“It doesn’t make sense,” said the man who had spoken first. “If your goal is to calm rioters down, why not just develop a chemical that does it? Something you can spray into a crowd? Why put something in your drugs that has to be triggered by a catalyst? That’s just way too complicated and difficult.”
“Maybe the catalyst is an image or a word. Something you could broadcast remotely.” The guy with the skull mods was agitated, his muscles a mess of electrical activity. “How else do you explain the pics of those meetings between that Smaxo VP and the Trade Zone defense minister? You think they were just swapping LOLs? The economic coalitions want a way to keep people from protesting their bullshit.”
“Well, I’m sure Smaxo is cutting deals with the Zone, but a backdoor triggered by a word? That causes some residual molecules in your blood to send your brain into theta wave mode?” The man who spoke now had close-cropped hair and a white shirt that clearly marked him as a corporate worker. “Sorry, but I just don’t buy it.”
The group crowded up to the bar, their bodies forming a warm set of obstacles around Paladin and Eliasz, their pores exuding sweat and excitement and metabolized euphorics.
“I’ve got an exploit that works just like that.”
Everyone in the group shut up to listen to the tall woman whose elbow pressed lightly against Paladin’s arm. She had a small patch of pink hair on her otherwise bald brown head, and wore the traditional Eurozone button-front shirt. A mass spectrometer was stuffed into her breast pocket. “Sound-triggered bacteria. I once zombied a whole club by spiking the booze. Had all the boys do pole dances and put the vid online.” She was less excited than the rest of the group, and a surreptitious blood sample revealed that she had no drugs other than caffeine in her system. When her shirtsleeve touched Paladin’s arm, he perceived molecules associated with air purification systems. She’d been in a dome, or underground, for a long time before coming here today.
The group continued to focus on the woman, who was digging in the pocket of her khakis for a device. Their postures suggested that she was a node, a person who sprouted and maintained social connections. She was at the core of this group, the person they all knew.
“That vid was hilarious,” barked the man with the phrenology map. “An epic hack.” As his face turned toward the woman, and therefore toward Paladin, the bot could see that the mountainous region over the man’s eyes was labeled “WTF.”
On Paladin’s left, Eliasz was covertly hyperalert. Slavoj, trapped between the social node and WTF, scrunched down in his chair and carefully focused on the dish of biscuits. It was obvious that he recognized them, but Paladin couldn’t decide if his posture was an effort to hide or, perversely, to capture the group’s attention.
“A round of black for my friends, please,” the node said politely to the teaman.
“Your usual?” he replied, reaching for a jar of crisp, expensive leaves.
“Yes, thank you. We’ll be in the back.”
“A round on Frankie! Smooth!” The man in corporate casuals slapped her arm appreciatively.
“Smooth!” echoed the gamer, lifting her rig and settling it on the sensor strip that banded her skull. Her eyes, dyed completely black, settled on Slavoj.
“Oh, hey,” she said.
“Hey, Mecha,” Slavoj muttered, toying with his tea glass.
Frankie’s group swirled away, following her through a beaded curtain at the end of the bar. Mecha, now at the tail end of the pack, plucked at Slavoj’s sleeve.
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“Just got off work.”
“Still working with Promoter on that Third Arm project?”
“Yeah, but we’re all consulting now, just to make ends meet while we’re waiting for funding.”
Paladin had taken baselines of the man’s speech, which indicated that it was statistically likely that Slavoj was lying now.
“I have to go, but we should hang out soon. I haven’t seen you in forever.” Mecha leaned into Slavoj to grab a biscuit off of the diminishing pile in the bowl. His body tensed and untensed as he prepared to speak and then didn’t. “Actually, what are you doing tonight?” Without waiting for a reply, she put on her rig and tilted her head. “You should come to this party at Hox2’s place.”
Slavoj thumbed the joint on his glasses, looking at her text. His heart rate was elevated—yes, he would be there.
Paladin tried to figure out a way to get their new friend to bring them along. Parties were a good place to make connections.
On her way back to the beaded curtain, Mecha brushed her fingers lightly over Paladin’s back. “Nice case,” she said. “Bet it does negative refraction, right?”
“It does,” Paladin vocalized.
“Looks great,” she said, aiming her gamer rig at the camouflaged apertures for his torso guns. “Pretty sweet defensive perimeter for a lab bot.”
The bot wasn’t sure what to say. “Thank you. Slavoj and I were just talking about lab life.”
As she reached the bead curtain, Mecha turned back one last time. “Bring your pretty bot friend, too!” she called to Slavoj.
The nervous QA engineer swallowed the last of his tea, then grinned at Paladin and Eliasz. “Do you want to come?”
Paladin noticed with pleasure that Eliasz’ face had muscled into one of its rare smiles. The bot had managed his first act of human intelligence gathering, entirely without help.
They said good-bye to Slavoj and returned to the streets of the medina. Though Paladin sighted the occasional biobot in the crowds, this city was obviously built for humans. The narrow lanes would never admit a mantis bot like Fang, and the vendor stalls emitted no bot-readable metadata.
“That was a great start on your HUMINT, buddy. Let’s do a little more practice.” Eliasz pointed down a street that veered slightly north, its walls recently whitewashed with a quick-drying fluid full of bioluminescent bacteria and network motes. Paladin hesitated.
“It doesn’t seem like there are very many bots in this city.”
“That’s the challenge. Even in a city that’s packed with bots, people are going to treat you differently. You have to work around it.”
The bot fell into step behind the man, unable to fit beside him as they walked past a small, scruffy cat sleeping on a low-hanging balcony and four children clustered around an ancient water spigot.
“How do I work around this?” Paladin pointed at his face.
Eliasz laughed and the bot found himself logging the location of every beam of sunlight as it glanced off the windows above. There was no reason for it. He just found himself wanting a granular record of this rare moment with Eliasz laughing and the light waves lengthening and stray water molecules hurling themselves through the air.
“Paladin, do you really think you’re the first operative who ever stuck out like a sore thumb? Look at me! I’m the color of cow milk. Pretty obvious I’m an outsider around here. But look at your new friend Slavoj. He’s an outsider, too. Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”
“Like when I told Slavoj we were finding it hard to get work.”
“Exactly! You may be a hydrocarbon guzzling bot, but he likes you because you’re dealing with the same problem. Just figure out a way to share their problems.”
They walked into an open plaza, ringed on all sides with courtyards and shops, and packed with dozens of stalls full of electronics components and biotech. Paladin had an idea.
Unlike Eliasz, he could speak Darija, the most common natural language in this region. That was something the bot could turn into a shareable problem. Leaving Eliasz’ side, Paladin approached a man selling muscle fibers very much like the ones that stretched beneath the bot’s carapace.