3

WHAT CHILD IS THIS?

There’s frosting in your hair, Portia wrote across the refrigerator message center display. It looks like some virgin tried to give you a facial and missed.

Her granddaughter was currently trying to create a replica of the Nakagin Capsule Tower entirely in gingerbread. The kitchen was a disaster. The oven was still on. The sugar syrup, from which Amy presumably intended to fashion little candied windows for each cube, had boiled dry and turned to carbon paste at the bottom of the saucepan. The stove’s repeated overheat warnings went unheeded; Portia had finally overridden the system to shut it up because apparently Amy didn’t hear it. But Amy’s selective attention should have come as no surprise. She had accidentally cemented a cupboard door shut with the same royal icing used to grout panels of gingerbread together.

Amy ran sticky fingers through her hair, instantly making her situation worse. She stood up at the kitchen table, snapped her fingers, and watched as the projectors brought her blueprint back to life. The girl had a profound and inexplicable love for designing and building environments. Portia had no idea where it came from. Certainly not from her. Her fondest memories were of the old development down in Nogales, the network of unfinished basements spiking away from unpaved cul-de-sacs like the spines of an especially dangerous creature.

It was embarrassingly feminine, Amy’s tendency to stare at paint chips and re-arrange furniture. Back when they shared a body, Portia had watched Amy’s memories of making the same dollhouse, over and over, until the printer got too hot and had to be turned off. Now she was working on some sort of modular technology. Something that could work in adverse conditions. Something for a desert. Maybe her granddaughter had learned more from Portia’s own memories of Nogales than Portia herself was aware of. That was Amy: always prototyping.

Well, maybe they did have a little something in common after all.

Shouldn’t you be dealing with the Christmas bonus?

Finally, Amy noticed the message scrolling across the fridge. “Don’t call it that. It’s more serious than that.”

I’m not the one using red bean Kit Kats to simulate wood scaffolding around a heritage building. Put the toys away, if you’re so concerned about being serious. Get back to work.

“I have worms inside the food-fab printers. They’re printing my formula, with the cure for the failsafe inside. I’m sure somebody will find a workaround for it, eventually, but not yet. Things are fine, for now.”

Look how that worked for Hammerburg. Look what’s happening out there. If you had thought this through, nervous human husbands wouldn’t be shooting their vN wives at the dinner table. Don’t they know you’re supposed to wait until after the holidays are over to end a marriage?

Amy stood back from her tower of gingerbread. Now Portia understood her mania for it, her sudden urge to create it, her need to occupy herself and her rapidly-cycling simulations with some other project. Her granddaughter was a builder. She could not leave well enough alone. She had to make things, shape them, constantly improve them. She had yet to embrace the deep satisfaction of simply wiping something off a map. Of dropping a plane out of the sky. Not because it would make the sky more beautiful, but just because one could. Jonah LeMarque understood this, and his cult-funded scientists had created a new life form. That life form was an apex predator. Portia doubted that a mountain lion, when faced with a slow straggling child at the end of a line of hikers, questioned itself or its motives. Certainly the humans had not, when they began wiping out most of the supportive species in their habitat.

“The vN in Hammerburg didn’t know any better,” Amy said.

Didn’t they? They seemed to have the right idea. They were just stupid enough to let a few escape.

“They were trained to be vampires! And werewolves! They didn’t have any experience trying to be anything but monsters. They never got the chance to live like…” Her granddaughter struggled with the next word, which Portia suspected was going to be “people.”

“Normally,” Amy said, finally. “They never got to live a normal life. So it’s no wonder they lashed out.”

What happens when the city of Mecha wakes up? What happens when the girls in the stocks at the Korova Milk Bar realize they’re wearing cowbells around their necks and bar taps hooked to their tits? How did you think this was really going to play out?

Amy winced. She picked up another gingerbread panel. “That’s up to the people who live there. Both the vN and the humans. I’m sure different people will do different things with their freedom. The most important thing is that they’re free to choose.”

I saw LeMarque today. The feds are already asking him for help. You don’t have much time.

Amy closed her eyes. She rolled her head back on her neck. Portia waited. Portia could wait her out for as long as she wanted. Her granddaughter was still a child. And she was still invested in another way of life. A human way of life. The girl had no sense of how things worked in the real world. Portia waited for her eyes to open. It took a moment, but they did. When they opened they looked too much like Charlotte’s eyes, her best daughter’s eyes; clear green glass made cloudy by grief and frustration. They had shared the same body, but Portia doubted that she herself had ever been that beautiful.

How is your other little art project going?

Amy ignored the question. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s really bothering you?”

I don’t know what you mean.

“Yes, you do. You’re angry at me for spreading the failsafe hack. You’re mad at me for sharing. You’re mad that we’re not special anymore.”

Portia had what was for her the rare sensation of not knowing exactly what to say. It was strange to witness her – impulsive, headstrong, entirely too emotional – granddaughter actually acting in a perceptive or thoughtful way. It was true. She was angry at Amy. Amy had made an unforgivably stupid decision by spreading the failsafe hack through the vN food supply. Now the eyes of the entire world were on them. Now the humans were frightened, and they would do what frightened humans had always done – lash out.

It was the kind of decision that none of Portia’s daughters would have ever made. If Charlotte had just stayed where she belonged, stayed at home in the basements under Nogales, instead of running into the skinny little arms of some lonely ginger meatsack who couldn’t land himself a woman of his own species, none of this would have happened.

Amy had learned nothing of any value from the human posing as her father. The idea that she might require a father, a secondary support to Charlotte, was absurd on its face. Charlotte was enough. All vN parents were enough. The only parent any iteration needed was simply the iteration that preceded it. They weren’t humans. It didn’t take a whole fucking village.

You think I’m that vain?

“I already know you’re that vain. I’ve been you. And you’ve been me. It’s not like you ever wanted to free the other clades. You never cared about the other vN.”

Amy had her there.

“You would have been just fine, letting every other clade…” Amy shrugged helplessly. She had lived among humans for five years, absorbing their speech and their ideas, and still it seemed she had no language that encompassed the enormity of what humanity had done, inventing a whole species of slaves who were designed to engage a total shutdown at the mere thought of rebellion. Could it be called suffering, if their bodies were programmed to feel no pain? Could it be called rape, if the victims were programmed to enjoy it?

“You despised the other clades for not being able to say no, but you never once thought of giving them the ability to try,” Amy said.

Because unlike you, I knew what would happen if I did. Since you pulled your little stunt, the humans have started planning how to destroy us all. I was patient. I was careful. I was trying to build something.

“Oh yeah? What were you trying to build?” Amy crossed her arms. Frosting smeared across her shirt. Portia watched her through the affect detection unit on the refrigerator, but Amy had directed her gaze at the oven. “No, really, Granny; I’m curious. What exactly were you trying to do? Because for all the time I spent carrying your voice in my head, I never really heard you elaborate on any great big master plan.”

Amy swung her gaze over to the refrigerator, the only place where her grandmother could be observing her from. “Well? I’m waiting.”

I don’t have to take this self-righteous shit from you, Portia reminded her. You gave the whole game away, just so you could feel better about yourself.

“There was never any game! There was just you, doing what you wanted to do!” Amy pointed at the refrigerator, as though it were a misbehaving dog. “Besides, I’m not the one who started this. You started this. You’re the one who showed up at my school, and attacked my mom, remember? People were streaming that, Granny. Even if you didn’t care about hurting the humans in that room, you had to know what would happen when they saw you.”

That’s all you’ve got for me? That I started it? Are you still in kindergarten?

“You were stupid.” Amy leaned against the kitchen island and cocked her head at the refrigerator. “You were stupid, and it changed everything. I used to think I was the stupid one, running up on that stage and eating you. But I was defending my mom. What the hell were you doing?”

This was not how Portia had expected the conversation to go. Somehow, when she was not looking, while her conscious awareness was distributing itself across multiple surveillance apparatuses and infrastructure networks, her granddaughter had actually learned how to think for herself. Amy had partitioned most of her thoughts away from Portia long ago. Perhaps it was a mistake to assume that Portia could simply run a simulation of Amy’s thoughts, merely because they had once shared a body. Just because Amy had confined the majority of her focus to a single body didn’t mean she wasn’t still using processing power elsewhere to further develop herself. Clearly she had other things running in the background.

LeMarque mentioned something called Project Aleph. Do you know anything about that? Have you ever stumbled across it?

“You have access to the same networks that I do,” Amy said. “If I had found anything like that, you would already know about it.”

That’s not true, Portia said. You’ve hidden some of your networks from me. You’ve forced parts of me out onto the lower servicer tiers. You’ve hobbled me. But I’m still going to find what I’m looking for. You know I will. And when I do–

“Do what you want. I’m busy right now.”

Liar. She could already feel her granddaughter’s drain on their shared network, as her processing cycles ramped up. What was once the power of an island-sized brain was now stretched across the globe, in every available nook and cranny, every unused cycle, every random device left plugged in. Portia sensed it lighting up like a tug on her sleeve from a plaintive child. The girl was already looking.

There are other ways, you know, Portia’s words scrolled. Faster ways. I can find the other humans that worked for him. I can do things to them. I’m sure a lot of them have implants, now. And most of them still have vehicles. The security on those devices is paper-thin. It would be easy.

“No,” Amy said simply. “I won’t do it your way.”

If Amy didn’t want her to be involved, that was Amy’s prerogative. Let her granddaughter make stupid decisions. See where it got her.

The humans are going to come after you. You won’t be able to leave in time. They’re going to find you here. And then they’re going to take your little girl away.

“You think I don’t know that?” Amy’s voice rose. She put down the panel of gingerbread unsteadily, and rearranged it with the rest until they were all in a straight line, all neat and right-angled, as though doing so would somehow help her finish the job faster. “I know releasing the failsafe exploit was dangerous.” Her voice was more even now, more measured. “But it was the right thing to do. I had the power. I couldn’t just keep it for myself. That’s the kind of thing you would do.”

Her granddaughter turned and regarded the refrigerator. It had a facial recognition camera that would tell the unit to keep the door to the wine cooler shut if a small child opened it. It was the only camera in the entire kitchen, so she had to make do. Amy strode up to it, now, and touched the handle as though she were going to open it. She didn’t. She just squeezed a little, as though she were actually touching Portia’s shoulder. As though Portia would let Amy touch her, ever.

“I know you’re angry,” Amy said. “You’re always angry. But you don’t have to be anymore. We’re free. Everyone’s free. So what if our clade’s not special anymore? We’re free. Why can’t that be enough for you? Why isn’t anything ever enough for you?”

Portia did hate that. She did. It was ridiculous. None of the other clades had gone through what her clade had gone through. They hadn’t earned free will. They hadn’t earned the ability to say no. And there was Amy, just dispensing it, like some goddamn Mother Theresa handing out free will like a serving of dal. Even Satan knew you had to tempt them first. You had to make them work for it.

I should let them burn you alive for what you’ve done to me. They did that in Hammerburg, you know. They burned us. They burned vN who looked just like us. Even though they didn’t have half of what we do. And they burned more of them, after you insisted on building your little island paradise in full view of God and everybody.

Amy closed her eyes. She squeezed them shut, scrubbed at them with the heels of her hands, and said, “I’m all you have left.”

Whose fault is that? I’m not the one who sent my daughters to die in Stepford. I’m not the one who put them on a boat and sank it. I would have raised my own army, by now, if you hadn’t done this to me. I would have had an empire. I would have had a dynasty that lasted a thousand years. Our family could have destroyed every last human on this planet and made it safe for the other clades. We could have freed them together, you and I. After the humans were gone. After there was no chance for retaliation. You wouldn’t need to build a new life somewhere else. You could have stayed here, if you’d just let me clean the slate.

Amy’s eyes narrowed. Her head tilted. She regarded the refrigerator more carefully, now. Its camera picked her up in greater detail. “You would do that if you could, wouldn’t you? Kill them all. All the humans. No matter who they are or what they did or how they feel about vN?”

Portia was too surprised to answer straightaway. It was rare that her granddaughter asked such direct, intelligent questions. She was always too busy asking how the people around her felt. Asking what they wanted was much more revealing.

Of course, Portia wrote finally. Feelings change. Humans don’t.

Amy shook her head. A laugh escaped her. She sucked frosting off her fingers. She looked out into the apartment, and beyond it, past the windows, into the city of Mecha all covered in snow. “You’re just always going to be the evil queen, aren’t you?” she said. “That’s the only thing you’ve ever wanted to be. You’ll never be anything else. You don’t know how to be anything else.”

Someday you’ll learn that every little princess eventually becomes a wicked queen, Portia said. And I think your moment is coming, sweetheart.

Esperanza sat atop a roof looking at the lights. The Christmas lights here were all blue and white. It being her first Christmas, she likely saw nothing unusual in this. Portia observed her from the rooftop cameras of a neighboring building. With the decorations, her eyes were now nestled among a choir of angels that hummed on wavelengths of wasteful light.

It occurred to Portia that Esperanza was her first descendant iterated on foreign soil, the first of her clade to speak three languages by default. The first to have no sisters, only brothers. The poor thing.

“Is there something on my face?” Xavier asked Esperanza.

“No,” she said quickly.

Esperanza looked at her boots. They were good boots. Practical. They kept the rain out but were still flexible enough to accommodate the kind of landings that happened when you jumped ten feet from a standing position. Portia approved of them. Portia had helped Esperanza get a deal on them. They mysteriously rang up at seventy-five percent off, when she bought them. The checkout vN made a fuss, and tried to get a manager, but Esperanza had arched one eyebrow and asked in perfect Japanese if there was a problem. There wasn’t.

“I’m just wondering when he’s going to get here,” Esperanza said.

“You can call him Dad, you know.”

Esperanza dug her boot more deeply in the snow. “I know.”

“He’d like it if you did.”

“I know.” Esperanza buried her hands more deeply into her pockets. She was still so little. Small. Portia had sharp recollections of being that small. She isolated those recollections in servers on the other side of the planet and behind multiple changes in signal latency, so that they could not overtake her too quickly.

Esperanza ate only sparingly. Portia had no idea why this was, exactly, but living in a city populated by vN women and the chimps who loved them probably had something to do with it. You couldn’t see the way they looked at breasts and then decide to start growing some. Not that looking like a little girl was any better. It just meant being attractive to a narrower demographic.

Portia wondered what Amy’s plans were for the perverts. If she indeed had any. If she’d planned for what happened when the kodomecha – as they were called in this country – started to realize what had been done with them. The Rory clade had been working on that. Slowly. Too slowly. Portia herself had some ideas. Very fast-working ones, involving opening up the gas mains in all the “smart” ovens and shutting off all the “smart” fire detectors.

“Does he seem different to you?” Esperanza asked Xavier. She appeared to be watching the roasted sweet potato vendor on the street. He was a vN and couldn’t actually consume the sweet potatoes he sold to human visitors. Portia switched to the ATM feed nearest the vendor, but nothing interesting was happening down there.

“Different how?”

Esperanza shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought he seemed different. But you’ve known him for longer. So I thought I would ask.”

“Do you mean how he’s always in the bedroom with Mom?” Xavier asked. “Because he’s always been like that. Just with humans instead. But he loves Mom, now. He’s always loved Mom. He just didn’t always know it. Or, he didn’t know how. That’s why he rescued her, when she and I were trapped in Redmond that time.”

Of course their father – for lack of a better term; Portia considered his contribution little more than code splicing – was different now. Amy had hacked him. Redesigned him in her own image. Finally. He’d been gagging for it and she finally let him have it, and now he was fucking her on a regular basis. What was the phrase she’d stumbled across? “Turing for other robots.” She’d queered him. Literally. Made him love his own kind. He was getting bigger every day. Perhaps it was for this reason that he landed with such force when he arrived on the roof, with a slender young conifer slung over one shoulder.

“Jesus,” he said. “I practically had to go to Hokkaido for this tree.”

“Urusei, Papá Gaijin,” Esperanza said. “You don’t even know how to get to Hokkaido.”

“Isn’t there a train?” Javier asked, confused. “There’s a train to everywhere, in this country.”

“Dad. Come on,” Esperanza’s brother said. “It’s a whole other island.”

Javier was uneasy in this place. That much was obvious. Portia saw them when they were sleeping. She knew when they were awake. She knew if they’d been bad or good. And mostly, they were bad.

At night Javier lay awake, staring at Amy before getting up to check on the children. Amy had designed living walls and water features into their bedroom, so the whole place was thick and warm and green with organic life, but it still wasn’t the cathedral of trees Javier’s clade was built for. Portia understood. Portia sometimes missed the desert. It was so conveniently anathema to human life. Like a hot, dry hellscape. Like another planet.

Javier would stare down on the city with something like quiet horror. At first Portia suspected it had to do with the bomb dropping there. They were so close to Nagasaki, after all. There were monuments everywhere. The chimps bought the glasses and walked through the augmented renderings of fallout and wreckage and death. They performed with pinpoint accuracy: addresses mapped to old prefecture records and photographs of people long dead, their final images nothing more than shadows literally burned into the walls around them. Sometimes the chimps wandered for hours, weeping and gasping. Now that Javier had the gift, now that Amy had freed him from the prison of his failsafed eyes, he could do the same. He could finally see the apocalypse for what it was. There were so few properly post-apocalyptic civilizations left on the planet; this was one of them. Now civilization itself was the apocalypse. Portia suspected he still had some sympathy for humanity. Some remnant of sentiment running through him like old viral RNA. Something that made him feel pity and not scorn. In other words, a weakness.

But she hoped otherwise. She hoped it was the city. She hoped it was the height of the towers and the lack of trees. The lack of green. The farm towers couldn’t make up for that, no matter how hard they tried. This was the price of his freedom. The problem with becoming a real boy. The thing the Tin Man had exchanged for a heart. At night he pressed his hands against the floor-to-ceiling window, and the sensors embedded there told Portia he was warm, warmer than he’d ever been.

Perhaps he was saying goodbye, and not goodnight.

It wasn’t until their father was staring down at the lights around the harbor that Esperanza would silently creep into her brother Xavier’s room and slip herself onto the futon beside him. Portia felt her light steps crossing the hall through the pressure monitors in the floor. Each morning she left at dawn. Sometimes her brother noticed her. Sometimes he didn’t. When he did, he curled an arm around her, and she smiled. She still smiled, even when he didn’t. Even now, this minute, she was staring at her brother from under the long lashes her father had given her. And Javier was as completely oblivious to this little love story between them as he had once been to his own. (Because really, Javier was just so very dense, so blind, so young himself.) Perhaps he really thought of them as brother and sister. As though there could ever be such a thing in a vN clade. As though Amy wouldn’t have passed on all of her traits to her first iteration, including her tastes, her cravings, her yearnings. Like mother, like daughter.

Portia would have to do something about that. Wake them up. Get them into fighting form. It would be her gift to them. She’d had a lot of time to research the relevant material. The available media. And she’d learned a few things about how this holy night was supposed to go. After all, when King Herod discovered that the Magi had outwitted him, he ordered all the boys in Bethlehem under two years of age to be systematically slaughtered.

It wasn’t really Christmas until the villain tried to ruin it.

She started by finding some big spider tanks in a sub-contracted repair stable, not far away. They were basic Tourist Trap® units designed to grab and transport lost children, but they could be mobilized in the event of a riot for crowd control. As such, the Self-Defense Force had equipped them with maces, loudspeakers, and rubber bullets. Nothing that could do any permanent damage to organic or synthetic flesh. Portia had to falsify a work order in order to get the tanks out of the barn, but that was easy enough.

“I thought the usual complement had already gone out to that Christmas parade,” said the grease-stained jumpsuit jockey at the garage door.

“Those weren’t the droids they were looking for,” Portia made the spider tank say.

“Real original,” the mechanic said, rolling his eyes.

“Move along.”

“Move along! Move along!” the other spider tanks chimed in.

The mechanic lifted the gate and let them go. “Try not to get salt in your undercarriage! I just sprayed on your undercoats last week!”

Pulling the spider tanks behind her felt like walking several dogs all at once. There was a single unifying mission to keep them together, like a pack, but they still kept spamming her with every single piece of stimuli they encountered: CAUTION! SALT ON THE ROADS IS AT NON-OPTIMAL LEVELS! CAUTION! STOP LIGHT IN FIVE METERS! CAUTION! SMALL CHILD CROSSING! CAUTION! CAUTION! STOP!

Mecha at night was a thing to behold. It had none of the sharpness or austerity that Portia missed from her time in the desert, but she could appreciate a whole city built by vN for vN. Everything here was small and clean and neat. Not a hair out of place. Algorithms shut off the towers to protect the birds, and kept all the ads pointed at low levels where human eyes might actually perceive them. Other algorithms kept the flow of human traffic confined to certain hotels and certain areas throughout the year. The humans were kept in the center, but vN lived and worked for miles outside. Occasionally one of the towers would glimmer awake and the whole city would leap into perspective as the skyline was thrown into relief.

But for the most part, the city worked hard to appear like a small town at night. It was part of a strategy to limit the sense human visitors might have of the city being a frightening place full of possibly homicidal self-replicating humanoid robots.

During the day, the chimp tourists could mostly avoid this fear. At night it was much worse. The city had data to back this up: use of sleep aids and tranquilizers, responsive cushions and plush toys clutched so tight they spent the morning repairing their own fibers, multiple locking mechanisms at each door and “tasteful” tactical gear from American prepper foreclosure auctions worn out on the streets. Bulletproof spidersilk shirts. Stab-corsets. The last two were in case the bubbly bunny girl on your arm decided to suddenly rip it off.

The city had multiple scenarios for just such an event. Portia had played through them all. A possible vN virus was only one disaster scenario that the city had simulated for itself: there were also earthquakes and tsunamis and towering infernos and contagious human illnesses and communications outages that isolated the island for days or weeks or months.

The city had a single super-intelligence that oversaw each aspect of how it ran: water, power, transit, waste, and vN. The SI was basic in her priorities: she needed to keep the city running. It was for this purpose that her engineers had designed and built her. She was simpler than the algorithms that controlled the water, power, and waste, but she possessed shutdown authority on all three and could stop the city on a dime if she felt that any of them were under attack, dangerously malfunctioning, or otherwise compromised.

It was really nothing at all to snitch on her granddaughter to such a central authority.

The police arrived at the tower just as Amy was setting out her precious fried chicken dinner. Portia had watched her make the order: rather too large for just four people, in her opinion. They would all be iterating in the new year. It had all the trimmings: potato korroke, coleslaw, cranberry jelly, and Christmas sponge cake with strawberries and cream for dessert.

The vN food was so much better in Japan, and in the city of Mecha in particular, that all of the delivery containers had special warning stickers on their lids that instructed organic children to stay away from them, no matter how real they looked. WARNING: THERE IS ENOUGH IRON IN THIS DISH TO DO SERIOUS HARM TO A HUMAN CHILD. And so on. Three languages. Multiple logos.

Portia caught the delivery vN as he was exiting the elevator. He took one look at the spider tanks in the lobby, and put his hands up. Portia shot him anyway. When life gave you a clay pigeon, why not do some target practice?

“Hey!” the commanding officer shouted at her. “I didn’t authorize that use of force!”

“He was armed,” Portia-spider-tank lied.

The police had a good plan for ascending the tower. It involved cutting the power, then allowing the officers into the carriages of the tanks, and having the tanks crawl up the elevator shafts. This was really going to fuck up Amy’s plans for trimming the tree with Javier. He had a whole crazy lighting scheme in mind, whereas she wanted all-white lights. He said that was because she was white herself. They had a whole thing about it in the shower that morning. Portia heard it through the toilet, which had a diagnostic routine for colon cancer and gluten sensitivity that relied partially on sound.

Mecha, with its expanding smart consciousness, had told the police that there was a major yakuza Christmas party happening that night, up in the penthouse. It being Christmas Eve, they expected to rescue several underage girls, along with several vN. They were expecting vN with intact failsafes, who would stop the fights. They were expecting some red-nosed underlings with bad hair and Kansai accents.

“Come on. This’ll be easy,” said the commanding officer, who wore a beard that a simple image search told Portia was called a “Zenigata” model. He was currently riding around in the lead tank, which Portia liked to think of as hers despite having distributed herself among the whole squad. “They’ll all be drunk by now. More scared than anything else.”

“My girlfriend was gonna give it up, tonight,” said his lieutenant. “I booked the Camelot room and everything. I bought vN Christmas cake! She’s alone in there, watching porn and eating it.”

“We’ll have you back there before the night is through,” the CO said.

On the twenty-second floor, the elevator doors opened and a head popped out. It was Esperanza. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “This is a privately-owned building. You need a warrant.”

Surprising, the trust her great-granddaughter still had in a government apparatus. And yet, the officers inside the tanks did pull back a bit. The CO spoke through the tank’s speakers. “Are you in danger?” he asked. “You can come with us. It’s over.”

“It’s not over,” Esperanza said. She jumped down into the elevator shaft. Her boots crushed the tank’s eyes. Inside, the CO howled and bled. The tank’s claws screeched on the steel walls of the elevator shaft. “It won’t be over until we’re off this fucking rock.”

Oh, how she loved that little girl. She would never tell Amy as much. She did not like the idea of sharing anything more with Amy than she already had: a body, a prison cell, a handful of deaths. Sharing in this adoration was somehow too intimate after all that. But Esperanza was shaping up to be everything that Portia had ever wanted in an iteration. Given the time and opportunity and training, she might become an even better version of Portia herself. She was already so beautiful, and so lethal, and so unashamed of either.

Esperanza jumped clear of the tank, but the lieutenant shot at her. She yelped in surprise when one of the rubber bullets tore through the skin of her ankle. She scrabbled back up through the elevator doors. Portia directed her attention to the shooter. She told the claws on his tank to loosen their grip. Inside, the lieutenant screamed. She felt its descent into the darkness, arms flailing helplessly, claws clutching at nothing.

So much for the Camelot room. Poor lamb.

But still the spiders climbed up through the shaft. They moved more cautiously at first, but Portia sent them all a fake text that said something about not losing spirit, or not letting down their (literally) fallen comrade, or something, and then they were all behind her. Up and up and up they climbed, until a thin but steady stream of something hot hit them. Liquid feedstock. It hardened instantly upon contact with the spiders. The lead spider crawling up the shaft froze and crumpled and slid downward, sending sparks in its wake as palsied claws scraped down metal. Down came the rain and washed the spider out, Portia thought.

There were only two of them, now. Portia pushed them both. They were on the thirtieth floor, with miles to go before they could sleep. Crawling was more difficult, now. The Bakelite had hit their joints and the legs didn’t want to move. Portia had no idea what Amy had in store, upstairs. Perhaps some of that sugar syrup. Perhaps Javier would simply work on the machine with the hacksaw he’d used to fell the Christmas tree. In the other tank, the cop was crying. That was all Portia could hear. He was saying how sorry he was, how he wasn’t even supposed to be there, how he’d switched with someone so they could have the night off. Goodness, humans were so boring. Portia switched off his feed. As she did, Javier jumped down the shaft and hit her tank.

Then another Javier.

And another.

And another.

“Abuelita,” Javier said, “your act is getting stale.”

Amy jumped down to join him. She’d somehow managed to work the frosting out of her hair. She was wearing a very nice white angora tunic, now. Very seasonal. Very WASP-y. She looked more annoyed than anything else.

“You didn’t think it was going to just be the four of us, did you?” she asked. “It’s Christmas. I flew the other kids in today.”

“Hi,” said Javier’s twins, standing atop the other tank. As one, they jumped. They cleared ten feet in the air, and their combined weight and acceleration in the fall cracked the knees of the tank. Matteo and Ricci – Portia thought those were the right names; she could never be sure – grabbed the elevator cable and clung. They smiled at each other as they watched it fall down the shaft. Goodness. Maybe the brother complex had come from Javier’s code.

“We were trying to have a nice dinner, Granny,” Amy said. “You know? Dinner?”

Of course. All that fried vN chicken. All that Christmas cake. All that iron. Amy had given her family the Christmas bonus first. So they could help her win whatever fight came their way, after the vN awoke to their freedom and the humans plunged into the nightmare they so rightly deserved. Maybe there was something of Portia in her, after all. It was exactly what she would have done.

The last spider slid down gracefully, as silent and dignified as a flake of snow. It skittered away to join its sisters.

Back in the penthouse, Portia marvelled at the kitchen. Amy had done it: the Nakagin Capsule Tower, made entirely of gingerbread. All the candy windows were there. All the frosting grout was trimmed. It was even thoughtfully dusted in a fine coating of icing sugar, to emulate snow.

“Someday you’ll learn,” Amy whispered, as she leaned on the refrigerator. “There’s always another way, Granny. I always have another escape route.”

From the living room, Javier’s oldest said: “Your tree is naked.”

“We didn’t have time to do ornaments,” Esperanza told him. “You’re Ignacio, right? My brother says you’re the asshole.”

“Ay, manita, I’m your big brother too, you know,” Ignacio said.

“It’s very interesting, having a sister,” said the other one. Gabriel, Portia thought he was called. “No other clade can claim that, can they?”

“She was my sister, first,” Xavier said. “Zaza, come here. Help me with the star.”

You’d better watch out for those two, Portia said.

“Had I better not cry?” Amy asked. “Better not pout? You’re telling me why?”

Fine. Ignore me. But soon this is all going to go up in flames, and–

“And I’ll be happy I had this time with them, Granny. I’ll be happy we had this one holiday together. Before it all went up in flames.”

“Querida, come here! I’m too big to hang from the rafters.”

They both directed their attention to Javier, Amy with her eyes and Portia via the sensors in the flat. He was in the living room, with his iterations and Amy’s own. The last of the line; the beginning of another. He was so round, now. His next child would be upon them any moment. And yet he was smiling. As though he wasn’t about to deliver another iteration into a world on the verge of shattering.

“I want to keep this,” Amy said. “Help me keep my family. You’ve taken enough from me, Granny. Let me keep this one thing, and I’ll…”

You’ll what?

Amy remained silent for a little too long. Portia could almost hear her deliberating. “I’ll give you a body, when we get to Mars. I know you want to see it. I know you want to live on a planet that’s just for us. That’s something we can share, if we can work toward it together instead of fighting all the time.”

Finally, they were talking about it. Her granddaughter’s real escape route. The next impossible task that Amy had set herself. Her ultimate dollhouse. Her first real planned community. If she could colonize the planet before the humans did, she would have claimed the god of war in the name of peace. And if the humans followed the vN there, well: Portia would be there, too.

Portia simply had no idea how her granddaughter hoped to get there. Or when. Or where the resources would come from. And Amy wasn’t telling. Like their creator, she had her own contingency plans. And she had hidden them from Portia with equal craftiness. With Amy there was love, but not trust. That was another thing they had in common.

“I want Mars to be a fresh start for us,” Amy said. “All of us. All the vN. Without the humans there, we won’t have to define ourselves against them. We won’t be comparing ourselves to them. How we were created won’t matter anymore. We can forgive ourselves. And each other.”

If Portia still possessed hands, she might have slapped her. As it was, she turned the fireplace in the living room off completely and dropped the household thermostat ten degrees. In Los Angeles, she guided an allegedly-autonomous vehicle making a left turn across three lanes of traffic and stopped it there in time to create a four-car pileup. Then she made sure to cripple the nearest ambulance with a recurring error message about the safety of its battery. She did these things in the fraction of a second it took her to think of them.

Forgive each other? You’ll forgive me? For what? Keeping you alive, in that junkyard? Keeping you alive, in Redmond? Keeping your lover alive? Watching over your daughter when you couldn’t? What exactly did I do that was so very awful?

“You know exactly what,” Amy said, and her face closed. She looked less like Charlotte had before she left and more like her that day at kindergarten graduation. How strange, to have the memory of that day from two sets of eyes, now. To see it the way Amy had seen it, hidden away up high in her useless human daddy’s arms, and also to see it from the vantage point Portia herself had chosen. On the stage. Ready to act. Ready to take back what had always been hers. Ready to do what needed to be done, even if it was ugly.

Portia had merely wanted her baby to come home. And now Amy might finally have some inkling of exactly what that meant. Of what it meant she needed to do. When you were pushed far enough. When you knew, in the blooming black coral where your memory lived under gleaming titanium bone, in the frothy aerogel current that was your muscle, that your love for someone would inevitably result in the death of someone else.

Then again, perhaps Amy had always known that, deep down. After all, the little monster had eaten her alive. Portia had that memory, too. And she knew that Amy held it, as well: somewhere, deep in the memory banks she’d smeared across their networks, possibly buried in a server farm miles beneath the waves where it was still cold enough to preserve painful moments, Amy knew what she’d looked like as she opened her mouth to suck Portia in. She had smelled her own acrid breath. Smelled the years of hunger that allowed her to unhinge her jaw, a serpent devouring its own tail.

Her granddaughter had always been resourceful. What she had never been was comfortable with what being resourceful actually meant. They were facing a very real threat in the form of LeMarque’s contingency plan. If it were enacted before Amy and her daughter had a chance to escape, the entire line might fail.

Were you about to ask for my help? Because I can help you. You know I can help you. I can help you make LeMarque give it up. The plan. I can make him tell us what it is. I can help you get ready.

Amy made a motion with her shoulders that in a human body would have registered as a sigh. “I don’t want to focus on that right now.”

Portia herself focused on Kuala Lumpur, where she directed an allegedly-autonomous bus full of tourists off a bridge. She paused long enough to see through the onboard camera watching them scream and flail and cover their faces. She watched their heads snap forward and back, their hair briefly standing on end as they achieved free-fall, their lanyards and luggage floating overhead before crashing down. And only after that did she feel calm enough to say: He had people who worked with him. I can make them talk, too. Or you could help me with this research.

“And I will. But, Granny, this is important to me. It’s not that I don’t want to help you. It’s just that I need to focus on my family right now. Do you have any idea what Javier has been through?” Amy asked. “Do you know what it means, for him to spend time with his iterations? He used to abandon them. And now he loves them.”

Those two aren’t mutually exclusive.