vN (27 page)

  He looked around at the rusted walls and the filthy water at his feet. "It's fine. Better than prison, anyway."

  They splashed through water, following an arrow pattern marked out in more glowing tape. It was mostly unnecessary, though – they could hear a woman's voice singing up through the steel. As they opened another hatch, it grew clearer and louder. Now Amy knew it was a recording: she heard a full band backing the woman up. She didn't recognize the song; it sounded sad, with a deep voice twisting up into high notes to emphasize some long-ago hurt. They entered a vertical shaft equipped with a thin ladder that left dark streaks on her fingers. Javier watched her through his legs, and slid the rest of the way down the ladder when she had cleared it. When they turned, they found another door, this one marked with the words "The Doctor Is: In." Music blared through it. Amy smelled rose incense.

  Javier gestured at the door. "Ladies first."

  The door stuck a little, but with some shouldering it popped open with a deep, pained groan. Inside, a man in a smoking jacket, a very long plaid scarf, loose linen trousers and treaded beach slippers sat in a caramel-coloured leather armchair before a massive display unit that unfurled from the ceiling of the container and stretched down to the floor and across to each of the adjoining walls. Behind him, a door peeked open on what looked like a workshop – she saw pieces of drones on the floor. Onscreen, Amy watched views of the museum gently fading in and out: families, years, damage, the same buildings collapsing over and over before building themselves back up again. She saw herself loom large on the display. The man raised his hand and brought it down. As he did, the music lowered in volume. He turned in his seat.

  "Hello, Amy."

  The man stood up and strode across a panelled floor strewn with intricately patterned carpets. He was round: round body, round, rolling walk, round head that shined under the light of blown glass lamps overhead. He made a little bow to Javier. "It's nice to meet you both. I see the two of you have met Rover." He opened an antique cabinet and produced two fluffy towels from elaborate scrollwork. "Please."

  Amy started drying her hair. "Thank you." She wiped down her arms. "You're Dan Sarton?"

  "Guilty as charged." He gestured at the display. "I know it doesn't look like much, but it's mine and it's not crowded with students, funders, or any other human allergens."

  Amy looked around. "It's not really much of an office."

  "Oh, dear, no. This isn't my office. This is where the museum keeps the backup servers. They handle the rendering load when one goes down for maintenance. Saves a lot of energy on cooling, as you might imagine." He lowered the music still further. The same high sound they had heard earlier took its place. "There are still fans, of course. You can understand why I block them out. But I still prefer to spend my time here if I can."

  Amy looked at the display. Currently, it showed a group of people watching educational footage of the old city – how the landfill undergirding the city's oldest buildings was of poor quality, how the soil was prone to liquefaction, how the whole thing was quite literally built on sand. "Why did Rory want me to come here?" she asked. "I'm not bluescreened."

  "My work in Redmond had to do with what we might call the vN immune system," Sarton said. "I hypothesized that bluescreen events were really failsafing events in disguise – that for whatever reason, the iteration in question had begun to failsafe, but gotten stuck."

  "So you know all about broken failsafes," Amy said.

  "I thought I did. Then you came along." Dr Sarton made kissing sounds at a large lump of red silk cushion in the corner, and it promptly inched its way across the floor and curled around Amy and Javier's ankles. "Have a seat."

  They sat. The cushion was warm, and it purred slightly. "Please don't mind the stains," Dr Sarton said. "I sometimes sleep here."

  Javier muttered something behind his hand that sounded a lot like "Chimps…"

  "The vN immune system is comprised of two parts," Dr Sarton said. "The first is exterior – your body remembers what it should look like, and edits out the damage that occurs. The second part is interior. You're protected against a wide variety of worms, memes, viruses, and so on. Most of that is unnecessary because you're not actually wired to a network. Connected models were considered, early on, but there was a very serious concern that if and when the failsafe failed – as the result of a hack, or a virus, or an emergent property – the failure might spread virally among vN."

  "Is that what happened to me when I ate Portia?" Amy asked. "She hacked me from the inside?"

  Dr Sarton licked his lips. He steepled his hands. "I'm not sure." He made a pinching motion at the display, and new footage opened up. Amy recognized her clade immediately. Groups of identical women shuffled in and among triage units full of wounded humans, squirting skin glue on wounds, holding hands, administering fluids.

  He said, "After the Cascadia quake, your clade was crucial to the relief effort." He pinched again, and the view bounced downward, toward one tent where a man with ruined feet screamed silently at the camera. His nurse ignored his noise, but kept working diligently on removing glass and other debris from the wreckage of his feet. "This was before you all attained sentience, of course. The nursing vN were easy to program and deploy as search and rescue units. Several were lost in the aftershocks. They were spread quite thinly; a Japanese prototype of a networked model was sent over to assist, but their container was lost in the Pacific."

  Amy looked over at Javier. He kept his gaze carefully pointed away from the screen. "Change the channel," Amy said.

  Sighing, Dr Sarton did so. "I know that it sounds very trite, but your foremothers did a lot of good in the past. When drug-resistant bacteria infected hospitals, for example, they could go on working and treating patients for days at a time without rest or demands for overtime pay – or any pay at all, for that matter. Or if healthcare wikis were hacked or wiped or went down for any reason, your model accurately remembered even the tiniest details related to individual patients and their treatment history. There was a time when no clinic in this country was complete without one of you."

  "Then what happened?" Amy asked.

  "You got smart," Dr Sarton said. "And like all underpaid workers who see a better opportunity elsewhere, you left. But you left with a profoundly different failsafe than the other vN."

  Amy thought of Javier's turned-away face, his closed eyes. He couldn't even watch the footage of the nursing models at work. There was too much hurt and suffering going on. But the nursing models had lived it. They had observed that pain and treated it and gone on about their business. It was their job.

  "They made us this way," Amy said.

  
Now you get it.

  "Your clade's failsafe was already destabilized by the time you attained self-awareness and the ability to iterate." Dr Sarton crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. "For most vN, it's a question of stimulus response. Their failsafes are reactions to perceived phenomena. For your model, the failsafe lay along a specific decision pathway – the decision to hurt a human being. Your model could monitor suffering so long as they were striving to alleviate it, but could not make the choice to cause it. They could never amputate a limb without anaesthesia, or break an infant's collarbone if it were tearing its mother's birth canal apart, even if the wound were causing her to bleed out."

  Beside her, Javier tried to settle himself deeper into the cushion. His fingers knotted in the material. His jaw was tight. "OK, I get it," Amy said. "We were different. Our failsafe was weak. Eventually it broke all the way, right?"

  "That's the prevailing theory, yes," Dr Sarton said. "No one knows exactly when it happened, or where, or for what reason. Portia can probably tell us more."

  
Tell him you morons brought it on yourselves
, she said.
Tell him you begged us for it.

  Amy sat up taller. "I don't want her version of events. I want to get rid of her."

  "I'll get to that in a moment." Dr Sarton's gaze sharpened on Amy. "What I'm going to tell you now is very, very important." The leather in his chair squeaked as he leaned forward. "The failure of your failsafe indicates to me that you may be living with a deeply compromised immune system. The systems in place that would otherwise prevent you from even thinking about harming a human being are non-functional. Those same systems are designed to protect you from hostile code or viral interference. If you expose yourself to foreign stemware, you will absorb and execute it – even if it runs a self-destruct program."

  Amy glanced at Javier. His face mirrored her mood: thoroughly unimpressed. "I know that, already." She flexed her legs. "That's how I can jump. I took a bite out of Javier. Even the bounty hunters chasing us understood that. They said my code opens up for anybody who comes along."

  An almost girlish squeak of laughter escaped Sarton's lips. He immediately pursed them, but his eyes couldn't hide his amusement. Amy stood up. "Is something about this funny to you?"

  "No." He cleared his throat. "No. Not at all."

  "Because I would hate to think that you found what Portia did to Nate
amusing
. It's not. It's awful. And I want it to be over. Now. That's why I'm here, not listen to some history lecture on where vN babies come from."

  A knock at the door interrupted them. The door opened to reveal a female vN standing there, wearing a man's dress shirt and nothing else. She wore the same Asianstyled shell as the ranger that had stopped to give them money – the one who had first told them about Rory's desire to help them.

  "Daniel?"

  "Everything is fine, Atsuko. Go back to your swimming."

  Atsuko lifted her legs over the cushion daintily as she crossed the room to be at Dr Sarton's side. She stroked what little remained of his hair and looked first at Amy and then at Javier. "Why didn't you tell me they were here? I've been looking forward to meeting them."

  "I'm selfish," Dr Sarton said, kissing the inside of her wrist. "I wanted them to myself for a little while."

  "Are you connected to Rory?" Amy asked.

  Atsuko smiled. "Yes. I use her diet to avoid iterating." She looked sad. "Rory feels just terrible about what has happened, Amy. She had no idea the hunger could have such… side effects."

  Amy felt her eyebrows crawl up toward her hairline. "Side effects?"

  "Your parents wanted you to stay small, so you dieted. But you were so hungry that when your grandmother came, all you could think to do was eat her."

  Amy frowned. "I didn't eat Portia just because I was hungry. I ate her because it was the fastest way I knew how to kill her."

  
That's my girl.

  Atsuko said nothing. She just gave Amy a soft and knowing smile, as though the two of them were old acquaintances and she were all too familiar with Amy's bad habits and common shortcomings. Condescending. That was the word for it.

  "Not that it worked, of course," Atsuko said. "She's still alive, in a manner of speaking. She's certainly still causing trouble. It's no wonder they wanted to bring you all in."

  "Atsuko, be nice–"

  "I'm sorry, Daniel, but I can't do that. This girl is very dangerous, and I don't think she understands the risks you're taking by having her here. Even if she is able to control her grandmother, with the position you're in, you can't afford to–"

  "That's
enough
, Atsuko." He took her hand and ran one of his over it. "It's because of the position that I'm in that I want to help Amy."

  "What do you mean?" Amy asked.

  Sarton pushed away from the display. Like a conductor opening a symphony, he gestured wide and opened up an image that swallowed the whole screen. It looked like a satellite scan of the Earth in darkness – tiny lights blazing in cancerous lumps that streaked across vast swathes of shadow. Some of the lights were dimmer than the others, and of varying colour. Some were so tightly clustered that they formed whole bullseyes. All of them seemed to be moving.

  "My name wasn't always Sarton," he said. "It used to be LeMarque."

  Behind her, Javier sat up so fast the cushion squeaked beneath him. "Are you fucking kidding me?" He stood close beside Amy. "Come on. We're done. It's over. We didn't come this far to get Strangeloved by New Pedo Ministries."

  Two angry pink dots rose to the surface of Sarton's pale face. It was his only display of frustration. "I'm
not like that
. I had nothing to do with designing that game. It's just how I got into robotics. It was the family business."

  "Oh, so the old man had a crush on you, and got you the job?" Javier said.

  Sarton's gaze fell to the floor. His hair had begun thinning around the crown of his head. He looked so fragile, suddenly. He was the first human being Amy had met in a long while that she had no need to fear on one level or another. He had no power over her. And he was more than afraid of her. He was ashamed.

  "Are you his son?" Amy asked.

  Sarton's head rose, but he continued staring at nothing in particular. "Oh, no. I'm a more distant relative – a type of cousin, technically, but spiritually more like a nephew. His relationship with my parents was…" Sarton paused, then shrugged. "It was what it was."

  "Did you know Dr Singh, when you worked in Redmond?"

  For a moment, Sarton looked bewildered. "Ashok? He was on an internship when I was there–"

  "LeMarque ordered Dr Singh to kill my mother," Amy said. "And me."

  The colour departed Sarton's face as quickly as it had arrived. He quickly scanned his office, as though trying to reassure himself that everything was just where he'd left it. He shook his head, but his fingers twitched, and Amy recognized the telltale signs of somebody who desperately wanted online contact. "That's not possible," he kept saying. "It's just not. He can't do that. His contacts are limited. The victims asked for it in their statements. They
pleaded
for it. Even his kids, my cousins…" was still shaking his head. "He can't be talking with corporate, much less with DARPA. It makes no sense. He's
in prison
."