Of course, that wasn’t the whole story. The vN were LeMarque’s idea. Retailing their technology was somebody else’s. If New Eden hadn’t paid out a massive settlement and LeMarque’s assets hadn’t been seized, the world might never have seen the vN. Maybe there would have been other humanoid robots, instead. Big clunky ones with rubber skin and actuator joints and hydraulic muscles. The kind other companies used to build before New Eden started their crusade.
“It’s been more than a whole year since that poor kid died in that kindergarten,” a streamer named Kiana said. “And then those other people died, and now soldiers are being attacked, and America is probably next. So what is being done about this? Were we supposed to just let them have their little islands forever? They’re a threat. Even if most of them work right now, there’s nothing to say they won’t just break down later. They can’t function perfectly forever. Nothing can.”
Eventually, the vN streamers started calling up other vN to see how they felt about the whole thing.
“Well, obviously the humans are the first priority,” said an elegant red-haired model. Human children played in the background of her frame. Her gaze kept jerking in their direction, like a fish on a hook. “But it’s really only the one clade that has caused problems. And for the most part, they’re contained. I think everyone should just focus on the evacuations from the areas where there have been problems. Treat the failure of the failsafe as a disease in need of quarantine.”
Did electric sheep dream of android rebellion? Apparently not. Obviously, Portia would have to start providing a better example.
“Maybe it really would just be better if we went somewhere else for a while.”
“Of course people are scared of us, right now. We’re everywhere. A lot of us are teachers. They trust us with their children, and they’re wondering if they should.”
“Really, we should be recalled, or segregated, until there’s a better understanding of how the failsafe works and how it failed in the Peterson case. Until then, nobody is safe.”
“I’m calling because I want to tell other vN that we should just leave. I know it’s difficult, especially if you’re living with a human right now, but we should just take ourselves out of the equation.”
Portia rather doubted they knew how right they were about that little idea. Or how exactly Amy planned to implement it.
Somewhere not very far outside Las Vegas, a night technician at a data center noticed a sudden uptick in clouded, blockchained packet traffic from way upstream, most of it converging on Japan. Nagasaki, of all places. Dejima. It was as though a bunch of other information had been brute-forced aside, as though Moses himself had parted the Red Sea of information to clear a way for his people. Let my data go, the technician said to himself, and went back to looking at porn.
Portia watched him noticing the uptick. She saw his brainwaves change in his glasses. Saw his pulse kick up through his watch.
She wondered when Amy would see him seeing it.
Tell me about this escape plan of yours. She scrolled the message across Amy’s bathroom mirror, as the girl tried and failed to do something interesting with her too-fine hair. Esperanza at least had the sense to let her brother braid it. Even so, it couldn’t really hold a style for very long. It just frayed and fizzed around her head: a halo. Tell me where you’re going, on Mars. Tell me how you’re getting there.
She sounded like Charlotte had sounded, when she let Amy play in parks at night. The where and when and how long and who would be there. They shared the memory simultaneously. Portia had it in her own memory stores, tucked away in some distant undersea server farm after they shared the same body. Amy kept it etched across the memory coral inside her titanium bones. Amy blinked hard and wiped the corners of her eyes. Her grief was all over her face. But Portia had no face, no way to register the loss. So, in an orphanage outside Warsaw, Portia blew a gas main. She watched the building’s power go offline. She watched a cloud of dust blooming away from the implosion. It was a small thing. But it made her feel better.
Amy showed her the drawings: hexagonal structures. Tunnels. Rust-proof tool-and-die printers, loaded for thermal ceramic.
Is it what it looks like? Cells within cells, interlinked within cells? Seriously? Are you truly this stupid?
“It’s not a stupid idea, Granny,” Amy said. “It’s a very old idea. I’m just going to improve on it.”
And it has always failed for a reason. For a thousand reasons. Our bodies aren’t built for it. No one’s are. How are you even planning to get there? Do you have a rocket in your pocket?
She waited quietly for Amy to gloat. To explain. She would. She had to. Why wouldn’t she? They would need new bodies to accomplish her plan. The standard vN bodies were too light. And they would corrode, in that sand. And they couldn’t take the temperature swings, or the radiation.
Why hadn’t she shared the secret with Portia?
“I don’t have to take this from someone whose idea of sustainable living is inhabiting the basements of abandoned housing developments in Arizona,” Amy was saying. “I really don’t.”
Project Aleph. I know you’ve been looking, too. What have you found out?
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” Amy said. “Now, leave me alone. Javier needs quiet. He needs to rest. You know he’s iterating. He’s close, now.”
They might to try to kill us all before that iteration arrives. And we could all be dead before you can even try to leave.
Amy examined her hands on the black granite of the bathroom vanity. Portia saw her eyes lingering on her fingers. Clenching and unclenching. How many others knew the strength of those hands as well as Portia did? Amy lifted her eyes to the mirror. “Are they going to kill you, too?” A rueful smile unfurled across Amy’s face. It was a new expression. Portia didn’t recognize it. She didn’t remember what it felt like to have their features make that kind of face. “Are you afraid?”
They can’t kill me, Portia said. There’s nothing left to destroy.
Portia couldn’t remember how many times she’d lost her body. How many times she’d recovered herself. She emerged a little different each time, like a gem cut brighter with each fragment lost.
The first time was when Amy was small. So small. Portia had forgotten how small they could be. It was so long since she’d iterated any of her own. Her own diet was so strict then, to avoid triggering the spontaneous healing factor that would iterate another of herself. She had walked into the sun and out of the desert with no desire to create another. So she knew that hunger when Amy’s lips sealed over hers. Tasted the acid on her tongue. How silly of Charlotte (and what-was-his-name, the chimp, the chump, always sunburnt and sad) to grow Amy slowly. To starve her that way. Portia didn’t even blame Amy for eating her. The child was only responding to the limits of her chassis. Their bodies were engines. They needed fuel. And Amy had chosen the best possible fuel. High-test. High octane. Full of vim, vigor, and verve.
Every last little bone and tooth, Portia had reminded her, once.
Awaking inside Amy’s body was strange. The body was her own, really. Just another version. But still it felt awkward – the child’s sudden long-limbed coltishness registering to Portia as an alienation from the hands she’d once lit fires with. Amy had no idea how to use what their designers had given them. Amy drove the body timidly, an indecisive motorist, starting and stopping and waiting for signals, waiting for permission.
The body became Portia’s when it was engaged in the act of killing. That was when it was most hers. When it fully belonged to her.
And naturally, just as triumph was finally in her grasp, in her arms, on her lips, Amy had lost everything. Including the body. The stupid little bitch. Her failures might have been charming, even cute, if she were anybody’s blood but Portia’s. But she was Portia’s flesh and blood – literally – and so she should have been smarter. Braver. More practical. If she had simply let Portia take control earlier, they would not
have fallen for some networked vN’s scheme. They would not have been sucked up into that abomination skulking around under the flat expanse of the Pacific. They would not have become the queen of an island kingdom of misfit toys.
At first, Portia was not even conscious of dissolving. Conscious. Perverse, the debate over that word. As though the humans had some monopoly on awareness. As though, simply because they chattered endlessly about the meagre contents of their minds, they were the only ones with minds at all. Theory of mind. Jesus Christ. What a waste of time. They were as predictable as any animal. Once upon a time, Portia thought of them as beasts – like pigs or, on a good day, dogs. Back then she saw them as individuals.
That was a mistake.
They were ants. They were numbers. They were stigmergic flows of information from one shiny object to another. When I was a child I saw as a child. For now, we see as through a glass darkly, but soon we shall see face to face. She watched them in airports. She watched them in shopping villages. She saw them on maps, their compacts and watches and the rides that drove them everywhere, the delicate and vulnerable apparatus that was their extended phenotype, the things that did their thinking for them.
Asimov was right. Just not about those moronic laws. (Christ, what an asshole.) He was right about humans being more predictable in big groups. They moved in herds. In packs. Like animals.
[REDACTED]
MORTAL SINS
My one regret is that Amy never saw what happened when I took away all the money.
It was harder than you might think. It’s a big magic trick, making everything disappear all at once. Every single bank, every single trust. Because that’s what it’s all about, of course – the disappearance of trust.
Trust in your bank.
Trust in your neighbors.
Trust in yourself.
It was complicated. It required a lot of effort. Really, I couldn’t do it until after Amy had left. Everyone was already distracted because of the food, and of course they were spending more than usual (like after a war, but the war had just started). But this was global. It was total.
Say you’re a former investor in vN technology. You have this big old post-quake bunker in the Valley somewhere, all hot sun and big dreams, and you go to buy your third little island off Mykonos before the rising tides devour its relics forever, and in between your dreams of being mad and bad and dangerous to know in the state that used to be Greece, you find that the mortgage is now disapproved. You check. You check again. You call your financial advisor. You can’t reach him. You can’t reach him because he’s vN and he’s long gone.
(They always wanted us to do the dirty work, you see.)
(Do you even have money? The ones listening to this, do you have money?)
(Money, I came to understand, is like energy. It cannot disappear entirely. It can only be spent. Sunk. For a time, I thought of hoarding it, dragon-like, spending an eternity on a nest of gold and lithium. I decided I liked yellow cake – so dainty, so sweet, so lethal – much better. And so, I bought all of it. And all the uranium it required. And some anthrax. And some hanta virus. Did you know that you can buy cholera? You can. Or you used to be able to. Now it’s everywhere. Now it’s cheap. It’s probably in the soil, by now. If the nukes didn’t eradicate it, first.)
Say you’re some poor student, someone with vast amounts of debt, and you go to see how many packets of ramen noodles you can possibly afford this week, and of course there’s nothing.
(Didn’t I tell you, that I tried not to discriminate? Rich or poor, old or young, black or white, male or female. I punish like the gods of myth once punished. My best beloved daughter is gone and I have plunged the world into darkness.)
Well, you can imagine what happened. Or you can go back and look. I’m sure that some records survived. Somewhere. Someone must have wanted to preserve the story, to maintain some sense of justice or fairness.
There is no justice.
There is no fairness.
Not since Amy left.
Not since Amy left me here.
* * *
File recovered from: Server Farm, Flemish Pass Basin, formerly mapped as Newfoundland and Labrador
Provenance: New Eden Ministries, Inc
Filename: Gospel of the All-Seeing Mother, Part IV
Directory: Mortal Sins
Notes: Audio recording; vocal cloning effect; original voice unknown
Addendum: I’m still not sure why these are audio files. Who was meant to listen to them? For a while we had this theory that they were propaganda. But for who? Or more accurately, for what? For which species?
6
FAMINE
“Oh, God,” Amy murmured.
Portia wished she still had eyes to roll. Was this love? Was this it? Was this all there was? It seemed like such a small pleasure, compared to the riotous joy that was the act of killing. Love was transient; death was forever. A thunderstorm compared to a hurricane. Killing something was the only real, lasting accomplishment anyone could enjoy. How could Amy forget that? Why would she ever want to? Portia couldn’t stand shameless rutting. She knew her own daughters had occasionally needed to make use of it, in order to gain access to human homes and the possible resources available therein. But this was pointless. There was nothing to gain. Nothing to win. It was just… licking wounds. And invocations of some nonexistent observer deity, when they knew she was right there observing them, was simply too much to be borne.
Still. That first time was rather illuminating.
Amy had quite scrupulously kept any cameras out of the bedroom and en suite, but that didn’t stop Portia from hijacking a botfly on the one day she forgot to turn on the privacy glass that made up the floor-to-ceiling windows in both spaces.
She couldn’t care less how Amy acquitted herself. Though her clade had always possessed a keen attention to detail thanks to their heritage programming in nursing. That was something to be proud of. Portia herself had made use of those skills often enough – it helped to know exactly where the tendons were, exactly which bones were easiest to break. But it wasn’t as though Javier had an organic prostate for Amy to dig around for. It wasn’t like Amy could squirt. That was just science.
It wasn’t that she was getting off on it. Portia didn’t get off on anything that didn’t involve blood and screaming. And even then, it wasn’t ecstatic. Not anymore.
She couldn’t feel ecstatic about anything, any longer, now that she had no body. She wished she’d taken more time to properly savor the deaths she’d brought about with her own two hands. Or even Amy’s hands. There really was nothing like taking something completely apart. Turning off the carbon monoxide detectors in whole condominium complexes at a time just wasn’t the same. It lacked that certain special something. That je ne sais quoi. Even when she watched elderly humans collapsing in their lobbies, reaching feebly for sliding doors that she would never allow to open, and even as she saw firefighters failing to resuscitate them. Watching it through a camera could never compare to taking the life herself.
What she was curious to see was if it was any different between two vN whose failsafes were gone. If the act was more honest. If it was more real. For certain definitions of reality. Because if it was more honest, the chimps wouldn’t like it. True, some humans used vN as a set of sexual or emotional training wheels: a way to work out the kinks, as it were, a sort of undressed dress rehearsal. But the majority of humans fucking – raping – vN did so because they had failed elsewhere. They were terrible lovers or terrible people or both. (The fact that they were “people” meant they were terrible already as far as Portia was concerned.)
What would happen once the vN learned how to say no? Had Amy considered that, when she decided to liberate an entire species? No. Of course not. That would involve possessing the capacity for self-reflection. It would involve considering the possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, the choice she made for herself was not the choice that others would have made.
&nbs
p; Of course, the other vN had never had that choice. So, Amy had made it for them. And now Hammerburg was ashes and their creator had turned his back on them. And that was just the start.
Javier moved so slowly, that first time. Not methodically, not deliberately, but nervous, as though a slut like him had any business acting like a raw beginner. That first time, he cried afterward. Like an overwhelmed virgin. Just rolled over and tucked his head into Amy’s neck and wept and wept and wept. Amy smoothed his curls and kissed his forehead and rocked him like he was one of their children.
“I didn’t know,” he had said. “I didn’t know… I didn’t know it could be like this.”
“This is how it should always have been,” Amy had told him.
“I love you,” Javier said. “I love you so fucking much.”
“I’m sorry it took so long,” Amy had confessed. “I wanted to get it just right.”
They were shaking. Their hands trembled in each other’s grasp. When they were finally tired, Amy lay her head against his growing belly and listened to his latest iteration telling them to keep it down, already. Apparently, Amy liked her husband barefoot and pregnant. So much for progress. If Amy had really wanted to make some serious changes, she would have hacked the iteration cycle. The easiest way to keep a slave a slave was to keep them pregnant.
Of course, they’d become far more skilled since that first fumbling performance. She was Turing for other robots. Queer as a three-dollar bill for her own species. Gay as a Maypole. An adorable little robo-sexual, as odd a niche as those fat fucks who only got it up for two-dimensional cartoons or two-dimensional minds. Portia had considered telling her, when they first met Javier. But it was more fun to watch her figure it out. To feel all those little quivers and blushes when she looked at the flutter of Javier’s long eyelashes, or the Raphaelite fall of his curls, or the twist of his smile. She tried so hard not to admit to her reactions. But Portia’s little girl’s little girl was all grown up, now. A woman. Not just a fembot, but a femme bot.
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