Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

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 ...