5: You Can't Unring A Bell
He found Amy alone in their bedroom, plucking at something invisible in the dark. Her hands opened and he saw the submarine projected. It looked like an anatomical drawing. Or maybe a schematic. He thought about Xavier had said about generation ships. They sounded sort of mythical, like jetpacks or flying cars.
“It’s really a shame,” she said, without turning to face him. “They were really onto something, here. I know why they used meat – it’s harder to detect, and it surprised us – but the tissue could have been put to better use. I think it may be a prototype for something else. I think the whole invasion was the prototype for something else. Something bigger. I think there’s another reason for all of this.”
“I love you,” Javier said.
Amy turned, finally. She was wearing white again. She was wearing the torque. Unlike human women, her eyes did not turn red with crying. The skin under them didn’t puff up. But he could tell. He had learned how to tell.
“I love you, too.” She sounded careful. Cautious. As though the love itself wasn’t the point. Which it wasn’t.
“And I’m sorry,” he added. “I know you were just trying to protect me.”
Amy nodded. “I was.” Her lips pursed. “I was just so angry. And I was jealous, too. I’m not very proud of that. But…” The white line of her lips grew even thinner. “If he hurt you, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
Javier closed his eyes. “Of course I would.”
“OK.” Her arms closed around him. “This is why I don’t want to take advantage of you,” she said. “Do you understand, now, what it would mean if I took advantage of your failsafe like that?”
Oh, yes. Yes, he did. He understood it better than she could know.
He kissed the top of her head. He hugged her back. “I understand.”
She butted up under his chin like a cat. “Thank you.” She hugged him harder. “I don’t like being mad at you. I’m sorry I was.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “It’s OK. You can get mad at me. I deserve it.”
“No, you don’t. You really don’t. We were both working our own protocols. They just happen to be different.”
Javier had spent most of his life being dishonest about one thing or another. He had stolen money from most of his lovers. He had lied to them about coming back. None of those lies – those small, petty, human lies – had prepared him for this one.
“I got you something,” he said. “It came in on the shipment.”
It would be OK, he told himself, as her slender fingers closed on the wrapper. She had pulsed him. Pulsed the whole island. For their own good. And this was for her own good, too. In a way. For their own good. Because Powell would leave. Powell would not do anything worse. And then they could figure something out. They could make it better. They could make sure she never got hurt. Ever.
“Thank you.” The wrapper rustled noisily as she tore it open. She snapped off a piece and held it out. “Would you like some?”
“That’s OK,” Javier said. “It’s for you, remember?”
“If you say so.” She popped it in her mouth and smiled.
Nothing happened.
“Are you OK?” Amy asked.
“Sure,” he heard himself say. “It was just a long night.”
She nodded. She sat down cross-legged on the bed. Then she made room for him, and he joined her. “You said something was strange about the lions,” she said.
Javier nodded. “I think they’re talking to each other. José told me to look into it. So I did, and they are.”
She still looked fine. Normal. She kept eating. She nodded to herself.
“That’s not good,” she said. “They’re part of the island’s default defence mechanism. So I can understand why they would attack a human being, but not why they would be spending time together. They’re supposed to watch the kids, not each other.”
“About that,” Javier said, “what exactly is the island’s default defence mechanism?”
She frowned. “You really want to know?”
He nodded.
“You’re not going to like it.” She put the poison down. “But I guess, since we’re being so honest, I should tell you.” She picked up his hand and stroked it. “It’s Portia,” she said.
Jesus. Powell was right. He tried withdrawing his hand, but she held it tight.
“Please don’t run away,” she said. “It’s not like how you think. It’s not her. Not her as an individual. More like her priorities. Her decision-making process. And it only engages when I’m not around.”
The simulations started branching before he was even conscious of them. “If you’re not around?”
Amy nodded. “Yeah. If something happens to me. Or if my focus shifts. If I can’t devote as much attention to the island, because I’m hurt. That’s why I keep my bandwidth to the island so constant. So I don’t upset the balance.” She squeezed his hand. “I know it doesn’t make me the easiest person to be with, but…”
Her hand began to shake. It started out as a faint tremor, the kind elderly humans sometimes had, almost imperceptible, like the movement of a second hand on a very old watch. Then it intensified. Became palsy. It shuddered through her little wrist and up into her arm, jogging her elbow up and down. Then it was in her shoulder, and she whimpered, and her grip on his hand was so hard he wanted to pull away but couldn’t.
“What’s happening to me?” she asked.
“I’m sorry.”
Amy’s eyes were wide. “Is Portia coming back? Is she doing this to me?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Her eyes lit on the wrapper. “You–”
She crumpled. The words died inside her mouth. Her face slammed into the bed like someone had pushed it there. She flipped onto her back. She bounced and seized and twisted. And through it all her eyes remained on Javier.
“I’m so sorry.” It was Powell, he wanted to say. Powell made me. Powell failsafed me. But when the change was done, she’d know, and she’d kill Powell.
“It’s pain,” he said. “It’s organic pain. It’s an add-on, to give you a sense of organic pain.”
Her spine arched in a terribly perfect half-circle. He tried to help her down and she screamed, an awful high shivery sound that seemed like it could shatter the diamond tree outside. Her heels drummed the bed and the bed roiled, bubbled, became hot and soft and viscous like tar. Something was happening to the house. The walls peeled down. The beams fell away. Sunlight shot through the shredded roof and her screams continued unabated, constant, breathless. And as she suffered his vision changed, went old-fashioned, entered failsafe. A thousand tiny pixels registered her agony for him, each pinprick of light burning its way down through him, imploring him to stop it, begging him the way her lips no longer could.
“I love you,” he was saying. He was holding her hand, still. He was clenching it. Hers curled around his. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
The screaming stopped. His vision cleared. He looked down and she was staring at him. It was over. The pain was gone. They could figure it out, now. Move on to whatever came next. He would apologize and make it right. He would start with kissing her. He shut his eyes and bent down and she didn’t move, didn’t kiss back. When he pulled away and looked again, she was perfectly still. Eyes open, unseeing. Her hand was slack in his.
Amy was dead.
He touched her face. It rolled to one side. The breeze lifted her hair and rippled her dress. He let go of her hand and it dropped onto the bed, their bed, and began to sink into the gleaming black surface of it. The whole thing had lost its structural integrity, just like the house. Now she – her body, her shell – was sinking into it. Black goo seeped up around her face. It was at her lips before he moved, took her hand, tried to pull her free, but it was too late. Her body shifted in the muck. The weight differential changed. She was in quicksand. He tried to hold her hand, wrench her free, dig her out, but the island gulped her down. Her eyes were open. They were still open when she slipped beneath the surface. Her hair floated on it for a moment and then it too was gone. There was only black.
“Dad?”
Javier turned. Xavier stood there, watching him. When Javier stood up, he backed away. Javier raised his hands, palms open. Black mud dripped away from them.
Beneath their feet, the island shuddered.
“What did you do?” his youngest asked.
“I had to–”
His son’s fist in his stomach was terrifically strong. He doubled over. The kid kicked him in the face. He was barefoot, and that was the only reason Javier kept his teeth. Then his foot crashed into Javier’s ribs. He was little, but it didn’t matter. He was focused. He jumped up and landed on Javier’s shoulders. Javier collapsed onto the floor.
“I hate you!” his son was saying. “I hate you! You bastard, you killed my mother!”
In the crack in the house, a shadow appeared. It growled. Javier struggled to his feet, and easily grabbed his son’s next punch. He pushed it aside gently, and just as carefully pushed his son behind him as he backed away.
The lions had come for the kill.
“What’s happening?” his son whispered.
“Something really bad,” Javier said. “When I tell you, you jump out of here. Then you run. And you don’t stop. You find your brothers and you get the hell off this island.”
One by one, the lions hopped into the house. They congregated at the bed. They pawed delicately at its surface. Their tails flicked, as though they were considering something.
“Now,” Javier said.
His son jumped away. The lions noticed the movement, but didn’t chase after him. Instead, they focused on Javier. He braced himself. He curled his fists. But no attack came. Instead, one of their number padded up to him and slid herself under his hand and along his thigh.
Good work, she seemed to be saying.
“You win,” Javier said. “Congratulations, you crazy old bitch.”
The lioness licked the mud from his hand.
The island was burning.
Javier jumped free of the house to follow his son, but a mist was already rising between their little home island and the big one. It made the jump difficult to estimate. That was fine. He’d walk. He set foot in the water. Too late, he realized there was no membrane to hold him up. The water closed over his head.
He saw the lions enter the water above him. He heard them before he saw them. Their bodies curved elegantly into the water and kicked briefly before orienting themselves. They paddled away toward the big island. He continued sinking. It was cold, down there. He had strong legs and he could have kicked up, but he didn’t. He had no need for air. He had no need for anything.
Beneath him, the island extended way, way down. It was black on black on black, with little glimmers here and there. It looked like a giant fungus, or maybe a massive brain, all that gelatinous mass occasionally sparking with life. The sparks grew more frequent the longer he sank. Trunk lines burned white like lines of traffic at night. Thick cords of light tangled, moved, changed shape. They unhitched themselves from the main body, flailing in the water, thrashing frantically while he remained still. He felt the island’s desperation as it changed. He felt none within himself. He should have been simulating what it was to crunch down into nothingness under the kind of pressure he was about to be under. He should have been trying to leave. He should have. He wasn’t.
It was comforting, almost, to revert back to the guy he’d always been. It was just too difficult for him to be anything else. A real father. A real husband. A real man. It was beyond his operational parameters, beyond his structural capacity. He wasn’t built for it. He saw that, now.
Before him, the island was an inverted city. Her roots hung deep in the water, thick as skyscrapers. They glittered and gleamed like structures of glass and steel. At any time, he realized, Amy could have shot them up from below and made a paradise to rival any human construction. They dangled there, all the unfinished places, the filigreed towers and great crude blocks, the hanging bridges of sighs never breathed. She had held them in reserve. She had let the islanders build what they wanted, instead.
Something cut into him from behind. A clean razor cut just beneath his skin, not painful, noticeable only by the way it tugged his shirt and caught his belt.
The diamond tree had fallen, too. That was fitting. It was heavier, and sinking faster. He freed it from his flesh, and he watched it sink, sparkling, into the depths.
A group of hands clasped it and pulled it lower.
He blinked and tried to see more clearly. But the hands had vanished. They were simply waiting, somewhere below, in the dark. He looked up. The unfinished city seemed closer, now. This close, he could see the decorations Amy had left each building. Some of them, at their crowns and gables, featured what might be gargoyles.
The gargoyles looked an awful lot like the puppet vN.
They were screaming. They were alive.
Something shook free from a dome in one tower. It punched and thrust its way out, piercing a shifting membrane, and slurped its way into the water. The submarine. It rocketed blindly up at Javier. A pore in its surface irised open. He kicked furiously. Tried to swim away. All the instincts washed away by the waves returned to him now, and he struggled in the water as though he were really drowning. But it was too late. He was sucked in. He was Jonah in the whale.
“What you have to know about humans is what they don’t know about themselves,” Arcadio says. “They’re machines, too. Humans are just machines. They run programs just like we do, they just run different ones.”
He is in the forest with his father. He likes the forest. He likes the many layers it has, all stacked up on each other like the things called “shipping containers” that Arcadio says, once upon a time, his clade stepped out of before leaping into the trees. Steel boxes a mile high, a secret inside each one. His clade came to the forest because it was made for the forest – for jumping and clinging. A-R-B-O-R-E-A-L. That was the English word. And like his father and grandfather before him, Javier loves it there – the way it is never silent, the way it is never lonely. He loves the speed with which the lizards skitter up the trees, and the gentle sway of crocodiles through the water. He loves the fizz of sunlight on his skin. And he loves the storms just as much when they sweep over the trees and make them whisper and moan.
But they are about to leave the forest, for good. There is more food beyond the treeline and more food is what they need for him to grow and for Arcadio to make more boys in his belly. It is high time he grew up. He is two months old, now.
It has been two months since Arcadio fled the burning camp with Javier in his belly. Two months since his father cut him out with an old multi-tool. Two months of fooling drones with their photosynthetic skin – it plays hell with their IR vision. Two months of killing botflies. Two months of opening their mouths wide to taste even the slightest hint of smoke.
Today is the first day he has seen human beings.
“What do you mean, they’re machines?”
Javier stares at the tourists from high above. They’re all so much bigger than he is. Bigger, and paler. Their hair is straight. Their words have hard edges. Nothing rhymes. They walk like they’re in pain all the time.
“They’re meat,” Arcadio says, “but that meat is just a jumble of chemical signals and electric impulses. Batteries and wires, you know? They’re just like us.”
“They’re prettier.”
Arcadio grins. “Yes. They’re prettier.”
“They don’t all look alike. They’re all different.”
“That’s right. They’re all unique.”
Unique. Javier smiles. What a wonderful idea, to make each iteration different from every other one. Combinations, not replications, each as individual as a storm. Not just mistakes, like him and Arcadio. Not just an error in automated self-repair.
“Come on. It’s time you met one.”
His father drops off the bough of the tree he is currently occupying. He falls eight feet to another bough, then three, until he stands on the lowest bough of the opposite tree. He snaps his fingers. That’s his signal for irritation. Javier has already learned to hate the sound.
“I’m not gonna wait,” his father says.
Javier jumps.
They wait for the humans to board their tour buses. As the buses pass below, they jump on. They’re light enough that the driver doesn’t notice their presence. If the bus’ sensorium says anything, they don’t hear of it. They bounce and sway on the roof for an hour. Javier’s fingers are stiff from curling across the rack when they jump free a few minutes outside of town.
From there they walk. Javier does not like walking; concentrating on measuring his steps eats more processing power than just jumping, but Arcadio says it uses less total energy, so they have to walk. Besides, el corporación is still looking for them. The motion-identifying algorithms in their drones can find them by their jumps. So no more jumping, until they’re safe.
“Do all towns look like this?” Javier asks.
The town is a cluster of houses made of bundled rods printed to look like wood, with thatch roofs that smell like recycled latex. They stand about ten feet high in the trees, above the muddy track where Javier and Arcadio are standing. Each building is connected to the other by a bridge of rope and slats. It’s all very neat and orderly. Javier has not seen so many right angles since the last time they camped in an old truck that got stuck in the mud during a long ago rainy season.
“I don’t think so,” Arcadio says. “It doesn’t look like any pictures I’ve seen. I think the humans made it special because it’s where they go on vacation.”
“Vacation?”
“It’s when they leave home and spend a lot of money and eat a lot of food and maybe fuck new people.”
And then Arcadio walks up some plank stairs, and Javier has to follow him. Stairs are hard. Arcadio warned him about them. His feet want to snag under the lip of each step. Arcadio waits at the top, rolling his eyes, and Javier tries to catch up and slips. His chin hits wood. Arcadio makes a big sigh with his shoulders and plucks Javier up by his collar and hauls him the rest of the way. When he looks at Javier’s face, he laughs.
“You got a pussy on your face, mijo.” He puts Javier’s hand on the wound and pinches the fingers shut around it. “Hold it like that until it quits bleeding. It’ll seal up soon.”
Javier follows him along a swinging bridge. Everything here is ropes and pulleys and buckets. No birds are singing. Instead there’s soft, airy music coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.
“Fucking flutes,” Arcadio mutters. He pauses at a piece of dead wood bristling with signage. The letters look familiar, but Javier can’t read the words. Arcadio points. “Come on. We need clothes.”
“I thought we were getting food.”
“We are. But first we need to get clothes. You don’t look right, and neither do I.”
Javier follows. They march across more swinging bridges until they find a place to hop down. The staff doesn’t live in the little village in the trees, Arcadio says. They live in plastic flat-pack houses that you set up by following a set of instructions with no words on it, just pictures. Arcadio used to set them up for human workers, he says. The vN they just used to bundle up in parachuting and hang from somewhere, all tied together so none could escape.
They pluck clothes from the line. Dark green P-O-L-O shirts (not pollo shirts, Arcadio says, and shut the fuck up and stop making so much noise) and chinos.
“These are what the workers wear,” Arcadio says. “Luckily, one of them just iterated.”
“What are those things?”
“Shoes. Well, sandals. Printed sandals.”
“What are they for?”
“They’re for your feet. Put them on.”
Javier gives his father a deeply skeptical frown. Nothing goes on his feet. Nothing. He can’t jump with those big rubbery things flopping around on his feet. Not jumping means not escaping. It’s a stupid idea.
“It’s a stupid idea.”
“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask you for it. Now do you want to eat, or not?”
So they go to the C-O-M-M-I-S-S-A-R-Y next, where the workers spend their pay on food. It’s special vN food that comes out of massive printers somewhere at the edge of the big city somewhere, all hot and smoky and ferrous, and the amount necessary to keep a non-photosynthetic clade running always costs just a little bit more than they would all make in a week.
“This place does clade-based employment,” Arcadio says. “That’s why we have to have a big clade. So we’ll get hired somewhere good.”
Brothers. Until this moment, Javier has never considered that he might one day have brothers. What would they be called? Would they be better jumpers? Would Arcadio like them better? If they were easier iterations, ones he didn’t have to take care of alone, he might like them better.
Javier is considering this when Arcadio asks him to steal his first bars of food.
“Wipe your chin,” Arcadio says, and then bends and does it for him with a roll of his thumb. The wound is still sticky, and Arcadio wipes the glittering black smear on the inside of his new shirt. “Good. Now you look normal.”
It occurs to Javier that he has never seen himself. There were mirrors in the car they camped in, but they were spotted with mould and angled strangely, so Javier only ever saw himself in bits and pieces. Never his whole face or body. But it probably doesn’t matter. He’s going to look just like Arcadio. He looks just like the way Arcadio used to look. There’s no need for a real mirror.
“Follow that woman,” Arcadio says. “She’s pretty. She’ll distract them.”
The girl is pretty. She’s human. She’s huge and round and has hair frizzing every which way, with a grey streak running through it like spilled sugar. Her blouse sticks to her back. Thus exposed, her shoulders fold forward like the curves of a big paper book, like the map book in the back of the car with the pages ripped out. They read that book together, he and Arcadio. They read about Mexico City and Los Angeles and even Dejima, the place that’s going to be Mecha, soon. Arcadio says they’re going to go there, someday. When the clade is big enough.
Javier waits until the other vN have noticed the woman. They are all smiling when he enters the room. It’s a big rectangle with a few skylights set in an A-frame roof. It echoes. There is a counter, and vN slide trays along the counter and push buttons and food extrudes from nozzles in the wall near the buttons. There are high shelves with things on them: more clothes, soap, little squares of foil with circles inside. The woman is being nice and friendly with everyone. She knows all their names. Hers is Angela.
All Javier has to do is grab some food bars. He walks past the crowd, and begins searching the aisles. The shelves hold all sorts of things he’s only ever heard about, so he drags his feet. Literally. Walking is so difficult. So he hops along, bouncing on his toes and skimming his squeaky new sandals along the dusty concrete.
The food is at the back of the room. It’s behind a wall of black chain-link fence that hums strangely. Arcadio has warned him about these fences – about electricity. So Javier knows that he must not touch the fence if he wants to get the food. The fence is over ten feet high. Getting over it without touching it will require a two-step jump. The walls are too wide to support a strong bounce between them. Arcadio could do it because his legs and body are longer, but Javier is still too small. This means getting a running leap at the wall and vaulting off it, backward, turning in mid-air, and landing against the shelves without making too much noise. Then doing it all over again, in reverse, and walking out like nothing has happened.
He slips the sandals off. They were a stupid idea. Why did Arcadio ask him to do this? Why did Arcadio think he could do this? He stares at the fence. He could just leave. He could just say that it’s too hard, that the fence is too high, that he doesn’t want to. And Arcadio would scowl at him and call him a pendejo, and later on he’d have another boy, a better boy, a braver boy, and that would be that.
He runs. He jumps. He bounces. He twists. He lands on the shelves. They jostle only a little.
On the topmost shelf, balanced precariously, a box teeters toward the floor. It slides down slowly, like it wants him to see it, and he pries one hand free and reaches and catches it. He is holding it when a group of bars in shiny red wrappers tumbles out of the open box, and onto the floor.
Instantly, a siren sounds, and the fenceposts begin to spark. They snap at each other, their tips glowing blue and then white, and thin ribbons of light spill out between them to touch the ceiling.
To escape, Javier will have to jump between them.
He hauls himself up to the topmost shelf. It clangs beneath him, but all he hears is the wasp sound of electricity. It’s hot. His hair stands on end. If it gets him – if he jumps wrong – he’ll die. He’s sure of it. It’ll fry him. So he simulates every possible jump. Humans are already rushing the fence. They wave something at a door in the fence and get through it. They have tasers. Javier focuses only on the forking tongues of light between the fenceposts. They are organically random. It’s hard to plot. Hard to calculate. Not now. Not now. Not now.
Now.
He launches himself. Too late he remembers to tuck in his feet; one of those forking tongues brushes his bare feet. The last thing he sees before the darkness comes is the pair of sandals he abandoned on the floor on the other side of the fence.
When the darkness rolls back, his body is stiff, and his wrists and ankles are in sticky gel-grips, and he says: “I want my dad,” and the camp foreman says Arcadio is gone, Arcadio left as soon as the alarm sounded. He shows Javier the footage. One minute Arcadio is there, waiting, and the next he’s in the air, in the trees, in the wind.
“But I’m a kid,” Javier says.
“They’ll feed you in prison, and you’ll get big,” the foreman says. “You won’t be a kid for long.”