She was overwhelmed with possible responses to his statement, but at least now the change to her credentials made sense.
Eliasz gripped her hand harder. She could taste his desire and anxiety. “Will you come with me?”
Before she’d gotten her autonomy key, Paladin couldn’t prioritize her own needs over Eliasz’ requests; she could queue them up a fraction of a second behind, but they were always behind. Now, she could put her own concerns first. And there was something more important than love that she needed to investigate. It would take less than a second to verify.
Using software she had installed in her own mind, the bot generated a new key to encrypt her memories. For the first time in her life, the process worked. Her memories were locked down, and the key that the Federation held in escrow would be useless. It would take centuries for even the most state-of-the-art machine to decrypt what she had seen and known for the months she’d been alive. At last, she knew what it felt like to own the totality of her experiences.
A profound silence settled around the edges of her mind, more powerful than a defensive perimeter in battle. Nobody could find out what she was thinking, unless she allowed it. The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.
Paladin was alone with her thoughts for several seconds. Then she vocalized. “I will go with you to Mars.”
Eliasz reached out to touch the new surface of her carapace, healed of all its viral tumors and wounds. “I know it’s not the same for you. A part of you is gone. But you are still the most amazing woman I have ever known.” He stroked Paladin’s abdomen over her brain cavity, now filled with shock-absorbing foam.
Paladin placed her hand over his. The electrical signals traversing Eliasz’ skin felt far more irregular than the last time they had embraced. She took samples along a ten-centimeter swath of his bare arm, and realized his perimeter system was gone. So they had both lost parts of themselves.
But Eliasz would never fully understand what Paladin was missing. He thought she’d lost her true self, which was utterly confused in his mind with her gender. Paladin’s research on the public net had led to massive text repositories about the history of transgender humans who had switched pronouns just the way she had. She was pretty sure that Eliasz anthropomorphized her as one of these humans, imagining she had been assigned the wrong pronoun at birth. Maybe he would never understand that his human categories—faggot, female, transgender—didn’t apply to bots. Or maybe he did understand. After all, he still loved her, even though her brain was gone.
Because she could, Paladin kept her ideas about this to herself. They were the first private thoughts she’d ever had.
JANUARY 16, 2145
The space elevator platform was a uniform gray, supported by dramatic cement alloy pillars sunk deep into the floor of the equatorial Pacific. It served as the sole anchor for a massive black tether, assembled and maintained by billions of heavily engineered microorganisms, which rose up from the platform’s center, threaded itself through the atmosphere, and continued on for thousands of kilometers into space. At its other end was a captured asteroid, acting as a counterweight and small whistle-stop town for people on their way to all the cities beyond Earth.
But Paladin could see little of that from the platform. Above them, the sky was a humid, depthless blue filled with organic compounds that Paladin could identify faster than the expression on Eliasz’ face. She had just started to receive stray data packets from the elevator’s two robot arms, their fists clenching and unclenching around the tether. Soon the transport gondola would be in visual range.
A crowd of passengers slowly gathered to watch the descent. All humans, but Paladin had gotten used to that by now. For five months, she’d lived with Eliasz in a human neighborhood in Budapest. There were enough autonomous bots in the city that nobody asked questions about their relationship, but occasionally she could perceive from their postures that it upset them. It wouldn’t matter as much on Mars, where the labor shortage meant that all were welcome, especially a bot who could work outside the atmosphere domes.
She could see the arms on the tether now, attached to a five-story gondola whose diamond windows broke the light into its constituent wavelengths. Eliasz was watching, too.
Paladin stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, exposing the translucent polymers of her knitted muscles in the joints between the plating. Eliasz tilted his head back against her chest, his hair a soft tangle under her chin. The man’s heart sped up as it always did when she pressed her body close to his; and the bot wrapped her wing shields completely around both of them, creating a private shelter with her armored embrace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A lot of people gave me good advice about the science, technology, geography, and economics of the world in this novel. For that, many thanks to Kent Berridge, Bethany Brookshire, David Calkins, Simone Davalos, Sean Gallagher, Joe Gratz, Norma Green, Margaret Horton, Terry Johnson, Terry Robinson, Daniel Rokhsar, Noah Smith, and Maia Szalavitz.
For early reads, editorial feedback, and writerly camaraderie, thanks to Anthony Ha, Liz Henry, Hank Hu, Keffy Kehrli, Claire Light, Na’amen Tilahun, and Jason Thompson.
For musical inspiration, thanks to The Arrogant Worms, Marshall Burns, Piper Burns, and Vernon Reid. For geographical inspiration, thanks to the Burns and Fletcher clans for making me feel at home.
For editorial brilliance and delightful ice cream, thanks to Liz Gorinsky. For always making my book dreams come true, thanks to the magical Laurie Fox.
For love, conversations, and goofiness, thanks to Charlie Jane Anders, Jesse Burns, and Chris Palmer, the best humans that a human could have.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annalee Newitz writes about science, culture, and the future. She is the tech-culture editor at Ars Technica, and the founding editor of io9. Previously, she was the editor in chief of popular tech site Gizmodo. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize.
She’s also been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, Smithsonian magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She’s coeditor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek, and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Formerly, she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley. You can sign up for email updates here.