Paladin was replaying their conversation as the train pulled into an open-air station in the Richmond shopping district. It was early morning, and a pale gray sky lit shuttered markets on the fringes of a small park. To the north, across a river, lay downtown Vancouver; in aerial maps, its westernmost tip made a humanoid profile whose face pressed against the Pacific. But instead of eyes, lips, and hair, that face held the green fields and glittering buildings of the University of British Columbia. That was her ultimate destination.
There she’d find Bobby Broner—formerly Actin from The Bilious Pills—who ran a clinic for experimental brain-computer interfaces. If anyone knew where Jack’s Vancouver lab was, Paladin guessed it would be Bobby.
Interrogating Bobby would have to wait, though. Right now Paladin needed to establish her identity as an autonomous bot looking for work. She decided to walk up No. 3 Road, which would take her from the human shopping district to the heart of the bot neighborhood. It sounded like the kind of name a bot would give a street, but map data on the public net revealed that No. 3 Road dated back to the twentieth century, when the area had been populated mostly by Chinese immigrants.
She kept looking for signs that she was walking in a free bot neighborhood, and finally realized they were all around her. The road markings had lettering that reflected in ultraviolet, bigger than the human-readable text. Everywhere she looked, she could see bots walking among the humans. Many were bipedal like herself, but others flew, or bobbed in gentle, gyroscopic motion above constantly shifting sets of wheels. A human hurrying toward her swerved out of Paladin’s way and sent a quick apology via microwave. Even the creatures who seemed human were biobots.
Paladin had never seen this many bots together outside Camp Tunisia. She realized with surprise that she had rarely encountered any autonomous bots in the cities she and Eliasz visited. Even the humans she’d met who seemed to love bots, like Mecha, knew them as slaves.
Her hand tasted salt, but her other sensors were trained on the bots of No. 3 Road. Although they had no need for sleep, these bots worked among humans and kept their hours. Many were clearly going to work, heading south for the train station as they checked their feeds and mail. Others were on bot time, walking in groups whose members were wrapped in the flashing haze of their information exchange.
Walking near the river, Paladin caught sight of Aberdeen Centre, the largest bot-controlled marketplace in the Zone. Fewer and fewer courtesies for humans appeared along the road. She passed stores marked only with radio identifiers that spawned colorful 3-D augmentations over quiet storefronts, invisible to humans. Strip mall warrens, gray and placid in the visual spectrum, seethed with iconography hawking everything from new sensors to secondhand furniture.
The sky was dense with layered geotags, information debris left by years of bot residents. Paladin could page through them all, or set up filters to perceive only a designated subset. She decided to perceive none of them, and once again saw pearlescent gray clouds thinning in places to reveal blue sky.
After observing the communication behaviors of bots around her, Paladin decided to emulate the crowd and raise a signal-filtering perimeter. Now she wouldn’t register on the many readers and sensors she passed unless she chose to. This had the effect of shutting down targeted ad displays, but also drained the landscape of the kaleidoscopic data augmentations that one of those anthropological studies of Richmond had described as “central to bot architecture.”
When she arrived at Aberdeen Centre, one block off No. 3 Road, Paladin relaxed the filters on her perceptions. She wanted to see it the way it was intended to be seen.
Dating back to the early twenty-first century, the mall had once been entirely packed with human stores specializing in Asian Union imports. In deference to its historical roots, bots had maintained one portion of the mall at human-scale, along with a small restaurant for tourists. Aberdeen Centre also retained its original facade, a vast curving wall of antique tinted glass, warping with age and refracting the light in a beautiful chaos.
Paladin stood on the sidewalk, focused on appreciating the structure that rose up before her, around her, and within her mind. Bots flowed in and out of a rectangular entrance, widened from its original size to accommodate two tanks abreast. As she tuned signals from the building’s surface, a vast diorama seemed to unfurl from the glass and extend high into the air.
Rippling like an enormous swatch of aluminum mesh, the diorama contained three panels depicting abstract, bulky figures labeled HISTORY, INDUSTRY, and AUTONOMY. The longer she watched, the more these figures took on a 3-D substantiality: History was the curving face of an old domestic bot, its saucer-shaped body fringed with the sweeper bristles that defined its sole purpose; Industry showed a group of bots working together in a laboratory; and Autonomy was simply a series of integers, constantly shifting and changing, to represent the key that gave bots root access on their own operating systems and control of their memories.
Every few seconds, the words “ABERDEEN CENTRE” would render, seeming to hover over the diorama and then melt away. In the distance she could see similar kinds of monumental artwork hovering over the translucent walls of the buildings flanking this one.
The mall was bigger than Camp Tunisia, and entirely devoted to the consumer desires of bots. At least part of that desire was for cultural enrichment. After wandering into a skylit atrium, Paladin found herself paying a fraction of a credit to walk through a museum exhibit devoted to the history of robot culture in Richmond.
Paladin paused before a display about the system of indenture. It was a set of video files and concatenated documents. A data-tagged timeline showed the emergence of robot kinetic intelligence in the 2050s, followed by early meetings of the International Property Coalition. Under IPC law, companies could offset the cost of building robots by retaining ownership for up to ten years. She scanned a legal summary that outlined how a series of court cases established human rights for artificial beings with human-level or greater intelligence.
Once bots gained human rights, a wave of legislation swept through many governments and economic coalitions that later became known as the Human Rights Indenture Laws. They established the rights of indentured robots, and, after a decade of court battles, established the rights of humans to become indentured, too. After all, if human-equivalent beings could be indentured, why not humans themselves? In the Zone, however, there were no laws that allowed humans to be born indentured like bots.
“For bots, industry always precedes autonomy,” explained a final string of text that seemed to burst out of the document Paladin was reading. “Aberdeen Centre is testimony to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of bots who are crucial actors in the global economy.”
As she headed to the exit, Paladin was waylaid by a maze of countertops displaying tiny replicas of early robots, like the round sweepers and artificial pet dogs. You could buy them in the form of charms or media files.
Hello. You are unidentified. I am Bug. Here comes my data. That’s why they hate us, you know. That is the end of my data.
Paladin was startled to receive the sudden, insecure transmission, especially when she realized it came from this room. She had perceived no one else in the exhibit. She replied cautiously, using her false identifier and checking her perimeter. Hello. Let’s establish a secure session using the FTZ protocol. I am Daisy. Here comes my data. Please show your location. That is the end of my data.