Suppressing something more bitter than a sob, Jack recalled the first essay Krish wrote for The Bilious Pills. He’d published it in the middle of the quarter, during one of their long, agonizing separations. Krish wrote:
Over a century ago, scientists first began to argue that the patent system and scientific data should be opened up. Back then, it was popular for conservatives to claim that putting geneng into the hands of the public would result in mega-viruses or total species collapse. Open data would be the gateway to a runaway synthetic biology apocalypse. But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.
Reading that decades ago, her chest had fizzed with deferred sexual desire and hope. She and Krish were collaborating on a project that was more exciting than anything she’d ever tackled in school. With their text repo, they would reach millions of people and bring Good Science to everyone. She’d known with absolute certainty that they were about to change the world.
But now Krish’s essay had been deleted from the public net, and the Freeculture movement they loved was being murdered in IPC interrogations, in burning Casablanca apartments, in drugs pirated for profit rather than freedom, and probably soon in this smuggler’s tunnel with the ghosts of her lovers.
An explosion sent a fine haze of dust through the permeable foam of her hiding place. Jack flexed her legs. This was no time to go maudlin over the demise of youthful dreams. The IPC agents had arrived.
JULY 18, 2144, 0705
Threezed’s eyes widened perceptibly when he bounced into the truck and saw the bot’s shredded arm.
“Holy shit, Med, that is not what I’d call ‘slightly damaged.’ Where’s Krish?”
“Krish is dead. My arm can be repaired.”
They drove in silence for almost an hour. Threezed twitched and checked his mobile, while Med tried to figure out how she would publicize the paper about reverse engineering Zacuity now that everything had gone wrong. She pushed the truck to the limits of its speed. At least if they got to Moose Jaw quickly, she might be able to prevent the agents from killing another one of her friends.
“What are we going to do?” Threezed’s voice was reedy with tension.
Med had no answer to his question, so she changed the subject. “Do you know how the agents figured out where Jack was? They read your journal on Memeland.”
“What?” Threezed let go of his mobile and it slid to rest between his legs, parted slightly on the seat. “How did they do that? My journal is anonymous! Plus, I never use anybody’s real names.”
Med glared at him, funneling her hopelessness into anger. “What the hell did you think would happen when you wrote about fucking somebody named ‘J’ who is from the prairies? When you wrote that you were going to follow her to the Free Lab? The IPC is full of intelligence agents. They specialize in tracking down slaves who have broken contract, and you didn’t exactly make it difficult for them.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before? You were reading my journal and you didn’t say anything!” In the darkness of the cab, the heat from Threezed’s tears looked like glowing tracks of blood on his face.
The bot’s anguish reached a crescendo that she didn’t have the option to express in tears. She slammed her remaining arm as hard as she could into the door and screamed, “I didn’t think of it, OK? I didn’t think of it!” She’d bruised her arm and opened a wound in the door. The truck emitted a soft warning noise.
“Alright—I get it! We’re totally fucked and it’s my fault!” Threezed scrambled across the bench seat to grab Med’s shoulders and shake her. “Now that we know we’re fucked, what are we going to do to help Jack?”
“I’ve brought some items from the lab that I think we can weaponize.”
“What have we got?” Threezed left his right hand on her shoulder and she realized that he’d grown incredibly calm. It wasn’t the blankness of hysteria in remission, either. It was the calm of someone who had been through much worse things, and knew how to survive.
She’d brought viral sealant pastes, packed into fat marbles you could shoot from air pressure guns. They were designed for cheap, rapid repair of industrial machines and vehicles. Shoot your boat’s hull with a paste pellet and the viruses would start duplicating, their shells turning into a metal patch for any damage. Med theorized that the paste would also seal up openings on the bot’s carapace, in essence gluing Paladin’s sensors and weapons apertures shut.
“Sounds good. Now what do we have that will kill that bastard who murdered Krish?”
“There’s nothing even remotely deadly to humans at Free Lab. But I do have something that will make it a lot harder for him to fight.”
JULY 18, 2144, 0805
Jack waited, breathing shallowly. Her body heat was masked by the electronics and atmosphere ducts running through the ceiling. As she’d hoped, the agent and the bot headed for the lab bench beneath her hiding place as soon as they realized she wasn’t in the tunnel. The man was covering the bot with his weapons stance, which was unusual. But then Jack saw the hastily patched wound in the bot’s abdomen, and the odd way she kept training her sensor arrays away from the man’s face. Something had gone wrong, though the bot was still deadly enough. And crafty. The bot was scanning Jack’s network for vulns in her power system, without much luck.
“What do you make of this?” The man gestured at Jack’s fabber and small collection of low-power sequencers.
The bot vocalized, “I think she was just here. We should sweep for hiding places and other exits.”
Jack had to move now. She slid open the doors and threw her knife expertly, burying it deep in the bot’s chest, where it delivered an EMP. Then she swung down, feet first, into the IPC agent’s face. She felt her feet connect with his skull, just as his perimeter delivered a powerful electric shock. Spasming, she fell to the floor next to him.
Adrenaline doused Jack’s vision and made her see the room in jagged, fast-forward detail. The barrier between her tunnel and the trash heap that obscured it lay in a pile of boulders and dust. A swath of the ceiling LEDs had gone out, and her attack had knocked a sequencer to the floor. Her feet felt warm, and she observed that the agent’s perimeter had partly melted the soles of her shoes. The man was knocked out, his forehead already starting to swell from Jack’s kick. His bot stood motionless from the EMP. She needed to disable the agent’s perimeter before he came to, so there would be no record of this encounter. Struggling though the pain of locked, burning muscles, she got up.
Jack yanked her knife out of the bot, jammed it into her belt, and assessed the situation. Beneath the agent’s skin, his perimeter mesh was routing data and electricity into possibly hundreds of devices all over his body. But usually there was some kind of controller near the waist. To make her getaway complete, she just needed a few seconds to dig around in this bastard’s pants.
Pulling up the agent’s jacket, Jack exposed the pale skin of his stomach. She pressed her hand to his skin, producing a tiny grid pattern as the threads of his weapons system dug into flesh. With her other hand she tore open the binding on his pants, exposing the fur on his lower belly. Where was the controller? She pushed the man onto his side, at last exposing a donut-shaped device about the size of a bottlecap low on his hip.