iD
Page 4
Amy stood up and crossed her arms. “Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really. It was a good thing you ate Portia. If you hadn’t, you’d never have met Dad.”
Oh, his son was very good. Amy looked a little stunned. Her mouth kept opening and closing. She obviously had no idea what to say. What a brilliant little tactician Javier had iterated. Thirteen was apparently his lucky number.
“And if you never met Dad, I’d have been born in prison.” Xavier blinked at him, all wide-eyed innocence. “Right, Dad?”
“Es verdad, mijo.”
“So it’s really good that you ate her. Otherwise I wouldn’t even be here.”
Q-E-motherfucking-D, Javier wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he caught his son’s eye and winked. His son winked back.
“Thank you for reminding me,” Amy said. “And now, let me remind you of something: you’re not going near the boat, today.”
Xavier’s mouth fell open. “Oh, come on…”
“No humans. Period.”
“But–”
“This isn’t a discussion. The island will tell me if you even come close, so don’t bother.”
The boy looked at Javier. Javier shook his head softly. The boy rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna go work on my treehouse, now.” He peeled away from them and jogged his way into a jump.
“Be careful…” Amy trailed off. The boy was already gone, leap-frogging over other vN and sailing through swarms of botflies. They watched him grow smaller as he jumped further and further away.
“Do you think he remembers?” Amy asked. “When I tried to eat him?”
“When Portia tried to eat him.” Javier slid an arm around her waist. “And no, I don’t. He was already bluescreened by then. He took a few thousand volts on that fence before Portia even touched him. And it was a couple of chimps who put him there, not you. Not her, I mean.” He squeezed her to him and kissed her scalp. “Stop doing this. I mean it.”
“But what if he’s watched it?” Amy turned to him. “The clip is out there. Just like the one of me attacking her. If he was curious enough to look for one, he’s probably seen the other.”
“Then he’s seen you rescue him, too.”
Amy’s affect hardened. Her lips firmed. “They never show that part.”
“Hey. Querida.” Javier tilted her chin up so she had to look him in the eye. In the daylight her eyes were the colour of wreckage, of seaglass, hard and bright and old. “We’ve been over this. Even if he does remember it, he’s let it go. We’ve all let it go.”
Amy smiled ruefully. “The chimps haven’t.”
The other vN busied themselves preparing for the shipment. They darted across the thoroughfare, trading clothes and gossip, mugging for their botflies. They wove around Javier as he proceeded toward his own little bud. It floated freely, separated from any arterial by exactly ten feet at all times. He focused on the green arbour marking the entry to his garden, and leapt. Glittering water vanished beneath his outstretched feet. Seconds later, he landed in the fragrant arms of a mango tree. Wrapping his legs around the trunk more completely, he stretched out and plucked one. It was perfectly red and soft. He decided to charge more, then dropped into the cool green shadows below.
His was the only space on the island entirely devoted to organic life. Real trees. Real blossoms. Real dirt. Real mould and real insects and real food. It took him a long time to coax a good permaculture out of the island’s synthetic flesh, but between the deep sea minerals and the algae and the bio-waste he traded interviews for, he’d made fertile soil: dark and damp and loamy. It worked so well, Amy had once asked him if the failsafe would allow him to grow drugs there. He told her it wasn’t worth the headache. Literally.
Instead, he grew food he could neither taste nor consume. There was a big call for exotic things out on the seasteads and pirate ships and barges. Mangos were big. And avocados. Little red bird’s eye chilis and saw-toothed shiso and tingly Sichuan peppercorns. Vanilla: a key ingredient in pirate hooch. Hen-of-the-woods: a luxury for vegans. The stuff Americans used to get shipped up from Mexico or Chile or Thailand or Japan. The things they used to traffic via container ships, before the thing that became the island started eating container ships. Now he grew those things on the skin of the island itself.
He bounced from tree to tree, collecting produce. It was a strange thing, having a job. He used to earn his keep on his knees, not his feet. This was the first time since prison he’d had dirt under his nails.
“Do you need any help?”
Amy waited for him in the next tree. She’d changed into a white cotton dress and an elaborate torque fashioned of press-plastic harvested from the Pacific patch. Artisanal plastic, the seasteader told Javier, when he bought it for her. Eternal. Undying. He’d bought a ring to match it. He had yet to give it to her. She’d probably think it was silly.
“Sure,” Javier brought a mesh string-bag from his back pocket. “Go for it.”
They jumped between the trees, squeezing and plucking. Javier took longer leaps than Amy; she tended to look longer and examine the trees before jumping.
“Are you afraid of hurting them?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The trees.”
She gestured at the greenery surrounding them. “Well, they are fairly fragile,” she said. “Besides, it’s your work. I don’t want to ruin your work.”
“You’re not going to ruin anything,” he said, swinging between branches. They bent and swayed under his grip, but they didn’t snap and he didn’t slip. “See? They’re tough. Flexible.”
She smiled down at him. “You’re a good farmer.”
“Well thank you kindly, ma’am.”
“No, really. You’ve done so much here, in so little time. It’s really impressive.”
He let his momentum rock him gently on the bough. He was going to ask about the cats in the Veldt. Really, he was. Just not right now. Now he had other things on his mind. “Are you trying to get in my pants? Because that can be arranged.”
Amy shook her head. “Do you think about sex all the time?”
“The longer you hold out, the more I think about it.”
He levered himself up, catching the bough with his feet and rising to stand when its bounce calmed some. He proceeded along the length of it, one foot in front of the other. He caught her staring at his feet and smiled. Maybe Amy was a foot person. How delightfully human of her. He jumped for her, pinning her against her own tree – a kallu, the liquor of which fermented in the lifespan of a mayfly – by slipping his arms and legs around it and her.
“So,” he said. “Where were we?”
Amy shut her eyes. She always got so embarrassed. It was charming, in its own way. “I’m sorry about this morning. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
“You didn’t yell. I’ve heard yelling, and that was not yelling.”
“You know what I mean.” Her eyes opened. “I’m sorry I’m not more like… what you want.”
“You’re exactly what I want. That’s what I keep trying to tell you.”
Amy shook her head. “You’ve been with a lot of humans. They had sex with you all the time.”
“You don’t take that as a ringing endorsement of my skills?”
She pressed back against the tree. Shadows glanced across her skin. “I just know you must miss it. And I’m not sure I could even keep up.”
Javier made a show of looking her up and down. “You could keep up.”
“But would you even enjoy it?”
He gave his best smile. She didn’t know how it worked, really. She didn’t know that his own enjoyment was comfortably algorithmic, that it relied entirely on external inputs from the other person’s affect. Indrawn breath. Blushing. Moaning. His orgasms were one big Voight-Kampff test.
“It’s not a contest. You just have to focus on nailing me, not nailing it.”
Amy stuck her tongue out at him. Javier wasted no time. He darted and kissed her.
W
hen they first started out, she’d kissed like the women she’d watched on dramas in her old life: all demure stillness, letting him lead. Now she kissed more like herself: direct, to the point, sucking his lower lip like his designers had sculpted it specifically for her use. That was the real Amy, not the nervous girl trying to spare him from something she’d never understood. He smiled and moved to her neck.
“This tree is incredibly uncomfortable,” he said, between kisses. “Let’s go home.”
She said nothing. She’d gone completely still.
“Come on, the shipment can–”
Amy reached up and covered his mouth with her fingers. Her eyes had defocused. “It’s not the shipment.”
She slid off the bough, skidded down the tree, and pressed one hand to the ground. Her hand sank beneath the island’s surface. Then her forearm, up to her elbow. She grimaced. It looked as though she were freeing a clog in the island’s plumbing.
He joined her. “What is it?”
Her expression rippled into surprise and delight. “It’s a submarine.” She withdrew her hand. Streams of black oil coursed down her fingers and rejoined the earth. “The chimps are trying to look up my skirt.”
Together, they closed the distance between his garden and the nearest arterial in a single leap. They didn’t even bother running. They bounded. Three feet, five feet, until the dark trees became one black blur. As they ran, the trees grew. Javier heard their leaves rustle as they expanded, thinning, creating cover. They jumped, and Javier saw the diamond tree straight ahead, far at the other end of the thoroughfare. They were running straight for home. All over the island, a mist began to rise.
“Hey, is this shit explosive, too?”
Amy didn’t answer. She pounded down the thoroughfare, running faster and faster, her hands like blades, her knees at a perfect right angle to her hips. She tucked her them into her stomach as they sailed over the heads of the other vN. As they cleared the canopy of mist, two other figures joined them.
“Go back to your treehouse, Xavier,” Amy said.
“Sorry, lady,” his oldest, Ignacio, said, “but you’re not our mother and you don’t tell us what to do.”
They dropped into the mist. They jumped again, and Ricci was there, with Gabriel and Léon.
“Hi, Dad,” Léon said.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You’re iterating.”
“Never stopped you, did it?”
Léon took to the air. Javier followed. Beneath his feet, beneath the mist, the island was changing shape. The arteries folded down onto each other, forming a single black arrowhead. It was the basic defensive posture the island assumed whenever it or Amy perceived a possible threat. The diamond tree loomed large in his vision. Amy sprinted forward. He and the boys stopped short at the beach, but she ran straight across the water. Her feet barely disturbed its surface. She leapt into the tree and landed in its fork, arms raised. Her skin was full of rainbows.
Beneath his feet, the island shuddered.
“You sure know how to pick ’em,” Ignacio said.
Javier bolted for home. He jumped from the beach and landed awkwardly in the water. The membrane caught him and he waded the rest of the way. The water was frustratingly heavy; he felt more tired than he should have by the time he made it to their little island. Amy had slid down the tree by then, and she stood with her back to him. Her fingers twitched angrily at her sides. She and the island were deep in damage control mode.
“What’s going on?” Javier asked.
She answered him with a question: “Above or below?”
“Huh?”
“Above, or below. Pick one. We can go down, or we can bring it up. Where would you like to go?”
His mind simulated several outcomes to both choices. He thought of a hole opening in the island’s flesh and himself sliding down into it. He thought of the weakness of human flesh, and the pressure, and the bends. “How far below was it?”
“Not that far.”
He insinuated himself into her field of vision. “Are there humans on that sub?”
She blinked. “I’m not sure.”
“You could kill them, if you bring them up too fast. If they’ve been too deep for too long. The p-pressure c-could–”
Now it was her turn to kiss him. It was very light and very quick, but it shut him and the failsafe down completely. When his eyes opened, Amy’s smile was all too bright. Her eyes were all too sad. He recognized the expression. She wore it when all the other vN on the island manifested their failsafe. It was pity.
“It’s probably automated,” she was saying. “It’s navigating by algorithm. That’s why I didn’t catch it, sooner.”
He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “You’re sure?”
He watched her pity turn to frustration. It displayed as a slight crinkling at corners of her eyes, an almost imperceptible line between her brows that, unlike those of human women, would never become permanent.
“I would never show you something that might trigger you. You know that.”
Beyond them, the ocean bubbled and foamed. Her expression changed again: anticipation. Whatever Amy had trapped down there, it was coming up. She raised one hand, waved slightly, and a murmuration of botflies swarmed above them.
“I’ll prove it,” she said. “I’m hacking the flies. That way, everybody can watch.”
She hopped out of the tree, and he followed. The flies shadowed them high above as they crossed the island. The bubbling had turned to an active churn. Whatever was coming was big. Big enough, he suspected, to sustain human life.
“Put it back,” he said.
“I know what I’m doing.” She looked over her shoulder at him. Then she looked up at the botflies. Her gaze rested on him again, and she spoke loudly and clearly enough for the flies to hear. “It came here, not the other way around. It’s an intruder. We have every right to investigate.”
“There are people in there–”
“You don’t know that, Javier.” She turned back to the sea, and the thing she’d raised from its depths.
It had a shape: long and tubular, but not rigid, not a perfect cylinder. Jointed. Serpentine. Organic. And as Amy raised her hands and lifted it from the water, it twitched and thrashed like a living thing. Something pallid and glistening dimpled and puckered across its surface as it writhed. Skin. Maybe even vN skin, Javier thought. They could use it like leather, these days. Rigid lines of scaffold beneath its surface popped into relief at it twisted, creating a series of random triangles under the skin. A dazzle pattern, Javier realized. Anti-sonar.
“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Amy murmured.
“What in the fucking fuck?”
Javier turned. Ignacio and his brothers were there, lips pulled back in identical expressions of disgust.
“Que bicho feo,” Xavier said, and jumped five feet high to get a better view. His brothers followed, and Javier joined them. From the air, the thing did look a bit like an uncut dick, or maybe like a fifty-foot dick-shaped toy from some enterprising silicone fabber. The dazzle pattern reminded him of something else, though. Old wireframe animation, he realized, upon landing. How quaint.
Then one of its frames popped open. A wet, stale smell permeated the beach. vN started pouring out. He could tell by the way they moved: smooth and perfect and uniform. They wore wetsuits. They carried guns. Javier smelled puke rounds.
“¡Levántate!” His boys followed him into the air at maximum leap. Amy stood her ground, head cocked, staring at the invaders. “Amy! Move!”
She leapt, but her gaze never left the other vN. They were an Asian-styled male model, probably all clademates, a pretty bishounen-type with long hands and long hair and the same full lips most all vN had no matter their other characteristics. DSL, a prison warden had once told Javier. Dick Sucking Lips.
Those same lips squished back pleasantly when Javier’s feet landed on them from ten feet up. It was satisfying, being able to hit back for once.
“Who sent you?” Javier asked.
The other vN tried baring his teeth, but some of them were gone. He pushed hard against the gun like an old guy struggling with a chest press. The hole inside him was growing. Stinging smoke rose between them.
“Aw, fuck it,” the other vN spat, and dropped his grip on the gun. Javier fell forward, landing square on the other guy’s fist. He slumped into the sea monster, briefly tasting iron and fat as he slid down its warm, twitching surface. Jesus. It really was organic.
Then he heard a click behind his head. Then there was nothing.
THREE
Toma Que Toma
Warm lips on him. His forehead, his cheeks, the tip of his nose, and finally his mouth. Fluttering. Delicate. Uncertain. Amy.
“Hello, gorgeous,” he said.
Her eyes were wet. Behind her head, the sky was beginning to cloud over. The afternoon storm was coming. “Oh, good,” she said. “Good. I was worried.”
“You should see the other guy.” Javier sat up. He felt like he’d been asleep for a week. “Where is the other guy?”
All around them, the others – the pretty K-pop idol vN and his own boys – lay still. So was the worm thing. It had finally quit struggling. Now it looked like some awful fleshy modern art piece left behind on the beach by lazy aestheterrorists. But that didn’t concerned him. What concerned him was Xavier and Ignacio and the other boys, their mouths open slack, their hands empty and limbs splayed.
“What happened?” he asked.