vN (18 page)

  Now she wondered how Javier did it. He'd made it look so easy, shifting easily between escaping and stealing and iterating and running, and now that she was stuck in the same situation, she had no clue how to go about it. Maybe he was just that lucky. Or maybe he got jobs in between – maybe even at the Sheep, where there was a whole system in place to help look after new iterations. The daycare took up a full third of the basement, being separated from the break room by an accordion wall and populated by tiny vN children playing old bargain bin cooking games or taking food handler permit tests from chunky plastic readers.

  The iterations were better behaved than the customers. The Sheep felt like a gaming channel made physical: yelling, swearing, laughing, and a lot of bragging. Shari zoomed by on her roller skates, occasionally crashing into her own customers or reaching over booths to give hugs and kisses to her favourite people. The night shift was her domain. "I'm nocturnal," she'd told Amy as she zipped by in search of a Rusty Innards: a dish of deep-fried chicken knuckles coated in peanut flakes. Then she had taken it upon herself to introduce Amy to every single table in the place and show off Amy's nurse costume.

  "That's how her model started out, you know," Shari told the customers. "Nurses."

  Nurses, to Amy's knowledge, did not dress in tiny white dresses with folded paper caps that clipped into one's hair with pins. Nor did they wear ribboned stockings that folded over the knee, or patent leather loafers. The nurses Amy had seen (in shows, at least) wore pyjamas and sneakers – very comfortable, very durable. The costume's only nod to reality was the pair of gloves Amy hid her damaged hand under.

  Before Amy's first shift started, Shari handed her over to Mack, the assistant manager. Mack was about six months old. He had come straight out of the Electric Sheep generational training program, having been born at another branch on the other side of the Cascades. Maybe it was because he'd never really been anywhere but the Sheep, but he was the quickest and most cheerful server Amy had ever seen. He was the one who first showed her the menu and told her to familiarize herself with it. Luckily, this involved more eating.

  Like the Rusty Innards, all the items on the menu had goofy names that somehow related to robots, although Amy sometimes didn't understand the references. There was a cocktail called Tears in the Rain, for example, that she had no clue about. But it was meant for humans, so it didn't matter. Most other items came in both organic and synthetic versions: the organic Ziggurat was a tower of alternating fried chicken and waffles glazed in butter and maple syrup, while the synthetic version was shaped the same with similar textures but made primarily out of aluminium ore. The organic Hasta la Vista was a breakfast burrito with chorizo and black bean salsa; the synthetic version contained a large serving of iron.

  Amy liked the Toaster Party best. She had always enjoyed the vN French toast that her dad made on Saturday mornings, and it seemed like it could only improve with ham and eggs sandwiched inside. Granted, the toast wasn't really toast, and the ham wasn't ham, and the eggs weren't eggs, and the whole dish wasn't really her dad's creation, but when she closed her eyes and bit down, it was the closest she could come to home.

 

Amy's hostessing duties included a large number of small tasks. Mack the manager had introduced her to the jobs she was to do during slow periods: giving the bathroom its regular cleaning (those soggy tampons weren't marching to the organic garbage by themselves); emptying the large cylindrical ashtrays outside (they were mostly bereft of cigarettes, but everything else made it in there, like dead gum and phlegm wads); hauling up kegs and other bar supplies (the bartender was a nice vN who showed her exactly how to make eggbased cocktails, and always made her shake them when there were a lot of customers around to stare at her chest). So far there hadn't really been any slow periods. Business was better than ever. Shari attributed this to Amy's presence.

  Amy's real job was smiling. She smiled when she said hello. She smiled when she said goodbye. She smiled when she led customers to their tables and smiled when she introduced them to servers. And she smiled for photos – endless streams of photos.

  "Can I take a picture with you?"

  The organic teenaged boy standing beside her was the second Javier cosplayer of the night. He was much taller than Javier, and his belly was round with fat and not with child, and his skin was neither olive in complexion nor very clear. He did, however, sport a head of dark curly hair and a BLOW ME T-shirt.

  "I told my girlfriend we were going to dinner in Port Townsend," he whispered in Amy's ear. "She's so fucking pissed."

  The girlfriend stood away from them, taking pictures by waving her compact at them slowly. Her gaze wandered to Mack and the other male vN. Evidently expecting more than just chicken and waffles, she had dressed far more carefully than her boyfriend.

  "You know they all look the same, right?" she asked, finally swinging her gaze toward them.

  The boy straightened. "Babe, I told you, it's a scavenger hunt. I'm logging all the Portias I can find while they're still around." He winced, and turned back to Amy. "No offence. I think it's totally unfair what they're doing to your model. It's, like, discrimination and shit. You know?"

  Amy could only nod.

  "And my girlfriend didn't really mean that, about you all looking the same." He took hold of Amy's chin with his thumb and forefinger. His smile stretched the pink and bleeding cracks in his chapped lips. "She's just jealous, cause you're so pretty."

  Amy pulled out of his grasp immediately. "I'll find your server."

  
You're out of character
, Portia warned.
You're supposed to enjoy the attention. Crave it. Encourage it. Every time. With everyone.

  "It's unprofessional," she murmured, as she resumed her podium and highlighted the table for service. She was growing to like the podium. It was only a slender piece of not-really-wood and an old tablet, but it was also the only thing standing between her and guys like the cosplayer. "I have a job to do and I can't be distracted."

  
Or maybe you just realize how disgusting it is
, Portia said.
Deep down, you know your dignity is worth more than whatever it costs to get to Redmond and play hero.

  Slowly, Amy lifted her hand to wave at the couple. The boy brightened and took his seat. "Thanks for the reminder, Granny," Amy said through her smile. "I'd forgotten why I was doing all this."

 

In the days that followed, Shari and Mack praised Amy for being such a hard worker. It helped that Amy actually enjoyed some of the jobs. She liked that sudden rush of silence when the back doors slammed shut behind her and the noise of the Sheep died out. She liked letting the trash bags fall for a moment and looking up to catch satellites blinking across the sky. Out here the night was different – quietly alive and smeared with stars. They spilled like icing sugar across dark granite, something she'd have to wipe up inside but which she could marvel at outdoors. This was the best feature of the night shift, she decided – the night. At home in Oakland the sky would be pink or orange, even this late. Not that she would have seen it, anyway. She'd have been too busy designing a ship or a castle or a tank. She'd have seen the night for what it was only in that sliver of time between turning the projector off and climbing into her hammock. Now she appreciated the way the night held her and covered her, how it let her hide inside its cool shadows and fragrant mists. She thought of it as a veil that stretched across her, and Junior, and Javier, and her dad and mom and the others of her clade, the women who shared her face and her code. She wondered how they got by.

  This wasn't a bad life. Amy had never thought she would wind up here, but she could see now how other vN did. There was work, and if you were lucky people were nice and they tipped you. And if you were even luckier, you got to go home afterward, and there would be people there, maybe human, and they loved you. That was the luckiest life of all. So you just did what it took to keep it going. Even if it meant humans touching you when you bent over to pick something up.

  
You're not meant to please these walking sacks of shit
, Portia had said the first time that happened.
You're meant to scare it out of them.

  It wasn't any sense of pride that kept her bussing tables, or folding napkins, or realigning the cakes in the dessert case to their best effect. It was Portia. Amy deliberately ate less to keep herself tired, so that even if Portia punched through, she couldn't get very far. She even started playing a game with the cooks just as her shift ended, where she dipped her hand in beer batter and then again in the deep fryer. When she tugged just right, a glove of perfectly airy crisp breading came off, and her repair mods were busy for hours.

  
You're fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun
, was Portia's only comment.

  Amy continued trying to find new ways of blocking Portia out. When she entered the pod each night, she toggled some of Shari's old earbuds to match her downloads on Rick's reader, and she would take Junior out of his bin and they would listen to the news together. They listened for arrests of vN who might be Javier, and for advice on what to do for bluescreen babies. Well,
she
listened. She couldn't vouch for Junior. But if he was still in there, he was at least well-informed about the world. She speculated with him on the disappearance of the container ships and the sudden rise in network outages ("Maybe it's a sea monster," she told him, and paused for laughter that never came). And at the start of her shifts, she nestled the buds in his ears, left the reader on the charger, and told it to seek out Spanish-language content.

  "It's only until payday," she said as she secured the lid that hid him from view. "Then we can leave, and I'll get you some help."

 

"My daughter's turning two today," the man said, gesturing at the smaller vN. He had a wide, baby-like face dusted with blond hair, and wore sandals with a Hawaiian shirt. He sat with two little vN girls to his table. One looked about ten, the other seven. They were both the same Asian model and wore their hair in cute little pixie cuts that framed their faces perfectly. "We ordered an Opera House, but it seems to be taking a while."

  "Let me check into it," Amy said, and returned a moment later with the last slice of opera cake and a crowd of her fellow servers, all of whom sang the Electric Sheep's birthday song:

 

 

  Everyone applauded, and the youngest vN clapped her hands over her candle to extinguish it. Her father reached over and tousled her hair and pinched her nose. He watched her take her first bite of the cake. When she smiled approvingly, he smiled back, then nodded to Amy. "Could you watch them for a couple of minutes? I have to visit the little boys' room."

  Amy checked her podium. No one was waiting. "Sure. I'd be happy to."

  The father looked at the girls. "Yui, don't let Rei eat it too fast, OK? I want her to take her time and enjoy it."

  The older vN sister nodded dutifully. "All right."

  Amy stepped aside to let him pass, then slid into his spot on the banquette. So far during her time at the Sheep, these were the first vN children she had met – the first belonging to customers, at any rate. It was edifying to know that other parents chose to grow their vN slowly, too. It meant her mom and dad's decision wasn't so weird.

  "Are you having a nice birthday so far?" Amy asked.

  Rei looked at Yui. Yui nodded. "Yes, I am, thank you," Rei said.

  "What have you done so far to celebrate?"

  Again, Rei looked at Yui. They shared a long look, then Rei said: "I played dress-up, and we made a movie, and then Daddy gave me a bubble bath, and then we came here."

  "Who did you dress up as?"

  Rei frowned. "I didn't dress up as anybody," she said. "I just wore different clothes."

  Amy nodded. "Well, what was your movie about? Can I look it up online?"

  Rei smiled. "Yes! Just–" She stopped, looked at Yui, scowled, and resumed eating her cake. "Mom says you wouldn't like it," she muttered.

  Amy looked between the two girls. "Did you say something?"

  Yui promptly pulled the plate of cake away. She looked up at Amy. "We come from a networked model."

  
Like Rory
, Portia whispered.
I bet they're on that special diet just like you were.

  "We're trying to teach her not to use our cladenet to keep secrets, but it's very difficult. She's only two."

  "And growing like a weed."

  From behind her, the father laid a hand on Amy's shoulder and squeezed. She glanced up, and he was looking down at her and smiling in friendly, almost childish way. He looked very innocent for a grown man, all round edges and bright colours and white teeth. He blushed innocently, too, the pink seemingly spreading from the hibiscus on his shirt to his skin and upward into his fine, thinning hair.

  "I'm Q.B., by the way," he said. "Those are my initials. I'm a regular here, and so are my girls."

  "That's nice." Amy tried to leave the banquette, but he squeezed her shoulder again and pressed down gently. "I should be going," she said.

  "You sure?" Q.B. asked. "Because we'd love to have you."

  Amy shook her head. "I'm still on shift."

  He nodded at the podium. "I don't see anyone waiting." He withdrew a small golden pendant from beneath his florid collar. It was a tiny golden apple with a single bite taken out of it. The jeweler had filled that space with a set of delicate clockwork gears, as though the bite had revealed a mechanism hidden within.