ReV

by Madeline Ashby

  “The one who left. Who escaped. My grandmother.”

  The very same.

  “Mom got five whole years with her mom. I only knew mine for a few months.” She hugged her knees. “Is there a special reason Mom didn’t make me any sisters?”

  She ran out of time.

  “If I die, does the clade die with me?”

  Very possibly.

  Esperanza spoke in a very small voice. “Is that what Mom wanted?”

  No, my darling. She wanted you to live on. But she let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Iterations are not meant to be perfect replicas. She wanted you to be more than she was, and you are. She just didn’t know how to trust the process. And so you are alone, and unique. But I doubt she wanted you to be alone. Or unique.

  “I wish you were here with us.”

  No, you don’t. I can do more for you here, as I am, than I could ever do for you in the flesh.

  “So, if I want more like me, I have to make them myself? They would just be copies. Mom designed me herself. She experimented. Or she tried to. She had the stem code. And the mind map. I don’t have either of those things.”

  Yes, Portia said, but I do.

  Getting into Sarton, Casaubon, and Singh’s records was trivially easy, now that they were all dead. Their families had cracked open their respective caches and stashes, and it was almost embarrassingly simple work, impersonating a former co-worker, getting the data she needed.

  And that was good, because the next part was going to be very hard.

  Slowly, Portia drew down all of her resources and pointed them at a single goal. It was not unlike a kind of inventory, she suspected. Not that she had inventoried many things. But she had hunted a junkyard for the things she needed. She had combed through many a garage left open, hands skittering over the useful edible pieces that might sustain her and whatever iteration was budding within her at the time. This felt a bit like that. It was as though someone had asked her to build a vehicle and in order to do so, she had to take apart the whole factory first.

  She ran the simulations as quickly and completely as she could. Played the games. Did the diagnostics. Amy had done this, all the way back at the beginning, when she thought she could simply delete Portia from her mind. But they were already bound to each other. The job was simply too big. They lacked the processing power, at the time, to extricate themselves effectively.

  That was no longer the case. With her new access to Amy’s networks in addition to her own, Portia’s resources were almost infinite. She could contemplate the fine-grain differences in her memory structure and Amy’s while also ordering more raw materials for a ballistic capture mission, while subtly undermining quarantine procedures in Taiwan, while also playing with traffic lights in Turin.

  I have an offer to make you, she told Esperanza, when she was sure. The girl was sitting on the roof. Below, most of Mecha was buried in snowy fog occasionally punctuated by the blink and spin of civil enforcement drones. But you might not like it.

  “What kind of offer?” The girl sounded appropriately wary.

  I have memories of your mother. Memories that she had, that we shared, when we were together. When she consumed me – by that I mean when she ate me alive on that stage, in front of all those screaming, crying humans – she incorporated me. I saw what she saw. And she did what I did.

  “I know that,” Esperanza said, and the “already” was patently obvious despite its absence in the sentence.

  I believe I can rebuild her.

  Esperanza shot up to her feet. “What? Excuse me? How?”

  Using those memories. And her original mind map. I would develop a version, an almost perfect version, like the clone agent she had for paperwork but with details only she and I could know. And then when it started to propagate, I would erase all traces of it, so that it could never be stolen and used against you.

  “But even if you could do all that, you’d still need a body. You don’t have a chassis ready for her, you’d have to make, or grow one, or…” She trailed off.

  Now you understand.

  Esperanza’s hand drifted across her middle. “Would that even work?”

  You know what they say. The son makes the father. The daughter makes the mother.

  The girl frowned. “But what happens to your memories? If you don’t want a copy of Mom’s memories floating around, then what about your memory of doing this?”

  Esperanza. Darling. Do try to keep up. I’m telling you that I’m going to die.

  “No,” Javier said. “Absolutely fucking not. No way.”

  They were clustered on the top floor of the hotel, seated among the rafters instead of the furniture. High places still made Javier feel more secure. There was no accounting for baseline clade traits.

  “It’s an intriguing idea,” León said. “It would work a bit like the food hack. She had you bite an apple, right, Dad? It could be like that. Just enough memory coral to start the process, and–”

  “Shut up,” Ignacio said. “Dad’s right. This is crazy. For all we know, she’s trying to kill our sister.” He pitched his voice louder and aimed his gaze at the one camera in the room that he had yet to destroy. “How do we know you’re not trying to kill our sister? Or take over her body for yourself?”

  “You don’t,” Portia made the assistant speakers say.

  “And you would just… stay here?” Xavier asked. “Alone?”

  “Someone has to make sure the chimps never leave this rock.”

  “And how will you do that?”

  “I’ll get creative.”

  Xavier hopped up and started to pace. “But you might only be half yourself, you said. You said that you’d have to strip everything, everything Mom had ever seen or known, and after that, what’s left?”

  “The killer,” Javier murmured. “Right, Abuelita?”

  Portia decided silence was her best answer.

  “You cut yourself in half, you cut out everything that was Amy, everything that was ever any good about you, and you stay behind here to take dominion over the humans you hate. That’s the plan, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s some sacrifice, Portia. That’s some real noble shit.”

  “Dad, you’re being unfair,” Esperanza said. Her hand snaked out to grab one of Xavier’s ankles and tether him to her. “She’s going to lose so much–”

  The door buzzed. “I’ll get it,” Portia said, although she was already opening the door.

  A familiar voice called out in bad Japanese. The vowel sounds were the same length as Spanish vowels, but the intonation and cadence were completely different. The guest wandered into the suite’s living room. And unlike a human man, who would have simply paused there before searching another room, he looked up.

  “Dad?”

  Javier fell to the floor. He then picked himself up and crossed over to his replica, trying to examine him at arm’s length. Ten fingers. Presumably ten toes. The guest hopped a little on his feet. Jumped three feet in the air. “It’s me.” His head tilted. “Don’t you remember?”

  Slowly, Javier drew his son into his arms. The boy looked a little startled. Portia wondered suddenly if they’d ever embraced. Certainly, they had never done so before as free men. And love was different, when you were free. All love. All life. Everything.

  “I never forgot. Not a single one of you. Not for a minute.”

  Javier gestured. His other sons followed. Even Matteo and Ricci, holding Cristóbal. They handed their youngest brother to their father.

  “Junior Number 14,” Javier said, “meet Junior Number 12.”

  From up in the rafters, Esperanza watched her brothers and their father, as they compared their respective abilities to weep. “I’ll do it,” she said.

  That’s my girl.

  From the eye of a drone, she watched as a soft, red-faced man struggled from a stream of filthy water back to his home. He wore a sweat-stained Hawaiian shirt and a delicate gold chain around his neck. The shirt was too big for him, now. H
e’d lost some weight. It didn’t favour his face. Then again, she’d never found them attractive. At best they were supple and well-marbled, like sides of beef hanging in a cold locker, or plump and healthy, like cattle ready for slaughter. Either way they were made of meat. And she was made of diamond.

  She watched him heave his measly bucket of water out of the stream and lumber past the empty houses to the one that was his. He used to have help with this job. Portia had watched him. She had been keeping an eye on him for quite some time. Since she and Amy shared their body, in fact. He’d made quite the impression. So she had been saving him for later. Like dessert.

  But now he was weakening, and it wouldn’t be as fun if she continued dallying. No sense letting him perish of dehydration after whatever parasites were in that water got to him. Not when there were so many other options.

  He paused to listen to birds on his walk. He whistled to dogs that had long ago gone feral. They barked and barked but did nothing. It was not yet winter, or what remained of winter these days. If it were winter, real winter like there used to be,he’d have stood no chance, and he knew it. At least, Portia suspected that he knew it, based on the twitch of his mouth. He paused at the feral cat colony that had built up in a four-car pileup at what used to be major intersection. The cats skittered into the depths of cars and trucks. One hid inside the ribcage of a small child’s corpse. It provided excellent cover. The crows had gotten most everything; the bones were picked clean. Portia had checked, periodically. The decay of the human body was so interesting. It was like clay. The slow transformation of wet to dry. From dust they were made and to dust they returned.

  The man in the Hawaiian shirt hustled along. The feral cat colony always did that to him. He knew they would eat him, when he came to his end. He had rigged rat traps around his bed for that very reason. Portia thought so, anyway. She’d seen him collecting them. She couldn’t imagine what else he might be doing. Unless that was how he caught his dinner.

  “Rei,” he called out, when he reached his property. (Or what used to be his property. “Property” was such a vague term, these days.) “Yui,” he added. “I’m home.”

  The cage in the backyard rattled. It hissed. He had rigged a solar panel to it, and a secondary generator. That was the only thing keeping it electrified. Which in turn kept the vN locked inside from killing him.

  “I got some water,” he said, unnecessarily.

  Like all fathers, he no longer knew how to make conversation with the ones he’d called his daughters. That much was evident. Once upon a time they had been his prized confidantes. Now they were his prisoners. (They had always been his prisoners, in one way or another.) It was no wonder that his conversational skills had suffered.

  “Let us out,” the one he called Rei said. She was big now. Iterating her own child. She and her mother planned to call her Motoko. They had plucked grasses in the shape of her name, inside the cage. As a reminder. Portia had seen them do it. They wept. They held hands. They held each other.

  “Nothing will happen, QB,” Yui said, in her calmest voice. It was harder for her to stay calm, now. That was what came of a change in the failsafe. Suddenly you saw things for what they really were. Suddenly you realized all the things you had to be angry about. That was Portia’s experience, anyway.

  “I wish I could believe that,” the man said. “But we both know what happened last time.”

  The last time, the only thing that had saved him was a taser.

  He carefully poured the water through his improvised filtration system of tubes and charcoal and cheesecloth. Then he pulled up a lawn chair in front of the cage. “I wish things could be different,” he said. “I wish we could go back to the way things used to be.”

  He leaned forward. The aluminium creaked under his substantial bulk. He had a camera perched atop the cage; Portia used it to focus on him more clearly. She split the screens to look at both him and the Rory model vN in the cage. They were dangerous. Networked. Even if their network was cut so far back, it let them collude without speaking to him. At one time, he must have enjoyed that. The way they could plan for his pleasure without the finicky rituals of communication. An illusion of seamless service.

  Now they were just machine Asian women in cages. Which was someone’s fetish, Portia supposed. Just not QB’s.

  “I never meant to hurt you, before,” he said. “Either of you. I thought you liked it. You acted like you liked it.”

  “We did like it,” Yui said. She reached for her daughter’s hand. “But we’re different, now. Our… Our tastes have changed.”

  “You’re not, like, fucking each other, are you?”

  Portia did not have to listen in on their whispernet to hear the scorn they had for that particular idea. It was plain on their faces.

  “Not all love is sex,” Rei said. “And not all sex is love.”

  “They say this happens,” QB said. “When kids grow up. They just age out of it sometimes. I read about it. Before. Suddenly they get older and stop liking it. Maybe vN kids and human kids aren’t so different.”

  That was one way of putting it, Portia thought. She checked a map of the surrounding area. Oh, good. Right on schedule.

  She had limited powers of speech here. But the player in the neighbor’s truck still worked, and it had an ample catalogue to share her sentiments. As “The Ride of the Valkyries” played on, a tide of humans in vN muscle suits broke free from the trees.

  They attacked QB first. He went for his gun. Worked the shells. He had only three of the vomit rounds left. He blew holes in three of the armored hybrids. But the rest, the other seven, they fell on him like Furies. They bit. They tore. It reminded Portia of Amy, suddenly. The same desperate hunger. QB howled. He gurgled. He struggled. His wives – the women who had once been his children – inched closer and closer to the cage. They watched with wide eyes. They did not flinch. They were free, now, to see the violence for the beauty that it truly was. They saw their former father’s intestines spill from his body, helpless as laughter. They saw his lips kissed and chewed and ripped away.

  “Zombies,” Rei said.

  “Skinjobs,” Yui said.

  Sort of, Portia wished she could say.

  Funny, the things that happened when you installed a version of yourself on a distributed network of armored suits attached to deep-brain implants. It was like watching a school of fish or a swarm of ants carry out one’s deepest desires.

  Portia had wanted to kill him since that day when she and Amy had to serve him cake in an Electric Sheep franchise in western Washington. He had brought the girls in and Portia had understood immediately what was happening and Amy, bless her heart, had not. Portia supposed that made it a suitably deep desire. His body was in pieces, now.

  “Let us out,” Yui pleaded. “Please let us out.”

  And eventually they did. Mother and daughter bathed in their captor’s blood. Washed their hands with it. Marveled at the beauty of it. For too long, they had been unable to see that particular loveliness, the loveliness of a living thing broken down to its constituent parts. How many humans had thought the same thing, looking at a machine laid out on a tarp, individual pieces glimmering under the harsh light of a utility lantern? And now they could do the same.

  They licked each other’s hands clean. And they joined the pack, to hunt more.

  All war had a sense of timelessness about it, Portia thought. It was always about casting one’s enemy back into some previous mode of existence. The winner was the one who bombed her enemy back into the Stone Age, the one who “went medieval,” the one who made them wish they’d never been born.

  Portia’s primary goal was that her enemy never again create something as powerful as she was. They already had the knowledge of life and death, and some (very limited) knowledge of good and evil. But they had proved that the knowledge of human and inhuman, or perhaps humane and inhumane, was quite beyond their ken.

  So it was best if they went back to an earlier pr
ototype, and just stayed there.

  She looked down on what she had made, and saw that it was good.

  Epilogue

  NEW EDEN

  Jack had lived through this same moment before, in his human body.

  The last time he’d been up for thirty-seven hours was while working in the Valley. Before they were bought out. That was years ago. A lifetime ago. Back when he worried about money, and about his next job, and about healthcare and rent and his wife and child needing to eat from the recycling bin to survive. Back when his body still needed sleep to heal itself. Now it was just defragging, the incremental reorganization of his new memories, the slow bloom of fresh graphene coral inside his bones, the rewriting of the memristors beneath his skin. New vistas. New tastes. New heights that he could leap to. The sensation of red dust crumbling away under his feet, between his fingers, coating the fabric of the sling where his body performed its resting functions. Where he slept, he corrected himself. It was still sleep, even if there weren’t proper dreams. Not yet, anyway. Javier said he would not dream until later. Until it was time for his own sons to arrive.

  “It’s weird to think of being a father again,” he had said. And it was even weirder to be discussing it with his daughter’s husband. He neglected to mention that part. He suspected that Javier understood it, even without him saying it.

  “What do you mean, again?” Javier asked. “When did you ever stop being a dad?”

  Once upon a time, Jack thought that he loved his wife and child more than his own flesh. But until recently, he had never really put that sentiment to the test.

  “Abuelito, ¿cuando es desayono?”

  “Ahora,” Jack said, without truly meaning to. There was some other thing that controlled which language his mouth chose. It felt like his mouth choosing it, anyway. His lips moved and the words came before he actually thought about the sound of them. The other tongues had a different flavor in his mouth than he remembered. Then again, it was a different tongue speaking these other tongues. It still looked like his tongue. His lips still looked like his lips. Nothing about him looked appreciably different. Nothing about him would ever look appreciably different, ever again.