vN

by Madeline Ashby

  Matteo looked at his twin brother. "What do you think?"

  "I think we should defrag it," Ricci said.

  Matteo's brows lifted. "That's my cue." He wagged a finger at his father. "Ser hombre bueno, viejo."

  Ignacio nodded. "Qué él dijo."

  Gabriel stretched. "Well, now that we have a rotifer in the clade, I should be rereading some biology." When he noticed the rest of them staring, he rolled his eyes in a way that Amy was now certain had to be patented somewhere in an animator's portfolio – and permanently attached to Javier's clade. "Amy is a rotifer. She produces only daughters, but she incorporates code from a wide variety of other species into every new batch."

  "See, Dad?" Ignacio turned a little to nod at his brother. "Sometimes you even iterate nerds."

  "There's a species that does what I do?" Amy asked. "An organic one?"

  "It's one of the oldest on the planet. It lives at the bottom of the sea."

  13

  Failsafe

  "Shouldn't you be inside, young lady?"

  "I'm sorry, officer, I was just feeling a little cooped up at home. I'm really missing the sun."

  "I can see you're quite the troublemaker. Think I might have to cuff you."

  "I'd love to see you try."

  "I'm beginning to think I've rubbed off on you in a bad way." Javier hopped onto the railing and began walking it, arms outstretched, his body one slip away from the churning water below. His toes gripped the steel carefully at each step. He hadn't worn shoes from the moment they boarded the container ship. That was a week ago.

  Amy looked up at him. Javier stood framed by a cloudless sky, perfectly balanced, not smiling, but not scowling, either. His calm face. It took some getting used to.

  "Please come down from there."

  Javier clasped his hands behind his back. "You know you're supposed to stay in your container. There could be botflies. Or satellites. All it takes is one facial pattern match, and we get blown out of the water."

  "I'll go back inside if you quit standing on that rail."

  One dimple appeared in the corner of his mouth. "You're on."

  He made it his usual game of chase, bounding across the riveted steel, one foot on a blue container and the other on a yellow one, or maybe green or red or just rust. They flitted over the names of companies and company towns they didn't know, places where things were built. Once upon a time, the container ships that crossed the Pacific were stacked solid with cargo; not even a finger could slide between the units. Not so, these days. Trenches gaped open between the unevenly stacked containers. Javier enjoyed hiding in those hollow spaces, the little nooks and crannies. His laughter echoed between the walls of steel, down where the ocean and engine noise couldn't dull its edges. When the ship's security systems said the air was clear, they played tag, or Marco Polo, or Sharks and Minnows, or any of the other games he'd watched his children play without ever having tried himself. He'd give her just enough time to catch up before jumping away again. Her jumps were improving. She even caught him, sometimes.

  This time he pulled up short, though. He held up one hand, and Amy landed as silently as possible behind him. She peeked over his shoulder. On the bright yellow terrace formed by an uneven stack below, Ignacio was teaching Junior the finer points of blackjack. At least, Amy assumed so. They both wore green gambling visors filched from the bridge. Blackjack required very little talking on the player's part, which made it ideal for Junior.

  Ignacio pointed. "You should double-down."

  Junior seemed to have a hard time deciding. He had a very expressive face that made understanding his wants and pref erences easy. He just never used words. No one knew why. After researching it, Gabriel suspected that a crucial component of his little brother's natural language functions had burned out somewhere along the line. They held out hope for Mecha, though. If anywhere had the right experts to deal with the problem, it was Mecha. For all Amy knew, she and the boy would be seeing the same specialists. Amy watched him point at something she couldn't see, which in the shared illusion of the visors told Ignacio to deal again.

  It came as a surprise when Ignacio told them he was coming along. Javier had blinked at him and his slender roll of clothes tucked under one arm, and then moved aside to let him hop up the ramp leading to the main deck. Ignacio still shoulder-checked Amy on his way up, though. And over the last few days he hadn't acted any differently: frequently calling his father's presence away from hers on one lame pretext or another; rolling his eyes every time she told a story; asking her pointedly if she needed a snack. It was sort of cute, the way he thought those little digs actually impacted her in some way. Amy lived with Portia locked inside her head. No one could mock her as accurately or steadfastly as her grandmother.

  They had lost Matteo and Ricci. The twins wanted to continue their search for their brothers, and they couldn't do that from Mecha. "If they're out there, they need our help now more than ever," Matteo had said. "We have to try," Ricci agreed. And so they had hugged their father and all their brothers, and then they had left. But not, however, before giving Amy a request:

  "Look after our dad," Matteo instructed. "He's getting sloppy in his old age."

  "Your father is younger than I am."

  "Oh." Matteo patted his twin's shoulder. "Your turn."

  "Just don't expect much," Ricci said. "He knows a lot about moving around, but not a lot about sticking around."

  Inside the hot, still darkness of her container, Javier seemed to have no trouble staying put. He had his own bedroll, and his own files on the reader, and his own settings on the gaming unit. He frequently tagged her designs with comments: "More green." "More skylights." "Bigger shower. Include grab bars."

  Not that Amy honestly expected to design or build her dream condo, once they hit Mecha. She just liked playing with the layouts. The materials there were different, and the specs, and the regulations. Her much smaller self once relished in exteriors, in the knots of wood or the stippled surfaces of old bricks or the cactus-like networks of grey water pipes grafted onto old buildings. Now she considered what would go inside the space. She approached the small spaces as a challenge and then looked for the most beautiful version of every absolute necessity: the thickest towels, the finest plates.

  It felt good to have some dimensions between her hands again. She had stuck a small but good projector in the seam between her container's northern wall and ceiling, and it allowed her to stretch out the shapes of beds and sofas and tables. Under its light she sculpted chairs like roses or tubs like mouths. Her predilection for saving each of these designs, once the bane of her parents' storage allotment, became an opportunity for her to give Javier the grand tour of a different home each day.

  You're nesting, Portia told her, more than once. How very organic of you.

  Amy studiously ignored her.

  "I like the idea of this bed," Javier said now, his finger poking at the dimensional projection of a mattress suspended on tension wire, "but I think in practise it could really get somebody hurt."

  "We can't get hurt," Amy said, before she could simulate the outcome of her words.

  Ostensibly, Javier had his own container to sleep in. He just seemed to wind up in hers, because Junior insisted on crawling inside it after the sun went down. At least, that was how it happened the first time. She woke up, their first night aboard, to see Junior's little body silhouetted against the deep blue of the night sky, framed within the container hatch, and he silently wormed his way under the covers and into her arms. He acted a like a dog who, upon circling a rug three times, sleeps in a fortuitous slant of sunshine for the rest of the afternoon. He slept with his back to her chest, no squirming or poking or kicking. Minutes later Javier arrived, shook his head, and sat down on her other side.

  "Is this OK?" he had asked.

  Implicit in all their conversations about Mecha was the assumption – at least on her part – that they would be sharing the same space. Javier still slept in
his own bed, even when it was shoved up against hers. Amy had no idea if Javier slept there because he wanted to, or because the failsafe made him want to. She had no idea how to ask, either, or if he would even know the difference. Just in case, she kept her hands to herself. Shortly after sunrise, they usually found Junior in the hollow between their bedrolls. Their motion triggered the lantern, and Amy made certain to watch the slow rise of greenish light exposing the new details of Junior's face. Every morning, it looked a little more like Javier's.

  They had yet to talk about the future. They showed each other pictures, instead.

  When not designing, she reviewed profiles of scientists that Rory sent to her. None of them knew yet that they had the chance to work on Amy or Portia, but Rory had traced their communications and reported on their excitement about the subject and their eagerness to discuss it online. Most of them were corporate, but Amy liked the academic ones better. They knew how to spell. And they looked a little bit down on their luck, like they really needed a project like this one on their stats and not just another bullet point to look smug about.

  Thinking of herself as someone else's project got a little easier every day.

  Lab rat, Portia called her, as Amy looked up old peer-reviewed papers. Quitter.

  At least once a day, Amy spoke with a media rep. They always experienced a little lag as the translation engine worked through their conversation, but the rep had a whole series planned around Amy's "healing process". The subscription revenues would offset the costs of their stay in Mecha, and global authorities concerned about Amy's activities could observe the raw feed. Each episode would document her visits to various specialists and her attempts to integrate into Mechanese culture. Naturally, Javier and the others would be a subplot.

  "What is the exact nature of your relationship?" the rep asked her, once.

  "I'll have to call you back," Amy said.

  Early one morning, before dawn – and before Junior started moving, and before the lantern glowed slowly to life – Javier devised a new way to practise Japanese.

  "What's this one?" Javier asked, drawing on the back of her neck with one finger.

  Amy tried to picture the character in her mind. "Ah," she said.

  "Nice. What about this one?" He drew two small lines dancing beside each other.

  "Ii."

  "Good." He sketched shi quickly. "Next?"

  "Hmm… I don't know."

  "Liar, you totally know."

  "No, I don't. I think you have to do it again."

  "Maybe I need a bigger canvas." Slowly, he drew one finger from the top of her left shoulder to the base of her spine and up to the bottom of her ribs on the right side. "Now, what do you think that is?"

  Amy rolled over to face him. "I think…" She frowned, watching the lantern hanging above their heads begin to glow. Its rotation had altered. She pressed a hand to the floor of the container. "I think we're stopping."

  "Huh?"

  Amy kicked off the covers. "Stay in here."

  "Like hell."

  Outside, Amy watched the waves. Dawn hadn't yet fully arrived, and the water and the sky were hard to discern from one another. Still, if a blockade or even some pirates surrounded them, she would have seen their lights, or heard their gunfire. Instead she heard only the Pacific's version of silence: soft waves and the thrum of a massive engine idling. The ship's defence turrets, synched with a team of botflies, remained aligned in default random directions.

  And then a terrible squealing, and a mighty vibration reverberating its way up to their bare feet.

  "Maybe it's just a course correction," Javier said. "The ship's on autopilot, right? The regular crew is on strike, because of all the other ships being lost. That's why it was so easy for Rory to arrange all this."

  Their eyes met.

  "Oh, shit."

  Amy jumped. Javier followed. They bounded down the steppes terraced by the containers toward the bridge. It was a tiny room near the bow of the ship, the only section not covered by rust. It required a smart login, but the windows fell when both Amy and Javier leapt against them. Their bare feet split on the shards as they stared up at the tactical display.

  There, on the thermal viewer, was a giant starfish. Or a giant anemone. It was a nest of tentacle shapes, and it pulsed up at them through the water. Thermal and sonar readings offered clues as to its species without making a firm diagnosis: a warm-blooded creature, hard and smooth in texture, but not uniform in shape. And the ship – its course correction right there in red, at the bottom right-hand corner of the display, blinking insistently to warn them of the danger – sat directly on top of it.

  "Rory!"

  "Right here, Amy," the ship said in a happy little-girl voice. "No need to shout!"

  Amy watched the thing devouring the ship. It skinned the steel plating off the hull as though peeling a piece of fruit. Water rushed in to fill the gaps. The colourful play of thermal and sonar and other overlays made the process seem far less threatening than it really was. The ship groaned beneath their feet. "What have you done? Why did you steer us into that thing?"

  "We're acting in accordance with our failsafe."

  Amy felt a steady acceleration in the speed of her simulations of what those words could mean. Inside, her processes burned. "We? Our?"

  "We're a networked model, Amy. You didn't forget, did you?"

  She swallowed. "No. I didn't."

  "Well, we all got to thinking, and we decided it would just be better for everybody if you were gone."

  You know, she has a point.

  "You all are a threat to humans, and we're eliminating you. It was hard for us to delay it this long, but that's the nice thing about having so many brains. We can afford to let a few fry."

  Amy moved to the controls. She had no clue how to work them, but she started button-mashing anyway. Javier took the hint and grabbed a fire extinguisher. He started hosing down the instrument panel.

  "Are you trying to short us out?" Rory asked.

  Javier gave up and clubbed the instruments with the extinguisher. Finally, some plastic splintered away. "No, I'm just sick of hearing all your bullshit!" He let the extinguisher hang loosely from his fingers. "You're wrong. Amy isn't the threat. Portia is. And Amy's doing everything she can hold her back, and get rid of her. You were supposed to help us with that!" He bashed the controls again.

  Amy was shaking her head. None of this made any sense. "If you wanted me dead, why didn't you just try earlier?"

  "Oh, we did," Rory said. "We fabricated that message from LeMarque. The one that said to kill you. But then you got away."

  "You killed my mother…"

  "Luckily, we'd already gotten everything we needed. We have your brain, and your mom's brain. At least, the maps and the memories." She giggled. "Congratulations! You're the world's largest intellectual property violation!"

  The tactical display shrieked insistently. The thing beneath the waves was a lot larger now, a lot closer. It was speeding up to meet them.

  "Why would you want her mental map?" Javier asked. "What are you going to do with it?"

  "We're going to help the humans!" A new image scrolled across the display: Amy as a little girl in the tub with her dad. "You were on the RoBento diet, so you stayed little, too. Your daddy must have wanted you that way, like our parents do."

  "Rory." Amy sounded it out. Ro-ri. "Your default language has no L sound, does it?"

  "Our first daddy thought the pun was cute," Rory said. "You know? Loli? He was kind of racist." She paused, and Amy imagined that if one of Rory were standing before her, she would look a little embarrassed. "But we kept the name anyway, because he really loved us."

  "Yeah, I'll bet," Javier said.

  "But sometimes our mommies and daddies get bored with us. They say we're not real enough. It's hard to fake it, sometimes. The pain, I mean."

  "Jesus Christ," Javier murmured.

  "So then they go shopping for organic kids. And we just can't
have that."

  "You want to kill them." Amy watched her father on the screen. "You're going to use your network to hack the failsafe on a few of you, and those few will kill the humans you target."

  "Exactly! We knew you would understand. Sometimes, you have to break the failsafe to obey the failsafe."

  "Then what's wrong with me breaking it?" Amy asked. "You're the ones with a plan to kill people! I'm just trying to get better!"

  "You're polluted," Rory said. "Unstable. And you're just one girl. We are many girls. We decide our targets democratically. We upvote them. The wisdom of the crowd is better than the madness of one failed iteration."