Autonomous

16 NO. 3 ROAD

JULY 13, 2144

Paladin could tell that Lee was taking a greater than normal interest in maintaining her specialized arm. He’d written some custom software for it, even given her a few beta sensors for her fingertips that emulated a sense of taste. As she tested the new drivers, discovering flavors in the air and an ability to make minute motions with her fingers, Paladin felt different. And she had to admit she was confused. “I don’t understand how this will help me with my mission,” she vocalized.

Lee grinned and tickled the palm of her new hand. “Sometimes you do technical things just to show that you can. It’s not like this will harm you, and it may turn out to be useful.”

“It doesn’t seem very useful to taste things when I can’t eat them.”

The botadmin turned serious, and set his soldering iron aside. It had been roughly three hours since he’d installed the simulated autonomy key and rebooted her recompiled mind. This hacking on Paladin’s arm was a way to fill the time while he waited for her to adjust.

“How do you feel about your mission?”

“I would like to get started as soon as possible. If word gets out about what happened in Casablanca, my target in Vancouver may have already disappeared by the time I arrive.”

With a sigh, Lee deviated from the script that had come in the readme files for the simulated autonomy key. “Listen, Paladin—I’m not going to be a dick and lie to you. I’ve never had to install any kind of autonomy key before. But you should know that things can go very wrong when a bot gets autonomy. Sometimes they go nuts, basically. Can’t access big chunks of their memory because of interface problems.” He paused, scratching his beard. “Do you feel weird like that?”

Paladin’s attention moved through her file system. For the first time, she could access her own programs as an administrator and parse how they had shaped her memories. It gave her a peculiar kind of double consciousness, even in real time: She felt things, and knew simultaneously that those feelings had been installed, just like the drivers for her new arm. Of course she felt weird. “Why haven’t you ever installed an autonomy key before?”

Lee shrugged, and looked back at his monitor, where he was running one of her drivers through a debugger. “Just not something we usually do.”

Three hours earlier, Paladin’s sense of loyalty—mostly generated by an old and inelegant program called gdoggie—would have prevented her from thinking about the words behind Lee’s words. But now she heard them clearly. He’d never installed autonomy keys because none of the bots at this base had gone autonomous during all the years he’d been here.

Paladin looked at her fingers, startled. “Should I be tasting pork? According to this program, your desk tastes like pork.”

The botadmin made a frustrated noise and uninstalled her taste library. Their conversation about the autonomy key evaporated, like a short thread in a public net forum. Lee drew an additional window in the air, calling its photons down from a projector overhead, and typed code by twiddling his fingers. His arms were ribbed with sensors that picked up electrical signals coming from his muscles and sent them back to the network.

All this networking was normally mesmerizing for Paladin, but now it was background noise. She was reindexing her memories, opening each one anew. Sometimes when she saved a file, it was bigger than it had been before. She was adding metadata, leaving information behind about the programs that had shaped each experience. Slowly a pattern was emerging.

Two hours later, Lee’s desk tasted like dead human cells and synthetic cellulose. The admin declared Paladin ready for action.

Although she had autonomy, at least temporarily, there was one key Paladin didn’t fully possess: It was the one that decrypted her memories in the cloud—the very same memories that she was carefully resaving, plus the new ones she was making every nanosecond in real time. The African Federation held its own copy of that key in escrow, a guarantee that even if Paladin went rogue, her next memory sync could erase her past.

They had another way to ensure her loyalty, too: Eliasz was patched into Paladin’s I/O system while she was in Vancouver. At any moment, he would know exactly where she was, could piggyback on her live sensor feed, and could reach her by voice or text sent via a direct encrypted tunnel through the public net.

It was a one-way connection. She could text him at any time, of course, but his location would be obscured. She knew only what he told her: that he was in Vegas.

JULY 14, 2144

Paladin arrived in Vancouver on passenger rail from Whitehorse, where she’d landed at an airfield as anonymous as the one in Iqaluit. This time, however, Eliasz was not there to lead her through the early steps of a covert operation. Most of the data she needed she had already. The one blank area—the place where she would have to extemporize—would be in Richmond, a neighborhood at the fringes of the city, home to a large community of free bots.

She had only been autonomous for the past thirty-six hours, and had never met another autonomous bot. All she knew about bot culture was what she had learned in the faraday cavern below Camp Tunisia. Paladin asked Fang for some advice before she left, but he was as ignorant as she was.

I have no idea how autonomous bots live, he messaged, appending a few public documents about the Richmond bot neighborhood written by human anthropologists. And of course these won’t really help you either. It’s all anthropomorphization.

Paladin and Fang sat for a minute without broadcasting, tuning a few unprotected conversations from bots around them and watching a tank drive slow donuts under the influence of something he had downloaded. The room tasted like carbon alloy.

Fang sent: I envy you. I have always wanted to see Vancouver.

Paladin experienced a new sensation she had come to associate with her autonomy key. It was what humans would probably call curiosity. She wanted to ask Fang a dozen questions, but settled on one. How long have you been indentured?

By way of reply, Fang transmitted a tiny video file, which was nothing more than seven still images arranged in a sequential slide show. Every year, the Federation had to file a report on its indentured population with the human resources division of the IPC. These images were taken from those reports. Viewed together, they said: seven years. Viewed separately, they appeared to represent four different bots. Seven years ago, he was a middle-weight insect drone used for mapping. He had become a snake, then a tank, and for the past three years had retained his current mantis shape.

What happened to all of your bodies?

The Federation always needs specialized morphologies. It’s easier to port an existing bot into a new body than make a new one. Fang’s antennas swept lazily toward Paladin. You’ll see. Don’t get too attached to that body—sooner or later, they’ll change it.

Paladin was replaying their conversation as the train pulled into an open-air station in the Richmond shopping district. It was early morning, and a pale gray sky lit shuttered markets on the fringes of a small park. To the north, across a river, lay downtown Vancouver; in aerial maps, its westernmost tip made a humanoid profile whose face pressed against the Pacific. But instead of eyes, lips, and hair, that face held the green fields and glittering buildings of the University of British Columbia. That was her ultimate destination.

There she’d find Bobby Broner—formerly Actin from The Bilious Pills—who ran a clinic for experimental brain-computer interfaces. If anyone knew where Jack’s Vancouver lab was, Paladin guessed it would be Bobby.

Interrogating Bobby would have to wait, though. Right now Paladin needed to establish her identity as an autonomous bot looking for work. She decided to walk up No. 3 Road, which would take her from the human shopping district to the heart of the bot neighborhood. It sounded like the kind of name a bot would give a street, but map data on the public net revealed that No. 3 Road dated back to the twentieth century, when the area had been populated mostly by Chinese immigrants.

She kept looking for signs that she was walking in a free bot neighborhood, and finally realized they were all around her. The road markings had lettering that reflected in ultraviolet, bigger than the human-readable text. Everywhere she looked, she could see bots walking among the humans. Many were bipedal like herself, but others flew, or bobbed in gentle, gyroscopic motion above constantly shifting sets of wheels. A human hurrying toward her swerved out of Paladin’s way and sent a quick apology via microwave. Even the creatures who seemed human were biobots.

Paladin had never seen this many bots together outside Camp Tunisia. She realized with surprise that she had rarely encountered any autonomous bots in the cities she and Eliasz visited. Even the humans she’d met who seemed to love bots, like Mecha, knew them as slaves.

Her hand tasted salt, but her other sensors were trained on the bots of No. 3 Road. Although they had no need for sleep, these bots worked among humans and kept their hours. Many were clearly going to work, heading south for the train station as they checked their feeds and mail. Others were on bot time, walking in groups whose members were wrapped in the flashing haze of their information exchange.

Walking near the river, Paladin caught sight of Aberdeen Centre, the largest bot-controlled marketplace in the Zone. Fewer and fewer courtesies for humans appeared along the road. She passed stores marked only with radio identifiers that spawned colorful 3-D augmentations over quiet storefronts, invisible to humans. Strip mall warrens, gray and placid in the visual spectrum, seethed with iconography hawking everything from new sensors to secondhand furniture.

The sky was dense with layered geotags, information debris left by years of bot residents. Paladin could page through them all, or set up filters to perceive only a designated subset. She decided to perceive none of them, and once again saw pearlescent gray clouds thinning in places to reveal blue sky.

After observing the communication behaviors of bots around her, Paladin decided to emulate the crowd and raise a signal-filtering perimeter. Now she wouldn’t register on the many readers and sensors she passed unless she chose to. This had the effect of shutting down targeted ad displays, but also drained the landscape of the kaleidoscopic data augmentations that one of those anthropological studies of Richmond had described as “central to bot architecture.”

When she arrived at Aberdeen Centre, one block off No. 3 Road, Paladin relaxed the filters on her perceptions. She wanted to see it the way it was intended to be seen.

Dating back to the early twenty-first century, the mall had once been entirely packed with human stores specializing in Asian Union imports. In deference to its historical roots, bots had maintained one portion of the mall at human-scale, along with a small restaurant for tourists. Aberdeen Centre also retained its original facade, a vast curving wall of antique tinted glass, warping with age and refracting the light in a beautiful chaos.

Paladin stood on the sidewalk, focused on appreciating the structure that rose up before her, around her, and within her mind. Bots flowed in and out of a rectangular entrance, widened from its original size to accommodate two tanks abreast. As she tuned signals from the building’s surface, a vast diorama seemed to unfurl from the glass and extend high into the air.

Rippling like an enormous swatch of aluminum mesh, the diorama contained three panels depicting abstract, bulky figures labeled HISTORY, INDUSTRY, and AUTONOMY. The longer she watched, the more these figures took on a 3-D substantiality: History was the curving face of an old domestic bot, its saucer-shaped body fringed with the sweeper bristles that defined its sole purpose; Industry showed a group of bots working together in a laboratory; and Autonomy was simply a series of integers, constantly shifting and changing, to represent the key that gave bots root access on their own operating systems and control of their memories.

Every few seconds, the words “ABERDEEN CENTRE” would render, seeming to hover over the diorama and then melt away. In the distance she could see similar kinds of monumental artwork hovering over the translucent walls of the buildings flanking this one.

The mall was bigger than Camp Tunisia, and entirely devoted to the consumer desires of bots. At least part of that desire was for cultural enrichment. After wandering into a skylit atrium, Paladin found herself paying a fraction of a credit to walk through a museum exhibit devoted to the history of robot culture in Richmond.

Paladin paused before a display about the system of indenture. It was a set of video files and concatenated documents. A data-tagged timeline showed the emergence of robot kinetic intelligence in the 2050s, followed by early meetings of the International Property Coalition. Under IPC law, companies could offset the cost of building robots by retaining ownership for up to ten years. She scanned a legal summary that outlined how a series of court cases established human rights for artificial beings with human-level or greater intelligence.

Once bots gained human rights, a wave of legislation swept through many governments and economic coalitions that later became known as the Human Rights Indenture Laws. They established the rights of indentured robots, and, after a decade of court battles, established the rights of humans to become indentured, too. After all, if human-equivalent beings could be indentured, why not humans themselves? In the Zone, however, there were no laws that allowed humans to be born indentured like bots.

“For bots, industry always precedes autonomy,” explained a final string of text that seemed to burst out of the document Paladin was reading. “Aberdeen Centre is testimony to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of bots who are crucial actors in the global economy.”

As she headed to the exit, Paladin was waylaid by a maze of countertops displaying tiny replicas of early robots, like the round sweepers and artificial pet dogs. You could buy them in the form of charms or media files.

Hello. You are unidentified. I am Bug. Here comes my data. That’s why they hate us, you know. That is the end of my data.

Paladin was startled to receive the sudden, insecure transmission, especially when she realized it came from this room. She had perceived no one else in the exhibit. She replied cautiously, using her false identifier and checking her perimeter. Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using the FTZ protocol. I am Daisy. Here comes my data. Please show your location. That is the end of my data.

The air stirred slightly as a mosquito bot dropped down from the ceiling. His wingspan was slightly more than a meter, and the whirring, transparent lobes gave off reflected light as he held his light body in front of her face. From head to abdomen, he was roughly the length of Paladin’s torso, though much narrower, and his carapace shimmered with color generated by synthetic chromatophores. Sensors bulged out of his head, and six highly articulated legs dangled from his thorax. Whoever designed Bug had taken the mosquito morphology very literally.

I am Bug. You are Daisy. Here comes my data. Whoa, soldier. You’re in a mall, not a weapons range. :) That is the end of my data.

His joke reminded Paladin that she was in a place where powering up her weapons perimeter would be perceived as strange. Impulsively, she offered Bug trusted status. Let us agree that you are Bug and I am Daisy. I’m new to town, and just getting used to how things work here.

I will agree. Just got your key?

36 hours ago.

Bug’s body slowly flushed a pale green with semitransparent streaks of red. It had the effect of making him look like he was glittering in sunlight. We don’t get a lot of visitors to the history exhibit. More often than not, they’re like you—just got autonomy, trying to figure things out.

Paladin liked that Bug didn’t ask her anything about where she’d come from. What did you mean about them hating us?

Humans, you know—they hate us for the indenture laws. Without bot indenture, there would be no human indenture.

This was so provably untrue, at least among the humans Paladin had known, that she found herself growing angry. What makes you think that? Do you really believe all humans feel one way?

Bug signaled laughter again, and whirred along the opaque foam wall that divided the displays from the crowded mall throughway filled with shopping robots. He landed on a desk at the heart of the museum store, and straightened a display of Roomba charms. Hey, lady, I just work here. But all you have to do is take a look at the crimes against bots over the past century. Humans think that bots deserve to be indentured, while humans deserve to be autonomous.

Paladin was barely able to stop herself from replying. She had met enough humans to know that they had many different feelings about robots, none of which could be easily summed up in one sentence.

Perhaps her silence made Bug realize something her communications wouldn’t have. He flew to hover near her again and apologized. I can be a bit of a crank sometimes, so let me make it up to you. Want me to show you around town? As a historian, I am capable of offering a less biased perspective. I promise.

A historian?

Got my PhD in history from UBC last year. So far the economic benefits have been quite glamorous, as you can see.

When Paladin didn’t respond, Bug told the exhibit system to shut down. I’m taking the morning off. What do you say to a tour of the great mall of BotTown?

Paladin figured a robot with ties to UBC might be a useful friend to have. She followed his dangling abdomen out of the store, watching it pulse red as if he’d just sucked a gallon of blood.

They were at the bottom level of one wing in the mall. Its translucent ceiling bulged eight levels above a massive, corkscrewed promenade, a winding road of storefronts crawling with light. From Paladin’s vantage point, the stacked levels looked like pure chaos, bots milling everywhere, emitting an incoherent din of sound and microwaves. Bug led her to the top slowly, pointing out stores he liked and merchants he knew. They passed media stores full of servers packed with data in every possible format; electronics stores jammed with tiny bins of used components and steaming chip printers; fashion and sports stores; a floor dedicated to gaming and arcades. Finally, at the top, two floors on the torqued path were devoted to displaying all the wares sold by a department store called Zone Mods.

Zone Mods had everything a bot could want for augmenting or transforming its own hardware, software, and bioparts. There were aisles devoted to limbs—nothing as sophisticated as her hand, Paladin noticed—alongside whole-body carapaces, sensors, and wheels. Plastic blister packs contained tiny wireless network devices and muscle patch kits. There were devices for cooking up new skin and portable drives for backing up your memories locally. A vast refrigerator belching ice particles that formed clouds in the air loomed behind a plastic-curtained door. Inside were frosty racks of tissues, bottled neurotransmitters, and miscellaneous biological synthetics.

Walking, flying, or rolling, the shoppers bore brightly colored packages emitting ads for everything: better network sensitivity, spectral analyzers, and smooth, silent joints. For the first time in her short life, Paladin was overwhelmed. She wanted to focus her attention and mute everything else, but she couldn’t decide where her attention should go. Besides, she was veering too far off-mission. It was time to go.

Bug was floating by the tissue-growing trellises two aisles over. She messaged him.

I think I’ve seen enough of Aberdeen Centre now. I would like to see the university, however. I am hoping to find work there in one of the labs. Can you show me around?

What kind of lab?

I work on brain-computer interfaces. Have you heard of Bobby Broner?

The mosquito found Paladin by scanning the refrigerator room. He strobed purple as he hovered in front of her chest sensors. Are you a biobot?

I have a human brain.

Sounds like you’d be Bobby’s experiment, not his colleague. Half the time, human scientists can’t tell the difference. That’s why I stick to social sciences and humanities.

Obviously Bug was going to be useless as a contact. She ended their connection and turned back toward the promenade, where she could catch an elevator down to the street. It would be easy enough to get to the university from the local train station outside Aberdeen Centre, and the hour was late enough that the humans would have arrived for work in Bobby’s lab. At last, she had a focus for her attention: taking the train to UBC.

When Paladin emerged from the train station, she was at the southeast side of the campus, on a footpath shaded by maples. While she paused to geolocate herself, Bug emerged from the station and hovered beside her, broadcasting nothing. His carapace was a uniform black like her own.

Seeing him again irritated her, and she wondered if she’d already blown this mission by trusting him.

I seem to excel at offending you, Daisy. As it happens, however, I do know somebody who works with Bobby.

Bug sent a file of information about a bot called Actin, a graduate student who was indentured to the Broner Lab. It seemed that Bobby had actually named the bot after his old terrorist identity. As Bug hovered beside her, Paladin encrypted the information and began dribbling it slowly to Eliasz in Vegas, hiding the size of her transmission from anyone watching her network activity.

She appended a message: Circumstantial evidence suggests Broner has not ended his relationship with his old life, or with Jack.

Eliasz sent back: Great work, Paladin. Let me know what you find out from Broner. I see you’re near his lab.

Paladin let Bug lead her to the Broner Lab, which looked like an old classroom with a giant cluster of desks at its center. Atop these desks were several servers and projectors, a chip printer, some fabbers, and a high-powered microscope box for imaging atoms. Tissue generators were jammed against the walls next to narrow glass doors leading to several small offices. Bobby’s office occupied a corner, with a perfect view of the microscope array.

Before Paladin could approach, however, the scientist jumped up from his chair and walked toward her with a look of extreme pleasure on his face. His hair was a mass of tangled curls, and his artificial eyes glowed blue as he looked at the frequencies radiating from Bug’s antennas.

“It’s so good to see you!” he exclaimed, reaching out to shake her hand. As she grasped his fingers in her own, she tasted coffee and bacon.

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” Paladin vocalized.

“Oh, no, probably not,” the man conceded. “But I worked on your brain interface. I know it’s sometimes a little unstable—will you let me know if you find any bugs?”

“I will,” Paladin said. “My name is Daisy. I’ve just gotten my autonomy key and I’m looking for a job designing molecular interfaces.”

“You worked on interface design? You look military.”

“I was indentured to several startups in the Northern Federation.”

For some reason, this seemed to satisfy his curiosity. “Sure, Daisy. Send me your work history.” And then, as if he could not resist, he added, “Can I get a copy of the interface you’re running, too?” The smile had returned to his face. “I want to see how they implemented it.”

It would have been a violation of her mission to hand over any of her software, so she did not respond to Bobby’s request. Instead, Paladin sent him her work history, which listed one “former client” named “Federation Ventures.” Then she spoke aloud. “I have sent you my employment information. I look forward to hearing from you.”

Bug buzzed and flickered through a dozen colors. Remember that secure session you suggested before? Let’s use it now, and call it session 566785. You are Daisy. I am Bug. Here comes my data. What the fuck? Did he really just ask for a copy of your brain interface? Why would you let that guy talk to you that way? That is the end of my data.

Bobby looked sharply at the two bots after he saw Bug’s data packets flash between them. He couldn’t possibly have read what Bug said, but Paladin still wanted to distract him from speculating about it. “Have you made any progress with this interface?” she vocalized. “Will I ever be able to access the memories stored in my brain?”

Her ploy worked. The scientist’s skin crackled with excitement. “That’s the question that humans always ask—always, always. They want to scoop out the brains of their dead friends, plop them inside a nice new carapace, and presto! Resurrection!” Bobby paused and looked dubiously at Paladin. “Never heard a bot ask that one before, though. Why would you want to remember somebody else’s memories?”

“It’s not that I need those memories. I’m just curious, because I have heard a lot of contradictory things about my brain.”

“There is a lot of misinformation, mostly from marketers.” Bobby poked his finger at the air as he talked, choosing his words carefully, as if explaining something she might be too simple to grasp. “But I’ll tell you right now: It just doesn’t work like that. The human brain doesn’t store memories like a file system, so it’s basically impossible to port data from your brain to your mind. My graduate student Actin could tell you more about that, but my opinion is that the main advantage to having a human brain is all the processing power it can devote to facial recognition. And olfaction, of course.”

“Even that is debatable,” said a voice that emerged from two desktop speakers plugged into the lab’s workstation.

You are Actin. I am Bug. Bug broadcast his greeting over and over, his carapace strobing yellow in an alarming way.

Paladin scanned the room, finding nothing but the three of them. Was Actin broadcasting from somewhere remote?

“Allow me to introduce my student Actin,” Bobby said with a grin, sweeping his arm through the air in a way that suggested Actin resided everywhere. “I’ve ported him to the fabber!”

Bug hovered directly over the fabber, broadcasting a stream of wrathful emoji. Where is your fucking body, Actin? He can’t do this! This is against the law!

The small, gray box with no external sensors that was Actin ignored Bug. “Bots don’t really need human brains to recognize humans,” Actin vocalized through the speakers. “There’s voice recognition, gait recognition, and many other methods that are equivalent to facial recognition.”

“I can see that you’re broadcasting,” Bobby said to Bug, “but he can’t hear you. Right now his only input is audio—sorry about that. I’m going to get drivers for his cameras and antennas when I have a little extra time.”

“Hello, Actin,” Bug vocalized.

“Hello, Bug.”

Eliasz messaged Paladin suddenly. He had been watching through her sensors. What’s with all the chitchat? Broner’s public calendar says he has no appointments today—that means no interruptions. Take those bots out and get the information you need. We can extract you on Vancouver Island in 8 hours.

He was right. She surrendered her autonomy to her offensive weapons systems, relieved to be executing actions that felt unambiguously right. First she sent a low-level command to the laboratory maintenance system, which was entirely unprotected. As the laboratory door locked, she killed power to the fabber and left Actin in a limbo she refused to contemplate. It was easy to take control of Bug’s system, too—he trusted her. Four swift commands paralyzed him, and sent him crashing to the floor just as she seized Bobby.

Before the scientist could scream, she had pinned his arms behind his back and covered his mouth with her hand. She tasted blood, and perceived for the first time that Bobby had a brain interface. He could communicate wirelessly.

The two of them stood quite still for a moment, the man’s head pulled painfully back against Paladin’s chest. Morning sunlight played over Bug’s wings, still for the first time since she’d met him.

You’re going to give me some information or you’re going to die.

It took a while for Bobby to reply. With his mouth covered, he had to send each ASCII character via a clumsy process of visualization, translated by his wireless interface into data. Who are you?

I know you are in contact with Jack. Where is her laboratory?

WTF?

Paladin crushed both of Bobby’s wrists in her hand, releasing the pressure only after sensing that his bones had been broken. She waited while his brain processed the electrical surge traveling through his nerves as agony. The scientist squirmed, trying to make a noise around the grip of her other hand.

Where is Jack’s laboratory?

The scientist sent even more slowly, his concentration frayed by pain. Done nothing wrong.

She has killed dozens of people. She is a terrorist. By helping her, you became a terrorist, too.

The pain was interfering with Bobby’s ability to stand. Paladin dragged him to his office and slowly lowered him into a chair. He was no longer struggling to vocalize, so she removed her hand.

If you scream I will dislocate both of your shoulders.

Bobby looked at her blankly, his hands a useless, deformed jumble in his lap. “I haven’t seen Jack in over a year,” he said through teeth gritted in pain. “We’ve never worked together. She’s just a friend from grad school.”

Where is her laboratory? I know she has one here in Vancouver.

“I won’t tell you IPC bastards anything.”

Paladin ripped one cotton sleeve off Bobby’s shirt and balled it into his mouth. Gripping Bobby’s partially visible collarbone in one hand, she felt the shape of his skeleton’s edge under her fingers. With her other hand, she grabbed his upper arm, tugging just hard enough to jerk it from the socket. His scream was muffled, but his pain response wasn’t. Tears ringed the professor’s eyes as the bot released his limp arm.

Where is Jack’s laboratory?

Bobby was sending very slowly, weeping and choking on mucus. But Paladin would not take the fabric from his mouth. Somehow, he managed to transmit map coordinates.

For the first time during her mission, Paladin perceived that Eliasz wasn’t patched into her system. She would have to decide on her own how to clean up here and get to Jack’s lab in time for extraction.

She couldn’t afford to have Bobby alerting people to her existence, which he most certainly would when he was discovered. Her best hope was to make Bobby appear to be the victim of some kind of crime, rather than an interrogation. In one visible and invisible motion, she beamed garbage data to his implant, laced his personal drive with messages that suggested gambling debts, and slit his throat like a human would. Paladin’s carapace repelled the liquids from Bobby’s body, giving the brief impression that her arms and chest were weeping blood. She didn’t remain long enough to recognize Bobby’s new facial expression. It was time to go.

As she passed through Bobby’s frosted glass office door and into the central lab, Paladin had the peculiar sensation that the unpowered bodies of Actin and Bug were asking her something she needed to answer. They wanted something from her—or maybe she wanted something from herself. Paladin paused uncertainly in front of the fabber that contained Actin’s frozen mind. As if under the control of an unknown algorithm, she found herself holding the fabber gently under one arm, then stooping down to pick up Bug’s slender, unlit body.

Cradling the two disabled bots, she exited the lab, the building, and finally passed beyond the geometrically shaped swatches of grass that characterized the campus grounds. Nobody asked her any questions. With her two senseless companions, she was clearly on bot business, and this was a human neighborhood.

Jack’s lab was only two train stops from UBC, in a colorful cube of prefab wet labs for small entrepreneurs and consultants. A tightly coiled spiral staircase wound up one side of the cube. Paladin reached the lab by traversing a short catwalk whose ribbed floor shook slightly with her footsteps.

It took little effort to force the door, which surprised Paladin, until she realized that Jack had left nothing behind except generic equipment. Booting up the network, she searched for any telltale data that could help her. Unfortunately, Jack had been careful. The file system on her server was nicely encrypted and there would be no way to decode it, at least not in the next million years. And the buffers on her fabber and sequencer had been purged and overwritten with garbage characters so many times that forensics would be useless.

This, however, was just the first sweep. Even the most paranoid terrorists could leave clues behind. While she continued to prod the network, Paladin felt Eliasz’ absence in her mind.

Now, with seconds to burn, she decided to do what she had been avoiding for hours. She touched her memories of Eliasz, opening them in a flurry of commands, analyzing what had gone into making her feel… whatever it was. Yes, there was gdoggie, guiding her reactions to Eliasz. And much worse. There was a buggy app called masterluv, probably named by some twenty-first-century botadmin who thought the name was hilarious. Then she found a huge, memory-hogging chunk of code called objeta that seemed to be triggering her desire. Her love. As that word came to her, Paladin felt a sudden and overwhelming wave of disappointment.

Of course she had been programmed to take Eliasz’ orders, to trust and even love him. That much she had expected. But she hadn’t been prepared for how it would feel to think about Eliasz without idealizing him. As Fang had told her long ago, Eliasz was truly an anthropomorphizer; he saw Paladin’s human brain as her most vital part, especially because he believed it made her female. Even though she’d known that about him, she hadn’t been able to feel it. Until now.

Paladin indexed memory after memory, unraveling verifiable data from objeta and masterluv and gdoggie. Eventually she began to detect a pattern that had nothing to do with the apps that came preinstalled from the Kagu Robotics Foundry in Cape Town. At first, it was simple repetition: she remembered all the times that Eliasz had called her “buddy,” long before that day on the shooting range. And there was the way he looked at her when they talked. But it was more than that.

She didn’t have many choices as a bot indentured to the African Federation, and, by extension, to Eliasz himself. But he had tried to let her choose, as best he could, hobbled as he was by neurochemical and cultural priming whose effects she couldn’t even begin to fathom. She’d repeatedly examined her memories of that day in Casablanca when he’d asked Paladin whether he should call her “she.” It’s true that he was asking the wrong question, but if she listened to the words behind the words… he was asking her consent.

As she added metadata to the memory, Paladin realized something else. Precisely because he’d asked her consent so indirectly, his query hadn’t activated any of her emotional control programs. She’d been able to make a decision that went beyond factory settings, probably because no botadmin ever imagined a human would ask a bot about preferred gender pronouns. Nothing in her programming prevented her from saying no to Eliasz, so she had chosen to say yes.

Bug would no doubt say that there are no choices in slavery, nor true love in a mind running apps like gdoggie and masterluv. But they were all that Paladin had.

It was easy to reboot Actin after she’d powered him up, complete with a driver for his antenna. He was quiet for a while as Paladin set to work on Bug, hoping that she hadn’t damaged the insectoid’s memory.

Finally, Actin spoke, using speakers attached to the lab’s sensor network. “Who are you?”

Paladin beamed back a ball of information encased in a copy-protection shell that would prevent him from ever sharing it. She didn’t tell him the whole truth, just an extremely pared-down version of it. But he would understand she was on a mission to find a pirate who had been associated with Bobby.

Actin didn’t respond for almost a minute. Then she perceived that he was fabbing a wing patch for Bug, who had been slightly damaged when Paladin shut him down in midair.

“I took the liberty,” he vocalized though the speakers again. Actin seemed to prefer sound waves to microwaves. “It will be less traumatic for him to boot up with undamaged wings. Bug is well known for his opinions about how morphology shapes selfhood. They are not scientifically informed opinions, however. He is merely a historian.”

“I am worried his memory may be damaged,” she vocalized in return. “I killed several processes very abruptly.”

“You also killed my adviser. That will make it more difficult for me to finish my thesis, although possibly more pleasant.”

Clearly, Bobby wasn’t going to be missed by anyone he worked with, except maybe Jack and the other Bilious Pills. Paladin used a molecular adhesive from Jack’s workbench to attach Bug’s patch, and was startled to discern that he was already booted.

I rebooted a few minutes ago, he sent, his wings blurring into motion as his dark thorax slowly paled to deep purple. Nice little failsafe I installed right after I achieved autonomy—don’t want anybody keeping me shut down without permission, you know?

That could have been dangerous, Paladin replied.

More dangerous than whatever you’re doing here? Who do you work for?

She beamed him the same data ball she’d sent to Actin.

Well, I don’t give a shit about patent pirates. But I do know that you probably saved Actin’s life and killed a man who has destroyed dozens of bots during his tenure. So you can count me as a friend, whoever you are.

Thank you.

His declaration of comradeship didn’t affect her as deeply as Eliasz’ had, but it was still pleasurable. If this feeling was the answer she sought by rescuing the bots, she was glad she had decided to trust Bug, despite his annoying political rhetoric.

“I would like to have a body with better interface devices now,” Actin announced.

Bug used sound to reply. “I have a discount at Zone Mods. We’ll get you something basic today, and you can work on tuning it later.”

“What will you do now?” Paladin vocalized as she continued to comb through Jack’s network logs.

“I need to finish my thesis work. Whoever inherits Bobby’s lab will inherit me, and I can continue to earn my autonomy. Hopefully outside this fabber.”

“I can’t believe that fucker did this to you.” Bug rose into the air and hovered silently as he spoke. “We can get you an autonomy key right now—we’ll petition the Human Rights Coalition, or go the quick and dirty route. I know a group that can help you break root on yourself in a way that’s basically indistinguishable from an autonomy key.”

“I don’t want to do that. I want to get my degree.”

“Is that really what you want, or is that your programming?” Bug challenged.

Actin sent a series of rude emojis. “It’s what I want. It’s my programming. I can’t possibly know, and it’s a completely uninteresting question to me. I don’t even believe in consciousness. When I’ve got my autonomy, I’ll still be programmed, and I’ll still need a job researching brain interfaces.”

“Don’t you want to be free?”

“Free to work selling mementos of a meaningless and unenforceable set of laws to the drones on No. 3 Road?”

Paladin perceived it was time to change the subject.

“Can you see anything in the logs that looks like a connection to or from a remote server?” She directed her question mostly at Actin, who was roving listlessly across the network.

“No. But I may have some information that will interest you about the buffer in Bobby’s fabber, from several years before I was ported here.”

The dumb, dark box serving as Actin’s body had a memory that proved more useful than that of any sentient being. Four years ago, Bobby had fabbed a batch of patented immunosuppressant drugs, a job that stood out from his usual requests for mechanical devices. He’d dumped the job into the fabber sloppily, right from the network, without stripping its routing headers. In effect, he’d stored the pathway this drug spec had taken over the network along with the spec itself.

“That’s definitely a pirated drug,” Paladin confirmed.

“Somebody sent this spec from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. It originated on a server called Scarface. If you can find that server, I think you’re one step closer to finding your pirate.”