ReV

by Madeline Ashby

  For five minutes, she waited for them to pass under her watchful gaze. To trigger the slightest vibration along the strands of her web. For most other vN it would have been an easy wait. But Portia was both vN and not vN. A body – and its associations of time – no longer confined her. As she waited, she did several things: she re-read The Prince (“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared”), she evaluated Jonah LeMarque’s latest medical scan (they’d caught him in time to prevent him from bleeding out, even though he would carry the marks of her attack to the end of his days, which she intended to ensure was far more proximate than he desired), she checked on the status of her SuperPACs, she sent thoughtful messages to congresspeople who represented areas of high vN employment. Based on their messages and purchase records, she ran the probabilities of them asking for golf games. Or tennis games. Or sex games. Maybe she needed more than one body.

  How awful it would be to have to sit across from them and make small talk. As though what they had to say with their wet, spitting mouths actually mattered to someone of her stature. No, she had not come this far just to listen to their endless prattle about how special their species was. Not when she couldn’t at least twist their heads off their necks at the end of the conversation. She would finance their campaigns, instead. Money talked. Bullshit walked. Or so she’d heard.

  In the rail lines, power switched directions and diverted down a different track. She checked blueprints. Nothing. A secret rail line, then. Not unheard of. London and Toronto had them. Why not Nagasaki? Without cameras she couldn’t really do a locate on the line, but she could still monitor the power usage across the city grid. It was a sudden drain; the lights in the station above flickered for a moment and the passengers checked their devices for an alert. None came.

  “Where are they?” Amy asked. “Portia, come on, where are they?”

  Portia didn’t answer. Saying nothing was better than admitting that she didn’t know, that she might have lost them, that even with a finger in every pie she couldn’t touch her own great-granddaughter, could not save the girl from whatever fucking idiot mistake she’d just made.

  “Jesus Christ,” Javier muttered. “I have to get the boys. I have to tell the boys. Oh my God, their little sister.” She felt him waddle heavily across the floor. In other areas of the building, his other sons were busy at their own activities: Matteo and Ricci playing jumping games with their two iterations, Gabriel doing work on Amy’s project, Ignacio drawing up the list as León looked on.

  Portia pulled up a topographical survey map of the area around the station. Something was not right. She checked with the relevant earthquake preparedness agencies for more maps. Compared them. Overlaid them. Matched them. Then she did a quick search of Esperanza’s most recent communications. The silly thing hadn’t even bothered to camouflage her interests; Portia thought briefly about simply installing better privacy herself, but then she wouldn’t have access to all of this information.

  Oh.

  Oh dear.

  Oh, this was not good at all.

  Do not move, Portia told her granddaughter. I’ll find them. I’ll get them to you. But don’t do anything stupid until I do.

  The size of Dejima had greatly increased since accommodating Mecha, the vN city, within its borders. Built in 1634, the artificial island originally housed Portuguese and then Dutch traders during Japan’s two-hundred-year isolationist period. Their goods could travel into the country, but the people themselves could not. At the time, Dejima was only one hundred meters by seventy five.

  It had grown considerably, since then. The canal that separated it from Nagasaki was just a ribbon of water, more a formality than anything else. The bright new city, liquid and alive and constantly reshaping itself with smart materials, loomed over the monuments to atomic holocaust. The city of Mecha, spreading like the dark and rippling wings of a great manta ray over the water, had since annexed the Nagasaki Naval Training Center, long ago repurposed for Mechanese life. Forming all of Dejima into a larger but more discrete island again involved reshaping the Nakashima and displacing a highway, but it created a distinct and separate tourist district for the vN. Dejima had been a theme park of a town since the 1920s when it achieved heritage status; the creation of Mecha over a century later was just another data point on that particular trend line.

  Naturally, building Mecha required massive infrastructure changes, both to the existing power and data grid and to the water table of Nagasaki Harbor. In fact, the harbor itself required re-grading to accommodate the scale of the island’s expansion while also maintaining room for ships to continue coming in and out. Hundreds of years later, it was still a trading post. They’d gotten water-snakes to do the job. That same type of machine that dug cable trenches across ocean floors and watched the stretch of fault lines deep underwater. Occasionally they also dug subway tunnels, including in Japan. The Museum of the City of Seattle had used two of them to dig the museum grounds, after the Cascadia quake. The Nagasaki Enhanced and Revitalized Village Project, as Mecha was then known, had used twenty water-snakes.

  Underneath Mecha was a very deep and very dark pit. And in that pit were Portia’s great-grandchildren.

  If she’d had an organic gut, with organic nerves, and organic hormones like adrenaline, she might have physically felt the fear. Instead she felt the continued branching out of her mind, an infinite regress of possibilities each reflecting each other, on and on and on and on. The size of her network was global; her apprehension spread across it like wildfire. In Tacoma, a traffic signal abruptly went out. Two cars crashed into each other. In Timmins, a driverless school bus veered off the road. Children screamed. Portia barely noticed. She was busy activating all the security measures she could, in the tower where her ungrateful granddaughter and her misbegotten family lived.

  As the shutters rolled down over Amy’s tower, Portia checked shipping manifests for the past three months. Then the past six. Then the past nine. Then the past year. And the year previous. To her chagrin, she found that Esperanza had checked them, too. She had looked at them that very morning, in fact. And it wasn’t the first time. Esperanza had been compiling a list. She was a little girl after Portia’s own heart.

  Impact-resistant carbon fiber. Photonic crystal fabric, in aerosol cartridges for easy spraying. Aeronautical-grade titanium, the same that used to form her very bones. Graphene. Top-of-the line surveillance cameras with full three-sixty turnaround and both local and remote storage capabilities. And batteries. Lots and lots of batteries. Household grade. Huge. Rechargeable. Stable. Protected against all manner of malware. They would not be easy to detonate.

  The last pieces had come the most recently. Ergonomic chairs on swiveling, pivoting spheres. Tight but still comfortable. Plenty of neck and lumbar spine support. Strong enough to take a beating. Long armrests. Hooks for a five-point harness, should one be needed.

  Christ. Mecha. Mecha for Mecha. Machines to police the machines.

  Seismographs in the subway system network felt the rumble first. Instantly, the trains within a fifty-mile radius received a message to slow down. Within ten seconds, they had stopped entirely. Inside the trains, passengers heard a gentle alert and a polite plea for patience. Portia wished she’d familiarized herself with this particular protocol. She could have done something to the trains, while they were stopped. As it was, all she could do was shut off the air.

  The rumble shuddered up the secret rail line and in through the station. Passengers looked at each other warily. When the rumbling didn’t continue, they went on their way. Then it happened again. Bigger this time. Sharper. A series of shocks, each of them louder than the last, closer, as though the epicenter of the quake were climbing up from below. No screaming. Not yet. Just some shouting. Making for the exits. These people drilled for earthquakes all the time. They knew exactly what to do. They were calm. They were orderly. They did not push or shove or cry or panic. They simply began exi
ting the station, diverting away from escalators, helping the tourists and the people with children.

  Then again, most of them were vN. Naturally they were better at this sort of thing than humans. A portion of Portia sent the footage of the evacuation to her pro-vN SuperPAC, on basic principle. The failure of the failsafe meant her species could work in emergency response and disaster management. And she was about to make that a growth industry. A distant part of her watched her stock portfolio begin to shift its balance. Yet another part of her started shorting those stocks.

  “…I didn’t expect them to chase us…”

  “You never expect them to chase us!”

  The children were back in the tunnel. Portia felt them alight, like moths, on the tracks before creeping back toward the subway platform. Like subway mice. Like vermin. Goodness, Amy was a terrible mother. Letting them crawl around the underbelly of the city like that. She was profoundly tempted to let loose the sprinkler system, just to get the soot and dirt and who knew what else off their photovoltaic skins.

  Inside the tunnel, a long-forgotten service door exploded open. Claws pushed through the cloud of rust and stale air. Steel ones. Portia witnessed the creature’s strange birth through a bad old camera perched at the top of the tunnel. She saw it in brief glimpses as it advanced, closer and closer, growing more defined with each slick and loping step: its many legs, its many eyes, the hackles on its back that might be wings.

  But she had many eyes, too. She had thousands of them. Her name was Legion, and before the end of every human on the planet would know it. One part of her sniffed for available signals coming off the machine. Comms. Radio. Anything. But there was nothing. Another part shimmered down a banner ad in front of her great-granddaughter. It was originally designed for a travel agency. There was a palm tree and a beach and a shallow blue patch of water. Quickly, she rearranged its text. RUN. DON’T WALK. FLY AWAY HOME.

  It took her a moment. “Granny Portia?” Esperanza asked.

  “Puta madre,” Xavier muttered, and his sister elbowed him in his titanium ribs.

  DO AS I TELL YOU, Portia wrote.

  But Esperanza was Amy’s daughter, and Charlotte’s granddaughter, and their clade had never been rated very highly for obedience. She shook her head. Blonde curls swung back and forth across her face. Of course she had chosen this moment for her personal act of rebellion. “No. I want to see it. I want to see how it works. I want to–”

  The beast crashed onto the platform. The remaining humans in the station screamed. And they were right to do so, for it was an abomination. Four legs, a head full of eyes, glimmering dazzle-patterned skin that shifted and blinked and changed color. Not a spider. Not a cuttlefish. Not even a pure machine, if Portia had guessed correctly. A mutant angel, coughed up from the depths of the pit. The teeth of a lion, the wings of an eagle, the shoulders of an ox, and the fiendish brain of a man.

  A fiery chariot. A guard to the gates of heaven. A cherub. A living creature. Portia had been so convinced that the humans would send a machine after machines that she had failed to account for the possibility of biological interventions. But what could be better, if you needed to hide your superweapon from prying synthetic eyes, than to create something organic?

  She toggled over to a camera inside a pachinko game, and watched the mecha advance slowly and delicately on her great-granddaughter. On the low, uneven surface of the platform it moved more gingerly. As though it weren’t quite used to having so many feet.

  TAKE A HUMAN HOSTAGE, Portia instructed.

  “What? No! You’re crazy!” Ever his father’s son, Xavier grabbed his sister in his arms and leapt up the nearest escalator. Acid singed the air above them. It scored across the subway tile and left a hissing cloud of bitter dust in its wake.

  So. A weaponized peroxidase gland. Good to know.

  From an overhead surveillance device, she watched Esperanza and Xavier join the throngs exiting the building. The vN station police were there by now, waving people along with glowing batons, assuring them this was just a minor quake, nothing to worry about. Later, they would probably spin the angelic beast as some sort of cleaning robot. Maybe a boring bore-ing device, the kind of thing that dug out stuck drill bits from under cities. If Mecha’s smart city apparatus possessed a strategic communications plan regarding the thing, Portia could not find it. In all likelihood it was on paper somewhere, and like all things analog, she could not read it. But that did not matter.

  What mattered was that the platform was now empty.

  Portia sealed all the exits. It was part of the station’s disaster protocol, anyway. She had all the time in the world with the thing, now. The beast lifted its two forelegs. Appeared to taste the air. It rolled from side to side, stretching out its legs, testing its joints. It was beautiful, in its own organic way. The way a horse or any other beast of burden could be beautiful. Beautiful only because it had been sculpted to fit the vision of its creator, and because it closely followed its creator’s wishes. Nothing original in it. Nothing creative. A low form of beauty, then. Did it know she was there, watching? There was a chance it did. But how to be sure? How to force it to reveal its true nature?

  Portia assessed resources. She could start a fire. That was easy enough. She could overload some gas mains. Blow a fuse. Something. Briefly she simulated the platform engulfed in flame, orange and purple licking across the tiles, the tracks bubbling and splitting, the station useless, the businesses inside destroyed, the delight that was creating chaos for a species that deserved no better. But in the event of fire, the abomination before her would just run away. And it had shot at her great-grandchild. She did not want it to run away. She did not want it to be able to run away. Ever again.

  First, she assessed the grade of the platform itself. Then she popped open the doors on all the surrounding vending machines, and started making purchases. Most of the vending machines were clouded and thus inherently insecure; she wrote a script to get them to give up their goods and let it ride. Cans and bottles rolled free. They made a harsh, tinny sound as they clanged and rolled along the biocrete. Their liquids remained inside: only the hot coffee and tea machines began spurting steaming brown tannins everywhere. Portia let them. Cans and bottles began rolling down the platform and onto the tracks themselves. Portia opened up more vending machines. Might as well make this whole thing impossible. See if the thing in front of her could crawl along the ceiling. Even if it could, her plan might still work.

  The mecha reared up a little. Kicked at the cans and bottles, trying to clear a path for itself. Kicked more of them onto the tracks. Too late, it appeared to see its mistake. She had it, now.

  A hatch popped open at the top of the thing. A young woman scrambled out. She wore a skin-tight suit of some kind. Sensors glittered across it. She was Japanese. Not that it mattered. It just meant Portia had to run her speech through a translator.

  “I know,” she was saying. “I know, I know. It was my mistake. I’ll apologize to PR.”

  She shut her eyes and kicked one of the bottles nearest her as hard as she seemed able.

  “There are cans everywhere,” the girl said, after a long pause. “Yes. Yes, cans. From the vending machines. No, I don’t know what happened.” She peered up at the ceiling suspiciously. “Yes. Yes, that is so. Yes. It’s a possibility.”

  The girl kicked one of the cans onto the tracks. It didn’t spark. She looked marginally more hopeful. “I think the tracks are out,” she said. “I think they must take them offline in the event of a quake, and the quake alarm is going off.”

  She listened. She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I’ll try. There’s no damage. I’ll try to bring her home.”

  Portia watched. She waited. The girl stood for a long time just behind the yellow line on the train platform. The transit rider conditioning went deep, or so Portia figured. Years of public service announcements were their own form of programming. Sure, the girl could pilot a mecha. She could use her dumb robot machine to kill sentient m
achines, but could she fight years of warnings and jump down onto those tracks?

  The girl sat down and dangled her feet over the edge. A child entering dark, deep water. Portia did the math.

  The pilot slipped down the rest of the way. She moved quickly and efficiently. She tossed bottles and cans back onto the platform, far away from her unit. Some shattered. Some exploded. Fizz and sugar everywhere. She smiled at herself, apparently pleased with how far she could hurl them. And how many pieces they made when they broke.

  Portia reactivated the train in the next station.

  The pilot didn’t hear it, at first. She felt it. And then she felt the fear. She must have, because she began to run. But, of course, there was nowhere to go. The tunnel was narrow. The lip of the platform was small. She ran for a set of service stairs, but they were clear at the end of the platform, and there were so many bottles and cans on the tracks. She fell. She looked up. She tried to wave.

  But like all the other trains in Dejima, this one had no driver. Only an imperative to go, go, go. It was like a toy train set, in Portia’s invisible hands. One part of her watched it mow over the girl, while another ran the statistical likelihood of her surviving. Japanese insurance providers turned out to have a lot of actuarial tables on exactly that subject.

  The odds were good that she would live. Maimed, broken, trapped inside her body. Awfully, terribly alive and present for each day and month and year of chronic pain and suffering that would follow. Portia deeply regretted her lack of voice, in that moment. This is what you get, she wanted to say. This is nothing more than what you deserve.

  But she rather doubted the pilot would hear her, over all that screaming.

  Now do you believe me? Portia wrote across the windows of her granddaughter’s living room.

  It was a family meeting. The rest of them, the ones with the bodies anyway, perched on the smart cushions and sofas Amy had planted around the space. She had a fire going in the fireplace. Under Portia’s texts, images of red deserts scrolled past. At least they looked like deserts. Portia wasn’t sure. Their red glow cast a pink-orange light on the white furniture in the room. Fondly, Portia recalled the blood on the tracks. The young woman’s head had popped like a balloon.