Idiot.
Amy's body sailed over the crowd's most ragged edge. She crashed into a wall and slid down. Her vision had turned the colour of old photographs on real paper. A group of her clademates had split off from the main body and followed her. Amy squinted at them. She thought she recognized them, though whether it was from her own life or Portia's she couldn't tell. Struggling to her feet, she made another leap. It carried her another few feet. The sisters adjusted trajectory and continued following. They walked briskly, almost trotting. They wanted to get to her first, she realized. They wanted what she had. Portia. Her legs. They would devour Amy and she would live inside each of them, a fraction of herself, trapped forever.
It won't work for them.
Amy jumped again. Her fingers trailed the wall. It felt too smooth. There had to be a door somewhere. The room was so big; she'd be dead before she found it.
It's not a glitch.
Amy didn't care. Not now. She kept jumping. The jumps were a little shorter each time. She staggered and pushed. The walls were so bright. Her hands tingled. They were behind her, now. Close. She heard their quiet giggles, like mean girls gossiping about the slow kid limping down the hall at school.
I could help you.
Amy paused. Considered. She knew the damage Portia could do. Damage she had no idea how to do. She couldn't eat them all. And her mother had warned Amy not to, only moments before. Before Portia carried her away.
"Help me? Like you helped my mom?"
Fine. Die your own way.
The first one grabbed her by the hand. Amy swung around awkwardly, and tried to punch her in the face. It didn't go well, barely skimming her chin. Then another aunt had her other hand, and her arms, and the other two grabbed her legs. She kicked them off for a moment – the new legs were still so strong – but they came back, gripping tighter this time. They lifted her twisting body over their heads. They carried it into the centre of the mob.
They laid her on the remnants of her mother's skin.
Amy spoke to the scores of herself, their faces black with smoke, their heads wreathed in industrially bright light: "Portia says it won't work."
Their smiles bared their teeth. They hunched over her, blotted out the light. Their hands gripped her limbs. Slowly, they began to pull. She struggled, but they held her down. They made cooing sounds. They petted her hair. It was a cruel, awful parody of what her mother would have done. Her right shoulder was the first to pop. She heard the bones moving, shearing. Her right knee gave way. The balls had separated from their sockets. The skin had begun to stretch. Her vision pixelated, and her clademates were no longer anthropomorphic in her sight, but compound, as though Amy were simply an insect they were torturing. In her memory – in Portia's memory – they had done that as girls. Pulled the wings off moths. Pulled the legs off spiders. It was their favourite game. Helpless creatures were what they had instead of toys. She closed her eyes. At least Portia would die with her.
Hot smoke squelched over Amy's chest. She heard screaming. Probably delight. She was in pieces. Just couldn't feel it, yet. They were scattering away to eat. She heard the slap of their feet across the concrete. A hand traced her face. Someone growled near her head. They were fighting over the sweetmeats.
"¡Aléjate de ella, puta!"
Amy's eyes opened. Javier was a blur. His hand slid under her neck.
"How'd you tell?" She gestured weakly at the other vN, and then at herself. "Me? From them?"
Javier hoisted her up, cursing when her arm rolled bonelessly off his shoulder. He switched positions, tried again, hissed at her knee. When he held her close she could make out the definite lines of his hair curling away from his head against the glare of the hangar.
"Please. I know my own flesh and blood when I see it."
Together they took flight.
The hangar was actually a portable storage unit, Javier said. He'd had a hell of a time finding it. It was way at one end of the campus, on land the company hadn't really developed yet, and once used for testing aerial systems. There were a bunch of them. He guessed the other portables were full of Amy's clademates. The team kept Javier in another building entirely.
"When they took your aunts and started driving away again, I thought we were going to another city." His leaps took them over the tops of buildings. At least, it seemed that way. What he landed on was flat and hard. The smell of trees was distant. "This place is like a small town. They took me for walks. Like a fucking dog. Meanwhile, they b-beat the sh-shit out of you."
"Game," Amy managed to say.
"Oh, I know about the game. I saw the fucking game. They showed me the fucking game."
"Long time."
"A week. You spent a week in there. I think they were ttrying to k-kill you. If it happened during a test, they could treat it like an accident."
Something bothered her. She couldn't remember what. Not grief. Unsearchable. Censored, for now. Something else. Her good hand spasmed on Javier's shoulder. "Junior!"
Javier snorted. "Where did you think we were going? He's at the reboot camp. I patched him just the other day."
• • • •
The reboot camp was its own building. Only one room held the bluescreens. It was kept very cold. Its steel door sweated condensation. The mocking handmade signs that employees regularly stuck to it always peeled away.
"It says Maternity Ward," Javier told her, as he kicked it aside.
He got them through the threshold. Amy wasn't sure if security was light because their escape had diverted it elsewhere, or simply because it was never good to begin with. Mediocrity would certainly explain how Q.B. had his way with all those bluescreens before losing his job.
Inside was dark, and exquisitely cold. Racks of cages like library stacks filled the room. They hummed. As Javier carried her through the stacks, lights inside each cage awakened to their presence and faded with their passing. The wave of light followed their progress. It exposed each small body, tiny and perfect and lifeless, eyes open or shut, skins dark and pale and all shades in between. It reminded Amy of a museum she had visited – drawer after drawer of preserved specimens, carefully repaired and exhibited. She had gone there with her mother.
"Ssh, don't cry, they're just sleeping."
He turned the corner and stopped. People in cleanroom suits stood at one of the cages. One held an infant in gloved hands. Amy squinted. Junior. In human hands. She thought of Javier allowing him to be taken away. Thought of her hands around Harold's fragile organic wrists.
She slid down out of Javier's arms and stood on her good leg. The cold had frozen her processes, her grief, and turned it to hate. She stood tall. Gripped her right arm. Popped it back into place. She stretched her right knee. It snapped back together. They stared at her through gleaming hoods, faces made invisible by glare and her exhaustion. She ordered her words slowly: "Javier. Close your eyes."
They jumped back as one. "Wait!"
The one holding Junior ripped off his hood: Javier stared back at Amy. Or rather, another version of him. His hair was cut differently. A clademate. They all removed their hoods, now. Familiar dark eyes examined her, then focused on Javier.
"Dad," one said. "Don't you recognize us?"
9
The Museum of the City of Seattle
There were five of them. Their names were Ignacio, Gabriel, Matteo, Ricci, and Léon. They all lived together in the abandoned concrete plant south of Seattle, where the quake damage was almost total. Amy saw only a little of that damage from the van the boys stashed them in, on their way off campus. They had a special pass that let them cross the I-90 bridge easily because they worked part-time in the Museum of the City of Seattle. There was a special lane for prepaid tourists and museum personnel.
"Everyone else has to use I-5," Ignacio explained. "Poor bastards."
Javier didn't answer him right away. He was busy staring at Junior. And Junior was busy staring at Amy. The patch – a method by which the bluescreen specialists overfed Ja
vier, triggered his iterative cycle, and transfused a sample of his stemware into Junior – had worked beautifully. The baby was alive and awake and even sitting up under the tent shaped by their bodies and the blankets they hid under. Whenever they hit a seam in the asphalt, Javier's hand would dart out to keep his son's head from bumping into the back seat. His fingertips were raw bone, jagged and black as winter branches.
"Your hand," Amy said.
"It was a fan," Javier said. "In the ducts. Rookie mistake. Drink your electrolytes."
Léon turned around in his seat. He pointed out the window. "Dad, look."
Something terrible had happened to this place. Amy had studied it one night after being barred from watching a documentary on the subject – her dad said it would trigger her – but it was different up close. After the sudden drop of the Cascadia fault, giant sinkholes had opened up in the land parallel to I-5, swallowing train yards and viaducts and leaving the interstate to hang out in open space like ridges of bone under a thin animal's hide. Boxcars, concrete pillars, and trees sprouted from the water. In the distance, she saw the dark blurs of islands with blinking towers at the tip of each. Beyond those, in deeper water, she saw windmills. She counted three. The middle one, situated a little further out, drooped like a wilting daisy.
They drove the rest of the way listening to the museum radio station. It specialized in music from the Pacific Northwest, songs about the Cascadia quake, and occasional snippets of archival sound. This place was neither a city nor an exhibit, but something else entirely: part nature preserve, part historical conservation effort, part augmented map, part game, part resort. The dashboard display bristled with tabs linked to payonly overlays through which they could view the various districts of the museum: the Viaduct, SubSoDo, New Elliott Bay, Post Alley. The ads read "WEAR MORE LAYERS: CHOOSE YOUR HISTORY," or "SHAKE THINGS UP: SEE THE SEATTLE NO ONE SEES."
"We'll take you there, tomorrow," Gabriel said. "There's someone you should meet. A failsafe expert. His name is Daniel Sarton. He works for the museum, now, but he used to work at the reboot camp. We were going to take Junior to him, if the patch hadn't worked. But he's working with Rory, too. You know, the vN with the diet? Apparently they want to help you."
Amy didn't remember entering the concrete plant. She closed her eyes in the van, and woke up in the dusty dimness on a pallet build from sacks of unmixed concrete. She easily grasped the appeal of the place: the massive hills of sand outside gave the boys cover, and inside, the pallets and the huge steel rebar rafters above gave them plenty of spots from which to jump. They were all up there now, perched precariously but confidently, legs swinging and arms crossed. From her high pallet, Amy could hear most of what they said.
"We found Ignacio first," said Matteo. He was half of a pair of twins. Amy wasn't quite sure how that worked, but they claimed to have been iterated simultaneously and Javier didn't deny it. The other twin's name was Ricci. "It made sense to start with the oldest. If we found him, we could trace your path north, and find our other brothers along the way."
"We're still missing some, though," Ricci said. "But we'll find them."
Javier held his face in his hands. "You wanted to be together?"
The twins glanced at each other. "He and I don't just enjoy living together, we benefit from it. Why wouldn't the rest of us?"
Javier threw one hand in the air. The other clutched Junior. "Do you have any concept of how dangerous this whole thing is? I raised you smarter than this–"
"This from the guy running around with America's Most Wanted," Ignacio said.
Javier snapped his fingers at him. "When I want your opinion, I'll ask you for it."
Ignacio nodded down at Amy. She quickly shut her eyes. "Redmond was just doing a little pest control, and if you–"
"Pest control? Do you even know why your baby brother is alive, right now? Do you know what she did to save him? She–"
"She ate him," Gabriel said. "She ate him, Father. She's probably the reason he bluescreened. We've seen the footage. She probably consumed one of his core kernels along with his toes. Otherwise he wouldn't have needed the patch."
There was a long pause. Amy didn't open her eyes. The other Juniors were right. In trying to save their little brother she had doomed him, just like she had doomed her mother by trying to rescue her that night at graduation. It would have been better for everyone if she had done nothing. Javier and his children would be better off now if she just left. When her body had healed completely, she would. She'd seek out Rory's help on her own, or maybe not at all. Rory didn't need her kind of trouble any more than the others did.
She was so consumed by these thoughts that she almost didn't hear Javier ask: "Were you going to come find me, after you found your brother?"
Silence. After an empty moment, Ignacio said: "I don't know, Dad. Did you come find me, after you iterated me in that shithole prison in Managua?"
The rafters creaked slightly as Javier launched himself away.
• • • •
It was a long time before he returned. Amy watched the boys slowly migrate to their own spaces among the rafters to sleep. They stretched out across the steel beams or hugged them like monkeys. Matteo was the exception; he found a ceiling-high pallet of concrete sacks and lay down. Ricci dropped out of the ceiling a moment later to join him. Their whispers echoed across the warehouse, but the edges of each word softened into indistinguishable sounds in the distance.
When the others seemed to be asleep, Javier emerged from a hatch in the roof and dropped down on the pallet beside her, silently. He smelled like rain. After depositing Junior in her arms, he pulled off his shirt and used it to wring out his hair. Then he spread it out over a neighbouring pallet to dry. From his pockets, he retrieved a series of food packets. He punctured the first one with a straw for her, and set it near her lips.
"You've been crying." Javier frowned. "Is Portia bullying you? Is she"
"No, it's not that." Amy propped herself on her elbows. "Shouldn't you be up there with them?" She pointed upward with her good arm.
"With this kid on my hands? No way." Javier held Junior up to the blue glow seeping in through the window. Junior squirmed and kicked. "I don't think he'll sleep at all, tonight. Up there, he'd just crawl away from me and fall down."
"I could hold onto him, and then you could go up there to sleep," Amy said. "Your boys seem to like it up there."
"They're natural climbers. Being up high feels good for them."
"And it doesn't feel good for you?"
"Well, sure, I guess, but in case you hadn't noticed, I still walk around on the ground a lot."
"But wouldn't you rather–"
"Are you physically incapable of having a conversation with me that doesn't involve fighting? Jesus." Javier folded his knees to his chest and leaned against the wall. He opened his legs enough to let Junior stand between them. The boy clung to his knees. "Look. Soon he'll be jumping."
Amy propped her head on her hand to watch. Junior bounced eagerly, each lift of his heels building to the first leap he would eventually take on his own. She wondered how the many design decisions and odd kinks in programming on the part of so many teams across the globe could align into something so perfect and so beautiful in Junior, but so broken and so ugly in herself and Portia. Didn't they possess the same operating system? How had she turned out like this – this piece of malware who almost kept this child from taking his first steps on the very legs they now shared?
As though he'd read her mind, Javier asked: "How are your joints?"
"They feel like they're made of popcorn."
His eyes roved over the wreckage of her. "You sure do have a nasty habit of getting torn apart."
"Yeah." Amy looked pointedly at his damaged hands. "You should eat, too."
"Right." He ripped open a packet of food, stared at it, and put it down. He looked at Junior. "How much did you hear?"
"All of it." For the first time in a long time, tears and
not hunger blurred her vision. "I'll go tomorrow. When I'm better. I know it's not a good idea for me to stay here. I almost got Junior killed, and my mom–" Her mouth wouldn't shape the words. "My mom…"
Javier edged closer to her. He lay down parallel to her. "What about her?"
Amy squeezed her eyes shut. This made it easier to say. It was the first time she'd ever said it aloud. "She's dead."
"Oh, Christ. Christ Jesus." He slid an arm over her and pulled her in close. He spoke quietly into her ear. "I saw the smoke. I didn't know. I'm sorry."
For a while, she just sobbed. She hadn't cried about it, yet, and now in the dark with his skin and the rain seemed like the right time. The sobs turned into keening, injured wails, compensation for the screams she hadn't let slip when her aunts tried to kill her, or when the Cuddlebug coiled around her, or when she first saw the truck waiting outside her storage pod. Her failures loomed over her, heavy and terrible and unbearably obvious: the stage, the RV, the dump, the truck. Redmond.
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