They knew he could fuck. They knew he couldn’t say no. They knew it was because he was a vN, a self-replicating humanoid with a hard-coded failsafe that guaranteed his affection for and protection of humans. They knew that all vN had the same failsafe, and that it would never fail, because the Rapture-happy mega-church whose tithes funded its design was just as picky about its legacy for those pitiful sinners left behind as it was about the Bible verses that backed up their Tribulation theology. That’s what they knew.
Now, they probably knew different.
Now, the failsafe was broken. A select group of kinky hackers had broken it within a subset of vN originally designed for nursing. The first clade of hacked vN, free of love and other shackles, escaped domesticity and made for the desert of the American Southwest. Their leader, Portia, attempted to cultivate the bug through serial self-replication and total selection. She created multiple iterations. Only one, Charlotte, was a true incarnation of her vision. Charlotte fled when she realized that Portia had killed all her iterations. Charlotte iterated one final time in Oakland, California, with a human man whose love for her was probably the purer for its ignorance of her past.
They called her Amy.
The rest of the world called her a menace.
Javier called her querida.
“Querida.” Javier burrowed his chin into her neck. Dawn would arrive soon. He felt it in his skin, and knew she felt it in hers. They shared the ability to photosynthesize. The sunrise was their thing. The thing they had instead of sex.
Amy’s hands twitched. Her fingers fluttered over the dark surface of the island. She’d graded the floor of this room flat save for a futon-sized square of very soft bed. Their muscles never ached, but Javier appreciated the gesture. She’d even kept that little square of space consistently warm. Javier wasn’t sure how exactly she communicated these design specs to the island, but he assumed it had something to do with the little flicks and swipes her fingers made in her sleep.
At first he thought they might be dreams, and he waited for news about her first iteration. That was the only time he ever dreamed – when he was iterating. And Amy had started prototyping a little girl, a while ago. But nothing had come of it. Now, he figured it was the island she was talking to. At least, he hoped so. It was better than the other alternative.
She’d talked in her sleep back when they first met, too. Only back then she’d been talking to Portia, and Portia was telling her Christ knew what. Probably how to burn things. Whatever it was, it involved a lot of whimpering and moaning and pleading. The only time that stopped was when he’d reach over and rest a hand on her shoulder. Just a hand, just her shoulder. Nothing more. But it was enough. She’d go still and her body would slacken, relax, just like a human woman’s. He’d never told her about doing that, then or now. It was his secret.
He tucked himself in closer around her. It was nice, being allowed to do these things more openly, now. His lips brushed the edge of her ear. “Querida.”
Amy rolled over to face him. In this light, her eyes were an unnaturally deep green. Viridian.
“It’s nice, not being in the back of a car somewhere,” she said, as though having read his mind.
“That’s for damn sure.”
“And we’re not on the run from anybody.”
“Not today.” He smiled. “We do have a new shipment coming in, though.”
Her eyes dimmed. A new tension appeared between her brows. She looked around the room. “Where’s Xavier?”
Javier’s thirteenth iteration chose the name “Xavier” after tiring of being called “Junior.” He had also gradually – slowly, painfully, cock-blockingly – outgrown sleeping in Amy’s room. Javier couldn’t blame him for lingering. Amy had fought tooth and nail to keep him safe after Javier abandoned him in a junkyard. She took care of him when he was bluescreened and no better than a toy baby doll. She carried him and kept him warm and talked to him. The boy probably didn’t remember all that. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten it.
“I know this may come as a shock, but not all little boys want to sleep with their mothers. That’s kind of an organic thing. It takes a brain to have an id.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “I’m not his mother.”
“You’re the closest thing. You helped me iterate him. You were the first one to ever hold him.”
Amy smiled. “It seems like such a long time ago.”
“Well, you are only six years old. A year is a long time, when you’re six.”
Amy stretched. “I guess he’ll want to grow up and get big like you, soon.”
“Well, there are advantages to being all grown up.” Javier drew a small circle around her knee with one finger. He let it become a spiral, tightening, while he kept his eyes on hers. Maybe this time.
Amy peeked down at his hand moving across her skin. “Are you trying to have sex with me?”
Javier flopped onto his back. “Well not if you’re going to be so goddamn unromantic about it!”
“I don’t think we should have sex. I don’t think it would be right. I’ve told you before.”
“What are you saving yourself for? You’re an atheist, for Christ’s sake. You know robots can’t get married, right? Legally. I mean in some countries just living with you for a year makes me your husband. Which would explain the lack of sex, I guess.”
Amy sat up. She knelt over him and made him look her in the eye. “Dr Sarton told me–”
“Sarton is a fucking pervert otaku hack. I don’t give a shit what–”
“He told me that you only feel that way about me because I was raised with humans.” It call came out in a rush. Her gaze darted away from him and pinned itself to the floor. “I’m just good enough to fool your Turing process. Your failsafe. You only like me because your failsafe works.”
She had a point. Or Sarton did. She was just good enough. Just human enough. She had all the weird tics and habits that humans did. This whole righteous insistence on keeping their relationship chaste was one of them.
“So it just wouldn’t be right,” Amy said. “Because of your failsafe. Because you can’t choose.”
He had no answer for that. Technically, she was right. He had no choice, when it came to Amy. Each time they’d parted ways, he’d come back. Fought his way back in. Rescued her. He couldn’t help it. Once, he’d waited in a Redmond reboot camp watching a stream of DARPA-funded scientists trying their best to break her. He’d begged them to stop. He’d cried and screamed and totally lost his shit. He’d almost failsafed right there in front of the monitor, on the floor, holding his head and squeezing his eyes shut. Then he’d torn the skin off his hands crawling through duct work to get to her. At the time, he had not questioned why. He’d done it to make himself feel better. Sex with Amy would make him feel better, too. Probably. If he could do it.
“Besides,” she said. “I’m not even sure it… works.”
Javier looked up at her. “Do I have to give you the whole ‘fully functional; multiple techniques’ speech again?”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Well, what do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t,” he lied. “Why don’t you tell it to me straight?”
“You’ve tried…” Her fingers fluttered. She brought them into her lap. Her blush was so pink and so instant it would have taken his breath away, if he’d had any. “I mean, we’ve tried. Before. And it never seems to go very well.”
He scrambled up to his knees. “That’s because it never seems to go very far, either. I’m not a first baseman. I hit home runs.”
Amy blinked. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Of course she didn’t. That was part of the problem. Just a year ago, she’d been a kindergartener. Playing house was enough for her. Having never taken the other steps, she saw no need to. She probably didn’t even want to.
“Is it me?” he asked.
“What?”
&n
bsp; “Is it sex you don’t want, or just me?”
Her mouth fell open. “How can you say that?”
He shrugged. “I can see why you wouldn’t. I’m not exactly clean. I’ve done a lot of bad things. I’m just about the world’s worst father–”
“That’s not true–”
“Sure it is. I know that. There’s not much about me that’s respectable.”
“I respect you! I respect you very much!”
Javier grinned. Amy was pretty adorable when she was getting called on her shit. Her eyes went wide and her posture went straight, like she’d just been asked to spell out a really difficult word for a prize. It made it easier to remember she’d spent most of her life as a child. Easier to be patient with it.
“I guess what I’m saying is, I can understand if you don’t want me.”
She had the grace to look embarrassed. “Don’t be stupid. You’re really…” Her mouth worked open and closed. “Pretty.”
“Pretty? Is that the best you got? I may be all machine, but I’m still all man.”
“I know that, but…” Her fingers skittered across the floor, as though she were physically searching for the words she wanted. “You don’t look like human men.” She smiled. “You look better!”
He rolled his eyes. “Please. I look like all my other clademates. I’m mass-production, nothing special.”
“Don’t say that. You’re very special.”
“Not special enough, apparently.”
Amy frowned. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t work that way. Without the failsafe I don’t… like humans that way.”
“Well, it’s not like I worship the ground they walk on, or something–”
“No, Javier.” She shook her head softly. “What I mean is, I don’t understand what’s so great about humans.”
This was the crossroads. No matter which avenue he took in this fight, they always came to it. Amy didn’t see what he saw. Didn’t feel what he felt. She’d never know that exasperated affection he had for them, as they puttered around their kitchens looking for the coffee cup they’d just put down; how you kept loving them the way you kept loving a puppy as it looked you straight in the eye and pissed on your rug. You collected them like you collected pieces of handmade earthenware, old and chipped and fragile and unique. They weren’t perfect. That was the whole point.
And then sometimes, as they slept, you listened to the creak and squeeze of their decaying hearts, or heard the bubble and choke of their lungs, and you realized how very temporary they were, and you started to reconsider your programming.
Time to bring out the big guns.
“You could fix me.”
She frowned. “What?”
“Break me. Hack me. Whatever. You could do it. You put yourself back together; you could do the same for me. Just do it without the failsafe, this time.” He reached for her softly-twitching hand and stilled it in his grasp. “And then I’d choose you all over again, free and clear.”
Her fingers trembled with restrained gestures. He only ever had a fraction of her bandwidth at any one time. The island consumed so much of it, even at moments like this.
“Do it,” he said. “I’m asking you to. We could do it right here and now.” He nodded down at the bed. “Just let the island absorb me, like it absorbed you. It took you three days to come back last time. I can handle three days in the goo. You might not have noticed, but I have a very strong sense of my own identity.”
Amy pulled her hand away. “It’s not like that. It’s not that easy.”
“Sure it is.” He looked down at himself. “Just make sure you bring all the important stuff back in working order.”
Amy stood. “No. I’m not going to do this. I won’t. I can’t.”
Javier stood up, too. He folded his arms. “Amy, are you a replican, or a replican’t?”
She levelled him with a stern glare. “You’re not doing yourself any favours, Javier.”
Amy gestured at the furthest wall and a portion of it slid away. She stepped out into the sunlight. Dawn was just growing into day. He followed her under the heliotropics, into the jungle of black-on-black. The trees bent back subtly to allow her more light. Lately their island was small. It held only their house within a thicket of black trees, and the single diamond tree that had always stood beside it. That tree was the first thing Amy had raised from the body of the massive group of vN that once lived beneath the sea. It was only with their combined processing power that she’d been able to rid herself of Portia, a partition of whom she had internalized when the old bitch tried to kidnap her. Amy accessed that power each time she redesigned the island. Now Javier wanted it, to redesign himself.
Amy splashed into the water and started walking across it. Behind her, Javier rolled his eyes. She always did her Jesus walk when she was feeling particularly self-righteous. He waded in after her. Beneath their feet, a membrane of the island’s flesh stretched taut between their home and the superstructure directly behind it. Javier kept his eyes on the water. But he didn’t only look down, he looked back, back to their little house alone on the water and the tree that stood beside it. No matter the formation of the islands, it was always at the very front: a perfect target.
Amy had designed their archipelago like a leaf: a single broad spine with multiple arterials of increasing length branching away from it, and little buds of space on the edges of each. Each bud featured structures of varying degrees of sophistication. Some of them were flat-pack, shipped in piece by piece or printed off by the seasteaders in exchange for services that were none of Javier’s business. New arrivals got whatever Amy shaped for them, but eventually they always wanted something of their own fashioning: teetering stacks of rusting containers; spiky tents of solar silk whose logos changed colour as the sun passed overhead; hollow pendulums as delicate as dandelion seeds, swaying from eldritch carbon fibre trees. Walking past them meant striding through glassy chiming; the islanders got pretty competitive about homemade lawn ornaments. The current meme was a unicorn weathervane whose hooves raced when the wind blew. Last month, it was sundials. It reminded Javier of a giant floating trailer park. The whole thing was roughly the size of a Dubai hotel. Amy ran five of them.
Javier followed her out of the water, to the spine of the leaf. vN of almost all clades used it like a thoroughfare. Botflies followed most of them, perched on their shoulders or hovering over their heads. They paused, regarded Amy, and zoomed away. As though having heard a signal, Xavier dropped out of a tree and bounded up to Amy. He was looking about nine or ten years old, these days. He threw his arms around Amy’s waist. She threw her head back and laughed at something he said. The laugh opened her face, and Javier glimpsed the little girl Amy must have been only a year ago.
A single jump caught him up to them. Xavier peered up at him and squinted. “¿Pelotearíais?”
“Callate tu boca.”
Amy glanced at both of them. “Be nice.”
She took hold of Xavier’s hand and led him down the causeway. Xavier swung her arm as they walked. He waved at the botflies with his free hand.
“Don’t encourage them,” Amy said.
“I’m just saying hello.” The boy continued waving. “It’s not like I have my own series.”
“Matteo and Ricci are making money for their baby,” Javier said. “You know that.”
“So? Someday I’m going to iterate a baby. Shouldn’t I start saving up?”
“You can start making money when you’re full-grown. You chose to stay a kid, so you have to play by kid rules.”
Xavier shook Amy’s hand in his. “She didn’t. She was still little when she ate Portia.”
Amy paused. Her face remained blank. A stranger would have assumed she was simply staring into the island’s middle distance, surveying the black trees and listening to the thick hum of botflies. She caught him looking at her, and gave him a brittle smile over Xavier’s head. Then she rearranged her features, softened her smile, a
nd knelt.
“Attacking Portia was a mistake. I did it because I was angry at her for hurting my mother, and because I was scared that she was really going to do permanent damage.”
“But she was doing permanent damage. I’ve seen the clip.”
Amy shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her mouth was a thin, flat line. “I don’t want you watching that again.”
“I stopped when the failsafe warning came up–”
“Good. But I still don’t want you to watch it again. Ever.”
Xavier gesticulated. Javier sometimes wondered if his designers had worked from some stereotype about Latinos talking with their hands. He couldn’t seem to quit doing it, and neither could any of his iterations. “But you were so badass!”
“I was not–”
“Yeah, you were,” Javier said, quietly.
Their eyes met. Xavier glanced between them. He tracked the line of their gaze. Amy broke it first. She turned to Xavier and held his hands.
“Well, I certainly wasn’t very smart. I bit off way more than I could chew.”
His youngest son had the decency to hold in his giggles for approximately three seconds before snerking through his nose. Amy shut her eyes and pursed her lips.
“I just said that aloud, didn’t I?”
“Yup!” Xavier punctuated his sentence with a five-foot standing jump. The kid was good, probably better than his older brothers. He landed like a superhero, a classic three-point pose, one knee and one fist plunging down into the black earth below. It was his favourite pose. He looked up at them, grinning. “You’re wrong,” he said.
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