4

A Game Called Mercy

 
 

You're the only one who can help his clade fight back. Tell him. Tell him that when the rest of this world is ash and smoke, his trait will live on in your daughters.

  Amy quickly wrapped the towel around herself. It was easier than looking at Javier's face, and it made her feel a tiny bit more in control of herself. She looked at her toes wiggling on the bloodstained carpet. "There is no reason." She brought her chin up. "I'm sorry for lying to you. But I wasn't lying about Granny, I mean Portia, hurting my mom. You've seen what she's like. None of the humans could have stopped her."

  The gun lowered a fraction. "Yeah. Seems like you're the only one who can do that."

  "I don't know why I ate her…" Amy shook her head. "I don't even remember thinking about it. My dad said there was nothing he could do, and then I started running, and then she grabbed me, and then… I bit her, I guess."

  "You bit her."

  "Well, she was a lot bigger and stronger than me, then. And she was holding my arms. So biting her was all I had left."

  "You seemed to know some moves a few minutes ago."

  "That was Portia, not me. I begged her to stop, but…" Finally, Amy looked up. Javier looked very tired, but his grip on the gun was still tight. "Are you sure you're OK? You're not stuttering any more, so the failsafe has stopped, right?"

  He backed away. "You heard all that?"

  Amy nodded. "I'm really sorry. I came back as fast as I could." She looked into the cage where Junior lay. "Do you think he's all right?"

  Javier's eyebrows lifted. "Hell if I know. I haven't exactly had to deal with this kind of situation, before." His brows furrowed. "So, if you could hear everything then, does that mean she's listening to us right now?"

  "Yes," Amy and Portia said in unison.

  The gun remained poised in the air. Javier's eyes were very dark and very still. Amy closed her eyes. She waited.

  "Keep a lid on her. I really don't want to melt you, but if it's between you and me, I'm picking me."

 

With the bedroom converted into a holding cell, the bounty hunters had turned their limited kitchen storage into a wardrobe of sorts. Sandwiched between extra rounds of ammunition – and an astonishing array of repurposed plastic takeaway containers – were some pairs of jeans and T-shirts, most of which seemed to have been purchased from bars and restaurants up and down the West Coast. They had promising names, like the Sagebrush Cantina, the Left Coast Siesta, or the Honey Hole. Melissa even had a T-shirt from the Electric Sheep ("It's the food you've been dreaming of!"). Standing there looking at the little sheep logo with the power cord trailing from its neck like a collar, Amy wondered why Rick and Melissa had gone. Maybe they caught a bounty, there. Maybe they had run the same scam on other vN that they'd run on Amy. Why had she even fallen for it in the first place? Had she really been so eager to believe the best about them? Had some component of the failsafe survived in her after Portia's arrival, some blind spot in her judgment when it came to humans?

  No. You're just stupid, that's all.

  "Shut up." Amy continued digging through the clothes. "You've almost gotten us killed plenty of times already. Is that what you really want?"

  We won't be killed. I'll destroy anyone who tries. And then I'll take over for good. I'm the better pilot, and you know it.

  After a moment's merciful silence, Amy selected a bra from a plastic bin and tried hooking it together. Three tries later, she still couldn't grasp why human women would bother. Her mother certainly hadn't worn them very often, and now Amy understood why. She wondered if Melissa had other more comfortable clothes to wear, somewhere else. It didn't seem like much of a life, driving from place to place and hunting down vN for occasional paychecks. Maybe they had a home base of sorts – a place to go back to when things went wrong. Then again, Amy doubted that things had ever gone quite this wrong for Melissa and Rick.

  "Come here," Javier said, from behind a curtain he'd hastily pulled to separate the driver's section of the RV from the cabin.

  Amy struggled into a T-shirt, then pulled aside the curtain. Javier sat in the driver's seat, watching the campsite. Rick's reader lay spread across the dashboard. In his lap, Junior pawed the enormous steering wheel. Javier jammed a massive set of keys in the ignition, then handed Junior over to her. The vehicle thrummed with new life. Within the dashboard, devices squeaked and flashed. "Feed him. I saw a little vN food in the cupboards. Probably meant for bounties."

  Amy balanced Junior on one hip. "Um… Did I miss something?"

  Javier turned on the radio. After some tuning, he found static. He glanced up at Amy. "You hear that?"

  "It's just white noise."

  "No, it's white space. It's unused bandwidth. At least, according to most people." He popped a panel in the dash, exposing an ancient radio. He switched inputs, tabbed something on the radio, and sat back. "Listen again."

  Amy listened. She closed her eyes. The static droned on and on, sometimes scratchy, sometimes smooth. It almost sounded like a rhythm. Soon a voice shaped itself from that rhythm. It was a cute and very young female voice: "Amy Frances Patterson was last seen in Washington State, near the Olympic National Forest. She is travelling with an eco-model named Javier, wanted for serial iteration in California. If you see either of them, please tell them to contact me."

  Javier turned the volume down. "I wasn't sure about that ranger at first, so I decided to check her story out. That's Rory.The one who writes the diet plans. She's a Japanese model. One of the networked ones."

  Amy's lips made a little O of jealousy. "Lucky…"

  "I know, right? I'd kill for that connectivity."

  "What else do you know about Rory?"

  "She's the one who helped me have all my kids," Javier said. "You need a really old, modded radio like this one to decode her broadcast, and she changes the codec every few days. The content changes locally – I really don't know how she does it, I think her whole clade's in on it, or something – and it's always about where the best food is for iterating vN. See? She's not all about keeping little kids little."

  "There are lots of mixed families who use the diet plan, Javier. Hundreds. Thousands. There are even vN who use it not to iterate. Like my mom."

  Oh really, now? That's quite the change. You know, you wouldn't miss Charlotte so much if you knew the truth.

  Javier was still talking. "Well, Rory made out like I was the sidekick, which is bullshit. I am not travelling with you, you are travelling with–" His head tilted. "Is that thing you're doing with your mouth adaptive, or did it come with your model?"

  "What thing?"

  "The wibbling. You're wibbling your lower lip. And your eyes are huge. It's like your ocular cavity's expanded while I've been looking at it. I think your model must have originally come with some sort of… I don't know what it is, but it probably works really well on organic guys."

  Amy turned around and walked away. She wiped her eyes. "Just drive."

 

This was how Amy wound up in a charging station at the edge of a sprawling parking lot, upon which sat a former bigbox store, now a combination farmers' market and capsule hotel. It was vN-friendly; the shelves – which had once held giant pallets of rice and tea and tube socks and monitors, and other things brought in from elsewhere – were available for hourly rental if vagrant vN wanted to take a safe nap. Amy had only seen them in news programs, and her mother had always changed the feed when they came on. You could subscribe to the recommissioned drones that had once worked the stores, though, and see what the vN were up to at night.

  Outside the complex stood tables and booths, full of soap and baked goods – and fat blocks of plastic feedstock, priced per pound depending on the quality of their marbling. There were little inventions, too. Amy couldn't tell what they were for, but they looked like the same little bundles of chips and wires you could buy – from any flea market – that did the same things vN did without really thinking about it: moisture and temperature detection, or mapping a straight line, or measuring cubic centilitres. It seemed odd to have so many different little devices to do those things. Then again, most people couldn't just do them with a single touch. They needed a mobile, at least, or a good pair of glasses. There was even a vintage disaster bot crawling the parking lot, telling the humans they were alive and barking strangely at the vN.

  Javier had pulled them into the charger farthest from the other stations, and he'd worn a hat and sunglasses when he hopped out of the RV to hook the battery to the enormous cable snaking its way free of the charger. Now they were sitting in the vehicle, watching the bar at the bottom of the dashboard display as it grew incrementally brighter and longer.

  "How are we paying for this?" Amy asked.

  Javier jingled the keys. One fob wore the same logo as the chargers outside. "They've got an account."

  How convenient, Portia said. Now they'll know exactly where to find you, when they check the account.

  "Granny says that'll help them find us," Amy said.

  "I don't give a flying fuck what that she has to say." Javier stood and made his way into the cabin. He started fussing with the dinette table. "Help me unfold this bed. I need to defrag all this."

  Javier set Junior on the floor, then unlocked something beneath the table that lowered it with a squeak. He then folded up one of the dinette's benches, removing the back cushion before pulling out the seat so it sat flush with the newly lowered table. Intuiting the symmetry of the arrangement, Amy did the same on her side. With the cushions included, there was now a little bed where the dinette used to be. It fit Javier just barely. He sat up and retrieved Junior from the floor. The baby was crawling now, or at least worming around on the cushions, struggling in vain to conquer the mountain that was his father.

  Uncertain where to sit, Amy chose the floor. She wedged herself up against one faux-wood wall and watched Junior pushing himself around on his rubbery knees. Javier lifted him carefully, then laid him across his shins.

  "What's it like, iterating?"

  Javier continued raising and lowering his son on his shins, his body coiled up slightly, his fingertips connecting his son's hands to his and making their two shapes into a complete circle. "You're hungry all the time. And you're… on, I guess. Sensitive. Like you can feel every little atom copying itself."

  "Can you talk to your baby while you're iterating? Like me and my psycho granny?"

  "No." Javier let Junior slide forward off his shins and toward his chest. "I dream a lot when I'm iterating, though. The closer it gets to the end, the more I dream."

  "What about?"

  "Unicorns."

  Amy blinked. "Seriously?"

  "No, of course not seriously. Jesus." He turned over to his side. "It's just the stemware copying itself. First my search engine clones itself in him, then it just goes hunting for relevant data and imports it."

  "Oh." Amy winced. "So, me dreaming Portia's memories is probably a bad sign?"

  For you, yes. For me, no.

  "She's talking right now, isn't she?" Javier propped himself on an elbow. "I can tell. Your face changes." His eyes narrowed. "Your face, it has all these expressions that mine doesn't. Even your crying looks real."

  Amy was only too happy to pick a fight. It meant not hearing Portia. "Maybe because it is real?"

  "But we don't even have endocrine systems," Javier said. "We can't get big rushes of emotion. Even our smiles are just plug-ins performing a subroutine for socially relevant nonverbal communication. So you can't be feeling all that bad. Your feelings were never that real to start with."

  Amy had no idea what to say. Of course her feelings were real. It was old-fashioned to think otherwise. Nobody really cared about the vN capacity for feeling, any more. Even if Javier were correct, and the things she called feelings were really just algorithms, the way she showed them seemed real enough to the people around her. After all, people like her dad had relationships with vN all the time. Why would they do that, unless they thought their feelings were real? Didn't her mom say "I love you" all the time? Didn't she mean it?

  "Are you trying to make me feel better, by telling me I have no feelings at all? Because it's really not working."

  Javier folded his arms. "How would you know if you were feeling better? Do you have a heart that can skip a beat? Or a stomach that does flip-flops? Does your blood go cold? Does your face get hot?"

  "Well, no…"

  "Didn't think so. You're not made of meat. You don't have the right chemicals. Those things chimps call feelings are really just hormones having a key party. They're no more real than what we've got preloaded."

  He flopped backward and rolled over, away from her. "My need for sleep, that's real. I'm fucking wrecked. My thumb still hasn't grown back all the way."

  "I'm sorry…"

  "See, there you go again." Javier rested one arm across his son's ribs. "You're saying sorry because you learned to say that when you've screwed up. You're not actually sorrowful, or anything. Your stomach isn't tying itself up in knots. You just know you did a bad thing and you don't want me to get mad, so you're apologizing."

  Amy was suddenly glad he couldn't see her face. One look and he'd know exactly what she had in mind. "I thought you just said that you couldn't get mad, Javier."

  "Well…"

  She poked him between the ribs. "What about now?" She poked again, harder this time. "Are you mad, now?"

  He batted her hand away blindly. "No."

  She jabbed two fingers right under the lowest rib. "Are you sure?" She snapped her fingers near his ear. "Because I can keep it up–"

  Javier flipped over and grabbed both her hands. He stood up and pushed her. She had to dig into the carpet with her bare feet just to get any traction. Amy had seen girls playing this game in the bathroom at school; they called it Mercy. They always stopped when she walked in. If they really hurt each other, then Amy would be hurt, too. At least, that's what the teachers had said – they said the other kids couldn't fight if a vN was watching. But privately Amy had always wondered why, if it was really so bad, the other girls started up again just as soon as the doors shut behind her. Javier certainly seemed to enjoy it. At least, she assumed that's what the smile meant.

  "Hey, stop hitting yourself," he said, and made her fist tap her chin lightly. "Why are you hitting yourself? Come on, stop hitting yourself!" He punched again and again.

  Frustrated, Amy tried stomping on his foot. He only laughed and made her hit herself once more. She aimed higher, with her knee. It was OK with other vN, she decided. There was nothing in the original programming about not hurting them. They couldn't even feel pain. But Javier doubled over anyway, then lunged forward and dug his fingers into her ribs.

  I'm not ticklish, she tried to say, but all that came out was squealing. She had seen other people get tickled before, had seen all the wriggling and screaming and laughing, and now she understood it: tickling was wonderful. She did a checkpoint pose, raising her arms high and letting herself go limp against the wall. He could get more spots more quickly, this way. Oddly, it didn't work – he stopped immediately, stepping back with his hands up like she'd suddenly turned electric and dangerous to touch.

  "You're supposed to fight back. Humans always fight back, anyway." He frowned. "I always have to quit, or my brain will fry. Something about how high their voices go when they beg you to stop…" He gestured vaguely at his skull, as though his important processes were really held there and not all through his body.

  "Why do they do that?" Amy asked. "It feels good." She bent down and started rolling up one leg of her jeans. "Can you try the back of my knee? My dad is ticklish there."

  His eyes rose from her bare leg to her face. "Huh?"

  "I've never been ticklish, before. I want to see if every spot is equally ticklish."

  Javier tilted his head. "You, uh, need my help with that?"

  "I promise not to fight back," Amy said. "And even if I did, it wouldn't matter, right? I'm vN. You won't melt."

  He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm starting to wonder." His head jerked toward the bed. "Sit."

  "I have to be sitting down?"

  "I can't really get the bottom of your feet if you're standing on 'em, can I?"

  "Oh! Good thinking." She sat, and stuck her feet out.

  Javier picked up one foot gingerly and started tickling. It was very light, and reminded her of the odd scratches she'd received from holding the class mouse for the first time. "So, this is new for you?"

  "Mmm hmm." Amy lay back on her elbows. "I've never been ticklish. I must have gotten it from you, like the photosynthesis."

  "It's built into our tactile receptors," Javier said as his fingers skittered lazily up the back of her leg. "It was so our clade would feel snakes and spiders crawling across our skin. So we wouldn't bring them back to camp with us by mistake."

  "So they wouldn't bite the humans?"

  "Right." He lifted one hand and stretched it out. "The jungle spiders are huge. Bigger than my hand. My dad said so. He had to kill one, once."

  "Did your dad see any other animals?"

  "He lost his hand to a jaguar, one time." Javier wiggled the remains of his left thumb. "Now I know how he felt."

  She sat up. "Can I see?"

  Javier held out his hand. Amy took hold of it with both of hers and flipped it over. The thumb was there, but it looked too small and loose to be of much good. She had really done some serious damage to it. "I'm sorry. I didn't know it would take this long to come back. It's still so floppy!"

  "Hey!" Javier retracted his hand. "Be nice."

  Amy wasn't aware she'd been mean. "Sorry." She grinned and reached out for Javier's middle. Now that she knew what tickling felt like, it was much more fun to try it on someone else. Javier tried slapping her hands away, but she was much quicker and ran her hands up under his arms. He scuttled backward, but she stuck her foot out to trip him and he fell down. Amy pounced. Her dad did it this way: somehow she always wound up on the floor. Vaguely, she wondered if Junior would enjoy being tickled, too. Javier was now rolling around like a big cat with his belly up, laughing and swearing. It was a little odd – normally people only ever said, "Oh shit, oh fuck," when they dropped something or locked their keys in the car. But the deeper her fingers went, the fouler his language got.

  "You said no fighting back!" Javier wiggled his fingers under her collar. "You promised!"

  Amy paused. "Don't you like this?" She sat back. "I can stop–"

  Something banged on the door of the RV. She froze. Javier shoved her off him and scrambled up. He peered through the window, rolled his eyes, and yanked the door open. "What?"

  "Meter says you're done," the voice said. "You're all charged up."

  "Thanks," Javier said, and slammed the door. He patted his pockets. The keys had fallen out while he was squirming around on the floor, and Amy held them up. He grabbed them quickly, and resumed his seat. The RV fired up the moment he swiped the keys across the dash. Amy watched through the windscreen as they exited the parking lot and found the road again.

  "I thought you wanted to rest," Amy said.

  "No, I'm good. Let's just go."

  "Shouldn't we at least have looked for food? Junior ate most of what was in the cabinets."

  "I'll keep him small for a while. You and I can get by on sunlight if we're not too active and don't get hurt."

  Amy bent down to his level and peered at the night sky. "What sunlight?"

  Javier sucked his teeth. He pinched open a map on the dash. It unfolded across the windscreen, mostly transparent in the way of hard water stains, but still legible. Reaching over, Amy tabbed through the available layers (rest stops, restaurants, laundries, places that sold puke rounds) until she found the right map for vN food vendors. It was barren, aside from one glowing green dot in the centre. That single spot was enough to make her want to vanish the map entirely.

  "It's a garbage dump," Amy said. "We have to keep going."

 

The dumps were full of food – carbon and lithium and ethylene and enough chemicals to keep the ionic liquid in their muscles charged and ready to run. Amy hadn't really thought of the actual make-up of her body and what it required in years. She ate pre-packaged vN food, and it gave her the right balance of elements to satisfy her self-repair mods. Processed garbage could become the feedstock that was printed into the packaged vN food. Only the big companies could buy the stock, though; vN couldn't make their own food and had to buy it. The one who couldn't ate the raw garbage.

  In a game she'd sampled once, you could play a garbage man, and your garbage truck came with little turret-mounted guns to scare off the hungry vN that would chase it. The game called them "junkyard dogs". You could shoot them. Doing so improved your standing in the garbage man union, and you got to move up within the ranks. You could even manage your own landfill and make important decisions, like whether your drones should tase vN on sight by default, or whether they should ask you first.

  Her dad had climbed a long way up the customer service tree to talk to a human person about that game. He had explained Amy's user profile. He said that it should have been obvious from the company's data collection that Amy was vN. They should have known, he said, because of her timing and her decisions and her word choice and how she interacted with the other players on the network. He had asked them if they thought it was funny when they streamed it to her for free. He had asked them who exactly he should be speaking with to terminate the account. And then he had said that yes, he did accept their apology, and yes, he would appreciate a free suite of beta-level historifics.

  To this day, Amy had never told her dad that it was her mom who searched for and showed her the game.

  "I wonder if Rick's reader has any games on it." Amy let Junior grip her fingers with his fists. They were sitting on the table Javier had unfolded into a bed. "Would you like to learn how to read?"

  Even if Junior had understood enough English to answer her, he didn't get the chance. The RV swerved abruptly to the right, throwing them both against the wall. Amy grabbed him and tucked him in close to her as the RV bounced up and down. She rolled off the bed just as a shower of cups rained down on them from a cupboard with a faulty lock. "Javier, what do you think you're doing?"

  "LET'S BOTH GET SOME REST," the RV said in a gentle tone.

  Gripping the wall as the RV slowed down, Amy made her way to the driver's seat. "Javier?"

  "YOUR VEHICLE WILL NOT START AGAIN FOR ANOTHER TWO HOURS. YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY HAS BEEN NOTIFIED. PLEASE TAKE A NAP."

  Javier sat in the driver's seat, head on his chest, eyes shut. The RV had driven itself onto a gravel access road with deep ruts, the sort that heavy logging trucks must have once made. As Amy watched, the RV's displays all dimmed and vanished, and the vehicle quieted. Only the image of an old padlock remained, with a series of Zs fluttering away from its keyhole and a countdown timer showing her how many minutes were left of the enforced nap.

  "Javier?"

  He didn't move.

  Looking at the fading sky outside, Amy set Junior on the dash and unbuckled Javier's seatbelt. "Javier, come on." She patted his face. No response. She snapped her fingers. She clapped her hands. Nothing happened.

  Maybe he's dead.

  "Shut up, Granny."

  Maybe saving your useless hide and getting shocked with too many volts and winding up in a car crash and iterating a child was just too much for him.

  "Wake up, Javier. My granny's saying mean things about you."

  Amy tried slipping her arms under his so she could at least pull him out of the driver's seat, but the position was too awkward; he kept slipping out of her arms. Finally she reclined the seat mechanically, and did it that way. When she had him half-on, half-off the unfolded bed, she put Junior next to him. The baby crawled onto his chest immediately and started pushing at his face. Nothing. Junior looked from his father's face to hers. He looked back at Javier, and tried pushing more. He kneaded his father's lips with his tiny palms. He bounced a little. He rocked. Javier still didn't wake up.

  "It's OK," Amy heard herself telling Junior. "We have the reader. We can just look this up. I'm sure it happens to everyone once in a while; there must be something."

  Bluescreen, the reader told her. There was a technical term, but this was the real word that real people used. Bluescreen: slang. The state a defective von Neumann-type humanoid enters when unresponsive to external stimuli such as light, heat, electricity, food–

  "Food!" Amy rolled up the reader and stuffed it in one pocket. She popped open the cupboards and dug out the rest of the vN food. Only three bars of the stuff were there. She ripped open the first wrapper, pried his jaws wide, and crammed the food down inside. She stood back and waited. Nothing happened. As an afterthought, she reached over and closed Javier's mouth.

  Instantly, his eyes opened. He struggled with the food for a moment, choking it down, then opening his mouth for more, fishlike. His eyes fluttered closed again as Amy eased more out of the wrapper and past his teeth. "Haven't you eaten at all?" she asked.

  Of course he hasn't. He wasted all his resources repairing you and feeding his iteration. And that was before being thrown in a cage – how do you think the bounty hunters caught him? With a butterfly net?

  Amy ripped open another bar of food and snapped off a section. She opened his mouth with two fingers and stuffed it inside. "I'm sorry, Javier. I didn't mean for this to happen."

  He groaned. Amy fed him more. Occasionally his eyes would open, but they closed again just as quickly, and soon the food was all gone. She checked the cupboards again, but that only confirmed what she already knew: there was nothing left. And Javier still hadn't really woken up. Biting her lip, she withdrew Rick's reader, unfurled it, and located the garbage dump on the map. Expanding her view, she estimated the distance and the time it would take. The map had no details on its security, but in truth she didn't really want to know. Knowing would only make it harder. Putting away the reader, she looked over at Javier.

  "Just try to rest, OK?" Amy said.

  Carefully, Amy lifted Javier's wrists and wrapped his arms around Junior. She rose from the bed and dug around in Melissa's clothes for a pair of socks. She watched Javier as she rolled them on. Finding a pair of old cowboy boots, she wormed her feet down into them and wiggled her toes. Last, she tied her hair back and zipped herself into a dark hooded sweatshirt.

  How very ninja of you, Portia said, when Amy saw herself in a mirror. They'll never catch you, now that you're dressed appropriately.

  Amy forced herself to ignore the voice inside her head, and instead focused on Javier. She lifted his legs so that he was completely on the bed, and pulled a blanket over him and his son. "I'll be back soon."

  She locked the door behind her, and started walking.