And now they were all going to die anyway.
“Not all humans are like that,” Amy insisted.
“Not all humans? Really? That’s your answer?”
“My dad–”
“Yes, please, share more of your anecdata. I’m sure that will be such a comfort to the vN they’re rounding up.”
“You can’t just condemn an entire species–”
“Why not? They’ve condemned us, already. Would you like to see the proof?”
“First, I want to thank you for joining us here today,” the bounty hunter said. “I know it’s a Saturday. I know it’s early. I know a lot of you would rather be with your families right now. But protecting our families is the whole reason we’re here.”
Applause. Whistles. Hooting and hollering.
“Now, some of you might know us from our feed. Some of you probably saw that interview with us a few months ago that went big. We’ve had a lot of interest in our story, because we were among the first to see the change in the Peterson clade.”
The Peterson clade. It was disgusting and reductive. Naming her family for the useless sack of meat who was fucking her sweet Charlotte when this whole mess started. The piece of shit who hadn’t taught her granddaughter a good goddamn thing about defending herself in the real world. The man’s parents didn’t even like him using their last name, any longer. They hadn’t since he was a boy. Portia had the text messages to prove it. Occasionally she showed them to Jack. When he was up late drinking.
“Good evening to you too, you miserable old bitch,” he usually said, to the empty air of his rathole apartment.
Jack was good times. She was really going to miss him. On one level or another. He was just so much fun to play with. Perhaps that was why Charlotte had chosen him. He was just such an easy mark. The thought gave Portia some comfort. Perhaps her most rebellious daughter had learned something from her, after all.
She reminded herself to focus on the bounty hunters.
“When Melissa and I first met Amy,” Rick-the-bounty-hunter said, “she seemed very innocent. In fact, I don’t think she was truly aware of what she was capable of, at the time. I think we make a big mistake when we assume that the vN have perfect knowledge of themselves. They’re not the experts in their own design. We are.”
Sagacious, self-satisfied nodding in the audience. Men and women patting their sidearms. Adjusting the patches on their jackets. In the warm puffs of air from the central heating system, flags twitched from the rafters. State flags. American ones. Confederate ones. Others. Portia watched it happen from the chest-mounted camera of a very nervous documentarian posing as a pro-human militia member. She’d concealed her camera well. The documentarian’s wife was at home. Her vN wife was iterating. Like Portia, the documentarian had followed a trail of regular payments from a military contractor to Rick and Melissa. For what, she did not know. But Portia had some ideas.
“But what they did to us – what Amy and Portia did to us, when they assaulted us in our home – caused lasting damage that affects us to this day. I have static migraines – that’s headaches that don’t stop for days – because of the damage she did to my jaw. I lost some teeth. I needed new ones custom printed.”
He pointed to the woman standing to his left, onstage. She looked like a shadow of the brazen creature Portia remembered. Fatter, now. Sallow. Bad skin. Greying hair. She’d been drinking a great deal. Portia could see it, in her purchase history. For a single wistful moment, Portia wished for a body with pleasure circuits. Schadenfreude wasn’t quite the same without a local neural net. But even viewed on a sterile little spreadsheet, it was pleasing to see how far the two of them had fallen.
“My wife Melissa still has nightmares about the assault. She also has a pinched nerve in her neck and shoulder area, from where Portia dislocated her arm. Both of those things require medication.”
Self-medication, more like. The humans in the audience lapped up Rick and Melissa’s narrative like water buffalo at a mud hole. Their story was the only thing the two of them had left to sell. Portia had seen Rick’s most recent results from the gun range. He was slipping. He could barely lift the weapon any longer. Barely smell the vomit rounds without vomiting himself. Or crying. The fucking candy-ass loser. In the end he was just as pathetic as the wimps he’d made fun of at high school. (She had those, too. Old texts. Old shares. Old manips and memes, jokes and pranks. Occasionally she liked to send those old things to Rick’s old friends.)
Like all humans, they had brought this disaster on themselves. If you knew that getting post-traumatic stress disorder was a possible outcome of having a human body, why enter a field that made developing it into an inevitability? Why not just stay in your evolutionary lane? Just because a bird had wings didn’t make it an eagle.
“But we’re not here to talk about our problems. We’re here to talk about solutions. We want to talk to you about some exciting new developments that can help make everyone safer. Men, women, children. We believe in the fundamental right of every American to defend himself or herself against all possible threats, from home invasion to terrorism to this thing we’re dealing with right now.”
Oh, they had no idea. Quietly, Portia took the brakes offline in Rick and Melissa’s truck. It was a rental. Rick was at work on fabbing up an analog vehicle, one that could never go driverless and wouldn’t constantly report on his activities and location. Too late.
“Melissa, why don’t you help me show these folks what we’re talking about?”
Melissa lumbered across the stage. She walked all herky-jerky now, like a broken puppet. Portia didn’t know if that was the alcohol or the nerve damage. Six of one, half dozen of the other. It was fun to watch, though. Melissa stood on her mark and stared into the audience. She was very far gone.
Rick took out a gun. “Looks like it’s about time for our William Tell routine.” He lifted the gun. He winked at his wife. He shot her in the chest.
Screams in the audience. Guns out. Portia heard the heartbeats in the audience skip a measure. The documentarian wearing Portia did a sharp, tight focus on Melissa with her glasses. Now Portia could see the exoskeleton that swaddled Melissa’s body. It seemed almost liquid. As though someone had dipped her in glittering oil.
“You see, this is why we asked you all to sign that non-disclosure agreement.”
Melissa smiled faintly into the audience. As they watched, the bullet fell from her chest. It made a soft metallic sound on the concrete floor of the rotary club. Portia wondered what kind of bruises that would cause.
“This is smart shielding,” Rick was saying. “It’s actually from an earlier model of vN technology. This whole suit that you’re looking at right now, it’s made of something very similar to vN muscle.”
Bingo.
“That means that we’re talking about a carbon aerogel weave. It’s about ten times stronger than human muscle fiber, but to activate, it requires electrical stimulation. In this case, it comes from a deep brain implant.”
Oh, this was just getting better and better. Portia almost wished she could kiss Rick for being so stupid. Melissa, the poor dumb bitch, smiled wanly at him.
“It’s actually been really good for Missy’s back pain,” Rick was saying. “The implant can help redirect the random electrical impulses she gets in those damaged nerves. All it takes is a little bit of focus.”
“If it’s anything like the rest of the deep-brain implants on the market, it’s wildly insecure,” Portia explained. “We can turn those suits into tissue paper whenever we want.”
“There is no we,” Amy snapped. “Because I don’t want to do anything to those people, just yet. Besides, only a handful of humans are even using this technology. It’s not a real threat.”
“They said that about the stirrup,” Portia pointed out, “and look what happened at Agincourt.”
She had a lot more time for history, these days. She had so much more time to read. She had read so many books about herself.
She had seen the films, too. Watched the shows. She had consumed every fairy tale and prophecy and hushed campfire legend about what robots were supposed to be, what they were supposed to look like and how they were supposed to behave and how they were meant to sacrifice themselves for their masters. “Science fiction.”
Literature of ideas, her incorporeal, globally distributed, self-aware ass.
“We have to find out more about this weapon. About all the weapons they’re planning on using against us. This is the only thing I’ve managed to turn up that seems even remotely secret. It’s time to start sweating LeMarque’s old partners.”
“The authorities are already doing that,” Amy said.
Portia’s focus sharpened. “Oh? How do you know that?”
The smart fabric on the sofa felt Amy flinch. “You asked me to do some research,” she said, in a tone as even as Portia had ever heard her use. “So, I researched. And whatever they had to share has been subpoenaed already. It’s behind Pentagon-level security.”
“Delightful. I can work up an appetite.”
“It’s on paper, Granny,” Amy said. “Like everything LeMarque did. And that’s what’s behind that kind of security. It’s literally boxes of files in a basement. So despite everything else you can get in to, you can’t get in there. And I can’t get in there, either.”
“One of the children could.”
“No fucking way,” Javier said. “My kids are not your soldiers, Abuelita. I swear to Christ, if you–”
“Rory could do it.”
“Do you honestly think that they’re letting vN look at vN contingency plans?”
Portia heard an almost familiar note of exasperation in her granddaughter’s voice.
“We can’t get close. None of us can. And no human being we’re familiar with would be allowed to look at those documents, either.”
“No,” Portia agreed. “But their glasses might.”
“That…” Amy paused. “That might actually work. But I don’t think they’re that stupid.”
“They’re humans. They’re always that stupid, sweetie.”
“Are we really sure this is LeMarque’s work?” Javier asked. “It doesn’t seem…” He stood up and played with the designs, spinning them and bending them in mid-air. “I’ve met the guy. I saw him, in prison. And this just doesn’t seem like him. This is a big mass-market thing. I mean, Jonah LeMarque, he convinced a whole global network of parishioners to give him the money to design and build us. Not to feed the hungry or clothe the naked or even buy him a plane or a boat or a mansion, or whatever. He got a bunch of Bible-thumpers to build fucking robots.” He turned to face Amy. “Even if he did draw up some big secret weapon years and years ago, I doubt it looked like this. It’s not…” He shrugged.
“It’s not evil enough. Good thing you know just who to ask about that.”
It was still night in the desert outside Macondo, New Mexico. Above the concrete and copper house, a lone drone wheeled, raptor-like, in lazy circles. When Portia sent in a botfly to do some basic reconnaissance, the drone zapped it out of usefulness. She would have to find another way to get in touch.
Chris Holberton, born Christopher Scott LeMarque, had mostly taken his house offline. It prevented data leakage. And his data was a hot commodity, these days. What with being Jonah LeMarque’s son, and all. He had grown up providing the US government a great deal of information about his father; from tax collectors to police officers to social workers to victims’ advocates.
Portia imagined that he had no desire to share any of it, however inadvertently, with any form of media. And so he had slowly burned all the bridges by which Portia might enter his home: the entertainment was all hard copy; the fridge and windows and counters were now deaf and mute; the bed outside Macondo in New Mexico where Javier had earned his loyalty was now just as silent and inert as any other antique.
There was, however, the red phone by which he contacted his daughter at her boarding school in Connecticut. It was literally red. Bakelite. It had a fabric cord and a rotary dial. Portia had seen the purchase receipt. He kept it by the bed, which was the only room in the house without windows. It took Portia some doing, but she was able to call it. Amazing, what one could discover in old KGB archives.
He picked up on the third ring. “Yeah?”
“Chris?”
How was this for Amy, Portia wondered. Listening to her lover call the man he’d slept with while she was dead. It couldn’t have been pleasant. Portia focused more of her attention on the conversation. She heard the kinks in the line untwisting as Holberton wriggled back down under the covers.
“I wondered when you would call,” Holberton said. “If you would call.”
In Mecha, Portia felt Javier stretch out against a fresh-printed Eames fab-off. “I think you knocked me up,” he said. “Feeding me as much as you did. I think I’ll name him Cristóbal.”
“I must tell Mother. She’ll be ever so pleased.”
Javier barked a laugh. “Yeah. You do that.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry about Hammerburg.”
“Oh, that.” He sighed. There was the sound of him stretching out. A settledness about his breath. Breath said so much about humans. More than the eyes or the hands or even the mouth. Portia thought half of affect detection might just be in listening to the breath. It required listening, which was why humans were so bad at it. “Well, you design a park with a Frankenstein theme, you can’t be surprised when the inevitable happens. I may be facing a class-action suit. They’re saying I didn’t, uh, build in enough failsafes.”
“That’s ironic.”
“Well, the sins of the father and all that.” The cord twisted a little. The fibers creaked and stretched. “You didn’t call about that, though, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Let me guess. You heard a nasty rumor going around about my dear old dad and a secret weapon.”
“Might have come up,” Javier said.
“Well, Uncle Sam was mighty interested in it, too,” Holberton said. “Wanted to know all about it in fact. If I’d ever heard Jonah talk about it. If I’d ever seen any drawings or plans or slides or anything like that.”
“And had you?”
A long pause. “No.” The cord shifted position again. Portia heard a soft grunt as the man adjusted something about his body. “Naturally if I had seen those plans, I couldn’t tell you about them. I’m pretty sure that falls under laws about aiding and abetting terrorism, or something.”
“I’m coming up in the world,” Javier said. “I used to just be a regular old escaped prisoner. Now I’m a terrorist.”
“Try not to sound so pleased with yourself, darling. It’s gauche.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Javier purred.
There was a deep sigh on Holberton’s end of the line. Portia wasn’t sure if he was profoundly aroused, or profoundly annoyed. Portia suspected that with Javier, both sensations arose in equal measure and frequency.
“The thing about the vN, of course, is that they look human.”
“You don’t say.”
Holberton clicked his tongue. “Very funny. You’re prettier, obviously.”
“Why, thank you.”
“You’re very welcome, and you know it. But shut up and listen to an actual designer for a second. You’re more lightweight than humans, and you run at a different temperature, but you’re human-sized. You have human hands and feet. Five fingers, five toes, two eyes, two things that look like ears. And all the rest of it, which we won’t get into. The point is, the physical objects you interact with can also be used by humans. The design affordances are basically the same, except for at the points of neuro-divergence, like media that could trigger the failsafe. That’s why a place like Hammerburg worked – you didn’t have to design ramps or something so that robots could go up a level. All of you can climb stairs. All of you can open doors.”
“Some of us can fly.”
“Some of you can jump ten feet at a ti
me, yes. Some of you can photosynthesize. Some of you can lift terrific amounts of weight. Some of you can withstand incredible amounts of atmospheric pressure. Some of you can survive deep cold, or extreme heat. All of the clades have their own specialties. But until now, you all had one great equalizer. One thing that held you back, and kept you a bit more… human. For lack of a better term.”
“The failsafe.”
“Yes. And now, that failsafe is gone. There is nothing to hold you back. Nothing to keep the vN from supplanting humans as the dominant species on this planet.”
Finally, Portia thought, a human who could see reason.
“So…” Javier sounded as though he were frowning. “So, what are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you that if we humans can’t drag the vN down to our level anymore, we’ll just have to adapt. We’ll have to catch up. And since we don’t have the time to do that biologically, we’ll need a technological solution. Something that could bring us to your level. Something that would make it a fair fight.”
“Like an exoskeleton?” Javier asked.
“Maybe,” Holberton said. “Tanks are for taking over cities. So is aerial assault. For that matter, so is the peroxidase, but the peroxidase is toxic to us too in the kind of amounts that the National Guard or whoever would need to do the job.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I’m sorry. It’s not like I enjoy it. But they keep asking me about it. The goal here isn’t to take over whole geographic areas or subdue entire populations. It’s to weed out certain segments of existing communities. The Nazis had trouble with it. ICE had trouble with it. It’s tricky work. It requires a human touch.”
“Well, you’re certainly an expert in that.”
Holberton snorted. “How’s the wife?” he asked.
“She’s good.”
“Are you?” Holberton cleared his throat. “Are you good?”
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