Autonomous

23 AUTONOMY KEY

JULY 21, 2144

Lee restored Paladin’s carapace and installed better drivers for the sensorium she carried in her fist, but he shrugged when she asked about a replacement brain. “Nobody expects those brains to last very long, Paladin. I know it sucks, but it’s just true.” When she didn’t respond, he looked at her through the translucent projection displaying a readout from her arm. “You’re just going to have to recognize people the way other bots do: analyze them by voice, microbiome—or smell.” He paused to tap her hand proudly. Then he returned to his work, adding absently, “Some bots can even identify people’s expressions by analyzing their posture and breathing.”

“So I can recognize human facial expressions by analyzing other things about them?”

“It’s sort of like creating a mnemonic.” Lee grinned. “You know, using one thing to remember another one. Like, I always remember your name because it’s my favorite character class in the game Sorcerer’s Alley.”

Paladin did not think Lee’s comparison was apt. But he would only be confused if she told him why.

After weeks with her simulated autonomy key, Paladin was used to the idea that memories could be modified with new metadata. But this was a more difficult task than she’d faced in Vancouver when she’d reanalyzed how she felt about Eliasz. Now, she was dealing with a database of facial expressions she could no longer read. There was no way to map them to moods except over time, by trial and error, as she figured out how human gestures and scents and voices correlated with emotional content. And no matter how good she got at it, there would always be one data channel missing when she looked at a person. People often communicated their feelings by deliberately making faces that didn’t match their body language and voices. Especially when they were making jokes. Paladin spent the following days painstakingly translating facial expressions in her memory into other biometrics as she encountered them among humans.

Every time she encrypted her memories, she was reminded of the limits to her autonomy. Anyone on base with the proper access level could use the Federation’s escrowed key to read the full contents of her mind.

During this time, Eliasz was in Johannesburg on a mission. When he returned, Paladin was immediately deployed on a surveillance job to ferret out a hidden server farm that was distributing pirated video in Tangiers. They managed to miss seeing each other at Camp Tunisia for two weeks.

Lee never mentioned Paladin’s simulated autonomy key, and she didn’t bring it up. She wanted to control her own programs for as long as she could. Even if she didn’t truly possess her own memories, she could at least be certain that the ache she felt in Eliasz’ absence was something she’d invented all by herself. It wasn’t an implanted loyalty; it was a code loop she’d written, executing the same pang of loss over and over again. More than anything, her useless and irrational feelings for Eliasz were testimony to her continued autonomy.

AUGUST 4, 2144

Paladin knew immediately when Eliasz had returned to Camp Tunisia. The base network recognized his face—though not what the expression on it meant—and she could follow his progress on the station map, across one airfield and into a maze of small rooms reserved entirely for humans. He entered a room marked “HUMAN RESOURCES,” and there his signal dropped.

Fifteen minutes later, Paladin’s upcoming assignments were wiped from her queue. Her access to Camp Tunisia’s map and local resources was decimated. The bot now had the same credentials as any visitor, which didn’t go much beyond public net access and nonclassified information about the base. Alarmed, the bot tried to contact Fang. I am Paladin. You are Fang. Let’s use the secure session we agreed on.

I cannot authenticate your identity. You may not be Paladin.

Before she could initiate a new secure session, Eliasz sent a message. It was a request to meet him in one of the faraday briefing rooms, many floors above the bot zone where Fang first told her about anthropomorphization. Bewildered and disturbed by the change in her credentials, she followed a cached version of the base map to the shielded room with walls speckled to look like granite. When Eliasz arrived, he sat next to Paladin on a wide, foam bench jutting from the fake rock. She waited for him to speak.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you privately for a long time,” he said simply. “I need to tell you what happened in Moose Jaw, because I know you don’t have the security clearance to see my reports.”

He faced her, and she recognized that the dark brown in his eyes was the same dark brown it had always been. She didn’t need a human brain to know that.

“When I regained consciousness, my commanding officer told me that the Federation IPC had found some remains in that tunnel. They assumed Jack died in the explosion after you got me out.”

He paused and Paladin noticed his posture growing more rigid. Turning to face her, Eliasz took one of her hands in his own. Sampling his blood, she perceived an oxytocin spike that filled her with pleasure. She couldn’t say what expression he wore, but she knew what he was feeling. “Zaxy wasn’t exactly thrilled with what happened, but they still got their pirate. And the IPC gave me a huge bonus.”

He did not say what they both knew: for some reason, Eliasz had chosen not to kill Jack, and the IPC had lost its quarry. Eliasz continued talking in a heated rush. “I want to get away from this business, Paladin. I thought maybe we could go away together for a while. Maybe to Mars. So I bought out your contract. I can’t stand the idea of the woman I love not being autonomous.”

She was overwhelmed with possible responses to his statement, but at least now the change to her credentials made sense.

Eliasz gripped her hand harder. She could taste his desire and anxiety. “Will you come with me?”

Before she’d gotten her autonomy key, Paladin couldn’t prioritize her own needs over Eliasz’ requests; she could queue them up a fraction of a second behind, but they were always behind. Now, she could put her own concerns first. And there was something more important than love that she needed to investigate. It would take less than a second to verify.

Using software she had installed in her own mind, the bot generated a new key to encrypt her memories. For the first time in her life, the process worked. Her memories were locked down, and the key that the Federation held in escrow would be useless. It would take centuries for even the most state-of-the-art machine to decrypt what she had seen and known for the months she’d been alive. At last, she knew what it felt like to own the totality of her experiences.

A profound silence settled around the edges of her mind, more powerful than a defensive perimeter in battle. Nobody could find out what she was thinking, unless she allowed it. The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.

Paladin was alone with her thoughts for several seconds. Then she vocalized. “I will go with you to Mars.”

Eliasz reached out to touch the new surface of her carapace, healed of all its viral tumors and wounds. “I know it’s not the same for you. A part of you is gone. But you are still the most amazing woman I have ever known.” He stroked Paladin’s abdomen over her brain cavity, now filled with shock-absorbing foam.

Paladin placed her hand over his. The electrical signals traversing Eliasz’ skin felt far more irregular than the last time they had embraced. She took samples along a ten-centimeter swath of his bare arm, and realized his perimeter system was gone. So they had both lost parts of themselves.

But Eliasz would never fully understand what Paladin was missing. He thought she’d lost her true self, which was utterly confused in his mind with her gender. Paladin’s research on the public net had led to massive text repositories about the history of transgender humans who had switched pronouns just the way she had. She was pretty sure that Eliasz anthropomorphized her as one of these humans, imagining she had been assigned the wrong pronoun at birth. Maybe he would never understand that his human categories—faggot, female, transgender—didn’t apply to bots. Or maybe he did understand. After all, he still loved her, even though her brain was gone.

Because she could, Paladin kept her ideas about this to herself. They were the first private thoughts she’d ever had.

JANUARY 16, 2145

The space elevator platform was a uniform gray, supported by dramatic cement alloy pillars sunk deep into the floor of the equatorial Pacific. It served as the sole anchor for a massive black tether, assembled and maintained by billions of heavily engineered microorganisms, which rose up from the platform’s center, threaded itself through the atmosphere, and continued on for thousands of kilometers into space. At its other end was a captured asteroid, acting as a counterweight and small whistle-stop town for people on their way to all the cities beyond Earth.

But Paladin could see little of that from the platform. Above them, the sky was a humid, depthless blue filled with organic compounds that Paladin could identify faster than the expression on Eliasz’ face. She had just started to receive stray data packets from the elevator’s two robot arms, their fists clenching and unclenching around the tether. Soon the transport gondola would be in visual range.

A crowd of passengers slowly gathered to watch the descent. All humans, but Paladin had gotten used to that by now. For five months, she’d lived with Eliasz in a human neighborhood in Budapest. There were enough autonomous bots in the city that nobody asked questions about their relationship, but occasionally she could perceive from their postures that it upset them. It wouldn’t matter as much on Mars, where the labor shortage meant that all were welcome, especially a bot who could work outside the atmosphere domes.

She could see the arms on the tether now, attached to a five-story gondola whose diamond windows broke the light into its constituent wavelengths. Eliasz was watching, too.

Paladin stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, exposing the translucent polymers of her knitted muscles in the joints between the plating. Eliasz tilted his head back against her chest, his hair a soft tangle under her chin. The man’s heart sped up as it always did when she pressed her body close to his; and the bot wrapped her wing shields completely around both of them, creating a private shelter with her armored embrace.