Autonomous

6 SIDE EFFECTS

JULY 6, 2144

Paladin and Eliasz were sitting under a tree in the main room of the Arcata Solar Farm house when Bluebeard and her cohort clattered back down the stairs. The bot could tell Bluebeard was pleased. It was written into her relaxed gait and expressed through the pattern of her breathing.

Across the room, listening to her feed on full blast, Roopa glared at them and curled her fingers to touch the weapon trigger pads in her palms. Three hours of sitting in peaceful immobility, and the security guard was still treating them like adversaries. The house network, though—not so much. Paladin was making some headway there. He carefully scanned devices around the room, from the atmosphere sensors to the kitchen appliances, and got lucky with the sprinkler system. The device sat on the network waiting for requests from tiny sensors peppered throughout the soil floor. Once in a while, those sensors would signal that it was dry enough to start watering the furniture.

But the sprinkler system was also waiting for requests from other devices. Somebody careless had set it up to pair with any new device that looked like a moisture sensor.

So Paladin came up with a plan. He initiated a pairing sequence with the sprinklers by disguising himself as a really old sensor model. Because the sprinkler system wanted to pair with sensors, it agreed to download some ancient, unpatched drivers so it could take requests from its new, elderly friend. Now it was a simple matter of exploiting a security vulnerability in those unpatched drivers, and Paladin was soon on the network, running with all the privileges of the sprinkler system. Which had access to quite a lot, including house layout and camera footage. After all, you wouldn’t want to start watering a room with people in it.

That camera footage would tell them everything they needed to know about who had been here and when. Paladin felt a rush of pride. Maybe he couldn’t do social engineering on humans yet, but he could still fool most machines.

He’d gotten access just in time. Bluebeard sealed their deal with a credit transfer, while Eliasz dropped hints that he might be able to get more IP from the same source. The pattern of heat in her face said she was interested, though her response was carefully neutral. “You have Thomasie’s contact information, eh?”

“Actually, no.” Eliasz looked over at Thomasie.

The two men exchanged a beam of data.

“Contact him if you want to set up another meeting,” Bluebeard said. Then she crouched down next to Paladin, still seated awkwardly beneath the tree, and looked right into the abstract, matte black planes of his face.

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Sorry, his vocalizer’s broken,” Eliasz spoke quickly. “He’s called Xiu.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk more, Xiu. Can you shake hands?” She held out her hand, tiny and calloused with an age her face didn’t show. Paladin extended his arm, allowing the scuffed metal of his fingers to curl around the pale pink of hers. She pressed her fingertips into his alloy, which yielded slightly and recorded the whorls embedded in each.

They matched nothing in the databases he had access to. Either Bluebeard had a completely unregistered identity, or age had degraded her prints so much that she was effectively untraceable. When their hands broke apart, she looked at the cluster of sensors on his face again, far longer than most humans ever did.

Bluebeard wanted him to know that she was unknown. She wanted him to explain to Eliasz later that this group of pirates was not to be fucked with. And that’s exactly what he did.

Flush with credits, Paladin and Eliasz rented a cheap room near the university, in a hotel that Gertrude had recommended. It was packed with visiting researchers and their families. The local mote network kept slowing down because everybody on it was downloading and uploading files that were far too media-rich to be scientific data.

“This city really is full of pirates,” Paladin remarked as Eliasz lay on the tiny futon and stared at the ceiling. “Almost everybody on this network is infringing copyrights.”

“That’s Iqaluit for you. As soon as we’ve got a handle on where Jack might be, we’re out of here.”

“I’ve got a backdoor into Arcata’s network, Eliasz, so we can analyze security footage from their cams. But I’m going to have to access it either really slowly or for really short periods of time. Otherwise it will be obvious that somebody is messing around in there.”

Paladin explained about Bluebeard’s extreme anonymity, and the relative sophistication of the Arcata Solar Farm operation. “I’m not sure how long we have before they figure out that we’re agents.”

“I’ve thought about that, too.” Eliasz sighed. “They’re not idiots. We’ve got to do this thing fast. You work on the network—look for Jack’s face in the footage, or references to Zacuity. Or even references to Federation business contacts.” He paused and sat up, putting a warm hand on Paladin’s lower back. “Let’s blow all this credit tonight so we’ve got a good excuse to do another sale tomorrow.”

That evening, they had two missions. Paladin would sip from the Arcata network, and Eliasz would hemorrhage cash in the most obvious way possible.

They walked along the dome’s edge, its massive vents rendered translucent and tilted open to admit the warm summer air. In winter the dome would seal shut, the meager hours of sunlight extended with an artificial glow that kept the suicide rate down to a statistically average level. Spiraling above them were dozens of towers whose trellises erupted with fruits and grains, and the air drifted with birds and shimmering tendrils of plant material. When Paladin zoomed in on the topmost farm levels, he could see humans and bots fertilizing the plants with tiny paintbrushes full of pollen.

“Let’s go to the ammo store,” Eliasz said. “The bullets are trackable, and the shooting range has a public feed for gun fans.” Then he grinned, and for once Eliasz’ facial expression perfectly matched the emotions indicated by the flow of blood in his cheeks and the dilation of his pupils. “Plus, we could use some shooting practice, right, Paladin?”

Twenty minutes later, Paladin was fully loaded and carrying a dozen thick, heavy bandoliers across his chest. Just for good measure, Eliasz printed out a couple of snap-together sniper rifles and socked away enough biodegradable bullets to take a serious bite out of their credit. Next, they would blow another huge amount of credits renting time at the shooting range, rumored to be the best in the Arctic. They took a car several kilometers outside the dome, whose soaring membrane walls swam with synthetic chloroplasts that sucked down the sunlight.

Baffin Heights Range was vast and rocky, its walled-in acres carpeted with purple summer flowers and planted with non-native trees to provide cover. There were hills and half-built forts, a cement bunker, and even some trenches dug by a local group of World War I reenactors. At this time of day, the place was nearly empty. It was dinnertime in Iqaluit, and the rich gun lovers who frequented this range all had meals waiting for them at home.

Eliasz beamed credits to a woman in a parka and toque at the gate, who barely glanced up from her display. Paladin watched the camstrips plastered to every surface, careful to move less smoothly than he could have. He’d have to hide his target accuracy when they hit the range, too.

Eliasz decided to begin their practice on a hill, where they’d paid for a few targets: a concrete foam house that would offer them cover, and a couple of dummies set up in a wooded area opposite them.

“The air out here reminds me of Warsaw in fall.” Eliasz pulled off a shot from the house window as Paladin arranged his extra rounds on the floor. Somebody had left a pile of food wrappers to biodegrade in the corner; by now they had melted enough for the Nestlé logos to stretch into deformed versions of themselves. “It’s cold but it’s not too cold. And there’s a smell in the air like cut grass.”

Paladin still did not know how to respond when Eliasz told him things that had nothing to do with work. He tried to come up with a relevant comment, or perhaps another question. He could ask why Eliasz’ prints matched those of a Warsaw priest, but Eliasz might be upset that Paladin had been searching on his biometrics, compiling a small but growing list of facts that might be true. The bot wished he could talk easily to people the way Eliasz did, but that would never be possible. No matter how long he studied the art of human intelligence gathering, his massive, hardened body with its wing shields would make it difficult for humans to feel at ease with him.

Paladin let two light machine guns slide quietly out of his left and right chest compartments, legs bending to compensate as his center of gravity shifted slightly. He still couldn’t think of a way to ask Eliasz about Warsaw.

“Loaded and ready.” Those words would have to stand in for everything else he wanted to say. Paladin was in combat posture for the first time since their early days at Camp Tunisia.

“Go for it.”

Paladin released a spurt of bullets through the house window, aiming in the general direction of the dummies. They’d been implanted with an artificial heat signature that turned their plastic bodies a deep red. The bot altered his assault strategy, trying to be as accurate as possible. It was a last-minute decision, based on the high probability that Eliasz’ enthusiasm meant that Paladin should perform optimally rather than sticking with his damaged bot disguise. The dummies’ heads exploded spectacularly.

“Nice.” Eliasz laughed, and Paladin knew he had correctly guessed what Eliasz wanted. “Well, now that you’ve wrecked our bad guys, buddy, let’s go down there and see what it takes to blow this shack up. What do you think?”

They picked up the rest of the ammo and headed down to the piles of splinter and fluff that had once been humanoid figures hidden in trees. Now man and bot were also hidden. Paladin unfurled his dorsal shields, making himself invisible, just to add realism to the scenario. The experience was so similar to his early training that he reflexively began accessing his jumbled memories of startup back in the Federation. There were disconnected images of the Kagu factory whose timestamps showed gaps of hours and days; signals from a batch of biobots who had been fabbed with him; a jarring memory of the moment when his proprioceptive sense had given way to a feeling of kinetic possibilities; and finally his current self-awareness, tinged with compulsions whose origins he couldn’t access or control.

Many of those compulsions were tied directly to his targeting system, which yanked the bot back to the present. There hadn’t been any flowers or trees on the shooting ranges where he’d first learned to aim and fire.

“Can you let me aim for you?”

Paladin wasn’t sure what Eliasz meant. “Programmatic access to my real-time targeting systems is available only to Federation admins,” he vocalized at stealth volume, enjoying the feeling of camouflage mode.

“I’ve heard that bots like you can—” Eliasz paused awkwardly. “That you can carry a human on your back during combat and… let him drive, so to speak.”

Certainly Paladin could carry Eliasz’ weight on his back comfortably, his shields protecting the man during combat. But none of his training, and nothing he’d learned from other bots, suggested he could surrender control of his weapons to somebody who had no access privileges on his system. Still, he could understand how Eliasz might have gotten that idea. A few simple searches on public media servers returned millions of hours of footage where people rode the bodies of giant, tanklike bots, targeting their enemies.

At that moment, Paladin decided to test something he’d been contemplating for several minutes, based on what he’d learned from the sprinkler system. Perhaps human intelligence gathering was a version of network penetration, and he could better integrate into social situations by inviting humans to see an illusory version of himself. Instead of dispelling Eliasz’ misunderstanding, he would find a way to accommodate it.

“I can carry you on my back and let you guide the gun systems.”

Paladin knelt next to Eliasz, his right actuator crushing a dummy’s arm. He extended two ten-centimeter bars from his upper thighs. They were actually electroshock weapons, built to deliver deadly amounts of current, but they would do as foot pegs when powered down. Without prompting, Eliasz stepped onto them, leaning his torso against the sealed control panel in Paladin’s back.

“Now what do I do?” His cheek was against Paladin’s, his chin on Paladin’s shoulder.

The bot stood at full height, and Eliasz rested his hands on the guns that jutted from Paladin’s chest. Eliasz’ right hand began to move slowly, getting to know the whole barrel by feel.

“It’s wired into your nervous system, isn’t it? You can feel my hand.”

“Yes, though it’s not really what you would call a nervous system. But I can feel you.”

“That’s amazing. I wish I could feel my guns. It would make things a lot easier.”

With Eliasz’ entire body pressed against him, Paladin could read his galvanic skin response at a granular level and watch fluids flowing through his organs. Following the same impulse that made him search Eliasz’ background in the world’s databases, he began to scan Eliasz’ body for mutation, for contamination, for anything life-threatening.

“How do I make you shoot?”

“You can subvocalize directions and I will follow them.”

Shoot the entire roof off that house. Eliasz’ lips were pressed into Paladin’s carapace, moving slightly as he gave the vague order.

He continued to touch the exposed metal of Paladin’s guns, fingers wrapped around each slim barrel for a few seconds until they became too hot. Then he slid his fingers beneath them, to the cool carbon alloy of the bot’s chest, stretching his thumbs back until his hands formed two V shapes beneath the protruding weapons.

Paladin had a lot of ammo to burn, and he took his time with the roof. Spent shells wafted to the ground at their feet and began biodegrading. With each spurt of bullets, Paladin undermined the structural integrity of the roof very precisely—never quite hitting it, but blasting away the foam and beams that held it in place. Every hit knocked out just a few more centimeters on the eastern edge of the house, and Paladin registered a feeling of satisfaction as the roof began to tip and sag.

As he bent to retrieve a magazine and reload, Eliasz shifted his weight away from the bot’s back. The man’s posture radiated discomfort. He was trying to stay on the pegs while keeping his lower body from making contact with Paladin’s.

Paladin categorized the physiological changes in Eliasz’ body and reloaded his guns. The bot decided to continue his human social communication test by not communicating. It didn’t make sense to remind Eliasz that every single movement of his body, every rush of blood or spark of electricity, was completely transparent to Paladin. He would allow Eliasz to believe that he sensed nothing.

Eliasz’ heart was beating fast, his skin slightly damp. The man’s reproductive organ, whose functioning Paladin understood only from military anatomy training, was engorged with blood. The transformation registered on his heat, pressure, and movement sensors. The physiological pattern was something like the flush on a person’s face, and signaled the same kind of excitement. But obviously it was not the same.

“Tell me where I should aim next,” Paladin vocalized directly into the whorls of Eliasz’ ear, pressed against the streamlined curve of the bot’s jawline.

“Keep shooting.” In his discomfort, Eliasz forgot to subvocalize. “Just shoot the roof off like I told you.”

Paladin shot, but his sensorium was focused entirely on Eliasz’ body. The man was struggling to stabilize his breathing and heart rate. His muscles were trying to disavow their own reactions. The bot kept shooting, transducing the man’s conflicted pleasure into his own, feeling each shot as more than just the ecstasy of a target hit. When the roof collapsed, he shot the crumbling walls.

Eliasz’ pulse slowed and returned to normal ranges. But Paladin kept going, shooting and reloading until every magazine was reduced to pale petals of biodegrading material around his feet and the house was nothing more than scorched chunks of foam.

Military bots like Paladin were programmed with basic sexual information about humans that was entirely clinical. If he’d been designed for sex, Paladin would have been given emo-cognitive training on the topic. His carapace would have been skin and muscle, fitted with genitals. His admins would have implanted him with perversions and erotic desires and programs to emulate a sexual response cycle that would match the neurochemical cascades of his human counterparts. Built as he was, however, he had few tools to interpret or contextualize what had just transpired.

Paladin knelt and Eliasz slid from his back to the ground. Standing side by side, the human and the bot surveyed the damage they had done. Pieces of foam had hurled themselves to the ground everywhere among the flowers. Destroying that house had eaten up nearly all their credits.

A car brought them back inside the dome and dropped them at the hotel. Eliasz spoke for the first time since the shooting range. “Wait for me in the lobby, Paladin. I’m going to have a shower and then we’ll go back to the Lex for dinner. Maybe we’ll see our protein hacker friends again.” The man kept his eyes on the now invisible gun apertures in Paladin’s chest. Though his intent was to avoid the bot’s eyes, he failed: Paladin had visual sensors all over his body, including in the exact place where Eliasz sought to hide from them.

And so Paladin was looking straight into Eliasz’ dilated pupils when he replied, “I’ll check my data drip from Arcata Solar Farm and see what we’ve got.”

By the time Eliasz returned forty-five minutes later, the bot knew a lot about the Arcata Solar Farm. He had also done some public net searches and learned a small amount about sexual relationships between humans and robots. He was not going to talk about the latter, so he told Eliasz about the former as they walked a few blocks to the Lex. It was late evening and the sun hovered above the horizon. Darkness would only last about one hundred eighty minutes once it went down.

“The Arcata pirates have definitely bought drugs from Jack before—life extenders and anti-inflammatants, mostly. She’s their only source in the Federation who is also a buyer. From what I could tell, she’s buying their black IP, fabbing the drugs somewhere, and shipping them back for distribution. Not at high volumes, though. We’re talking small batches—generally a thousand doses per delivery. So I’m guessing Arcata Solar Farm isn’t her main client.”

“Makes sense,” Eliasz replied. “When was the last time they dealt with her, according to the security cams?”

“Just a month ago. They bought anti-inflammatants, which they’ve already sold.”

“Shit. Based on what the Federation knows about her patterns, there’s no way she’ll be back here for at least a few more months. She must have ported at Inuvik instead of here. Well, we’re fucked in one way, but not in another.”

“How are we fucked?”

“We’re fucked because there are dozens of routes south out of Inuvik, especially if she has good transportation, which she no doubt does. She’s not an amateur.” Eliasz paused at the mouth of the street that led to the Lex. Already, the bot was picking up molecules from the chili-laced steam that seeped out of the restaurant’s door two hundred meters away. “We’re also fucked because we have no idea where she’s heading—could be Calgary, where she obviously sold that Zacuity… or, hell, it could be Montreal. My guess, though, is that she’s already heard what’s happening in Calgary and is heading for a safe house in one of the smaller cities.”

“So how are we not fucked?”

“No matter what, we’re leaving Iqaluit in twenty-four hours. Hopefully sooner. We’ve got to get on Jack’s trail fast. Why don’t you start sifting surveillance from Inuvik, see if anything Jack-shaped pops up?”

They trudged up the street to the Lex, where Eliasz found Gertrude eating spicy bok choy with a group of neurolinguistics students who were more interested in vowel shifts than patent injustice. Eliasz struck up a conversation, maintaining their cover identities, trying not to create any anomalous patterns in their behavior.

Paladin ignored the humans. He was busy communicating over the private bot network, where conversations were soothingly unambiguous. Nobody asked him to overlook fundamental realities as he exchanged surveillance information with Inuvik agents about several suspicious incidents over the past forty-eight hours. They gave him a wealth of data: he had images, audio, and radio communications to sift through for clues.

On the public net, the subject of bots and human sexuality also revealed a wealth of data. But when Paladin eliminated representations from fiction and the sex industry, he found himself with almost no information. Military bots were not designed to have sex with humans, and therefore his situation was largely undocumented. The indentured were not permitted to post on the public net—they were usually barred by NDAs, but also by social convention. Plus, so few military bots became autonomous that their text repo commits were sparse. None of them dealt with human eroticism.

At last, one of Paladin’s searches related to Jack yielded a bot report whose contents looked promising. Two Inuvik reps had gone into deep maintenance mode for no reason after a routine pharma infringement bust at a cafe near the river. They were questioning two humans near the arrest, but hadn’t yet scanned their full biometrics. Before they shut down, however, one of them had logged the barebones encounter:

1530 suspect in custody, initiating arrest

1537 statements from all witnesses in cafe, coordinates attached, data attached

1539 questioning two individuals exiting cafe

1540 female and male no broadcast identifiers

1541 maintenance check

1542 maintenance check

1543 maintenance check

1544 resuming arrest

Something weird had obviously happened there. Why would bots begin interrogating two people, then suddenly go into maintenance mode? Though records showed that Jack usually traveled alone, Paladin thought this male and female with no broadcast IDs, connected with a pharma bust in Inuvik, might be a possible lead. He saved a copy of the file locally to show Eliasz later.

As for his other search, he was going to have to do a little human intelligence gathering.