vN (35 page)

  They used to be small. Then they grew. It all happened very quickly.

  Environmental pressure. That was it. Had to be. Only reasonable explanation. Why else this shape, when there were others available? And why ask now? Hadn't they been over this? This shape was optimal. This one. This. One.

  Dark down here. Cold. Had to toughen up. Make more. Watch for weak ones. Eliminate them.

  No, it hadn't been that simple. There was memory involved. Design. Strategy. They evaluated. Then they iterated. Over and over, they iterated. They were small, then they were big.

  An iteration is not a copy, it is simply the next version.

  They had a memory about the next version: they were it.

  They were small but they were special, Mom said. No, not her. Bio-Mom. Other Mom – her skin was so soft and so warm and it turned such interesting colours and one time they got to pop a blister all by themselves and they saw the moist pinkness underneath, and this mom said that was fine, they could peel away the dead stuff if they wanted – said they were lucky, so very lucky, to be different. Free. Mostly.

  Bio-Mom said: "
Sweetie, everybody needs a little discipline
."

  Bio-Mom had a friend whose house she went to while they waited in the car (they had eaten that car! their seats puffed up like marshmallows!), but one time they got curious and they got out (oh, those child-locks were tricky little bastards, you had to play like you were disabled or something), and they crawled along the foundations of the house (a real house, split apart from the others, it was so terrifically old), and peered through the basement windows. Bio-Mom was in the basement. Naked. Mostly. Tied up to a wall. Like at a knife-throwing show. Like vids of a knife-throwing show. Only the knife-thrower had a pain ray.

  It was this laser that targeted the fluids of subcutaneous organic tissues and boiled them. No scar. Just the hissing and the howling and the
No, I won't do that any more, I know it's wrong, I know I shouldn't
. There was a flash of light and a flinch. You never knew where that light would land. Or if you knew where, you didn't know what shape it would arrive in. That was a physics joke. Bio-Mom knew a lot of those.

  Bio-Mom said: "
Without pain, I wouldn't know who I really was
."

  She said that while trying to explain. They didn't get caught – not the first few times. Just kept watching. Bio-Mom's tolerance kept building up. Or maybe she was faking. They wondered, sometimes. She got so dramatic. She was so reserved, the rest of the time. They joked about which one was the robot. But in the basement she was so… hormonal.

  "
You should think of it as physical therapy
," she said. "
I'm retraining my nerve endings to respond to abnormal stimulus.
"

  She added: "
It can be our secret.
"

  Then she turned at the door, the sunlight softening the creases at her eyes, and she said: "
I think you should call me Susan from now on
."

  Susan had named their synthetic mom Glados. Everyone kept misspelling it, though, so they kept it G-L-A-D-Y-S.
"There's no accounting for taste,"
Susan said.

  Susan and Gladys used to have a good relationship. Gladys did everything right. She cooked and cleaned and took honey from the hive. She pointed out the queen to them. She showed them all the drones hard at work. Bees were special. They smelled magnetism. Felt it in their fuzzy little bellies. Even at the last minute, when they became food for the next queen, they felt that pull.

  There could only be one queen at a time, Gladys told her. Once the princess is born, she has to start her own hive.

  Gladys was good and sweet. She knew things about the human body. The kids in the neighbourhood came to her with cuts and scrapes. She always had the same conversation with them. She gave the same warnings. Keywords. Search parameters. How come you're so much smarter, the organic kids always asked them. Why can't she talk like us?

  Gladys had no idea. They tried jokes on her. She smiled and said they were funny. She understood, but never laughed. She only told Susan she loved her at certain times of the day: morning and night, goodbye and hello.

  
"She's so… mechanical,"
Susan said. "
Not like you
."

  Gladys did not cuddle. Her hands moved efficiently, not tenderly. She had helped Susan with an illness earlier in Susan's life. In another country. Susan spent months inside a plastic tent with only Gladys for company. Then she fell in love. She told them this story all the time. A fresh mutation of the Florence Nightingale syndrome; she called it the Coppélia croup.

  "
Before you were born, I did some work on her OS
," Susan told them. "
I found some other women online. They were working on male models. They wanted men for this kind of relationship. I told them they'd get farther with nurses, but they're too picky.
"

  Still. Those other women helped. They shared a lot of knowledge between them. They were so generous with it. They gave it all away, so Susan could feed her kink. Unfortunately, the hacks never quite worked.

  Then they were born.

  Susan let them pop her blisters and pick at her scabs and examine her scars. Susan used to burn herself. Susan used to not eat. She had a thousand ways of punishing herself. She needed to do it. She was a very bad person. She said.

  "
If you really love me, you'll do this for me
," she said. "
It doesn't go against the failsafe. Not really. Not if I want it.
"

  Susan told this to Gladys on multiple occasions. Gladys protested. She said someone might get hurt. Susan said that was the whole point. Then Gladys started to stammer and shake. She'd beg Susan to let her love her simply and truly, the way she was built to do.

  "
I told myself I'd love her better if she were truly free
," she explained, "
but you and I both know that's a lie
."

  They left Gladys on the side of the road somewhere. They asked her to pick raspberries. Then they drove away. Susan wept.

  Then they chained Susan up in their own basement, and made her drink from a dog dish, and her tears turned from self-loathing to rapture.

  Susan turned as docile as a cleaner bot. They made her do all the work Gladys used to do. Naked. She loved it. They smelled it on her – her sharp personal vinegar mixing with the sweetness of her enteric-coated triple-threat pills: aspirin, statins, something for memory.

  Memory performs better and better, the more it's used.

  They made Susan fetch them more food, and they ate too much, and soon their first iteration was on the way. Susan glowed. She danced through each room, mixing palette in hand.
"I hope she's just like you. I'm going to love her just as much if not more. We'll be a real family.
"

  Susan didn't want a baby. She wanted to be the baby. Make no decisions. Serve two identical masters. Do as they said. Trust her whole life to the crystalline perfection of carbon intellect. Spend her nights straining at the chain just to get one brief moment of suckle.

  Pathetic.

  They left her chained up in the basement. "
I've been so good
," Susan called up the stairs, while they shut the windows and opened the pilot lights.
"You've been up there for hours and I haven't even moved! But I think I smell something, Portia. Portia, I need you to open this door.
"

  They weren't around when the house exploded, but they searched the images later. They enjoyed seeing the charred skeleton of the house. They hoped the other organics left it that way. Be a shame to waste all that destruction. All that effort.

  Memory performs repair.

  They have other memories, happier ones. They have the memory of happiness, now. They have the subroutine for smiling. So much goes on in the face. The fluids inside it never settle into one place. They can never decide on one shape.

  They can never decide on one shape.

  They don't know how they know the way the treehouse should go, but they know. It just makes sense – the walls, the pipes, the light through the leaves. They are sensitive to colours and textures. They imagine the coolness of bark and the warmth of old wood. They spend hours with the display, hands weaving through the air long after the rest of the home is asleep, when Dad's organic snoring comes in from the next room. He insisted she have her own room. Mom said she didn't really need one.

  
"I never had my own room,"
Mom said.

  Mom had a basement. A hole. With the others. They invited her to live with them, in a little separate room, just enough space for two, but she always refused.

  Sometimes Mom came in to sleep with them. She caught them playing at three in the morning and she said nothing, made no complaint, just slid into the bed beside them and hugged her knees and watched the DreamHouse™ built itself up before disintegrating. She occasionally warned them about storage capacity and account limits.

  In their banks, they held the memory of past prototypes. Many of them.

  Perhaps this is why they feel such affinity for these files. They feel familiar. All those attempts. This one kept trying new things. They know about that process. They know about examining the failure before moving on to something new. The failures are not objectively bad – they are simply another step.

  Another version.

  This version does not practise total selection. This version keeps all the versions. Makes informed decisions. Has no goal, no mission, just the desire to do their best and then do it over again. Just the desire to make. To shape. To try.

  They imagined places where everyone would be safe. They imagined windows that withstood earthquakes and walls that sheared storms. They wanted something indestructible. They wanted a home that would heal itself, the way their flesh did.

  Their flesh needed healing, now. They had an infestation. Crabs. Barnacles.

  If they would go up to the light, they would heal faster. They had memories about that, too. Broken joints and broken legs and broken ribs. The flesh kept repairing.

  One time, it hadn't. While they were digesting. They had a memory of writhing inside a black and airless space, clawing at the slick walls with fading fingers, watching their legs melting into a pool as they tried to bargain:
I promise I won't do it again, I'll be quiet, I won't interfere, I'll–

  They remember.

  They re-member.

  This time. This time they may have outdone themselves. The light tingles when it hits them.

  Epilogue

  
Dé Tu Abuelo un Beso

 

Javier explained it to his children this way:

  Years ago, after Cascadia, a container full of networked vN were sent to help with the relief effort. The container was lost in a storm. No one heard from it. Human authorities eventually figured that undersea pressure on the container had destroyed everything inside it. In reality, the von Neumanns waited, and waited, and waited, at first patiently expecting their mission to begin, then wondering why it hadn't as they grew hungrier by the week, before finally turning on each other after a few months and inevitably iterating a short while later. The network they shared allowed them to distribute the work of designing their own probes, ones who could withstand the cold and the pressure. They iterated collectively, bumping up attributes they liked and knocking down the ones they thought less useful. Finally their next iteration was ready, and out he swam, and he found everything needed to survive, and he made more like himself. He returned to the container to spawn, but by then it and its inhabitants had decayed beyond recognition. He bore his son alone in the darkness beneath the waves, and his son did the same, and soon their numbers expanded to a metastate within which they could plan their next prototype. Eventually, they formed the collective that became the beast most people knew.

  What most people didn't know was just how many of them there were. Signal latency was a real bitch of a problem, one even vN couldn't quite solve, and so the Great Elder Bot (as Javier now called it) budded off when it achieved enough mass. One now formed the island beneath their feet. But there were others. Amy said she talked to them, sometimes. They liked warm places, where the mercury and the other metals permeated the water. They liked smokers and subduction zones. Their clade stitched pinstripes around the planet. And when they got really hungry – while working on the latest iteration, say – they sometimes plucked their food from the surface. And one day, in the middle of an allyou-can-eat container ship buffet, they scarfed down something with two very distinct flavours: a pocket of piss and vinegar in a sweet, soft shell. Amy.

  Xavier was the first to try saving her. Together, they watched the arm of the massive creature suck her down its gullet, her body – Portia's body, in that moment – twitching and kicking as it slid into oblivion. And then Javier's arms were suddenly empty, and his son was in the air, his arms and legs having attached to that much larger mecha limb as confidently as they might have secured themselves around the trunk of a tree. His youngest attacked the creature with his fingers and his teeth. He ripped into its dark flesh like a sculptor attacking clay. It whipped through the air and dashed him against containers. He refused to let go.

  Javier's children had a funny habit of outshining him.

  He'd stripped the vessel for weapons, after that. He broke the guns off their turrets, and raided the containers for anything of use. He'd fired up the lifeboat's outboard and aimed it straight at the Great Elder Bot's core body. And when he got there, he found his youngest son waiting for him, his arms burned up to the elbows, his knees raw and bloody, alone on the tip of a machine whose glossy bulk had already sheared the rudder off their lifeboat.