More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When does the thinnest smear of genetic material left by spilled blood finally evaporate? At some point it becomes invisible to human eyes, its redness dimmed by water and the mopper’s crawl, but there are still pieces left—shattered cell walls, twists of DNA, diminishing cytoplasm. When do those final shards of matter go away?
Nothing like drugs to take the edge off drug problems.
At least bots could earn their way out of ownership after a while, be upgraded, and go fully autonomous. Humans might earn their way out, but there was no autonomy key that could undo a childhood like that.
Under its layers of abdominal shielding, Paladin’s biobrain floated in a thick mixture of shock gel and cerebrospinal fluid. There was a fat interface wire between it and the physical substrate of his mind. The brain took care of his facial recognition functions, assigning each person he met a unique identifier based on the edges and shadows of their expressions, but its file system was largely incompatible with his own. He used it mostly like a graphics processor. He certainly had no idea where it was from, beyond the fact that a dead human working for the Federation military had donated it.
Though he was just beginning his term of indenture, Paladin had heard enough around the factory to know that the Federation interpreted the law fairly liberally. He might be waiting to receive his autonomy key for twenty years. More likely, he would die before ever getting it. But he wanted to survive—that urge was part of his programming. It was what defined him as human-equivalent and therefore deserving autonomy. The bot had no choice but to fight for his life. Still, to Paladin, it didn’t feel like a lack of choice. It felt like hope.
Bots, who cost money, required a period of indenture to make their manufacture worthwhile. No such incentive was required for humans to make other humans.
Inside, molecules associated with cotton fibers, bleach, and fuel floated through Paladin’s sensors.
He wanted to please Eliasz. Paladin was sure that wasn’t just some indenture algorithm weighting his decision matrix; it was his true desire.
Nearly every piece of furniture was a living bonsai.
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.
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
...more
“We live in a world where everyone can live for over a century without disease and without pain!” Behind her, the Pills used a metal-eating bacteria to soften the locks and rip open the cargo containers like paper. “But the keys to this good life are held in the greedy hands of a few corps, whose patent terms last longer than a human life. If they won’t open access to medicine, we’re going to smash it open! The time has come to fight this system that calls health a privilege!”
The road was smooth, probably from a recent refoaming. Lakes tended to move around up here, depending on precipitation, so the local towns preferred roads that would biodegrade quickly. When a lake ate the road, they just sprayed a different route around its new banks.
The transparent material was barely cool; it was designed to shield travelers from a temperature so low it could blacken hands with frostbite in minutes. She wanted to evaporate the window just to feel her fingers die.
Nothing like work to fill in where personal history has left a smoking hole.
He was a user of his own consciousness, but he did not have owner privileges. As a result, Paladin felt many things without knowing why.
Recently relocated engineers wandered like confused tourists through the medina’s spice markets, past stalls where slabs of real butchered lamb were for sale right next to outlets offering trellis-grown pork tissue wrapped in biodegradable polymers for half the price.
As the sun sank, every surface in the medina continued to radiate heat.
Among the most successful businesses to come out of that regulatory free-for-all were outfits founded by engineers from Prague, Budapest, and Tallinn.
Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”
The sinking sun ripped shadows from everything, creating elongated skeletons of darkness that were almost comically menacing.
Therefore she must be dead. Which made no sense, because it was only a few hours ago when Jack discovered that she might be in danger of being dead, in the unlikely event that Jack could not talk her out of being in a position to possibly be dead.
She had met enough humans to know that they had many different feelings about robots, none of which could be easily summed up in one sentence.
As she grasped his fingers in her own, she tasted coffee and bacon.
But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.
More than anything, her useless and irrational feelings for Eliasz were testimony to her continued autonomy.
The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.
Because she could, Paladin kept her ideas about this to herself. They were the first private thoughts she’d ever had.
