It was during one of these long nights that he discovered what happens when you force adolescent boys to spend all day with robots whose chests are laser etched with the sign of the cross. There weren’t a lot of functional video sensors left in the factory, but one of them picked up some motion in infrared and sent an alert to Eliasz.
Hidden behind a rubbish pile of arms and legs, he found two of the interns with an unprogrammed biobot. She’d obviously been cobbled together out of castoff parts, with her skin applied patchily and her mind left unformatted. As soon as the boys saw Eliasz, they tossed her back on the pile of limbs and hurled themselves out a window to race back to the dormitories. Knowing what the priests would do to the boys if he reported them, Eliasz decided to keep their indiscretions to himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do with the bot.
She looked uncannily like an unconscious teenage girl—until he peered more closely. The boys had been more careful with her lingerie than her chassis. One of her arms was longer than the other, and the tissue on her inner thighs needed nutrients. She had no mind installed, but her hair was slicked into curls and her face covered in makeup. They had modeled her on a common sex worker bot, popular on the pay feeds. Eliasz picked her up gently, unsure what to do. Her carbon fiber body was light in his arms. The more he saw of what the boys had done to her, the more mesmerized and revolted he was.
He decided disassembly was the best option, and spent a painstaking hour reducing the bot to a pile of limbs, torso slices, a head emptied of its sensors, and a lumpy roll of tissue that was too damaged to recycle. Her endoskeleton would be useful, though. He carried her in pieces to the parts bin.
“Thank you.”
The voice came from behind him, in the same rubbish pile where he’d found the boys with their bot.
When he turned, Eliasz saw an unfinished bot standing with arms akimbo. The bot’s exposed metal-and-fabric muscles must have camouflaged him in the garbage. His battered chest carapace—his only external casing—bore a detailed laser etching of a fantastically muscled Christ on the cross.
For the second time that night, Eliasz wasn’t sure what to do.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
The bot stared at him. “I can’t leave. I keep watch here, but tonight I decided to do something.”
“Are you indentured to the church?”
“I am Scrappy. You are Eliasz. I belong to Piotr.”
Eliasz moved closer. Was this bot talking about Father Piotr? Eliasz’ mind was muddy with exhaustion and he was still unsettled by what he’d done to the sexbot. Images of her inert body parts kept erupting into his mind. Standing beside Scrappy, Eliasz found himself wondering what it would be like to do what the boys had done with a bot.
Scrappy thrummed with life, and had no repulsive layer of makeup over wads of damaged tissue. As he spoke, he gestured by moving his arms in a perfect, graceful ellipse. There was something undeniably beautiful about him. Eliasz tried not to look at the matte black of his bones, threaded with soft fabric stronger than anything on Earth.
The bot pointed at a heap of hands. “I keep watch over this. But I do not have orders to watch everything that happens. That’s why I sent the alert.”
Eliasz tried to think of something else to say, to chase away the ideas coalescing in his mind. “Why can’t you leave?”
“My legs.” Scrappy pointed down, to show Eliasz that he’d been bonded to the floor. Eliasz wasn’t sure about all the laws of indenture, but he knew one thing: The indentured could not be permanently bound. He knelt to examine the seam between the bot’s legs and the floor, wondering where the molecule regulators were kept. It would only take a few minutes to free Scrappy, though he’d have to build some feet for him.
Looking up, Eliasz could see the braided fibers in Scrappy’s neck and caught a glimpse of actuators where the bot’s carapace settled against his hips.
Scrappy spoke. “Humans are coming.”
There was scrabbling outside the window, and Eliasz saw three of the older boys, almost at the age of contract. They were only a few months younger than Eliasz. He froze, his face only centimeters from the slick ball joint between Scrappy’s thighbone and pelvis.
“Look—it’s the guard!” One of the boys let out a bark of laughter.
“He’s sucking off Scrappy!”
“Faggot!” More laughter.
“Suck it, faggot!”
Eliasz rose up, putting his body between the bot and the boys. His face was hot with blood and rage. His only weapon was a baton, but Eliasz had always been good with weapons, and he moved fast. At least one of the boys wouldn’t be able to say the word “faggot” again for a long time. For people without franchises, there was a three-month wait period to access Warsaw’s bone printer, unless it was a life-threatening scenario. Which it wasn’t. The boy could live with a shattered lower jaw, as long as the church had wire and straws.
Eliasz had a lot of practice erasing this cognitive marginalia from his mind, but it reemerged when he had nothing to occupy his attention.
So he focused on a good memory, consciously strengthening its vividness as if he were running it through an image processor. It was Paladin’s beautiful, angular, armored body—the way it looked when she was shivering in his arms that afternoon in Casablanca. Just as Paladin crashed, her shields glitched and she flickered into invisibility and back out again. Other bodies, other missions, other countries tried to crowd out the picture of her face in his mind, but he overwrote them with the feeling of her carapace against his naked skin.
Eliasz was suffused with a feeling more powerful than any humiliation his long-ago experiences could possibly supply. He had no trouble identifying it as love.
19
A DISTURBING WORKPLACE ACCIDENT
JULY 17, 2144
Med pushed an update of the Retcon Project to the Free Lab servers and went for a walk across University Bridge. Early morning light turned the river from black to blue, and she spotted the V-shaped wake of a beaver carrying a last mouthful of reeds to its lodge before retiring for the day. Word about the therapy was already boiling up on forums for doctors, especially in the north where most patients had limited franchises. Open drugs were often the only option they had.
Med checked the project forums once per second, but it would be days before she had enough data to analyze. To distract herself, she tuned some feeds while the forum checks ran in the background of her mind. Hundreds of millions of people were watching a new comedy series about bumbling robots. Record harvests on Mars meant immigration there was getting cheaper. A disturbing workplace accident had left New York City flooded, and police blamed drugs.
Even before she watched, Med knew it was a Zacuity breakdown, probably the worst so far. This time it was a young engineer, just out of university, whose job it was to troubleshoot the software controls on an elaborate set of viaducts, pumps, and valves that kept the rising waters of the Atlantic from seeping into downtown Manhattan. After days without sleep, she’d decided to rethink the fundamental principles underlying the artificial marshland that acted as a massive sponge between the city and its waterways. She began to experiment, taking notes the entire time.
Unfortunately, as the engineer explained in a meticulously footnoted, fifteen-thousand-word document posted on Memeland, she also needed a control for her experiment. Which meant she’d have to look at New York City in its most natural state, saturated with water. Before anyone could stop her, the engineer flooded the subways and streets in downtown Manhattan, drowning dozens of people in underground housing, and forcing a huge evacuation. Many people were still missing. The engineer had been arrested, but it was impossible to undo her work without days of cleanup. Free Trade Zone leaders had declared a state of emergency.