Autonomous

5 GOOD SCIENCE

JULY 5, 2144

“That was seriously fucked up,” Threezed said enthusiastically.

Jack had taken the sub deep below the surface. The portals in the control room looked like dark ellipses from an enormous text message. Jack and Threezed were watching Taxi Driver, a mid-twentieth-century movie about a man who goes insane and tries to free an indentured sex worker in New York City.

Threezed scratched his face, where the last of his scabs was flaking off. He’d cleaned up pretty well after that first night when they’d introduced themselves. He refused to talk about what had happened, and Jack didn’t push. The fact was, she didn’t want to think about what she’d done to Threezed’s client any more than he did.

After sleeping for nearly twenty-four hours, Threezed had awakened with a sardonic personality and the kind of youthful energy that every Vive addict was chasing. First he offered to tune her engines—he claimed he knew his way around sub mechanics—but Jack wasn’t prepared to have some stranger without a past going that deep into her systems. She was perfectly willing to put him on homemaker duty, though. He couldn’t do much damage scrubbing.

When he wasn’t tidying something, Threezed focused his attention on the mobile she’d loaned him. His only implant was an indenture tracker, so he’d been relying on these flimsy, foldable devices his whole life. Mobiles weren’t exactly durable, or powerful. But they could access plenty of bandwidth from the free mote network, whose microscopic data relays were sprayed into the atmosphere by drones in most of the economic coalitions.

Jack kept the free motes in range stunned with a signal jammer, and she didn’t want Threezed using the sub’s comms, so he was left with nothing to do but stream her locally stored movies from the motes in her ventilation system. He started with movies from the twenty-first century, where the English accents were easier to understand and the resolution was pretty good. Then he moved on to silent movies of the 1910s and ’20s, their worlds rendered in abstract grayscale, like engineering diagrams. He said it was easier for him to read the English intertitles than understand the weird accents in movies from later decades.

Tonight, however, he was pretty impressed with this full-color Martin Scorsese movie from 1976. They watched it with subtitles. “It’s strange how they were dealing with the same shit we are,” Threezed remarked, picking at a scab on his knee. “You always hear about how people were so diseased back then, and everything was really slow and backward, but I’ve totally known guys like that. I mean, I’ve totally known cab drivers like that.”

“Yeah, I guess people don’t change that much from century to century.” Jack shrugged. Now that the movie had him in a decent mood, it seemed like a good time to bring up their next move. “So, we’re going to get to Inuvik in a day or two,” she said. “I can drop you off there.” A bustling port town on the Arctic coast, Inuvik was the perfect place to get lost. Threezed could catch a fast train from there to dozens of big cities in the Zone.

“Inuvik? What am I supposed to do there?”

“Don’t worry—I’ll give you some credits to get you on your feet.”

“But how am I supposed to get on my feet when I’ve got this chip in my arm?” Threezed passed his hand over the fleshy part of his left upper arm, where the indenture tag was implanted.

“I killed your tag a couple of days ago. Nobody will be able to tell it’s there.”

“You killed my tag… without telling me?”

“It’s not safe for you to be trackable after what happened. Did you really want to be broadcasting your identity to the world?”

“Well, I…” Threezed trailed off. His hand tightened over the place where his dead tag would probably live forever in its teardrop of surgical glass.

Jack was about to suggest that he catch a train to Vancouver when her perimeter fizzed under the skin of her right hand. She had a message.

“Sorry… I’ve got to check this.” Jack shot Threezed an apologetic look. She crossed the bridge to her chair near the control consoles and gestured up a window that only she could see. Its dark rectangle perfectly blocked the angry expression that was slowly distorting the shapes of Threezed’s mouth and eyes.

One of her search programs had found an uptick in news about drug-related accidents and crimes.

It seemed that the homework fiend was part of a small epidemic of workaholism. First came an elderly man who refused to stop mowing his lawn. Doctors restrained him, but he kept roaring and twitching, demanding the mower controls. Next was a woman who only wanted to walk dogs. There was a city worker who had unleashed a fleet of autonomous road foamers with orders to spray new sidewalks in seemingly random locations downtown, during rush hour. The vehicles injured several people, cementing their feet and legs, before her supervisor was able to shut down the fleet. Then came a nanny, weeping and incoherent, nearly arrested after spending ten hours in the park just to push children on the swings.

Unsettled, Jack gestured through a few more news stories. At least five people were dead, mostly from dehydration, and dozens hospitalized. The more she read, the more convinced she was that her reverse-engineered Zacuity was to blame. These reports were just from Calgary, so who knew what was going on in smaller cities like Iqaluit and Yellowknife? There could be dozens more people with these side effects, with far less access to medical help. This was the kind of pharmaceutical disaster she’d vowed to fight against, and now she’d caused one, for the exact same reason the corps did: money. Pharma deprivation death machine, indeed. Digging her nails into the palms of her hands, Jack forced herself to focus. She needed to stop this thing from getting a lot worse.

But Jack didn’t have much time. Somebody was going to have to pay for those deaths, and a radical anti-patent activist who sold pirated drugs would be high on the IPC’s list of suspects. When Zaxy connected the dots and figured out her role in this shit show, she would be on their hit list. Not because they wanted justice, or even to make an example of her. Jack was the only person alive who knew it was Zaxy’s patented molecular structure for Zacuity that was killing people. The company had to cover up the connection between their new drug and these meltdowns. Killing her was by far the easiest way to do it.

Threezed chose that moment to amble over, kneel at her feet, and squeeze her knee, his hand warm through the canvas of her coveralls. He looked up at her through the map projection that defined her future, his eyes wide with feigned innocence. The clean fluff of his hair framed the graceful lines of his face and neck, making him look like a yaoi character. “I’d like to repay you for what you’ve done for me,” he murmured.

Threezed was a practiced flirt. Maybe he was trying to manipulate her, or maybe his indenture had trained him in this specific form of gratitude. Both options were depressing, but Jack hardly noticed through the distortion field of her own depression. Something cracked inside her, then broke. Wiping the display out of the air, Jack stared into Threezed’s almost-black eyes and wondered if Zaxy was actually going to assassinate her. Wondered if maybe she deserved it.

The sub thrummed into motion, bringing them closer to Inuvik, second by second. Threezed leaned forward and gently brushed his cheek against her inner thigh. It was tempting to take the easy way out and just go into hiding with this coquettish young man for a few months, but the instant she thought about it, her unhappiness grew so acute that the temptation was over. Zacuity was coring out people’s minds, and she was responsible. There was no way she could live with herself if she didn’t warn people about how dangerous this drug really was. When Jack got to the mainland, she was going to call in a favor that might save hundreds of lives… but probably not her own.

She ran her fingers through Threezed’s hair and thought about dying wishes. “Are you sure?” she asked.

He bowed his head in an ambiguous gesture of obedience and consent.

SUMMER 2114

Thirty years ago, when Jack was Threezed’s age, she spent every afternoon in a climate-controlled wing of the university genetics lab. She had an internship that mostly involved organizing sample libraries of proteins and obscure bits of RNA. When she wasn’t tagging test tubes, she dreamed about becoming a synthetic biologist who could stop genetic diseases with perfectly engineered therapies. She knew without a doubt that one day she was going to do Good Science and save millions of lives. She just needed to find the right protein or DNA sequence that would undo whatever molecular typo made a mutated cell keep living when it should have died. That summer, Jack learned the art of apoptosis, or making cells extinguish themselves.

In the fall, she matriculated into a PhD program at one of the top bioengineering departments in the Free Trade Zone. Franklin University was near an old port city and military base called Halifax, right on the North Atlantic. Jack had never lived near the ocean before, and she rented a tiny room whose advantages included a perfect line of sight to the local high-speed antenna array—better than the free mote net—plus, a tremendous sea view. She joined the well-funded Bendis Lab, designing custom viruses for drug delivery.

But then something unexpected derailed her promising academic career.

It happened on a warm Friday afternoon. Wandering down the wide foam road into town, Jack ran into a guy named Ari who was in her protein folding seminar.

“What did you think of that last lab, eh?” she asked. He’d been pissed in class about something their professor had said about the direct relationship between proteins and human behavior.

“Total garbage,” he snorted. “Hey, what are you up to tonight?”

Jack perked up. Ari was pretty cute, and it had been a while since she’d hooked up with anybody.

“Nothing much. I was thinking of grabbing some dinner and watching a movie. Want to hang out?”

“I’m going to the Freeculture meeting. You should come.”

Jack didn’t know that much about Freeculture, except for the fact that her lab’s principal investigator, Louise Bendis, had some kind of beef with them over a patent she’d filed. From that, and stories about Freeculture in science journals, she’d gotten the vague impression that they were the sort of people who threw a lot of technical terms around to justify selling “liberated” drugs.

She must have looked dubious, because Ari laughed and said, “We’re not going to ply you with drugs or anything. But you should know more about the patent system if you’re going to be working on the Bendis Patent Farm.” He made a snarky face. Then he smiled again, and lightly touched Jack’s arm. “A bunch of us are going to get dinner after.”

“Sold,” she pronounced. What the hell. She was at university to expand her mind, right? And maybe she’d get laid.

The meeting was in an airy graduate student lounge down the hall from the Plant Biology Department. Years ago, some joker had tweaked a few genes in a plant designed to repair glass and set it free on the windows. Now the light was filtered by leaves whose molecular structure had bonded with the glass and remained stuck there in artful clumps long after the plant had died.

About twenty-five students were sitting in a circle of chairs introducing themselves when Ari and Jack arrived. Most of them studied genetic engineering, with a few cognitive and neuroscience weirdos. The students were all surprisingly smart, and Jack was immediately charmed by the evening’s invited speaker, a young professor from Saskatchewan who was mired in a protracted legal battle with his university over whether he would be allowed to file an open patent on some simple antivirals he’d discovered. He had thick, shoulder-length black hair, and green eyes that were striking against his brown face. His name was Krish Patel, and he made Jack forget about all the idle hookup plans she’d had for Ari.

Krish compared the patent system to the indenture system, which Jack thought was kind of a stretch. But she had to admit that the patent system did seem to be at the root of a lot of social problems. Only people with money could benefit from new medicine. Therefore, only the haves could remain physically healthy, while the have-nots couldn’t keep their minds sharp enough to work the good jobs, and didn’t generally live beyond a hundred. Plus, the cycle was passed down unfairly through families. The people who couldn’t afford patented meds were likely to have sickly, short-lived children who became indentured and never got out. Jack could see Krish’s point about how a lot of basic problems could be fixed if only patent licensing were reformed.

Afterward, at the restaurant, Jack got into a huge debate with Krish about whether open-patent antivirals could really lead to more innovation in viral shell engineering. She liked how he calmly reasoned with every criticism she had, incorporating her ideas into a solution right there on the spot.

He walked her home after dinner, and she came up with some incredibly lame excuse to invite him upstairs.

Curled up on a sofa near the window, they shared some 420 and listened to the ocean in the distance. “So the politics of virus shells,” Jack said, exhaling. “Pretty hot stuff. Pretty sexy.”

Krish stared at her, his hand frozen in midair, the pipe in his fingers slowly bleeding smoke. He looked half-terrified, half-perplexed. She realized suddenly that he might not have understood she was bringing him here to have sex. Maybe he thought she’d really just wanted to talk sequence all night.

“I am flirting with you,” she clarified.

“Oh, good—that’s what I thought.” He laughed. “One can never be sure, though.”

She liked the way he never made assumptions, even about basic things like fucking.

When they kissed, she could taste the political analysis he’d described during the Freeculture meeting. His flavor, a mixture of smoke and fennel, was redolent of the Good Science she’d dreamed about doing when she was an undergraduate: the science that helped people, and gave them a chance to lead lives they could be proud of. Nothing made her want to strip a man naked more than knowing he had good ideas… and so she did. She could taste a nuanced ethical understanding of the patent system all over his body.

Over the next few months, Jack divided her time between less-than-challenging work at the Bendis Patent Farm and extremely challenging reading about patents. Some of it was stuff that Krish recommended, but once she’d read the basic essays and books, she followed footnotes and references and struck out on her own. She became a regular at the Freeculture meetings, and even gave a demo one evening about a little program she’d written that could help reverse engineer certain classes of patented drugs. Though it was gray-area legal, she emphasized that the program was just for research purposes—or maybe for some kind of pandemic-style emergency when lots of drugs had to be fabbed right away.

One of the CogSci guys asked why you couldn’t just visit the patent office and get the drug’s recipe directly from the publicly filed patents. She quoted from a recent article by a Freeculture legal scholar at Harvard, who had analyzed how much time and money it would take for an ordinary person to retain lawyers and experts who could actually navigate the expensive patent databases and figure out how a drug had been put together. Most drugs that made it out of trials were a confusing hodgepodge of licensed parts and processes, and it took corp money to figure out how it had been made. For an ordinary person who just wanted to copy a gene therapy, it was usually easier to amplify and sequence the drug fast, then analyze it with her little program.

Some of the other students added to Jack’s program, and pretty soon it became a small but thriving open source project called reng, for “reverse engineer.” Krish gave reng to his students back in Saskatoon, they passed it along to Iqaluit engineers, and pretty soon Jack was getting patches from people in weird places she’d never heard of in the Asian Union and Brazilian States.

When Jack wasn’t trying to figure out how to dismantle the patent system, she was busy being completely in love with Krish. Admittedly, she didn’t take love nearly as seriously as some of her classmates did, the ones who talked about “dating” and “getting married.” She viewed romance like any other biological process. It was the product of chemical and electrical signaling in her brain, inspired by input from the outside world. If she was deliriously happy around Krish and constantly yearning to have sex with him when he was away, that was just the ventral tegmental region of her brain and a bunch of neural pathways at work.

Krish felt the same way about Jack. Even when he went back to Saskatoon for the quarter to teach, they talked every day. Then, they took things to the next level: They founded an anonymized text repo together, about practical ways to deliver drugs to the public domain. It was the most intense relationship Jack had ever had.

JULY 5, 2144

An input mechanism in Yellowknife triggered a query to a molecule database in Bern, seeking several specific strings in one data field. One hundred sixty milliseconds later, the query returned a set of pointers.

The input mechanism in Yellowknife who had requested those pointers was a biobot named Med who had just watched a man die of organ failure. Three days before, the man had arrived at the emergency room nearly comatose. He’d been doing nothing but painting his flat for five straight days—not eating, barely drinking a few swallows of water, going out only to get more paint so he could keep adding more coats. The neurons in his midbrain were losing dopamine receptors in a familiar addiction pattern, the kind of thing you see after years of heroin use or gambling. No one had ever seen a person develop such a pattern in response to a week of painting.

That’s why Med was running searches on the molecules that she’d found in the guy’s bloodstream. It matched perfectly to a patented drug called Zacuity, but there’s no way this snowboard instructor would have had the cash for that kind of scrip. He must have gotten it as a street drug, which meant somebody had done an impeccable job reverse engineering Zacuity.

Med pushed a lock of blond hair out of her eyes and leaned her slight, flesh-covered frame against a desk. She was designed to look human, her face the replica of a woman whose image Med’s tissue engineer had licensed from an old Facebook database. Though technically indistinguishable from that long-dead human, Med’s features had a generic “pretty white girl” look that most humans recognized as a bot tell. Under Med’s pale skin, there was no disguising what she was. Her carbon alloy endoskeleton was braided with fibers and circuitry that would be obvious to anyone with sensors that reached beyond the visible spectrum. Med closed out her session with Bern, tuned the hospital’s motes with her embedded antennas, and filed her report about the molecule.

The painting guy’s father was supposed to arrive from Calgary in a few hours, and it would be left to some doc to explain to the man why his son had died of “painting addiction.” Yet another reason why Med preferred to be on the research side of things. Less human drama.

As Med crossed the hospital grounds back to her office, the data she’d just saved locally on the intranet was examined by a pattern recognition algorithm. This hidden algorithm came through a law-enforcement backdoor on the network, invisible to everyone except the person who initiated it. The algorithm flagged several strings in Med’s report. It was opened before it could be sent to anyone on the hospital staff, then promptly overwritten with junk.

JULY 6, 2144

Jack had seen Threezed naked before, when he first cleaned up, but never for hours on end. She was starting to get used to it. Now she alternated between staring at her desktop and glancing at his skinny flank, thrust out from under the counterpane in her cubby, where he was sleeping. From the easy chair near her desk, she could just make out the pale curve of his ass. Right now, though, the stream glittering beneath her fingers was more pressing.

The news was bad. For once, the science text repos and media corps agreed on something, and it was that at least one hundred people had died in Calgary from drug-related complications. Addiction experts were rushing out case studies. Nobody mentioned that the culprit was reverse-engineered Zacuity.

Once a decent reverse engineer took a hard look at her drug, its provenance would be pretty obvious. Either nobody had bothered to do that yet, or Zaxy was hushing up the results. None of her contacts in the Zone had posted their emergency signal, which would be steganographically hidden in an image and uploaded to a well-trafficked cat lovers’ forum. That meant that nobody had gotten a visit from the IPC. Or at least, nobody had lived to warn her about it.

Jack wouldn’t be safe for long, but it seemed like she still had some time to make things right.

If her sketchy calculations were right, Zacuity was getting people addicted after just one or two doses—something she’d only seen before in poorly designed party drugs or unmodded cocaine. She had no idea how many people had bought her pirated Zacuity, let alone who was eating it legally in beta. But it was clear that people susceptible to addiction were going to keep dying until somebody put a boot to Zaxy’s throat and forced the corp to admit they’d made a productivity drug that behaved like a crappy stimulant from the nineteenth century.

The problem was that she’d have to launder her discoveries through someone else—someone who was legally permitted to reverse engineer Zacuity. Plus, she had to manufacture and distribute an anti-addictive fast, before anyone else died. Jack knew just the lab to do all of it: the reverse engineering, the publicity, and the just-in-time fix for Zacuity’s addiction flaw. It was a long shot, though. Decades had passed since she’d worked there, and she might not be very welcome. Still, it was her only hope.

With Threezed still sprawled out on her bed, she headed to the control room and checked their location. With luck, she could be in her truck and on the road in twenty-four hours, her payload stuffed safely in the back. It was a terrible plan, but not as terrible as the one that had gotten her into this overall moral fuckup in the first place.

The sub nosed its way into the Beaufort Sea, its waters hugged by an enormous chain of islands whose edges formed the maze of the Northwest Passages. She was aiming for a rather nondescript promontory known as Richards Island. With all their gear piled into a kayak, she could follow the island’s eastern shore, hit the broad curve of the Mackenzie River, and score a tow from a cargo ship all the way to the docks at Inuvik. She’d chuck Threezed in town, and drive south to the lab as fast as possible.

Jack began scouting for places to park the sub.

Even at the height of summer, there were still regions of the ocean where crumbled bergs and glaciers left the pale water stippled with ice. The white, reflective chunks provided good cover, and had the additional advantage of being packed with microcontrollers and mote trash that was still pingable. Her ship’s short-range signals would blend into the mumble of traffic emitted by dying chips and antennas.

In the hold, she and Threezed put the last of her payload into stretchy, thin waterproof sacks. The pills and tiny vials were packaged in brightly colored perfume and aromatherapy boxes with swirly, bright pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses on them. Abruptly, Threezed stopped gathering up the boxes and stared at one, featuring a fat, bejeweled Ganesh beaming over the curl of his trunk.

Jack was impatient. “Let’s hurry up, Threezed. Time to go.”

“Can I stay here and hide with the ship? I can fab stuff I need. I’ll keep everything clean and just watch movies.”

“Look, I like you, but that’s not gonna happen. I don’t know you well enough to let you take charge of my sub.”

“You could lock me out of the nav system.”

“For all I know you’re a master cryptographer and systems expert who can smash my security setup in five minutes if you want.” She made a swiping motion that said, discussion over.

“Wouldn’t I have done that already if I could?”

“Not necessarily.” Jack unconsciously reached for the handle of the knife she kept jammed in her belt, resting her open palm on it. Custom controls near the blade activated her perimeter system. “Close up those sacks and help me get the kayak ready.”

Maybe if she kept Threezed busy, he would stop asking her to trust him more than she wanted to trust anyone—including herself.

As they surfaced, sun saturated the control room. Jack glanced at the place where the thief’s bloodstain had been just three weeks ago. She hefted one of the sacks over her shoulder. It was about the size and weight of a man’s body.

Threezed was already on the deck, using heat bulbs to catalyze a reaction that made the kayak unfold and go rigid. Under his ministrations, the soft mound of rubbery cloth seemed to grow a skeleton beneath its skin, and finally took on the shape of a long, thin craft with two passenger seats.

Jack fastened her sack to the stern and shoved it into the water, where ice floated like clumps of dirty, curdling cream. There, the kayak stretched out further, taking its final shape. It could support a light, rigid negative-refraction dome—perfect for hiding from satellite sweeps—and would self-power with a nearly invisible kite sail, already unfurled overhead. After three days, the whole vessel would biodegrade into protein foam, becoming fodder for the Mackenzie River’s bacterial ecosystem.

With the dome secured over their heads, Jack and Threezed settled into the kayak’s uncomfortable seats. The sail came online, its system making micro-adjustments in the lines to keep the vessel stable. As long as the wind stayed with them, they’d make pretty good time. Jack put on goggles to do one last sweep of her security systems, then accessed her sub’s controls from a menu that appeared to hover a foot from her eyes. With a nod, she submerged the sub below a dirty, ragged iceberg that stretched its massive fingers ten meters below the surface.

Cheap heating elements kept the kayak livable, but hardly warm. Jack peered anxiously ahead, the hood of her parka thrown back, waiting for the first glimpse of hundreds of little islands covered in pine trees and scrub that marked the end of the Beaufort Sea and the beginning of the delta.

Her perimeter started picking up stray data packets from local networks on ships she couldn’t see. In her goggles, she saw a tiny flag hovering over one with a completely open network. It looked potentially friendly. She started poking around in its directories, querying a few accounts with a carefully worded request. Lots of little boats bartered for a tug down the Mackenzie River and into town—it was standard Arctic business and a local gray-market tradition.

The ship with the open network was hailing her now, or at least a person calling himself CanadaDoug2120 had opened an encrypted channel to offer her a tow line in exchange for twenty vials of five hundred milligram Vive shots. Probably a local: Up here in the north, people still called themselves Canadians sometimes.

You got it, she messaged back, changing course to come up invisibly behind CanadaDoug2120’s rig and connect with the tungsten fabric line he claimed to be playing out for her. Now she could clearly see the outline of his dull gray and blue hybrid solar barge, currently running fast on gas. Other ships became visible as they closed on the hybrid, some stacked high with cargo containers, all of them moving toward the deepest parts of the water as they navigated for the Mackenzie. Some parts of the delta were little more than marsh between islands, and the waters were stained with the red and brown churn of silt.

The line started pinging her perimeter from five hundred meters away. She loaded its exact coordinates into the sail, setting up an intercept course that would take her dangerously close to a police hydrofoil painted with the green, red, and blue of the Free Trade Zone. Her invisible little kayak wouldn’t register on the police vessel’s visual sensors, but the police might pick up her network traffic if she maintained her connection with the line. She would normally spurt bits of chaff traffic to hide her real packets, but a data wake full of transmissions that were too carefully anonymized for your garden-variety trading ship would be even more suspicious.

Jack killed the network and smothered her long-range signals. She’d have to do this thing manually. They should intercept the rope at a predictable set of coordinates. She’d just extrapolate from its last location, taking into account the heading and speed of the ship itself. Which was looming large in her unaided visual range, its bulk partly obscured by the police hydrofoil coming between them.

The insectile vessel in its garish Zone colors skated past. Her goggles chattered silently to their own loopback interface, sending no data beyond the device itself.

The rope should be off to the right of the bow.

“Threezed, lie as low as possible,” she growled, pulling reinforced waterproofs onto her hands and ripping away just enough of the dome to get her torso out, hands extended. The air needled her face with cold, finding its way under her hood. The water was a smooth gray, feathered with the brown of delta mud. At last, she saw the rope’s glittering terminus cutting a tiny wake through the water. At the same moment, its short-range signals became sniffable. The rope and ship initiated a secure handshake. Pulling herself all the way outside the dome, Jack grabbed the line with gloved hands and connected it to the kayak’s hauling port. Twisting around, she cut lines to the sail and felt a small pulse of relief.

Without that piece of fabric floating overhead, she would be even harder to track. As quickly as she could, she withdrew into the invisibility of the dome, nearly kicking the balled-up Threezed as she jammed herself back into the front seat.

No matter the circumstances, she’d never failed to hitch a ride down the Mackenzie when she offered Vive. Even if her pills were killing people in Calgary, Jack reflected, she could at least give a sailor a good deal on a few more years of life.

They reached the dockyards, converted the drug sacks to backpacks, and left the kayak with a pile of other biodegradables, spinning in a slow vortex of foamy water beneath an abandoned pier. Silent beneath his pack, Threezed followed her to the espresso shop where CanadaDoug2120 waited.

“When this is over, I can drive you to the train station.” Jack tried to sound kind. “Best place to go if you want to disappear.”

“I have nowhere to go.”

“Well, I’ll buy you a ticket anywhere. No problem.”

“I want to stay with you.”

There was no way to explain to him all the reasons why that couldn’t happen. Her eyes wandered to an alley between brightly colored apartment buildings, their hydraulic lifters dating back a century to when this whole city was built on permafrost. Her truck was parked there, in a garage below a crazy, patched snarl of utilidors that once connected the buildings like a psychotic catwalk, routing the city’s water, waste, and power through heated pipes above the frost-hardened ground. Most of Inuvik’s utilidors were long gone, but preservationists had gotten this bunch declared a landmark, some kind of memorial to pre-Anthropocene times.

“I’m sorry, Threezed, but I can’t bring you where I’m going. Where would you rather go? Vancouver? Yellowknife? Anchorage?” She reeled off the names of three cities that were big enough to get lost in. “If you really do know your way around a motor, I’ll bet you can find work somewhere.”

He frowned. “Where? Who is going to hire some guy with no work history? The only way I can work is to get slaved again.”

“That’s not true.” She tried to think of examples that would prove her point, and came up with nothing.

One block ahead, the cafe sign announced “Hot Espresso and Fresh Bannock.” CanadaDoug2120 was a big guy wearing a bright orange toque, sitting in a battered foam booth with a steaming latte between his hands. Jack gave him a hearty sailor hug, slid the Vive into the side pocket on his parka, and made a big show of chumming around for the security feeds. Threezed picked up a little food and caffeine. Then they made for her truck, walking casually, juggling two lattes and an oily bag of bannock.

Several minutes later, two bots fell into step with them. From their hardened carapaces, she guessed police or military. Judging from the green insignias on their chests, they were definitely indentured to the Zone.

One of them spoke, voice emerging from a mouth-shaped grille in his headless chest. “I am Representative Slag. Did you come in on a boat today?”

Being questioned about travel by Representative anythings was not good. Jack maintained her loose-limbed walk, keeping things casual.

“Nope, I’m just getting my truck actually. Can I help you with something?”

Reaching into the deep vents of her coveralls, Jack thumbed her knife, remotely starting her truck and unlocking the storage space. She wanted an exit route, and fast.

“We noticed you talking with this man,” Slag continued, his broad chest momentarily obfuscated by a grainy projected image of CanadaDoug2120, his head topped by a bright orange spray of pixels. “Is he a friend of yours?”

Jack paused for a moment, considering her options. It didn’t seem like these bots were from any kind of patent authority. But if her association with CanadaDoug2120 had tripped some kind of social network alarm, she wasn’t about to get into a long conversation with them—especially when she had no idea how many alerts her biometrics would trigger once they started looking.

Moving her fingers as unobtrusively as possible, she raised the doorway on her storage space and backed the truck out. The vehicle was only a few meters away.

Before she could delay Slag any further, she caught a blur in her peripheral vision that rapidly resolved itself into Threezed, swerving behind the bots. He snapped open the control panels on their backs. In an instant, the bots were staring at her silently, their minds occupied by whatever Threezed was doing to their command interfaces.

“Ha! Nobody ever resets the defaults.” Threezed stood between the two bots with his arms buried in their bodies like some weird puppeteer.

“…the fuck?” she got out.

“They’ll just sit like that for a few minutes and then start up again. A friend of mine taught me the command—works great on cheap bots like these. Just hit the panel button, type in the string, and they stop moving for a while.”

Her truck was waiting silently in the street ahead of them.

Jack looked Threezed square in the face and gave him a nod of respect. “Get in the truck,” she said. “We’re going to Yellowknife.”