vN: The First Machine Dynasty

by Madeline Ashby

  Amy ran the rest of the way to the dumpster. She ran her fingers over the lock; it zapped her and she flew backward. She skidded roughly over the broken asphalt. Her teeth sang. Her limbs refused to move. This was twice in one night. Locked inside her own body, she worried about permanent memory damage. Javier continued banging inside his new cage. And now there was an alarm, and it was speaking in calm authoritative tones over funhouse music: "LIE DOWN ON THE GROUND AND PUT YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD. POLICE HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED. LIE DOWN–"

  "Amy!"

  She tried speaking. "I… I can't…"

  "AMY!"

  She forced herself to stand. Her legs were slow. She stumbled. "I'm coming…"

  "Get me out of here!" The dumpster shook with the force of his kicking and punching. She saw dents. "The whole lid's electrified!" she heard him say, his voice muffled with garbage. "You gotta get me out from outside!"

  "I…" She looked at her hands. "I'll try. Wait right here."

  "Hurry!"

  Amy staggered away from the dumpster. You could just leave him, you know, a voice inside said. He's not your business. He kidnapped you at gunpoint. Amy shook her head heavily. It would be wrong to leave him, if only because she had said that she wouldn't. She staggered forward toward the car, crossing the parking lot on traitorous feet. She opened the door with shaking hands. Thankfully, Javier had left the keys inside. Amy buckled herself in after two tries. She turned the ignition, and promptly rammed the sacks of old clothes. Wincing, she carefully switched to reverse, twisted in her seat to look behind her, and pulled away. Then she stopped with a jerk, and tried wrestling the car to her will. It was absurdly stubborn. She blinked and tried keeping her gaze straight. When it wan dered, so did the car. It felt heavy and stupid under her guidance, like a clumsy prosthetic. Javier had set the seat way back, and she had no idea how to fix it. She had to keep stretching her legs just to brake in shaky fits and starts. She made a wide turn and put the dumpster in her sights.

  "Hold on!" Crossing her fingers, Amy floored the gas and aimed straight for the dumpster. The impact threw her forward so hard her teeth clicked. A giant pillow exploded in her face, slapped there as though by an especially nasty girl at a sleepover. The alarm changed. She heard sirens, now. She wanted to sleep.

  Someone wrenched the passenger side door open. The car sagged under sudden and massive weight. Javier. "Good thinking," he said. "You shorted the system."

  "I crashed the car."

  "Yeah, well, get moving, unless you want to wind up back in jail."

  Amy looked up. She squinted out the shattered window. Police cars were filling the parking lot. "Oh, no…"

  "Oh, yeah," Javier said. "Floor it." He held his stomach and grimaced. "I mean it. Move! Now!"

  "Stop yelling at me!"

  "Start driving!"

  "Shut up!" Amy tried in vain to peek over the giant balloon in her face. "I can't see!"

  "Pull back and go right," he said. "I'll talk you through it." He bent double in his seat.

  "Are you OK? Did I crush you?"

  "No. Just drive." He hissed air through his teeth. "Aw, damn. Not good. Not good."

  "What's not good?"

  "Just drive!"

  Amy jerked the car into reverse, promptly rear-ending a police car, then peeled off across the parking lot. "Where am I going?"

  "You're entering traff– You're there."

  She heard horns.

  "Keep going straight. Nudge yourself left."

  "Nudge myself?"

  "I don't know! Think left! Just do it!"

  "I hate this. I hate cars. I don't understand why people actually like this."

  "Those people drive a lot faster than you do."

  Amy's foot fell. She leaned out the window. An oncoming car nearly took her head off, and she ducked back inside. The car filled with red and blue police lights; the sirens sounded much closer, now. "What do I do?"

  Javier turned back to look at the police cars. "Uh… Go left."

  "There is no left! There are cars coming!"

  "Puta madre," Javier muttered, rolling his eyes and yanking the wheel from her grasp.

  They roared across two lanes of traffic. The sound of Amy's shrieks filled her ears. Other cars swerved to avoid them. Take your foot off the pedal, something inside reminded her, but it was too late – she felt the ground give way beneath the car, heard a groaning creak as the vehicle tipped forward, then over, and began to fall.

  Trees rushed to catch them.

  Amy tried her door. It was jammed; she had to slip outside her seatbelt (it took a lot of awkward bending) and slide over to the empty passenger side. In the dark, she could only feel around in the dirt. Javier must have crawled away. "Javier?"

  Nothing. Just distant road noise, and the occasional hush of air through the pines. Then the single chirp of a stopped police car. Turning, Amy saw two white vehicles parked at the place where the car had ripped through the guardrail. She didn't bother looking for humans; she scuttled away from the flickering rays of busted headlights and into the deeper darkness. She ran blindly. Rocks and raw roots tripped her twice, but she barely noticed. The important thing was to stay out of the light.

  Her new long legs no longer seemed so awkward; they carried her a lot farther a lot faster than her old ones would have done. Ducking under a low-hanging bough, Amy paused to listen again – this time for machines. Right now, humans worried her less than other, lesser robots. It made sense that the officers parked on the embankment hadn't come down to look for her; two baseline humans simply could not outrun a frightened vN. But a drone could survey the entire forest with a single glance, and a botfly could zip in and out of the trees to seek her out, and both of them could give the police the information they needed to surround her. She listened again. But she heard no high-pitched cicada whine… just the quiet hiss of muttered swear words.

  "Javier?"

  "Not so loud!" he said.

  He had hidden himself behind a tree a few yards away. She saw his foot, now, the only thing wiggling in the shadows. Amy scrambled over, her limbs twice as clumsy now, and leaned against the tree.

  "Are you OK?"

  He shook his head. He doubled over. "No." His lips pinched together and his eyes squeezed shut. "Jesus Christ, you'd think this'd get easier with time."

  "What's wrong?"

  Javier almost laughed. It came out high and a little desperate. "Where did you grow up, a fucking convent?" He slammed his head against the tree and trembled. The vibration came from inside him, like someone had twisted his tendons taut one at a time until they shivered and sang. Under his eyelids, his eyes darted back and forth. He smelled a little sweet; his systems had started burning energy at a furious pace.

  "You're scared," Amy said.

  "Gold star, querida, gold fucking star."

  "Hey, don't snap at me just because you're the one who's frightened. Don't you think it's a bit late for that now, anyway?" Javier continued shivering. His hands came up to cover his face. He rocked back and forth against the tree. Amy swallowed, and tried to think of something nicer to say. "I mean, you've already done some pretty scary things today, and you didn't seem frightened at all."

  Hesitantly, she reached over and tried to pat Javier's hand. It burned hot to the touch, and shook under her fingers. He grabbed them and squeezed them; Amy squeaked and he let go, a little.

  He spoke through gritted teeth: "This is different."

  Javier placed her hand over the warm skin of his enormous belly where his shirt had ridden up. Beneath it, something moved. Javier's heels ground ruts in the dirt. He whimpered and kept her hand pinned to his body. "When you feel it start to rip," he said, "you just keep it open, OK?"

  Amy looked into his damp and grimacing face. "What?"

  "Better this way. Didn't want to do this in a cell." Javier's eyes opened. They seemed calmer now, focused. "It's the stress. The shocks. He's early."

  Beneath Amy's fingers, something warm and wet oo
zed up from Javier's navel. It glistened in the dark. She pulled his shirt up the rest of the way. A seam opened, bubbled, split across his skin. Javier curled his fingers under the tear and pulled the skin back slowly.

  "You gotta help me," he said. "Baby's coming."

  2

  Lucky Number Thirteen

  Javier's baby popped free of his father's body like a shiny coin from an old rubber purse. He emerged head-first, his wrinkled body wreathed in glimmering smoke, and blinked once at Amy before vomiting everywhere. Then he lifted up his arms feebly.

  "Pull him out," Javier said, holding his giant wound open with trembling hands.

  "What?"

  "Careful. He'll be slippery."

  Javier was right. Sticky threads black as obsidian covered his son, and they stretched like melting candy as Amy lifted him, leaving wisps of themselves curled around the surrounding trees and their needles. Amy had to wind the baby around a few times, like collecting noodles around a fork, before finally pulling him free. She tried to wipe him off (and succeeded only in coating her arms up to her elbows in Javier's goo), but Javier tugged the hem of her shirt.

  "Don't," he said. "It's good for him. Raw materials. Growth medium." He pushed at the flabby skin of his belly, trying to close the wound. It oozed out all over his hands. He curled in on himself like a human boy who'd just been kicked. "He needs the sun. Find a clear spot."

  Amy looked down at the baby in her arms. He had his father's perfect eyelashes and head of shiny black hair. The goo had already dried into a fine crust there, and it crackled all over Amy's arms and hands. He regarded her with calm, still eyes. "Don't you want to hold him?"

  "No. Go. Now." When she didn't move, Javier slit one eye open. "Please. Just gimme a minute. I'll be there."

  "Are you sure? Because–"

  "Will you get going, already?"

  Amy stepped back. "Fine. Sorry." She turned and started walking.

  "Hey."

  She whirled. "Now what is it?"

  "You're OK, right?" Javier swallowed. "You were sounding a little crazy, before."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Talking in your sleep," Javier said. "After we crashed." He tapped his temple. "Thought you were booting wrong."

  Amy frowned. "I'm fine. And I don't talk in my sleep."

  Javer grinned. "How would you know?"

  Rolling her eyes, she carried Javier's son into a little empty place where she could watch the sky paling into blue from an old stump. She and Javier must have crawled further away than she'd originally estimated, because from here she couldn't see the wake of destruction their stolen car must have left behind. When dawn finally came, she saw how alone they were – the trees stretched on for miles, their progress broken only by jagged lumps of rock. Water streamed between a few of them, forming dark ribbons that whispered down a mountainside ringed by other, lower mountains, all blanketed in a patchwork of alternating bald earth and spindly pines. Amy had never been anyplace this green before. There were fewer resources for vN in out-of-the-way places, her dad had told her. Cities were better. More shops sold vN food and the humans were friendlier, less afraid. It was safer, he said, to stay urban. Now they were lost in the middle of nowhere.

  The baby grabbed her hair insistently. "I've never seen anybody give birth, before, especially not a boy," Amy told him. "At least, not in real life."

  She had seen it happen a lot in dramas. They always got humans to play the part of vN. The actors always glowed with real sweat and real tears and they always tried really hard to make it look like they had only a handful of facial expressions, until the baby came and the actor got to look human for a few minutes while he smiled tiredly into the camera. Her mother used to say that it was a little unfair how humans won awards for playing robots, but robots never won anything for playing humans. Amy hadn't really understood what she meant at the time. She had asked about it, but they were in the middle of Friday movie night at home and her mother had said something about getting the vN pizza out of the oven. Amy had gone to follow her, but then her dad decided to play tickle monster and soon they were rolling around on the floor. Amy wished she had told him the truth: that it wasn't his dancing fingers that made her laugh, but his smiling face. Maybe other vN were ticklish, but not her. It wasn't in her model's original programming. She wondered if her dad knew. She wondered where he was.

  Again, Javier's baby tugged her hair. Javier had said that stress made the baby come early. Maybe she had triggered it somehow; maybe she had seriously injured him when she drove the car into the dumpster. "I didn't know," she told his son. "Honestly, I swear, I didn't know. I was just trying to help."

  Look what happened the last time you tried helping, a voice inside said.

  "I'm sorry." Amy no longer knew whom she was saying it to. She shut her eyes and held the baby tight. "I'm really, really sorry. I'll try to be more careful next time–"

  "He can't understand you, you know." Amy flinched. She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, and turned around. Javier had shed his shirt, and his fat had melted back inside him, leaving only vague hints of itself in loose skin that hung over his suddenly-baggy shorts. His belt curled away from him, now, cinched tight enough to leave slack. When Amy squinted, she saw the shining scar across his stomach. Already, it had begun to fade. Javier threw himself to the grass at her feet. "All my kids default to Spanish." He tickled the air with his fingers. "Give him to me."

  Amy handed the baby to Javier. He proceeded to unwind him from the sweater and check his hands, his feet, and between his legs. He nodded once, satisfied. "All mine." He laid the child stomach-down on his chest.

  "But you speak English," Amy said.

  "I learned it. My father taught me." Javier rested a hand across his son's back. "We – my boys and I – stem from a clade based in Costa Rica. They were re-forestry specialists. That's what my father was doing before he left and iterated me. He was bringing back the rainforest."

  Amy tried picturing life in a rainforest, with all the animals. She imagined birds bright as jewels swooping past, and lazy, lethal cats sleeping in the boughs of giant trees. "Why did he want to leave?"

  "He didn't," Javier said. He stood his son up on his chest, now, holding him with hands that shook only a little. "You got kids?"

  Amy shook her head. "I'm…" I'm too little, she wanted to say, but that wasn't true, any longer. "I'm not ready," she said instead, because it was something her mom's human friends said when the subject came up.

  Javier nodded. "Me, I got twelve."

  "Twelve?"

  "Yup. This one's lucky number thirteen."

  Amy couldn't help but stare. She knew that technically, vN could iterate as many times as they wanted, as long as they ate enough and didn't get hurt and no one interfered. But who would want to have twelve babies? And where were they, now?

  "Are they all grown up?" Amy asked.

  He nodded, lifting his son and letting him go horizontal, as though he were flying. "Oh yeah. They're all big, now. I had six last year."

  "Six? In a year?"

  "What can I say? I'm the last of my clade. I gotta spread my seed. Literally."

  "But…" Amy did the math. "But that means you forced them to grow up early, right?"

  "What's early?" Javier asked. "vN grow at the speed of consumption. I fed them. They grew. The end."

  "But… where are they?"

  "Here and there," Javier said. "Wherever I left them. Wherever they choose to go. They're independent guys. I'm an independent guy."

  Amy didn't quite know what to say. Her own dad said that a man who didn't spend time with his family could never be a real man, but he also said that came from a movie, and it was a movie that came with a failsafe warning so she couldn't watch it. "But on the inside, aren't they still little? When you… abandon them?"

  Javier put his baby down and pushed himself up on his elbows. "I don't abandon them. I teach them stuff. Like English, and how to get food, and stuff like that
. They can take care of themselves by the time I'm gone."

  She pointed at Javier's new baby. "So you're just going to leave this one behind, too, once he's bigger?"

  "That's the plan. Then he'll have his own iterations, and do the same with them. And then they'll repeat the process. Exponential growth. Survival of the species."