Annalee Newitz - Autonomous

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For all the robots who question their programming.

THE LAST SASKATCHEWAN PIRATE

From a late twentieth-century ballad by The Arrogant Worms

I used to be a farmer and I made a living fine

I had a little stretch of land along the C.P. line

But times were hard, and though I tried, the money wasnt there

And bankers came and took my land, and told me fair is fair.

I looked for every kind of job, the answer always no

Hire you now? theyd always laugh. We just let twenty go!

The government they promised me a measly little sum

But Ive got too much pride to end up just another bum.

Then I thought, who gives a damn if all the jobs are gone,

Im gonna be a pirate on the river Saskatchewan.

Cause its a heave-ho, high-ho, coming down the Plains

Stealing wheat and barley and all the other grains

And its a ho-hey, high-hey, farmers bar your doors

When you see the Jolly Roger on Reginas mighty shores.

Youd think the local farmers would know that Im at large

But just the other day I saw an unsuspecting barge

I snuck up right behind them and they were none the wiser

I rammed their ship and sank it, and I stole their fertilizer.

A bridge outside of Moose Jaw spans a mighty river

Farmers cross in so much fear their stomachs are a-quiver

Cause they know that Tractor Jack is hiding in the bay,

Ill jump the bridge and knock them cold and sail off with their hay.

JULY 1, 2144

The student wouldnt stop doing her homework, and it was going to kill her. Even after the doctors shot her up with tranquilizers, she bunched into a sitting position, fingers curled around an absent keyboard, typing and typing. Anti-obsessives had no effect. Tinkering with her serotonin levels did nothing, and the problem didnt seem to be dissociation or hallucination. The student was perfectly coherent. She just wouldnt stop reimplementing operating system features for her programming class. The only thing keeping her alive was a feeding tube the docs had managed to force up her nose while she was in restraints.

Her parents were outraged. They were from a good neighborhood in Calgary, and had always given their daughter access to the very best pharma money could buy. How could anything be going wrong with her mind?

The doctors told reporters that this case had all the hallmarks of drug abuse. The homework fiends brain showed a perfect addiction pattern. The pleasure-reward loop, shuttling neurotransmitters between the midbrain and cerebral cortex, was on fire. This chemical configuration was remarkable because her brain looked like shed been addicted to homework for years. It was completely wired for this specific reward, with dopamine receptors showing patterns that normally emerged only after years of addiction. But the students family and friends insisted shed never had this problem until a few weeks ago.

It was the perfect subject for a viral nugget in the medical mystery slot of the All Wonders feed. But now the story was so popular that it was popping up on the top news modules, too.

* * *

Jack Chen unstuck the goggles from her face and squeezed the deactivated lenses into the front pocket of her coveralls. Shed been working in the suns glare for so long that pale rings circled her dark brown eyes. It was a farmers tan, like the one on her fathers face after a long day wearing goggles in the canola fields, watching tiny yellow flowers emit streams of environmental data. Probably, Jack reflected, the same farmers tan had afflicted every Chen for generations. It went back to the days when her great-great-grandparents came across the Pacific from Shenzhen and bought an agricultural franchise in the prairies outside Saskatoon. No matter how far she was from home, some things did not change.

But some things did. Jack sat cross-legged in the middle of the Arctic Sea, balanced on the gently curving, uncanny invisibility of her submarines hull. From a few hundred kilometers above the surface, where satellites roamed, the subs negative refractive index would bend light until Jack seemed to float incongruously atop the waves. Spread next to her in the bright water was an undulating sheet of nonreflective solar panels. Jack made a crumpling gesture with her hand and the solar array swarmed back into its dock, disappearing beneath a panel in the hull.

The subs batteries were charged, her network traffic was hidden in a blur of legitimate data, and she had a hold full of drugs. It was time to dive.

Opening the hatch, Jack banged down the ladder to the control room. A dull green glow emerged in streaks on the walls as bacterial colonies awoke to illuminate her way. Jack came to a stop beneath a coil of ceiling ducts. A command line window materialized helpfully at eye level, its photons organized into the shape of a screen by thousands of projectors circulating in the air. With a swipe, she pulled up the navigation system and altered her heading to avoid the heavily trafficked shipping lanes. Her destination was on a relatively quiet stretch of the Arctic coast, beyond the Beaufort Sea, where freshwater met sea to create a vast puzzle of rivers and islands.

But Jack was having a hard time concentrating on the mundane tasks at hand. Something about that homework-addiction story was bugging her. Mashing the goggles over her eyes again, she reimmersed in the feed menu. Glancing through a set of commands, she searched for more information. HOMEWORK FIEND CASE REEKS OF BLACK-MARKET PHARMA , read one headline. Jack sucked in her breath. Could this clickbait story be about that batch of Zacuity shed unloaded last month in Calgary?

* * *

The subs cargo hold was currently stacked with twenty crates of freshly pirated drugs. Tucked among the many therapies for genetic mutations and bacterial management were boxes of cloned Zacuity, the new blockbuster productivity pill that everybody wanted. It wasnt technically on the market yet, so that drove up demand. Plus, it was made by Zaxy, the company behind Smartifex, Brillicent, and other popular work enhancement drugs. Jack had gotten a beta sample from an engineer at Vancouvers biggest development company, Quick Build Wares. Like a lot of biotech corps, Quick Build handed out new attention enhancers for free along with their in-house employee meals. The prerelease ads said that Zacuity helped everyone get their jobs done faster and better.

Jack hadnt bothered to try any Zacuity herselfshe didnt need drugs to make her job exciting. The engineer whod provided the sample described its effects in almost religious terms. You slipped the drug under your tongue, and work started to feel good . It didnt just boost your concentration. It made you enjoy work. You couldnt wait to get back to the keyboard, the breadboard, the gesture table, the lab, the fabber. After taking Zacuity, work gave you a kind of visceral satisfaction that nothing else could. Which was perfect for a corp like Quick Build, where new products had tight ship dates, and consultants sometimes had to hack a piece of hardware top-to-bottom in a week. Under Zacuitys influence, you got the feelings you were supposed to have after a job well done. There were no regrets, nor fears that maybe you werent making the world a better place by fabricating another networked blob of atoms. Completion reward was so intense that it made you writhe right in your plush desk chair, clutching the foam desktop, breathing hard for a minute or so. But it wasnt like an orgasm, not really. Maybe it was best described as physical sensation, perfected. You could feel it in your body, but it was more blindingly good than anything your nerve endings might read as inputs from the object-world. After a Zacuity-fueled work run, all you wanted to do was finish another project for Quick Build. It was easy to see why the shit sold like crazy.