Autonomous

18 VEGAS

JULY 14, 2144

The sky rained pixels and the market awnings expelled cool mist as fine as smoke. Under its climate-controlled bubble, Vegas never changed. Projectors painted the dome above them with fantastical weather. Today it was Jupiter’s diminishing megastorm depicted in a lurid red, its sluggish whorl of clouds filling the Strip with a surreal, ruddy light.

Tourists pressed past Eliasz to the tram windows, eager to ogle the city’s monumental architecture. There were silver and gold buildings so narrow they looked like playing cards balanced on their edges; bulbous palaces; simulated cities, their landmarks rendered in caricature; transparent inverted pyramids; and, of course, the famous gardens whose sculptures were made of fire, fountains, music, wild animals, giant robots, and full-scale replica slave ships.

Everywhere, on the moving sidewalks and hologram-infested streets, there were human resources for sale. Each market center had its specialty, from gardeners and domestics, to secretaries, engineers, and bookkeepers. The indentured with high levels of education were expensive, hidden from the crowds, stocked in display rooms with the tools of their trades. You found them, one per room, in the labyrinthine hallways of the market centers.

But others were expensive because they were beautiful. They were not hidden away. These, led on show leashes, their skin glowing with cosmetics and hair piled in luxurious shapes, were what pulled murmurs from the throats of Eliasz’ fellow passengers. They sighed at the pretty things augmented to be prettier. They joked about being rich enough to afford one.

At each stop, the tram disgorged more of its human contents, shoppers and gawkers alike, until Eliasz rode alone in the direction of Wynn Market. Through the windows he saw a woman in a matte rubber spray-on body suit. She looked almost robotic. Seeing his eyes on her, she spun slowly, her perfect lips forming a perfect kiss. A bored-looking sales rep held her leash. His button-down shirt rippled with an illegible logo for the company selling her.

Eliasz thought of Paladin, autonomous on her mission in Vancouver, and promised himself that he would do everything in his power to prevent her from ever seeing this place. Then the tram reached Wynn and it was time to shut down all feelings but one: adrenaline-fueled attention.

Wynn Market was built around the ruins of a card-shaped palace. Once a luxury hotel, like most of the markets on the Strip, Wynn had suffered some kind of catastrophe in the twenty-first century that made melted skeletons of its penthouses. Only its intact lower floors were inside the dome, which curved sharply overhead. At the foot of the Wynn Market building was a vast bazaar of stalls, containers, and prefab sheds that spread confusingly down Wynn Lane, which bisected the Strip at this point. In truth, Vegas was not domed so much as tubed. From above, the Strip was like a long, gently curving cylinder. At one end, it was capped by a transport center. At the other, it radiated outward into a series of smaller tubes like tributaries. Many of these were little more than improvised tent shanties, filled with lukewarm, stale air. Wynn Market, where the cheapest contracts could be negotiated, stood at the nexus of all these branches.

Eliasz was headed for the tributaries, which held wares whose contracts were often barely legal. He knew this part of Vegas better than he knew himself.

If Frankie’s information was correct, and Jack’s companion was an AU boy with numbers for a name, there were only one or two places where the kid might have been sold. Eliasz ambled through the bazaar, affecting the casual walk of a shopper, pausing to peer into the interior of the Wynn building. All the indentured on the auction block lived for weeks or months in the city’s millions of market rooms, with their minimal beds and tiny bathrooms, meeting client after client until a contract was negotiated. Here the rooms were shabby, but elsewhere on the Strip they could be as posh as the homes and businesses where the indentured would serve out their contracts. Where Eliasz was headed, though, there were no rooms at all.

Wynn Lane narrowed into a pedestrian walkway lined thickly with booths and big boxes. Inside, people stood listlessly on leashes or slept. Many had crude, mass-produced prosthetics—they came from military or maybe machinist jobs, too damaged to finish out their original contracts. A lot of the sales reps here specialized in buying up these kinds of contracts at a reduced rate and flipping them quickly.

Eventually Eliasz reached an unnamed alley whose curved, tinted roof arched only a few meters above his head when he ducked inside. Narrow and dark, the alley was a covert rivulet of wealth, the air sweet and purified. Nondescript cargo containers hung with thick drapes gleamed in tidy rows on either side for roughly a kilometer before the alley terminated in a dead end. Some of these containers held property more valuable and coveted than anything you could get on the Strip. Others were packed with expendable refuse that was still young and fresh enough to fetch a decent price.

You weren’t supposed to indenture kids in the Free Trade Zone, but it was done all the time. Sometimes covertly, sometimes accidentally, and always cruelly. This was the neighborhood where Eliasz had started his career in property law enforcement, rooting out the scum who sold under-sixteens. It was a tricky business. You couldn’t always tell the kids from the adults. Some of the children on offer had been doped with Vive when they were young—or they’d doped themselves—to look forever like vulnerable schoolboys and Lolitas. Twenty-year-olds who appeared to be thirteen were legal commodities. Eliasz believed that anyone willing to sell a fake kid would have no problem selling a real one, but the city wouldn’t let him go after anybody but the flagrant violators, the guys who imported goods from the economic coalitions where indenture schools and vague age-of-consent laws made it easy to buy ten-year-old roof cleaners and fourteen-year-old fetish objects.

On this alley, there were few such extreme criminals. More common were the operations that managed to stay in the barely legal zone, the ones he’d been told to watch but not prioritize.

He’d reached his first destination. The place looked exactly the same as when he’d seen it two years ago. A small red-and-gold sign over the door read “QUALITY IMPORTS.” Whether this was the shop’s name or an advertisement for its contents, Eliasz had never been sure. Inside, the air was cooled by an additional set of purifiers, one of which was aimed directly at the upper body of a man hidden behind a hazy projection that hovered over his desk.

“Good to see you’re still here, Calvin,” Eliasz announced.

The projection evaporated, revealing a small man with tidy gray hair sitting in front of a cabinet full of servers. To his right was a door that led into the showroom that took up most of the space in the container.

“I can’t say the feeling is mutual,” the man replied crisply. “Back to hassling legitimate businesses with your child slavery scaremongering? Or are you just visiting?”

“I’m looking for a kid named Threezed. Sounds like one of yours.” Eliasz beamed an authenticated ID to Calvin’s projector. “I’m not working for Vegas anymore—this is official IPC business. So look in those detailed records of yours and tell me if you sold a kid named Threezed to somebody who might have been working in the Arctic.”

“Hey, hey, cool down. I keep my records open to all law enforcement during working hours, you know that. I’m clean.”

“Lay off the bullshit and give me access.”

The man twitched, then made a series of quick gestures over the table. A flat database page popped up and Calvin’s fingers jerked out a search for the string “30” under “DESIGNATION.” There was no field for “NAME.” Dozens of results piled in the air, going back fifteen years.

Eliasz pulled them down to his mobile for safekeeping, then flicked through the list hovering in front of Calvin’s face. He guessed Threezed had been sold fairly recently—probably in the last year or two. Seventy-five percent of runaway crimes happened in the first year of indenture. That narrowed the list considerably. Six files remained: strips of text pinned to thumbnail headshots of AU and Federation boys, their expressions deliberately neutral. Nobody bought contracts for the indentured who looked too emotional.

All of Calvin’s search results looked like they were under sixteen, but their records claimed otherwise.

“Who bought these contracts?” Eliasz asked, jabbing his finger at the thumbnails. Calvin opened full files on each, spreading them out in the air with the palms of his hands.

“These two went to a farm up north,” he muttered, scrolling through the data. “This one I sold just recently, to a molecular foundry.”

Eliasz pointed at the “BUYER” field on the fourth result and spoke sharply. “You sold 45030 to somebody named Pseudo Nym who has no employment?”

Calvin peered at the entry and narrowed his eyes. “The buyer was between jobs, and his ID and credit were good. Not every contract has to go to a specific job. People buy general assistants all the time. Plus, I was lucky to sell his contract at all. He was a snotty little shit.”

Eliasz’ hand tightened on his perimeter control. “What do you mean by that?”

“He was one of those indenture schoolers from the AU—thought he was smarter than everybody else. Kept saying he was a star on Memeland and that he needed to be placed somewhere with good net access. Where do these boys get that kind of entitlement? As far as I’m concerned, they’re lucky that somebody wants to pay to feed them for the next ten years.”

Eliasz numbed his rage before it could control him. He needed more information, especially because this kid fit the profile perfectly. Somebody with a dubious employment background, buying from a guy like Calvin, might easily be crossing paths with smugglers. He snapped his fingers to open a window on his mobile, and started several searches running across Memeland: Threezed, indenture, slave, AU, Arctic, Jack, Jack Chen, Judith Chen, pirate, drugs, Bilious Pills. For good measure, he added: Quality Imports, Vegas. If this kid was writing about his life, at least some of those terms would surface in proximity to each other. Eliasz’ search, projected perpendicular to his waist, looked like a glowing white puddle hovering in the air under Calvin’s projection.

“What made you think this Pseudo Nym was going to feed 45030 here?” He gestured at the thumbnail, which showed a brown-skinned boy, prettier than most, a fluffy thatch of black hair obscuring his forehead. His previous contract had been with an engine design shop in the AU.

“I’m not doing anything wrong here, buddy. You checked my records—these are all legal sales, alright? This guy signed a contract agreeing to support this shit kid.”

“What else do you remember about this buyer? Have you sold to him before?”

“I don’t know anything, and even if I did I’m not legally obligated to tell you.”

Eliasz reached over the counter to touch Calvin’s arm and abruptly pulsed his perimeter, enough to deliver a strong shock. With a scream, the sales rep spasmed out of his chair and landed with a crash on the floor.

“Oh, sorry about that. Did that jog your memory?”

“He… he had a submarine. Needed somebody who knew something about engines. That’s why he wanted the boy.”

“Why the fuck are you protecting this scum? What’s his real name?” He kicked Calvin’s tailbone, shocking him again for good measure.

“I don’t know!” Calvin choked, then spat blood. He’d bitten his tongue. “Why the fuck do you care so much?” He grinned nastily through the blood. “Somebody steal your slave boy once? Is that what turned you into the avenging angel of Vegas?”

This was going nowhere. “This isn’t personal,” he said tonelessly, resisting the urge to turn Calvin’s brains into sludge on the wall.

“Can I stand up now, or are you going to start beating me again? I don’t think the internal affairs department is going to like the way you’re treating a legitimate businessman.”

“Feel free to file a complaint.” Eliasz grabbed a fistful of data out of the air and turned to leave.

The drapes covering the door of Quality Imports swirled behind him in a perfect, velvety arc. Calvin wasn’t stupid enough to call attention to himself by filing a complaint, and besides, Eliasz wasn’t bound by the rules of this jurisdiction anymore. He answered to a higher authority: the IPC.

The unnamed alley smelled like lavender. Across the street a man dressed in business casuals talked quietly to an adolescent girl with unnaturally blond ringlets. The man offered the girl an injection, then settled on a mahogany bench to show her something on his mobile. She snuggled into his arms, staring at a holographic blob, looking confused. Six meters away, a sales rep smiled at them from the doorway of a pink container called “The Alice Shop.” He was sending his goods out on a test drive, perhaps, or had just made a sale.

Eliasz turned his back on the scene and walked back to Wynn Lane. At the intersection, he was enveloped in tendrils of warm, moist atmosphere that smelled of human bodies in various states of exhaustion or agitation. He found a slightly scabby plastic bench outside a drugstore hawking generics and sat down. To peruse the Memeland search results, Eliasz angled his projection so it was legible only to his eyes.

The first few hits were garbage from people writing about politics and biohacking, quoting from a copy of The Bilious Pills hosted by a free text repo archive in Anchorage. Though these hits were useless for his search, he sent off a quick note to IPC intelligence flagging the archive. That kind of content shouldn’t be publicly available.

He kept reading. More garbage results on various Judith Chens. And then he found a block of prose that looked promising, from an entry written just a few weeks ago by somebody called SlaveBoy.

Below the post was a zigzagging field of almost five hundred nested comment threads. Most were one-liners, written in English and Chinese, welcoming SlaveBoy back and expressing relief that he hadn’t died. Others were long, personal stories that Eliasz flicked through disinterestedly.

Another post, two days later:

And then, eight days ago:

Eliasz paused. This was obviously Threezed, and the “J” was Jack.

There were two more entries, one from yesterday, but they didn’t indicate where Threezed was. “J” had disappeared from the journal, and the boy was writing a lot about robots and autonomy.

Still, it seemed Paladin was right: Jack was still in touch with contributors to The Bilious Pills, including the anti-patent agitators running this free lab. Probably funded by a noneconomic organization trying to undermine the IPC.

He patched into Paladin’s data feed. The bot was at Broner’s office, talking to the scientist about brain interfaces. He sent an order for her to interrogate the man now, appending coordinates for an extraction point.

It was time to close in. Eliasz and Paladin would rendezvous on Vancouver Island, and from there… Eliasz started a search on free labs in the northern Zone. The results were all references to one place: the Free Lab at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. If Jack wasn’t there, he was willing to bet they would know where to find her.

With a couple of hours to kill before extraction, Eliasz bought himself a soda and strolled back toward Wynn Market. Idle times were dangerous. Things he’d seen when he worked here, and back home in Warsaw, writhed at the corners of his vision.

When Eliasz came of age, over a decade ago, he’d been lucky. His father had bought a limited franchise that allowed Eliasz to work in Warsaw, as long as he was employed by the church. His sisters were not so lucky. They left home one by one, indentured to corps overseas.

Eliasz’ first job was as a guard in the church dormitories for the Boys Manufacturing Internship Program. Mostly he was there to catch runaways. He spent his days watching the boys assemble bodies in the church robotics factory, troubleshooting algorithms and studying bot anatomy. Supposedly it was so they would learn basic technical skills and land better clients when they entered contract. At night, he worked shifts in the church dormitory, listening to the boys crying themselves to sleep or getting into pointless fights over nothing.

It was during one of these long nights that he discovered what happens when you force adolescent boys to spend all day with robots whose chests are laser etched with the sign of the cross. There weren’t a lot of functional video sensors left in the factory, but one of them picked up some motion in infrared and sent an alert to Eliasz.

Hidden behind a rubbish pile of arms and legs, he found two of the interns with an unprogrammed biobot. She’d obviously been cobbled together out of castoff parts, with her skin applied patchily and her mind left unformatted. As soon as the boys saw Eliasz, they tossed her back on the pile of limbs and hurled themselves out a window to race back to the dormitories. Knowing what the priests would do to the boys if he reported them, Eliasz decided to keep their indiscretions to himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do with the bot.

She looked uncannily like an unconscious teenage girl—until he peered more closely. The boys had been more careful with her lingerie than her chassis. One of her arms was longer than the other, and the tissue on her inner thighs needed nutrients. She had no mind installed, but her hair was slicked into curls and her face covered in makeup. They had modeled her on a common sex worker bot, popular on the pay feeds. Eliasz picked her up gently, unsure what to do. Her carbon fiber body was light in his arms. The more he saw of what the boys had done to her, the more mesmerized and revolted he was.

He decided disassembly was the best option, and spent a painstaking hour reducing the bot to a pile of limbs, torso slices, a head emptied of its sensors, and a lumpy roll of tissue that was too damaged to recycle. Her endoskeleton would be useful, though. He carried her in pieces to the parts bin.

“Thank you.”

The voice came from behind him, in the same rubbish pile where he’d found the boys with their bot.

When he turned, Eliasz saw an unfinished bot standing with arms akimbo. The bot’s exposed metal-and-fabric muscles must have camouflaged him in the garbage. His battered chest carapace—his only external casing—bore a detailed laser etching of a fantastically muscled Christ on the cross.

For the second time that night, Eliasz wasn’t sure what to do.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

The bot stared at him. “I can’t leave. I keep watch here, but tonight I decided to do something.”

“Are you indentured to the church?”

“I am Scrappy. You are Eliasz. I belong to Piotr.”

Eliasz moved closer. Was this bot talking about Father Piotr? Eliasz’ mind was muddy with exhaustion and he was still unsettled by what he’d done to the sexbot. Images of her inert body parts kept erupting into his mind. Standing beside Scrappy, Eliasz found himself wondering what it would be like to do what the boys had done with a bot.

Scrappy thrummed with life, and had no repulsive layer of makeup over wads of damaged tissue. As he spoke, he gestured by moving his arms in a perfect, graceful ellipse. There was something undeniably beautiful about him. Eliasz tried not to look at the matte black of his bones, threaded with soft fabric stronger than anything on Earth.

The bot pointed at a heap of hands. “I keep watch over this. But I do not have orders to watch everything that happens. That’s why I sent the alert.”

Eliasz tried to think of something else to say, to chase away the ideas coalescing in his mind. “Why can’t you leave?”

“My legs.” Scrappy pointed down, to show Eliasz that he’d been bonded to the floor. Eliasz wasn’t sure about all the laws of indenture, but he knew one thing: The indentured could not be permanently bound. He knelt to examine the seam between the bot’s legs and the floor, wondering where the molecule regulators were kept. It would only take a few minutes to free Scrappy, though he’d have to build some feet for him.

Looking up, Eliasz could see the braided fibers in Scrappy’s neck and caught a glimpse of actuators where the bot’s carapace settled against his hips.

Scrappy spoke. “Humans are coming.”

There was scrabbling outside the window, and Eliasz saw three of the older boys, almost at the age of contract. They were only a few months younger than Eliasz. He froze, his face only centimeters from the slick ball joint between Scrappy’s thighbone and pelvis.

“Look—it’s the guard!” One of the boys let out a bark of laughter.

“He’s sucking off Scrappy!”

“Faggot!” More laughter.

“Suck it, faggot!”

Eliasz rose up, putting his body between the bot and the boys. His face was hot with blood and rage. His only weapon was a baton, but Eliasz had always been good with weapons, and he moved fast. At least one of the boys wouldn’t be able to say the word “faggot” again for a long time. For people without franchises, there was a three-month wait period to access Warsaw’s bone printer, unless it was a life-threatening scenario. Which it wasn’t. The boy could live with a shattered lower jaw, as long as the church had wire and straws.

Eliasz had a lot of practice erasing this cognitive marginalia from his mind, but it reemerged when he had nothing to occupy his attention.

So he focused on a good memory, consciously strengthening its vividness as if he were running it through an image processor. It was Paladin’s beautiful, angular, armored body—the way it looked when she was shivering in his arms that afternoon in Casablanca. Just as Paladin crashed, her shields glitched and she flickered into invisibility and back out again. Other bodies, other missions, other countries tried to crowd out the picture of her face in his mind, but he overwrote them with the feeling of her carapace against his naked skin.

Eliasz was suffused with a feeling more powerful than any humiliation his long-ago experiences could possibly supply. He had no trouble identifying it as love.