“It’s very interesting, having a sister,” said the other one. Gabriel, Portia thought he was called. “No other clade can claim that, can they?”
“She was my sister, first,” Xavier said. “Zaza, come here. Help me with the star.”
You’d better watch out for those two, Portia said.
“Had I better not cry?” Amy asked. “Better not pout? You’re telling me why?”
Fine. Ignore me. But soon this is all going to go up in flames, and–
“And I’ll be happy I had this time with them, Granny. I’ll be happy we had this one holiday together. Before it all went up in flames.”
“Querida, come here! I’m too big to hang from the rafters.”
They both directed their attention to Javier, Amy with her eyes and Portia via the sensors in the flat. He was in the living room, with his iterations and Amy’s own. The last of the line; the beginning of another. He was so round, now. His next child would be upon them any moment. And yet he was smiling. As though he wasn’t about to deliver another iteration into a world on the verge of shattering.
“I want to keep this,” Amy said. “Help me keep my family. You’ve taken enough from me, Granny. Let me keep this one thing, and I’ll…”
You’ll what?
Amy remained silent for a little too long. Portia could almost hear her deliberating. “I’ll give you a body, when we get to Mars. I know you want to see it. I know you want to live on a planet that’s just for us. That’s something we can share, if we can work toward it together instead of fighting all the time.”
Finally, they were talking about it. Her granddaughter’s real escape route. The next impossible task that Amy had set herself. Her ultimate dollhouse. Her first real planned community. If she could colonize the planet before the humans did, she would have claimed the god of war in the name of peace. And if the humans followed the vN there, well: Portia would be there, too.
Portia simply had no idea how her granddaughter hoped to get there. Or when. Or where the resources would come from. And Amy wasn’t telling. Like their creator, she had her own contingency plans. And she had hidden them from Portia with equal craftiness. With Amy there was love, but not trust. That was another thing they had in common.
“I want Mars to be a fresh start for us,” Amy said. “All of us. All the vN. Without the humans there, we won’t have to define ourselves against them. We won’t be comparing ourselves to them. How we were created won’t matter anymore. We can forgive ourselves. And each other.”
If Portia still possessed hands, she might have slapped her. As it was, she turned the fireplace in the living room off completely and dropped the household thermostat ten degrees. In Los Angeles, she guided an allegedly-autonomous vehicle making a left turn across three lanes of traffic and stopped it there in time to create a four-car pileup. Then she made sure to cripple the nearest ambulance with a recurring error message about the safety of its battery. She did these things in the fraction of a second it took her to think of them.
Forgive each other? You’ll forgive me? For what? Keeping you alive, in that junkyard? Keeping you alive, in Redmond? Keeping your lover alive? Watching over your daughter when you couldn’t? What exactly did I do that was so very awful?
“You know exactly what,” Amy said, and her face closed. She looked less like Charlotte had before she left and more like her that day at kindergarten graduation. How strange, to have the memory of that day from two sets of eyes, now. To see it the way Amy had seen it, hidden away up high in her useless human daddy’s arms, and also to see it from the vantage point Portia herself had chosen. On the stage. Ready to act. Ready to take back what had always been hers. Ready to do what needed to be done, even if it was ugly.
Portia had merely wanted her baby to come home. And now Amy might finally have some inkling of exactly what that meant. Of what it meant she needed to do. When you were pushed far enough. When you knew, in the blooming black coral where your memory lived under gleaming titanium bone, in the frothy aerogel current that was your muscle, that your love for someone would inevitably result in the death of someone else.
Then again, perhaps Amy had always known that, deep down. After all, the little monster had eaten her alive. Portia had that memory, too. And she knew that Amy held it, as well: somewhere, deep in the memory banks she’d smeared across their networks, possibly buried in a server farm miles beneath the waves where it was still cold enough to preserve painful moments, Amy knew what she’d looked like as she opened her mouth to suck Portia in. She had smelled her own acrid breath. Smelled the years of hunger that allowed her to unhinge her jaw, a serpent devouring its own tail.
Her granddaughter had always been resourceful. What she had never been was comfortable with what being resourceful actually meant. They were facing a very real threat in the form of LeMarque’s contingency plan. If it were enacted before Amy and her daughter had a chance to escape, the entire line might fail.
Were you about to ask for my help? Because I can help you. You know I can help you. I can help you make LeMarque give it up. The plan. I can make him tell us what it is. I can help you get ready.
Amy made a motion with her shoulders that in a human body would have registered as a sigh. “I don’t want to focus on that right now.”
Portia herself focused on Kuala Lumpur, where she directed an allegedly-autonomous bus full of tourists off a bridge. She paused long enough to see through the onboard camera watching them scream and flail and cover their faces. She watched their heads snap forward and back, their hair briefly standing on end as they achieved free-fall, their lanyards and luggage floating overhead before crashing down. And only after that did she feel calm enough to say: He had people who worked with him. I can make them talk, too. Or you could help me with this research.
“And I will. But, Granny, this is important to me. It’s not that I don’t want to help you. It’s just that I need to focus on my family right now. Do you have any idea what Javier has been through?” Amy asked. “Do you know what it means, for him to spend time with his iterations? He used to abandon them. And now he loves them.”
Those two aren’t mutually exclusive.
4
ONE YEAR EARLIER
Javier always spoke Spanish the first few days. It was his clade’s default setting. “You have polymer-doped memristors in your skin, transmitting signals to the aerogel in your muscles from the graphene coral inside your skeleton. That part’s titanium. You with me, so far?”
Junior nodded. He plucked curiously at the clothes Javier had stolen from the balcony of a nearby condo. It took Javier three jumps, but eventually his fingers and toes learned how to grip the grey water piping. He’d take Junior there for practice, after the kid ate more and grew into the clothes. He was only toddler-sized, today. They’d holed up in a swank bamboo-tree house positioned over an infinity pool outside La Jolla, and its floor was now littered with the remnants of an old GPS device that Javier had stripped off its plastic. His son sucked on the chipset.
“Your name is Junior,” Javier said. “When you grow up, you can call yourself whatever you want. You can name your own iterations however you want.”
“Iterations?”
“Babies. It happens if we eat too much. Buggy self-repair cycle – like cancer.”
Not for the first time, Javier felt grateful that his children were all born with an extensive vocabulary.
“You’re gonna spend the next couple of weeks with me, and I’ll show you how to get what you need. I’ve done this with all your brothers.”
“How many brothers?”
“Eleven.”
“Where are they now?”
Javier shrugged. “Around. I started in Nicaragua.”
“They look like you?”
“Exactly like me. Exactly like you.”
“If I see someone like you but he isn’t you, he’s my brother?”
“Maybe.” Javier opened up the last foil packet of vN electrolytes and held it out for Junior.
Dutifully, his son began slurping. “There are lots of vN shells, and we all use the same operating system, but the API was distributed differently for each clade. So you’ll meet other vN who look like you, but that doesn’t mean they’re family. They won’t have our clade’s arboreal plugin.”
“You mean the jumping trick?”
“I mean the jumping trick. And this trick, too.”
Javier stretched one arm outside the treehouse. His skin fizzed pleasantly. He nodded at Junior to try. Soon his son was grinning and stretching his whole torso out the window and into the light, sticking out his tongue like Javier had seen human kids do with snow during cartoon Christmas specials.
“It’s called photosynthesis,” Javier told him a moment later. “Only our clade can do it.”
Junior nodded. He slowly withdrew the chipset from between his tiny lips. Gold smeared across them; his digestive fluids had made short work of the hardware. Javier would have to find more soon.
“Why are we here?”
“In this treehouse?”
Junior shook his head. “Here.” He frowned. He was only two days old, and finding the right words for more nuanced concepts was still hard. “Alive.”
“Why do we exist?”
Junior nodded emphatically.
“Well, our clade was developed to–”
“No!” His son looked surprised at the vehemence in his own voice. He pushed on anyway. “vN. Why do vN exist at all?”
This latest iteration was definitely an improvement on the others. His other boys usually didn’t get to that question until at least a week went by. Javier almost wished this boy were the same. He’d have more time to come up with a better answer. After twelve children, he should have crafted the perfect response. He could have told his son that it was his own job to figure that out. He could have said it was different for everybody. He could have talked about the church, or the lawsuits, or even the failsafe. But the real answer was that they existed for the same reasons all technologies existed. To be used.
“Some very sick people thought the world was going to end,” Javier said. “We were supposed to help the humans left behind.”
The next day, Javier took him to a park. It was a key part of the training: meeting humans of different shapes, sizes, and colors. Learning how to play with them. Practicing English. The human kids liked watching Junior jump. He could make it to the top of the slide in one leap.
“Again!” they cried. “Again!”
When the shadows stretched long and Junior had jumped up into the tree where Javier waited, he said: “I think I’m in love.”
Javier nodded at the playground below. “Which one?”
Junior pointed to a red-headed organic girl whose face was an explosion of freckles. She was all by herself under a tree, rolling a scroll reader against her little knee. She kept adjusting her position to get better shade.
“You’ve got a good eye,” Javier said.
As they watched, three older girls wandered over her way. They stood over her and nodded down at the reader. She backed up against the tree and tucked her chin down toward her chest. Way back in Javier’s stem code, red flags rose. He shaded Junior’s eyes.
“Don’t look.”
“Hey, give it back!”
“Don’t look, don’t look–” Javier saw one hand lash out, shut his eyes, curled himself around his struggling son. He heard a gasp for air. He heard crying. He felt sick. Any minute now the failsafe might engage, and his memory would begin to spontaneously self-corrupt. He had to stop their fight, before it killed him and his son.
“D-Dad…”
Javier jumped. His body knew where to go; he landed on the grass to the sound of startled shrieks and fumbled curse words. Slowly, he opened his eyes. One of the older girls still held the scroll reader aloft. Her arm hung there, refusing to come down, even as she started to back away. She looked about ten.
“Do y-you know w-what I am?”
“You’re a robot…” She sounded like she was going to cry. That was fine; tears didn’t set off the failsafe.
“You’re damn right I’m a robot.” He pointed up into the tree. “And if I don’t intervene right now, my kid will die.”
“I didn’t…”
“Is that what you want? You wanna kill my kid?”
She was really crying now. Her friends had tears in their eyes. She sniffled back a thick clot of snot. “No! We didn’t know! We didn’t see you!”
“That doesn’t matter. We’re everywhere, now. Our failsafes go off the moment we see one of you chimps start a fight. It’s a social control mechanism. Look it up. And next time, keep your grubby little paws to yourself.”
One of her friends piped up: “You don’t have to be so mean–”
“Mean?” Javier watched her shrink under the weight of his gaze. “Mean is getting hit and not being able to fight back. And that’s something I’ve got in common with your little punching bag over here. So why don’t you drag your knuckles somewhere else and give that some thought?”
The oldest girl threw the reader toward her victim with a weak underhand. “I don’t know why you’re acting so hurt,” she said, folding her arms and jiggling away. “You don’t even have real feelings.”
“Yeah, I don’t have real fat, either, tubby! Or real acne! Enjoy your teen years, querida!”
Behind him, he heard applause. When he turned, he saw a red-haired woman leaning against the tree. She wore business clothes with an incongruous pair of climbing slippers. The fabric of her tights had gone loose and wrinkled down around her ankles, like the skin of an old woman. Her applause died abruptly as the little freckled girl ran up and hugged her fiercely around the waist.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” the woman said. She nodded at Javier. “Thanks for looking after her.”
“I wasn’t.”
Javier gestured and Junior slid down out of his tree. Unlike the organic girl, Junior didn’t hug him; he jammed his little hands in the pockets of his stolen clothes and looked the older woman over from top to bottom. Her eyebrows rose.
“Well!” She bent down to Junior’s height. The kid’s eyes darted for the open buttons of her blouse and widened considerably; Javier smothered a smile.
“What do you think, little man? Do I pass inspection?” she asked.
Junior grinned. “Eres humana.”
She straightened. Her eyes met Javier’s. “I suppose coming from a vN, that’s quite the compliment.”
“We aim to please,” he said.
Moments later, they were in her car.
It started with a meal. It usually did. From silent prison guards in Nicaragua to singing cruise directors in Panama, from American girls dancing in Mexico and now this grown American woman in her own car in her own country, they started the relationship with eating. Humans enjoyed feeding vN. They liked the special wrappers with the cartoon robots on the front. (They folded them into origami unicorns, because they thought that was clever.) They liked asking about whether he could taste. (He could, but his tongue read texture better than flavor.) They liked calculating how much he’d need to iterate again. (A lot.) This time, the food came as a thank you. But the importance of food in the relationship was almost universal among humans. It was important that Junior learn this, and the other subtleties of organic interaction. Javier’s last companion had called their relationship “one big HCI problem.” Javier had no idea what that meant, but he suspected that embedding Junior in a human household for a while would help him avoid it.
“We could get delivery,” Brigid said. That was her name. She pronounced it with a silent G. Breed. Her daughter was Abigail. “I’m not much for going out.”
He nodded. “That’s fine with us.”
He checked the rearview. The kid was doing all right; Abigail was showing him a game. Its glow diffused across their faces and made them, for the moment, the same color. But Junior’s eyes weren’t on the game. They were on the little girl’s face.
“
He’s adorable,” Brigid said. “How old is he?”
Javier checked the dashboard. “Three days.”
The house was a big, fake hacienda with the floors and walls and ceilings all the same vanilla ice cream color. Javier felt as though he’d stepped into a giant, echoing egg. Light followed Brigid as she entered each room, and now Javier saw bare patches on the plaster and the scratch marks of heavy furniture dragged across pearly tiles. Someone had moved out. Probably Abigail’s father. Javier’s life had just gotten enormously easier.
“I hope you don’t mind the Electric Sheep…”
Brigid handed him her compact. In it was a menu for a chain specializing in vN food. (“It’s the food you’ve been dreaming of!”) Actually, vN items were only half the Sheep’s menu; the place was a meat market for organics and synthetics. Javier had eaten there but only a handful of times, mostly at resorts, and mostly with people who wanted to know what he thought of it “from his perspective.” He chose a Toaster Party and a Hasta La Vista for himself and Junior. When the orders went through, a little lamb with an extension cord for a collar baa-ed at him and bounded away across the compact.
“It’s good we ran into you,” Brigid said. “Abby hasn’t exactly been very social lately. I think this is the longest conversation she’s had with, well, anybody in…” Brigid’s hand fluttered in the air briefly before falling.
Javier nodded like he understood. It was best to interrupt her now, while she still had some story to tell. Otherwise she’d get it out of her system too soon. “I’m sorry, but if you don’t mind…” He put a hand to his hollowed belly. “There’s a reason they call it labor, you know?”
Brigid blushed. “Oh my God, of course! Let’s get you laid, uh, down somewhere.” Her eyes squeezed shut. “I mean, um, that didn’t quite come out right…”
Oh, she was so cute.
“It’s been a long day…”
She was practically glowing.
“And I normally don’t bring strays home, but you were so nice…”
He knew songs that went this way.
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