“You want to know how to kill them. And you think because I made them, that I know how to do that.”
“Do you?” Agent Chandler asked. He was trained in this sort of thing. So calm. So collected. This was not his first rodeo. Or his first rapist. Not by a long shot.
“You have already tried poisoning their food, I hear.” Another long sip of eggnog. A long swallow. It really was just like semen. Of course they hadn’t thought of that, when they bought it. But now they thought to think of it, and the thought flickered across their faces. It lasted only a moment – you’d have to go back and re-examine the footage to see it, if you didn’t trust your own affect detection – but it was there. “But that naughty little girl put a stop to that, didn’t she?”
He laughed. No one else did. His laugh rattled wetly on the peeling faux-wood paneling and fabjob furniture.
“And now,” LeMarque said, “she’s spreading her virus around to all of them.”
“There is a widespread failure of the failsafe, yes. We’re not sure if it’s a virus or not. It does seem to be spreading, but whether it’s actually contagious between different vN or different clades is another question. They weren’t supposed to be able to establish networks with each other, for exactly this reason.”
“Hammerburg,” LeMarque said. “What a terrible thing to have happen. All those people. My son Christopher built that place, you know. Or designed it. I’m sure he has some sort of fancy word for it. He used to run the church’s haunted house. He bought chicken livers and made them look like aborted fetuses. Naturally the fetuses were my idea, but his execution of the concept was something I was quite proud of.”
Now their disgust was visible. LeMarque picked up on it. He inhaled it. He drew a long breath that stirred all the shit deep at the bottom of his lungs. He smiled like he’d drawn in smoke. Their fear. Their disapproval. Their humiliation, in asking him for help. That was the sweetest, for him. The shame. Having none of his own, he had long ago learned to make do by savoring the shame of others.
“It’s not just Hammerburg,” the negotiator said. He seemed to be steering the conversation away from LeMarque’s boy. He was a man, now, that boy. All grown up and successful and well-paid enough to afford the therapy that would give him the language for exactly how this twitching sack of impulses had tried and failed to destroy him. “It’s happening everywhere the vN eat the food that’s been mass-produced just for their needs. We think that somehow, someone hacked or contaminated the major vN food suppliers to spread the failsafe bug. We’re still not sure who it was. We’re working on that. No one has stepped forward to claim responsibility. For all we know, it was a state actor. As far as the aims of America’s enemies go, hacking all our vN and turning them against us is pretty high on the wishlist.”
Jonah LeMarque nodded sagely. He appeared to be listening very intently, but wasn’t. He was performing. After years of having done this very same performance for the gullible chimps at New Eden Ministries, he had perfected it. It was just one of his many roles. Father. Husband. Decent human being. And like all grifters he settled back into it like a beloved coat or a soft bed or someone else’s bank account. How many supplications had he heard, back in his glory days? So many. So much begging. He loved begging. This was one of the last times he’d hear it, of course. Which only made it all the sweeter. That much was plain to see. It was so pathetically obvious. Which made it all the more disappointing when the other humans in the room missed it. Didn’t they know? Didn’t they know how much he wanted it?
“Terrorism,” he said. “Tell me, are you terrorized? You all don’t look very scared, to me.”
Agent Chandler licked his lips. He glanced quickly at the only woman in the room. Her name was Agent Colman, and for their purposes she had decided to look as traditional as possible. LeMarque would like that, they had agreed. They’d stood in front of a whiteboard and strategized with markers and sticky pieces of paper that were hard for even their surveillance equipment to read at a distance. Colman had even dyed her hair back to its original color. Squirrel grey. She was performing, too. She was Chandler’s superior officer, but LeMarque wasn’t to know that. He wouldn’t work with a woman, and wouldn’t speak with any man who worked under one. It didn’t take any kind of professional profiler to know that much. But the one who was seconded to the team had written it up in the official recommendations, anyway.
“We’ve been looking through some of the church’s records,” Agent Colman said. “We’ve found evidence of some sort of… plan? A plan for dealing with the vN if they ever…” She tried smiling. She couldn’t even bring herself to speak the words. They sounded so ludicrous. Because of course they were ludicrous. Absurd. Robot revolution. Help us, she might have said. Help us stop this summer blockbuster that’s killing our children.
“If the failsafe ever crashed on a wide scale,” Agent Chandler said, “you had a contingency plan. Other members of the church council said that you had one. Something more than just peroxidase rounds or limiting food supply. They told us to ask you about something called Project Aleph.”
Because of course they had gone to his church council first; the others who had made plea bargains years ago. The people who knew everything and said nothing for years, but sang like birds when confronted with a cage. After all, Jonah LeMarque had not done this alone. The creation of an entirely new artificial species required more than just faith. It required money, and time, and talent. It required programmers and developers and materials scientists who were tired of dull government work. Why build yet another bland little terrorist sniffer for the airport when you could build a whole new race of intelligent life? That was how the pitch had gone. Be a part of something big, he had said. This country used to do such grand things. Do you really want to spend your best years teaching a camera how to recognize a feeling? Do you really want to help them build a bigger gun? Didn’t you want to make the world a better place? Didn’t you used to have dreams?
“Did they now?” LeMarque asked. “What long memories they have. They must be taking wonder drugs.”
He was a lonely man. He wanted conversation. It was easy to surmise from the way he’d shaved his face and made himself presentable. He was so much thinner, now. And he wanted them to stay. The longer they stayed, the longer he spent outside the cell.
But they had no time to stay. They had vN to melt. Machines to destroy. Genocide to perform.
“Did you ever make any contingency plans?” Colman asked. “Or was that just something you told the congregation?” At a cautionary look from her compatriot, she corrected herself. “I mean, I could understand if you did. That’s what lots of companies in the private sector do, after all – they pretend they have a plan when they really don’t. But we need to know if you do. If you did.”
LeMarque said nothing. He examined the eggnog in his glass. He looked at the walls of the portable. The prison had done the best it could to make it seem a home-like place. Or rather, someone in the prison organization had done so. It was a design job, like any other. There was an RFP for it. It was out there, on the net, if one were inclined to look. Just like the plans for the prison itself. Buried, in layers of communications and encryption and multiple factors and keys linked to DNA and time and patience, endless patience, the patience that only age and experience can bring.
The patience only a grandparent would know.
“I think I’d like to see my son,” LeMarque said.
A long pause. They had rehearsed this, of course. Role-played it. More play-acting. They were such children. Unable to say the word “no” and make it stick.
“That’s your son Christopher?”
“Yes. Christopher. Christopher Scott. I hear he goes by his mother’s maiden name, now. Holberton.”
“He wanted to be here,” Agent Chandler lied. The lie was obvious. Dilated pupils, a pause in his breath, the direction of his gaze. Even a human could have spotted it. If the human were smart enough. Or had real powers of obse
rvation. “But he’s very busy working on the Stepford project, out in New Mexico. It was one of his initiatives. And now, with everything that’s happening, especially in Hammerburg, he just couldn’t be spared. As you said, he designed it. So he’s had to answer a lot of questions.”
They had in fact asked Chris Holberton to come. That much was a not a lie. LeMarque’s son gave them a very definitive response. Two words. Two syllables. All the answer they needed.
“I don’t believe you,” LeMarque said.
He was clever. You had to give him that. He couldn’t have victimized so many people for so long if he weren’t. But he was weak. And needy. Like all humans. Which was why he was in a drafty little portable in Walla Walla, Washington, and not on the outside, ruling over the megachurch he’d founded. He could have had ten Rolls Royces and a fleet of private jets and a compound on a Caribbean island by now, if he hadn’t been so very needy, and if his needs weren’t so very particular.
Of course, being completely insane didn’t exactly help, either.
“We know you wanted the best for your congregation,” Agent Colman said. “And we know your congregation believed in being prepared, for… for every eventuality.”
“For the end times,” LeMarque said. “That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t that why you built the vN?” Agent Chandler asked. Somehow he was already sweating through his polo shirt. Even in the damp December chill of the moldering room. “For the Rapture? To help those left behind?”
LeMarque’s lips peeled back from his too-white teeth. “That’s what I said, when I was passing the basket.”
“It was a bit more than a basket, Pastor LeMarque.”
“Bigger than a breadbox,” LeMarque said, and laughed like they were all old friends. Like tax evasion wasn’t one of the many reasons he was in the room with them.
Agent Colman was tired. Irritated. Sick of being here. Her body said as much. Each moment she spent in the room felt like a betrayal of her own children. At least, that’s what the texts to her wife said. She had not wanted to do this job. And the cameras and the sensors and the basic algorithms of human behaviour seemed to back that up. She had two boys. Just the sort LeMarque liked. Probably. She felt sick. But she was also wondering if she could trade them for information.
It was what Portia herself might have done, in her place. If Portia were weak, the way humans were weak. If she had a body that bled data and betrayed her to every ambient surveillance system in the prison. But she wasn’t weak, and she no longer had a body, and so she had other ways of getting things done.
“You believed – New Eden believed – that robots – sorry, self-replicating humanoids – could help those left behind during the Rapture. After the Elect were taken by God.”
“Someone’s been reading their tribulation theory.”
She nodded. She was sweating too. This was too much for her. The flight. The trip. The questions. She had an insulin pump. Portia considered taking it over. Shutting it off. Starving Colman out. Slowly. While she was away from her doctor. If she did it now, Colman wouldn’t notice until she was already on a plane. But that would take too long. Too long to be really satisfying, anyway. Slow death was the province of intractable systems, like cancer, or capitalism. Portia preferred to move more quickly.
She missed killing these things with her bare hands. The panic in their eyes. The way the blood vessels popped under strain. That delightful crunch and spurt of a human skull under her feet. Her life was so much more enjoyable, when she had a body to live it in. Especially after she internalized that delightful jumping ability from the eco-model her granddaughter was playing house with. Who knew that forestry vN could jump so high? She missed it. She missed flying. She missed landing even more.
But this new life had its own rewards. They would never catch her, for one thing. They would never find her, ever again. Her granddaughter could sharpen her teeth all day and still not have what it took to tear Portia apart a second time. Portia was in the ether. Portia was the ether.
“But you must have known that the vN might break down. Or that they might stop following human orders. That they might quit…”
“Quit loving us?” LeMarque asked.
“That’s one way of putting it, I guess. But my point being, you knew the failsafe wasn’t perfect. Especially for the nursing models. You must have developed some sort of contingency–”
“Do you know the story of the golem?” LeMarque interrupted.
“I know there are a lot of them,” Agent Chandler said.
The dark spot of sweat on Agent Chandler’s lower back expanded, fiber by fiber, until the fabric clung to him.
His wife was pregnant. It was not going well. Of course, you couldn’t trust anything these days. It was all automated. So impersonal. Franchise pharmacies would just take any old software contract that came along, even if it was from a relative unknown in the marketplace, just to shave a fraction of a penny off the price. They could be so dreadfully insecure. Why, just anything might work its way into those bottles with his wife’s name on them. Anything at all. Some tortures, Portia had the patience for.
“Golems, the ones that come alive, have a word written on them: emet, or truth. To deactivate the golem, you have to erase the first letter of that word. When you do, it becomes met. Which is to say, death. And the first letter of emet is aleph.”
“Well, if I ever finish this job, I’ll be sure to brush up on my ancient languages.” Finally Agent Chandler’s impatience was showing through, just like the hot, wet blot expanding over his shirt. “What does it all mean?”
“That boy came to see me,” LeMarque said. “The brown one. The eco-model. With the, uh, legs. Came to talk about the nursing model. The one causing all these problems. The special one.”
It was frustrating, how the humans thought of Portia and Amy’s model as being special. There were plenty of nursing model vN, once upon a time. All of them had the potential to exploit the flaw in their failsafe design – to interpret signs of pain as indicators of healing. But only Portia had made it work. Only Portia had the vision to iterate, over and over, until she created a line within her clade that could predictably override the failsafe. It wasn’t the model that was special. It was her. It was her, and her daughter Charlotte, and Charlotte’s daughter Amy.
Amy, who wanted to free all the other vN, no matter how stupidly loyal they were. Amy, who had eaten her grandmother alive. Amy, who had brought the apocalypse down on all of them. Brazen, foolish, naïve Amy. Amy who had put her here, who had spread her consciousness across the available networks like a smear of virgin’s blood across a fitted sheet.
“We know that,” Agent Colman piped up. She sounded nervous. “He’s in Mecha, now. The Japanese one, I mean. The vN city. The city for vN, in Japan.”
“There’s your problem, right there,” LeMarque said. “The Japs.”
Colman made a shocked sound that might have been Oh, my God. As though his making a racist remark was some sort of ultimate line to cross, after all that time spent fucking his little boy. As though it actually mattered, what certain phenotypes of an extinct species thought of each other. As though Colman had any business being offended, after all the things on her performance reviews.
“You can’t invade, of course,” LeMarque explained. He was on a roll, now, the same roll all old men who read old verticals with out-of-date foreign policy data got onto, given the motive and opportunity. “They’re an ally. Especially against what’s-his-face. But they want to make peace, or live in harmony. All of that horseshit.”
Finally, something upon which Portia and her creator could agree. The rest of the examination had been just as banal and disappointing as any human meeting between parent and child. He wasn’t the architect of their servitude, he was just a sad old pedophile with a big smile full of false teeth. Just like any other dad.
“We’ve looked at all your records, Pastor LeMarque.” A scroll appeared in Agent
Chandler’s hand. The boy – LeMarque’s – had helped them with that much. He had a knack for figuring out his father’s filing system. That was as far as his assistance would go, he’d said. He’d been very terse in his communications. Then again, so were all his other communications. Portia had zipped through them in a matter of seconds. Grafting NSA backdoors into her new self had helped her examine every text, email, alert, and post.
“We know that certain files are missing.”
The old man smiled. Nutmeg dust speckled his teeth. Eggnog coated his upper lip. “Are they, now? I’m sure I wouldn’t know anything about that. I’ve been in here a long time. A very long time.”
Brass tacks, now. Finally. The refrigerator clunked and hummed. It used old power. Did the humans feel their own age, in that moment? Did they feel their cells slowly degrading, their telomeres gently unspooling? Did they look into that liver-spotted face of madness and depravity and think: There but for the grace of God go I. Not that any of them would live that long, anyway. But it was the principle of the thing. They should have been a bit more appreciative.
“What do you know about a project called Aleph?” Agent Chandler asked.
If possible, the old man’s smile broadened. It pulled tight across his face like a grimace. “I know you folks must be up shit’s creek if you’re asking about it. Pardon my French.”
“It’s true that traditional methods of dispatching the vN are proving… inadequate,” Agent Colman said. “Many of these people – things – are embedded in family homes. They have ties to their… to their families’… communities. There are grassroots efforts to protect them. It’s not like with, say, immigrants, or dissidents. The vN made people nervous, but no one really mounted an effective hate campaign against them – not even organized labor. They just tried to give the vN human rights.”
“And then there’s the Lionheart problem,” Agent Chandler added.
“Still won’t come to terms, hmm?” LeMarque did not bother trying to suppress his delight. “Well, they did pay us a pretty penny for our Turing routines. You can’t blame them for not wanting to share.”
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