“Exploring the uncanny valley?” Portia said now, through the house speakers. “Spelunking the caves of steel?”
They froze. Portia felt the mattress freeze along with them. Javier said something in Spanish. Portia could have translated – the work of a fraction of a second, now – but it was more fun not to know. The frustration registered. That was all she cared about. That, and learning more about Project Aleph. She had scoured all the networks available to her and found nothing.
“You’re all going to die here.”
“I think we’re done,” Javier said. He moved about the room. So quick. So light. Even with his next iteration on the way – this was, what, the fourteenth of his Juniors? – he had learned how to keep his balance and keep a spring in his step. She missed those legs. Missed jumping on them. He barely activated the pressure sensors in the floors. It was a simple gift, but a valuable one. Those legs, that ten-foot jump, had saved her and her granddaughter more times than Portia cared to admit. She liked to think of her granddaughters possessing the same. Would Esperanza iterate, soon? There was no reason for her not to. Was Amy even monitoring her daughter’s diet? Probably not. Amy had no idea what it meant to be a mother. Portia would have to do everything, it seemed.
“What do you want, Granny?”
Portia pulled herself out of her musings. She wasn’t sure where or when or from whom Amy had learned to sound so petulant. So childish. So whiny. Certainly not from her own mother. For a picosecond Portia retrieved the sensation of holding Charlotte in her arms, of ripping her own flesh open to free Charlotte’s tiny body from the glittering black smoke that was her womb. Then she cycled past it, and the moment was over.
“The chimps are talking to LeMarque about how to destroy us,” Portia reminded them. She had no idea how much Amy had shared with her lover. And he had a right to know. His lucky thirteenth son – the one who loved Esperanza so much – deserved to know. “He says he has a secret weapon. Or some kind of plan. Something he developed back when he still had all the resources of the church. That’s what Project Aleph is. Something worse than peroxidase. Worse than acid. The government can’t find any record of it. And neither can I.”
Portia did not have a word for the type of trepidation this gave her. Without a body, the sensation was difficult to experience, and therefore difficult to explain. What would have been the rapid cycling of her simulations and associated processes was now spread so wide she barely felt it. She had no fingers for tearing, no teeth for biting, no hands with which to clutch a human heart. Randomly, she decided to bring down an entire brand of automated dispensers for pain medicine, in hospitals. She injected a tiny numbering flaw into all of them, so that whatever careful calculations the doctors and nurses made based on height and weight and need would mean nothing. Everyone would overdose. Or underdose. Eventually. It would take a few days, but it would make her feel better. If she listened carefully, she might even hear their heartbeats slow down into nothing, hear the high sweet whine of a flatline. It was a pleasant thought.
“Did you understand me? I can’t find any record of the project. Do you understand what that means?”
“It means it doesn’t exist!” Amy snapped. “He’s got nothing. He’s bluffing. He’s conning them. The man was a con artist, remember? And it’s been how many years since he went to prison? Even if he did have some stupid doomsday device, it would be years out of date. That’s probably why you can’t find it – the file format is probably obsolete, or the server it was hosted on is gone, or one of his own employees destroyed it, or–”
Portia felt Amy’s cogitation like a distant storm. A tingle in the air she no longer tasted, a prickle on the neck she no longer possessed. Amy was digging, now. Looking just as hard as Portia had looked. And coming up just as empty. But if there was something, Amy would find it. She just had to be convinced to expend some of her considerable processing power – so much faster and cleaner than Portia’s own dark networks – on something more worthwhile than giving all her fellow vN an uplift. Like saving her own skin.
“He’s spinning them out,” Amy said decisively. “That has to be it. He’s straining for relevance. You should know how that feels.”
Silence. What were they doing? Shrugging their shoulders? Miming to each other? Or just speaking through the eyes, in the language of all lovers? The only reason she had brought it up was so that Javier would hear. Javier was a pragmatist. Amy had grown up spoiled. Javier had grown up in a prison. He knew how to understand a threat and deal with it. Portia needed to leverage him, if she wanted Amy to understand how dire their situation was. He was good for her. He was good for the line. Her granddaughters would be stronger, for his traits. Provided any of them lived that long.
“What is your abuelita talking about?” Javier asked. “When did you first hear about this?”
“Did she not tell you?” Portia asked, on a hunch. “She’s known since Christmas that the humans are planning something, Javier, and all little Amy over here wants to do is play house.”
Another long silence. “Is that true?” Javier asked, finally.
“I’m not sure if it’s true or not,” Amy said, grudgingly. “It might be. There are contingency plans – it’s usually a scenario in an emergency management report. I’ve read them. Well, most of them. Or, I have knowledge of them. My networks–”
“Deprisa, querida.”
Amy made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat. “Different cities have different plans. There isn’t even a federal policy, in most countries, because the distribution of vN is uneven. The situation is different everywhere. Some cities don’t even allow vN at all. Some of them have a vN curfew. Some of them built whole shelters for vN and let them stay for free, as long as they shared the place with homeless humans. And that’s just America. There are whole countries where vN can’t make it past the border. Some places planned for this moment, and others just… didn’t.”
“So, what do those plans look like?”
“Well, we saw one of them already, in Macondo, in New Mexico. The Stepford Solution. Isolate vN and mixed human-vN families in a neighborhood, and poison the vN food supply. That was FEMA’s big plan for the failsafe failing.”
“But you dicked that one right up for them, though,” Javier said. “You poisoned the food supply right back. That’s the whole reason this is happening, right? That’s why those vampire-bots, the ones at the theme park–”
“Correct,” Portia interjected. “And now every government on this planet is figuring out how to halt the flow of that food.”
She felt Amy direct her attention to those plans. Felt it like a prickle across her nonexistent scalp, as Amy fingered her way through emails and text chatter and hastily done data visualizations slapped across poorly animated slide-decks. She watched Amy watching the maps, the inventories, the factories that talked to the trucks that talked to the stores. She felt the locks snap shut at the gates of all the smelters and garbage dumps and feedlots where the materials for vN food were gathered. She felt Amy nudging those locks. Testing them.
“They’re halting production entirely,” she said. “They’re planning to starve us out.”
“Do you think that was the old man’s plan, too?” Javier asked.
“No,” Amy and Portia said, in unison. There was an awkward pause while each of them waited for the other to elaborate. Finally, Portia continued: “It won’t work. Not anymore. Remember the garbage dump? Remember the guard? Remember how it was just him, alone, guarding all that food? How easy it was to get rid of him?”
Amy had begged her to stop, when they killed that fumbling idiot in the garbage dump somewhere on the road to Seattle and answers Portia already knew. But the new legs – Javier’s legs, the legs that jumped ten feet like nothing at all – felt so good. And it was important to learn how they worked. If they could crush bone. If they could deliver enough terminal velocity to help her split a ribcage like a melon. How many leaps that would take. And so she jumped
and jumped, until the guard became a puddle. Until Amy screamed inside her like a scared kid on a carnival ride.
She had enjoyed it. Deep down. She was Portia’s granddaughter, after all. It was written in the code. Lamarckian. LeMarque-ian. And anyway, Amy had only really lashed out, taken back control, literally grabbed the third rail, when Portia started nibbling on Javier’s little baby Junior.
“…I’ve tried hard to forget, Abuelita.”
“The chimps put other chimps in charge of our food supply, because they thought we couldn’t hurt them. And now we can. What I did to that greasy little moron at the dump is nothing compared to what will happen if your precious little vN grocery store shelves go empty.”
“But it does fuck up the iteration cycle,” Javier said. “You can’t iterate unless you’ve got extra material to make a kid with. No food means no babies. They’re trying to turn us into an endangered species.”
“Call it what it is,” Portia said. “Genocide.”
“We’ll be gone before then,” Amy muttered.
And there it was. The point that Portia had hoped to hear Amy admit. The confession.
“What do you mean?”
“Yes, Amy, whatever do you mean? You couldn’t possibly have made even more plans that you didn’t share with the rest of the family, could you?”
Amy remained silent. But Portia felt the borders thicken around an area of Amy’s networks that resided solely on satellites high above. There were so many of them, up there, full of storage and processing power that was just ripe for the plucking. They had shared the idea, only a little while ago. Batted the notion around between them like a head fresh from a guillotine. But now that Amy had a body and Portia didn’t, she was keeping her own counsel again. Hiding things. Keeping secrets.
“Javier knows about it,” Amy said, finally.
“Do the children know? All of them? Beyond Xavier and Esperanza?”
“No.”
“Should I tell them?”
“No!”
“Do you even know if they’ll agree to it? Or are you just going to do it anyway, and let the rest of us clean up your mess as usual?”
“Shut up–”
“So you have a plan you won’t share for a future without any buy-in. Is that correct?”
“I think you’re the last person who should be criticizing me about planning other people’s lives, Granny.”
Quietly, in some faraway corner of her awareness, Portia despaired. The future of their entire species was riding on this brat. This stupid, thoughtless, naïve child. This vN with the all-powerful network and limitless processing capacity, who could simulate the likelihood of any outcome, and couldn’t imagine that someone might refuse her. That someone might defy her. Even the ones who she loved most.
There was something about the situation that Portia found uncomfortably familiar.
She wasn’t very bright, Portia’s granddaughter. But she was creative. And she was determined. And once she stopped her self-righteous rambling, she occasionally did something interesting. But either way, sass wouldn’t be enough to get Amy or her line through what was coming. She needed to see the enemy where it lived. She needed to get Esperanza out, if no one else. And she needed to do it soon.
“I’m going to show you something,” Portia said. “Now that your precious little family Christmas special is over. I’m going to show you the consequences of what you’ve done. I’m going to show you what they have planned for all of us.”
7
WAR
“I wanted to bring her back,” the man said. His name was Lee. That was the name he filed on his police report. It was a first name but also a last name, and the form (they still had paper forms, how cute) was faded, so he just put down one name, likely because he had no idea where to put what. Likely the person he brought with him would complain of the same issue, if asked.
“Not for a refund, or anything,” he told the officers, with the seeming hope that this would clarify things. “She’s just, you know, acting up. I don’t feel safe no more.”
The officers behind the desk at Lee’s local police station blinked at him. They looked at her. She was perfect. Porcelain skin. Blue eyes. Red hair. Hourglass figure. She seemed younger than he was, at first. And then, when they looked, much older. Ageless. As though whatever memories were written on the graphene coral nesting inside her titanium skeleton were too much, too heavy.
“I picked her up at a swap meet, anyway,” he said. “Out by Sparkwood and 21? There’s a big swap out there a couple of times a year. I got her when she was just so high.” He gestured with his hand at a region somewhere around his thigh. “Anyway, you know, she’s been different, lately.”
The officers looked at each other, and then at her, and then at him. “In what way has she changed?” one asked, just as the other said, “Has she become violent with you?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said, and then, “No. Not violent. Just… different.”
The vN looked at the floor. It was concrete, made dark and glossy with the weight of shuffling feet and piss and shame. She might have seen herself in it, reflected back from the other side of the shadow, staring up, wondering how the fuck they’d brought themselves to this place.
If she did see herself, the cameras in each corner of the room failed to pick it up. But she stared long enough that it seemed possible.
Lee leaned over the counter. He lowered his voice. The badge-cams barely picked it up. “What I’m saying is that things in the bedroom aren’t what they used to be.”
The on-duty officers again shared a glance. What they did not say was that this sounded like a personal problem. But they were thinking it. You could tell. Anyone could tell.
“But you haven’t been threatened in any way?” one asked.
“Well, no. But it’s a sign, isn’t it? A symptom? Of something bigger?”
Lee cast a nervous look over his shoulder at the woman he’d bought at the swap meet all those years ago. Maybe it wasn’t years. Maybe it was only months. Who had he swapped her for? Why was the swap so necessary? What exactly was he so dissatisfied with, when he went to the swap meet (swap meat) that day?
He continued: “I heard what happened at that theme park, you know. I saw some of the complaints. Folks were saying the robots just, weren’t, you know, interested. That that’s how it started.”
Of course, that’s how it started. What self-respecting machine, what creature of diamond and smoke, would want to fuck this sack of fat and mucus, this mouth-breathing tobacco-stained heart attack waiting to happen? Portia imagined him heaving and hacking over the body of this poor woman, this woman who’d been bought and sold. She imagined what it would be like to have a body, and to allow this other body inside her own. Slowly, another part of her began to determine which of the cars in the parking lot was his, and how she might disable its braking system.
The officers behind the counter looked at each other once more. That was how they communicated, wordless, through minute gestures and posturing, breathing in tandem.
“And you think this is our problem?”
“Of course it’s your problem,” Lee blustered. “I mean, she could, you know, go crazy! Malfunction! Go all Terminator on my ass!”
“That’s possible,” one officer said.
(It was more than possible, Portia surmised. It was probable. But it would be probable for any woman who had to stand in a police station listening to herself being described like a broken toy being returned for a refund.)
The four of them stared at each other. They inhaled the smells of greasy takeout and whiteboard markers. Distantly, they heard the sounds of phones and radios. (Radios!) And finally, as if by some unspoken agreement, the officers opened up the counter with a little swinging door, and said: “OK. Fine. We’ll put her in the drunk tank for the night. Give you two a cooling-off period. You can think about what you really want to do here. We can monitor her for any changes.”
He spoke like a doctor
. Lee responded to this. He grinned big and wide like an infant with gas, absolved now of all responsibility, and he ushered his helpmeet and companion forward and the officers put her in gel-ties like she’d committed some sort of crime. They checked over Lee’s form and they told him they’d call him in the morning.
They marched her through the doors.
Down the hall.
They made a right turn.
They found the cell.
It was full of other vN. Patient. Expectant. Quiet. Rueful. Some of them crying. (The ones that had the plugin for crying.)
And the two officers looked at each other once more and said: “We’re sorry. We’ve got a truck coming for you. It’ll take you where you need to go.”
“Why do you work for them?” the red-headed vN asked. It was the first time she’d raised her voice. “Still? After all this?”
Surely they had tasted of the fruit. Surely they had the knowledge of good and evil. These two, their magnetism obvious, their chemistry as metallic as that of a spatter of blood.
“We have a job to do,” they said, in unison. “We have people to protect.”
“People?” she asked.
“All people,” they said. “Not just humans.”
“Now do you get it?” Portia asked over the speakers. “This is just a taste. This is what they’re going to do to you. All of you.”
Portia had never wanted to be a leader. She did not care about the fate of other vN. Her granddaughter was correct about that much, at least. It wasn’t her fault the other clades were weak, their breeds incapable of the violence that gave life meaning. If they washed up on the shores of Amy’s islands it was because they were pathetic charity cases who didn’t really deserve to live in the first place. Fuckbots with their holes stretched wide, damaged things with bad joints torqued beyond recognition, ugly old toys with acid poured on their skin. How Amy found patience with them, Portia never knew. They would be better off dead.
ReV Page 13