Leaning back against the wall she’d just tunneled through, legs splayed in front of her, Jack sighed. Safety. For a little while.
Although she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days, she wasn’t ready to be unconscious. Jack scrolled idly through the feeds on her mobile, projecting a few into the air, wondering whether Retcon could outrace the damage Zacuity was doing.
All the news feeds were reporting on another workplace meltdown incident. The major feeds covered it with the usual splash of decontextualized horror, but reporters at the investigative text repo Internecine said it sounded more like the Zacuity rampage at the Calgary train control center.
A botadmin at the Toronto branch of Timmo’s had one job: to keep the machines making donut holes, squirting blob after blob of fatty dough out of their cannulated needle fingers and into the simmering oil. He began requesting overtime and skipping meal breaks. His coworkers said he developed a “creepy” relationship with one of the donut bots.
And then, just today, the admin decided everything was a potential donut hole. Pieces of garbage. A stray cat. The hands of his unfortunate customers. Eventually, his own legs. Anything that could be mashed up and forced through a tube, to be extruded in perfect, mouth-sized blobs. The Timmo’s was a bloodbath, with at least two dead.
Internecine showed some clips they’d somehow ripped from a police bodyfeed.
“We’re just making donuts!” the admin screamed, holding up a ball of gore. “Why don’t you let us make donuts! Timmo’s bots make… the… best… donuts!”
Jack stared at the pepperoni she had been about to eat, feeling ill.
FALL 2120
At first, Casablanca was everything that Lyle had promised. The African Federation was still young, and the government worried very little about enforcing intellectual property laws, as long as the economy was expanding.
Jack and Lyle rented a flat in the biotech ghetto, a neighborhood whose nickname was self-explanatory. It was near the high, ocean-facing wall around the old medina. Always a middle-class neighborhood, the area had been tended and upgraded over the centuries to retain its traditional Moorish architecture of colorful tiles and hidden courtyards, while also growing a new surface of photovoltaic paint over semipermeable walls that absorbed water and strobed with glowing algae at night. The winding streets looked ancient, but they had been paved with foam. Even the crumbling seams in the walls came from bioconcrete, a mash of water-activated bacteria and epoxies that healed itself as cracks formed.
They took lucrative jobs at a startup that built custom proteins for other businesses, and swore that they would save their best ideas for after-work projects. But so far, they’d been working such long hours that the ideas hadn’t come. That’s when Lyle decided it was time to take an evening off. She brought an expensive red-and-brown blanket home and swirled it around her body. “Let’s get under it together and swear to do something very, very important.”
Most of their clothes were already on the floor by the time Lyle pulled the blanket completely over their heads. They kissed fiercely, yanking each other’s underwear off. The space beneath the caftan grew hot and close with their breathing.
Jack looked into her lover’s eyes, which had gone nearly black in the caftan’s shadow. Lyle’s fingers moved inside her, and Jack kept staring into those eyes, her body swollen with pleasure, thinking that she had never loved anyone this much in her entire life. And then she could no longer focus on anything other than her own pleasure.
Lyle wasn’t much for postorgasm cuddling these days. She threw off the caftan and started talking.
“I’m serious, we can really shake things up here. We should start our own Free Lab, but make it really radical, much more radical than Krish’s.”
Jack didn’t say anything. She was still trying to savor their closeness, pulling Lyle’s thigh between her legs. Lyle rewarded her by throwing her other leg over Jack’s hip, squeezing their bodies together in a pleasurable tangle.
“Don’t you want to do that, Jack?”
Lyle was moving in a way that was increasingly distracting. “Yes,” Jack whispered.
The first planning meeting for the Casablanca Free Lab, held at a teahouse, was a lot less pleasant than the undercover meeting that had spawned it. Somehow Jack’s call for participation on a couple of local biotech hacker forums had gotten reposted to an artists’ mailing list, and a bunch of poets showed up to argue with them about the true meaning of anarchy. Instead of a practical conversation about renting a space where they could build a wet lab, they had a three-hour shouting match about liberty and recolonialism.
Casablanca had grown wealthy on biotech, but local artists and subversives considered scientific progress equivalent to gentrification. They had a very hard time grasping the idea that science could be radical, and a laboratory could be free.
It took Jack and Lyle a full year of argument, on the net and in person, before they reached the pragmatic stage of renting a space. By that time, they had a pretty good grasp of Darija, and a core group of five people who were willing to put in money and time to set up the lab.
The Twin Center had just been converted into cheap live-work spaces, and the Casablanca Free Lab moved into one of its subbasements. They did this partly because it was a large space with running water, but partly to appease the poets who lived in the upper floors. It was the right move. The poets still liked to remind the engineers gleefully that culture stomped on the head of science, but they had stopped calling them recolonizers—at least, to their faces.
Krish was ecstatic to hear that they had set up the first satellite Free Lab, and tried to help with grant applications.
“Fuck his grants,” grumbled Jack, reading his messages. “We don’t want to be beholden to some economic coalition.” The rest of the collective agreed with her. To distance themselves from Krish’s Free Lab, they would need a new name. They called themselves Signaling Pathway—Signal for short.
“We still need a way to make money,” Lyle pointed out, after they’d spent some time sketching a logo.
“We could charge for memberships,” suggested a volunteer.
“That doesn’t sound very free. What would the poets say?”
Everybody laughed. But it was true: They couldn’t ask for money and call themselves liberators. Subversives were already suspicious enough of science in this town, and you couldn’t very well charge admission to the revolution.
For the first few months at Signal, they deferred the money question. The collective had ponied up enough cash for at least six months’ rent. Plus, they were having fun. Jack was teaching a basic synbio class, showing other residents in the building how to reverse engineer simple organisms. One teenager figured out a way to grow mint in his family’s tiny garden by engineering the plant to use nitrogen more efficiently.
As Signal-related projects flourished, people came from all over the Maghreb to see their space. Local companies donated old fabbers, sequencers, and tissue trellises. Lyle ran weekly meetings where regulars and visitors could mingle to discuss the Free Lab’s mission. It was at one of these weekly meetings that they met Frankie.
Lyle had finally debugged her tattoo, and a sequence of flowers danced on her freshly shorn head, matching the illuminated flowers that crawled up and down her dress. Meetings always began with beer and a foul-tasting drink called Club-Mate, an old tradition that went back to hackerspaces of the twenty-first century. Clumped around the bench were kids and retirees, rich biotech professionals and info anarchists who lived in squats. Each person introduced themselves, using a real name or pseudonym as they wished.