoke up again, timidly. “Are you Captain Jack from The Bilious Pills?”

Jack and Krish burst into laughter, reenacting a little diversionary tactic they’d perfected decades ago, during the height of their underground fame. When authority figures or outsiders asked if they were part of The Bilious Pills, their cover story was incredulity. Somehow, they always managed to do it in a way that didn’t sound staged.

“Well, my name is Jack,” she said, still wearing a grin. “But I’m not the captain of anything.”

“I can’t believe the IPC still cares about anyone from The Bilious Pills,” Krish added with a chortle. “It’s been defunct for… how long?”

“Twenty-seven years,” Med said. And then, as if to explain the odd specificity of her knowledge, she added, “When I was growing up, I read a local copy on the Cohen Lab server.”

“I see,” said Jack.

SUMMER 2119

Two and a half decades ago, the entire Free Lab knew she was Captain Jack. And it wasn’t long after she and Lyle started sleeping together that everybody knew about that, too. Maybe it was because Lyle was as antic as her tattoo was static. She made no secret of her infatuation with Jack, grabbing her for kisses in the hall outside the lab and pulling her merrily into a wide circle of fashionably rebellious friends.

On Saturday evenings, Lyle would sashay into the Free Lab wearing old-fashioned red lipstick, wrapped in some crazy textile made out of silver feathers and red algae.

“Your chariot is here, daaaarling!” she would call to Jack, and everybody in the lab would watch them leave arm in arm. It was an overt display that made Jack uncomfortable, because she’d always courted notoriety under a pseudonym. But it made her proud, too. She had a hot date instead of a long, numb night with her mobile.

Lyle got away with a lot of things because she was so damn smart. Her doctoral research on molecular motors had won an award for the most promising first work from a young scholar, and had already become the basis for several therapies that were now in development. When she scored a postdoc that she could take to the lab of her choice, her decision to join the Free Lab made headlines in the science text repos—and even one or two gossip feeds that loved her bad-girl reputation.

Though she spent days in the lab doing research, Lyle focused her restless attention in so many directions that she sometimes took sleep relievers and stayed awake for a week at a time. She was part of a social network that included artists and activists who were always hatching what they called “disruptive strategies” aimed at undermining all forms of authority: cultural, economic, scientific. Mostly their disruptions involved artistic fashion shows full of uselessly beautiful GMOs and tissue mods that said something about global recolonization.

Jack didn’t exactly fit into the group, but she got a free pass with even the most dedicated disruptors of the bunch. Her pirate-costumed arrest made her a subversive hero. None of Lyle’s friends had ever been jailed for their activism, though a few of them had been briefly detained. Their positions of relative privilege led to endless conversations about who among their circle could legitimately claim the right to speak for “victims of the system.”

When Lyle’s friends walked into the Broadway Noodle House on Saturday night, all modded and gussied up, they were a game world come to life. Their gleaming ultralight armor and festive textiles always got attention. They got more attention still when, around midnight, they arrived at their true destination: a clubhouse for hackers called Buried Spaceship.

Sure, it was packed with scenesters, kids who just liked the mad science atmosphere and weren’t actually interested in science itself. But Jack still loved that place. The black, soaring walls were flecked with stars, planets, and a massive mural depicting the jagged, icy edge of a crater that the “ship” had smashed into. From the ceiling’s high, ancient beams hung an antique uncrewed aerial vehicle, its slim body and fat nose suspended from ultrastrong translucent wire. The long, polished-foam bar curved around a row of props designed to look like antique replicators out of an old Star Trek movie. A few even had fabbers in them, just to give the full effect. People who worked the bar delighted in asking newcomers if they would like some Romulan Ale.

Memory often favors the seemingly mundane. Jack could barely recall the massive Buried Spaceship birthday party for Lyle that had been weeks in the making. But her mind retained every trivial detail of one random spring night at the club, when the weather still called for toques and parkas. She and Lyle had been dating for a couple of months, and were deliriously embracing as they listened to reverberating beats a local band scratched out of the shimmering air, their arms and hands glittering with sensors. Lights were strobing over the UAV, its life of surveillance converted into an afterlife of psychedelic crime.

That’s when Jack caught a brief glimpse of the two of them dancing in a slice of mirror at the edge of the dance floor, looking for a moment like strangers.

Lyle’s head bobbed, a manic grin on her face, her body swaying in a frothy dress of wire mesh and a bright, sheer polymer. Jack, wearing nothing but a frayed Freeculture T-shirt and dark pants, threw her arms wide, not caring that everyone knew who she was—the lowly researcher whose only accomplishments were a dead text repo and an arrest record. At that moment, watching herself jump up and down with Lyle, she realized that the woman she saw in the mirror was not a loser. Her life was going somewhere. Maybe not where she’d expected, but somewhere good. Spinning around, she saw the heavens sprayed across the walls and realized that she was no longer living in the trashed remnants of her old expectations.

Back at Free Lab, Jack was too absorbed in her work and too blissed out over Lyle to notice that Krish had gone from politely distant to politely hostile. At last, over one of their increasingly infrequent “checking in” dinners, he came out and said it. “I think this thing between you and Lyle is really bad for the Free Lab.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” He’d caught her by surprise.

“Lyle is brilliant, but she’s crazy. I’m worried what’s going to happen if things go bad between you.”

“You think she’ll take off and you’ll lose her grant money?”

“Give me a break, Jack. I’m more worried what would happen if she stayed and you had to work together.”

“You and I are working together.”

He stared at the remains of a sandwich on his plate. “That’s different. Neither of us is the infamous Lyle Al-Ajou.”

Much later that night, curled together for warmth under a self-heating blanket, Jack and Lyle talked about how Krish was obviously just jealous—of their relationship, their futures, everything.

Lyle thought Krish was right about one thing, though. She was crazy. She came from a long line of crazy women. “My mother says that smart women are always crazy. Maybe she’s right.”

Jack tried to wrap her body completely around Lyle’s, like a shield. “That sounds like junk science from two hundred years ago,” she whispered.

Lyle shook her head. “No,” she insisted. “You don’t understand.”

Her words came out in a chaotic rush. When Lyle was little, her grandmother had lost touch with reality, the neural connections in her brain clogged by dementia. At the time, there was no therapy for this particular kind of protein buildup around the synapses. The old woman thought she was still marching to get the vote for women in the Gulf. Lyle would wake up to the sound of her grandmother shouting feminist slogans in their living room. Sometimes she would just walk out the door and shout in the street.

Lyle’s mother and aunts were humiliated. First, they tried to hide their mother behind locked doors, and then they sent her to a hospice. Each of them, in their own way, believed that their mother had been insane even before the dementia set in. Some of Lyle’s aunts were deeply religious, outraging their mother by covering their heads and faces when they drove out to the voting centers to support right-wing candidates.

But Lyle’s mother didn’t care about politics; she just wanted to be a doctor, so she went to college in Dubai to study medicine. Once there, she discovered something Lyle’s feminist grandmother had never anticipated: Suffrage didn’t mean equal opportunity. Her professors expected her to study microbiology until she met a marriageable man. When she demanded more lab time, they gingerly offered sympathy and fatherly advice. After years of frustration, she gave into their gaslighting with a bitterness matched only by her ambitions for her brilliant daughter Lyle.

As soon as Lyle turned thirteen, her mother sent her to an elite prep school in the Zone, far from home and friends—and far from the cities where women couldn’t be scientists. She only contacted Lyle to inquire about her grades, her studies, her progress. If Lyle admitted to having friends or interests outside school, her mother threatened to cut her off.

Lyle had fulfilled her mother’s dreams in one way. She was a biotech prodigy, and never stopped experimenting, even after the lab was closed for the night. When she visited home the summer she turned eighteen, she had a depilated, tattooed head and flowers growing out of the backs of her hands. Her cousins called her a slut. But her mother was convinced the truth was worse: Lyle was spending too much time on politics to be a real scientist. She needed to do more than play with synbio fashions to prove her dedication to medicine.

Dependent on her family to pay for her franchise in the Zone, Lyle listened to them, and covered up her flowers every time she visited the Gulf. As soon as she could support herself on the Free Lab grant, she blocked all incoming messages from her family. But every day, she felt her mother’s judgment, as if her mitochondrial DNA contained a list of everything that was wrong with her.

“It makes me crazy,” Lyle said, for perhaps the fourth time that night.

Jack looked into the mascara-smudged puddles of Lyle’s eyes and saw only the remnants of an anguished childhood, a rough history. Something that would ease over time.

“You’re not crazy. You’re just dealing with a lot of shit.”

“It is a lot of shit,” Lyle sobbed, her tears growing cold as they ran across Jack’s throat onto the pillows beneath them. “I feel like I’m carrying out her evil plan even though I’m doing what I love.”

In that moment, their relationship went from hot diversion to long-term pact. They talked about moving away together, escaping the cage of academia and doing geneng in the wild. A lot of Zone-educated kids from the Gulf had settled in the northern Federation, and Lyle had friends there. As her tears dried, she talked about how amazing Casablanca was, full of top scientists, and how easy it would be for engineers with their training to find interesting work.

Eventually, Lyle’s dream of Casablanca felt more real to both of them than a future at the Free Lab. When summer came to the prairies, covering the hills outside the city in millions of yellow canola flowers, they decided to leave.

The “checking in” dinner with Krish after their decision did not go well.

“What the fuck are you doing? Throwing away your career again?” Krish scream-whispered angrily. They were at their usual sandwich place, but Krish was self-conscious because a group of his Free Lab students was drinking in the corner and he didn’t want them to hear about his personal life.

“I’m not throwing away my career. I’m going to get a job doing geneng—you know, in the real world beyond academia?”

“That would be a waste.” Krish said each word as if it were its own sentence, looking furious and sad. “Jack, you are brilliant. You could be making a real difference, engineering therapies that will be released under an open license. They’ll never let you do that at some private company.”

“I’m never going to stop making open drugs, Krish.” She was suddenly touched by his concern, and squeezed his hand. “Sequence wants to be free.”

JULY 13, 2144

Jack had to do a little business before she left Saskatoon. Taking a quick walk by the river, she left the remainder of her stash at the top of an archway below the Broadway Bridge. Minutes later, she received an influx of Zone credit, transferred in impeccably anonymous fashion.

She had some money, her truck was charged, and she’d packed her things. Now she’d have to deal with the hard part: getting rid of Threezed.

Jack found him using the Free Lab mobile he’d taken, sitting gracefully on the broad, sunny stairs leading up to the lab. He was still wearing the U of S hoodie, which suddenly aroused her curiosity.

“Where did you get that hoodie?”

“Some kids who run a used clothing store on Broadway gave it to me.” Then he added, casually, “They might give me a job, too. I told them I’d come back with my enfranchisement creds.”

That was a good sign. Jack smiled. “I’ve got the credits to start your franchise. And if you ever want to go to university, I’m sure Med or Krish could help you apply. You could start growing a new identity and be eligible for more jobs later.”

“I know you’re leaving and you don’t want me to come with you.” His face held no expression.

“It’s not safe. I need to disappear.”

“Where else are you going to get what I can give you?” He used his half-sarcastic street hustler voice, stretching back and lifting the bottom of his hoodie to reveal a flat stretch of stomach.

She ruffled his hair and tried to keep smiling. “The IPC is already sending out terrorist alerts on me.”

He stared at his mobile, ignoring her, fingers twitching as if he were texting. Maybe he was.

“I’m going to leave you with enough credit that you’ll be fine as long as you get a job in the next month. I bet you can stay at Med’s. It’s not like she needs a bed, anyway.” She leaned down to kiss him, and he responded with a chaste peck on the lips.

“I’m sure Krish will let you keep that mobile. Secure it and I’ll pass those credits over.”

“OK.” He looked resigned. “Thanks for a good time.”

She headed up the steps to the Free Lab. Checking her messages absently, she saw that Threezed had texted her.

And thanks for killing that asshole who slaved me.

For a second, she was flooded with intense, contradictory feelings—for Threezed, for people long gone. Then the door closed behind her, and Jack forced herself to stare straight ahead at the lab benches. It made no difference whether she loved Threezed or just thought he was a nice fuck. She couldn’t do anything about it either way.

Luckily, Med had distracting news from Yellowknife. It turned out that Retcon worked astonishingly fast. After just a few hours, the three nonplacebo patients had stopped seeking out their addictive processes and were eating again. They had patchy memories of the past few days, but so far no additional cognitive problems had been identified.

The bot wanted to tell Jack more about the specifics of how Retcon affected the patients’ brains, and David wanted to point out all the ways he’d improved on the typical documentation for an open drug. But she couldn’t listen right now. The Retcon Project was entirely open, so she could follow their progress by checking their code repository on the Free Lab server.

Med agreed to keep an eye on Threezed, and Krish told the Free Lab sysadmin to release the mobile to him.

Threezed had two friends to rely on, at least.

That idea kept Jack calm as she eased her truck onto the highway. The sinking sun ripped shadows from everything, creating elongated skeletons of darkness that were almost comically menacing. Bales of switchgrass were curled into perfect rolls at the sides of the road, waiting to be loaded on trains and turned into fuel. Tangles of brush still bore dark clusters of tart Saskatoon berries. The air was warm, but not dusty-hot, and the sky was a sheer, brutal blue softened at its edges by rolling prairie hills. The view caused Jack to ponder, for possibly the thousandth time, why people said Saskatchewan was flat.

Now the city was gone, and nothing but the foam road lay ahead.