As Jack’s fingers closed around the controller, the bot spoke. “If you continue to touch him, I will kill you.”
Jack put her hands in the air. Obviously the EMP hadn’t kept the bot down for very long.
“Keep your back to me and stand up.” The bot used an entirely inflectionless voice. Jack obeyed, trying to assess whether she could still run. Or, failing that, draw her knife and throw. She decided to stall.
“Who sent the IPC after me? Was it Zaxy?”
“Put your hands behind you.”
She complied, and felt the bot’s grip, warm and smooth, stronger than handcuffs. The man was starting to groan and stir on the floor at her feet.
“Why are you doing this?”
“You know very well why we are here. Your terrorist activities have killed over a hundred people.”
“If that’s so, why all the subterfuge? Why did the IPC only send the two of you?” Jack was playing for time, but she also wanted to know. “Is Zaxy trying to cover up the fact that Zacuity is driving people insane? I didn’t invent the drug that killed those people, you know—it was Zaxy’s. I just reverse engineered it.”
The bot said nothing until the man muttered. “Paladin.”
“I’m here, and I have the prisoner.”
“Just kill her, then.” The man opened dark brown eyes and looked directly at Jack.
Suddenly Jack heard a series of pops and Paladin’s body shuddered. The bot released Jack’s hands and the agent, struggling to stand up, went down again. Whirling in the direction of the noise, Jack saw her rescuers. Threezed and Med stood in piles of garbage, bright yellow air pressure guns in their hands, shooting what looked like jumbo-size hard candies at Paladin and Eliasz.
Blotches of virus paste spread over Paladin’s torso, sealing the bot’s guns inside her chest. The pink goo was a novel, experimental substance, and the bot had never been hardened against it. She tore at the spreading patches, but they swarmed onto her fingers, making mittens out of her digits.
Med stepped forward, strands of metal twitching in her stump while her undamaged arm fired off another round at the man, who had started to scream. Everywhere the virus marbles hit him, bizarre forests of fine hair seemed to spring out of his skin. His face was growing a riot of glassy curls, and his eyelashes tangled shut. Eliasz gasped through his mouth as his nasal passages filled with tiny stalks. Somehow, the viruses had wriggled under Eliasz’ skin and eaten through his bio-glass perimeter wires. All those millions of microscopic fibers, kept under constant tension, had sprung out of his skin and formed a disabling tangle of fiber-optic fur. He and his bot wouldn’t be chasing anyone for several minutes at least.
“It turns out Catalyst’s recipe for removing the plants growing on her head is good for something other than fashion,” Med vocalized, a new chord of sarcasm in her voice. “Maybe we should give her a postdoc.”
Jack stumbled forward, her muscles still wracked with pain. Threezed looped her arm around his shoulder, dragged her through the rubble, out the trap door, and into what passed for safety.
JULY 18, 2144, 0810
Eliasz’ head throbbed, and he could barely see through the wool of his shredded perimeter system. But he still had one weapon running, a dumb gun he kept strapped to his ankle. Behind him, Paladin emitted a noise that sounded like tearing metal.
Jack was limping toward the trap door, supported by a boy whose face unmistakably matched the one from the database at Quality Imports. Except he didn’t look like SlaveBoy anymore. He was strong and well fed, with a new chip that broadcast his enfranchisement as a citizen of Saskatoon. Jack had been taking care of him. In the seconds it took for Eliasz to reach for the gun, his memory strobed with hundreds of faces—all the children he hadn’t saved in Vegas, his sisters, the boys he’d beaten up in the church robot factory. Even the worst of them didn’t deserve the hand they’d been dealt. They were just unlucky to be born without franchises. For a hallucinatory moment, as Eliasz felt his skin crisping with wire, he wondered whether it was some kind of perverse miracle that Jack had found Threezed.
Eliasz’ finger rested on the trigger, and his hand aimed. But then he heard a howl of metal eating metal behind him and realized Paladin might be fatally wounded. He could check on the bot, or he could kill the pirate. He had a choice.
Or maybe he didn’t.
With an agonizing crackle of his neck, Eliasz turned to find the bot freeing virus-coated fingers from her torso. She was recovering, not dying. By the time Eliasz aimed his gun again, eyelids nearly sewn shut with wire, the pirate and her friends were gone. Everything he’d recorded with his perimeter systems had been destroyed by a graduate student’s depilation experiment.
22
BIG PHARMA
JULY 21, 2144
Med stood in a mote-speckled beam of sunlight that fell from one of the Free Lab’s high windows. She was absorbing energy through the photovoltaic patches knitted invisibly into the tissue of her skin. Absently, she held her hands out in front of her, as if examining her nails. For the hundred and forty-seventh time, she assessed the slight differences in skin texture between her original arm and the new one she’d installed yesterday.
The paramedics were long gone, and Krish’s mother had returned to Vancouver with his remains. You couldn’t always predict strokes with annual medical exams, the docs said, and Krish was never an avid self-quantifier. The lab’s camera network was so glitchy that nobody questioned why it just so happened that he died during a period of down time. Meanwhile, according to the feeds, the notorious pirate Judith “Jack” Chen—jailed once for terrorism in the ’teens, and wanted by the IPC—had been killed in a firefight in her Moose Jaw hideout.
In reality, Jack was hiding behind a haze of bogus mote data in Med’s apartment, recovering from her injuries and grafting purple and black extensions to the stubble on her head. In the cat lovers’ forum, she found a gif of a bot petting a kitten with an encrypted message from Frankie knitted steganographically into it: “Not dead yet.” Jack’s relief was like a hit of Ellondra. She left a picture of a cat sprawled on her back, pink sliver of tongue sticking out, with a reply for Frankie secreted into the code: “Still breathing.”
In one frantic day of work, Jack finished the press release that Krish had started. “Strong evidence shows Zaxy engineered its drug Zacuity to be addictive,” it began. That alone scored Med an exclusive interview with ZoneFeed, to be followed by an in-depth report on New Scientist.
When Med’s research paper went live on the Free Lab text repo, ZoneFeed would publish their interview. Med didn’t need to sit down at her desk and hit the publish button the way a human would. She sent a command to the server using the lab’s wireless protocol. Standing in the middle of the Free Lab, she accessed the feeds with her mind, watching the ZoneFeed story replicate itself and spawn increasingly frantic private messages from other news outlets. The Retcon Project’s code repository was exploding with traffic. Hospitals all over the world were printing out the drug, and the more liberal corps started issuing their own press releases, distancing themselves from Zaxy and saying they would no longer supply their employees with Zacuity.
Med returned to her office to respond to reporters, watching as snatches of their conversations appeared minutes later as video grabs in the feeds.
The Free Lab’s entire staff had basically taken the day off to watch the Retcon Project become famous. Somebody tapped a keg around noon, and by 3:00 p.m., things had gotten rowdy. Catalyst projected four different news feeds into the air over the lab benches. The Free Trade Zone Economic Coalition had finally made a statement: A rep claimed they were launching an independent inquiry into Zaxy’s productivity drug, based on research from the University of Saskatchewan. The entire Free Lab burst into cheers.