“Dante, go get the pancake mix,” Jack said, again in Spanish. He wondered, vaguely, if there was some sort of code quirk for his daughter’s descendants liking pancakes more than other pre-fab foods. And then he wondered what they would make of the mined minerals. Not what they would think of them, but what they would make of them, what they would create.
His great-grandson hopped off the barstool and bounced a good foot in the air before landing somewhere near the pantry. Dante jumped once and snagged open the door. He jumped again and found a pouch.
“This one?” the boy asked.
“No, the other kind,” his sister Beatriz said. She pointed. “I want the kind with the chips in it.”
Jack said nothing about the unintentional pun his great-granddaughter had made. Dante did another jump. He did that sometimes, when he was pondering something. It was as though the movement were somehow essential to his cognition. As though he would no longer be himself if he could not move. In Jack’s experience, there was no difference in that respect between human and vN children. Then again, they were all human now. They were all people here.
The boy selected the other pouch and placed it on the worktop. Jack watched Dante hop back on the barstool. He coasted from surface to surface, arms tucked naturally into his ribs, his movements perfectly efficient. He had never known any other gravity than this one. He had no forgotten strings to hold him down.
“Can we go to the farm today?”
“Of course we can,” Jack said.
“Can we play hide and seek?” Beatriz asked.
“If you like,” Jack said. “But only in the safe area. I don’t want you playing around the camel-bots and spider-bots. They’re big and dumb and they could hurt you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” they said, and they each turned it into a two-syllable word, stretching the vowels across the vastness of their annoyance. They had never lived anywhere that was not designed around preserving their lives, but Jack still remembered his old life, his old routines. All the things in the world – the old world, the distant blue one and not this freshly bleeding red one – that could hurt his little girl. He was a doting grandfather, and a worried one, even though his worry no longer felt the same. He might once have felt a breathless terror at the idea of their being crushed underfoot by some massive machine. Now he felt only the expansion of probabilities in his mind. It was bloodless, this fear. Heartless. His stomach no longer churned. His throat no longer closed. But it was terror, all the same. Because it was love, all the same.
“Tell us a story about Granny Amy,” they said.
With his new lips, he smiled at his great-grandchildren. Their nomenclature was so strange. But they were building new families here. New structures. From this distance it was no more unusual than old Russian family nicknames, or the fact that Korea had something like only twenty surnames at last count. The human species – the organic kind – was given to its own chaos of language. In ordering it, the vN had created their own strangeness.
“What kind of story?” he asked.
“Little girl story,” Beatriz said, just as Dante said, “Eating Granny Portia!”
“You don’t want to hear the story of how she brought us here?” Jack asked, because this was the story about his daughter that made him the proudest, the one he could not help but tell over and over. His little girl, the one who made dollhouses and played with toy boats, the one who crossed this great distance, the one who had done what humans – the other humans, the older humans, the kind that breathed and bled and died – had dreamed of for so long. His little girl, who had fulfilled that promise while others just contemplated it.
“We already know that one,” Dante said. “Tell us about Granny Portia.”
“She wasn’t very nice,” Jack said mildly. “She was born on the old world, just like your Granny Amy.”
“Granny Amy and Granny Portia were the same person,” Beatriz said. “Once.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “Once. For a little while.”
“Because Granny Amy ate Granny Portia,” Dante said. “Every little last bone and tooth.”
His body no longer shuddered or shivered at that thought. He almost wished it would. But he had left that memory woven inside his old body. And all the trauma was there, too. All the helpless tics and twitches that kept him awake and all too aware, at the oddest and most inconvenient times. Probably he should have felt grateful for that.
“Yes,” he said. “I saw it happen. Your Granny Amy’s jaws opened up, just like a snake, and she swallowed her whole.”
“What’s a snake?” Beatriz asked.
“Yeah, what’s a snake?” Dante asked.
So he had to explain snakes. He explained a scaly creature with no arms or legs that crawled and tasted the air with its tongue and digested all its food very slowly. He said that people – the other people, the previous iterations, the ones who were left behind – used to be afraid of them. It was a well-known fear, he said. He did not explain why. He did not tell the other story, about the other Eden. (Satan having compassed the Earth, with meditated guile returns as a mist by Night into Paradise, enters into the Serpent sleeping.)
“People used to have them at home, sometimes,” Jack said. “For pets.”
“What are pets?”
“They’re animals that live in the house, because they’re part of the family.”
Dante and Beatriz frowned at each other. They had trouble with the concept of animals. They had never met them, or the human beings who kept them.
“Imagine someone who’s not quite as smart as you, but still has feelings like you do, and still loves you very much,” Jack said.
They twisted around on their barstools. They examined each other. Much like hopping and jumping and streaking through the air, looking at each other was part of their thought process, too. As though they could not truly know their own minds without looking at the other. Then again, Xavier and Esperanza had borne them at precisely the same time. Down to the same minute. They had watched, exhausted and beaming, as their parents lifted their iterations from their swollen, smoking bodies.
“Like the Housekeeper?” Dante asked.
“Sort of,” Jack said. “Only warm and fuzzy. Or sometimes dry and scaly. And not an algorithm.”
Beatriz wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”
Jack smirked. Someday they would get proper animals. Animals taught empathy, he thought. Sure, their function had been different when they lived in the other place. They flushed birds or caught mice or sang songs. But they also cast the human spirit in relief. And this place would need that, too. And he would be here to see it. Provided that those other, older, obsolete humans didn’t come along.
Portia would see to that.
It was strange to put one’s faith in a villain. To trust something so evil so completely. And yet he did. She had always hated humanity. She would keep it alive just long enough to watch it suffer. And she could spin out that suffering, he thought. The only real danger they faced was the danger of her getting bored. The only hope of leaving she might allow them was the hope she could ultimately deny. It would make the torture sweeter.
Contrapasso. That’s what they should have named the old place, now that it was under new ownership. Let the punishment fit the crime. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Here, every cowardice must meet death. For although, considering their origins, their species had been made to live as brutes, they would follow virtue and knowledge instead.
Jack should have felt bad. But he didn’t. Which meant he was on her side. Just a little bit. At least, he sympathized with her more than he cared to admit. He wouldn’t have thought that possible, in the old days. Sometimes he missed Charlotte so much it sucked the air right out of his lungs. At least, that was how it used to feel. Now it felt more like a gap. An absence in his day. These days it was easier. Now he was a different person in a different body, that felt different things. Now the lack of her was no longer a physical ache that kept him from
sleeping or eating or speaking or going out. Now there were great-grandchildren that bounced off walls and into his arms. Now there was the possibility of flight. Now there were red cliffs under his feet and diamond trees in the valleys below.
“What do you want to know about Granny Portia?” he asked.
“Will she ever come visit?” Beatriz asked.
He wasn’t sure how to answer that. He supposed it was technically possible. He found the thought genuinely terrifying. He knew that Amy had reached some sort of detente with her, before they took their leave. Some sort of agreement. But that didn’t mean Jack had to like it.
“Do you want her to?” Jack asked.
“Only if she gets to have a body,” Beatriz said. “Bodies are better for hugging.”
“That’s true,” Jack said. Perhaps that was what had calmed Portia down. Amy seemed to think so. As long as Portia was distracted, as long as she didn’t get bored, as long as her destructive potential was widely dispersed, they would have a fighting chance up here. In the end, Amy had said, one body was never enough for her anyway.
“Do you feel sad, living all by yourself?” Dante wanted to know. “Granny Amy says you probably feel sad. But I think being by yourself is cool.”
Beatriz poked him between the ribs. He slapped her hand away. They smirked at each other. Perhaps they would not repeat the drama of their parents, and their parents’ parents. Now there was greater diversity in the population. They had more choice. And they were among the first generations to deal with the uncertainty that came with choice.
“I was an only child, before,” Jack said. “So, I’m used to being by myself.”
“Your parents didn’t have any more iterations?” Dante asked.
“No. My parents didn’t… iterate. They did things the organic way. Maybe that was part of the problem. And I think I was too much for them as it was. I was kind a handful. Like you two.”
They laughed. In truth, Jack wasn’t sure if his parents had decided to have more. Perhaps he had left brothers and sisters behind on that little blue marble. If so, his parents had never told him about them. He doubted it would have made a difference, if they had.
“Tell us a story about the old world,” Beatriz said.
“Once upon a time,” Jack said, “there was a boy named Jack. And in a town called Las Vegas, he met a girl named Charlotte. She was very beautiful. She had green eyes, just like the two of you.”
Dante and Beatriz spun on their barstools, gripping the kitchen counter, twisting and turning themselves in perfect unison. They had his wife’s eyes. His daughter’s eyes. Seaglass, he had called the color, and when they had asked what seaglass was, he explained about the ocean. (“Imagine a forest of water,” he had said. “Imagine a sky that held you in its arms.”) Their skin was brown with sun and lineage. He felt raw and pink standing before them, his looks a relic of some other time and place and bloodline. When his parents kicked him out all those years ago, they had probably not expected him to run quite this far away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the patient support of my agent Sally Harding, my editor Gemma Creffield, Eleanor Teasdale, and everyone at Angry Robot.
Further, I could not have completed it without the compassion and caring of multiple therapists and doctors. During this time I was supported in work by the people at the XPRIZE Foundation, in particular Eric Desatnik; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Institute for the Future; OCADU, in particular Nick Puckett; the Dubai Future Foundation, SerialBox, and my colleagues at Changeist, Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith. I also relied on the early reads of Sandra Kasturi, Damien G. Williams at Virginia Tech, and Joi Weaver. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the staff of the InterContinental Hotel Geneva, who looked after me during the United Nations AI For Good Conference where I completed a crucial draft of this book. (This book, like so many others, would not exist without late-night pizza and wine.) And, of course, I could not have finished this book without the love and consideration of my husband David Nickle, who listened to every ending until I found the right one.
And lastly, I must thank you, the one reading these words. Thanks for waiting.
ReV Page 25