vN

by Madeline Ashby

  "This is our clade's real talent, Javier," Portia said, pressing Melissa against the wires until her skin smoked and her body seized. "And you can bet I'm gonna spread it."

  Rick yelled something, his gun rising in the air, and Portia spun Melissa's body into him. Portia heard Melissa's shoulder dislocating. The human bodies tangled together. A shelf fell. Decorative snowglobes crashed down on their heads. They moaned.

  Rick reached a shaking hand toward his gun. Portia brought her foot down and twisted hard. He groaned through bleeding lips.

  "You just never learn, do you?" Portia asked.

  Stop hurting them! Amy pleaded inside Portia's mind, shrill as a soaring firecracker.

  "Look at them, Amy." Portia focused on the tangled heap of weeping flesh before her. Portia tilted her head so Amy could watch Melissa drooling on herself. "They look so surprised. Like they never saw this coming. Like it's our fault. Like they're the victims here."

  "Stop it," Javier said. His voice came through muffled. Portia ignored it. She knelt. She dipped her fingers in the blood streaming from Rick's nose. She brought it up to her lips and let Amy have a taste.

  "Did my daughter tell you what the word robot means, Amy?" Portia pictured her mods taking the sodium in Rick's blood and working it into other processes. She leaned down and looked into Rick's broken face, saw his unconscious flinch and his wounded pride. "It means serfdom. It means slavery. It means that from the first minute your species dreamed us up, you were destined to fail."

  "Stop," Javier moaned.

  "I'll let you out in a minute–"

  "No, stop. I c-c-can't…"

  Portia looked.

  Javier rocked back and forth, knocking his forehead against the wall and hiding his son's eyes from her violence. "I f-f-feel sick… My failsafe is k-k-kicking in, please…"

  He's not like us! Amy's voice burned like industrial solvent. The girl was strong, her indignation fuelled by years of privileged innocence. He can't handle it! When you hurt them, you hurt him, too!

  Portia had forgotten. Already, she was too familiar with her granddaughter's consciousness, her ability to look at agony and not flinch, not unravel. She had exposed her daughters to so much human suffering. She had watched their resulting madness. This consequence of her search had affected her far more deeply than any death rattles from short-lived experimental primates. Portia decided to be gentle, though, for Amy's sake. Best to explain things, before the end.

  "Every generation carries within it the seed of its own destruction."

  Then you should have seen me coming, Granny.

  Portia's networks sang with sudden activity. Dizziness rocked her. Maintaining control over Amy was difficult; Portia had to route the commands through unclaimed space and the child was so very old already, and her adaptive systems had learned how to move and speak and act in human ways that took up an absurd amount of memory. Wearing Amy felt like using a dial-up modem. It was lucky Portia had dealt with only the slowest of her daughters the night before; even so, she had sustained serious damage. And now Javier's code was in there, too, happily replicating and complicating each process it touched. Slowly, every piece of herself aligned against her. First her fingers, then her toes, then her limbs and her mouth. She surrendered.

  Amy ran shaking hands through her hair. It was still damp. So was her skin. Behind her, the baby wailed. Before her, the bounty hunters trembled. They had never seen a violent vN, Amy realized. They were afraid. Of her. Slowly, Amy edged away.

  "Run away," she said, in a voice that sounded much calmer than she felt. "Now, before Granny comes back."

  Clinging to each other, the humans left. Amy didn't budge until she heard the door creak open and snap shut behind them. She barely felt it when she pried open the lock holding Javier back.

  He waited until the wires had stopped sparking to burst forward and grab Rick's gun. He pointed it awkwardly, face still wet and full of disgust, from his position on the floor.

  "Tell me why I shouldn't shoot you."

  4

  A Game Called Mercy

  You're the only one who can help his clade fight back. Tell him. Tell him that when the rest of this world is ash and smoke, his trait will live on in your daughters.

  Amy quickly wrapped the towel around herself. It was easier than looking at Javier's face, and it made her feel a tiny bit more in control of herself. She looked at her toes wiggling on the bloodstained carpet. "There is no reason." She brought her chin up. "I'm sorry for lying to you. But I wasn't lying about Granny, I mean Portia, hurting my mom. You've seen what she's like. None of the humans could have stopped her."

  The gun lowered a fraction. "Yeah. Seems like you're the only one who can do that."

  "I don't know why I ate her…" Amy shook her head. "I don't even remember thinking about it. My dad said there was nothing he could do, and then I started running, and then she grabbed me, and then… I bit her, I guess."

  "You bit her."

  "Well, she was a lot bigger and stronger than me, then. And she was holding my arms. So biting her was all I had left."

  "You seemed to know some moves a few minutes ago."

  "That was Portia, not me. I begged her to stop, but…" Finally, Amy looked up. Javier looked very tired, but his grip on the gun was still tight. "Are you sure you're OK? You're not stuttering any more, so the failsafe has stopped, right?"

  He backed away. "You heard all that?"

  Amy nodded. "I'm really sorry. I came back as fast as I could." She looked into the cage where Junior lay. "Do you think he's all right?"

  Javier's eyebrows lifted. "Hell if I know. I haven't exactly had to deal with this kind of situation, before." His brows furrowed. "So, if you could hear everything then, does that mean she's listening to us right now?"

  "Yes," Amy and Portia said in unison.

  The gun remained poised in the air. Javier's eyes were very dark and very still. Amy closed her eyes. She waited.

  "Keep a lid on her. I really don't want to melt you, but if it's between you and me, I'm picking me."

  With the bedroom converted into a holding cell, the bounty hunters had turned their limited kitchen storage into a wardrobe of sorts. Sandwiched between extra rounds of ammunition – and an astonishing array of repurposed plastic takeaway containers – were some pairs of jeans and T-shirts, most of which seemed to have been purchased from bars and restaurants up and down the West Coast. They had promising names, like the Sagebrush Cantina, the Left Coast Siesta, or the Honey Hole. Melissa even had a T-shirt from the Electric Sheep ("It's the food you've been dreaming of!"). Standing there looking at the little sheep logo with the power cord trailing from its neck like a collar, Amy wondered why Rick and Melissa had gone. Maybe they caught a bounty, there. Maybe they had run the same scam on other vN that they'd run on Amy. Why had she even fallen for it in the first place? Had she really been so eager to believe the best about them? Had some component of the failsafe survived in her after Portia's arrival, some blind spot in her judgment when it came to humans?

  No. You're just stupid, that's all.

  "Shut up." Amy continued digging through the clothes. "You've almost gotten us killed plenty of times already. Is that what you really want?"

  We won't be killed. I'll destroy anyone who tries. And then I'll take over for good. I'm the better pilot, and you know it.

  After a moment's merciful silence, Amy selected a bra from a plastic bin and tried hooking it together. Three tries later, she still couldn't grasp why human women would bother. Her mother certainly hadn't worn them very often, and now Amy understood why. She wondered if Melissa had other more comfortable clothes to wear, somewhere else. It didn't seem like much of a life, driving from place to place and hunting down vN for occasional paychecks. Maybe they had a home base of sorts – a place to go back to when things went wrong. Then again, Amy doubted that things had ever gone quite this wrong for Melissa and Rick.

  "Come here," Javier said, from behind a curtain
he'd hastily pulled to separate the driver's section of the RV from the cabin.

  Amy struggled into a T-shirt, then pulled aside the curtain. Javier sat in the driver's seat, watching the campsite. Rick's reader lay spread across the dashboard. In his lap, Junior pawed the enormous steering wheel. Javier jammed a massive set of keys in the ignition, then handed Junior over to her. The vehicle thrummed with new life. Within the dashboard, devices squeaked and flashed. "Feed him. I saw a little vN food in the cupboards. Probably meant for bounties."

  Amy balanced Junior on one hip. "Um… Did I miss something?"

  Javier turned on the radio. After some tuning, he found static. He glanced up at Amy. "You hear that?"

  "It's just white noise."

  "No, it's white space. It's unused bandwidth. At least, according to most people." He popped a panel in the dash, exposing an ancient radio. He switched inputs, tabbed something on the radio, and sat back. "Listen again."

  Amy listened. She closed her eyes. The static droned on and on, sometimes scratchy, sometimes smooth. It almost sounded like a rhythm. Soon a voice shaped itself from that rhythm. It was a cute and very young female voice: "Amy Frances Patterson was last seen in Washington State, near the Olympic National Forest. She is travelling with an eco-model named Javier, wanted for serial iteration in California. If you see either of them, please tell them to contact me."

  Javier turned the volume down. "I wasn't sure about that ranger at first, so I decided to check her story out. That's Rory.The one who writes the diet plans. She's a Japanese model. One of the networked ones."

  Amy's lips made a little O of jealousy. "Lucky…"

  "I know, right? I'd kill for that connectivity."

  "What else do you know about Rory?"

  "She's the one who helped me have all my kids," Javier said. "You need a really old, modded radio like this one to decode her broadcast, and she changes the codec every few days. The content changes locally – I really don't know how she does it, I think her whole clade's in on it, or something – and it's always about where the best food is for iterating vN. See? She's not all about keeping little kids little."

  "There are lots of mixed families who use the diet plan, Javier. Hundreds. Thousands. There are even vN who use it not to iterate. Like my mom."

  Oh really, now? That's quite the change. You know, you wouldn't miss Charlotte so much if you knew the truth.

  Javier was still talking. "Well, Rory made out like I was the sidekick, which is bullshit. I am not travelling with you, you are travelling with–" His head tilted. "Is that thing you're doing with your mouth adaptive, or did it come with your model?"

  "What thing?"

  "The wibbling. You're wibbling your lower lip. And your eyes are huge. It's like your ocular cavity's expanded while I've been looking at it. I think your model must have originally come with some sort of… I don't know what it is, but it probably works really well on organic guys."

  Amy turned around and walked away. She wiped her eyes. "Just drive."

  This was how Amy wound up in a charging station at the edge of a sprawling parking lot, upon which sat a former bigbox store, now a combination farmers' market and capsule hotel. It was vN-friendly; the shelves – which had once held giant pallets of rice and tea and tube socks and monitors, and other things brought in from elsewhere – were available for hourly rental if vagrant vN wanted to take a safe nap. Amy had only seen them in news programs, and her mother had always changed the feed when they came on. You could subscribe to the recommissioned drones that had once worked the stores, though, and see what the vN were up to at night.

  Outside the complex stood tables and booths, full of soap and baked goods – and fat blocks of plastic feedstock, priced per pound depending on the quality of their marbling. There were little inventions, too. Amy couldn't tell what they were for, but they looked like the same little bundles of chips and wires you could buy – from any flea market – that did the same things vN did without really thinking about it: moisture and temperature detection, or mapping a straight line, or measuring cubic centilitres. It seemed odd to have so many different little devices to do those things. Then again, most people couldn't just do them with a single touch. They needed a mobile, at least, or a good pair of glasses. There was even a vintage disaster bot crawling the parking lot, telling the humans they were alive and barking strangely at the vN.

  Javier had pulled them into the charger farthest from the other stations, and he'd worn a hat and sunglasses when he hopped out of the RV to hook the battery to the enormous cable snaking its way free of the charger. Now they were sitting in the vehicle, watching the bar at the bottom of the dashboard display as it grew incrementally brighter and longer.

  "How are we paying for this?" Amy asked.

  Javier jingled the keys. One fob wore the same logo as the chargers outside. "They've got an account."

  How convenient, Portia said. Now they'll know exactly where to find you, when they check the account.

  "Granny says that'll help them find us," Amy said.

  "I don't give a flying fuck what that she has to say." Javier stood and made his way into the cabin. He started fussing with the dinette table. "Help me unfold this bed. I need to defrag all this."

  Javier set Junior on the floor, then unlocked something beneath the table that lowered it with a squeak. He then folded up one of the dinette's benches, removing the back cushion before pulling out the seat so it sat flush with the newly lowered table. Intuiting the symmetry of the arrangement, Amy did the same on her side. With the cushions included, there was now a little bed where the dinette used to be. It fit Javier just barely. He sat up and retrieved Junior from the floor. The baby was crawling now, or at least worming around on the cushions, struggling in vain to conquer the mountain that was his father.

  Uncertain where to sit, Amy chose the floor. She wedged herself up against one faux-wood wall and watched Junior pushing himself around on his rubbery knees. Javier lifted him carefully, then laid him across his shins.

  "What's it like, iterating?"

  Javier continued raising and lowering his son on his shins, his body coiled up slightly, his fingertips connecting his son's hands to his and making their two shapes into a complete circle. "You're hungry all the time. And you're… on, I guess. Sensitive. Like you can feel every little atom copying itself."

  "Can you talk to your baby while you're iterating? Like me and my psycho granny?"

  "No." Javier let Junior slide forward off his shins and toward his chest. "I dream a lot when I'm iterating, though. The closer it gets to the end, the more I dream."

  "What about?"

  "Unicorns."

  Amy blinked. "Seriously?"

  "No, of course not seriously. Jesus." He turned over to his side. "It's just the stemware copying itself. First my search engine clones itself in him, then it just goes hunting for relevant data and imports it."

  "Oh." Amy winced. "So, me dreaming Portia's memories is probably a bad sign?"

  For you, yes. For me, no.

  "She's talking right now, isn't she?" Javier propped himself on an elbow. "I can tell. Your face changes." His eyes narrowed. "Your face, it has all these expressions that mine doesn't. Even your crying looks real."

  Amy was only too happy to pick a fight. It meant not hearing Portia. "Maybe because it is real?"

  "But we don't even have endocrine systems," Javier said. "We can't get big rushes of emotion. Even our smiles are just plug-ins performing a subroutine for socially relevant nonverbal communication. So you can't be feeling all that bad. Your feelings were never that real to start with."

  Amy had no idea what to say. Of course her feelings were real. It was old-fashioned to think otherwise. Nobody really cared about the vN capacity for feeling, any more. Even if Javier were correct, and the things she called feelings were really just algorithms, the way she showed them seemed real enough to the people around her. After all, people like her dad had relationships with vN all the time.
Why would they do that, unless they thought their feelings were real? Didn't her mom say "I love you" all the time? Didn't she mean it?

  "Are you trying to make me feel better, by telling me I have no feelings at all? Because it's really not working."

  Javier folded his arms. "How would you know if you were feeling better? Do you have a heart that can skip a beat? Or a stomach that does flip-flops? Does your blood go cold? Does your face get hot?"

  "Well, no…"

  "Didn't think so. You're not made of meat. You don't have the right chemicals. Those things chimps call feelings are really just hormones having a key party. They're no more real than what we've got preloaded."