Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

It was hard to miss the fact that the last two numbers branded onto his neck were three and zed. That scar was his name, too. Jack folded her arms over the sudden stab of sympathy in her chest. “Nice to meet you, Threezed.”

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.

The bot could tell Bluebeard was pleased. It was written into her relaxed gait and expressed through the pattern of her breathing.

“Robotics isn’t really my area. I’m more on the genomics end of things.” “Me too,” the bot replied.

He stared at her, a pirate in coveralls with silvery-black stubble on her head and a knife on her belt, flanked by a runaway slave and a robot scientist.

He trusted Lee, the same way he trusted Eliasz—and for the same reason. These feelings came from programs that ran in a part of his mind that he couldn’t access. 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.

She wasn’t sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.

a Moorish pattern of elaborately interpenetrating polygons.

Paladin noticed with pleasure that Eliasz’ face had muscled into one of its rare smiles. The bot had managed his first act of human intelligence gathering, entirely without help.

Muscle verbed!

Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”

She wondered whether the indenture system had its own version of piracy, and tried to imagine what that would be.

Lights were strobing over the UAV, its life of surveillance converted into an afterlife of psychedelic crime.

When she visited home the summer she turned eighteen, she had a depilated, tattooed head and flowers growing out of the backs of her hands.

“Sequence wants to be free.”

Now you know who you really are!” He paused, his face a chaos of emotion that passed quickly into one of his rare grins.

People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy.

I know a group that can help you break root on yourself in a way that’s basically indistinguishable from an autonomy key.”

Everything he’d recorded with his perimeter systems had been destroyed by a graduate student’s depilation experiment.

Somewhere on the Anchorage Radical Archive servers back home, there was a mirror of her reverse engineering paper that would never be removed.

reserved entirely

This should read 'reserved exclusively'.

filled with organic compounds that Paladin could identify faster than the expression on Eliasz’ face.