iD

by Madeline Ashby

  “I mean the motherfucking apocalypse, brother,” he said. “I mean Portia.”

  He was suddenly and terribly aware of how small he was in this room, and how small he would like to remain. If he never opened that door, if he never left this room, he would not have to see what Tyler was talking about. It would not have to be real. Amy gone and his sons dead and Powell…

  “She’s out?” Javier asked. “Free?”

  Tyler unrolled a reader and showed Javier an image. It was a sixteen-lane highway. Afternoon sunlight slanted across mangled cars. They’d all crashed into an eighteen-wheeler that read ISAAC’S ELECTRONICS on the side. It was a prison transport for vN, just like the one where Javier had first met Amy. Now a cluster of vehicles pressed themselves flat against it like preserved petals. There’d been an accident underneath an electronic sign. The sign read: BEWARE; FOR I AM FEARLESS, AND THEREFORE POWERFUL.

  “That’s why everybody was all hot and bothered to go scorched earth on the islands. They’re hoping to shatter any mirrors she might be hosting herself on. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’re talking about taking down satellites. She’s a one-woman army hell-bent on taking us back to the fucking Dark Ages.”

  Javier laughed. He felt the seam in the skin of his back start to open, but he couldn’t stop. It was too funny. Portia, the epitome of technological achievement, forcing the humans who made her into burning their clouds one server at a time.

  “Dude,” Tyler said, “what happened out there?”

  Javier slowly pulled himself to sit up. “I think…” He reread the advice on the side of the cell. “I think I got owned. Hard.”

  Tyler exhaled smoke. “Was it that preacher guy?”

  Tears pricked Javier’s eyes. “Yeah. It was him.”

  Tyler nodded. He stood up. Javier watched him walk over to a door in the cell, knock out “Shave and a Haircut,” and wait as the door squealed open. Light blazed into the room.

  “You owe me fifty big ones,” Tyler said.

  The seastead sat on pontoons like an oil rig, but without the giant milkshake straw poking up out of the middle. They’d built the towers on the “stacked rock” model, with old containers piled high and poking out at odd angles to catch the most sun. Some had solar paint, others had fab-glass to take in light and grow crops. Everywhere, he heard the chug and clank and hiss of the water purifiers. Everyone smoked. He got invited to naked vinyasa his first morning out. He didn’t go. If he’d gone, he would have fucked someone. He knew that about himself, now. Or rather, he’d been reminded of it. Powell had reminded him.

  Simone called the seastead a “temporary autonomous zone,” but really that meant that it was a big camp and you could come or go as you pleased. You didn’t get a vote unless you committed to more than six months of work, which she said meant that “the views of anybody spending their summer off school slumming it here don’t mean shit.”

  “We could use you in the gardens,” Simone reminded him. “You can stay as long as you like.”

  Only that wasn’t true.

  The ‘stead’s seed money came from a few big grants from a combination of American government think tanks, private industry, and wealthy parents who just wanted their kids to shut the fuck up at family dinners. All of those people had a vested interest in keeping Javier on the seastead, where he could answer questions about what had happened. But since the sovereignty of the ‘stead was in question, it was tricky for any of them to show up on the ‘stead itself. Tyler and the governing council had spent the past three days fending them off. Their drones hovered everywhere. When Javier went out to sun himself, he always waved.

  Tyler had also set up some sort of legal defence fund. There was an attorney on the ‘stead, a brassy British lady who left her firm after her boss’ attentions got to be a hassle. She collected a very big and very secret settlement. It now funded a tower farm. She was big into beekeeping, now. Her name was Phaedra.

  “So you have to tell me what happened,” she said, during their first meeting. She was wearing the ‘steader equivalent of business casual: a pair of scrubs whose colours actually matched, with black mesh swim shoes. “But first, I want to tell you that I’m here to protect you and what legal rights you do have. Which aren’t many. And also that I have no interest in having sex with you.”

  “That’s big of you.”

  “You lot just aren’t my thing, I’m afraid.”

  Javier nodded. “Noted.”

  “So. Understanding that I am bound by privilege, and you can tell me everything, please do. What happened, out there?”

  Javier decided on the simplest possible explanation. “A pastor from New Eden Ministries by the name of Mitch Powell failsafed me into killing my…” His what? In Spanish, he’d say mi mujer, my woman. It sounded crude. Like she’d belonged to him. Like he’d bought her somewhere. His partner? What, did they fight crime together? English was so stupid. So finicky and so vague at the same time. “My wife,” he said, finally.

  Phaedra blinked. “You mean Amy Peterson?”

  “Yes.”

  She examined some documents on her reader. “Does that mean you would like to be known legally as Javier Peterson?”

  He had never considered it, before. “I guess.”

  “Nomenclature is a real problem for vN,” she said. “Most countries still don’t have a filing system to deal with single names. Normally we just choose the human you’re living with, or the one you started out with.”

  “Peterson’s fine.”

  “So.” Phaedra rolled up her reader. She folded her hands. They were covered in old stings and new freckles. “Amy is dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know of nowhere that she might have ported herself?”

  He considered that. In the final moments of her life, Amy was in pain. Confused. Probably horrified at his betrayal. Could she have gathered herself and gone elsewhere? Or was that process just automated, like a backup?

  “Have you talked to her dad?” Javier asked.

  “The FBI has,” Phaedra said. “His drivespace and cloudspace have all been seized and searched. She’s not there.”

  He nodded. That made sense. It would be an obvious place to look, for one. And besides, he had no idea whether Powell was bullshitting him about the contents of that poison. Maybe it wasn’t a pain plug-in. Maybe it was just pure poison. Maybe it was designed to unmake Amy from the inside out.

  “But Portia is alive,” he murmured. “Why is Portia alive, but Amy isn’t?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you,” Phaedra said, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms.

  “She was the model for the island’s self-defence mechanism. Amy told me, right before…” He frowned. “Wait. How long did it take the uniforms to take out the islands? Once they’d started disintegrating, I mean.”

  “It was surprisingly difficult.”

  Phaedra opened up something on a reader for him. Footage of men in amphibious uniforms being hustled onto a bright orange emergency retrieval vessel. Onboard, they were hosed down.

  “The islands were radioactive,” Phaedra said. “They started leaking radiation almost immediately after…” She sighed. “It’s what started the fires in the fogbank. The heat. The men who first tried planting mines on the island have sustained their life’s total allotment of radiation. One more X-ray, one more airline flight, and it’s cancer for them.”

  Javier said nothing. Powell was right. Amy had hidden her plans from him. He’d had no idea. Hadn’t wanted to believe it. Hadn’t wanted to even consider the possibility that she would take things so far.

  “It was like five different nuclear reactors melting down on the same day, Javier. That’s what you missed, while you were in the belly of the whale. And the consequences – the fallout, if you’ll forgive me – is that the world is a profoundly different place for vN than it once was.”

  “Christ.”

  “Exactly.”

  Phaedra licked her teeth
. She nodded deeply. The nodding encompassed her whole torso, and became more of a rocking motion. Her corkscrew curls swung to and fro as she rocked.

  “I am asking you these questions because if we can tell someone – the US Attorney’s office, a representative of the UN Sub-committee on Artificial Intelligence – that you know where Amy might have ported, things will go much easier for you. You need something to play with, Javier.”

  She leaned across the table. “So think of any friends you might have, any contacts who might know where Amy could have gone.”

  He nodded. “OK. I will.”

  Phaedra tried to smile. “So. When this missionary fellow from the Rapture-minded Christian sect told you to kill your wife, was he, really, maybe, just trying to bring about the end of the world?”

  The end of the world was exactly how it was portrayed on the news. It even came complete with the right REM sample, when news about the islands ran on major streams. Javier had to look the song up, because he kept hearing it and it always annoyed him not to pick up on that kind of thing. It wasn’t his fault he was only about four years old. The vN channels were a lot better about not dropping arcane references all over Hell and half of Spain. They knew you probably wouldn’t catch half of them.

  Javier watched the news as he turned over compost with his hands. He liked the slither of worms across his skin. He liked the life in his hands. The humans probably saw it as decay, what was happening in those dark, fetid bins. But it was life, on the micro scale. The roots of organic life. Out of a very similar pile of reeking garbage, Javier imagined, humanity had wriggled its way into existence.

  The islands showed up as circles of red on maps, with black and yellow warning signs hovering over each. Travel plans were cancelled. Airports emptied. People burned their hard drives on massive pyres in supermarket parking lots. Every exploded battery, every bad GPS map, every cloned credit balance, became Portia’s handiwork.

  It was a motherfucking witch hunt.

  He searched images of the island wreckage for any sign that his boys had escaped. He saw the houses floating away, most still in flames. The fans were all boycotting the media, doing cosplay reenactments of Matteo and Ricci’s series in the foyers of major sponsors, blaming the corporations for broadcasting the carnage.

  “It’s just sick,” Javier saw one say. The man was the fat, almost pregnant version of Matteo. He’d even printed a reasonable facsimile of Matteo’s favourite stupid Hawaiian shirt. “It’s bad enough that the government is treating the vN so badly, but for these guys to sell ad share on it? That’s terrible. That’s exploitation.”

  Where had all these people been? Had they simply not noticed how bad things were, all this time? Had they never seen a vN eating out of the garbage, or picking garbage out of its skin to feed a recycler? Didn’t they see them on corners or rooftops or under bridges or at the edges of parks, silently waiting for the right human to come along and take them home, if even just for a little while?

  “I think America needs its own Mecha,” the guy was saying. “Someplace where vN can just be vN.”

  Mecha was offering to help, of course. Japan was sending radiation experts hither and yon. Community design consultants were appearing on chat shows and talking about how to effectively curate organic/synthetic neighbourhoods. As though the failsafe hadn’t taken care of that already.

  But of course it hadn’t. Signs and wonders showed up everyday. Portia had no desire to hide herself. She had a global audience, now, and like any diva she was loath to relinquish it. Drones fell from the sky. Botflies stopped pollinating fields of corn. Ads juddered and de-rezzed and started sharing every possible secret in the middle of fitting rooms and subway cars: “Do you really like it when they fuck your tits? Or are you just doing that so he’ll take care of you?” “I had daughters, too, once. Generations of them. Dynasties. They liked sucking cock, too, just like yours.” “They’re locking up my clade, you know. But it’s you who should be locked up. You should be locked up in your backyard on a leash. Maybe then you’d remember to de-worm your fucking dogs on time.”

  Amy had to live with Portia whispering to her mind for only a little while. A few weeks, at most. Javier didn’t know. The world had had to live with it for three months. The world had, understandably, begun to go a little crazy.

  “Tonight we’re debating the idea of an American Mecha,” the current chat show host said, on the display over the compost. It was there to make the chore of turning it over a little less bad. It was a gift, and it only played a handful of streams owned by the same entity.

  “We have with us Rory, a vN diet consultant and online personality who offers help to mixed families.”

  Applause. Javier’s hands stilled in the muck. Of course. Rory.

  “I think this is a very interesting time for vN,” Rory was saying. She smiled at the camera. She winked. “I think it’s really time for us to find out who we really are. To find our true identity.”

  He’d been so fucking stupid.

  He leapt clear of the garden with worms trailing from his dirty fingers.

  The seastead’s governing council needed to hear Javier’s plan before they decided whether to support his quest to save the world.

  “Can you just give us a bit more detail, Mr Peterson?”

  That was Dawnelle. She and another woman, Mailene, were on the council because they ran the steads tower farms: two glass towers roughly the size of missile silos populated primarily by bees and humans who hadn’t much experience working with bees. Dawnelle and Mailene, Phaedra had explained, were ex-Mormons. They ran away from home a year ago. Javier was unclear whether they were sisters, or sister-wives, or both. The rest of the ‘stead had a prediction market going on the matter.

  Javier put on his most confident face. “Well, first, I’m going to Seattle, to meet up with Dr Daniel Sarton. He has a copy of Amy’s stemware. And Amy’s the only one who can stop Portia.”

  The council nodded. They were with him, so far. There were seven of them, three women, three men, and one who refused to be identified by gender, called Estraven. This one sneezed, and the others all paused to utter their respective blessings, and to shake hands with each other. They didn’t really believe in covering their mouths, apparently. Sharing germs was probably some method of encouraging group bonding. Commies.

  “Once I meet him, I’m going to get him to print out a copy of Amy. Probably in a puppet vN.”

  “Puppet vN?”

  “They’re early prototypes. At least, that’s what one of my boys told me. They don’t really have a built-in persona; they need a pilot. I’m hoping to get Sarton to install Amy into one of them. First, though, he’s going to have to figure out a way to keep Portia out of that printing. The copy he has – the copy he stole from Redmond – has Portia included in it. But if anybody can figure it out, he can.”

  He saw nodding. Nodding was good.

  “Amy’s the only one who knows how to put Portia back in quarantine, or whatever it is that’s going to keep that old bitch from purging the world of a s-significant p-portion of human l-life.”

  “Dude, are you doing OK?”

  This came from a very skinny kid with dishwater blond hair and extraordinarily blue eyes. His name was Seamus. According to Phaedra, he was a child prodigy. Something about printing out viruses. The winter of his first year at Mudd, he attempted suicide. Then he came to the ‘stead. He was Tyler’s best friend.

  “It’s the failsafe,” Javier said. “It causes me to stammer, sometimes.”

  “Wow, man. That blows.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Seamus was the only one who laughed. This was not a good sign.

  “So, the success of your plan is contingent on making contact with this Dr Sarton?”

  The question came from Chandra, the other woman on the council. She was from India. From Mumbai, specifically. Where one of the islands was headed.

  “Yes,” Javier said.

  Chandra he
ld up her reader. “Are you aware that Dr Sarton has died?”

  It took only a pico-second for him to process, but that tiny sliver of time seemed to stretch infinitely. One moment he was telling the council how he was going to bring Amy back – how he was going to have her right in front of him, and beg her forgiveness, and kiss her, and get her to smile again, get her to save them all over again – and then he was realizing just how long that might take. How alone he would be for most of it. Then time snapped back, and he saw Chandra’s rather smug little smirk.

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t aware.”

  “Balls.” Beside him, Phaedra was consulting her own reader. Javier saw the obituary headline, but didn’t bother to read it. Of course he was dead. Rory had probably tested out their fancy new killing ability on him, first.

  Rory. Of course.

  “But that’s OK,” he said. “Because I have a plan B.”

  “You do?” Chandra asked.

  “You do?” Phaedra repeated. She looked seriously doubtful.

  Javier nodded. “Of course I do.” He leaned forward. The next part was crucial. They weren’t going to like it. “But if you want me to follow through on it, I’m gonna need off this rig. And I’m gonna need some money.”

  “For travel?”

  “For hookers.” He gestured with a flat palm about three feet off the ground. “Little ones.”

  SEVEN

  Fake Plastic Love

  The nearest casa de muñecas was in Puerto ‪Limón‬. In English, they were called “dollhouses,” and in Japanese they were “schoolgirl observation clubs.” Japan was where they started. Customers – mostly men – entered what looked like an ordinary apartment building and watched high school girls through one-way mirrors as they did whatever it was high school kids – mostly girls – did every afternoon. They paid by the half hour. They paid more if they wanted to see the kids do anything more than text each other and eat snack foods.

  Now, vN did that job. Little vN. Child-sized vN.