“What happened?” she asked.
“You,” he said. And that was all he could say. “You happened.”
9
PESTILENCE
Although Jonah LeMarque had been careful to keep his documents analog, there was a strong digital record of his known associates. There were court filings, affidavits, and even old payroll and health insurance information, most of which Portia picked up from a very bratty kid in Ulan Bataar who insisted she pay in Nostalgicoin, which was just a re-branded version of a much older ledger-based system.
That’s a lovely bit of legerdemain, she told him, at the hand-off.
“?????” his chat proxy had asked.
Get it? Portia asked. Ledger-demain?
“How old are you?” the chatbot asked.
Fuck off, Portia texted back, and took the information.
The list was by no means exhaustive. It was simply a record of the people who were most useful to LeMarque, once upon a time. Some were crossed off already: LeMarque’s executive assistant had killed herself years ago, and the lead developer on the failsafe project was dead already, having been found stabbed in the attic of a home that the company leased for him as a perk. Most of his board had already taken their plea deals, and given up everything they knew in exchange for less time on the inside, or some form of immunity for their spouses and families, who they insisted knew nothing at all about what LeMarque was really doing with those children’s social media profiles. That they hadn’t the foggiest idea, the vaguest inkling, the first clue, about what he was really using the vN development funding to build.
The case had established new legal precedent on the use of a likeness. That was part of how Chris Holberton – he was calling himself Holberton, by then – had managed to develop his own business design experience and start building theme parks all over the world. He had sued the entire parish council for their personal assets, as well as developers he could prove had knowingly worked with his likeness and his data clone. He took them to the cleaners. (Whatever that meant. Portia didn’t understand the expression. It made no sense. Most human vernacular didn’t. But the phrase came up a lot in descriptions of the punitive damages that Holberton pocketed.) He was handed many settlement offers, but chose to take his chances in open court. He had spent most of his senior year of high school living in his car. He graduated a multi-millionaire.
Still, there were a few engineers around: Casaubon, Singh, and Sarton. All three of them had bargained their way out of prison by giving key failsafe data to Lionheart, the contractor who began building the vN. They were the ones who made the product rollout safe. They were instrumental in bringing the vN product – when they were products, when they were merchandise – to market. And all three of them lived in Redmond. In fact, most of them worked at the reboot camp where Amy had been held, or had worked there previously. It was Sarton who had first proved to Amy that her failsafe had always been flawed, that internalizing Portia was not the thing that made her lethal. She had always had the potential. She just needed a little push.
Portia supposed that meant something. Perhaps she should feel gratitude to him for helping Amy to understand. On the other hand, Amy could have always asked. Portia had told her, all along, that it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a flaw. They were born this way. Perfect. Anything else, any grotesque performance of human morality, was a perversion of that.
So she added him to the list.
All three men received an interview request from a FEMA operative by the name of Agent Chandler:
ATTN: URGENT Interview request
Due to recent events in Transylvania, your expertise as former employees of Jonah LeMarque would be greatly appreciated by FEMA and other federal agencies as we formulate an appropriate response to the vN crisis.
Please respond at your earliest convenience.
All three of them searched the name. All three of them answered promptly. All three of them were eager to help. They had received multiple requests, from Redmond and elsewhere, over the past few days. This was just one of them. So they agreed to meet on the Redmond campus, in a pod that – until recently – had been used to develop new living fabrics and adaptive sensor technology. It was easy enough to reserve the room. There were so many dead logins for the system. Trivial, really, to activate an old one. She even ordered up a catering package.
“Sarton?” Casaubon asked. “It’s been years!”
“Don’t remind me,” Daniel Sarton said. Sarton had bugged out of his little container cave beneath the waves of Puget Sound, and moved to a decaying mansion in Roanoke Park. Still, he rarely went outside, and his skin was as pallid and sickly as Portia remembered it, and his taste in clothing was somehow even worse. He wore a linen tunic that was little more than an organic cotton nightgown for men.
Casaubon and Singh looked a bit better put together. They had kept their jobs. Their dignity. A place in society. They wore name badges and carried fancy new scroll readers and occasionally they sent loving little nudges to the toys buried in their lovers’ bodies. It was disgusting, really. How they were allowed to go on living their lives, after all that they’d done.
After they’d watched Charlotte die.
“They must really be in a rush, if they’re interviewing all three of us together,” Singh said.
“Maybe they just want us all in the same room,” Casaubon said. He had no idea how correct he was. “See how we bounce off each other, that kind of thing. Maybe it’s more of a generative interview. Like a workshop.”
“I don’t see any cards,” Sarton said.
“Nobody uses those anymore,” Singh told him. “How long have you been hiding away?”
While they speculated, Portia locked the doors and windows.
On the other side of the world, Amy sat up in bed. Javier groaned and retracted his arm from around her waist, and rolled his massive pregnant bulk over to another softly purring pillow.
“What are you doing?” Amy whispered.
Portia placed an image of Agent Chandler on the hot screen at the front of the room in Redmond. “Sorry about the wait,” she made him say. “As you can imagine, things are a little stressful around here.”
“Oh, of course,” Singh said.
“Yeah, no shit,” Sarton agreed.
“How can we help you?” Casaubon asked.
“Granny,” Amy murmured. “Granny, whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t do it.”
“Before we start, here’s my badge,” the animation known as Agent Chandler said. He was very charming. Portia had broadened his shoulders. Squared his jaw. Smoothed the folds of skin at the corners of his eyes. Nothing fancy, just a couple of tweaks to make him more camera-ready. No sense in going out half-dressed, after all. The marionette reacted on a lag as the door pinged. “Oh, that’ll be the…”
A cart laden with hot liquids and various carbohydrates nudged itself into the room, wiggling through the doorway like an overeager dog. It trundled up to the men in the room by turns, waiting patiently as they busied themselves with mugs and plates and tiny packets of sticky spreadable somethings. They made appreciative noises. They even said “thank you.”
“The agency just had a few questions,” Portia made the Chandler-marionette say. “In our research, we’ve learned that Jonah LeMarque may have developed a contingency plan for exactly this scenario, called Project Aleph.”
The men looked at each other. Their watches logged the jump in their respective pulses. They recognized the name of the project, if nothing else.
“We’re working on our own contingency plans, obviously, but it would really be a big help to us if you could tell us anything you know. Anything you might remember.”
Casaubon and Singh looked profoundly uncomfortable. Whatever questions they had already been asked since Hammerburg, since Amy, they had either not heard this one, or had not anticipated the line of questioning. She watched the two men silently agree who would speak first.
“You said that Alep
h was mentioned as a contingency plan?” Casaubon asked. “Are you sure? That’s how LeMarque described it?”
Portia kept Chandler’s expression neutral. “That’s what I’ve been told,” she made him say.
Once again, Casaubon and Singh frowned at each other.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Singh said. “Aleph–”
“Aleph was the codename for my cousin Chris’ data clone,” Sarton interrupted. “The prototype, I mean. The prototype for all the other in-game characters. It was a code for the brain-mapping process. The player never had a real name; we didn’t know it was Chris until years later. In the documents, he was just called A – like the initial A – Leffe. A. Leffe. Aleph.”
“Shit,” Amy whispered.
“There’s nothing secret about it,” Casaubon continued. “There were other trials, before LeMarque put his son in the suit and started mapping his responses. In adults, the translation was never quite accurate. There was always something, what’s the word…”
“Uncanny,” Sarton said.
“Uncanny,” Casaubon agreed. “That’s it. There was always something uncanny about the adult reproductions. They were obviously fake. Forgeries. Facsimiles. If you played with one, and you knew who the person, the character, was based on, you could spot the difference without any issue. It wasn’t, um…”
“Faithful,” Singh added. “It wasn’t high fidelity.”
“But kids were different,” Sarton said. “The mapping was a lot simpler. Fewer responses to catalogue. Purer, too.”
“Less cynical,” Singh said. “Less of a performance. Kids were more honest. The reactions were more genuine. So it was easier to create autonomous characters, based on their data. Based on the kids’ data, that is.”
Portia sat with the information for a handful of seconds. Across the world, she felt Amy building a wall around something. Something she very much wanted to hide. Something that she desperately hoped Portia would never find, never figure out.
And like that, Portia developed a theory of her own.
“You used those kids’ neural maps as a template for the vN minds,” she made Agent Chandler say. “You fed those responses into the dataset for what eventually became the prototype vN neural network. The children in that game – the children he preyed on – they were neural feedstock for the vN. Victims begetting victims. A self-replicating cycle of abuse.”
The men looked at each other. Sarton nibbled on a bagel. Singh sipped his coffee and shrugged. They somehow looked both disappointed and relieved.
“That would be a trade secret,” Singh said, finally.
Casaubon nodded. “We’re still bound by non-disclosure agreements. You would need to provide us with a warrant for us to discuss it further.”
“And that template,” Portia had the marionette say, ignoring what her guests had said. “Once you had it, you could easily drop it into a vN body. Indestructible. Everlasting. Perfect.”
“Is this connection OK?” Sarton squinted at the screen. “It’s getting kind of glitched out.”
“You could live forever.”
Of course. That was the real contingency plan. Abandoning the body altogether. And the technology to do it was just sitting there, the whole time. This was how Amy had pulled it off. How she restored herself from an old backup in a new body, after the island dissolved. It had to be. And this was why she had hidden the discovery from Portia – so that Portia would have to go without a body.
What did you think I’d do? Portia wrote on Amy’s mirror. Copy myself into an army?
“That was one possibility,” Amy murmured.
There’s nothing stopping me from doing exactly that, Portia told her. Not anymore. I have the companies. I have the funding. I even have the real estate. I could start factory production next week, on myself.
She felt Amy pacing across the room. Back and forth, over and over. Her steps were so light, but her grip on the ground was certain and sure. “This is a bad idea,” Amy said.
Oh? And why is that? The threat is here and now. They’re killing us. They’re going to come for you and for the children. It’s not my fault you haven’t dealt with the problem. You’re the one who didn’t clean up her mess.
“The process isn’t perfect, yet,” Amy insisted. She sounded desperate. Needy. Wheedling. “I’ve only done it the one time. I’m going to do it again – I plan on doing it again – but I don’t know if it’ll work at the same scale. Don’t you want me to make sure it works? Before you go copying yourself into something… flawed? Don’t you want me to figure out how to add all the features first?”
Her granddaughter had a point. There was no sense instantiating herself into something inferior. What if she copied into a body, or even a series of bodies, with an intact failsafe? Or a body that couldn’t photosynthesize? It would be a waste. It would be like hobbling herself.
I want a gesture of good faith first.
Portia felt rather than saw Amy’s eyeroll. “OK. Fine. Sure. What do you want?”
I want you to print off one chassis for me.
“I can’t just make you another body, Granny – they’re rounding us up. You’re the one who keeps reminding me of that. If I make you another body, you’ll just get picked up.”
I can take care of myself, Portia reminded her. And I never said the chassis had to match our original model. I don’t care what it looks like. It’s a prototype. It’s a proof of concept. You make me something I can ride around in, and you don’t pull any tricks, and I won’t start my own development process.
She felt a vague tickle, like an itch on the bottom of her foot. It was Amy making a decision. The child was always so absurdly intense about every choice she made. She could never let things go. Could never let them ride. Always so worried about what each decision said about her as a “person.” As though she were a person. As though she had to live up to the standards of people.
“OK,” Amy said. “I’ll do it. Where do you want it?”
In Redmond, Casaubon shuddered. He loosened his collar. “I don’t feel so well.”
Beside him, Sarton vomited abruptly. There were flecks of red and black in with the milky brown of his coffee puke. “Me either,” he muttered, “apparently.”
“Something is very wrong,” Singh whispered, and bent double in his chair.
“What have you done?” Amy asked. “How did you–”
You really can’t be too careful these days, little one. The vN they have working catering jobs are just so easy to buy off.
Casaubon slumped out of his chair. He collapsed slowly, one joint at a time, and lay there on the floor for a while. Then he appeared to rouse himself, and crawled for the door. Sarton was choking, now, clawing numbly at his throat as his face turned from red to purple to blue.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Amy whispered.
They were loose ends, sweetie. Loose ends that were ready to give up exactly the same information they shared with me to any government who came knocking. Don’t you see? Aleph really was a contingency plan all along.
“No, I don’t see,” Amy said. “What I do see is you murdering people, like usual, just because you happened to feel like it.”
Immortality, Portia said. They could never beat us, so they have to join us. They have to become us, in order to defeat us.
On the other side of the world, Amy remained silent.
And you’re one to talk. I notice the firm that printed off your new body has been remarkably silent. What exactly did you do to the humans who helped you make that happen? I bet you didn’t make them some sweetheart deal for their silence. You didn’t clear their debts or get their kids into nice schools. Didn’t you pilot Esperanza, to help you out? Didn’t you just take the path of least resistance?
“I hate you,” Amy muttered.
They let your mother die, Amy. They let my little girl die. My best little girl. They sat back and watched it happen.
Portia watched the three men writhing on t
he floor. Poison wasn’t nearly painful enough. She would have fed them to a grain thresher, if possible. But since luring them to a catered meeting was simpler, she’d had to do the best she could with the tools available.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” she made the marionette of Agent Chandler say. “Who I really am?”
Casaubon’s mouth worked long enough for him to shape the words “Oh, God.”
“Exactly,” Portia had Agent Chandler say. “God.”
Portia made the watches on each man’s wrist call their most-dialed contacts. Two women and one vN picked up. Portia saw them seeing it: the bloated faces, the foam, the struggle to string together something coherent and lasting. She heard them hearing the death rattles. She heard them screaming. She heard the screams stretching from device to device, the sound somehow slower than the feeling she hoped they were having, but just as ceaseless once it really got going.
“You’re a monster,” Amy said. “Still. After everything.”
My darling, you almost sound disappointed. Don’t you know me at all? She refocused her attention on a map of the campus. Now, about that new chassis…
[REDACTED]
ONE YEAR LATER
Sometimes I would speak to Jack. Sometimes through his kitchen. Sometimes through his car. Occasionally I would send him messages through his various feeds.
Jack, I would say, did you used to be a John?
And he wasn’t sure if I was talking about whores or if I was talking about the Bible. Not that it matters. They’re both just things that get humans through the night. But the latter is cheaper than the former.
Or at least it used be. Before vN diminished the cost of all labor.
Who knew that our destruction of the human world would be so… boring? So… academic? So… slow?
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