Autonomous

14 OTHER TRUE SELF

JULY 12, 2144

When Eliasz’ brain crackled into alertness, his body tried to kill Paladin. Still half-asleep and panicked, Eliasz twitched to activate his perimeter weapons, then savagely grabbed the bot around the neck. The tiny cot creaked as their weight shifted further to one side. Though it was impossible for Eliasz to strangle Paladin, any movement would set off a powerful electrical pulse from Eliasz’ perimeter. Not deadly, but possibly damaging at close range. Paladin held perfectly still, his head even with Eliasz’, analyzing minute shifts in his facial muscles to determine when hysteria began to lose its grip on him.

“I have already analyzed the drug Frankie put in your system, Eliasz,” Paladin vocalized eventually. “It was carefully engineered to have no long-term effects, and is not addictive. In fact, it contains an anti-addictive element that should prevent most people from ever craving it again.”

With a slight tremor, Eliasz withdrew his hands from Paladin’s neck and powered down the weapon. “Fuck, I’m so sorry, buddy,” he whispered. “I knew something like that might happen, and I should have warned you about it.” He sat up, leaning his damp back against the wall, keeping himself carefully positioned behind Paladin’s still-reclining form. “I really need some water.”

The bot took only a second to drop to the floor and achieve a standing position next to the bed. He walked to the small potable water faucet, its shiny spout positioned beneath the gray water showerhead. On a washing stand drilled into the wall over a drain, there was one foam cup. As he filled the cup, he watched Eliasz covering his chest with a light shirt. Paladin decided that he would retain, but rarely access, the file he’d saved of the words Eliasz used to describe Paladin’s always-uncovered body.

“I know it seems counterintuitive, but it was actually a good thing I was unpatched against Frankie’s drug.” He took a long drink, draining the cup. “She was hazing us, and it would have looked suspicious if I’d been too invulnerable.”

Eliasz placed a now steady hand on the bot’s shoulder when Paladin sat on the cot next to him. “We did good last night. Did you get any intel?”

“Actually, I believe I did.” Paladin told Eliasz about Frankie’s connection with The Bilious Pills, the publication whose terrorist activities had landed Jack in prison. Everyone who had committed to the group’s text repo had used pseudonyms, but the IPC had data files on most of them. Though The Bilious Pills had been officially disbanded after Jack’s arrest, the pirates behind it appeared to have maintained close connections over the years.

Bluebeard had been part of the group along with Frankie and Jack. So had a human-computer interface engineer in Vancouver called Actin, real name Bobby Broner. Krish Patel, a renowned biomedical researcher in Saskatoon, was known as Captain Nemo. Another former contributor was a doctor in Yellowknife, called Posthuman, real name Malika Ellul. Two more were dead.

“It’s possible Jack is still working with the Pills, and one of them is harboring her,” Paladin finished.

Eliasz looked dubious. “She may be a pirate, but Jack’s not stupid. By now she knows we’re onto her, and she’ll be focused entirely on saving her ass. Staying with somebody whose name is so publicly connected to hers would be foolish.”

“I don’t believe they are publicly connected,” Paladin explained. “Nearly all information about The Bilious Pills has been removed from the public net. I had to get my data from IPC intelligence.”

Eliasz’ hand still rested absently on Paladin’s shoulder. “OK, good to know. Let’s work on Frankie for now, and keep our options open with the others.”

It was still early, and after last night’s party, none of their potential sources would likely be awake. Eliasz was famished, and announced that they’d kill two birds with one stone by going to a breakfast hangout near the Twin Center. It was a postparty spot in the neighborhood, a place where they could continue exploiting the connections they’d begun making the night before. Eliasz sponged off in the shower, and they headed downtown. The air was filled with pollen, along with stray molecules from the sea.

Paladin was thinking about his brain.

Early that morning he had discovered a small chunk of data from Kagu Robotics Foundry waiting for him on the Camp Tunisia servers. Apparently his request was so unusual that it had been assigned to a botadmin, who appended a note:

We don’t normally give out personal information about organ donors to our biobots program. But because you are a recipient of the organ, we have determined that we can release some information to you, provided you accept this property management wrapper that will prevent you from sharing sensitive data with anyone else.

Attached was a file, accessible only inside an app designed to contain rights-protected media and trade secrets. Paladin opened it, and discovered that the more he knew, the less he could tell anyone.

His brain had once belonged to a soldier named Dikeledi [Last Name Withheld]. Like Paladin, she had been indentured to the African Federation. The file said she had died in the line of duty, but did not say how. Obviously by some method that had spared her brain, which had been removed from her body the day Paladin was completed. He had no memory of Dikeledi’s brain being installed, only that he could recognize the difference between thousands of human faces, and instantly read the emotional content of their expressions when they flashed before his sensors in tests.

At the time of his construction, a Kagu botadmin told Paladin the brain allowed him to do all that facial-recognition processing. But the bot arms at the foundry told him that the brain was unnecessary—just an advertising gimmick. A line that Fang had repeated. Paladin was left unsure what this brain really meant to him, and why he needed it.

Paladin poked at the software wrapper containing his knowledge, trying to determine what he could tell Eliasz about it. Depending on how he phrased it, he might be able to convey more information than the rights management software intended.

“I have some personal news I would like your opinion about,” Paladin vocalized experimentally. “I have received information from the Kagu Robotics Foundry about my brain. It came from a person in the Federation.” That much was public information. He could not say whose brain it was, but he could assign a pronoun to her. “She gave me this brain, but I am not sure if it matters. Other bots say it’s just an advertising gimmick.”

“She? Who is she?” Eliasz stopped beneath a palm tree, his hair thumbed by a hot breeze.

“I can’t tell you.”

“But do you know?”

“Yes.”

Eliasz grinned and rapped on Paladin’s carapace over the brain, as he had done before. “That’s so fantastic! Now you know who you really are!” He paused, his face a chaos of emotion that passed quickly into one of his rare grins. “Who would have guessed you were a woman?”

The two began to walk again, Eliasz occasionally looking at Paladin and refraining from saying something.

From endlessly researching the word “faggot,” and finally reaching an approximate understanding, Paladin knew that human gender was part of sexual desire. But he was starting to perceive that gender was a way of seeing the world, too. Military bots, especially ones with armored bodies like Paladin’s, were almost always called “he.” People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition.

That’s why humans had given him a gender before he even had a name.

As they approached the breakfast shop, Paladin perceived trace elements of seared meat borne by the wind. It came from an imitation British pub, complete with a sign announcing “THE KINDS OF BREAKFASTS AUTHENTIC ENGLISH WOULD EAT IN THE DAYS OF QUEEN VICTORIA.” This early in the morning, the patrons were sparse, but there were a few families and a big group of disheveled partygoers, their bodies still thrumming with the drugs and hormones they’d processed the night before.

Before they entered, Eliasz turned to Paladin and gazed upward into the bot’s face. The man was searching, the bot realized, for the kinds of expressions Paladin always looked for in human faces.

“Should I start calling you ‘she’?”

As a robot, he didn’t care what pronoun people used; as Fang had pointed out, gender was something humans projected onto robots. Changing his pronoun would make absolutely no difference at all. It would merely substitute one signifier for another. But then Paladin considered the implications of Eliasz’ facial expression, which at that moment hovered between desire and fear. Of course: If Paladin were female, Eliasz would not be a faggot. And maybe then Eliasz could touch Paladin again, the way he had last night, giving and receiving pleasure in an undocumented form of emotional feedback loop.

Paladin realized that this was the first time he’d been given a choice about something that might change his life. He thought about it for many seconds before replying.

“Yes,” the bot vocalized.

Their arms pressed together as they entered the pub, and Paladin took a microsample of the man’s blood. Eliasz’ oxytocin levels had risen slightly—this time, without pharmaceutical intervention.

They found the partygoers inside. Some of them had been high on pirated Ellondra when Frankie dosed Eliasz.

“Hey, it’s Aleksy!” A man with pale skin doffed his bright red hat theatrically. He turned to the group. “Last night was so epic. Aleksy was patched against Ellondra, so Frankie owned him up with a custom chemical! Oh, man.” Then he grinned at Eliasz. “Your bot had to carry you home!”

Eliasz gave a sheepish shrug. “Yeah, I was really out of it. But at least I wasn’t knocked over by something as simple as Ellondra.”

Red Hat warbled a laugh and gestured for them to come over. “I’ll tell you a little secret: None of us is actually concerned about being vulnerable to Ellondra. That stuff is great.”

Eliasz and Paladin dragged up some chairs, pushing into the group next to Mecha and Slavoj, who didn’t mind having more excuses to bump into each other and giggle.

Red Hat turned out to be Hox2, the person who ran the space in the Twin Center where they’d gone last night. Another group of bleary-looking people in transparent armor arrived, and Hox2 retold the story of his night, with more flourishes at the moment of the drugging. Hox2 finally ended his tale by gesturing at Paladin.

“Does he always carry you home from parties?”

“She,” replied Eliasz, around a mouthful of eggs.

“What?” Hox2 and the people in transparent armor looked confused, while Slavoj and Mecha started to kiss.

“She’s a she,” Eliasz explained. “And I believe this is the first time she’s ever carried me home. So, do you live in that place where you had the party?”

That managed to change the subject. The basement space was obviously one of Hox2’s favorite subjects, maybe even more than coercive drugging. “Technically, it’s a space for doing lab work, so I can’t live there, right?” He raised his eyebrows conspiratorially. “It used to be an official free lab, but now we let people develop under mixed licenses. People have to make money on what they’re doing, right?”

This comment set off what sounded like a well-worn debate at the table, with some people arguing that a free lab would be better for social progress, and others taking the view that nobody would have any incentive to invent things without patents. Breakfast wore on, and Mecha got up to leave. Hox2 stood with her, straightening his hat, and announced that he had to get back to the space and clean up.

“You should come by later this afternoon,” he said to Eliasz. “Frankie is doing a presentation on some free tools for analyzing protein functions.” As Hox2 walked away, he patted Paladin’s head. “Yes, you can bring him too!”

“Her,” Eliasz muttered to his cold cup of tea.

Presently, Eliasz tapped his wrist and beamed some cash to one of the people in transparent armor, who was collecting everybody’s money for the meal. Then he stood up, too. “I’m gonna catch a nap and then go check out Frankie’s presentation.”

Slavoj waved at both of them. “Bye, Aleksy and Pack! See you later!”

They walked back to the hotel in silence, avoiding the egg-shaped electric cars that taxied people through the streets, and threaded their way through sidewalks crowded with shoppers.

As soon as they entered their room, Eliasz turned to Paladin and grabbed her body with an urgency the bot now recognized. She wrapped her arms gently around him and bent her head so that he could kiss the fine mesh over her voice synthesizer. There were no piezosensors on the place Eliasz would know as her mouth, so she felt nothing of his kisses except a kind of light pressure in the structural frame of her head. But her arms and legs could smell molecules on the man’s body that came from salt and sexual arousal.

“I knew there was a reason I wanted you, Paladin,” he whispered. “I must have somehow sensed that you were a woman.”

There it was: the anthropomorphization. But did it really matter if Eliasz didn’t understand that bots had no gender? If Eliasz saw her as a woman, Paladin could have what she’d been wanting for days on end. It would make things easier for both of them, even if the truth was more complicated than Eliasz realized.

Eliasz ran his hands over her carapace, finding the edges of her armor plates and trying to reach between them to feel the woven fibers of Paladin’s muscles. “You feel so good.” Pressing his body against hers, he powered down his entire defense perimeter. The sensation made Paladin ache with fear and protectiveness; she was the only thing that kept him from danger now.

Eliasz’ pulse elevated and he pulled away from her. “Come to bed with me, Paladin,” he said, grabbing her hand. As he stumbled into the main room, she followed, watching him remove all his clothes and a translucent web of sensors, which he left in an invisible tangle on the floor.

He led her to the bed. She allowed him to push her down on it and climb on top of her, his chest blocking the apertures for her guns. His flushed face pressed against the curve of her neck. It was the first time she had felt him completely naked against her, and she placed her hand against the knotted muscles of his lower back as he strained and sighed in a pleasure she knew she’d induced as surely as Frankie’s drug had.

When at last Eliasz’ heartbeat slowed, he lay sweating in the crook of her arm, running his fingers across her other hand, the one Lee had modded.

“What does that feel like to you?” he asked sleepily.

“It feels like… pressure and movement. I can sample your blood and see that there’s prolactin in it.”

“Does it feel good?”

“Knowing that it is you, and that I am keeping you safe, makes me feel good.”

He sat up a little more, looking at her face. “Is there a way that bots can… come? Have an orgasm?”

Paladin thought for a while, considering what Eliasz meant by “orgasm,” and trying to find some kind of equivalent experience.

“I am only a few months old, so my knowledge of undocumented functions is incomplete. But I have a program that I downloaded from the bot server at Camp Tunisia that causes some of the same physical symptoms as an orgasm.”

Eliasz’ heartbeats came faster again. “Can I watch you while you play it?” He pressed his body against hers the way he had earlier, growing aroused.

“It would not be safe while your weapons are off. The file forces me to reboot.”

The man jumped up and settled the light net of sensors over his head, waiting for it to weave itself tightly across his skin, connecting with his subcutaneous network. “Lie on your side and I can cover you,” he whispered, curling around her torso and head, protecting most of her legs with his own. She checked to be sure that his perimeter was on a secure setting, though it was not armed against her.

“I will play it now,” she vocalized. She opened the original executable and it began to run, the worm rapidly replicating a few pieces of nonsense data inside her as she watched the scene stolen from a game world, of herself rescuing a man on the battlefield. She felt Eliasz’ hands and body moving against her carapace distantly, adding to the general sense of wrong inputs flooding her sensors. At last she was overwhelmed: Her mind filled with errors, and a pleasurable confusion raced through her before she crashed in his arms.

When she rebooted, Eliasz was still in a defensive posture around her, stroking the shielding around her brain.

“Awake now?” He kissed the back of her head.

“Yes.”

“Great, because I really do have to sleep.”

“It is safe now.”

His grip on her relaxed, and she stole away from the bed to stand guard at the center of the room.

As the day began to cool, Eliasz woke up, checked his messages, and took another sponge bath before they headed out to Frankie’s presentation.

“Pay attention to anything Frankie does on the network, and look for a way to access her messages on it,” he said. “We just need positive confirmation that she’s been communicating with Jack recently. If so, we’ll proceed to a full interrogation.”

When they arrived at Hox2’s place, it looked like it was transitioning between trashed party spot and community lab. The wet lab was still partly a wet bar, and people were helping themselves to last night’s beer. Frankie was uploading data to a projector cube in the center of a long lab bench that bisected the dance floor. She laughed when she looked up and saw Eliasz and Paladin arriving. “Feeling a little hung over, Aleksy?”

“Not so much that I wasn’t able to get over here to see if you can do anything other than dose unwary engineers.”

“I’m flattered.” She returned to gesturing at the projector.

Paladin tuned local radio wave transmissions, looking for any signs that Frankie’s projector was networked in a way that would give the bot access to whatever server she was using. Just as Frankie’s audience started plunking down cups of beer on the bench, Paladin found her opportunity. Frankie was networking her glasses with a protein synthesizer she’d pulled down from a shelf. Monitoring the exchange, Paladin managed to capture the authentication sequence the synthesizer used to connect with the glasses.

Presently, Frankie reached a point in the presentation when she no longer needed to use the synthesizer. She severed the connection. Now Paladin could send the authentication code to Frankie’s glasses, which had already been set up to receive connections from the synthesizer without question. Paladin was in. Jumping through directories quickly, she located a batch of recent messages stored on the device and encrypted with a very old algorithm that took only seconds to break. One of the messages was clearly from Jack, though its origins had been obscured—it had been routed through a server located in a research lab on the Moon.

Stop manufacturing that Zacuity shit until I get back. Very dangerous. Lots of fatal side effects in the Zone. Also, don’t expect me in fall—I may have to lie low for a while.

Frankie had replied: No problems on my end. Be safe.

It was time for the question and answer portion of Frankie’s presentation, which soon turned into a debate over Adder, the language she’d used to write the tool that error-checked phosphorylation pathways. Three developers sitting together at one end of the bench were extremely taken with a new language called Ammolite that had been written last year by some researchers at a free lab in the AU. They took turns pointing out how Ammolite would solve some of the problems with data structures in her tool.

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” groaned Mecha, who had settled next to Paladin. “I can’t believe this is going to turn into another Adder versus Ammolite debate.” Then she raised her voice, aiming her irritation at the group of Ammolite enthusiasts. “She wrote the damn tool in Adder—get over it. Can we please talk about fucking phosphorylation?”

“Yeah, I think we’re getting off topic at this point,” Frankie agreed.

This seemed to be the signal for general talk to break out, and for several people to stand up and pour more of last night’s beer into cups.

Paladin shared her intel with Eliasz’ perimeter, while he did his best to ingratiate himself with Frankie and WTF, who had just come down from the loft.

“I could really have used your tool in my last job,” Eliasz said to Frankie. “What do you call it? I want to find it on the net.” She ignored him, conferring in a low voice with WTF. Eliasz feigned casual disinterest, checking messages on his wrist. He shot a look at Paladin when he saw the data. Good work, his expression said.

Finally Frankie turned back to Eliasz. “I haven’t released it yet, kid. But I might throw what I have up on the Hox server tonight.” She walked upstairs without a second glance.

Mecha, however, was eager to talk. “Frankie’s very perfectionist about her tools. Don’t feel bad that she doesn’t want to let you see it. That’s just Frankie.”

Eliasz watched Frankie’s tuft of pink hair and WTF’s lumpy skull as they entered the loft together. “So does she live here with Hox2 or something?” he asked casually, toying with his beer cup.

“No, she lives in the medina, sort of close to that teahouse where we met.”

“I like that area,” Eliasz continued conversationally. “I was thinking of getting a flat there, too.”

“A bunch of us live there because it’s cheaper than downtown.”

“Is it cheap enough that you don’t need roommates to afford a place?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mecha said enthusiastically. “Frankie lives by herself and has a great place. I have a roommate, but the flat is so big we barely see each other.”

They continued to talk while Paladin listened, wondering why it was that Mecha would give away dangerously personal information about herself and her friends in the middle of a casual conversation with someone she’d only met the day before. She supposed that everyone had their vulnerabilities, and Mecha’s was talking. She couldn’t resist giving away what she knew. And that meant Frankie was vulnerable, too, especially if you added in the poor state of her network security.

There was one way Frankie was very secure, however. Eliasz kept trying to engage Frankie in conversation, and he kept failing. She looked increasingly harassed, and finally grabbed his arm and steered him to the edge of the bar/lab. Paladin trained her audio sensors on them.

“Look pal, I’m not going to kick you out of this lab because it’s open to everybody, including covert IPC agents.” Frankie’s syllables were clipped. “But I’m not your friend, and I’m not going to help you get whatever you’re here for. So leave me the fuck alone.”

Eliasz chuckled and threw up his arms while backing off a few inches. “Hey, that’s cool. Not sure what you mean by that, but I’m sorry to bother you.” He returned to the bench with Paladin and Mecha, staying for another fifteen minutes of Adder versus Ammolite debate. Then he and Paladin left by the same path they had the night before, crossing from the dance floor to the elevators. But this time, both were on high alert.

When they reached the street, Eliasz took stock of their surroundings. The triangular shape of the Twin Center’s entrance was formed by two angled staircases that started on the sidewalk and led to an elevated park nestled between the towers that gave the place its name. Now the mall sheltered pirates, and the park hosted an informal night market with stalls offering everything from fresh fruit to pirated software.

“The good news is that we have solid evidence that she’s linked to our terrorist,” Eliasz said. “I now have authorization from the Federation to interrogate her.”

Paladin had studied interrogations, but never witnessed one. “How will you do that? She’ll never talk. She already suspects you’re with the IPC.”

“I have a little something that I doubt she’s patched against.” Eliasz patted the side pocket in his pants. “I also know exactly what route Frankie’s going to take to get home. All we have to do is follow her. When we get there, you grab her and I’ll give her a taste of my medicine.”

Later that night, Eliasz and Paladin took advantage of the poor lighting on the path to the medina to merge with the shadows in a closed teahouse doorway. At last Frankie walked by, trailed by WTF and a few others from the lab. They followed at a distance, passing beneath old, arched gateways made of stone, and polymer awnings that flapped quietly in the wind off the ocean. A few people were on the street, emerging from yellow strips of light that edged the cracked-open doorways of teahouses.

Frankie’s friends began peeling off into courtyards or up stairways to their flats. At last she was alone, her rolling gait taking her several doorways past the hacker teahouse. Paladin pulled ahead of Eliasz, her body in full stealth mode, light bending around her carapace and her feet soundless on the stone street. As Frankie turned up a short flight of stairs, Paladin jumped on her, clearing several steps and grabbing the woman’s arms in one fluid motion. Before Frankie could cry out, the bot had covered her mouth with one hand.

For a few seconds they engaged in quiet combat on the stairs, Frankie kicking and trying to pull away from Paladin’s grip.

But then Eliasz arrived, a tiny injector gripped between his fingers, which he wrapped around Frankie’s throat, as if he meant to strangle her. Instead, he administered the drug, then moved his hand up slightly to grip her chin as it hit her. Her muscles had gone so slack that she was unable to hold her head up on her own.

Paladin kept a tight grip on the woman to keep her from sliding down the stairs as Eliasz whispered to her. “I think we’re going to have a nice talk now. Let’s start by going inside your flat. What is your key?”

Frankie looked at a point beyond Eliasz’ head, her eyes unfocused. “You bastard,” she replied, her mouth working slowly through each syllable. As the drug’s effect intensified, Frankie lost her footing, leaning heavily on Paladin as she tried to stand again.

“Frankie,” Eliasz said softly. “I want you to look at something very interesting.” He aimed her unsteady gaze in the direction of a tiny projector in the palm of his hand, which emitted what looked to Paladin like a simple light that pulsed more brightly every few seconds. Something about the drug Eliasz had given Frankie caused the pulses to occupy her full attention. It was some kind of multihypnotic, Paladin guessed, that would lower her inhibitions, magnify her desire to trust, and relax her muscles. Any sensory input would feel overwhelming. Distracting her already-saturated attention with something simple, like a light, would intensify the drug’s trust-blooming effect.

They stood for almost a minute with Frankie absorbed by the projection and Eliasz watching her pupils dilate. Then he returned to his question, which he asked even more gently. “What is the key?”

She held up an unsteady hand. “Biometric,” Frankie sighed, speaking to the light.

Frankie’s flat was sparsely furnished, with a bedroom in back and a front room occupied by a few chairs pulled up to a tabletop projector. She had a fabber and sequencer in the kitchen, which also contained the flat’s biggest window. Eliasz pulled the blinds down in each room before turning on a single light, while Paladin settled the loose-limbed Frankie into a chair.

Frankie seemed to lapse into a state of near-unconsciousness. Then she straightened up, her muscles bunching and relaxing in an uncoordinated fashion. Paladin stood quietly behind her, hands on her shoulders. The bot was prepared to restrain her at any moment.

Eliasz pulled up a chair so that he sat knee-to-knee with Frankie. He looked into her eyes, black with pupil, and covered her knees with his warm hands. “Frankie, I’m your friend,” he said softly, leaning closer. He was working with the drug to establish an intense emotional bond. A bead of saliva formed at the corner of Frankie’s mouth. She couldn’t look away from Eliasz’ face.

“Fuck you,” she mumbled.

He ignored her. “We have proof you’re working with Judith Chen, the pirate and terrorist you know as Jack. You’re either going to be in prison for a short time, or the rest of your life. Tonight you make that choice. I can make things easier for you if you tell me where Jack is hiding.”

Frankie seemed to nod out for a second, the drug no doubt making it more difficult for her to process this information. Neurochemically, she would be yearning to trust everything Eliasz said. It would be hard for her to stop herself from talking. But Frankie also knew exactly what was happening to her brain, how she was being manipulated, and would fight it.

“You don’t have anything on me,” she said finally.

Eliasz projected a file in front of Frankie’s vague eyes, showing her the thread between herself and Jack that Paladin had discovered via the projector. Frankie was obviously caught off guard. “Jack…” she murmured uncertainly.

“Where is Jack?” Eliasz asked. “She’s in trouble, but you don’t have to be.”

Paladin put her hands on Frankie’s head, reading the flickering electrical signals from her drug-altered brain. Her visual centers were extremely active: She must be using visualization to resist Eliasz’ questions. They needed to distract her, break her concentration, focus her brain activity elsewhere.

“Hit her,” Paladin said. It was the fastest way to get the job done.

Eliasz punched Frankie in the face, breaking her nose. Her head rocked back, and she began to gurgle and choke on the blood gushing down her face.

Paladin reached a finger into Frankie’s mouth to scoop out the stringy clots, then grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair to push her head upright again. Now the spike in Frankie’s visual activity had tapered off. The drug’s powers would be peaking now, and would start to fade over the next fifteen minutes.

“Where is Jack?” Eliasz peered into Frankie’s ruined face. “It doesn’t have to hurt anymore. I’m your friend.”

Her words tumbled out, the chemically induced urge suddenly overcoming her will. “She’s got a lab in Vancouver. But I don’t know if that’s where she’s gone.” She paused, her parted lips slack and gory. Frankie would be feeling no pain for the moment; she had just placed her trust in Eliasz, and the multihypnotic would make that feel good, to encourage further bonding with her interrogator. “She’s with a runaway slave, though. Some boy named Threezed she found in the Arctic. He might have taken her somewhere else.”

After her confession, Frankie must have found another way to resist the hypnotic. That was the last useful information they got out of her, though they continued to beat and drug her for the next three hours. At last, when both her arms hung broken at her sides, Frankie passed out and would not wake up.

Eliasz alerted the Federation’s local IPC agents, who relayed their position to police. Fifteen minutes later, two bots arrived, their armored, bipedal bodies similar to Paladin’s own. One addressed Paladin: Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using AF protocol.

Paladin agreed, and they gave their session a number.

I am Talon. Please transmit interrogation file. That is the end of my data.

Paladin sent a series of compressed video files while Talon’s companion lifted the unconscious woman out of the chair, now stained with blotches of blood that were already drying into brown at their edges. Frankie moaned in pain as the bot gripped her upper arm where the jagged edge of a bone had pierced her skin.

“Here is additional information that will aid with a terrorist conviction,” Paladin vocalized. She sent the message thread between Jack and Frankie in a forensic wrapper intended to prove it had not been tampered with since its extraction from Frankie’s server.

“Thanks, guys,” Eliasz addressed the bots. “We’re heading out.”

“The Federation appreciates your work,” Talon vocalized formally, adding via microwave: Good luck to you, Paladin.

The bots clattered down Frankie’s front steps. They were official law enforcement, so there was no need to move stealthily. Perhaps they even wanted the neighbors to see that the notorious pirate had been captured.

“I’ve got the coordinates for an extraction point,” Eliasz told Paladin, who was closing Frankie’s door, locking it unnecessarily. “We move out in thirty minutes.” He beamed a map to Paladin, showing a helicopter pad at the port. They could reach it by walking.

At this hour, the winding streets of the medina were quiet and dark. The yellow glow of the Hassan II minaret divided the horizon over low roofs. For a moment, Paladin considered that, from a human perspective, the streets would look even murkier when contrasted with that perfectly architected shaft of light. Maybe that was the point.

The ancient port was filled with tugs and fishing boats, and the water was held still by a long, curling jetty made from enormous, interlocking cement jacks. Here and there on the docks, Paladin could see people sleeping under stained blankets of waterproof cotton, but if they noticed Eliasz and the bot, they showed no sign of it. At last a helicopter skimmed over the mosque toward them, its engines noise-cancelled to the point where all they could hear was the air being beaten with such regularity that it became a long, unending sigh.

The two settled into the cabin. Soon Casablanca was little more than a shining crescent at the edge of a vast continent. Eliasz finally spoke. “I’ve suggested to the project head that we split up to follow the two leads Frankie gave us. I’m going down to Vegas to see if I can dig up something on this escaped slave, and you can follow up on that Vancouver lab. Thanks to your research on The Bilious Pills, I think you’ll know where to start.” He paused, and took Paladin’s hand. The helicopter was unpiloted, and there would be no video capture here, either. “Vancouver also has a large community of autonomous bots, so that’s your cover: You’re a newly autonomous lab bot looking for work. When we get to base, your botadmin can set you up with a simulated autonomy key.”

“What is the difference between a simulated autonomy key and a real one?”

“A simulated key expires,” Eliasz said, his hand gripping hers as they dropped down over the jet field.