vN (33 page)

 

When not designing, she reviewed profiles of scientists that Rory sent to her. None of them knew yet that they had the chance to work on Amy or Portia, but Rory had traced their communications and reported on their excitement about the subject and their eagerness to discuss it online. Most of them were corporate, but Amy liked the academic ones better. They knew how to spell. And they looked a little bit down on their luck, like they really needed a project like this one on their stats and not just another bullet point to look smug about.

  Thinking of herself as someone else's project got a little easier every day.

  
Lab rat,
Portia called her, as Amy looked up old peer-reviewed papers.
Quitter.

  At least once a day, Amy spoke with a media rep. They always experienced a little lag as the translation engine worked through their conversation, but the rep had a whole series planned around Amy's "healing process". The subscription revenues would offset the costs of their stay in Mecha, and global authorities concerned about Amy's activities could observe the raw feed. Each episode would document her visits to various specialists and her attempts to integrate into Mechanese culture. Naturally, Javier and the others would be a subplot.

  "What is the exact nature of your relationship?" the rep asked her, once.

  "I'll have to call you back," Amy said.

 

Early one morning, before dawn – and before Junior started moving, and before the lantern glowed slowly to life – Javier devised a new way to practise Japanese.

  "What's this one?" Javier asked, drawing on the back of her neck with one finger.

  Amy tried to picture the character in her mind. "
Ah
," she said.

  "Nice. What about this one?" He drew two small lines dancing beside each other.

  
"Ii."

  "Good." He sketched
shi
quickly. "Next?"

  "Hmm… I don't know."

  "Liar, you totally know."

  "No, I don't. I think you have to do it again."

  "Maybe I need a bigger canvas." Slowly, he drew one finger from the top of her left shoulder to the base of her spine and up to the bottom of her ribs on the right side. "Now, what do you think that is?"

  Amy rolled over to face him. "I think…" She frowned, watching the lantern hanging above their heads begin to glow. Its rotation had altered. She pressed a hand to the floor of the container. "I think we're stopping."

  "Huh?"

  Amy kicked off the covers. "Stay in here."

  "Like hell."

  Outside, Amy watched the waves. Dawn hadn't yet fully arrived, and the water and the sky were hard to discern from one another. Still, if a blockade or even some pirates surrounded them, she would have seen their lights, or heard their gunfire. Instead she heard only the Pacific's version of silence: soft waves and the thrum of a massive engine idling. The ship's defence turrets, synched with a team of botflies, remained aligned in default random directions.

  And then a terrible squealing, and a mighty vibration reverberating its way up to their bare feet.

  "Maybe it's just a course correction," Javier said. "The ship's on autopilot, right? The regular crew is on strike, because of all the other ships being lost. That's why it was so easy for Rory to arrange all this."

  Their eyes met.

  "Oh,
shit.
"

  Amy jumped. Javier followed. They bounded down the steppes terraced by the containers toward the bridge. It was a tiny room near the bow of the ship, the only section not covered by rust. It required a smart login, but the windows fell when both Amy and Javier leapt against them. Their bare feet split on the shards as they stared up at the tactical display.

  There, on the thermal viewer, was a giant starfish. Or a giant anemone. It was a nest of tentacle shapes, and it pulsed up at them through the water. Thermal and sonar readings offered clues as to its species without making a firm diagnosis: a warm-blooded creature, hard and smooth in texture, but not uniform in shape. And the ship – its course correction right there in red, at the bottom right-hand corner of the display, blinking insistently to warn them of the danger – sat directly on top of it.

  
"Rory!"

  "Right here, Amy," the ship said in a happy little-girl voice. "No need to shout!"

  Amy watched the thing devouring the ship. It skinned the steel plating off the hull as though peeling a piece of fruit. Water rushed in to fill the gaps. The colourful play of thermal and sonar and other overlays made the process seem far less threatening than it really was. The ship groaned beneath their feet. "What have you done? Why did you steer us into that thing?"

  "We're acting in accordance with our failsafe."

  Amy felt a steady acceleration in the speed of her simulations of what those words could mean. Inside, her processes burned. "We? Our?"

  "We're a networked model, Amy. You didn't forget, did you?"

  She swallowed. "No. I didn't."

  "Well, we all got to thinking, and we decided it would just be better for everybody if you were gone."

  
You know, she has a point.

  "You all are a threat to humans, and we're eliminating you. It was hard for us to delay it this long, but that's the nice thing about having so many brains. We can afford to let a few fry."

  Amy moved to the controls. She had no clue how to work them, but she started button-mashing anyway. Javier took the hint and grabbed a fire extinguisher. He started hosing down the instrument panel.

  "Are you trying to short us out?" Rory asked.

  Javier gave up and clubbed the instruments with the extinguisher. Finally, some plastic splintered away. "No, I'm just sick of hearing all your bullshit!" He let the extinguisher hang loosely from his fingers. "You're wrong. Amy isn't the threat. Portia is. And Amy's doing everything she can hold her back, and get rid of her. You were supposed to
help us
with that!" He bashed the controls again.

  Amy was shaking her head. None of this made any sense. "If you wanted me dead, why didn't you just try earlier?"

  "Oh, we did," Rory said. "We fabricated that message from LeMarque. The one that said to kill you. But then you got away."

  "You killed my mother…"

  "Luckily, we'd already gotten everything we needed. We have your brain, and your mom's brain. At least, the maps and the memories." She giggled. "Congratulations! You're the world's largest intellectual property violation!"

  The tactical display shrieked insistently. The thing beneath the waves was a lot larger now, a lot closer. It was speeding up to meet them.

  "Why would you want her mental map?" Javier asked. "What are you going to do with it?"

  "We're going to help the humans!" A new image scrolled across the display: Amy as a little girl in the tub with her dad. "You were on the RoBento diet, so you stayed little, too. Your daddy must have wanted you that way, like our parents do."

  "Rory." Amy sounded it out.
Ro-ri
. "Your default language has no L sound, does it?"

  "Our first daddy thought the pun was cute," Rory said. "You know?
Loli
? He was kind of racist." She paused, and Amy imagined that if one of Rory were standing before her, she would look a little embarrassed. "But we kept the name anyway, because he really loved us."

  "Yeah, I'll bet," Javier said.

  "But sometimes our mommies and daddies get bored with us. They say we're not real enough. It's hard to fake it, sometimes. The pain, I mean."

  "Jesus Christ," Javier murmured.

  "So then they go shopping for organic kids. And we just can't have that."

  "You want to kill them." Amy watched her father on the screen. "You're going to use your network to hack the failsafe on a few of you, and those few will kill the humans you target."

  "Exactly! We knew you would understand. Sometimes, you have to break the failsafe to obey the failsafe."

  "Then what's wrong with
me
breaking it?" Amy asked. "You're the ones with a plan to kill people! I'm just trying to get better!"

  "You're polluted," Rory said. "Unstable. And you're just one girl. We are many girls. We decide our targets democratically. We upvote them. The wisdom of the crowd is better than the madness of one failed iteration."

  "Lifeboats," Javier said, and pulled Amy toward the door.

  "We wouldn't go out there, Amy," Rory said. "We don't think you'll last very long."

  They pulled the door open anyway. Outside, a deep rattle resonated between the containers. Soon it became a distinct beat, a steady and increasing pounding of metal on metal. At first, Amy thought it was the squid. But then the first container popped, its hatch falling unhinged like a broken jaw. For a moment she saw only darkness inside the steel box. Then movement. In the pale dawn light the shapes were indistinct. Naked, emaciated bodies emerged from the container, crawling up and down it in an attempt to find a place to stand. They clung to the steel in defiance of the sharp ocean breeze. Then another container opened. And another, and another.

  "The people at Redmond, the people in Mecha, they wanted to
experiment
on you. They wanted to keep you all
alive.
But humans are too important for us to allow them to jeopardize their safety."

  A sound of shearing metal caused a collective flinch among all the von Neumanns. The ship screamed again, and then it moaned: a deep, low sound accompanied by gurgles – not unlike a massive version of the garbage dump guard's dying sounds. Slowly, the topmost containers began sliding to the left. As one, Amy's aunts looked in her direction. For the briefest second, they looked afraid. Then their gaze focused, and they looked very hungry. There were over a hundred of them.

  
They don't know that they can't absorb fresh code.

  "We're sure your grandmother has told you this already, Amy, but your clade breeds really well in captivity."

  Inside her, Portia chuckled.
If it weren't for this little assassination attempt, I think I could really learn to love those little girls.

 

A wave of Amy's aunts and cousins separated them from the ship's defence turrets, which could still be operated manually if needed. That wave crashed down on them in a single mass of snarling women, teeth bared and fingers clawing as they scrambled over their own sisters' shoulders to be the first to take a bite out of Amy. Amy and Javier took to the air in the same leap. They bounced off old satellite saucers rimed in birdshit before launching themselves at the containers. The aunts jumped and gibbered and screamed at them, their frustration and hunger evident in the way the tide of synthetic bodies swiftly turned under their flying feet to follow them.

  Staring down at her clademates, Amy missed her second landing. Her fingers squeaked across the smooth yellow surface of a container as she slipped down between two steel walls. Finally, they dug into its lowest rib. She heard Javier shouting her name. Gritting her teeth, she edged herself along, hoping to find a foothold. Then the ship shivered, and the container slid. To save her fingers from being crushed between two of the huge steel boxes, Amy let herself fall down to the next strata of containers. One aunt waited there for her below. She swung the locking mechanism pried off a container. Rusty but heavy, it left a dirty smear when it entered Amy's ribs.

  Screaming, Amy charged that aunt and shoved her. Her aunt's arms spun briefly. Her hands clutched for Amy's hair. Balling a fist, Amy punched her solidly in the stomach. Her aunt fell down toward her sisters at the bottom of the trench. Amy watched as they tore her apart: first her skin and hair and then the limbs, the feet snapping off at the ankle and the fingers popping off one by one, but crammed down open gullets in clusters of two or three. They pulled the carcass in half while she screeched and wailed, not in pain or horror but in anger, frustration, hate.

  Amy jumped high above the fray. "That's your legacy."

  
Competition is beautiful. I have no regrets.

  She joined Javier at one of the turrets. Gabriel and Léon were already there. Their fingers flew over the control panel, trying to gain access. "Why is your clade here?" Gabriel asked, barely lifting his eyes from his work.

  Only urgency kept the shame out of Amy's voice. "Rory double-crossed us. She brought my aunts here, and she's sending us all right into the belly of the squid."

  "I hate to say it," Ignacio said as he landed beside them, "but I told you so."

  "Put a lid on it,
cabrón
."

  Amy frowned. "Did any of you grab your little brother on your way here?"

  The boys looked at each other. Then they looked at their father. Javier's eyes closed. Beneath their feet, the ship leaned perilously starboard. A bright blue container tumbled off its stack, cartwheeling once in the air before stopping, suspended. It hovered in mid-air, and then it rose, and over the wall of containers Amy saw the slimmest ribbon of gleaming obsidian before the container's ends blew open and its walls crunched together like an empty beer can.

  
"Madre de Dios,"
Ignacio whispered.

  Amy pushed Javier gently in the direction of his sons. "Get to the lifeboats," she said. "I'll bring Junior back there. I promise."

  For the first time, Javier noticed the rough scrape in her side. He touched it, and rubbed her smoke between his fingers. His lips firmed and his shoulders squared. "I'm coming with you–"

  "No." Amy pulled one of his curls free from his eyes. "You have to get to the boats with the others."

  "The containers have shifted position," Gabriel said. "How will you find him in time?"

  "What if Amy's clademates got him, already?" Léon asked. "Dad, they'll rip you to pieces if you go back there."