“I know it seems counterintuitive, but it was actually a good thing I was unpatched against Frankie’s drug.” He took a long drink, draining the cup. “She was hazing us, and it would have looked suspicious if I’d been too invulnerable.”
Eliasz placed a now steady hand on the bot’s shoulder when Paladin sat on the cot next to him. “We did good last night. Did you get any intel?”
“Actually, I believe I did.” Paladin told Eliasz about Frankie’s connection with The Bilious Pills, the publication whose terrorist activities had landed Jack in prison. Everyone who had committed to the group’s text repo had used pseudonyms, but the IPC had data files on most of them. Though The Bilious Pills had been officially disbanded after Jack’s arrest, the pirates behind it appeared to have maintained close connections over the years.
Bluebeard had been part of the group along with Frankie and Jack. So had a human-computer interface engineer in Vancouver called Actin, real name Bobby Broner. Krish Patel, a renowned biomedical researcher in Saskatoon, was known as Captain Nemo. Another former contributor was a doctor in Yellowknife, called Posthuman, real name Malika Ellul. Two more were dead.
“It’s possible Jack is still working with the Pills, and one of them is harboring her,” Paladin finished.
Eliasz looked dubious. “She may be a pirate, but Jack’s not stupid. By now she knows we’re onto her, and she’ll be focused entirely on saving her ass. Staying with somebody whose name is so publicly connected to hers would be foolish.”
“I don’t believe they are publicly connected,” Paladin explained. “Nearly all information about The Bilious Pills has been removed from the public net. I had to get my data from IPC intelligence.”
Eliasz’ hand still rested absently on Paladin’s shoulder. “OK, good to know. Let’s work on Frankie for now, and keep our options open with the others.”
It was still early, and after last night’s party, none of their potential sources would likely be awake. Eliasz was famished, and announced that they’d kill two birds with one stone by going to a breakfast hangout near the Twin Center. It was a postparty spot in the neighborhood, a place where they could continue exploiting the connections they’d begun making the night before. Eliasz sponged off in the shower, and they headed downtown. The air was filled with pollen, along with stray molecules from the sea.
Paladin was thinking about his brain.
Early that morning he had discovered a small chunk of data from Kagu Robotics Foundry waiting for him on the Camp Tunisia servers. Apparently his request was so unusual that it had been assigned to a botadmin, who appended a note:
We don’t normally give out personal information about organ donors to our biobots program. But because you are a recipient of the organ, we have determined that we can release some information to you, provided you accept this property management wrapper that will prevent you from sharing sensitive data with anyone else.
Attached was a file, accessible only inside an app designed to contain rights-protected media and trade secrets. Paladin opened it, and discovered that the more he knew, the less he could tell anyone.
His brain had once belonged to a soldier named Dikeledi [Last Name Withheld]. Like Paladin, she had been indentured to the African Federation. The file said she had died in the line of duty, but did not say how. Obviously by some method that had spared her brain, which had been removed from her body the day Paladin was completed. He had no memory of Dikeledi’s brain being installed, only that he could recognize the difference between thousands of human faces, and instantly read the emotional content of their expressions when they flashed before his sensors in tests.
At the time of his construction, a Kagu botadmin told Paladin the brain allowed him to do all that facial-recognition processing. But the bot arms at the foundry told him that the brain was unnecessary—just an advertising gimmick. A line that Fang had repeated. Paladin was left unsure what this brain really meant to him, and why he needed it.
Paladin poked at the software wrapper containing his knowledge, trying to determine what he could tell Eliasz about it. Depending on how he phrased it, he might be able to convey more information than the rights management software intended.
“I have some personal news I would like your opinion about,” Paladin vocalized experimentally. “I have received information from the Kagu Robotics Foundry about my brain. It came from a person in the Federation.” That much was public information. He could not say whose brain it was, but he could assign a pronoun to her. “She gave me this brain, but I am not sure if it matters. Other bots say it’s just an advertising gimmick.”
“She? Who is she?” Eliasz stopped beneath a palm tree, his hair thumbed by a hot breeze.
“I can’t tell you.”
“But do you know?”
“Yes.”
Eliasz grinned and rapped on Paladin’s carapace over the brain, as he had done before. “That’s so fantastic! Now you know who you really are!” He paused, his face a chaos of emotion that passed quickly into one of his rare grins. “Who would have guessed you were a woman?”
The two began to walk again, Eliasz occasionally looking at Paladin and refraining from saying something.
From endlessly researching the word “faggot,” and finally reaching an approximate understanding, Paladin knew that human gender was part of sexual desire. But he was starting to perceive that gender was a way of seeing the world, too. Military bots, especially ones with armored bodies like Paladin’s, were almost always called “he.” People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition.
That’s why humans had given him a gender before he even had a name.
As they approached the breakfast shop, Paladin perceived trace elements of seared meat borne by the wind. It came from an imitation British pub, complete with a sign announcing “THE KINDS OF BREAKFASTS AUTHENTIC ENGLISH WOULD EAT IN THE DAYS OF QUEEN VICTORIA.” This early in the morning, the patrons were sparse, but there were a few families and a big group of disheveled partygoers, their bodies still thrumming with the drugs and hormones they’d processed the night before.
Before they entered, Eliasz turned to Paladin and gazed upward into the bot’s face. The man was searching, the bot realized, for the kinds of expressions Paladin always looked for in human faces.
“Should I start calling you ‘she’?”
As a robot, he didn’t care what pronoun people used; as Fang had pointed out, gender was something humans projected onto robots. Changing his pronoun would make absolutely no difference at all. It would merely substitute one signifier for another. But then Paladin considered the implications of Eliasz’ facial expression, which at that moment hovered between desire and fear. Of course: If Paladin were female, Eliasz would not be a faggot. And maybe then Eliasz could touch Paladin again, the way he had last night, giving and receiving pleasure in an undocumented form of emotional feedback loop.
Paladin realized that this was the first time he’d been given a choice about something that might change his life. He thought about it for many seconds before replying.
“Yes,” the bot vocalized.
Their arms pressed together as they entered the pub, and Paladin took a microsample of the man’s blood. Eliasz’ oxytocin levels had risen slightly—this time, without pharmaceutical intervention.