“Don’t you ever eat or sleep, Med?” Catalyst asked with a grin.
Med returned Beady to a small cage next to her. “No.” Her voice was casual. “I’m a robot.” Something about the formal way she said “robot” made it immediately clear she wasn’t joking.
Catalyst was about to stuff a hunk of warm, cinnamon-coated bread into her mouth, and suddenly stopped. “You are? How did you get to be a professor?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of the Cohen Lab at Anchorage?” David asked archly, pleased to show he knew more than a grad student. “They make biobots that are raised autonomous, just like humans.”
Threezed had come down from the loft. He reached for a bun from the bag, pushing past David in a way that seemed deliberately calculated to be rude. “Really?” he asked sarcastically, finding Jack’s eyes with his own. “Is that how humans are raised? Autonomous?”
David looked confused, but obviously felt that he should put this question to rest, especially since it had been posed by a person who was clearly not part of the lab hierarchy. “Yes,” he said in a slightly condescending tone. “Humans do not require the same financial investment to reproduce as robots, and therefore they are only indentured as adults, by choice.”
“Thanks for the little property lesson, sweetie.” Threezed rolled his eyes. Swiping an unused mobile off the table, he ambled out of the lab.
“Sometimes you are a complete fuckwit, David,” Catalyst muttered.
“Well, sometimes you are, too!” he shot back.
Med shrugged and analyzed the real-time images she was receiving from the local network, where data was coming from a haze of microscopic devices spreading like fluid through Beady’s brain, analyzing what it was doing under the influence of Retcon. She shared the whole thing out to a holo desktop they’d created, creating a 3-D image that she sliced with a clipped motion of her hand.
Beady made scrabbling noises in his cage.
Presently Krish arrived, also bearing coffee and buns. He sat down with the group like a student, unpacking his breakfast and tapping out a few commands on the desktop. “How’s it going? Looks like we’ve got some new data.”
Jack wiped her hand through the air, pushing some unanalyzed brain slices to Krish.
“I saw Threezed leaving with one of our lab mobiles. What is he doing?”
“I believe that he is learning about autonomy,” Med replied.
Threezed returned in the early afternoon, wearing a faded University of Saskatchewan hoodie and looking a lot less sullen. Jack nodded at Threezed and he nodded back: fight over. Their conversation that morning had changed the connection between them, made the whole thing feel less desperate.
Beady was feeling better, too. It appeared they’d edited out the memory that made him seek Med’s voice at all costs, even his own life. His dopamine receptors were growing back nicely, too.
Jack addressed the group. “I think we’re ready to soft launch now. Let’s publish the Retcon repository and get some feedback.”
Med looked up. “I’ve never pushed a drug out like this—without trials.”
“We already know Retcon works in simulations and on Beady here.” Jack patted the roof of the mouse cage. “That’s a good start. Next we’ll get results from docs testing it on subjects who are already at risk of death.”
“So it’s an informal Phase I drug trial, where you test to see whether it’s deadly to humans,” Med mused.
“That’s true. There is a very small chance it could kill people.”
Catalyst interrupted. “That’s a risk with any drug, and we all know companies like Zaxy push shit out on the market all the time without taking them through trials. They get an exemption for drugs administered by a licensed Zaxy provider.”
“But our providers won’t have access to the kinds of medical facilities Zaxy would have,” Med said.
“This is pretty much how open pharma works, Med,” Krish said gently. “And I think you already know a group of subjects who are at risk of death.”
Everybody was looking at the bot now, waiting. She was lead on the Retcon project, and they wouldn’t do anything without her final approval.
“Alright.”
A muted cheer went up from the group.
“Now, who volunteers to write the documentation?” The cheers turned into groans and laughter. Eventually David offered his services, and Catalyst said she’d put together a list of Freeculture groups to contact about the specs. Med and Jack retired to Krish’s office to message Med’s former colleagues in Yellowknife about that informal Phase I.
A reply came back in under a minute: There were still six patients in Yellowknife with crippling urges to clean houses, enter data, even unload boxes from trucks. The doctors wanted the specs and documentation for Retcon, and Med’s former supervisor promised he’d send all the results to Free Lab.
At that moment, Catalyst tapped hesitantly on the glass doors. “Sorry to interrupt, but I just saw a really weird message on the Iqaluit geneng server.”
Jack and Krish looked at each other.
“What do you mean?” asked Med.
“There was an article about how that solar farm explosion was actually part of an IPC witch hunt for suspected patent pirates in the northern Zone.” She paused, looking guiltily at Jack. “Including one named Jack, whose picture looked a little like you.”
Nobody said anything, so finally the grad student spoke up again, timidly. “Are you Captain Jack from The Bilious Pills?”
Jack and Krish burst into laughter, reenacting a little diversionary tactic they’d perfected decades ago, during the height of their underground fame. When authority figures or outsiders asked if they were part of The Bilious Pills, their cover story was incredulity. Somehow, they always managed to do it in a way that didn’t sound staged.
“Well, my name is Jack,” she said, still wearing a grin. “But I’m not the captain of anything.”
“I can’t believe the IPC still cares about anyone from The Bilious Pills,” Krish added with a chortle. “It’s been defunct for… how long?”
“Twenty-seven years,” Med said. And then, as if to explain the odd specificity of her knowledge, she added, “When I was growing up, I read a local copy on the Cohen Lab server.”
“I see,” said Jack.
SUMMER 2119
Two and a half decades ago, the entire Free Lab knew she was Captain Jack. And it wasn’t long after she and Lyle started sleeping together that everybody knew about that, too. Maybe it was because Lyle was as antic as her tattoo was static. She made no secret of her infatuation with Jack, grabbing her for kisses in the hall outside the lab and pulling her merrily into a wide circle of fashionably rebellious friends.
On Saturday evenings, Lyle would sashay into the Free Lab wearing old-fashioned red lipstick, wrapped in some crazy textile made out of silver feathers and red algae.
“Your chariot is here, daaaarling!” she would call to Jack, and everybody in the lab would watch them leave arm in arm. It was an overt display that made Jack uncomfortable, because she’d always courted notoriety under a pseudonym. But it made her proud, too. She had a hot date instead of a long, numb night with her mobile.
Lyle got away with a lot of things because she was so damn smart. Her doctoral research on molecular motors had won an award for the most promising first work from a young scholar, and had already become the basis for several therapies that were now in development. When she scored a postdoc that she could take to the lab of her choice, her decision to join the Free Lab made headlines in the science text repos—and even one or two gossip feeds that loved her bad-girl reputation.