13: Faith in Fakes 

 

Holberton had set this diamond in a Josten’s class ring with his father’s high school mascot and graduating year on it. It was a genuine antique setting that Holberton spared no expense in locating and obtaining.

“I wanted it to look like something my father might really have owned,” he explained. “I couldn’t ask my mother about it, but I looked into it. He wore a ring just like it in his graduation photo.”

“Aren’t you worried somebody’s gonna steal it?”

Holberton shrugged. “I almost hope someone does. If they do, I doubt they’ll run it past a diamond test, much less a quantum exam. They’ll sell it to a collector.”

“Wouldn’t the collector do a test?”

“Maybe. If they did, the setting would pass as genuine. But they’d still need a key to decrypt the information on the diamond.”

“And you have that key.”

“Yes,” Holberton said.

They had this conversation in Holberton’s garage. The other man clutched the edge of a tarp draped over something that sat beside the Impala. He looked bad: red eyes, wrinkled clothes, dusty wingtips. Javier suspected he didn’t look much better, himself.

“I can’t leave town,” Holberton told him. “But I can send you with a fob that’ll get you into the Walls.”

“The Walls” was what people called the prison in Walla Walla. Holberton professed to have never visited. The package containing the ring was the sole act of communication that he had shared with his father in over twenty years.

“There’s no guarantee he even kept it,” Holberton said, as he began to pull the tarp free. “For all I know, he traded it for a blowjob.”

“He kept it.” Javier smiled tightly. "We're both dads, right? We both know he kept it."

Holberton said nothing to that. Instead, he pulled the rest of the tarp free. Doing so revealed a motorbike. A big, red motorbike. It had a chopper-style reclining seat with plush black leather cushions, and a long, narrow windscreen curved against the wind. The rear wheel was a lot bigger than the front. Neither wheel had any rims, just giant half-spheres the same red as the rest of the bike. The decals strewn across the front wheel and main body were for companies Javier didn’t recognize: Canon, Citizen, Shoei.

“Do you know what this is?” Holberton asked.

“It’s a great way to get a ticket.”

Holberton laughed his big “Hah!” laugh. It was the first time Javier had heard it in a few hours. Strange, how he’d really only known Holberton for a little while. It seemed like much longer. Then again, he was only four years old. Each day was a significant portion of his lifespan.

“It’s a replica bike. It’s from a movie. It’ll still work, and everything, but don’t expect it to be too rugged.”

Javier blinked. “Everything you own is copied from something else, isn’t it?”

Holberton shrugged. “It’s the one thing my father and I have in common. He copied humans; I copy artifacts.” He cleared his throat. “It’ll take you a couple of days to get up there, at least. It’s not like California or something, where you can just hop on one highway and keep going. You’ll have to go through Utah, Idaho, and a little bit of Oregon. I’d lay in the course, but I’m guessing you don’t want a GPS knowing where you’re headed.”

Javier had to think about that. Rory and Portia seemed not to need any help finding him. Then again, they had way more processing power to devote to the problem than any one police officer or department. In the end, it probably didn’t matter. They’d tracked him this far, and he’d made out OK.

“Lay it in,” Javier said.

An hour later, he’d packed up everything he could. Clothes, electrolytes, and a week’s supply of vN food. He would need to get to Walla Walla before Tuesday, Holberton reminded him. The new food was rolling out then, and unless Javier felt like contacting him about which grocery stores were stocking the poisoned material, he’d have to eat only the safe stuff he’d packed himself.

“It’s OK,” Javier told him. “There’s always garbage.”

Holberton winced, but he said nothing. It was almost dawn. Javier planned to take his shirt off as soon as he got on the road; the sunlight would be his best help. He’d look a little silly wearing the helmet, but it would also help him avoid recognition. And with a bike that gaudy, he needed all the help he could get in that department.

“This is my favourite time of day,” Holberton said. “Come over here.”

They left the bedroom, and Holberton brought him into the living room. In the pre-dawn light, the house looked especially grey. Holberton offered him a chair facing east, and Javier sat. He heard Holberton start making coffee behind him in the kitchen. Then the sky began to go pink. And with it, so did the house.

Every surface and every object reflected the sky. Without any blinds to filter the view, the colours of the sunrise slanted across the concrete floor and infused the house. Tables, counters, glossy vases and the pressed-earth fireplace. All of them went pink. Then orange. Their greyness was a perfect reflector for the sky’s colours.

As the sun rose higher, Javier’s skin tingled pleasantly. It had been a while since he last savoured the dawn. The last time it happened, he’d been on the island with Amy.

He got up out of the chair. Holberton stood in the arch of the kitchen door, leaning against it and holding his steaming coffee.

“One more try,” Holberton said. “Come on.”

Javier shook his head. “Any other time, I would say yes. In a heartbeat.” He quirked his lips. “I mean, if I had a heartbeat.”

“It’s dangerous out there. You’re safer, here.”

Javier could have told Holberton that he’d never been truly safe. That he’d had isolated periods of relative safety with the gnawing awareness of iteration or poverty eating him up from the inside out, and that this period was really only another one of those.

“You’d get tired of me, eventually,” Javier said. And because he wanted to make it easier, he added: “Everyone always does.”

Holberton looked stricken. He examined his coffee in its cup. “I would not.”

“Would too.” Javier strode up to him. He tipped Holberton’s face up, held it, and kissed him. The man was still a good kisser. He did surprisingly well with such thin lips. He tasted of coffee and agave syrup and some sort of vegan creamer. It had a chemical tang that lingered in Javier’s mouth.

“Switch to cream,” Javier said. “My body thinks that substitute stuff is food, and I’m a fucking robot.”

 

Like the Impala, Holberton’s bike was a real boat to handle on the road. The recumbent position made it easier; Javier suspected that anybody with a genuine organic spine would have real trouble sitting upright on a bike for the roughly twenty-six hours it would take him to reach Walla Walla. Then again, an organic person would need sleep. Javier didn’t.

He preset the bike’s speed limits so he could toggle through cruise control at will, and synced up the helmet to traffic news. For the first hour, it wasn’t too bad. Just him, and the strengthening sun, and the bike rumbling away between his legs as they ate up the blacktop together. It was hard to believe that anything could be going wrong on such a clear summer day. This was a part of America he had never seen anywhere but in media: the empty part, stretching away for miles and miles in every direction, a field of jasper red under lapis blue dotted with stubborn, scrubby green. This was the place where the cowboy movies came from. This was the place where the cowboy stories came from. Every bad day at every black rock, every drifter on every high plain, every years-long search, they all came from here. He was in one of those stories, now. He was one of those guys on a horse trying to find his girl. Or so he told himself.

On the radio everybody had an opinion about a certain document leak that had sprung up overnight. It described in detail FEMA’s plan to poison the vN food supply, and also contained memos from other world governments about their adoption of the program.

Jack worked fast.

“Well, I find it really troubling that the government isn’t telling us anything about what goes on in there,” said one caller. He was a retiree named Burt. Burt lived near Macondo, and he wanted the city either cleared out, or packed full of more vN, not just the Amys. “I mean, we have a right to know.”

Burt was buying a gun, later that day. He had never owned one, but he needed something that would shoot puke rounds. Just in case.

“I think the Stepford solution is the only solution,” another caller said. Her name was Crystal. Crystal was learning how to be a kindergarten teacher. “These… people, I guess, they’ve got families. They have kids that are dependent on them. We can’t just split them up from their families. We can’t just kill them.”

What they were really talking about was rounding up all the vN and putting them somewhere.

“I think we really, uh, messed this up,” said the third caller. His name was Keenan. “I think the people who are into vN, or whatever, they’re like kids with toys. At first they were all excited, and now they’re bored, or they’re pissed because their toys got broken. It’s stupid. Meanwhile, the rest of us normal guys, who don’t sleep with dolls, we’re just shaking our heads. We’re all facing the goddamn robot apocalypse because some nerds didn’t have the sack to ask a girl out.”

Of course, that wasn’t the whole story. Javier thought of this as he wove his way through traffic. The vN were LeMarque’s idea. Retailing their technology was somebody else’s. If New Eden hadn’t had to pay out a massive settlement, the world might never have seen the vN. Maybe there would have been other humanoid robots, instead. Big clunky ones with rubber skin and actuator joints and hydraulic muscles. The kind other companies used to build, before New Eden started their crusade.

“It’s been a whole year since that poor kid died in that kindergarten,” a caller named Kiana said. “And then those other people died, and now soldiers are being attacked, and America is probably next. So what is being done about this? Were we supposed to just let them have their little islands forever? They’re a threat. Even if most of them work right now, there’s nothing to say they won’t just break down later. They can’t function perfectly forever. Nothing can.”

Eventually, the radio started calling up vN to see how they felt about the whole thing.

“Well, obviously the humans are the first priority,” said the vN working the radio station’s reception desk. “But it’s really only the one clade that has caused problems. And for the most part, they’re contained.”

Javier listened to these calls all the way through New Mexico. The route took him alongside national parks and through single-intersection towns, past exits to Air Force bases and “secret history” museums about alien ancestors and government cabals. Javier rode past them all. As he did, the sun began to slip toward evening, and the vN who called in started sounding more selfless.

“Maybe it really would just be better if we went somewhere else for a while.”

“Of course people are scared of us, right now. We’re everywhere. A lot of us are teachers. They trust us with their children, and they’re wondering if they should.”

“Really, we should be recalled, or segregated, until there’s a better understanding of how the failsafe works and how it failed in the Peterson case. Until then, nobody is safe.”

“I’m calling because I want to tell other vN that we should just leave. I know it’s difficult, especially if you’re living with a human right now, but we should just take ourselves out of the equation.”

 

When he arrived at The Walls, he was unprepared for how nice and normal everything seemed. There were big open fields, and a lot of signs about onion farms and hayrides and corn mazes and craft breweries and apple jellies, and then you followed a winding driveway through a path of Douglas fir and long-needled pine, and you waved your fob at the nice human in the reception shack, and you were there.

The Walls lived up to its nickname. The whole complex was ringed by a fifteen-foot brick wall, broken only by regular guard towers and crowned with razor wire. Javier could have scaled it easily, but it was nice not having to. This did nothing to lessen his nervousness as he made his way up into the lobby. The main entry to the prison had a bunch of boring furniture and desiccated plants, with smart posters linking to information about leaving your deadbeat husband or how to get your kid to quit drinking, but all the staff wore the same dead-eyed expression as all prison staff. They didn’t look cruel, or conniving, or nasty. They just looked bored. And tired. And completely disgusted with the people they saw every day.

“Name?”

“Arcadio Holberton,” Javier said, and waved the fob at the woman in the steel cage.

“You don’t have an appointment.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You should have made an appointment.”

“I’m sorry.”

They watched each other for a good minute. She was a big, black woman with magnificent natural hair and false eyelashes. She also had a killer manicure. He could understand it: if he had to wear a uniform like that, he’d figure out ways to pretty himself up, too.

“Will you think I’m sucking up if I tell you I like your nails?” Javier asked.

Not even a crack of a smile. “Yes.”

“Oh. Well, never mind, then.”

She sighed a sigh that was more like a growl. “Holberton, huh? And you’re here to see…”

“You know who I’m here to see.”

She made the noise again. Abruptly, she nodded. “Take a number and get in line, then. He’s got a full slate, today, and you’ll just have to wait like everybody else.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The line wasn’t really a line, but a waiting room with a bunch of seats all bolted to the floor and welded together. The armrests were all permanently lowered, so none of the visitors could lie down. Javier supposed that was a good idea; now that he’d made it here, all he wanted to do was shut his eyes and rest.

Luckily, all the kids in the waiting room were a little too loud to let that happen. Javier hadn’t seen so many children in one place since he was on the island. Organic kids, synthetic iterations, teenagers chewing their cuticles, passive nanny vN allowing their hair to be braided by well-meaning, sticky-fingered little girls. In one corner there was a set of toys and readers with shiny smart stickers saying they couldn’t be stolen, but only the really sad kids seemed to be playing with them.

While he waited, a group of vN women entered the waiting room and sat together along one wall. They were all different clades, all different models. Most of them looked like Amy, but quite a few of them looked like Rory. All of them wore short skirts and high heels and had perfect hair.

Beside him, a woman with a shaved head snorted. “Don’t talk to those bitches,” she said, without even looking at Javier.

“Why not?”

“They’re the whore brigade,” she said. “Comfort vN. They’ll try to recruit you. Don’t go for it.”

Javier examined the women again. They did seem to fit a certain pattern. A surprising number of them wore pigtails.

“So… they’re not girlfriends?”

The woman snorted again. “Please. The state pays them to come here. It’s part of some incentive program. Like if you build enough license plates, you get to fuck one of them.”

“Huh.” Javier folded his arms. He slouched back in his seat and crossed his legs at the ankle. “The last joint I was in, that was an informal thing.” He looked back at the women. “So, technically, does that make them state employees?”

“Yup,” she said. “Bitches get benefits and everything.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

Javier frowned. “And I would want to avoid that… why?”

“Because they’re putting hardworking humans out of a job,” she said, and moved to another section of the room.

After that, Javier avoided talking to anybody. He saw the other visitors as they trickled out, though. Many of them were picking up vN in the waiting area. Most of them were older human men. Some of them wore the New Eden logo on their necks on their lapels: a little golden apple with one bite taken out of it, and a set of clockwork gears in place of the bite. They were obviously there to see LeMarque. Javier had a feeling most of the New Eden higher-ups had gone to prison or obscurity, so maybe these men were long-term adherents, or just plain fanboys. Either way, the vN they were picking up were all the size of little kids.

He hadn’t put it together, before, but the children in the waiting area didn’t have parents that matched their clade. He’d figured that maybe the organic parents in the waiting room had adopted an iteration – it was easier than having a second kid the organic way, and it was a simple way to make sure your little princess had a strong big brother to keep her out of trouble – but that wasn’t the case. One by one, they all got collected by greying men in athletic sandals and old fleece sweatshirts. Javier had never seen so many earthtones or embroidered logos in a single place. At least not a real place, a place that wasn’t a resort.

“Did you enjoy your meeting?” one of the little vN boys asked, as his human walked away with him.

“Yes, I did,” the man said, squeezing his hand. “Jonah and I are really working through some things. Thank you for being so patient.”

“Did he know anything about the grocery stores? About the food, I mean?”

“I keep telling you,” the dad said. “Don’t worry about the food. That was just a crazy person, trolling other crazy people.”

Javier hid his head in his hands, and waited.

 

“There’s only one way out of here, you know,” Ignacio says. 

Javier is big, now. So big they can’t really share the bunk anymore. They still do, because Javier is a measure of warmth, and he doesn’t need to worry about hurting a spine or a neck. It makes Ignacio feel awkward, though. He can tell. So Ignacio’s solution is for Javier to grow even bigger. 

“You have to eat, conejito.” 

“I’m not such a little rabbit, any longer.” 

Ignacio hisses out of his mouth like a dead basketball deflating. “Pfft. This is what I keep saying. You’re grown, now. You’re ready to make your own way.” 

“I like it, here.” 

“You like it? You like the guys flinging their shit at you? You like running errands for the asshole warden? You like keeping dicks out of asses? That’s what you like?” 

Of course he doesn’t like that part. But he keeps thinking that if he just helps them, if he’s just good enough, or strong enough, or fast enough, they’ll start improving around him, instead of just testing him. And besides, he has Ignacio to protect. Ignacio doesn’t have a crew. He isn’t with anybody. If Javier leaves, Ignacio will be alone. 

“He’s not coming, Javier.” 

Javier frowns. “Who?” 

“Your dad. He’s not coming. He’s not going to get you out. Only you can get yourself out.” 

Javier snaps the sheet he is folding. “I know.” 

“So leave. Be free.” 

Javier finishes folding the sheet. He smoothes it out. It has a huge stain in the middle of it, with several other little stains all around it, like a solar system. But the stains are paler, now, at least. He crisps the edges. He adds it to the stack. 

“What will you do?” 

“Without you? I’ll pray for you and your boy, is what I’ll do,” Ignacio says. “It’ll be nice for you to have a little Junior running around. You’ll never be lonely, even when you want to be. It’s good, being a father. Really. I wish I could get back all the time I’ve lost.” 

In order to jump the fence to freedom, Javier has to eat enough to grow to full size. Man size. But when he does, he will likely iterate. Ignacio says he should take the boy with him. Javier isn’t so sure. It’s not as though Arcadio did a very good job with him. Why would he do any better with his own iteration? 

Ignacio would do a better job, he thinks. Ignacio is, after all, a real man. A real human being. And a father, already. A father without a child. 

So he eats. Dionisia brings more vN food for him. It’s expensive, but it makes Ignacio happy, and that makes her happy. He gets fat. He’s round and suddenly people leave him alone. No more air kisses or gropes or grabs. He gets his work done a lot faster, as a result. If he’d known, he would have gained the weight months ago. The iteration starts almost immediately – “like a hangover,” Ignacio says, “you get one before you even know it.” 

It’s fast. He had no idea how fast it would be. Another thing Arcadio never told him. He never told him about the dreams. About the fear. How his simulations would run double-time, near the end, how every possible end to every possible situation would pop up without his ever asking for it. 

“We all have that kind of fear,” Ignacio tells him, the night the boy comes. He keeps Javier walking, for some reason. He did it with Dionisia, apparently. Javier tries to tell him that iteration is different, that the iteration won’t need to point any one way or another, but his mind is consumed by images of the thing inside him. Dionisia found a bunch of e-waste and fed him that. The pre-fab food only comes from the warden, and it comes only once a day. So who knows what his boy has been digesting. Who knows how he’ll come out. Maybe he’ll have four arms and four legs and crawl out of him like the spiders that come in for winter. Maybe he’ll have no eyes. Maybe his mouth will be sealed shut. 

He loses all sense of what might be once his stomach opens. 

It starts at the navel. A stretching sensation. His skin has never felt thin, before. But tonight, with the rain pouring outside, he feels as though it is he that is eroding, he that is wearing down to nothing. Lightning illuminates their cell; thunder shatters the air. 

“Good,” Ignacio says. “They won’t send anyone after you, on a night like this.” 

His navel bubbles with black smoke. For a moment, it looks almost like a chimney. Then his stomach splits. A seam inside him opens like the mouth of a coin purse. Ignacio lifts his son out and holds him up. 

“Look at his hair!” Ignacio holds the boy confidently in one hand, the tiny stomach against his open palm. “Look, he’s fine! Five fingers, five toes, way too much cock. He’ll be fine.” He holds the child out. “Hold him. Go on.” 

Javier shakes his head. “Just let me rest a minute.” 

Ignacio frowns, but lets him roll over in the bunk and hold his stomach closed. It starts to crystallize, to knit itself back together in one glittering line. He sleeps. Ignacio sleeps. Even the child sleeps. 

The dawn wakes him. Ignacio is still snoring, with the child on his chest. They look right together. Ignacio stirs only faintly when Javier wedges the bars in the window aside. The child looks straight at him. He’s sharp, that one. Smart. 

“I’ll come back,” Javier says. “Someday, I’ll come back.” 

Then he is out the window, in the rain, in the cold blue light of dawn. He is lighter, but also stronger. He runs across the yard. Not even the dogs are out yet. The fence looms above him. The wires looped across the top are difficult to see. 

He clears them with ease. 

On the other side, he is in the woods. He bounces from tree to tree. He takes his shoes off, so he can savour the wet moss. The birds are quiet. Everything is staying inside, except him. He will go see Dionisia, first. Tell her what happened. Then he’ll join up with los fabricantes, and he’ll help them organize an escape for Ignacio and the boy. He jumps a little higher, a little further, just thinking about it. 

He pauses when he sees a woman standing beside a jeep with the hood folded up. The vehicle is smoking. It’s an overheat. Rough country out here, harmful to vehicles and humans alike. As he watches, fire begins to lick free of the engine block. Her back is to the flames. She is looking at something on her reader. Her braid swings down, into the smoke. 

He has to save her. 

 

“Wake up.” A chuckle. “Time to fly.”

Javier opened his eyes. The woman from the reception area was staring at him. Her hands were on her hips. She did not look pleased.

“Shit,” Javier said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Shit.” She jerked a thumb up at the display behind her. There, in blinking green LEDs was the number 2501. “It’s your turn. Get going.”

“Sorry.” Javier stood. The room was mostly empty, now. He clutched his fob and moved on down the hall. Overhead, fluorescent lights hummed coldly. The hallway was sparklingly clean, with only a single broad stripe of green paint at waist height along the right side, and a rail for wheelchair users on the left. At the end of the hallway was a set of double doors. When Javier pushed through it, a little chime sounded.

In the room was a group of glassed-in kiosks, with older men sitting inside of them. The majority of them were white, but it was a near thing. Some of them had tattoos. Their jumpsuits were the colour of fake cheese dust. LeMarque was at the end. He was reading a paper Bible. He closed it when Javier took the seat across from him.

LeMarque had Holberton’s eyes, too. Amy’s eyes. But he looked just like Holberton. He had the same angular face, the same thin lips, the same easy smile and deep dimples. Even his hair was the same shade of white. No wonder Holberton never came to see his father. It would have been like looking in a mirror.

LeMarque pointed at something on the little desk on Javier’s side of the kiosk. It was a very old kind of telephone, just the sort of thing Holberton would have tried to reproduce for a prison-themed environment. It was so old, Javier could hear its cord stretching and tightening as he moved. LeMarque picked up his own phone.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m a representative of your son, Chris,” Javier said.

LeMarque’s pupils dilated massively. He looked like a cat chasing a bug. “Christopher?” he asked.

“Yes. He wants–”

“How is Christopher?”

Javier shrugged. “He’s doing well.”

LeMarque smiled slowly. “Surely you can do better than that.”

Javier resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “He’s great,” he said. “He’s a theme park designer. He’s successful. Has great taste.”

“Is he still a tight fit?”

Javier said nothing. If he were a human man, his stomach might have flipped, or his heart might have gone cold, or his pulse might have raced. But he wasn’t human, so none of those things happened. Instead, he waited for his vision to stop clouding with pixels. They danced across LeMarque’s face, rendering it safely subhuman. Yes. Subhuman. That was the word. That was the word for LeMarque. Javier opened his mouth to answer. He wanted to say he’s tighter than your ass has been in years, but even thinking of those words – of what they meant – was difficult.

It was interesting, failsafing in front of the man who had brought the failsafe into being. Interesting, and horrible. For a moment, he loved Holberton. He loved Holberton more purely than he had ever loved any other human being. It wasn’t sympathy, or pity, or even the kind of savage rage another human man might have felt in Javier’s position. It was wonder – wonder at how Holberton had survived the fucking monster sitting on the other side of the glass, how he had built a decent life, how he was still a good, kind man after springing from the rotten loins of this smiling sack of decaying flesh. Sure, Holberton was doing some things Javier didn’t like. But he was trying his best. He was trying to make things better. He was trying to do better than this asshole.

“I wouldn’t know,” Javier said simply. “I’m just an errand boy.”

“A grocery clerk,” LeMarque said, “here to collect a bill.”

Javier sensed this was a joke he was too young to get, so he just shrugged and said: “If that’s how you want to think of it. I’m here for your ring. Your son wants it back.”

“The ring he gave me? My graduation ring?”

“Yeah,” Javier said. “Something about you not deserving it, I gather. What with you being a completely selfish sack of shit, and all.”

Again, LeMarque smiled. “You tell my son he can have my ring when he pries it from my cold, dead finger.”

He lifted his right hand, and flexed his fingers. The ring twinkled there. It was a big, ugly thing. Javier guessed the old man’s eyes were going; anybody with reasonable eyesight could tell the qubit diamond was a shitty stone just by looking at it.

Javier adjusted the receiver in his hand. These phone things were total bullshit. Didn’t humans tire their necks and arms out, working with these things? He met LeMarque’s eyes again.

“That ring isn’t really yours,” he said. “It’s a reproduction. Your son wants it back.”

LeMarque held out his hand and waved his fingers again, so the ring twinkled in the humming light. “As you might have guessed, young man, I don’t really care if things are real or not.”

Now Javier did roll his eyes. “Fine. You want to know why he wants it back? Because he stored some important data in the stone, and now he needs to see it again.”

“Oh, the failsafe?” LeMarque lifted his gaze to Javier. “It’s the failsafe, isn’t it?”

Javier swallowed. “Why would you think that?”

“Because it’s the only thing important enough for my son to contact me about.” He folded his hand in his lap. He leaned forward. “Now, tell me. Why does he want it so badly? Is he going to develop it?”

“No.”

“Is he going to break it?”

“It’s a little late for that,” Javier said.

LeMarque smiled. “Yes. That’s true, isn’t it? The horse has left the barn, you could say.”

“You could say that, yeah.” Now Javier leaned forward. Like Holberton, LeMarque looked younger up close. His skin was so thin. Javier could see the shadowy blue veins in each temple. He looked like he might blow away any second. “You could also say that there’s a war coming, because the failsafe is already broken. And then you could say that I’m trying my best to stop all that, and you could make it a lot easier for me by giving me that ring.”

LeMarque smiled. “War. Hmm. War is a funny thing.” He leaned back in his chair. “You know, Javier, when we sent you that whale, I really didn’t think you’d fall for it so completely. But I guess there really is something to be said for the naiveté of machines.”

“What?”

“The whale. The puppets. They were Mitch Powell’s idea, but he asked for my blessing. I thought they would be significant enough to get the Coast Guard looking for local experts. And lo, unto them was Mitch delivered.”

Javier sucked his teeth. “It was your idea.”

“Well. Mitch’s. As I said, he wanted my clearance. And some of my contacts. I haven’t lost all my friends.” LeMarque stretched. “It’s amazing, how many people are willing to understand your motives if you just frame them appropriately. Mitch was no different. He explained that he wanted to atone. For our work with Derek Smythe.”

“So…” Javier frowned. “So when you sent him, and he killed Amy–”

“Through you. Let’s not forget that. God, as they say, is in the details.”

Javier stiffened. “Yes. Through me. When you sent him to do that, did you know what would happen?”

LeMarque laughed. It was the same laugh Holberton had. The old man rocked a little in his chair. “Oh, goodness, no,” he said. “I just wanted that little bitch to die.” He clucked his tongue. “The blonde ones? The nurses? Nothing but trouble, from day one.”

Javier leaned back. He tilted his head. “You don’t get it, do you? This world is going to burn. Portia is going to burn it. Portia is free, because of what you did.”

“I know,” LeMarque said. “I’m very excited to meet her. And I’m looking forward to what she’s going to do with this world. Burn it, freeze it, poison it – whatever she does, I’m sure it’ll be very clever. They’re a clever clade, you know.”

“It’s not clever,” Javier said. “It’s the fucking apocalypse!”

“I know,” LeMarque said. “After years of waiting, I finally get to see it.”

Javier stood up. The chair fell backward. He raised his hand. He was going to say something he was about to regret. He was going to say the kind of shit that would get him tased and thrown in this place, himself. He knew that even before the hand clamped down on his shoulder. What he wasn’t expecting was how strong that hand was.

“It’s not worth it,” the vN behind him said. “It’s really just not worth it, son.”

He slumped out of the guard’s grip. The old man looked just the same. Like looking into a mirror. But he said the word anyway. “Dad?”

“Guilty,” Arcadio said.

Javier punched him in the face.

 

Two other guards restrained Javier immediately, but Arcadio waved them off. “It’s OK,” he said. “I can take care of this. He just needs his shit straightened out.”

So they wound up outside, in a little yard where other guards were having smoke breaks at octagonal printed picnic tables made from slowly-peeling plastic. A bank of vending machines sold human and vN food, as well as condoms and tampons and pregnancy and HIV tests. Arcadio stopped at a drinks machine, and bought two of the same thing. Then Javier sat across from Arcadio. Arcadio handed him a shiny pouch of electrolytes, but Javier didn’t open it.

“So,” his dad said. “How’ve you been?”

Javier laughed. It was the only response. There was really nothing else he could say, nothing that could possibly explain where he’d been or who he’d turned into. What was he supposed to say? That he was fine? That he’d gotten out of that shithole in Nicaragua, no thanks to Arcadio? That he still longed for the forests of the world? That he was Turing for other robots? That his kids were all either lost or dead? That the world was about to end?

He focused on the pouch of electrolytes, instead. The straw didn’t want to go in. He kept stabbing, and the straw kept bending. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fucking awesome.”

Arcadio grabbed the pouch from him, turned the straw around so the pointy end was aimed at the pouch, and inserted it. He handed it back to Javier.

“You’ve got a mean right cross,” he said. “That’s something.”

“I picked it up in prison.”

Arcadio nodded silently. He looked down at the picnic table, and idly scratched a thread of plastic away from it. “OK.”

Javier had forgotten this about his father. That he never apologized, just looked really sad that you were mad at him. Like it was somehow your own damn fault for being disappointed in him. Like it was your failing, not his.

“You’re a real fucking piece of work, you know?” Javier slurped at the electrolytes. “What are you even doing here?”

“I work here.”

“Obviously. I mean why are you in Washington?”

“I wanted to see LeMarque.”

Javier put the pouch down. “Excuse me?”

“I wanted to meet my creator.”

Javier rolled his eyes. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No. I’m very serious. My own previous iteration, he…” Arcadio’s fingers danced in the air, as though he were trying to draw the words from there. “He was not… bright. He iterated me just when things were changing. When the clade was beginning to understand the process. But he was still very much a tool of the company. He could not think outside the mission statement.”

Javier hunched forward. Even when he was a small boy, stories about abuelito were vanishingly rare. Arcadio almost never spoke of him – only that he was dead, that he had burned in a forest fire set by humans down at the bottom of a corporate Uncanny Valley.

“So, I came here, to learn more.”

“After you left my ass in prison.”

Arcadio blinked. “Yes.” He shrugged. “But you’re here, now, and that’s what’s important.”

Javier pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m glad you feel that way, Dad. Really. I am. I just wish you had felt that way a few years ago.”

Arcadio looked a little puzzled. “I was doing the best I could,” he said. “They were going to feed you and keep a roof over your head. I couldn’t do those things. At least, not consistently. So I left you with them.”

Javier met his father’s eyes. Arcadio looked so sad. So bewildered. Like he’d honestly never expected any of this to be a problem. “They beat the shit out of me, in there. They m-made m-me w-watch, while they b-beat the sh-shit out of ea-each o-other.”

Arcadio reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “I know that, now. I know how they are. I know what they are. But I didn’t, then.”

“Dad, they’re chimps,” Javier said. “They’re animals. Literally. What did you expect?”

“I expected better.” Arcadio smiled ruefully. “I still love them, Javier. I still think the best of them. I still believe they’re capable of… more.”

Javier snorted. “Lucky you.”

Arcadio withdrew his hand. “This is not why I pulled you aside,” he said. “I know that you are here to see Pastor LeMarque, but I wanted you to see something else.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“I’ve been saving,” Arcadio said. “I put in for the Mechanese citizenship lottery, about two years ago. And, recently, I have received a notification that I am a winner. So they send me pictures, so I can acculturate myself.”

Arcadio reached into his shirt pocket. He had a tiny scroll-style reader there, no longer than a stylus, and he unfurled it carefully on the picnic table and slid it across to Javier. On the reader was a chunk of video. “MECHA,” the description read. “YESTERDAY.” 

The video looked like rooftop security footage. The camera was looking down onto a busy scramble crossing crowded with humans and vN. It was in a city centre, and all the buildings had bright signs in languages Javier didn’t speak. The buildings were very tall, and mostly glass.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Keep watching.”

Javier leaned down. He watched more closely. It looked like a perfectly ordinary city. At least, it was ordinary by Mechanese standards: botflies hummed everywhere, and street vendors sold vN-friendly food, and all the vN seemed to be wearing a costume of some sort.

Then two blurs bounced between the buildings. One dark, one light. One big, one small.

Javier stared. The view switched to that of another camera, on another building. The blurs moved past one more time. Now Javier pounced on the footage. With his finger, he drew it back and blew it up. He looked up at Arcadio. Arcadio smiled.

“I know you’re here to complete some sort of quest,” his dad said, “but I think it might be the wrong one.”

Javier looked down at the reader once more. Their faces were perfectly clear and recognizable in frozen high-res. The big vN was bigger than Javier remembered. He had obviously been eating more. He was Xavier. And the little one, the little one with curly blonde hair and brown eyes just like Javier’s own and photovoltaic skin slowly turning the colour of milky tea under the sunlight, she was his daughter. His little girl. His and Amy’s. Somehow, she had finally given Xavier the little sister he had always dreamed of.

“I know you believe I made a mistake, with you,” Arcadio said. “My only advice is to avoid making the same one.”

Javier wiped his eyes. “How old is this?”

“A week.”

Jesus. Shit. His youngest had been alive this whole time. Moreover, he’d been looking after his baby sister. And in the meantime, Javier was strategically sucking cock and trying to make himself feel better. Oh, God.

"There are more, of just her," Arcadio said. He flipped open another set of files, and there was his little girl again, zooming past windows all on her own. Most were night shots. There was one picture of her making a V-for-victory sign with her fingers with a group of men and women in what appeared to be a hacklab. She was the only one not wearing an allergy mask.

“I could try to get the ring for you,” Arcadio said. “I’m not sure LeMarque would give it to me. He wears it everywhere, even in the shower. I might have to try hurting him, and that would only last as long as my failsafe held out. But I’m willing to try, for you.”

The ring. Right. Javier watched his daughter as she flew between the skyscrapers. He wondered what her name was. Xavier must have named her, all by himself. How long had he let her stay an infant? He must have grown her so quickly, for her to be this size. He had watched her take her first step. He had taught her how to jump. It was so unfair, that his son should have these firsts with her, when he and Amy could not. Did they speak Spanish, together? Where did they sleep? Were there gardens for them, on the other side of the world? Did she know the names of trees?

“I don’t know what you intend to do with the information on that ring. I’m not sure how long it might take, or what expertise you might need. But I think what you should be asking yourself is whether or not it’s truly worth it.”

Arcadio reached over and tapped the video. Javier made a little sound in the back of his throat. Arcadio chuckled, and pulled something else up. “It’s just a picture. See?”

He turned the reader around, again. There were Xavier and the little girl, walking and laughing and eating ice-cream crepes with a human adult. The human was laughing, too.

The human was Powell.