Paladin knelt next to Eliasz, now curled into a fetal position on the rug.
“Come to bed with me, Paladin,” Eliasz whispered. “It will be OK this once.” He trailed off, and Paladin used his new hand to feel the stuttering flashes of arousal that passed through the man’s body.
“I will carry you to bed.”
“Lie down next to me.” He gripped Paladin’s leg, staring at him with drug-stretched pupils. “You are so beautiful. Let me feel you next to me.”
For the second time that day, they looked into each other’s faces. But now, unlike in the medina, the sight of Eliasz’ dark eyes was like a worm filling Paladin’s mind with junk characters and overriding his action priorities. It was hard to set Eliasz’ words aside and follow protocols. “It is not safe,” the bot said quietly. “We are in danger. Frankie drugged you.”
Sweating and shaking, Eliasz pulled himself to his feet by clinging to Paladin, then wrapped his arms around the bot’s torso and pressed his face against one armored shoulder. “Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay,” he chanted in a whisper.
It was not safe. But Paladin wanted to lie down beside Eliasz on the narrow cot, to train his sensors on the man’s drug-amped desire, to recognize in the man’s face a possible representation of his own chaotic feelings. And so he found a compromise between his desires and his programming.
Laying Eliasz on the bed again, he lay down, too. His carapace, balanced at the edge of the mattress via tiny movements of his actuators, became a shield for the man’s vulnerable body. He faced Eliasz and faced away from him simultaneously, scanning for danger. He rested his hand on the man’s flank, the tiny needles in his palm sipping minute samples of Eliasz’ blood. The bot could read each molecular change in Eliasz’ body as the man’s euphoria grew and subsided. He wished there was some other way he could touch Eliasz that would give him an even more intimate understanding of what was happening.
“Why did you say this was wrong?” Eliasz was shivering through one of the highs that bunched his muscles into spasms. He stared into Paladin’s face and his fingers pressed urgently against the bot’s chest.
“What we are doing is not wrong. I was worried that you weren’t safe, but I can keep watch.”
“But you said it was wrong. Two men cannot lie together.” Eliasz was gasping, his heart rate spiking as he hallucinated, talking to someone who wasn’t there.
Paladin tried to reorient Eliasz in reality. “It’s Paladin. I am not a man. I am a bot. I belong to the African Federation.”
Eliasz started to cry, the salt of his tears indistinguishable from the salt of his sweat. Paladin didn’t know what to say. It was unlikely the man would remember any of this in a few hours. Eliasz had already gone rigid with ecstasy again, his mouth slack and wordless. The bot did not resist when the man faced him, hooking one arm and one leg over his carapace, clinging as hard as he could. It felt good, as if Eliasz were finally telling Paladin everything he wanted to know.
13
RETCON
JULY 13, 2144
“When are we going to run away together… master?” Threezed whispered hotly in Jack’s ear, appending the client’s honorific with a sharp dip in his voice. They were naked and her thighs formed a cradle for his slim hips. Though her thoughts had been vagued out by postorgasmic pleasure, Jack was instantly alert and dismayed.
She rolled on her side to dislodge him. “What is your goddamn problem, Threezed?”
“I just don’t want you to leave me here when you guys figure out that mesolimbic pathway thing.” Threezed traced one puckered curve of the scar between Jack’s breasts. She was still slightly damp with his sweat. “What am I supposed to do here?”
They lay on an unfurled sofa bed next to stacks of old servers and fabbers. After two straight days of coding and testing, Jack was exhausted. She should have been sleeping instead of fucking. She twisted around in Threezed’s embrace and groped through her sack for an attention-focuser. Finding a blister pack, she popped out a shiny silver bead of pirated Vigilizer—that would clear her mind so she could start working again.
But when the drug kicked in, she found that all her ideas were about Threezed.
“What if I bought you a franchise here? I have enough to pay for a basic citizenship package that would let you work and go to school in Saskatoon. And if you wanted to move somewhere else in the Zone, it’s a pretty cheap upgrade.”
Threezed propped himself up on his elbows and looked thoughtful. “Do you have a franchise here, too?”
“I had one when I lived here. Now I have an international business franchise that gives me rights in five economic coalitions. I’m covered pretty much anywhere I go.”
Although she’d broken many laws in her time, Jack had never lived without a franchise. Her parents bought her one the moment she was born. They had a family package that guaranteed all the Chen children could own property, apply for jobs, go to school, and move to another city if they wanted. Though Lucky Lake was small, it was still incorporated—the city used money from local enfranchisement deals to pay for police and emergency responders, as well as regular mote net dusting to keep all their devices robustly connected.
If the Chens hadn’t had a successful farm, Jack would have turned eighteen with no franchise, and no hope of working unless she entered contract. She’d known a few kids at school in that situation, mostly Natives who got indentured to jobs in habitat management or mining up north. For the first time in decades, she recalled how her school principal had described this arrangement as “cultural enrichment.” The kids under contract would live in dorms near historic Native communities, earning their franchises while immersed in the traditional landscapes of their ancestors. Jack hadn’t thought about her old high school classmates in years. As the principal’s words echoed in her memory and she looked into Threezed’s face, she realized how much bullshit that had been. Some of those kids had probably died up on the Arctic coast without ever owning anything, even themselves. She wondered whether the indenture system had its own version of piracy, and tried to imagine what that would be.
Threezed had rolled on his back and was looking at the electroluminescent threads knit into the stiff panels of the ceiling.
“Think about it, OK?” Jack sat up and sealed the vent on her coveralls. “Saskatoon’s a pretty nice city. Not a bad place to be enfranchised.” Before Threezed could reply, she dropped down the loft ladder.
Med was at her bench, fabbers and sample fridges scattered around her. The bot appeared to be talking to a tiny white mouse cupped in her hands while David watched with his usual serious expression. It was 5:45 a.m.
When Med and David ignored her, Jack made a stab at conversation. “Why are you talking to the mouse?”
“Trying to see if we’ve erased the right memory.” David gestured up a projection of the mouse’s brain. It hovered over the table, slowly rotating, swollen to the size of a basketball and crackling with colors signifying neural pathways and molecular transformations. “We used Zacuity to get Beady addicted to Professor Cohen’s voice, and now we’re exposing him to the addictive process while dosed with Retcon.”
The Vigilizer felt good, but Jack was still grateful when Catalyst arrived with a thermos of coffee and steaming buns from the co-op bakery on Broadway. Nobody else was working in the lab at this hour, but somehow the Retcon team had gotten the idea that this project was special. It had snared Med a coveted job in the lab, for one thing. And there was also the matter of Jack’s mysterious presence, as well as Krish’s involvement. The situation clearly merited all-nighters.