Paladin had a lot of ammo to burn, and he took his time with the roof. Spent shells wafted to the ground at their feet and began biodegrading. With each spurt of bullets, Paladin undermined the structural integrity of the roof very precisely—never quite hitting it, but blasting away the foam and beams that held it in place. Every hit knocked out just a few more centimeters on the eastern edge of the house, and Paladin registered a feeling of satisfaction as the roof began to tip and sag.
As he bent to retrieve a magazine and reload, Eliasz shifted his weight away from the bot’s back. The man’s posture radiated discomfort. He was trying to stay on the pegs while keeping his lower body from making contact with Paladin’s.
Paladin categorized the physiological changes in Eliasz’ body and reloaded his guns. The bot decided to continue his human social communication test by not communicating. It didn’t make sense to remind Eliasz that every single movement of his body, every rush of blood or spark of electricity, was completely transparent to Paladin. He would allow Eliasz to believe that he sensed nothing.
Eliasz’ heart was beating fast, his skin slightly damp. The man’s reproductive organ, whose functioning Paladin understood only from military anatomy training, was engorged with blood. The transformation registered on his heat, pressure, and movement sensors. The physiological pattern was something like the flush on a person’s face, and signaled the same kind of excitement. But obviously it was not the same.
“Tell me where I should aim next,” Paladin vocalized directly into the whorls of Eliasz’ ear, pressed against the streamlined curve of the bot’s jawline.
“Keep shooting.” In his discomfort, Eliasz forgot to subvocalize. “Just shoot the roof off like I told you.”
Paladin shot, but his sensorium was focused entirely on Eliasz’ body. The man was struggling to stabilize his breathing and heart rate. His muscles were trying to disavow their own reactions. The bot kept shooting, transducing the man’s conflicted pleasure into his own, feeling each shot as more than just the ecstasy of a target hit. When the roof collapsed, he shot the crumbling walls.
Eliasz’ pulse slowed and returned to normal ranges. But Paladin kept going, shooting and reloading until every magazine was reduced to pale petals of biodegrading material around his feet and the house was nothing more than scorched chunks of foam.
Military bots like Paladin were programmed with basic sexual information about humans that was entirely clinical. If he’d been designed for sex, Paladin would have been given emo-cognitive training on the topic. His carapace would have been skin and muscle, fitted with genitals. His admins would have implanted him with perversions and erotic desires and programs to emulate a sexual response cycle that would match the neurochemical cascades of his human counterparts. Built as he was, however, he had few tools to interpret or contextualize what had just transpired.
Paladin knelt and Eliasz slid from his back to the ground. Standing side by side, the human and the bot surveyed the damage they had done. Pieces of foam had hurled themselves to the ground everywhere among the flowers. Destroying that house had eaten up nearly all their credits.
A car brought them back inside the dome and dropped them at the hotel. Eliasz spoke for the first time since the shooting range. “Wait for me in the lobby, Paladin. I’m going to have a shower and then we’ll go back to the Lex for dinner. Maybe we’ll see our protein hacker friends again.” The man kept his eyes on the now invisible gun apertures in Paladin’s chest. Though his intent was to avoid the bot’s eyes, he failed: Paladin had visual sensors all over his body, including in the exact place where Eliasz sought to hide from them.
And so Paladin was looking straight into Eliasz’ dilated pupils when he replied, “I’ll check my data drip from Arcata Solar Farm and see what we’ve got.”
By the time Eliasz returned forty-five minutes later, the bot knew a lot about the Arcata Solar Farm. He had also done some public net searches and learned a small amount about sexual relationships between humans and robots. He was not going to talk about the latter, so he told Eliasz about the former as they walked a few blocks to the Lex. It was late evening and the sun hovered above the horizon. Darkness would only last about one hundred eighty minutes once it went down.
“The Arcata pirates have definitely bought drugs from Jack before—life extenders and anti-inflammatants, mostly. She’s their only source in the Federation who is also a buyer. From what I could tell, she’s buying their black IP, fabbing the drugs somewhere, and shipping them back for distribution. Not at high volumes, though. We’re talking small batches—generally a thousand doses per delivery. So I’m guessing Arcata Solar Farm isn’t her main client.”
“Makes sense,” Eliasz replied. “When was the last time they dealt with her, according to the security cams?”
“Just a month ago. They bought anti-inflammatants, which they’ve already sold.”
“Shit. Based on what the Federation knows about her patterns, there’s no way she’ll be back here for at least a few more months. She must have ported at Inuvik instead of here. Well, we’re fucked in one way, but not in another.”
“How are we fucked?”
“We’re fucked because there are dozens of routes south out of Inuvik, especially if she has good transportation, which she no doubt does. She’s not an amateur.” Eliasz paused at the mouth of the street that led to the Lex. Already, the bot was picking up molecules from the chili-laced steam that seeped out of the restaurant’s door two hundred meters away. “We’re also fucked because we have no idea where she’s heading—could be Calgary, where she obviously sold that Zacuity… or, hell, it could be Montreal. My guess, though, is that she’s already heard what’s happening in Calgary and is heading for a safe house in one of the smaller cities.”
“So how are we not fucked?”
“No matter what, we’re leaving Iqaluit in twenty-four hours. Hopefully sooner. We’ve got to get on Jack’s trail fast. Why don’t you start sifting surveillance from Inuvik, see if anything Jack-shaped pops up?”
They trudged up the street to the Lex, where Eliasz found Gertrude eating spicy bok choy with a group of neurolinguistics students who were more interested in vowel shifts than patent injustice. Eliasz struck up a conversation, maintaining their cover identities, trying not to create any anomalous patterns in their behavior.
Paladin ignored the humans. He was busy communicating over the private bot network, where conversations were soothingly unambiguous. Nobody asked him to overlook fundamental realities as he exchanged surveillance information with Inuvik agents about several suspicious incidents over the past forty-eight hours. They gave him a wealth of data: he had images, audio, and radio communications to sift through for clues.
On the public net, the subject of bots and human sexuality also revealed a wealth of data. But when Paladin eliminated representations from fiction and the sex industry, he found himself with almost no information. Military bots were not designed to have sex with humans, and therefore his situation was largely undocumented. The indentured were not permitted to post on the public net—they were usually barred by NDAs, but also by social convention. Plus, so few military bots became autonomous that their text repo commits were sparse. None of them dealt with human eroticism.
At last, one of Paladin’s searches related to Jack yielded a bot report whose contents looked promising. Two Inuvik reps had gone into deep maintenance mode for no reason after a routine pharma infringement bust at a cafe near the river. They were questioning two humans near the arrest, but hadn’t yet scanned their full biometrics. Before they shut down, however, one of them had logged the barebones encounter: