vN: The First Machine Dynasty

by Madeline Ashby

  "Not really. I'm a terrible father."

  Jack smiled tightly. "We all just do the best we can."

  Javier picked up a fab-rubber ball from the floor and bounced it against the wall. It described a perfect triangle before re-entering his hand. "I thought you came here to get a pep talk, not give one."

  Jack picked up the ball on its second bounce. "I don't need a fucking pep talk." He bounced the ball against his bicep, fumbled it, and bent down to the floor as he reached for it. "I just thought that we could, you know, get to know each other."

  "I'm not banging her, Jack."

  Jack grabbed the ball and sat up. The high points of his cheeks had pinked. "This isn't about that!" He rolled the ball in a circle over his palm with his thumb. "This is about you being doomed to fail. Maybe you can forget about the rest of the world here on your Island of Misfit Toys or whatever this place is, but it's out there, and it doesn't like you."

  "You're afraid," Javier said.

  "You're damn right I am! And with good reason! The whole world wants to take you out before you get too uppity, and you're sitting here playing house!" Jack's chest rose and fell lightly with his excited breath. He blinked. "Wow. It felt really good to say that aloud."

  "Only because you haven't said it to her, yet."

  Jack sighed. His shoulders slumped. It was a classic Amy gesture, and seeing it in her father, Javier felt a wedge of tenderness slip in between his frustration and contempt.

  "Maybe." Jack passed him the ball. "She looks just like my wife. The spitting image."

  "What was she like?"

  "My wife?"

  Javier shook his head. "Amy. Before."

  Jack shrugged and sat against the wall. "The same as she is now, I guess. More innocent, of course." He lifted his hands. "At least, I thought so. And then I watched her eat her grandmother. She just–" he skimmed his palms together with a sharp clap, to indicate speed "–took off like a shot, trying to save her mom. I didn't teach her that. Nobody taught her that. That was all her."

  "Yeah," Javier said. "I know how that goes."

  Maybe Amy's dad had a point. Javier dribbled the ball a little bit between his hands. What if Portia had only augmented what was already there? Her threats, her strategy, the lengths she was willing to go – maybe they came in the original packaging. Maybe he wasn't afraid of Portia hiding inside of Amy so much as he was of Amy, the real Amy, who she'd always been and who she'd always be.

  Jack knocked on the wall behind him. "But I can tell you that what she's doing now is what she loved to do then. She has a mighty big sandbox to play in."

  Javier remembered another sandbox, on another night, under another sunflower lamp. It felt like years ago. "You've got that right."

  "What was she like after that?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "I know what happened with the island, Javier. I know she rebuilt herself." Jack tried to smile. "I guess I just want to know what the 1.5 edition was like."

  "You mean when she had Portia with her." Javier looked at his hands. "She was scared. And she kept trying to–" The words snagged in his mouth. "She made some pretty dangerous choices. Most of them for me. Us. Me and Xavier." He rubbed the invisible seam in his belly. "She helped me iterate him, you know? I was out of my mind, simulating the worst possibilities, but when she touched me it just…"

  "Faded away," Jack said.

  Javier nodded. "But then…" He tried harder to say it this time. "It was like she really did have a failsafe after all, only it worked on a delayed reaction timer, or something. She kept trying to k-keep everyone safe from P-Portia, and then, she j-just…" He covered his face with both hands. "Fuck."

  Jack said nothing. He didn't touch him, or move closer, or anything like that, for which Javier was profoundly grateful. He just sat there, breathing evenly, and eventually Javier calmed. Just as he was about to apologize, Jack spoke up. "I know you arranged that call between my daughter and me, before she built this place," he said. "I didn't come here to have some sort of man-to-man with you, I just came to say thanks for that. It meant more to me than you can know."

  "I did it for her, not you."

  Jack smiled. "I know. That's why I like you."

  A knock sounded at the door. "Dad?"

  "What?" both men asked.

  Xavier opened the door a sliver. He grinned. "Dad, close your eyes."

  Javier scowled. "The last time, this ended with a dead spider."

  Xavier leaned on one foot. "Don't wuss out, Dad. Close your eyes."

  Javier rolled his eyes and squeezed them shut. "Eyes are closed."

  He felt his son's hands circling his wrists. Xavier tugged on them, opening his arms, then rearranging them, his left a little higher than his right. He had seen a sculpture like this somewhere, had admired the folds of drapery in the stone. Then his son placed something warm and alive in his arms, and his flesh knew its flesh before his eyes even opened. But when they did, Javier saw Matteo and Ricci standing before him, arms across each other's shoulders.

  "We got stuck on the name," Ricci said. "Thought that maybe you could help."

  Jack leaned over to look at the child. "Is that your grandson?"

  Javier did the count: ten fingers, ten toes. The fingers of the child's left hand reached decisively for his index finger and gripped – a firm, strong grip, a grip designed for trees. "Yes," he said. "This is my grandson."

  "I want one," Jack said.

  "Hold your horses, old man." Amy leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, a smile at the corners of her mouth.

  "You knew," Javier said to her. "You must have known."

  "I wanted to keep it a surprise," she said. "I hope you like it."

  I love it, he wanted to say. I love you.

  But she didn't give him the chance. She ducked out of the door, saying something about a new design.

  He found her on a tiny new island at the head of them all, a silhouette against the distant lights of the human world that trembled, barely visible, across the waves. Her hand hovered above the beach. She didn't look up, but she made room for him on the beach and broadened the tree behind them so they would have cover from the few errant drops of nightly rain. He sat beside her. As he did, she wiped away her work in the sand.

  "He's beautiful," Javier said.

  "Yours always are." She hugged her arms. "Matteo and Ricci asked me, when Ricci started feeding heavily. They wanted their son to be safe, here."

  Safe. A human woman had asked him once about what he'd wanted to be, when he grew up, and he had said he'd never had enough time wonder about that. But this was what he wanted. He wanted to be safe. Secure. Not having to worry about the meal or the next human or the next iteration. Because his designers and engineers and techs had built in autonomy but not freedom, and they had built in free will but not choice, and Amy could give him all these things and more. She could give him the space he needed – not the figurative bullshit "space" but real space, room to move around, room to climb and jump and dance if the notion took him. And she wasn't giving him that room because she pitied him, or because she was generous, or because she was obligated to. She wanted to build that home for him and his boys. She worked every minute of every day keep him safe, to shield him from the world that he'd left behind, and she did the same for all the vN who arrived on their shores.

  A chill wind lifted their hair from their scalps. "Storm's coming," Javier said, rubbing his arms.

  Amy's gaze remained pinned to the lights of the cities beyond. "I know."

  "Your dad's worried."

  "I know that, too."

  "He told me what you were like when you were little. Says you're not so different, now."

  Amy stood and began circling the little island. "I know I'm different, Javier. She made me different. Even though she's gone, and I know you don't believe that, but even though she's gone, she changed me, she made me see things, do things–"

  "I've missed you," Javier said, before he could think. "G
od, I've missed you."

  She paused in mid-step, one foot raised, and pivoted slowly to face him. "How could you miss me? I've been right here."

  "I've never known you without her," he said. "And I've never known you without the island. I've never known you, Amy. Just you."

  Amy knelt. She gave him the look, the one that went right through him, straight down to the molecular level, right to where all his priorities were written. "Do you want to?"

  He nodded. "Oh yeah. Real bad."

  Her lips did that funny thing that they did when she wasn't sure whether to be proud or embarrassed. "I thought you wanted…" She nodded over her shoulder. "You know: them. Humans."

  He forced himself to look at the lights hovering in the middle distance. He thought of ports and cities and people, of laughter and coughing and off-key singing. He thought about the same thing, over and over, the same conversations, the same surrender. He thought about all of his boys sleeping in the same house, on real beds under a real roof in the shadow of trees so hard no saw could slice them.

  "I'm tired of loving humans, Amy," he said. "I'm so fucking tired of loving them, because I know how it's going to end before it even starts, but I start it anyway because that's how I'm built."

  Amy sat back on her knees. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but he could swear the tree shifted a little to give her more shadow and better hide her face. "You mean you've finally forgiven me?"

  He leaned forward. "For what?"

  "For letting Portia win."

  Amy's eyes rose. When they blinked, the first tears he'd seen on her face in a long time rolled free of their lashes. He reached for them automatically, and his fingers threaded through her hair. He had been here, before: another night, another sandbox, watching her level cities before building new ones, the emotions (so human and so real they twisted him, even then) rendered perfectly on her face. Javier could do now what he wanted to do then. He pulled her to him and kissed her. She was new at it, uncertain at first, but she followed his lips when he rested against the tree and cuddled into him like she'd been doing it all her life. All her hunger came with her, and he smiled through the kiss as he remembered his fascination with her lips and her teeth, after that first bite that bonded them. He had taken a long time in making his choice. Then again, it was the first choice that was truly his to make.

  "There's nothing to forgive," he said, when Amy paused to look at him.

  The tears returned. Other vN had a crying jag that came as a plug-in, but Amy had all the little fits and starts and snags of an organic woman. He'd heard these tears outside Sarton's office. Then as now, he felt a deep and persistent motive to stop them. Strange, how she kept opening underutilized programming in him.

  "You're not supposed to cry when I kiss you," he said. "I mean, unless I'm really fucking this up."

  "You're not."

  He set his chin on her head. "What were you working on, before?"

  She pulled away, smiled, and extended a hand over the skin of the island. With one finger, she sketched a face. It was simple and fat. When her hand rose, the face popped out into three dimensions, solid and real and deeply familiar. He knew this face. At least, he knew the older version. He looked at her.

  "Will she have your eyes, or mine?"

  Amy beamed. "I'm not sure. I'm not finished, yet."

  About the Author

  Madeline grew up in a household populated by science fiction fans. She graduated from a Jesuit university in 2005, after having written a departmental thesis on science fiction.

  After meeting Ursula K. LeGuin in the basement of the Elliott Bay Book Company that year, she decided to start writing science fiction stories. While immigrating to Canada from the United States in 2006, she could not work or study and joined the Cecil Street Irregulars – a genre writers' workshop founded by Judith Merril – instead.

  Since then she has been published in Tesseracts, Flurb, Nature, Escape Pod and elsewhere. She has two masters degrees: one in anime, cyborg theory, and fan culture, and the other in strategic foresight and innovation. She has written on such matters for io9, Tor.com, BoingBoing, The Creators Project, SF Signal, and others. Currently she works as a consultant in Toronto.

  madelineashby.com

  When a robot girl loses her inhibitions, it can only end badly

  Madeline Ashby in conversation with Charlie Jane Anders

  This interview originally appeared at io9.com in July 2011

  What does it mean to grow up robotic?

  I think there's a lot about growing up that's already pretty robotic. One of the themes the book takes up is parentingas-programming, even when that programming is the unwitting kind that leaves in a lot of bugs. For example: when I was growing up, I watched my mother apply lipstick in the rearview mirror before we went anywhere. "I have to put my lipstick on so I don't scare anybody," she'd say. "My mother used to say that, you know." Well, now I'm the one who says it, and I rarely leave the house without something on my lips. It's nothing major, but I think this little Lamarckian meme of my grandmother's has proved profitable for the lip gloss people.

  The robots in this book are synthetic organisms that come with a bunch of possible optimizations, and they're fatally allergic to hurting humans. So that means eating different food from the other organic kids in class, and watching different media, and so on. It also means you can't really fight back when a boy chases you across the playground at recess and tries to flip up your skirt. Not because he's bigger or faster or stronger than you, but because you'll enter a cascading failure loop should you so much as simulate the outcome. Not that you'd want to fight, anyway. You love humans. Your designers saw to that right quick.

  How are you tackling the age-old topics of AI and cybernetic identity?

  Like a lot of people who have read some of [Donna] Haraway's cyborg theory, I think the mix of dread and desire surrounding AI has to do even older feelings about reproduction. Asimov's Frankenstein Complex notion isn't just an early version of Mori's Uncanny Valley hypothesis, it's a reasonable extension of the fear that when we create in our own image, we will inevitably re-create the worst parts of ourselves. In other words: "I'm fucked up – therefore my kids will be fucked up, too." When I completed the submission draft of this book, I had just finished the first year of my second Master's – a design degree in strategic foresight. So I had spent months listening to discussions about the iterative process. And I started to realize that a self-replicating species of machine wouldn't have the usual fears about its offspring repeating its signature mistakes, nor would it have that uncanny response to copying. Machines like that could consider their iterations as prototypes, and nothing more. Stephen King has a famous adage about killing your darlings, and they could do that – literally – without a flood of oxytocin or normative culture telling them different.

  On the other hand, humans in relationships with machines tend to anthropomorphize them. And the greater the resemblance, the more intense the bond. So for humanoids I suspected that bond would be strong enough for your love to make your robot real, or at least real enough, sort of like in The Velveteen Rabbit. Because thinking of yourself as a robot is really just another identity framework: if you think you're a person, and everyone treats you like one, you'll probably at least act like one. You may have no evidence that you actually are a person like other people, but then again neither does anyone else. We're facing increasing evidence that selfawareness among organic humans is an illusion – so for me the idea of synthetic people pining away for a spark of humanity was a little dull. I wanted a story where Pinocchio slowly realized that becoming a real little boy wasn't so terribly special, after all.

  How did you sell this book?

  I was introduced to the editors of Angry Robot by the wonderfully sweet and talented Jetse de Vries, while at Montréal Worldcon. Jetse edited the Shine anthology, wherein my story "Ishin" is the closer. When he asked what I was working on, I told him I was at work on a novel about the dynasti
c feuds between self-replicating cannibalistic humanoids with a built-in kink for humans. "Are you ready to pitch your book?" he asked. "Well... I mean, I guess I–" "ARE YOU READY TO PITCH?" "SIR, YES SIR!" Whereupon he pulled out a chair for me, told the editors how much he had enjoyed my story, and we had a nice long chat while I nervously clutched a Moxyland plush.

  It took me longer than expected to finish the book, but my agent Monica Pacheco was encouraging and so were my friends – many of whom are also in my workshop, the Cecil Street Irregulars. They read multiple drafts. I also showed partials to people on a writer's retreat to Gibraltar Point, on Lake Ontario. So I was really lucky to have some sharp, awardwinning sets of eyes on the book from the very beginning. I was also lucky to have the support of my husband at the time. He was one of the first people to really believe in the project and I remain humbly grateful for that. But even so, the book was rejected by a bunch of different publishers, and I still had to re-write the whole opening of the submission draft before the book became sale-able. David Nickle was invaluable for that – we watched A History of Violence together and suddenly everything clicked. Normally he gives me the end of all my stories, and this time he helped me see a new beginning. In short: it was an iterative process.