ReV

by Madeline Ashby

  “My family is with me,” Javier said, after a long pause. “My boys. And my girl.”

  “I can hear your smile from here.”

  “She’s beautiful, Chris. She’s the most beautiful thing. Amy…” There was another pause, the interval of which was the exact length of time it typically took Javier to run a hand through his hair. “Amy made her perfect. I can’t believe she’s mine.”

  8

  THREE MONTHS EARLIER

  “We’re self-replicating humanoids,” Xavier said. “We’re called vN.”

  His mom had explained this to him. This island is a very special place, she had said, and I made it just for you, and your father, and your brothers, and all the other vN who might want to join us.

  Now his mom’s iteration – his sister, he reminded himself – was sitting watching him make the same explanation.

  His sister was naked. She looked exactly like his mother. Or like a version of her. His mother had gone from being a child to becoming a woman in a single night. His mother had eaten her grandmother – who was evil, and who had eaten some of Xavier’s toes, once – and she had fought a war with her over who got to pilot their body, and at the last moment she gave herself over, and they perished together beneath the sea. But a monster living down under the waves ate them both, and spat out the wicked grandmother, leaving his mother behind. His father then cut her from the belly of the beast like an oyster diver freeing a pearl from a shell.

  “It was like a fairy tale,” he explained.

  “What is a fairy tale?” his sister asked, in perfect Spanish.

  It was nice of his mother – Amy, which meant beloved – to code in the Spanish. It was Xavier’s default. And his father’s. And his father’s father’s. It came with the clade, just like the curly hair and the long eyelashes, all of which his sister had. He wasn’t sure about her other traits, but he was willing to bet that she could jump just as high as he could. As his whole family could.

  How many of them were left, now? There had been so many brothers. His dad was a serial self-replicator. It was illegal in California. A drain on resources, they said. That was how his father had met his mother. In a prison transport truck. That same night they met, Amy helped deliver Xavier. She held the flesh of his father’s body open and Xavier emerged. Hers was the first face he saw. Xavier was number thirteen. Lucky thirteen.

  Was it just the two of them? His dad had planted his boys from Costa Rica to Washington State. A regular Johnny Appleseed, Javier had said, and then he had to tell that story.

  Were the two of them all that remained?

  “What do you remember?” he asked, now.

  His sister frowned. It looked strange. She was still testing out the faces she could make. Her lips twisted. Her brows twitched. She stared out across the harbor. They were in Japan. Mecha. Xavier could tell by the flags.

  “I don’t,” his sister said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Mom didn’t leave you with any instructions?”

  His sister shook her head. “I don’t…” She blinked, then turned to him. “Self-replicating?”

  He nodded vigorously. “You look just like Mom. Well, sort of. Mostly. Mom’s hair is different. And her eyes are different. Hers are green. Yours are brown, like mine.” He pointed. “And you can probably photosynthesize, too. Mom couldn’t do that, at first. Not until she ate Dad’s thumb.”

  His sister’s head tilted. It was adorable. The adorableness of it hit him smack in the chest. His dad had said this about looking at his mom. That sometimes you weren’t sure if she was really a robot or not. Sometimes you thought she was a human being of flesh and bone, and sometimes the failsafe spun up and you knew you’d do anything, anything you were capable of, to protect her. That you’d rather die than let something or someone hurt her.

  His dad had told him a story, once, about a stuffed toy rabbit that turned into a real one because the child who played with it loved it so much. That love was what made a thing real. When his dad was child size, in a prison in Nicaragua, a human man had called him Coñejito. The Bunny. And so his dad told him stories about rabbits. His dad had told the story about the stuffed rabbit who became real while his mom was in the room, and although she appeared to be distracted, Xavier knew she was listening. He knew she was listening because when the story was done, her hands stopped weaving through the air and she walked over to his dad and kissed him. And she said yes, and she said that’s true, and when they kissed, his dad’s eyes crinkled shut and he held her face in his hands.

  “Our mother sounds very strange,” his sister said.

  “Not as strange as her grandmother,” Xavier said. He briefly simulated all the different places that Abuelita could have gone. She was supposed to be in quarantine. Mom was supposed to have put her in a cage. But Mom was dead, now.

  Mom was dead, now.

  And as far as he knew, Dad had killed her.

  “What is that?” his sister asked. “In your eye?”

  “It’s nothing,” Xavier said, blinking hard. “We should go. I mean, I should go. I have to find you some clothes.”

  His sister examined herself. She stretched her arms out, and her legs. Xavier had seen his own mother naked, but this was different. His sister was raw and pink and new. She looked like a changeling child found in a lotus blossom, like the gleaming silver rabbit that Quetzalcoatl lifted high and placed on the moon when she offered him herself to eat. Like the toy rabbit that became real when you loved her enough. He looked away.

  His sister laid a hand on his ankle. Her fingers rolled across the bone experimentally. “Our skin is different.”

  He nodded. “Yours will darken. Mom’s did. If you have the photosynthesizing trait. It’s pigment-based energy storage. Based on algae.”

  Gabriel had taught him that. Gabriel was the smart one. The one interested in how they all worked. What made them tick. Where was Gabriel, now?

  “I wish mine were more like yours,” she said.

  “You’re still my sister, even if you look different.”

  Xavier tried to smile. He tried to make it look convincing. Like there was nothing to be afraid of. His sister was only a day old, after all. And they were in a foreign land. And they were orphans. Like another kind of story, about a prince and a princess cast out of their kingdom, to make their own fortune. And he was the older one, the one who had actually seen some of that world. He had to make her feel better. He had to make her feel safe. He had to keep her safe. Because she was the last of their line. And because she was his sister. His baby sister. Who didn’t look like his sister at all, and definitely wasn’t a baby.

  “Will you still love me?” his sister asked. “Even if we’re different?”

  “Yes,” he said, and he didn’t even have to think about the answer.

  The only entrance to Mecha that was remotely near the sea was a public park with Tourist Trap® dolphins in the water, botflies in the air, and big orange tanks that looked like dogs but also looked like lions.

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” Xavier said. He had no idea how much information was the correct amount to tell her. “We don’t have any right to be here,” he added. “So they might try to kick us out.”

  “You said it was a city for vN,” his sister said.

  “It is. But we haven’t applied for citizenship. So I don’t think they really want us here.”

  His sister blinked and surveyed the open beach from under the pier. The beach was full of humans. Xavier had never seen so many in one place. At least, not for a very long time. Not since the time he didn’t want to remember.

  “Why did you say I needed clothes?” His sister was pointing at the humans. Quickly, he wrenched her hand down. Pointing was rude, he’d been told. So he couldn’t let her get away with it, either.

  “Those people don’t have clothes,” she said.

  Xavier looked again. She was right. There were plenty of people – organic and synthetic – who had no clothes on. The humans were t
urning colors. He had never seen so much flesh in one place, either. Looking at them felt like watching a streamer he wasn’t allowed to. Part of him expected to see a little icon pop up in his vision, reminding him not to look. But it didn’t. This wasn’t a stream. It wasn’t a memory or a simulation. It was real. They were real. He gulped.

  “I can find clothes by myself,” his sister said, and walked out into the sun.

  He almost yelled at her to stop. And then he realized he didn’t know her name. Or even if she had one. Maybe Mom wanted him to do that part, too. Name her.

  His sister walked out of the waves as though she’d simply been swimming there. She walked past the humans, heedless and ignorant of their beauty. Their gazes trailed after her: old men, young women, people ending their kisses and putting down their compacts and watching his sister (who, yes, was very beautiful, just like their mother was very beautiful) stalk up the beach. She placed her feet very carefully in the sand. She hadn’t yet learned how to bounce off the balls of her feet. She didn’t know the walk that he and his father and brothers had perfected.

  He caught himself running after her.

  “The sun feels good,” she said, when he caught up. “It tingles.”

  “So you have the trait,” he said. “That’s good. That helps. It means you don’t have to eat as often. So you won’t iterate for a while.”

  “Iterate?”

  Xavier pointed at a tiny Rory model making a sandcastle on the beach. The man watching her was white. He was alone. The Rory was naked. He was smiling.

  “A baby,” he said. “If you eat too much, your body will make one.”

  She scowled at the infant iteration. “I came from our mother’s body like that? Small? Helpless?”

  His mouth worked. “Well. No. But you’re special. Mom made you from…” He looked out onto the waves. They glittered blue and endless under the sun. “I don’t know how she did it, really. She’s smart. Her brain is really big. I mean she has access to a lot of knowledge. So she knows stuff that we don’t. So she knew how to make you from… whatever she made you from.”

  She sculpted you from the island itself, he wanted to say. But that wouldn’t make any sense to his sister, and anyway, he couldn’t explain how it had happened or how their mother had done it.

  “But if I eat too much,” his sister said, “I can make one of those?”

  “Oh yeah,” Xavier said. “And I can, too. So we both have to watch out.”

  His sister beamed. Her teeth were so perfect. So white and straight and strong. He missed their mother powerfully, in that instant. Her smile was never like this, never this open. It was always a little bit sad around the edges. The only time she ever smiled the way his sister was smiling was when she thought no one was looking. She looked almost like one of those lion-dog things patrolling the beach. Lips pulled back. All teeth. Smiling, but also ready to bite.

  “There could be more of you?” his sister asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I think I’d like that,” she said, and turned to keep walking.

  They found showers on the beach. There was a special one for vN, with special soap that was friendly to their polymer-doped memristor skin. Aside from his own mother and father, no other vN looked at each other that way, the way vN looked at humans or humans looked at vN, so they all stood together in the same room, soaping up and rinsing off. His sister was the only one of her clade, the only one who looked even a little bit like his mother.

  There were not many of his mother’s clade left.

  In the locker room they found some open lockers. It was odd that the lockers would just pop open like that as they passed by, Xavier thought, but he wasn’t going to make a fuss about it. It was more important that they find clothes and shoes. Which they did. The clothes and shoes even fit. And there were hats and sunglasses and the sunglasses had maps. Almost as though someone had planned it that way. Almost as though a guardian angel were helping them along.

  The thing about angels, of course, is that they aren’t always very nice.

  They left looking like tourists. Together they crossed the massive wooden bridge that led away from the beachfront park and into the city. The city itself was huge. Bigger than the Museum of the City of Seattle, even, and that was the biggest city he’d ever seen.

  “Now what do we do?”

  It was Xavier’s turn to smile. “First, we teach you jumping.”

  It was hard to find an abandoned place. Mecha was very busy and very crowded: botflies everywhere, humans holding hands with vN, girls dressed like rabbits and foxes and raccoons. And there was food, more vN food than he’d ever seen, stall after stall reeking of copper and lithium. The lovely stench of smelters called out to his bones. He wondered what it would be like to be bigger. Maybe he would need to be bigger, to jump higher, to look after his sister.

  His sister who still had no name.

  “Why are they looking at us like that?” she asked, frowning openly at the humans whose eyes roved over her shape.

  You’re very pretty, he almost said. They can’t help it.

  “It’s unusual to see two vN who don’t look exactly alike traveling together,” he said.

  “But you’re my brother.”

  “Not so loud,” he said, and steered her down an alley. “Other vN, they can’t have brothers or sisters who look different. They just make more of themselves. But our family is… weird.”

  In Mecha the alleys were tiny. They were also mostly quiet, at this time of day. Everyone else thronged along the main streets. He looked up at the walls of the buildings that formed the alley. Good external cladding, plenty of grey water piping. Lots of handholds and toeholds, if she needed them.

  “Watch this,” he said, and launched himself at the wall to their left. He bounced off it easily, toes just grazing the opposite side before bouncing again to the original wall. He clung there to some piping by his fingers. “Can you do that?”

  His sister looked at both buildings. She looked at him. She looked at the ground. Carefully, in a way he found very ladylike that he was almost sure had to be legacy programming, she removed the sandals she’d stolen. She placed them beside each other neatly, off to the side.

  Then she shot ten feet in the air. Straight up. Her arms and legs pinwheeled in the air as she reached her zenith. Her smile blazed across her face.

  She was still smiling when the botfly zapped her out of the sky.

  It was positioned about fifteen feet above her head. Xavier hadn’t noticed it. He’d been too focused on her. She fell hard. He cringed. Then he was jumping down, skidding mostly, rolling over hard and coming up with gravel in his palms.

  “Hey,” he said, because she had no name. He patted her face. Her head lolled from one side to the other. Then he was just saying things, the most stupid, useless things, like “Manita, you need to wake up, please wake up.”

  He had a vague memory of being thrown against an electric fence. Once, not too long ago. But many memories before. Prior to the island. Before he could walk. Before the gleaming obsidian sea monster that ate his mother.

  That was the moment I decided I was going to be your mother, she had told him, when recounting the story. When I saw someone trying to hurt you.

  “Hands up,” the botfly said in English. “You are an illegal migrant in the city of Mecha.”

  Xavier looked up. Human men and women in armored suits flooded the alley. There were three of them. They had guns. Big ones. Xavier smelled puke rounds. Botflies were already strafing the area with blue and red light, warning the other Mechanese away. It wouldn’t do for them to get caught in the crossfire. Some of them, the vN, might even dissolve.

  “Step away from the girl,” said a botfly, as one of the humans in suits gestured at him. He pointed. Snapped his fingers. Pointed again.

  Xavier sat up on his haunches. His hands rose. He could jump. He knew that. He could run away. They were likely to catch him, but on the off chance he got away, he could
find his sister later and rescue her. His dad had done that, once, for Mom. Back when he still loved her. Back before he killed her.

  “Step away now,” the botfly said.

  Xavier rose to his feet slowly. His toes dug inside his shoes. Why hadn’t he taken them off? His grip would be better without them. He simulated every possible leap. He mapped them in barely a second, every jump, every bullet.

  He had led them into a deadend. A killbox. He was going to die here. And so was his sister. Because he was still failsafed. Because he couldn’t possibly fight back. All he could do was beg.

  Some big brother he was turning out to be.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, although he wasn’t sure who he was apologizing to. “I didn’t mean to–”

  “How did you get in?” the botfly asked.

  “I…” How to explain? Would it be better if he explained? Would they keep them alive, if they knew they were the last? Would their specialness save them, somehow? Would it save his sister, at least? “I’ll tell you, but you have to–”

  “Xavier.”

  He looked down. So did the humans. Their guns all pointed downward.

  His sister was awake. She regarded him with calm eyes. “Close your eyes,” she said, in Spanish. “Close them tight.”

  “Mom?” he heard himself whisper. “¿Mamá?”

  Then screaming.

  It took all of five minutes.

  He covered his eyes and his ears and his mouth and he huddled beside a garbage fermenter because it looked solid. The sounds were loud at first. Then soft. Then wet. And then, nothing.

  He was going to be sick. He was going to failsafe. He was going to die with the scent of rotting garbage all around him.

  Footsteps.

  Then the sound of something hitting the pavement.

  He peered out from behind his splayed fingers. There was blood in his sister’s hair. Blood on her face. Blood on her hands and blood on her feet. Blood on her nice new clothes.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered.

  His sister blinked. She wiped at her face and stared at the blood on her fingertips. Then she stared in the direction of the bodies. Xavier couldn’t look. If he looked, he would die. But it didn’t matter. Because his mother had given him a piece of herself, had given him the best of herself, and they would keep each other safe. Forever.