Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

The homework fiend’s brain showed a perfect addiction pattern.

Jack Chen unstuck

It was a farmer’s tan, like the one on her father’s face after a long day wearing goggles in the canola fields, watching tiny yellow flowers emit streams of environmental data.

where freshwater met sea to create a vast puzzle of rivers and islands.

“HOMEWORK FIEND CASE REEKS OF BLACK-MARKET PHARMA,” read one headline. Jack sucked in her breath. Could this clickbait story be about that batch of Zacuity she’d unloaded last month in Calgary?

The sub’s cargo hold was currently stacked with twenty crates of freshly pirated drugs. Tucked among the many therapies for genetic mutations and bacterial management were boxes of cloned Zacuity, the new blockbuster productivity pill that everybody wanted. It wasn’t technically on the market yet, so that drove up demand.

Tucked among the many therapies for genetic mutations and bacterial management were boxes of cloned Zacuity, the new blockbuster productivity pill that everybody wanted. It wasn’t technically on the market yet, so that drove up demand.

Jack hadn’t bothered to try any Zacuity herself—she didn’t need drugs to make her job exciting. The engineer who’d provided the sample described its effects in almost religious terms. You slipped the drug under your tongue, and work started to feel good. It didn’t just boost your concentration. It made you enjoy work. You couldn’t wait to get back to the keyboard, the breadboard, the gesture table, the lab, the fabber. After taking Zacuity, work gave you a kind of visceral satisfaction that nothing else could.

Seriously,” said the woman who had offered Paladin access to her fabbers. “They rake in so much cash from all that IP and then treat their developers and admins like shit. It’s patent-farm bullshit. I’m Gertrude, by the way.” “Ivan,” said Eliasz, “and this is my bot Xiu. He’s having a little trouble with his speakers.” Eliasz had picked a nym for Paladin that was more commonly given to women, but gender designations meant very little among bots.

Its dark rectangle perfectly blocked the angry expression that was slowly distorting the shapes of Threezed’s mouth and eyes.

Maybe it’s different for biobots. That’s crap. Your brain is nothing more than a processing device for facial recognition. You can operate almost as effectively if it goes offline. It doesn’t reveal some essential gender identity any more than your arm reveals that you are secretly a squid.

I’m an outsider around here. But look at your new friend Slavoj. He’s an outsider, too. Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”

“For bots, industry always precedes autonomy,” explained a final string of text that seemed to burst out of the document Paladin was reading. “Aberdeen Centre is testimony to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of bots who are crucial actors in the global economy.”

I work on brain-computer interfaces. Have you heard of Bobby Broner? The mosquito found Paladin by scanning the refrigerator room. He strobed purple as he hovered in front of her chest sensors. Are you a biobot? I have a human brain. Sounds like you’d be Bobby’s experiment, not his colleague. Half the time, human scientists can’t tell the difference. That’s why I stick to social sciences and humanities. Obviously Bug was going to be useless as a contact.

“That’s the question that humans always ask—always, always. They want to scoop out the brains of their dead friends, plop them inside a nice new carapace, and presto! Resurrection!”

“It will be less traumatic for him to boot up with undamaged wings. Bug is well known for his opinions about how morphology shapes selfhood. They are not scientifically informed opinions, however. He is merely a historian.”

“You also killed my adviser. That will make it more difficult for me to finish my thesis, although possibly more pleasant.”

By the time Eliasz aimed his gun again, eyelids nearly sewn shut with wire, the pirate and her friends were gone. Everything he’d recorded with his perimeter systems had been destroyed by a graduate student’s depilation experiment.

It took the dean’s office two days to figure out that Med had released the findings from a major paper to the media without going through the proper public relations channels. The result was that her schedule for the morning had been cleared for a mandatory meeting with the administration.

“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.”