1530 suspect in custody, initiating arrest
1537 statements from all witnesses in cafe, coordinates attached, data attached
1539 questioning two individuals exiting cafe
1540 female and male no broadcast identifiers
1541 maintenance check
1542 maintenance check
1543 maintenance check
1544 resuming arrest
Something weird had obviously happened there. Why would bots begin interrogating two people, then suddenly go into maintenance mode? Though records showed that Jack usually traveled alone, Paladin thought this male and female with no broadcast IDs, connected with a pharma bust in Inuvik, might be a possible lead. He saved a copy of the file locally to show Eliasz later.
As for his other search, he was going to have to do a little human intelligence gathering.
7
THE BILIOUS PILLS
JULY 7, 2144
The truck was its own driver, and that driver was a high-functioning paranoid. It kept to low-traffic roads under light surveillance. At this time of year, tourist season, that meant the least scenic routes. Jack couldn’t distract herself with lovely views of the Mackenzie, glittering with minerals and pale boats. While Threezed watched a silent movie on one of the truck’s terminals next to her, she tracked satellite positions overhead and cars in visual range on the road around her.
The fastest route to the lab was through Yellowknife. Her old friend Mali lived there, working as a GP at a public hospital. Maybe she could get Threezed some kind of entry-level job swabbing cheeks or mopping up. It was the least she could do after he’d saved her ass back there in Inuvik.
Yellowknife was a city of slender skyscrapers and centuries-old, real-wood homes that hugged the shores of Slave Lake, a popular resort in the northern Zone. At this time of year it was packed with tourists and college kids who’d indentured themselves for the summer to work as servants and guides at vacation lodges. The crowds would also make it easy for Mali to sell a big part of Jack’s stash. Though Mali was hardly a radical anymore, she was unbending in her belief that everyone should be able to afford the treatments she prescribed. When they couldn’t pay for patented pharma, she sold them Jack’s pirated goods. All the money Mali earned went right back into Jack’s next delivery.
The knife on Jack’s belt pulsed gently: Her perimeter had picked up some local news of interest. Somebody in an off-the-record Yellowknife pirate forum wanted to warn people about a batch of bad drugs going around. A guy had taken this stuff called Zacuity to pull an all-nighter processing a giant pile of health insurance claims for unemployed patients. Claims processing was mostly automated, but in unusual cases, a human had to step in and sort things out. In short, it was the most boring job in the world. A perfect pairing with Zacuity.
At first, the guy seemed weird but OK. He worked longer hours. He had awkward conversations with his friends where he would suddenly start listing dozens of numerical codes for medical conditions that were only covered if you had full employment with a corp. Then he started working twenty-four-hour shifts, eating Zacuity instead of food, and getting no sleep. That’s when he told his friends that every claim had to be processed by human hands—and if that meant people didn’t get their surgeries on time, that was just the price they had to pay for good service. He’d gone completely nuts, printing out claim forms on reams of extremely expensive paper, which he stacked a meter high around his desk like a defensive wall. His manager finally called the police, but it was too late. At least one patient had died while waiting for meds that should have been authorized by a simple insurance algorithm. The insurance processor himself died of massive organ failure, probably from dehydration, behind a pillar of unfulfilled requests for pediatric anti-autism therapies.
The post ended with an update: Medics in Yellowknife were asking people who had taken Zacuity to get to the hospital as soon as possible. No questions asked. They just wanted to make sure nobody else got killed.
Jack ripped open one of the boxes she’d set aside from her stash and positioned a mood-stabilizing strip under her tongue. She gripped the steering wheel uselessly, waiting for calm. This was the biggest fuckup of her career, if you could call piracy a career.
FALL 2115-FALL 2118
Jack and Krish named their anti-patent text repo The Bilious Pills, after the first medicine patented in the former USA. It was a little in-joke that was generally misinterpreted to mean something like “snarky bitches” by their adversaries, namely the Big Pharma bosses and liberal patent system apologists.
The repo’s vocal cadre of followers called themselves Pills, and many became famous among researchers whose work was being wrecked by the calcification of patent law. Jack rejected a full-time job at Louise Bendis’ patent farm by committing an open letter to The Bilious Pills about how drug patents make the human population sicker. She got quoted on news shows, but after that no university wanted to hire her as a professor. How would she ever fund a lab when she’d devoted herself to destroying Big Pharma, her most likely source of grant money?
Instead, Jack became a low-level researcher at Franklin, teaching geneng to undergraduates and doing other people’s lab work. And yet everywhere she went, from international synbio conferences to local meetings of Freeculture activists, her reputation as a founder of The Bilious Pills preceded her. She became a regular contributor to a health and science show that streamed to millions of people every week.
The patent reform movement was reaching a critical mass. It wasn’t just the scientists and engineers who were angry—the public cared, too. Medicines were too expensive. Every month, they got more and more crowdfunding for The Bilious Pills, until Jack could finally quit her lab job to work full-time on anti-patent organizing. That’s when she and Krish decided it was time to stage a major protest. Something that would broadcast to the world how broken the patent system really was.
Their chance came when a massive ship docked at Halifax, its cargo containers packed with pharma that had been fabbed in the African Federation. It was bad enough that people in the Federation were making drugs for people in the Zone that they couldn’t afford themselves. But in the past year there had been a record number of deaths in the Federation from childhood neurological disorders, several varieties of cancer, and infectious fatigue syndrome. The meds on the ship could be saving hundreds of thousands of Federation lives right now. Instead, they would be warehoused in the Zone.
Jack spent two frantic days exchanging encrypted messages with a Pill whose pseudonym was “Rosalind Franklin.” She had the connections to deliver the drugs to Federation kids who needed them. All they needed was the right moment.
They snuck aboard early in the morning, surrounded by a dozen swarm cams that streamed the whole thing live. Jack led a group of twenty-three of the most radical Pills wearing masks, powdered wigs, and eighteenth-century-style military jackets. It was a pirate action, after all. Jack stood out in her black three-point pirate’s hat adorned with a skull and crossbones.