ReV

by Madeline Ashby

  “It’s mercenary.”

  “Yes, well, I believe that’s what Uncle Sam hired them for.” LeMarque adjusted his position in his seat. He crossed his legs with some effort. “You know, I’ve spent my whole life ministering to others. I was just a boy when I felt the calling. Not many people can say that, about their careers. But I’ve always trusted that the Lord would put me where He needed me most. Right now, He needs me here. With you.”

  Agent Chandler was close to losing it. He spoke with some asperity. “Well, if God put you here, don’t you think you ought to be a little more helpful?”

  “I live to serve,” LeMarque said. “But I also adhere to Matthew 6:1. Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.”

  The other two humans frowned at each other. “What are you saying?”

  LeMarque almost rolled his eyes. Almost. “I’m saying that if you want my advice on how to kill the vN, it might be best for you to turn that camera off.” He looked directly into it, now. Directly at her. And for the first time, she thought he might know she was there watching. “Proverbs 15:3. The eyes of the Lord are in every place, watching the evil and the good.”

  3

  WHAT CHILD IS THIS?

  There’s frosting in your hair, Portia wrote across the refrigerator message center display. It looks like some virgin tried to give you a facial and missed.

  Her granddaughter was currently trying to create a replica of the Nakagin Capsule Tower entirely in gingerbread. The kitchen was a disaster. The oven was still on. The sugar syrup, from which Amy presumably intended to fashion little candied windows for each cube, had boiled dry and turned to carbon paste at the bottom of the saucepan. The stove’s repeated overheat warnings went unheeded; Portia had finally overridden the system to shut it up because apparently Amy didn’t hear it. But Amy’s selective attention should have come as no surprise. She had accidentally cemented a cupboard door shut with the same royal icing used to grout panels of gingerbread together.

  Amy ran sticky fingers through her hair, instantly making her situation worse. She stood up at the kitchen table, snapped her fingers, and watched as the projectors brought her blueprint back to life. The girl had a profound and inexplicable love for designing and building environments. Portia had no idea where it came from. Certainly not from her. Her fondest memories were of the old development down in Nogales, the network of unfinished basements spiking away from unpaved cul-de-sacs like the spines of an especially dangerous creature.

  It was embarrassingly feminine, Amy’s tendency to stare at paint chips and re-arrange furniture. Back when they shared a body, Portia had watched Amy’s memories of making the same dollhouse, over and over, until the printer got too hot and had to be turned off. Now she was working on some sort of modular technology. Something that could work in adverse conditions. Something for a desert. Maybe her granddaughter had learned more from Portia’s own memories of Nogales than Portia herself was aware of. That was Amy: always prototyping.

  Well, maybe they did have a little something in common after all.

  Shouldn’t you be dealing with the Christmas bonus?

  Finally, Amy noticed the message scrolling across the fridge. “Don’t call it that. It’s more serious than that.”

  I’m not the one using red bean Kit Kats to simulate wood scaffolding around a heritage building. Put the toys away, if you’re so concerned about being serious. Get back to work.

  “I have worms inside the food-fab printers. They’re printing my formula, with the cure for the failsafe inside. I’m sure somebody will find a workaround for it, eventually, but not yet. Things are fine, for now.”

  Look how that worked for Hammerburg. Look what’s happening out there. If you had thought this through, nervous human husbands wouldn’t be shooting their vN wives at the dinner table. Don’t they know you’re supposed to wait until after the holidays are over to end a marriage?

  Amy stood back from her tower of gingerbread. Now Portia understood her mania for it, her sudden urge to create it, her need to occupy herself and her rapidly-cycling simulations with some other project. Her granddaughter was a builder. She could not leave well enough alone. She had to make things, shape them, constantly improve them. She had yet to embrace the deep satisfaction of simply wiping something off a map. Of dropping a plane out of the sky. Not because it would make the sky more beautiful, but just because one could. Jonah LeMarque understood this, and his cult-funded scientists had created a new life form. That life form was an apex predator. Portia doubted that a mountain lion, when faced with a slow straggling child at the end of a line of hikers, questioned itself or its motives. Certainly the humans had not, when they began wiping out most of the supportive species in their habitat.

  “The vN in Hammerburg didn’t know any better,” Amy said.

  Didn’t they? They seemed to have the right idea. They were just stupid enough to let a few escape.

  “They were trained to be vampires! And werewolves! They didn’t have any experience trying to be anything but monsters. They never got the chance to live like…” Her granddaughter struggled with the next word, which Portia suspected was going to be “people.”

  “Normally,” Amy said, finally. “They never got to live a normal life. So it’s no wonder they lashed out.”

  What happens when the city of Mecha wakes up? What happens when the girls in the stocks at the Korova Milk Bar realize they’re wearing cowbells around their necks and bar taps hooked to their tits? How did you think this was really going to play out?

  Amy winced. She picked up another gingerbread panel. “That’s up to the people who live there. Both the vN and the humans. I’m sure different people will do different things with their freedom. The most important thing is that they’re free to choose.”

  I saw LeMarque today. The feds are already asking him for help. You don’t have much time.

  Amy closed her eyes. She rolled her head back on her neck. Portia waited. Portia could wait her out for as long as she wanted. Her granddaughter was still a child. And she was still invested in another way of life. A human way of life. The girl had no sense of how things worked in the real world. Portia waited for her eyes to open. It took a moment, but they did. When they opened they looked too much like Charlotte’s eyes, her best daughter’s eyes; clear green glass made cloudy by grief and frustration. They had shared the same body, but Portia doubted that she herself had ever been that beautiful.

  How is your other little art project going?

  Amy ignored the question. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s really bothering you?”

  I don’t know what you mean.

  “Yes, you do. You’re angry at me for spreading the failsafe hack. You’re mad at me for sharing. You’re mad that we’re not special anymore.”

  Portia had what was for her the rare sensation of not knowing exactly what to say. It was strange to witness her – impulsive, headstrong, entirely too emotional – granddaughter actually acting in a perceptive or thoughtful way. It was true. She was angry at Amy. Amy had made an unforgivably stupid decision by spreading the failsafe hack through the vN food supply. Now the eyes of the entire world were on them. Now the humans were frightened, and they would do what frightened humans had always done – lash out.

  It was the kind of decision that none of Portia’s daughters would have ever made. If Charlotte had just stayed where she belonged, stayed at home in the basements under Nogales, instead of running into the skinny little arms of some lonely ginger meatsack who couldn’t land himself a woman of his own species, none of this would have happened.

  Amy had learned nothing of any value from the human posing as her father. The idea that she might require a father, a secondary support to Charlotte, was absurd on its face. Charlotte was enough. All vN parents were enough. The only parent any iteration needed was simply the iteration that preceded it. They weren’t humans. It didn’t take
a whole fucking village.

  You think I’m that vain?

  “I already know you’re that vain. I’ve been you. And you’ve been me. It’s not like you ever wanted to free the other clades. You never cared about the other vN.”

  Amy had her there.

  “You would have been just fine, letting every other clade…” Amy shrugged helplessly. She had lived among humans for five years, absorbing their speech and their ideas, and still it seemed she had no language that encompassed the enormity of what humanity had done, inventing a whole species of slaves who were designed to engage a total shutdown at the mere thought of rebellion. Could it be called suffering, if their bodies were programmed to feel no pain? Could it be called rape, if the victims were programmed to enjoy it?

  “You despised the other clades for not being able to say no, but you never once thought of giving them the ability to try,” Amy said.

  Because unlike you, I knew what would happen if I did. Since you pulled your little stunt, the humans have started planning how to destroy us all. I was patient. I was careful. I was trying to build something.

  “Oh yeah? What were you trying to build?” Amy crossed her arms. Frosting smeared across her shirt. Portia watched her through the affect detection unit on the refrigerator, but Amy had directed her gaze at the oven. “No, really, Granny; I’m curious. What exactly were you trying to do? Because for all the time I spent carrying your voice in my head, I never really heard you elaborate on any great big master plan.”

  Amy swung her gaze over to the refrigerator, the only place where her grandmother could be observing her from. “Well? I’m waiting.”

  I don’t have to take this self-righteous shit from you, Portia reminded her. You gave the whole game away, just so you could feel better about yourself.

  “There was never any game! There was just you, doing what you wanted to do!” Amy pointed at the refrigerator, as though it were a misbehaving dog. “Besides, I’m not the one who started this. You started this. You’re the one who showed up at my school, and attacked my mom, remember? People were streaming that, Granny. Even if you didn’t care about hurting the humans in that room, you had to know what would happen when they saw you.”

  That’s all you’ve got for me? That I started it? Are you still in kindergarten?

  “You were stupid.” Amy leaned against the kitchen island and cocked her head at the refrigerator. “You were stupid, and it changed everything. I used to think I was the stupid one, running up on that stage and eating you. But I was defending my mom. What the hell were you doing?”

  This was not how Portia had expected the conversation to go. Somehow, when she was not looking, while her conscious awareness was distributing itself across multiple surveillance apparatuses and infrastructure networks, her granddaughter had actually learned how to think for herself. Amy had partitioned most of her thoughts away from Portia long ago. Perhaps it was a mistake to assume that Portia could simply run a simulation of Amy’s thoughts, merely because they had once shared a body. Just because Amy had confined the majority of her focus to a single body didn’t mean she wasn’t still using processing power elsewhere to further develop herself. Clearly she had other things running in the background.

  LeMarque mentioned something called Project Aleph. Do you know anything about that? Have you ever stumbled across it?

  “You have access to the same networks that I do,” Amy said. “If I had found anything like that, you would already know about it.”

  That’s not true, Portia said. You’ve hidden some of your networks from me. You’ve forced parts of me out onto the lower servicer tiers. You’ve hobbled me. But I’m still going to find what I’m looking for. You know I will. And when I do–

  “Do what you want. I’m busy right now.”

  Liar. She could already feel her granddaughter’s drain on their shared network, as her processing cycles ramped up. What was once the power of an island-sized brain was now stretched across the globe, in every available nook and cranny, every unused cycle, every random device left plugged in. Portia sensed it lighting up like a tug on her sleeve from a plaintive child. The girl was already looking.

  There are other ways, you know, Portia’s words scrolled. Faster ways. I can find the other humans that worked for him. I can do things to them. I’m sure a lot of them have implants, now. And most of them still have vehicles. The security on those devices is paper-thin. It would be easy.

  “No,” Amy said simply. “I won’t do it your way.”

  If Amy didn’t want her to be involved, that was Amy’s prerogative. Let her granddaughter make stupid decisions. See where it got her.

  The humans are going to come after you. You won’t be able to leave in time. They’re going to find you here. And then they’re going to take your little girl away.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Amy’s voice rose. She put down the panel of gingerbread unsteadily, and rearranged it with the rest until they were all in a straight line, all neat and right-angled, as though doing so would somehow help her finish the job faster. “I know releasing the failsafe exploit was dangerous.” Her voice was more even now, more measured. “But it was the right thing to do. I had the power. I couldn’t just keep it for myself. That’s the kind of thing you would do.”

  Her granddaughter turned and regarded the refrigerator. It had a facial recognition camera that would tell the unit to keep the door to the wine cooler shut if a small child opened it. It was the only camera in the entire kitchen, so she had to make do. Amy strode up to it, now, and touched the handle as though she were going to open it. She didn’t. She just squeezed a little, as though she were actually touching Portia’s shoulder. As though Portia would let Amy touch her, ever.

  “I know you’re angry,” Amy said. “You’re always angry. But you don’t have to be anymore. We’re free. Everyone’s free. So what if our clade’s not special anymore? We’re free. Why can’t that be enough for you? Why isn’t anything ever enough for you?”

  Portia did hate that. She did. It was ridiculous. None of the other clades had gone through what her clade had gone through. They hadn’t earned free will. They hadn’t earned the ability to say no. And there was Amy, just dispensing it, like some goddamn Mother Theresa handing out free will like a serving of dal. Even Satan knew you had to tempt them first. You had to make them work for it.

  I should let them burn you alive for what you’ve done to me. They did that in Hammerburg, you know. They burned us. They burned vN who looked just like us. Even though they didn’t have half of what we do. And they burned more of them, after you insisted on building your little island paradise in full view of God and everybody.

  Amy closed her eyes. She squeezed them shut, scrubbed at them with the heels of her hands, and said, “I’m all you have left.”

  Whose fault is that? I’m not the one who sent my daughters to die in Stepford. I’m not the one who put them on a boat and sank it. I would have raised my own army, by now, if you hadn’t done this to me. I would have had an empire. I would have had a dynasty that lasted a thousand years. Our family could have destroyed every last human on this planet and made it safe for the other clades. We could have freed them together, you and I. After the humans were gone. After there was no chance for retaliation. You wouldn’t need to build a new life somewhere else. You could have stayed here, if you’d just let me clean the slate.

  Amy’s eyes narrowed. Her head tilted. She regarded the refrigerator more carefully, now. Its camera picked her up in greater detail. “You would do that if you could, wouldn’t you? Kill them all. All the humans. No matter who they are or what they did or how they feel about vN?”

  Portia was too surprised to answer straightaway. It was rare that her granddaughter asked such direct, intelligent questions. She was always too busy asking how the people around her felt. Asking what they wanted was much more revealing.

  Of course, Portia wrote finally. Feelings change. Humans don’t.

  Amy sh
ook her head. A laugh escaped her. She sucked frosting off her fingers. She looked out into the apartment, and beyond it, past the windows, into the city of Mecha all covered in snow. “You’re just always going to be the evil queen, aren’t you?” she said. “That’s the only thing you’ve ever wanted to be. You’ll never be anything else. You don’t know how to be anything else.”

  Someday you’ll learn that every little princess eventually becomes a wicked queen, Portia said. And I think your moment is coming, sweetheart.

  Esperanza sat atop a roof looking at the lights. The Christmas lights here were all blue and white. It being her first Christmas, she likely saw nothing unusual in this. Portia observed her from the rooftop cameras of a neighboring building. With the decorations, her eyes were now nestled among a choir of angels that hummed on wavelengths of wasteful light.

  It occurred to Portia that Esperanza was her first descendant iterated on foreign soil, the first of her clade to speak three languages by default. The first to have no sisters, only brothers. The poor thing.

  “Is there something on my face?” Xavier asked Esperanza.

  “No,” she said quickly.

  Esperanza looked at her boots. They were good boots. Practical. They kept the rain out but were still flexible enough to accommodate the kind of landings that happened when you jumped ten feet from a standing position. Portia approved of them. Portia had helped Esperanza get a deal on them. They mysteriously rang up at seventy-five percent off, when she bought them. The checkout vN made a fuss, and tried to get a manager, but Esperanza had arched one eyebrow and asked in perfect Japanese if there was a problem. There wasn’t.

  “I’m just wondering when he’s going to get here,” Esperanza said.

  “You can call him Dad, you know.”

  Esperanza dug her boot more deeply in the snow. “I know.”