If you scream I will dislocate both of your shoulders.
Bobby looked at her blankly, his hands a useless, deformed jumble in his lap. “I haven’t seen Jack in over a year,” he said through teeth gritted in pain. “We’ve never worked together. She’s just a friend from grad school.”
Where is her laboratory? I know she has one here in Vancouver.
“I won’t tell you IPC bastards anything.”
Paladin ripped one cotton sleeve off Bobby’s shirt and balled it into his mouth. Gripping Bobby’s partially visible collarbone in one hand, she felt the shape of his skeleton’s edge under her fingers. With her other hand, she grabbed his upper arm, tugging just hard enough to jerk it from the socket. His scream was muffled, but his pain response wasn’t. Tears ringed the professor’s eyes as the bot released his limp arm.
Where is Jack’s laboratory?
Bobby was sending very slowly, weeping and choking on mucus. But Paladin would not take the fabric from his mouth. Somehow, he managed to transmit map coordinates.
For the first time during her mission, Paladin perceived that Eliasz wasn’t patched into her system. She would have to decide on her own how to clean up here and get to Jack’s lab in time for extraction.
She couldn’t afford to have Bobby alerting people to her existence, which he most certainly would when he was discovered. Her best hope was to make Bobby appear to be the victim of some kind of crime, rather than an interrogation. In one visible and invisible motion, she beamed garbage data to his implant, laced his personal drive with messages that suggested gambling debts, and slit his throat like a human would. Paladin’s carapace repelled the liquids from Bobby’s body, giving the brief impression that her arms and chest were weeping blood. She didn’t remain long enough to recognize Bobby’s new facial expression. It was time to go.
As she passed through Bobby’s frosted glass office door and into the central lab, Paladin had the peculiar sensation that the unpowered bodies of Actin and Bug were asking her something she needed to answer. They wanted something from her—or maybe she wanted something from herself. Paladin paused uncertainly in front of the fabber that contained Actin’s frozen mind. As if under the control of an unknown algorithm, she found herself holding the fabber gently under one arm, then stooping down to pick up Bug’s slender, unlit body.
Cradling the two disabled bots, she exited the lab, the building, and finally passed beyond the geometrically shaped swatches of grass that characterized the campus grounds. Nobody asked her any questions. With her two senseless companions, she was clearly on bot business, and this was a human neighborhood.
Jack’s lab was only two train stops from UBC, in a colorful cube of prefab wet labs for small entrepreneurs and consultants. A tightly coiled spiral staircase wound up one side of the cube. Paladin reached the lab by traversing a short catwalk whose ribbed floor shook slightly with her footsteps.
It took little effort to force the door, which surprised Paladin, until she realized that Jack had left nothing behind except generic equipment. Booting up the network, she searched for any telltale data that could help her. Unfortunately, Jack had been careful. The file system on her server was nicely encrypted and there would be no way to decode it, at least not in the next million years. And the buffers on her fabber and sequencer had been purged and overwritten with garbage characters so many times that forensics would be useless.
This, however, was just the first sweep. Even the most paranoid terrorists could leave clues behind. While she continued to prod the network, Paladin felt Eliasz’ absence in her mind.
Now, with seconds to burn, she decided to do what she had been avoiding for hours. She touched her memories of Eliasz, opening them in a flurry of commands, analyzing what had gone into making her feel… whatever it was. Yes, there was gdoggie, guiding her reactions to Eliasz. And much worse. There was a buggy app called masterluv, probably named by some twenty-first-century botadmin who thought the name was hilarious. Then she found a huge, memory-hogging chunk of code called objeta that seemed to be triggering her desire. Her love. As that word came to her, Paladin felt a sudden and overwhelming wave of disappointment.
Of course she had been programmed to take Eliasz’ orders, to trust and even love him. That much she had expected. But she hadn’t been prepared for how it would feel to think about Eliasz without idealizing him. As Fang had told her long ago, Eliasz was truly an anthropomorphizer; he saw Paladin’s human brain as her most vital part, especially because he believed it made her female. Even though she’d known that about him, she hadn’t been able to feel it. Until now.
Paladin indexed memory after memory, unraveling verifiable data from objeta and masterluv and gdoggie. Eventually she began to detect a pattern that had nothing to do with the apps that came preinstalled from the Kagu Robotics Foundry in Cape Town. At first, it was simple repetition: she remembered all the times that Eliasz had called her “buddy,” long before that day on the shooting range. And there was the way he looked at her when they talked. But it was more than that.
She didn’t have many choices as a bot indentured to the African Federation, and, by extension, to Eliasz himself. But he had tried to let her choose, as best he could, hobbled as he was by neurochemical and cultural priming whose effects she couldn’t even begin to fathom. She’d repeatedly examined her memories of that day in Casablanca when he’d asked Paladin whether he should call her “she.” It’s true that he was asking the wrong question, but if she listened to the words behind the words… he was asking her consent.
As she added metadata to the memory, Paladin realized something else. Precisely because he’d asked her consent so indirectly, his query hadn’t activated any of her emotional control programs. She’d been able to make a decision that went beyond factory settings, probably because no botadmin ever imagined a human would ask a bot about preferred gender pronouns. Nothing in her programming prevented her from saying no to Eliasz, so she had chosen to say yes.
Bug would no doubt say that there are no choices in slavery, nor true love in a mind running apps like gdoggie and masterluv. But they were all that Paladin had.
It was easy to reboot Actin after she’d powered him up, complete with a driver for his antenna. He was quiet for a while as Paladin set to work on Bug, hoping that she hadn’t damaged the insectoid’s memory.
Finally, Actin spoke, using speakers attached to the lab’s sensor network. “Who are you?”
Paladin beamed back a ball of information encased in a copy-protection shell that would prevent him from ever sharing it. She didn’t tell him the whole truth, just an extremely pared-down version of it. But he would understand she was on a mission to find a pirate who had been associated with Bobby.
Actin didn’t respond for almost a minute. Then she perceived that he was fabbing a wing patch for Bug, who had been slightly damaged when Paladin shut him down in midair.
“I took the liberty,” he vocalized though the speakers again. Actin seemed to prefer sound waves to microwaves. “It will be less traumatic for him to boot up with undamaged wings. Bug is well known for his opinions about how morphology shapes selfhood. They are not scientifically informed opinions, however. He is merely a historian.”
“I am worried his memory may be damaged,” she vocalized in return. “I killed several processes very abruptly.”
“You also killed my adviser. That will make it more difficult for me to finish my thesis, although possibly more pleasant.”