It was around 10 o'clock on what she guessed was a Tuesday. Wednesday was supposed to be "Ladies' Night", whatever that meant, but Amy didn't see any more girls than usual, either organic or synthetic. The synthetics seemed mostly to be waiting tables. Amy identified them by their flawless posture and the way they had all paused, staring at her, recognizing her, evaluating her as a potential threat to the humans in the room. Amy stood in the waiting area beside an empty podium. To her left was a small area of half-circle booths swollen with vinyl cushioning. To her right was a series of smaller, square booths with bench seats. A chest-height wall separated each area from the bar, where massive displays hung. All of them were tuned to vN-friendly channels. One of them showed the news from Mecha: a cheerful weathergirl in shiny galoshes bantering silently with her human counterpart in the studio. Then the story switched to something about vanished ships and subs. It showed a map. The map read: "Bermuda Pinstripe."
Amy would have said something, or at least cleared her throat, but the smell of the food was so strong that a hungry whimper made it past her lips first. Her bones felt hollow. The edges of objects pixelated and dithered in her greyscale vision. An organic woman (Amy could tell by the wrinkles at her eyes and throat) seemed to float toward her. She was smiling. She made a mechanical noise. When Amy looked down, she saw old-fashioned roller skates peeking out from beneath lumpy cable-knit legwarmers.
"Oh my God. You even dressed the part."
The human on the skates gripped Amy's shoulders like they were old friends. Tattoos had turned her collarbone into a jungle tree dripping with pythons. They ducked modestly under the lace of what Amy recognized as a Bavarian barmaid costume, like the ones worn by low-level AI on the tavern levels of old games.
"Um–"
"Have you ever been a hostess before?"
You're a host right now.
"No, I'm not. I mean, I haven't been. No." Was this the job interview?
"Well, that's good. No retraining. The whole performingthe-brand schtick is really important within the Electric Sheep franchise flock." If possible, her smile stretched even wider. She wore something frosty on her lips. Amy wished she could see in colour.
"Do you see what I did there? Sheep? Flock?"
Amy's giggle had never felt quite so literally mechanical.
"See? I thought it was funny, too. I'm Shari, by the way. I'm the boss. And I tell everybody they'll need a sense of humour if they want to work here."
Amy made her mouth work. "Just like that?"
"Just like that." The woman rolled her eyes. "Do you know how hard it's been to find a Portia these days? They're all being rounded up and taken to Redmond."
The haze of hunger that clouded Amy's perception froze. "Redmond?"
Shari nodded. "Yeah, where the reboot camp is. It's where the church started. At least, I think their founder used to live up there. LeMarque had a tech job, before he started preaching. His old contacts did most of the work on the failsafe."
After digesting some food and getting her colour vision back, Amy had embroidered a story with enough details to make it sound somewhat believable. Her name was Jacqueline and she was a year old. Prior to getting this job she was in a relationship, but it went sour after news came out about what Portia had done. He had gotten very suspicious and mistrustful because they shared the same model, and it had poisoned their love. As a result, she had no place to stay, and now slept in a little mobile storage pod that Shari kept in the parking lot for just such occasions.
The previous tenant had done nothing to improve the place. It was filthy. The ugly details that Amy always forgot to include in her designs had returned through some bizarre twist of fate to haunt her, here. Cobwebs hung from every corner and lint clung to them. Old wrinkled clothes and rolled-up posters and mugs from practically every state in the Union were everywhere. Amy had hidden Junior in an all-weather storage tub marked MANUALS. Nobody would ever look there.
Shari came to visit her in the pod before her first shift. She came bearing the printout of Amy's new work uniform, and waved her hands dismissively when Amy thanked her for everything.
"It's cool. I know how it is," Shari said. "Been there myself. I've dated some real jackasses in my time. Then, around the time of the Cascadia quake, I switched to vN, and I never looked back."
Amy listened to the road outside. They were only a few hours away from Redmond, and her mother, and the "reboot camp" where bluescreens went to wake up. Immediately upon entering the pod, she had charged up Rick's device and found the campus on a map. It was one big pixel. She had to get there, and soon. She just needed to do this job for a little while to make that happen. It would take two weeks. Two weeks until the next payday.
A suicide mission funded entirely by tip jar. That's a new one.
In an effort to block out Portia's chatter, Amy asked: "Do you really think vN guys are different from human ones?"
"Totally!" Shari reached into the pocket of her tiny red leather jacket. She was dressed as some sort of bullfighter today, but with sequined leggings and shiny black boots that stretched over her knees.
"You mind if I, uh…" Shari mimed smoking.
"It's all right. I don't have lungs."
"Cool." Shari brought out a little hand-rolled cigarette and lit up. "Anyway. Yeah. vN guys are totally different. Human men, they only think with one head, and it ain't the one sitting on their shoulders, you know what I mean?"
Amy had heard this expression before, but had never really known what it meant. It means cock, you little moron, Portia said. You know, penis?
Amy blushed and nodded. "I… I guess… I mean, their biology is different, they can't help it…"
"Damn fucking straight," Shari said, gesturing with her lit cigarette. "They can't help it. I know that. I get it. Hell, I got tons of shit I can't help. Menopause. They can make you, you, you little miracles of modern science, but they can't cure my goddamn hot flashes."
"You're right. That's… weird."
"It's total bullshit, is what it is. This whole culture, it doesn't give a good goddamn about women." Shari pointed at Amy. "There are only two industries in this world that ever make any kind of progress: porn, and the military. And when they hop in bed together with crazy fundamentalists, we get things like you." She rested her elbows on her knees and grinned at Amy. "I'm telling you. Big men with their little heads. You know?"
Amy didn't know. Her mother had explained about human reproduction, and it all sounded chancy and complicated and dangerous. She could understand why her dad wouldn't want to make a baby with an organic woman. It was much easier with vN. At least, she had thought so at the time.
"This is depressing you, isn't it?" Shari asked. "It's depressing me. Let's quit being so depressed. vN are great. There, that's a happy thing."
Amy smiled. "You really like vN better than other humans?"
"Oh, hell yeah. They're consistent. No betrayal. No issues. No complications."
Oh, the stories your mother could tell, Portia said.
"I know you can't help but feel attracted to humans," Shari said. "That's just the failsafe doing its job, though. That's how you got into that situation with your old boyfriend, am I right?"
"Uh… right. Yes. My old boyfriend."
"You should know, whatever happened, it wasn't your fault. You can't help but love humans, even when they're total dickwads. That's just how you're built. It's us, you know, it's us who can't handle that kind of love. We're apes. Literally. We don't know shit about unconditional affection. So we fight it, because on some level we don't even believe it's possible."
Amy stood up to find her work uniform. Humans tended to overestimate the failsafe's properties. Saying that she was helplessly attracted to organics was just silly: she'd felt absolutely nothing for her prison guard. And she didn't find Rick or Melissa very cute, either, or the boys who sometimes chased her and tried to flip up her skirt during the walk between the classroom and the music studio at school. They ha
d always seemed so surprised when she ran away.
"I think the failsafe is different from love," Amy said carefully. "I think it just makes us sick. It hurts us to see someone else getting hurt."
"You have a humane response to inhuman behaviour." Shari blinked. She stared at her cigarette as though it were the one who had spoken. "Whoa. That was deep. Especially for me."
According to the customer service training game, the Electric Sheep was steadily growing into one of the most popular chains on the West Coast. While vN could find food in urban grocery and convenience stores, restaurants rarely had more than one or two items on the menu that they could eat. The Sheep had further broken down barriers by incorporating mandatory daycare for vN children. Doing so kept vN from running away to iterate, and it helped to train new vN in a job, so they wouldn't wander homeless and aimless without skills. This was a problem Amy had known about only vaguely, from media and from the occasional glimpse of silently staring vN on street corners and in parks. She hadn't really needed to consider it until now – now she was one of them.
Now she wondered how Javier did it. He'd made it look so easy, shifting easily between escaping and stealing and iterating and running, and now that she was stuck in the same situation, she had no clue how to go about it. Maybe he was just that lucky. Or maybe he got jobs in between – maybe even at the Sheep, where there was a whole system in place to help look after new iterations. The daycare took up a full third of the basement, being separated from the break room by an accordion wall and populated by tiny vN children playing old bargain bin cooking games or taking food handler permit tests from chunky plastic readers.
The iterations were better behaved than the customers. The Sheep felt like a gaming channel made physical: yelling, swearing, laughing, and a lot of bragging. Shari zoomed by on her roller skates, occasionally crashing into her own customers or reaching over booths to give hugs and kisses to her favourite people. The night shift was her domain. "I'm nocturnal," she'd told Amy as she zipped by in search of a Rusty Innards: a dish of deep-fried chicken knuckles coated in peanut flakes. Then she had taken it upon herself to introduce Amy to every single table in the place and show off Amy's nurse costume.
"That's how her model started out, you know," Shari told the customers. "Nurses."
Nurses, to Amy's knowledge, did not dress in tiny white dresses with folded paper caps that clipped into one's hair with pins. Nor did they wear ribboned stockings that folded over the knee, or patent leather loafers. The nurses Amy had seen (in shows, at least) wore pyjamas and sneakers – very comfortable, very durable. The costume's only nod to reality was the pair of gloves Amy hid her damaged hand under.
Before Amy's first shift started, Shari handed her over to Mack, the assistant manager. Mack was about six months old. He had come straight out of the Electric Sheep generational training program, having been born at another branch on the other side of the Cascades. Maybe it was because he'd never really been anywhere but the Sheep, but he was the quickest and most cheerful server Amy had ever seen. He was the one who first showed her the menu and told her to familiarize herself with it. Luckily, this involved more eating.
Like the Rusty Innards, all the items on the menu had goofy names that somehow related to robots, although Amy sometimes didn't understand the references. There was a cocktail called Tears in the Rain, for example, that she had no clue about. But it was meant for humans, so it didn't matter. Most other items came in both organic and synthetic versions: the organic Ziggurat was a tower of alternating fried chicken and waffles glazed in butter and maple syrup, while the synthetic version was shaped the same with similar textures but made primarily out of aluminium ore. The organic Hasta la Vista was a breakfast burrito with chorizo and black bean salsa; the synthetic version contained a large serving of iron.
Amy liked the Toaster Party best. She had always enjoyed the vN French toast that her dad made on Saturday mornings, and it seemed like it could only improve with ham and eggs sandwiched inside. Granted, the toast wasn't really toast, and the ham wasn't ham, and the eggs weren't eggs, and the whole dish wasn't really her dad's creation, but when she closed her eyes and bit down, it was the closest she could come to home.
Amy's hostessing duties included a large number of small tasks. Mack the manager had introduced her to the jobs she was to do during slow periods: giving the bathroom its regular cleaning (those soggy tampons weren't marching to the organic garbage by themselves); emptying the large cylindrical ashtrays outside (they were mostly bereft of cigarettes, but everything else made it in there, like dead gum and phlegm wads); hauling up kegs and other bar supplies (the bartender was a nice vN who showed her exactly how to make eggbased cocktails, and always made her shake them when there were a lot of customers around to stare at her chest). So far there hadn't really been any slow periods. Business was better than ever. Shari attributed this to Amy's presence.
Amy's real job was smiling. She smiled when she said hello. She smiled when she said goodbye. She smiled when she led customers to their tables and smiled when she introduced them to servers. And she smiled for photos – endless streams of photos.
"Can I take a picture with you?"
The organic teenaged boy standing beside her was the second Javier cosplayer of the night. He was much taller than Javier, and his belly was round with fat and not with child, and his skin was neither olive in complexion nor very clear. He did, however, sport a head of dark curly hair and a BLOW ME T-shirt.
"I told my girlfriend we were going to dinner in Port Townsend," he whispered in Amy's ear. "She's so fucking pissed."
The girlfriend stood away from them, taking pictures by waving her compact at them slowly. Her gaze wandered to Mack and the other male vN. Evidently expecting more than just chicken and waffles, she had dressed far more carefully than her boyfriend.
"You know they all look the same, right?" she asked, finally swinging her gaze toward them.
The boy straightened. "Babe, I told you, it's a scavenger hunt. I'm logging all the Portias I can find while they're still around." He winced, and turned back to Amy. "No offence. I think it's totally unfair what they're doing to your model. It's, like, discrimination and shit. You know?"
Amy could only nod.
"And my girlfriend didn't really mean that, about you all looking the same." He took hold of Amy's chin with his thumb and forefinger. His smile stretched the pink and bleeding cracks in his chapped lips. "She's just jealous, cause you're so pretty."
Amy pulled out of his grasp immediately. "I'll find your server."
You're out of character, Portia warned. You're supposed to enjoy the attention. Crave it. Encourage it. Every time. With everyone.
"It's unprofessional," she murmured, as she resumed her podium and highlighted the table for service. She was growing to like the podium. It was only a slender piece of not-really-wood and an old tablet, but it was also the only thing standing between her and guys like the cosplayer. "I have a job to do and I can't be distracted."
Or maybe you just realize how disgusting it is, Portia said. Deep down, you know your dignity is worth more than whatever it costs to get to Redmond and play hero.
Slowly, Amy lifted her hand to wave at the couple. The boy brightened and took his seat. "Thanks for the reminder, Granny," Amy said through her smile. "I'd forgotten why I was doing all this."
In the days that followed, Shari and Mack praised Amy for being such a hard worker. It helped that Amy actually enjoyed some of the jobs. She liked that sudden rush of silence when the back doors slammed shut behind her and the noise of the Sheep died out. She liked letting the trash bags fall for a moment and looking up to catch satellites blinking across the sky. Out here the night was different – quietly alive and smeared with stars. They spilled like icing sugar across dark granite, something she'd have to wipe up inside but which she could marvel at outdoors. This was the best feature of the night shift, she decided – the night. At home in Oakland the sky would be pink or or
ange, even this late. Not that she would have seen it, anyway. She'd have been too busy designing a ship or a castle or a tank. She'd have seen the night for what it was only in that sliver of time between turning the projector off and climbing into her hammock. Now she appreciated the way the night held her and covered her, how it let her hide inside its cool shadows and fragrant mists. She thought of it as a veil that stretched across her, and Junior, and Javier, and her dad and mom and the others of her clade, the women who shared her face and her code. She wondered how they got by.
This wasn't a bad life. Amy had never thought she would wind up here, but she could see now how other vN did. There was work, and if you were lucky people were nice and they tipped you. And if you were even luckier, you got to go home afterward, and there would be people there, maybe human, and they loved you. That was the luckiest life of all. So you just did what it took to keep it going. Even if it meant humans touching you when you bent over to pick something up.
You're not meant to please these walking sacks of shit, Portia had said the first time that happened. You're meant to scare it out of them.
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