Autonomous

17 SLAVEBOY

JULY 16, 2144

In the teaching barn, cows were going about their incomprehensible bovine business. Med liked to stroll through the agricultural school during the early morning hours when humans slept, watching the infrared outlines of the animals and the condensation collecting on the inner panes of greenhouse panels. Sometimes she just wanted to be among other living, nonhuman creatures who belonged on the campus as much as she did.

She was pondering an image from Yellowknife of a Retcon patient’s brain. Since taking the Zacuity antidote three days ago, his dopamine receptors had regrown quickly. As the drug changed the neurological structure underlying his addiction, the man reported that he still wanted to paint his house—but not that much. In fact, he wasn’t really looking forward to it. There were similar reports from other patients.

Patients who struggled with long-term addiction usually avoided their chosen activity or substance, fearing a relapse. But with these Zacuity addicts, that didn’t seem to be an issue. The Retcon patients still wanted to engage in the activities they’d been addicted to, but no longer felt compelled to do them. The mania was gone. And, perhaps unfortunately, work no longer brought them unmediated joy.

Now it was time to get down to the most difficult part of their project: proving that the pirated drug was actually Zacuity, the new blockbuster from pharma megacorp Zaxy. When so few people actually understood how drugs were made, it was easy for a big corp to lie and get away with it. She and the Retcon team would have to come up with a way to explain reverse engineering so that even a bored feed hopper could understand it.

The cows began to low companionably, and Med stared up at the galaxy smeared across the dark sky.

Her parents back in Anchorage were proud of her for taking this job, and some of her old teachers and botadmins sent messages of congratulations. But she felt restless and dissatisfied in an unfamiliar way. She was working on a problem with no known parameters, its implications threaded through her life instead of through twists of DNA.

She’d gone from developing drugs to fighting Big Pharma. She had no idea what it would do to her career when the research paper she was coauthoring with Krish went online. They were accusing Zaxy of a serious crime by calling Zacuity an addictive drug. It was going to blow up all the media feeds, and her unusual background as an autonomous bot would no doubt be part of the lurid tale. Inevitably, somebody would accuse Krish or the Cohen Lab radicals of having “reprogrammed” her to be a subversive. Humans always said things like that when they didn’t like the way a bot was behaving.

And then there was Threezed. Ever since he’d shown up in the lab at Yellowknife, her life had been derailed—or fast-tracked, depending on how you wanted to think about it.

But her deepening friendship with Threezed was the strangest and most inexplicable part of this anomalous series of events. He provided her with some of the only nonwork conversations she’d had since leaving her family in Anchorage. Threezed kept late hours, and distracted her when everybody else was asleep. They talked about movies and music and a lot of other things that were completely unrelated to pharmaceutical development. Last night they started by talking about her name.

“Med? Is that short for Medicine?”

“No,” she laughed. “It’s for Medea. Somebody thought it would be a great idea to name me after a character from Greek mythology who got revenge on her philandering husband by murdering their children and flying away in a burning chariot.”

“Well, at least you’re not named after the last two numbers assigned to you by Human Resources.”

“It’s true.”

She tried to think of something else to say that wouldn’t sound condescending, clueless, or both. Coming from one of the only places in the world where bots were born autonomous, Med had this feeling a lot. It kept her from forming friendships with other bots in the lab. How could she understand them, when she’d always been autonomous? She felt like her bot identity was incomplete without that seminal experience, but at the same time, it didn’t make humans seem any less alien.

Threezed seemed to sense her mood. “Don’t feel bad that you never got indentured.” He touched her arm for a few seconds. “Nobody wants that. Plus, I’m sure you’ve been fucked over in lots of other ways.”

It was one of the nicest things a human outside her family had ever said to her.

Finally, she got up the nerve to ask him what it was like to be indentured.

“I used to write about it a lot, but I’m writing more about autonomy these days,” he said.

“You wrote about it? Where?”

She couldn’t believe it when he told her. “You’re SlaveBoy? From Memeland? Are you serious? I used to read you all the time.” She paused, remembering. “I thought you were dead.”

“Yeah, I know a lot of people thought that after I stopped posting a couple of years ago. I got sold in Vegas and didn’t have access to the net. But I’ve started updating again—look!”

He showed her the SlaveBoy journal on his mobile. Sure enough, there were new entries starting a couple of weeks back. She began to scan through them and stopped abruptly at a detailed description of sex with “J.” She might be Threezed’s friend, but there were some things she didn’t want to know.

SlaveBoy was one of those underground sensations on the net that flashed in and out of public awareness. Most of his posts were read only by his subscribers, but sometimes he wrote something so raw and bizarre that it bubbled up into the commercial text repos. Med’s sibling Ajax had introduced her to SlaveBoy’s journal six years ago, during the anxious summer in Anchorage before she started graduate school.

“You want to know what it’s like to be indentured?” Ajax asked Med. “You should check out SlaveBoy’s feed. He’s this kid in the AU who grew up in an indenture school. He says he’s like a bot because he doesn’t remember anything before indenture.”

She’d read through the whole thing that night, mainlining SlaveBoy’s prickly, grotesquely truthful story. He’d started posting when he was ten, describing his schoolwork and friends. But as he’d grown older, he began to chronicle the injuries, both small and enormous, that were a part of indenture. At the age of twelve, he changed his handle from SchoolBoy to SlaveBoy.

When he was on the verge of turning fourteen, a few weeks before Ajax showed Med the journal, the SlaveBoy feed had been linked all across the public net. He’d written a vivid, emotionless account of his school going bankrupt. All the kids’ contracts were sold, and SlaveBoy found himself indentured to a mechanical engineering shop that developed turbines.

He wrote:

Somehow his dispassionate retelling made it more upsetting than if he’d actually described weeping over his rape, or beating his hands against the bars on his dormitory window.

All over the net, people were talking about how SlaveBoy’s story confirmed that indenture laws were being violated. Half-hearted, unsuccessful efforts were made to unmask his real identity, and some claimed he was a creation of anti-indenture radicals. Med had never doubted he was real. Nobody who was trying to drum up support for a political position would dare to be as sarcastic and ambivalent as SlaveBoy.

And now, years later, she had proof that he existed. In Threezed she suddenly saw two people: the young man she knew, and the SlaveBoy she had imagined knowing. She didn’t ask him if all those things had really happened. She didn’t try to comfort him. She was only curious. “What happened to you in Vegas?” she asked.

“Oh, you know what they say.” He shrugged, his tone as blank as his prose. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”