Finally, he reopened his secure session with Fang. I think he knows he wants sex.
How can you be sure?
Because I asked him about it, and he said he wasn’t a faggot. He classified our activities using a sexual term.
He didn’t. His use of that word is a clear example of anthropomorphization. Robots can’t be faggots. We don’t have gender, and therefore we can’t have same-sex desire. Sure, I let humans call me “he” because they get confused otherwise. But it’s meaningless. It’s just humans projecting their own biological categories onto my body. When Eliasz uses the word faggot, it’s because he thinks that you’re a man, just like a human. He doesn’t see you for who you really are.
Paladin could think of no response he cared to transmit. But after hours of crawling the public net, he had a few mental models that allowed him to predict the kinds of behaviors a human might expect from a robot faggot. Maybe it’s different for biobots.
That’s crap. Your brain is nothing more than a processing device for facial recognition. You can operate almost as effectively if it goes offline. It doesn’t reveal some essential gender identity any more than your arm reveals that you are secretly a squid.
Paladin once again found himself in a contradictory state, knowing Fang was right, but unable to feel the truth of it.
Fang sent more data: I’ve fought beside your model before, and the bad guys always take out the brain first. Why do you think Kagu advertises the location of the brain so much? It’s like camouflage. Malicious attackers expend their weapons on a useless target.
Paladin possessed a file time-stamped from the first few minutes of his life. In it, he’d stored a video of the arm bots on the Kagu factory floor explaining his physical capabilities. They’d used those exact words, “like camouflage.”
Talking to Fang was inflaming Paladin’s desire for data, not reducing it. He exited their session.
The more he analyzed what had happened with Eliasz on the shooting range, the more complicated it seemed. Paladin had accumulated entire days’ worth of memories, petabytes of data, about Eliasz. Unlike most humans, Eliasz didn’t treat Paladin like a thing, a tool to be deployed. He told the bot things that no other entity had ever shared with him. And Eliasz displayed desire for Paladin when the bot was at his least human, his body unfolded into a weapon. How could that be anthropomorphizing?
If Paladin used Fang’s logic to analyze the situation, however, it was hard to deny that other explanations were possible. He accessed his memory of Eliasz saying “I am not a faggot” for the seven hundred and sixteenth time. “Faggot” was a word for something that only humans cared about. Maybe Eliasz really was like the sprinkler system at Arcata Solar Farm, mistaking Paladin for something that he was not.
Finally Paladin considered the possibility that his own feelings were also an illusion. Every indentured bot knew that there were programs running in his mind that he could not access, nor control—and these programs were designed to inspire loyalty. But were they also supposed to make him care this much about small physiological changes in Eliasz’ body? Was this constant searching and data-gathering about Eliasz something that he would shut down if he were autonomous?
Fang addressed Paladin again: Remember our secure session? Let’s keep using it.
But Paladin didn’t want to talk to Fang anymore. Impulsively, he tuned the open wares menu on RECnet and downloaded a worm jammed inside an immersive combat simulator. The accompanying .txt file explained that just as the action got intense, a memory error would crash him. The program would also helpfully output the entire sequence to a log file so he could save and replay his half-destroyed memory of the experience.
Paladin found himself pouring bullets into an enemy tank, an injured human beside him. As the game’s code uncoiled, he knew his only goal was to destroy the tank and bring the man to safety. He chose to strap the human to his back and continued to fire. When the adversary’s ruined molecular bonds boiled with gas fires, when Paladin was just about to fulfill his mission, the man’s body fragile and alive against his back, he hit the malicious code. The bot’s whole body spasmed, his reflexes made useless by bogus and contradictory commands. A wave of ecstatic nonsense gripped him and the file ended.
The next morning, Paladin still hadn’t heard back from Kagu about his brain. He and Eliasz lifted off into the scalding blue of the sky, a light stealth jet buoying them over the sand. They landed in a Casablanca suburb called California, and hitched into town on a truck caravan. Their base of operations was a cheap hostel near Biotech Park, at the fringes of the old medina along the piers.
Biotech Park was a corporate incubator, but it was also a kind of city unto itself. Famous across the Maghreb, the campus looked like a massive wall of mirrored glass by the water, next to the equally massive Hassan II Mosque, whose rooftop lasers sought line of sight with Mecca during prayers. It held hundreds of startups locked in a frenzy of research and investment capital, all vying to be the next Zaxy. When ancient amplifiers broadcast the call to prayer, it got picked up and relayed by the mote network. Clumps of engineers would emerge from their workstations onto the vast, pale-orange plaza stones of the mosque—sometimes to pray, and sometimes to take pictures of other people praying.
The life sciences industry had remolded the landscape for miles along the coast, spawning smaller but still-glittering versions of itself devoted to housing genetic engineers and their families. Expensive condo developments advertised on giant billboards, offering private berths for residents’ yachts. The culture of Biotech Park spread everywhere, washing over the old medina walls across the street to flood its centuries-old narrow lanes with consumer biotech shops, game stores, and European fashion boutiques. Recently relocated engineers wandered like confused tourists through the medina’s spice markets, past stalls where slabs of real butchered lamb were for sale right next to outlets offering trellis-grown pork tissue wrapped in biodegradable polymers for half the price.
Though it dominated the skyline, Biotech Park did not create order or regimentation. Instead, it simply amplified the polyglot chaos that was Casablanca in summer.
Paladin and Eliasz adopted cover identities similar to what they’d used in Iqaluit: a down-on-his-luck engineer with his bot. They wandered through the medina’s tea shops, asking anyone who would talk to them whether they knew about good contract work in the Park. Somehow, Eliasz knew which tea shops would be packed with engineers grabbing a curved glass of tea between long stints of amplification, transcriptome modeling, and sequence analysis.
“Those teahouses are the kinds of places where Freeculture projects are born.” Eliasz explained his strategy to Paladin as he tossed his bag on a low bed back at the hostel. Outside, the afternoon prayers mixed with the sounds of traffic while two men shouted Darija and Russian. “You work all day for some company that doesn’t care about you, but you and your buddies still want to change the world. So you go out to tea and bitch about it. Then you start a project, you give it a name, start passing it around. Before you know it, you’ve either got the next blockbuster drug—or the next patent crime.”
Eliasz checked his weapons perimeter, passing his hands over his head and chest in solemn blessing. 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. There was enough room here for the bot to stand up comfortably, though he guessed he would have few opportunities to do it. He touched the bed with his new hand, where minute skin flakes reminded him of all the humans who had been here before.