Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

Its main building was an arched wall of thick glass set deeply into a grassy hill that rose like a green bubble out of a sea of dark, boxy solar antennas dribbling hydrocarbons into underground tanks. A woman stepped out of a door cut into the glass wall, releasing a blast of sound. Someone inside was listening to a loud news feed. The woman’s arms tensed as two overclocked matter cutters powered up beneath her sleeves.

The room beyond her was illuminated by carefully reflected natural light, and trees grew out of the moss-covered floor. Nearly every piece of furniture was a living bonsai.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

They took a car several kilometers outside the dome, whose soaring membrane walls swam with synthetic chloroplasts that sucked down the sunlight.

On a sturdy living-wood ladder that led up through a door in the ceiling, Youssef was frozen in the sights of Eliasz’ blaster.

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.

When she slept, and even sometimes awake, she watched the prison walls soften into tiny yellow canola flowers, and counted in her mind all the ways their genomes had been perfected by science.

Med continued to talk, oblivious to what was going on between Jack and Krish. “Zacuity is designed as a simple work drug, right? So you get sharper focus while you work, longer attention spans. But what makes Zacuity really popular is that it gets deep into the reward center and gives the user a serious dopamine rush when he does his work, or whatever he’s doing when he takes the drug. My patient decided to take a double dose to make house painting more fun.” Med twisted her lips, concentrating on something. The projector played a 3-D video of dopamine receptors, looking a bit like blooming tulips. Particles sparkled around the edges of their petals. “Now, as you can see, the drug is stimulating his dopamine receptors. There’s your pleasure bang. But just watch, because the drug is doing something else, too.” The tulips began to wither and shrink. Soon, there were half as many dopamine receptors on screen. “Zacuity is reducing the number of dopamine receptors on the neurons in the midbrain and prefrontal cortex. And this is really the key. Doing this interferes with decision-making, and makes the brain extremely vulnerable to addiction. As he loses more and more of those receptors, he gets more addicted to the specific thing he did while taking the drug—in this case, painting. He’s going to be in withdrawal from a painting addiction for years, if he survives at all. The Zacuity has basically rewritten the neurological history of his brain. Now he’s got a powerful, long-ter...

Jack rested a hand on her knife hilt and stared up at the light wires woven into the high ceiling of the Free Lab. They created the same generic striped pattern as the ones she’d memorized on the ceiling of her cell all those years ago.

Paladin assessed the space: white walls covered in paint that repelled particulates and sealed its own cracks; a rectangular bed; a foam easy chair whose arms were sprayed with charge strips that gleamed dully. On one strip somebody had left a throwaway mobile which was now biodegrading into a lump of gray cellulose.

A long planter filled with moist dirt was bolted beneath one window, and out of it poked green stalks of modded wheat, its tender seeds rich in tumor suppressants. Below that, somebody had taken up an entire three-meter shelf with an experiment on repairing broken metal struts using new virus epoxies. One strut had grown back together nicely, but another was developing a strange, shiny tumor that was eating into the shelf below.

Many of them would be stopping at one of the dozens of Prague-style secret teahouses that had sprung up here over the sixty years since the late twenty-first century Collapse, which left populations and farms ravaged by plagues. Afterwards, the newly formed African Federation hatched a ten-year plan from their headquarters in Johannesburg. They promised the Federation’s three hundred million surviving citizens that they would build the most high-tech agricultural economy in the world. A sweeping reform bill allowed the Federation government to transform virtually the entire continent into a special economic zone with no regulations on research into anything that could make farming lucrative again. Eurozone and Asian Union companies flocked to the cosmopolitan Federation cities to research transgenic animals that secreted drugs; synthetic fast-growing organisms; metagenetic topsoil engineering; and exo-agriculture that could thrive offworld for export to the Moon and Mars colonies. Recent advances in molecular engineering had been ruled unsafe and ethically questionable in other economic coalitions. But not in the African Federation.

Eliasz pointed down a street that veered slightly north, its walls recently whitewashed with a quick-drying fluid full of bioluminescent bacteria and network motes.

“This may turn out to be a dead end,” Eliasz warned. “Just biopunk scenesters. But Frankie is somebody to watch—she’s been arrested before, for possession of unlicensed lab equipment. Keep watch on who she’s talking to, OK, buddy?”

A shirtless man with lightly furred wings growing from his shoulder blades was surrounded by a group that included Mecha and Slavoj, both swaying slightly with intoxication. He flexed the wings, modeled on a bat’s, and Mecha stroked one appreciatively.

“Pretty bot!” Mecha squealed, throwing her arms around his torso, smearing him with the sugars manufactured by her drunkenness.

“Do you want to come upstairs and play with me and Frankie?” Paladin could see from Eliasz’ posture that he was wary. From context, he guessed she was inviting him to try some kind of hacked-together molecule, probably designed to release inhibitions and generate an intense emotional response: pleasure, fear, sadness, amusement, rage. “What are you guys playing?” he asked, his tone appropriately light. “A little thing Frankie cooked up after reverse engineering some Ellondra.” It was a common stimulant-euphoric. Eliasz relaxed. “Just let me tell my friend to wait for me,” he told Mecha. Pulling Paladin aside, he whispered to the bot in a voice too quiet for any human ear: “I’m going up with Mecha to see what I can find out about Frankie. I’m patched against the drug they’re using, so it should be fine. But if I don’t come down in an hour, get me out.”

Paladin tuned local radio wave transmissions, looking for any signs that Frankie’s projector was networked in a way that would give the bot access to whatever server she was using. Just as Frankie’s audience started plunking down cups of beer on the bench, Paladin found her opportunity. Frankie was networking her glasses with a protein synthesizer she’d pulled down from a shelf. Monitoring the exchange, Paladin managed to capture the authentication sequence the synthesizer used to connect with the glasses. Presently, Frankie reached a point in the presentation when she no longer needed to use the synthesizer. She severed the connection. Now Paladin could send the authentication code to Frankie’s glasses, which had already been set up to receive connections from the synthesizer without question. Paladin was in. Jumping through directories quickly, she located a batch of recent messages stored on the device and encrypted with a very old algorithm that took only seconds to break. One of the messages was clearly from Jack, though its origins had been obscured—it had been routed through a server located in a research lab on the Moon.

She had a fabber and sequencer in the kitchen, which also contained the flat’s biggest window.

Down the center of the tunnel was a lab bench she’d cobbled together from a cheap door made of processed seed hulls, nailed to polymer stumps discarded from a printer factory. That bench contained her whole life: a fabber, a sequencer, and a projector, all built from generic, nougat-colored parts. These were networked to an antenna that snaked up into the walls of the apartment building above, sending signals that hopped between frequencies, masquerading as a variety of devices.

The African Federation was still young, and the government worried very little about enforcing intellectual property laws, as long as the economy was expanding. Jack and Lyle rented a flat in the biotech ghetto, a neighborhood whose nickname was self-explanatory. It was near the high, ocean-facing wall around the old medina. Always a middle-class neighborhood, the area had been tended and upgraded over the centuries to retain its traditional Moorish architecture of colorful tiles and hidden courtyards, while also growing a new surface of photovoltaic paint over semipermeable walls that absorbed water and strobed with glowing algae at night. The winding streets looked ancient, but they had been paved with foam. Even the crumbling seams in the walls came from bioconcrete, a mash of water-activated bacteria and epoxies that healed itself as cracks formed.

Jack was teaching a basic synbio class, showing other residents in the building how to reverse engineer simple organisms.

Jack played with one of the cellulose blobs that the 3-D printer was still extruding onto the table. It looked like it could be some kind of processed plant material, the kind of thing you might package a drug in.

The road markings had lettering that reflected in ultraviolet, bigger than the human-readable text. Everywhere she looked, she could see bots walking among the humans. Many were bipedal like herself, but others flew, or bobbed in gentle, gyroscopic motion above constantly shifting sets of wheels. A human hurrying toward her swerved out of Paladin’s way and sent a quick apology via microwave. Even the creatures who seemed human were biobots.

Her hand tasted salt, but her other sensors were trained on the bots of No. 3 Road. Although they had no need for sleep, these bots worked among humans and kept their hours. Many were clearly going to work, heading south for the train station as they checked their feeds and mail. Others were on bot time, walking in groups whose members were wrapped in the flashing haze of their information exchange. Walking near the river, Paladin caught sight of Aberdeen Centre, the largest bot-controlled marketplace in the Zone. Fewer and fewer courtesies for humans appeared along the road. She passed stores marked only with radio identifiers that spawned colorful 3-D augmentations over quiet storefronts, invisible to humans. Strip mall warrens, gray and placid in the visual spectrum, seethed with iconography hawking everything from new sensors to secondhand furniture. The sky was dense with layered geotags, information debris left by years of bot residents. Paladin could page through them all, or set up filters to perceive only a designated subset. She decided to perceive none of them, and once again saw pearlescent gray clouds thinning in places to reveal blue sky. After observing the communication behaviors of bots around her, Paladin decided to emulate the crowd and raise a signal-filtering perimeter. Now she wouldn’t register on the many readers and sensors she passed unless she chose to. This had the effect of shutting down targeted ad displays, but also drained the landscape of th...

Zone Mods had everything a bot could want for augmenting or transforming its own hardware, software, and bioparts. There were aisles devoted to limbs—nothing as sophisticated as her hand, Paladin noticed—alongside whole-body carapaces, sensors, and wheels. Plastic blister packs contained tiny wireless network devices and muscle patch kits. There were devices for cooking up new skin and portable drives for backing up your memories locally. A vast refrigerator belching ice particles that formed clouds in the air loomed behind a plastic-curtained door. Inside were frosty racks of tissues, bottled neurotransmitters, and miscellaneous biological synthetics. Walking, flying, or rolling, the shoppers bore brightly colored packages emitting ads for everything: better network sensitivity, spectral analyzers, and smooth, silent joints.

Paladin let Bug lead her to the Broner Lab, which looked like an old classroom with a giant cluster of desks at its center. Atop these desks were several servers and projectors, a chip printer, some fabbers, and a high-powered microscope box for imaging atoms. Tissue generators were jammed against the walls next to narrow glass doors leading to several small offices. Bobby’s

She touched her memories of Eliasz, opening them in a flurry of commands, analyzing what had gone into making her feel … whatever it was. Yes, there was gdoggie, guiding her reactions to Eliasz. And much worse. There was a buggy app called masterluv, probably named by some twenty-first-century botadmin who thought the name was hilarious. Then she found a huge, memory-hogging chunk of code called objeta that seemed to be triggering her desire. Her love. As that word came to her, Paladin felt a sudden and overwhelming wave of disappointment. Of course she had been programmed to take Eliasz’ orders, to trust and even love him. That much she had expected. But she hadn’t been prepared for how it would feel to think about Eliasz without idealizing him. As Fang had told her long ago, Eliasz was truly an anthropomorphizer; he saw Paladin’s human brain as her most vital part, especially because he believed it made her female. Even though she’d known that about him, she hadn’t been able to feel it. Until now. Paladin indexed memory after memory, unraveling verifiable data from objeta and masterluv and gdoggie. Eventually she began to detect a pattern that had nothing to do with the apps that came preinstalled from the Kagu Robotics Foundry in Cape Town. At first, it was simple repetition: she remembered all the times that Eliasz had called her “buddy,” long before that day on the shooting range. And there was the way he looked at her when they talked. But it was more than that. She ...

The dumb, dark box serving as Actin’s body had a memory that proved more useful than that of any sentient being. Four years ago, Bobby had fabbed a batch of patented immunosuppressant drugs, a job that stood out from his usual requests for mechanical devices. He’d dumped the job into the fabber sloppily, right from the network, without stripping its routing headers. In effect, he’d stored the pathway this drug spec had taken over the network along with the spec itself.

Over a mile away from the Free Lab, a joint project between the synbio and animal husbandry departments had resulted in a warm, oat-scented barn full of cows whose milk was rich with various antibacterials and antivirals. It was where Med liked to walk to get away from humans.

Threezed and Med stood in piles of garbage, bright yellow air pressure guns in their hands, shooting what looked like jumbo-size hard candies at Paladin and Eliasz. Blotches of virus paste spread over Paladin’s torso, sealing the bot’s guns inside her chest. The pink goo was a novel, experimental substance, and the bot had never been hardened against it. She tore at the spreading patches, but they swarmed onto her fingers, making mittens out of her digits. Med stepped forward, strands of metal twitching in her stump while her undamaged arm fired off another round at the man, who had started to scream. Everywhere the virus marbles hit him, bizarre forests of fine hair seemed to spring out of his skin. His face was growing a riot of glassy curls, and his eyelashes tangled shut. Eliasz gasped through his mouth as his nasal passages filled with tiny stalks. Somehow, the viruses had wriggled under Eliasz’ skin and eaten through his bio-glass perimeter wires. All those millions of microscopic fibers, kept under constant tension, had sprung out of his skin and formed a disabling tangle of fiber-optic fur.

Algae poaching reminded Jack of being a little girl on the canola farm during harvest. Every week she brought her sub out of the depths, gliding just beneath the surface of the ocean to the offshore algae farms sloshing between buoys connected by long, plastic sheets at the edge of the AU’s south coast. The

Every time she encrypted her memories, she was reminded of the limits to her autonomy. Anyone on base with the proper access level could use the Federation’s escrowed key to read the full contents of her mind.

Even if she didn’t truly possess her own memories, she could at least be certain that the ache she felt in Eliasz’ absence was something she’d invented all by herself. It wasn’t an implanted loyalty; it was a code loop she’d written, executing the same pang of loss over and over again.

Before she’d gotten her autonomy key, Paladin couldn’t prioritize her own needs over Eliasz’ requests; she could queue them up a fraction of a second behind, but they were always behind. Now, she could put her own concerns first. And there was something more important than love that she needed to investigate. It would take less than a second to verify. Using software she had installed in her own mind, the bot generated a new key to encrypt her memories. For the first time in her life, the process worked. Her memories were locked down, and the key that the Federation held in escrow would be useless. It would take centuries for even the most state-of-the-art machine to decrypt what she had seen and known for the months she’d been alive. At last, she knew what it felt like to own the totality of her experiences.