“It’s Friday, Med. Let’s go dancing or something.”
Med pinched off the projectors and seemed to emerge from a bubble of hovering text. This was the same thing Threezed said to her almost every night when he got off work. They both hated dancing.
“Let’s watch a movie,” she replied with a grin. “Something weird and old from your media history class.”
Threezed had taken on a new identity: John Chen, who had been homeschooled and self-employed on a farm outside Saskatoon until his public employment record started two months ago with a cashier job at a thrift shop on Broadway. He’d shut down his SlaveBoy journal and was auditing some media studies classes at U of S while he figured out his next move. Every day, it became more obvious what that move would be.
JANUARY 16, 2145
Algae poaching reminded Jack of being a little girl on the canola farm during harvest. Every week she brought her sub out of the depths, gliding just beneath the surface of the ocean to the offshore algae farms sloshing between buoys connected by long, plastic sheets at the edge of the AU’s south coast. The perimeter alarms here were not sophisticated. She never saw anyone—human or bot—patrolling these far edges of the farm.
Jack recalled the sun-fed green of Saskatchewan’s growing season as she plunged her hands into the spirulina that slid through her fingers and looked like fine, tangled hair on the drying mats. When she pulled the mats onto the bridge, positioning them under dehumidifiers, she wondered what it would be like to unspool her life back to her parents’ farm. What if she had studied agriculture instead of genetic engineering?
Her days might have ended just like this, quietly harvesting the plants that would fuel her body and machines. That other person, Judith the farmer, would have felt the sun overhead and seen the crop flowing around her feet just the way Jack did. It pleased her to imagine that the safer, alternate version of her life had, at least for this slice of time, subsumed the real one. If you ignored the poaching, of course. And the Freeculture contacts she was making on the AU message boards.
When spring came around, she decided, the safer version of her life would relinquish its hold on her again.
23
AUTONOMY KEY
JULY 21, 2144
Lee restored Paladin’s carapace and installed better drivers for the sensorium she carried in her fist, but he shrugged when she asked about a replacement brain. “Nobody expects those brains to last very long, Paladin. I know it sucks, but it’s just true.” When she didn’t respond, he looked at her through the translucent projection displaying a readout from her arm. “You’re just going to have to recognize people the way other bots do: analyze them by voice, microbiome—or smell.” He paused to tap her hand proudly. Then he returned to his work, adding absently, “Some bots can even identify people’s expressions by analyzing their posture and breathing.”
“So I can recognize human facial expressions by analyzing other things about them?”
“It’s sort of like creating a mnemonic.” Lee grinned. “You know, using one thing to remember another one. Like, I always remember your name because it’s my favorite character class in the game Sorcerer’s Alley.”
Paladin did not think Lee’s comparison was apt. But he would only be confused if she told him why.
After weeks with her simulated autonomy key, Paladin was used to the idea that memories could be modified with new metadata. But this was a more difficult task than she’d faced in Vancouver when she’d reanalyzed how she felt about Eliasz. Now, she was dealing with a database of facial expressions she could no longer read. There was no way to map them to moods except over time, by trial and error, as she figured out how human gestures and scents and voices correlated with emotional content. And no matter how good she got at it, there would always be one data channel missing when she looked at a person. People often communicated their feelings by deliberately making faces that didn’t match their body language and voices. Especially when they were making jokes. Paladin spent the following days painstakingly translating facial expressions in her memory into other biometrics as she encountered them among humans.
Every time she encrypted her memories, she was reminded of the limits to her autonomy. Anyone on base with the proper access level could use the Federation’s escrowed key to read the full contents of her mind.
During this time, Eliasz was in Johannesburg on a mission. When he returned, Paladin was immediately deployed on a surveillance job to ferret out a hidden server farm that was distributing pirated video in Tangiers. They managed to miss seeing each other at Camp Tunisia for two weeks.
Lee never mentioned Paladin’s simulated autonomy key, and she didn’t bring it up. She wanted to control her own programs for as long as she could. Even if she didn’t truly possess her own memories, she could at least be certain that the ache she felt in Eliasz’ absence was something she’d invented all by herself. It wasn’t an implanted loyalty; it was a code loop she’d written, executing the same pang of loss over and over again. More than anything, her useless and irrational feelings for Eliasz were testimony to her continued autonomy.
AUGUST 4, 2144
Paladin knew immediately when Eliasz had returned to Camp Tunisia. The base network recognized his face—though not what the expression on it meant—and she could follow his progress on the station map, across one airfield and into a maze of small rooms reserved entirely for humans. He entered a room marked “HUMAN RESOURCES,” and there his signal dropped.
Fifteen minutes later, Paladin’s upcoming assignments were wiped from her queue. Her access to Camp Tunisia’s map and local resources was decimated. The bot now had the same credentials as any visitor, which didn’t go much beyond public net access and nonclassified information about the base. Alarmed, the bot tried to contact Fang. I am Paladin. You are Fang. Let’s use the secure session we agreed on.
I cannot authenticate your identity. You may not be Paladin.
Before she could initiate a new secure session, Eliasz sent a message. It was a request to meet him in one of the faraday briefing rooms, many floors above the bot zone where Fang first told her about anthropomorphization. Bewildered and disturbed by the change in her credentials, she followed a cached version of the base map to the shielded room with walls speckled to look like granite. When Eliasz arrived, he sat next to Paladin on a wide, foam bench jutting from the fake rock. She waited for him to speak.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you privately for a long time,” he said simply. “I need to tell you what happened in Moose Jaw, because I know you don’t have the security clearance to see my reports.”
He faced her, and she recognized that the dark brown in his eyes was the same dark brown it had always been. She didn’t need a human brain to know that.
“When I regained consciousness, my commanding officer told me that the Federation IPC had found some remains in that tunnel. They assumed Jack died in the explosion after you got me out.”
He paused and Paladin noticed his posture growing more rigid. Turning to face her, Eliasz took one of her hands in his own. Sampling his blood, she perceived an oxytocin spike that filled her with pleasure. She couldn’t say what expression he wore, but she knew what he was feeling. “Zaxy wasn’t exactly thrilled with what happened, but they still got their pirate. And the IPC gave me a huge bonus.”
He did not say what they both knew: for some reason, Eliasz had chosen not to kill Jack, and the IPC had lost its quarry. Eliasz continued talking in a heated rush. “I want to get away from this business, Paladin. I thought maybe we could go away together for a while. Maybe to Mars. So I bought out your contract. I can’t stand the idea of the woman I love not being autonomous.”