vN (36 page)

  Javier had expected the water to be cold when his feet hit the waves. But the machine's internal combustions had warmed the surrounding depths, and the soles of Javier's feet hissed when he walked across its skin. At the time, he had no clue that the heat that seared his skin – and forced him and Xavier to take breaks from the digging – was the heat of Amy's reforging. Javier hadn't even been sure he could dig her out. That the thing beneath the surface was a machine, he knew. But what kind of machine, what it did, he had no idea. Maybe it was a massive algal bloom of oil-devouring mech-krill. Maybe it was a hideous cancerous mass of sentient trash. But it had Amy deep in its guts and they had to keep digging, keep shooting at it and pouring acid on it and chasing it when it drifted away. He did not discuss these actions with his sons so much as hear their distant pleas for him to come back to the boat, to leave the thing alone, to realize that she was dead and there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do, and that he was wasting her sacrifice with his stupidity. Its surface could open up at any moment and swallow him, they said. They were alone here, with no supplies or food or method of calling for help. They were burning through a battery. They had to escape while escape remained an option.

  But Amy had already lost herself inside one monster. Javier wasn't about to let her be swallowed by another. He swung an axe down into the machine's shining carapace, and he kept swinging until he felt the grind of his bones inside their sockets. And finally Ignacio jumped off the boat, tapped him on the shoulder, and handed him a vomit cannon. "Dad," he said, "for this job, I think you want some power tools."

  That night under the stars, with his boys sleeping in a tiny little raft that they all expected to be swallowed up at any moment, he had run the probabilities of her being pulped away into nothing. They had no reason to believe that she was anything more than extruded feedstock. Her memories and patterns and habits were probably lost, digested in the belly of a giant.

  And watching his sticky skin slowly mending over each repeated burn, Javier could only simulate the things he would have said,
should
have said, should have done. If they had gone their separate ways after Xavier was born, if he had run further from the garbage dump, would they have been in this mess? If he had let her go in Redmond, would she be alive now? What if he had kissed her the way he'd wanted to so many times, and said
Fuck it, fuck the quest, fuck finding the answer, it's good when we're together and that's enough
? Maybe he could have lived with Portia hiding behind Amy's eyes. Maybe he could have adjusted to her voice in Amy's cries and her fingernails raking his chest, maybe if Amy were there too. Maybe he could have loved them both. He considered this possibility, and many others, until the morning light exposed a thin and trembling blister containing the outlier in all Javier's calculations.

  It should not have surprised him that Amy had reprogrammed the thing from the inside. She did that with everyone. She worked like a virus, altering priorities and setting new defaults and raising the bar and looking at you like you'd always had the potential to change, you just hadn't always known it. He had been in her grip for Christ knew how long. Maybe it was the failsafe. Maybe she was just human enough. Or maybe he was just enchanted enough with her berserker mode, having identified an alpha whose pack he could insert himself into. But in that moment, when the light hit her, his awareness rested on exactly none of those things and focused instead on how whole she was, how faithfully reproduced in every detail, from her too-fine hair to the knobbiness of her knees. He had seen her in various states of damage, in prison and on the side of the road and deep in the bowels of Redmond and in the jaws of her family, body smashed and voice destroyed, and he had watched her repair herself each time. But she had never looked so beautiful as she did now, a tiny perfect thing in the midst of all the dirt and salt and carbon, a pearl gifted to him by the sea.

  He had knelt, and wiped the black grime from her face and strained it from her hair with his fingers. If he were organic, his systems would have tried to attenuate the flood of anxious chemicals with a mental meditation valve, a prayer to some figment that dwelt between the neurons. But he was not flesh, so he did not hope, and instead he waited as the dawn filled her face with pink and gold. He held her as her eyes opened, and his every process stilled with the exhausted finality of a task long in the working.

  "You came back."

  For the first time, uncalculated tears blurred Javier's vision. "Haven't you noticed?" he asked. "I
always
come back."

  The flesh of the creature that had swallowed her then bore her up, standing her on her two new feet so that she could survey the landscape. With a neat motion like a conductor bringing an orchestra to attention, she raised the majority of the mass above the surface. And as she began to sculpt the first trees, Javier watched a shred of the surface skim itself off and slither up her legs to become a dress for her newborn body.

  She was Amy, but she wasn't. The mech had absorbed her, but she had absorbed it, too. She had bought their lives with her own, and what was resurrected – what she reassembled, what she made of herself in that deep and awful darkness – was the latest iteration, and it was networked.

 

Months later, Javier still caught himself staring at her and wondering who she really was. Most of the time, the vN – whose body emerged naked from the carbon veil blister on the Great Elder Bot's darkly gleaming skin – acted like the Amy he knew. She walked with Amy's light steps under the black fronds of the heliotropics she'd sketched into the air, and she slept in Amy's curling shell shape while the black roof of their house folded itself into an A-frame to better shed the nightly rains. She laughed Amy's laugh. She smiled Amy's smile.

  And his son still loved her. Junior – Xavier, he insisted on calling himself, now – still leapt into her arms at every possible opportunity. He still wriggled his way into her arms on nights when she'd spent a few too many hours redesigning the island. He butted his chin under hers and grabbed her wrist to coil her arm around his ribs. Xavier slept with a smug smile. Javier caught him there some mornings as he passed by her room.

  It felt wrong not sleeping beside her. His body knew this, but it also knew that this Amy was different from the one who once shared the backs of trucks with him. He had tried to discuss the difference – her newfound calm, her focus, the speed with which she now made each decision – with Xavier, but his youngest son merely rolled his eyes. What Xavier and Amy had shared during the long days and nights of the boy's bluescreen delay, Javier would never truly know, but the time had cemented something pure and clear between the two of them, something Javier had never once enjoyed with his own iterations. He saw it when she gently separated his son's curls with her long and careful fingers, or when she delved below the island's obsidian surface and withdrew a quicksilver peach for him to eat. He saw it in the complete comfort and trust on his son's face.

  The father of thirteen children, Javier had only ever seen that bliss on his sons' faces when they had found a human whom they loved to please. But Amy wasn't like the humans his other sons knew. She wouldn't tire of his novelty, or wonder if he were "really real", or pass him off to a friend when his affection proved unnaturally strong. She would die – had died – to protect him. And despite having loved his share of humans, Javier maintained no illusions about their loyalty. To love humans was to know them, and to forgive all their flaws, even the ones they didn't yet know of.

  He'd been with humans of all shapes and colours through good times and bad. They had a habit of finding him in the troughs and valleys of their lives, when they just wanted something easy, something that just worked, but occasionally he served as a sort of dessert, a reward for their accomplishments. He met them in bars and parking lots and bleachers. They took him to their homes, their capsules, their cars, and even to their churches when they were feeling particularly ambivalent about the whole enterprise. He had been the vengeance fuck, the guilty fuck, the
it's not cheating if you're not a person
fuck. He had sat with them through
Just a tiny little slice
and
I'll call her back tomorrow
and
If they didn't want me to dummy up the numbers, they'd have made these forms easier to fill out.

  "You love us like God must love us," the last one told him, before the fucking started. The last one was really into God. A lot of gods, actually. He was pursuing a degree in divinity, whatever that meant. He started out all Good Samaritan and ended up leaving little pillars of salt on everything. It happened between the garbage dump and the Electric Sheep.

  It was
why
Javier came to the Electric Sheep, why he found Amy and followed her over land and under water.

  That time, for the first time, he felt like a machine.

  He never really noticed the failsafe before that. It was just a part of him, a function that kept him and all the other vN running. Its processes faded from his awareness and he thought of it as a solitary mechanism, the way humans called the complex and dynamic relationship between the air in their lungs and the deep rich colour of their blood "breathing". Like all features, it worked best when it went unseen. But that time, with the divinity student, he felt it. He felt the helpless pull when the other man smiled. He knew he'd wind up on his knees sometime in the next few hours. He'd felt the reward nodes of his network ping him appreciatively when he made the other man come. But the reward didn't feel like a reward. It felt like a by-product.

  Organic women had told him about orgasms like this, when they talked about the person they had just left.
It's just what happens if you keep hitting the right buttons
, they said.
I felt like a fucking console.

  He'd wondered if he were broken, or defective, or otherwise compromised, when the other man's head came up and he smiled and asked if Javier was enjoying himself. How could he not enjoy himself? Why wasn't he? Why was he thinking about another vN at a time like this? The human was a good one, from the dimples on his face to those in his back, just below his belt, and he could sing the Song of Solomon in the original Hebrew, and he said that everyone of Javier's model must be having such a hard time out there on the road.

  "Yeah, it's pretty hard, all right," Javier had said, grinning, because he just couldn't help himself.

  And that was the crux of it: he just couldn't help himself. He knew that. Until that moment, he had lived with it, even enjoyed it. But as he laid his head on the other man's chest and listened to the squeezing of his heart, Javier found himself wondering when that organ would slow, how it would stop, whether it would be a clot or a hole or just the inevitable conclusion of a long history of organic decay. He wanted Amy fiercely then, desiring not her heart but its absence, the comforting silence of a body that would not age into decrepitude or abandonment.

  He began his search the very next morning.

 

In the middle of the night, listening to the rain, Javier heard Amy stand up and begin pacing her room. He gave himself a good five minutes before he checked on her. She did this, sometimes – she woke up, adjusted things, went back to sleep. He had no idea if she even slept at all. Her body could remain still, but she continued processing all night, she and the island alone together, in constant dialogue about fixes and tweaks.

  Jesus, but he was a jealous man.

  He got up and made for her room. Her pacing ceased when he paused at her door, and she answered his question before he could ask it: "They've let my dad go. Early release." In the dark, he heard her frown before he actually saw it. "They really want to chip away at us, don't they?"

  He entered the room and kept his voice quiet, so as not to wake Xavier. "You think they've sent him to spy on us?"

  "Wouldn't you?"

 

His son found Amy's father first. They met on the path to the house. The path was new; Javier woke to find it spreading down from their door to the ocean, at which point Amy informed him that a secure slipcraft had been hired under her father's name to deliver him there. He'd filed all the permits necessary for island access. Amy needn't have worried about a hidden implant; the qualifiers on her father's release forced him to wear a tracer, and they both agreed it likely held more than the usual complement of surveillance.

  Javier watched them, the organic man and the synthetic boy, from a hidden place in the trees. Amy's father looked so pale, his blood so red just under the surface of the skin, his movements so loose and wasteful compared to the economy of von Neumann energy differential. He needed a shave; sweat beaded in the ginger bristles of his beard. But when his bleary eyes settled on Xavier, he smiled Amy's smile: soft, a little tired, but deeply peaceful. Xavier straightened up as though that smile had poked him in the ribs.

  The boy stuck one hand out. "I'm Xavier."

  "Jack."

  "I named myself after my granddad." The boy started walking up the hill. Jack followed. "Xavier was the first Jesuit to make it to Japan. That's how my granddad got the name. Our clade's boss, a long time ago, was really religious."

  "I'm named after my father," Jack said. "His name was Jonathan."

  Xavier nodded slowly, as though this were some deep and difficult truth to understand. Then he beamed. "So, you're a Junior too."

  "Who's a what, now?"

  Javier jumped down out of the trees. He watched Jack's eyes narrow and then widen with recognition; the boy looked more like him with every inch he grew, but they were not yet completely identical. Javier had no clue why the boy wanted to remain a boy for so long; his other sons had all grown and left him by this age, or he had left them. But he had let Xavier make his own choice, and he said he wanted to stay little, and he had the discipline to avoid eating too much. Jack's eyes lifted from Xavier's open, smiling face to examine Javier anew.