“You’re going to have a speaking part in this operation, buddy,” Eliasz said, looking into Paladin’s face. “You’re my indentured lab assistant. I want you to get some HUMINT, too.”
Abruptly Eliasz sat down on the bed, dropping his bag into the place where a pillow might have been. “A couple of hours until people start getting out of work at Biotech Park. I’m going to get a little sleep. Keep watch.” The man rolled his whole body to face the wall, bending his knees in the semifetal position every soldier learns after sleeping in tight quarters for any length of time.
Paladin stood in the middle of the floor, his sensors in a default high-security mode. That mode was one of his deepest instincts, and he couldn’t conceive of resisting when asked to keep watch. Nothing seemed more natural. But high security did not prevent him from reopening the file that held his experiences after eating that worm.
He wanted to watch it now, while Eliasz lay vulnerable next to him. Reviewing his own crash made the bot sway slightly with pleasure, but didn’t disable him the way it had when the worm was executing. Still, he couldn’t allow himself to play it more than once. Too dangerous.
Paladin closed the file and focused his entire attention on monitoring the room, filling his sensors with the hum of Eliasz’ blood flow, the temperature of the air, the molecules cascading through his spectrometers. The electrical signature coming from Eliasz’ nervous system indicated he’d fallen into a deep sleep almost instantly. The bot monitored Eliasz’ breathing and wondered how his life would be different if he became unconscious for several hours every day.
11
FREE LAB
JULY 11, 2144
“That bot is a vicious bastard,” Krish spat in an angry whisper.
“You’d have to be to take down Blue and her crew.”
Jack and Krish sat at a worn thermoplastic table in the Free Lab’s kitchen. A coffee machine made from recycled lab equipment was slowly spitting out dark, rich liquid.
They stared numbly at a feed display on the surface between their hands, detailing the destruction of Arcata Solar Farm. Government reps explained that it had belonged to a pharma pirate ring whose cover was a remote solar operation on Baffin Island. Very little data survived the attack, but a few seconds of recovered security footage showed a bulky humanoid bot with wing shields crushing the skull of an armored guard. Physical evidence suggested that this bot had killed everyone and stolen a helicopter. Depending on the political bent of the feed source, it was being called an IPC conspiracy or a terrorist attack.
“I saw Blue just a few months ago.” Jack held her voice steady as she poured coffee into a Pyrex measuring cup. “I was supposed to bring her some of the Zacuity.”
“This is not good, Jack, not good. If this is part of the hunt for you, you are in serious danger. You need to get the hell out of here and let Med and I take care of developing the therapy.”
“No. You need my help. It will only take a couple of days.”
“He could be on his way here right now.”
“There’s no way. Blue had her shit together with security. Even if he got the servers, it would take him hundreds of years to decrypt them.”
“You don’t think they’ll come after me? After this lab? It’s not very hard to guess you might wind up here.”
Jack felt a flick of annoyance. Did Krish really think she hadn’t figured out a way to stay hidden? “There have been no connections between us on the public net for at least twenty-five years. And they won’t be able to follow my data trail here, either. I take a lot of precautions.” She patted her knife, which automatically routed all her communications through an anonymizing network that stretched across the Earth and through at least two research facilities on the Moon.
Krish looked dubious. She wanted to grab him by the spongy synthetic wool of his jacket and yell that she knew what she was doing. Couldn’t he respect that this project was so important that it was worth everything to her? No. He didn’t know what it was like to pay the price for doing something risky.
“Look—I poisoned those people with my drug. I need to fix it.”
Krish stared at Jack’s hands on the table through the hologram that rose out of a commercial break in the feed. It was the Zaxy logo, an anthropomorphized letter Z, dancing with a woman who had been liberated from sexual dysphoria by a new drug called Languidity. His face hardened into that ruthless expression she’d never seen when they were lovers. “Let’s get to work, then.”
When Krish and Jack emerged from the kitchen, Med was describing the project to a woman whose black hair grew in fluffy patches around purple vines rooted in her scalp. They were deeply involved in a debate about how already-existing addiction workarounds could be integrated into a therapy. More students arrived for morning lab, some drifting over to meet this new researcher, whose midnight arrival had become the subject of lab gossip.
Watching them, Jack had to admit that the Free Lab did resemble the ideal research space she and Krish had dreamed about back in the days of The Bilious Pills. Everything they produced was open and unpatented. All their schematics and research papers were on the public net. Almost anyone, even nonstudents, could use the Free Lab equipment if they had an interesting idea.
Of course, nobody here was pirating, at least not officially, even though sometimes that was the best way to save lives fast. And a lot of their open work was eventually absorbed into locked IP by the big patent holders. Companies like Zaxy and Fresser came here to recruit from the talent pool all the time.
Still, the lab was free enough to harbor a pirate whom the International Property Coalition would happily see murdered. That was no small thing.
SPRING 2119
In its early days, the Free Lab was located deep underground in a cavernous, dusty room whose doors had been stenciled a hundred years prior with the words “COMPUTING CENTER.” They were renetworking, repiping, and drywalling the place with the help of Krish’s grant, but slowly, so there were dozens of half-finished offices and cubbies where you could curl up and disappear.
One evening, after a particularly mind-numbing series of assays, Jack fabbed a thin futon, dragged it up a ladder to a skeletal loft over the sequence library fridges, and fell asleep behind some discarded shipping boxes for protein-folding devices. Up there, noises from the lab were muffled and everything had the comforting, grassy smell of packing foam. It was the first good night’s sleep she’d had since her arrest, and she never went back to Krish’s house after that. Everyone in the lab knew she was living in the loft, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary for researchers to do things like that when they got really involved in work.
For the next several months, boxes were her bedroom and 2-D movies were her nighttime entertainment. Krish left her alone, lost in his new role as manager of a well-funded lab, and she lost herself in the frosty, brittle quiet of a Saskatchewan winter. The simplicity of her job was a kind of GABA regulator, she realized, de-spiking her moods while she dealt with whatever the fuck was going to happen next.
Spring was transforming the prairies into ruffled grain fields when Jack met Lyle Al-Ajou. Lyle was Krish’s star postdoc and she had a buggy tattoo on her half-shaved head. It was supposed to move through a sequence of common flowers, but crashed every time it bloomed into a deep orange poppy. The static image on her light brown skin, its code unmended, gave Lyle an appealingly absentminded air.