Autonomous

15 PIRATE YOUR BODY

JULY 13, 2144

Moose Jaw hadn’t changed much in the past thirty years. As Jack’s truck entered the tiny city, she passed the giant moose statue looming to the left of the highway and drove down narrow roads lined with refurbished wooden houses covered in the frills of another era’s architectural fashion.

Downtown were a few casinos and a mineral spa where Jack’s family had come for the Christmas holidays. Built over two centuries ago, the spa was a landmark, its ancient pools an attraction for the daring in winter, because you could swim under a low arch and find yourself in a steaming public bath out of doors. As a little girl, Jack had delighted endlessly in that outdoor pool. She would dip under to wet her whole head, then bob in the odd-tasting water up to her neck until her hair became a fine white net of frost around her face and crackled under her hands.

Aside from the casino, Moose Jaw’s main attraction was a series of tunnels that ran under the city. Local legend held that they had been home to the city’s immigrant Chinese labor force in the early twentieth century. These anonymous men and women lived and worked in dark underground hovels doing laundry for the white prairie folk. After Jack went on a tour of the musty, underground rooms, she started telling the kids in elementary school that she had a great-great-great-grandparent who once lived below the city.

Her father was appalled when he found out. It was the first time he connected her mobile to the family server and let her explore on her own, showing her how to find the photographs proving the Chens had come from Hong Kong to Vancouver long after the tunnels had been abandoned, settling in Saskatchewan in the early 2000s.

Jack’s interest in the tunnels continued even after she reluctantly accepted her father’s version of the family history. She returned to Moose Jaw as an adult in the summer between her first and second year of college, tagging along with a group of friends who were volunteering with an archaeological dig. For months, they carefully excavated the area beneath a condemned warehouse off Main Street.

The principal investigator had a grant to investigate whether the tunnels had actually belonged to bootlegger Al Capone during the twentieth-century Prohibition era. Since most of the tunnels had been blocked off over two centuries ago, finding the answer involved a lot of careful digging, 3-D imaging of each layer, and stringing wire everywhere so that the site eventually looked like a massive grid.

It was ultimately never clear whether the additional tunnels they excavated actually belonged to Al Capone or just a random gangster. Large and ventilated, the space they found still contained bootlegger gear and a few antique guns. When the grant ran out, Jack helped seal up the entrance, which was now in the basement of a new apartment building. The archaeologists, ever hopeful that one day their grant might be renewed, left one entrance to the excavation open, accessible via a small trapdoor.

After her experiences with research grants, Jack knew that nobody would ever be visiting that tunnel again. Except her. She was keeping the tradition of the tunnels alive by using them for smuggling. Over the past two decades, she’d tricked them out with an air purification system, a covert hookup to the network and power grids, sleeping quarters, and a hidden safe where she could stash a secure mobile and several bags of drugs.

Sometimes Jack stayed here for weeks, letting her trail go cold. Maybe her ancestors had never lived in these tunnels, but they felt like a legitimate inheritance.

Slipping into an old routine calmed her down. She paid untraceable cash for a month’s rent on a parking spot at one of the spas, shrugging a faraday bag over her truck. It also contained a perimeter alarm. If anybody tried to get into the vehicle, it would alert her and start a video feed that she could pick up in her tunnel. Then she bought a little fresh fruit and pepperoni—she kept a cooker down there, but she had a craving for comfort food.

At last she arrived at the service entrance to the now-aging apartment building. Jack blasted the surveillance cameras with an infrared beam, creating what looked like a few seconds of glitch while she eased down through the basement hatch.

“Light,” she said to the dusty air, waiting for the old fluorescents to turn heaps of wood and shattered solar cells into more than piles of shadow. This dirty room was another way of covering her tracks. Anyone who managed to find the nearly invisible hatch would be met with what looked like a pile of last century’s trash.

Her safe house was in the main portion of the tunnel, but she’d blocked access to it with a thick spray of concrete foam, leaving only a small hole near the floor that could be plugged with a perfectly shaped hunk of the same stuff the wall was made of. She pulled this plug in behind her, worming backward into the main tunnel, scraping her arms, belly, and back on the rough material as she passed through.

“Light and air,” she coughed. The bootleggers’ haven began to glow with yellow light, and a fan hummed.

The tunnel had a low, curved roof reinforced with thermoplastic beams and strung with LED wires. Shallow nooks carved into the walls had once held smugglers’ weapons and loot, but might actually date back to the immigrants who needed to stow household items. Down the center of the tunnel was a lab bench she’d cobbled together from a cheap door made of processed seed hulls, nailed to polymer stumps discarded from a printer factory. That bench contained her whole life: a fabber, a sequencer, and a projector, all built from generic, nougat-colored parts. These were networked to an antenna that snaked up into the walls of the apartment building above, sending signals that hopped between frequencies, masquerading as a variety of devices.

At the far end of the room, under the air purifier box, was her futon. Atop the chilly floor, she’d unrolled a soft, colorful carpet from Fez, a city south of Casablanca. This place was like her sub, hidden below the surface but wired to the outside world.

Leaning back against the wall she’d just tunneled through, legs splayed in front of her, Jack sighed. Safety. For a little while.

Although she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days, she wasn’t ready to be unconscious. Jack scrolled idly through the feeds on her mobile, projecting a few into the air, wondering whether Retcon could outrace the damage Zacuity was doing.

All the news feeds were reporting on another workplace meltdown incident. The major feeds covered it with the usual splash of decontextualized horror, but reporters at the investigative text repo Internecine said it sounded more like the Zacuity rampage at the Calgary train control center.

A botadmin at the Toronto branch of Timmo’s had one job: to keep the machines making donut holes, squirting blob after blob of fatty dough out of their cannulated needle fingers and into the simmering oil. He began requesting overtime and skipping meal breaks. His coworkers said he developed a “creepy” relationship with one of the donut bots.

And then, just today, the admin decided everything was a potential donut hole. Pieces of garbage. A stray cat. The hands of his unfortunate customers. Eventually, his own legs. Anything that could be mashed up and forced through a tube, to be extruded in perfect, mouth-sized blobs. The Timmo’s was a bloodbath, with at least two dead.

Internecine showed some clips they’d somehow ripped from a police bodyfeed.

“We’re just making donuts!” the admin screamed, holding up a ball of gore. “Why don’t you let us make donuts! Timmo’s bots make… the… best… donuts!”

Jack stared at the pepperoni she had been about to eat, feeling ill.

FALL 2120

At first, Casablanca was everything that Lyle had promised. The African Federation was still young, and the government worried very little about enforcing intellectual property laws, as long as the economy was expanding.

Jack and Lyle rented a flat in the biotech ghetto, a neighborhood whose nickname was self-explanatory. It was near the high, ocean-facing wall around the old medina. Always a middle-class neighborhood, the area had been tended and upgraded over the centuries to retain its traditional Moorish architecture of colorful tiles and hidden courtyards, while also growing a new surface of photovoltaic paint over semipermeable walls that absorbed water and strobed with glowing algae at night. The winding streets looked ancient, but they had been paved with foam. Even the crumbling seams in the walls came from bioconcrete, a mash of water-activated bacteria and epoxies that healed itself as cracks formed.

They took lucrative jobs at a startup that built custom proteins for other businesses, and swore that they would save their best ideas for after-work projects. But so far, they’d been working such long hours that the ideas hadn’t come. That’s when Lyle decided it was time to take an evening off. She brought an expensive red-and-brown blanket home and swirled it around her body. “Let’s get under it together and swear to do something very, very important.”

Most of their clothes were already on the floor by the time Lyle pulled the blanket completely over their heads. They kissed fiercely, yanking each other’s underwear off. The space beneath the caftan grew hot and close with their breathing.

Jack looked into her lover’s eyes, which had gone nearly black in the caftan’s shadow. Lyle’s fingers moved inside her, and Jack kept staring into those eyes, her body swollen with pleasure, thinking that she had never loved anyone this much in her entire life. And then she could no longer focus on anything other than her own pleasure.

Lyle wasn’t much for postorgasm cuddling these days. She threw off the caftan and started talking.

“I’m serious, we can really shake things up here. We should start our own Free Lab, but make it really radical, much more radical than Krish’s.”

Jack didn’t say anything. She was still trying to savor their closeness, pulling Lyle’s thigh between her legs. Lyle rewarded her by throwing her other leg over Jack’s hip, squeezing their bodies together in a pleasurable tangle.

“Don’t you want to do that, Jack?”

Lyle was moving in a way that was increasingly distracting. “Yes,” Jack whispered.

The first planning meeting for the Casablanca Free Lab, held at a teahouse, was a lot less pleasant than the undercover meeting that had spawned it. Somehow Jack’s call for participation on a couple of local biotech hacker forums had gotten reposted to an artists’ mailing list, and a bunch of poets showed up to argue with them about the true meaning of anarchy. Instead of a practical conversation about renting a space where they could build a wet lab, they had a three-hour shouting match about liberty and recolonialism.

Casablanca had grown wealthy on biotech, but local artists and subversives considered scientific progress equivalent to gentrification. They had a very hard time grasping the idea that science could be radical, and a laboratory could be free.

It took Jack and Lyle a full year of argument, on the net and in person, before they reached the pragmatic stage of renting a space. By that time, they had a pretty good grasp of Darija, and a core group of five people who were willing to put in money and time to set up the lab.

The Twin Center had just been converted into cheap live-work spaces, and the Casablanca Free Lab moved into one of its subbasements. They did this partly because it was a large space with running water, but partly to appease the poets who lived in the upper floors. It was the right move. The poets still liked to remind the engineers gleefully that culture stomped on the head of science, but they had stopped calling them recolonizers—at least, to their faces.

Krish was ecstatic to hear that they had set up the first satellite Free Lab, and tried to help with grant applications.

“Fuck his grants,” grumbled Jack, reading his messages. “We don’t want to be beholden to some economic coalition.” The rest of the collective agreed with her. To distance themselves from Krish’s Free Lab, they would need a new name. They called themselves Signaling Pathway—Signal for short.

“We still need a way to make money,” Lyle pointed out, after they’d spent some time sketching a logo.

“We could charge for memberships,” suggested a volunteer.

“That doesn’t sound very free. What would the poets say?”

Everybody laughed. But it was true: They couldn’t ask for money and call themselves liberators. Subversives were already suspicious enough of science in this town, and you couldn’t very well charge admission to the revolution.

For the first few months at Signal, they deferred the money question. The collective had ponied up enough cash for at least six months’ rent. Plus, they were having fun. Jack was teaching a basic synbio class, showing other residents in the building how to reverse engineer simple organisms. One teenager figured out a way to grow mint in his family’s tiny garden by engineering the plant to use nitrogen more efficiently.

As Signal-related projects flourished, people came from all over the Maghreb to see their space. Local companies donated old fabbers, sequencers, and tissue trellises. Lyle ran weekly meetings where regulars and visitors could mingle to discuss the Free Lab’s mission. It was at one of these weekly meetings that they met Frankie.

Lyle had finally debugged her tattoo, and a sequence of flowers danced on her freshly shorn head, matching the illuminated flowers that crawled up and down her dress. Meetings always began with beer and a foul-tasting drink called Club-Mate, an old tradition that went back to hackerspaces of the twenty-first century. Clumped around the bench were kids and retirees, rich biotech professionals and info anarchists who lived in squats. Each person introduced themselves, using a real name or pseudonym as they wished.

Frankie looked like a typical engineer in her starched shirt and casual khakis. Her brown skin and black hair made it more likely that she was local, but she could just as easily be from the AU or the Zone. She said she built things with Adder.

After the meeting, Lyle gave the newbies a tour of the lab. Jack checked on some sequence, while across the room Lyle’s bright dress grew a comet tail of admiring hackers. When Jack looked up from her readout, Frankie was standing next to her. “I need to talk to you in private,” she said.

“It’s private here.”

Frankie just looked at her. “Do you have a faraday room?”

Jack was beginning to wonder if this woman was one of the occasional crazies they got at Signal, a person gone paranoid in the pursuit of ambiguously legal science.

“No,” she said gently. “But we are several floors underground. I’m not sure what you’re worried about, but the people here are pretty cool.”

“I’m worried that the IPC has bugged your shit.” She waved her hand at the churning sequencers, then brought it to rest on the tablet Jack had folded up and strapped to her belt. “Do you know how easy it is to turn this thing into a bug?”

Definitely crazy. Jack tried to be nonchalant. “I’m not worried about it.”

“You should be. Do you really think the IPC has stopped tracking you after what happened with The Bilious Pills? Especially now that you’re preaching the freedom to reverse engineer in Africa?”

That settled it. Jack was done with this weird bitch. “Fuck off, OK? I’m not doing anything illegal.”

“I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to help you and that rich girl from the Gulf figure out what it would really mean to bring free drugs to people who need them. That was always your problem at The Bilious Pills—you were so focused on your little legal arguments, and dressing up like pirates, that you forgot about the real crimes. Like murder.”

Suddenly Jack realized who she was talking to. Frankie was the woman behind the Bilious Pills byline Rosalind Franklin.

Rosalind Franklin had sent the autonomous drone fleet that liberated the pills from Halifax Harbor before Jack got arrested. But Jack had only known her as a pseudonym, a fiercely smart but mysterious writer from somewhere in the African Federation. Her first essay for The Bilious Pills began with an intensely personal story, unusual for an academic, in which she explained quite bluntly how her family had been murdered by Zaxy when they refused to license the antiviral Blense to a local manufacturer. It was an unforgettable essay, especially because it ended with an elegant little program—thirty lines of Adder—that perfectly reverse-engineered Blense. Nobody who worked on the text repo knew her real name.

“Are you Rosalind Franklin?”

The woman shrugged. “No, I’m her ghost, come to get revenge on the white dudes who stole the Nobel Prize from me.” Then she laughed, a loud bark that did not fit somebody who seemed so focused on hiding. Several faces in Lyle’s comet tail turned to look at them.

Jack felt like she’d passed a secret test. “I’m glad you came. We always wondered who you were.”

“I’m glad you’ve decided to do some real work instead of just scribbling in a text repo.” Frankie’s compliments were always insults. They had the disturbing effect of making people want to please her more.

“Do you live around here? Are you interested in starting a project at Signal?”

“I’m thinking of moving here.”

“Are you still working at a university?”

Frankie tilted her head to the side. “I never worked at a university.”

Jack and Krish had always assumed Rosalind Franklin was a university researcher—all of The Bilious Pills contributors they knew had been students or junior faculty. But Rosalind Franklin had never divulged where she worked. She just wrote beautiful code and angry, persuasive essays.

“Oh, are you in industry?”

“No. I’m a pirate.”

Before Jack could respond, Lyle joined them, putting her arm around Jack’s waist and kissing her. “Who’s your friend?”

Frankie frowned at Lyle. “Why do you want to draw attention to yourself with your clothes? Don’t you think you’re upsetting the social order enough without rubbing it in people’s faces?” And with that, Frankie went to wait by the elevator.

“That was Rosalind Franklin.”

“The woman who wrote for The Bilious Pills?”

“Yeah. She said she might be moving here and wants to help us.” Jack felt off-balance as she watched the elevator doors close.

Nobody was more vulnerable to Frankie’s insults than Lyle. When Frankie became a regular at Signal, Lyle got itchy in her flamboyant clothing, picking holes in her stockings that flared into runs. She let her hair grow in, its natural, glossy black replacing the debugged tattoo. And then she started working with Frankie on a secret project that took a lot of her time.

Lyle said Frankie had ideas for a program that could help with rapid prototyping of flu vaccines. Mostly, however, the pirate would come to Signal empty-handed, leave with a sack of drugs, and return empty-handed. Of course, a lot of people used Signal to prototype drugs. That’s what everyone assumed Frankie was doing, too. And maybe it was.

Then Lyle started skipping work, supposedly to hammer on sequence with Frankie. Jack hunted her down at Signal one evening after she’d been MIA all day. “Where the fuck have you been? I keep having to make excuses for you at work, and it’s getting really old.”

“I told you, I was with Frankie—it’s been a really hard time for her, restarting her business.”

“She moved here months ago.”

“Look, there’s a lot about Frankie you don’t know.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know either—like her real name, for example.”

“You don’t need to know someone’s birth name to know they’re doing good work. She’s bringing flu vaccines and antivirals to people who can’t afford them, and she’s helping to set up a small manufacturing operation for this collective down in Fez so they can do it for themselves. Besides, you don’t go by your real name, either.”

Jack leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, feeling the raw insulation crinkling under her arm. This wasn’t the conversation she wanted to be having. Everybody knew her real name was Judith Chen. Jack was a nickname, not a pseudonym.

“So you’re helping her pirate drugs instead of going to work?”

“I hate that job—I’m quitting. Frankie’s going to help pay for the lab.”

This was turning into a serious what-the-fuck conversation. “You do understand that Frankie is breaking the law. Yes, she’s doing some good, but she’s also selling a lot of shit that’s just for fun, for parties. How does that help the people of Fez?”

Lyle shrugged, and grinned. “Since when do you care about patent piracy?”

“Since I’m trying to run a legitimate Free Lab. Everyone is welcome here, you know that. We’re not policing anyone. But if anyone found out we were funded by piracy, well…”

“What do you think would happen?”

“I think it would be worse than jail. And that was already bad enough.” Jack was going to cry, or throw up, or maybe punch Lyle in the face. She was jealous of Frankie, or scared of her—maybe both. So she walked away without saying anything.

Lyle caught up to her on the street, three blocks from their flat. She put an arm around Jack, and they walked without saying anything until they reached the door. Jack thought about how they’d met, how good the late summer air smelled in Saskatoon, and how she’d already lost both a continent and a calling.

Maybe there was some weird crap going on with Lyle and Frankie, but Jack was suddenly filled with certainty that she could deal with it. She didn’t want to lose another person she loved. Or another place. And Jack had to admit she wasn’t particularly worried about piracy.

Lyle was much happier after she quit her day job. Signal was flourishing, and she told Jack it was the first time she truly believed she wasn’t living out some twisted version of her mother’s dreams. For a few months, it felt like they were back in the Free Lab storage room again, madly in love with each other and the revolution.

Until one afternoon when Jack got a text from an unknown string of numbers, which usually meant Frankie. It read: We need to talk about Lyle. Meet me at the teahouse in an hour?

Frankie held court in a dim, red-curtained room at a teahouse in the biotechie ghetto. Sitting cross-legged at a low table surrounded by plump cushions, the pirate was playing with a handheld 3-D printer that was spitting out what looked like tiny chunks of cellulose.

She stood quickly when Jack arrived. “Thanks for coming.”

Frankie ordered another pot of tea and gave Jack a look that was entirely free of her usual sarcasm. “Have you talked to Lyle lately about her new project?”

“I thought she was working with you.” Jack felt a twist of the old jealousy; there were so many things she didn’t know about what Lyle was doing with Frankie.

Frankie settled her chin into her fist, and Jack noticed with surprise that the pirate had dyed her hair pink. “I haven’t hung out with her in weeks. She’s been working with a new group, run by this woman called FoxP2. I’m worried.”

“Well, now you know how I’ve been feeling for the past year,” Jack commented sardonically.

Frankie said nothing, and swirled tea in her cup. “FoxP2 is dangerous.”

“More dangerous than a pirate who sells illegal drugs to the highest bidder?” Jack felt like an asshole as soon as she said it, but Frankie was unfazed.

“We both care about Lyle, and I understand why you’re pissed at me. But I want you to understand that I am very careful about my work. I don’t want to get caught, and I spend a lot of time making sure of that. Hasn’t Lyle told you about my business?”

“You already told me you’re a pirate.”

“I told you that because I trust you. But I also run a legitimate business as a consultant, and all my money is funneled through that. I’ve worked with an attorney to make sure the IPC will never get anything on me.”

Maybe she was lying about that attorney. If so, at least her lies demonstrated that she understood the dangers of her job.

“I take it this other woman isn’t as careful as you are.”

FoxP2 and her collective wanted to disrupt the system, but their plans didn’t extend much beyond the disruption. Lyle was apparently helping them engineer muscles for pirated legs and arms, each replacement limb in violation of dozens of patents. Their work was excellent, but flashy. FoxP2 had a public text repo called Pirate Your Body, where she bragged about all the lives that she’d saved with her work. And all the greedy biotech corporations she’d screwed over.

As Frankie talked, Jack pulled out her mobile and found FoxP2’s journal on Memeland. The latest entry was just a series of pictures uploaded from a party. Lyle figured in a lot of them, dressed in armor, with her head half-shaved. Jack recognized a few people from Signal dancing with her. She thumbed back over to the pictures of Lyle again, trying to figure out what she’d been doing the night they were taken.

“Somebody is going to punish them. The Federation can’t afford to look like it’s harboring flagrantly subversive groups. It’s bad for trade. We’ve got to get Lyle to stop working with FoxP2.”

Jack had to admit that FoxP2’s project looked exactly like the kind of thing that got people detained by the IPC—and sometimes disappeared. It was too obvious they wanted to flout the law. Was it possible that Lyle genuinely didn’t understand the stakes here?

Frankie’s glasses were receiving data, and the pirate ducked out of the room for a moment. Jack played with one of the cellulose blobs that the 3-D printer was still extruding onto the table. It looked like it could be some kind of processed plant material, the kind of thing you might package a drug in.

She tried to imagine how she would bring up FoxP2 with Lyle—it wouldn’t be easy. But she never had a chance to have that conversation. Frankie ran back into the room, her lips thinned into a line, and yanked Jack up by the wrist. “FoxP2 is a bigger fuckup than I thought. We need to go.”

As they left the tea shop in a rush of panic, Frankie forgot the 3-D printer, even though it was the latest model and very hard to find in Casablanca.

Jack remembered the next twenty-four hours as a series of violent, black-and-white still photographs, like the slides archivists pasted into old movies where footage has been lost.

It was 9:00 a.m. when they arrived at Signal, and it had already been raided. A couple of hackers who had hidden under some pillows in the loft told them the story. Thugs from the IPC had waved something that looked like an international warrant, chased everyone out, and confiscated all of the equipment that they didn’t recognize, which was almost everything. Jack received an official mail from the IPC explaining that the equipment would be held until such a time as they could determine what it was being used for.

It was midnight, and FoxP2 was dead—or, at least, that’s what they assumed. Her lab had been blown up. The Federation news sites already had quotes from IPC officials saying a terrorist lab had exploded while manufacturing illegal drugs. FoxP2’s journal was gone from its usual server. Science chroniclers immediately mirrored it at a radical text repo archive in Anchorage.

It was 3:00 a.m. and Lyle’s body was a collapsed shadow blocking the bedroom door. Someone had dumped her in Jack and Lyle’s apartment, wrapped in latex polymer. She was not doing six things at once. She was not talking about changing the future. She was not dancing. She was not dying her hair, hacking molecules, leaving a mess in the kitchen, or giving Jack a kiss. She was not electroluminescent. Therefore she must be dead. Which made no sense, because it was only a few hours ago when Jack discovered that she might be in danger of being dead, in the unlikely event that Jack could not talk her out of being in a position to possibly be dead.

Jack was halfway down the stairs when the bomb went off. She couldn’t stop herself from turning around, looking back at everything she loved on Earth burning. A jagged piece of ceramic hurled itself out the door and burned its way through her jacket. Maybe through her heart.

It was 5:00 a.m.; somehow they were in Frankie’s truck, on the road to Fez. They had left Signal behind; they had left Lyle’s body behind. They had to get out of town, Frankie said. Jack was having a hard time responding to anything. A tissue repair bandage was sticky on her neck and chest. Arms wrapped around her bent legs, she pressed her closed eyes against her knees and felt tears running down the insides of her thighs.

“What am I going to do?” She rocked back and forth against the lumpy polymer seat.

Frankie shot a look at her, then faced the dusty road again. “You’re going to survive. That is what you’re going to do.”

Because she could not yet take in the full weight of Lyle’s death, Jack pondered the causalities: Why had Lyle chosen to start a project with FoxP2 instead of continuing to work with Frankie? Why hadn’t Lyle ever told her about it? Why had she put herself in that kind of danger?

Even decades later, Jack pondered that same question: Had Lyle been trying to destroy herself in some kind of terrible self-fulfilling prophecy of madness? It still drove Jack crazy to think about it. She padded across the carpet to her futon, mobile tucked under her arm, determined to watch a movie rather than dwell on long-ago events she couldn’t change.

Lying down in her safe house, Jack tried to imagine older crimes than the ones she had witnessed, two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old murders that had taken place in this very tunnel. Maybe all the blood shed by those dead generations made it easier to bear what she had experienced. Or maybe it just made everything worse.