14: Runs in the Family
“Name?”
“Arcadio Javier Corcovado.”
The existence of a last name was new to Javier. He’d never had one, until he took Amy’s that day at the seastead, and it wasn't like he ever carried any identifying documents with him But apparently Arcadio had been signing everything with the name of the forest where he was born.
“Generation?”
“Second.”
“Original make and model?”
“Lionheart, ECO-1502.”
“Occupation?”
“I was a guard at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.”
The customs agent speaking to Javier was not a vN. Rather it looked like a spider: multiple camera eyes on its face, six rotor legs on heavy rubber casters with two gripper claws at its front, a bulky abdomen that could be flipped open and used to carry either cargo or a human pilot on its back. It was all white, save for its Mechanese flag logo: a large red circle on a white ground with tiny gear-teeth. It was pouring him tea with one three-pronged claw, and handing him an earthenware tray of vN treats with the other.
“WELCOME TO INTERZONE,” the sign above it read.
The Interzone was not so much a “zone” as a room. The white and red theme extended here, too: white leather smart sofas that inched along the floor to corral crawling iterations, red silk pillows that warmed or cooled on contact depending on which side you flipped up, dazzling speckled lilies and voluptuous orchids in tiny glass vials. Javier heard the sound of running water somewhere in the room, but couldn’t place where it was coming from.
“Would you like to continue working in corrections?” the customs spider asked, as Javier took his tea and mochi.
“No,” Javier said. “I’d like to go back to my original design parameters. I want to be a gardener.”
The spider expressed emotion by slumping most of its gleaming white weight to one side. It spun its right claw in the air.
“Aww…” it said. “That’s so nice to hear.”
“Thank you.”
“I find it so comforting to go back to original programming,” the spider said. “We’re so lucky to know our place in the world. I think humans spend so much time trying to figure out who they are, and they get hurt in the process. It’s nice to already know all the answers to those types of questions.”
“Absolutely,” Javier said.
“Were you unhappy in Washington?”
Javier pretended to have a difficult time answering. He waited a good few seconds, and then said: “It was difficult to see how the humans treated each other, in that environment.”
“There are plenty of humans in Mecha,” the spider said. “Will you have a problem with them?”
The spider was reading not only his affect, but also his temperature, his gait, and the density of his bones. This last was the most crucial element in his identification. As vN memory accumulated, the graphene coral in their bones grew heavier and more tightly packed. By virtue of being older, Arcadio should have had heavier bones than Javier. They were only a few months apart in age, but it was enough to make a difference. Javier’s only hope was that he had somehow generated more memories, that he’d had a fuller life. As ways of measuring up to his father went, it wasn’t too bad.
“I don’t think so,” Javier said. “I don’t think the human visitors here will be the same types of people as the ones I met at the penitentiary.”
The spider’s claw froze in the air. “Types?” it asked. “What types do you mean?”
“Well…” Javier sipped his tea. What types did he mean? He had a clear picture of the people he’d met in prison in Nicaragua, and an even clearer image of the ones passing their time in the waiting area at the Walls. Describing that picture was something else. Should he tell the story about the woman with the shaved head? Or the New Eden pedo and his little vN lover? What level of gritty realism would convince the machine sitting in front of him? “Well, angry types,” he said. “Or sad. I think people come to Mecha to be happy. And I’m happy when I see humans who are happy.”
The spider nodded so vigorously its claws rattled a little in their couplings. “That is so true,” it said. “It can be so frustrating to spend time with a depressed human. No matter what you do, they just keep on feeling bad!”
“It’s an organic problem,” Javier said.
“Ours is not to know how,” the spider said. It appeared to sigh, slumping forward on its legs. Then it popped up and spun both claws. “But! Here in Mecha, we strive for the best user experience imaginable! There are many humans who leave our island feeling completely cured of all social disorders! Every Mechanese is devoted to the happiness of human beings!”
“Oh, of course!” Javier held up both his hands, palms forward. “I don’t want you think that I can’t make humans happy. I just want to try doing so in a different way, from now on.”
“It sounds like you’re ready for your citizenship test, then,” the spider said.
“Citizenship test?” Javier frowned. “I thought I’d already passed. I thought only passing tests were entered in the lottery.”
“Oh, that’s just the theoretical exam,” the spider said. “This is something new. This is the practical.”
For a moment, he thought he was back at the Akiba.
At least, that was what it looked like. The spider led Javier down a narrow, accordion-style hallway that opened onto what was probably a portable building. The spider pushed open the door, and ushered Javier inside.
Inside was a festival on a summer night. It was warm, and terrifically humid. Fireflies blinked greenly through the air. They were real. They drifted toward hanging paper lanterns and fairy lights strung down a busy street full of humans in tourist clothes. There were some of Rory in there, too – mingling and looking pretty without really saying anything. Most of them were in traditional clothes, but a few of them weren’t. They were buying skewers and playing games. They fished for goldfish and held up charms and compared bolts of cloth.
“Everyone,” the spider said, “this is Arcadio!”
The crowd turned. “Hi, Arcadio!”
“We’re going to start the clock, now.” The spider turned to Javier and took his right hand in its right claw. “Now, I’m sure you recall the terms of citizenship agreement you signed when you completed your application, but I must remind you of this one detail: you are not allowed to discuss what goes on in this exam with any other potential applicants. Sharing that information is grounds for revocation of your citizenship.”
“Uh…”
“Good luck, Mr Corcovado. We’re all rooting for you.”
The spider sped out of the room. Above the door, a clock flashed: 14:59. Fifteen minutes. He had fifteen minutes to prove that he belonged here. But what did that involve? Ordinary citizenship exams required a bunch of forms, and maybe an interview, and then an oath. Was this the interview? Were they going to ask him how much he knew about his new home? About its history? If so, he was completely fucked.
He went up to the nearest Rory. “What am I supposed to do, here?”
“You’ll see,” she said, as a cart rolled up at the end of the street. On it were the words “FREAKS OF NATURE”. Another Rory jumped out, wearing a circus ringmaster’s uniform. It was very cute: tophat, tails, fishnets, everything.
“Step right up!” she said, cheerily. “Welcome, one and all, children of all ages, to the last human freak show on this island!” She gestured at the cart, and its display rippled. “See Kappa-Kodo, half-boy, half-fish!”
Everyone applauded.
“See the Onibaba, the Bearded Lady!”
The applause increased.
“See Shinji, the Man Without Feelings!”
Out of the cart stepped a man. His age was hard to place. He had some teeth missing. He was Japanese. He smelled like alcohol rub. And his pupils said that he’d just taken a load of beta blockers.
“Everyone, this is Shinji,” Ringmaster Rory said.
“Hi, Shinji.”
“Shinji has a special neurological disorder. It’s called congenital analgesia.” She said the word loud and slow. Everyone cooed. “Shinji, please explain.”
Shinji apparently had a hard time working his jaw. Maybe it was just that he was having a hard time with the English. “I can’t feel any pain.”
“None at all?” Ringmaster Rory asked.
“None at all.”
“Have you ever felt any pain?”
Slowly, Shinji shook his head. “No.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see this in action, won’t we? I think we should put that to a test! Who will test Shinji’s nerves of steel?”
A big man strode up to Shinji. He was white, and broad-shouldered, and badly sunburned. He took off his jacket. His shirt was barely holding his muscle in. Under the thin cotton stretched across his right shoulder, Javier thought he saw a Navy tattoo.
“So you won’t feel this, then?”
He punched Shinji square in the jaw. Shinji reeled. Javier waited for the pixels to arrive, for the image to de-rez. But it didn’t. Shinji stayed standing, and so did he. Shinji shook it off, and so did he.
“No,” Shinji said. “I didn’t feel that at all.”
“Oh, my God,” Javier murmured. This was what it was like, not to have a failsafe. This was how it felt. At least, he thought it must be. It was the closest he’d ever been.
“Are you sure?” the white guy was asking. He punched Shinji right in the gut. “How about now?”
Shinji bent double. He coughed. He spat. “It’s uncomfortable,” he said, “but it doesn’t hurt.”
Javier looked at the surrounding humans. “Shouldn’t…” They looked at him, pointedly. Then they looked back at Shinji.
Shinji was getting the fuck beat out of him.
“Nothing,” he was saying. “Nothing. Ever.”
“Stop!” Javier shouted. He wriggled in between the humans and marched up to the cart. “Stop it! This is sick!”
“Why?” the one doing the beating asked. “He can’t feel it. He’s fine.”
“I’m fine,” Shinji said, and spat out a tooth.
The white dude kicked him in the groin. “You should try it,” he said, as Shinji worked to stand up. “Go on. Give it a go.”
Around him, the crowd applauded. He waited for the applause to diminish, but it didn’t. “Do it!” one urged, and the urge became a chant: “Do! It! Do! It! Do! It!”
He looked at Ringmaster Rory. She winked.
This was the test. It had to be.
They were giving him a chance to hurt a human being in a consequence-free environment. They wanted to know if he was tempted. The spider had said it was a new exam, and that made sense. Because if one clade could lose its failsafe, so might all the vN clades, one day. If and when that ever happened, the Mechanese authorities probably wanted only those vN who had never once felt any inkling of violence in their hearts for humanity. They wanted lovers, not fighters.
“It’s OK,” Shinji said. “Just get it out of your system.”
“No one would blame you,” Ringmaster Rory said. “Maybe if we told you more about him? He beat his grandmother to death with a tire iron. But then he got confused – he didn’t know what to do with her. The blood leaked down to the unit below, and here we are.”
“I’m getting early release.” Shinji’s voice was thick with blood. “For doing this. For participating.”
We think of the key, each in his prison.
He reached down to help Shinji up.
“It’s not that easy, pal.”
The punch landed in the back of his head with the kind of force that would have instantly concussed an organic human being. For Javier, it meant a stumble to the floor that quickly became a high jump to the rafters. They were so high as to be invisible, and painted a midnight blue to blend in with the projection of a night sky, but they were there. He used his legs as leverage to swing himself up into an upright position.
“Aw, no fair,” the white guy said. “Come on down here and take it like a real man.”
But he wasn’t a real man, and, he realized, he had never been happier about that fact. “Let me out!”
“Come on down here, buddy. The test isn’t over.”
“Yes, it is! I passed!”
Ringmaster Rory took off her tophat. She put it on Shinji’s bleeding head. “Come on, now, Javier. We all know that’s not true.”
Oh. Shit.
“Did you think we wouldn’t find you?” she asked. “Did you think we weren’t watching you? We couldn’t get to you on the plane, or at Holberton’s house, or even on that stupid low-tech bike, but we have you now.”
“I haven’t done anything to you,” Javier said. “Let me go.”
Ringmaster Rory laughed. “You started all this, Javier. You’re the one who couldn’t keep it in your pants. You’re why Portia’s loose. You’re why FEMA is poisoning the food supply. They’re going ahead with it, you know. A prospective formula is already online. People are printing it themselves.”
“I’m sorry,” Javier said. “I’ve lost a lot, too. Remember?”
“Not enough to make you any smarter,” Rory said. She nodded at the humans. “Destroy him.”
They brought out guns. When they primed them, Javier smelled horseradish. Puke rounds. The last time he had smelled any this close was when he’d taken Amy hostage on that prison transport truck. It felt like so long ago. At the time, he told himself he simply wanted to get the hell out of another jail term, and that was why he’d taken such an audacious risk. Now he knew the truth. He had never been rescued, and he had the chance to rescue someone else. Someone who was in the same position he’d been in, once. Someone who was obviously too young to know what she was doing. Someone who had done something bad in the pursuit of doing something good. No one had ever saved him. But he could save someone else.
If he lived through this, he would save her again.
The first round hissed past his head, and he jumped. He jumped randomly, bouncing against a rafter and falling down clumsily to the “street” below. The humans looked entirely different, now. They were no longer tourists, or even actors. They fired without blinking.
“You called the fucking army?” He jumped higher. He had to find a sprinkler. Something that would trigger an alarm. Anything.
“I guess she never changed you,” Rory called. “If she had, you’d be able to fight back.”
Javier jumped down into the food stalls. He overturned the bowls of goldfish. They sloshed down to the ground. He flipped over carts of fruit. The smell of the bullets stung his eyes. A fine yellow mist was rising. He jumped higher, again. If he went down there again, he wouldn’t even be able to see. As he watched, some of the humans reloaded.
He was going to die, here. Slowly. No one was going to save him. No one was coming. Amy was gone. Powell probably had his kids, already. Jack was on the run. Holberton and Alice and Manuel and Tyler and Simone were all far away. He should have stayed with them. They’d all offered him the one thing he’d never had: a home. And he’d gone on this stupid quest instead, and had nothing to show for it, not even the diamond where the love of his life had her soul encrypted. Now all that was left of her was her psychotic grandmother.
Portia.
“PORTIA!” He stared at Ringmaster Rory. “Help!”
For a moment, nothing happened. Below, they all stared at him as though he'd lost his mind. Maybe it wouldn't work. Maybe she wasn't listening. Or maybe he just hadn't said the magic word.
"Please! Portia! I need your help!"
Ringmaster Rory jerked. A look of horror crossed her face. She tried to run into the crossfire. But as Javier watched, she ran straight for the barbecue pit, instead. She paused to beam up at him. "Looks like I'm the answer to your prayers, sweetie. Now cover your eyes."
Then she picked up the charcoal grill, lifted it over her head, and threw it at the humans. Sparks flew. Hot coals spilled free. Two humans were pinned screaming beneath its weight. He smelled burning flesh. His vision started to pixel. The humans were shooting at Portia, now, but she ran straight into the bullets, hands out, mouth open. Belatedly, he realized there were three of Rory in the room. Now all three were Portia. Their skin began to ash away, flaking up in spirals just like the sparks, but they each chose a human and beelined for their new targets.
He covered his eyes. He covered his ears. He heard the cracking, anyway. The ripping. The screaming. And then Portia's terrible laughter. It sounded thick and wet, like her mouth was full of meat.
"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change, darling. You just keep that in mind."
Everything went black.
When they pried him loose from the rafters, he told them that the vN in the room had all gone insane. The spiders – he spoke with three, all in one room – all nodded their huge bodies and spun their claws and downcast their many eyes.
“It’s so unfortunate,” one said. “It’s been happening so randomly to that clade, we thought we’d still be OK using it as security.”
“You might want to look into that,” Javier said. “You know. Revamp that particular policy.”
And after he signed an affidavit promising never to talk about what he’d seen, they let him go.
His new citizenship granted him the privilege of sleeping in a capsule room for a month while he made other living arrangements. It was a seven-by-three-by-four foot space, complete with a futon, a tiny display, a fan, and a little set of shelves no deeper than an old paperback. You entered it by waving your little petty cash card at a door in a blank-looking building and taking the elevator that blinked a green light at you. On the seventh floor, another blinking green light led him to a hatch. He waved his card at it, and it popped open.
“Hello, Javier,” Rory said, when he closed the hatch behind him.
He looked at the hatch just in time to watch a bolt slide across it.
“Hija de puta,” he muttered. “What do you want now, Rory?”
“Just a chat.”
Javier rolled his eyes and stretched out on the futon. There was a little package of vN candy on the pillow. They looked like little Buckyballs made of sugar, but they were probably just carbon. He rustled the package. “Yeah? You know what we could talk about? How about your latest fucking attempt on my life?”
“That’s what we wanted to discuss. We’re very sorry, Javier.”
It occurred to him that Rory might actually be lonely. She – they – had no friends. No real ones. Just pawns. Pawns, and multiple iterations of the same self. Javier was on a very short list of people who knew who Rory really was. The rest was just an echo chamber.
“Where is this going, Rory?”
“We’re curious about your plans in Mecha.”
There was no way in hell he was going to tell her about his kids. “Oh, you know. The usual. Drink some tea, eat some rofu. Maybe work at a host club.” He eyed the hatch. “If you ever let me out, that is.”
“Of course we’re going to let you out. We just thought we’d say hello. And apologize.”
Javier frowned. He knew Rory. She never just said hello. “I haven’t told anybody what you’re doing to the pedophiles,” he said. “So you can’t be pissed at me for that.”
“We’re not angry with you, Javier.”
His frown deepened. “You do remember that you tried to have me killed in Las Vegas, right?”
“We remember.”
“And that you have just tried to have me killed again? Like, yesterday?”
“We regret that very deeply. We are reevaluating our decision-making apparatus.”
“And so, what, the slate is just wiped clean, now?”
There was a long pause. “Yes.”
He wished he could sit up. He settled for pushing himself up on his elbows. “So, let me get this straight. I kill one of yours in Costa Rica, I kill two of yours in Las Vegas, Portia kills three of yours in Mecha, and now you’ve got me locked up in a room that looks like a coffin, and you’re just going to let me go?”
“We wanted to welcome you to Mecha. Despite our best efforts, you’ve made it here.”
She had something, there. She had originally promised him and Amy passage to Mecha, only to try drowning them. A year later, he was finally here, but Amy wasn’t.
“Well, thanks,” he said. “Is that all?”
“We just want you to remember this conversation, later on. Remember that we let you go. We can be generous. We can be accommodating.”
The bolt slid back, and the hatch opened.
“You may want to visit the ninja forest, on the island’s western edge. The acrobats are quite captivating.”
“Acrobats,” Javier said.
“They’re really something, Javier. You should go. But the only entry is via the old city, so you’ll have to get admission there, first.”
“Thanks for the tip, Rory, but I don’t exactly trust you,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re leading me into a trap.”
“We are not trying to trap you, Javier. We are trying to help you.”
“See, that’s the part I’m not ready to believe. Because you’ve never helped me, Rory. Ever.”
“We are trying to make up for that, now.”
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“We are dying.”
“… What?” Was that even possible? Rory had distributed herself across hundreds – if not thousands – of her clademates. She lived in their network. And she’d lived there long enough to iterate multiple generations. For her to be dying meant…
“Portia is winning, Javier. She is destroying us from the inside.”
“How?”
The display flickered on. On it, he saw a Rory model in a kitchen. It was a mixed-species kitchen. Javier could tell, because there was a basket of fruit on the counter that only humans could eat. It was night. Very late, judging by the clock on the microwave. The view was from a camera embedded in one of the appliances; Javier guessed it was the refrigerator. She stood before the stove. She raised one trembling hand to it and held it aloft. Javier watched as she stood there, her hand shaking. She stood there, her whole body shuddering as her fingers spasmed. And then her hand pounced down on the dials of the stove, and very quickly lit each of the burners. It was only a small amount of heat; Javier couldn’t even see any flame. But it was enough. Her face blank but her eyes wet, she turned away from the stove and sat down.
“It only takes a minute,” Rory said. “A blown fuse, a sudden swerve, a mixture of bleach and ammonia in a closed room. We kill ourselves, afterward. The coroners think it’s because we’ve failsafed, watching the deaths of our human families.”
It wasn’t Portia’s usual way of doing things – that was to take control of someone’s body and kill all the humans within range with her bare hands. “Why doesn’t she just kill the humans?”
“We don’t know.”
The image on the display fizzled a little. It blipped. Then it went black.
THESE BITCHES NEED TO LEARN HOW TO DO IT RIGHT.
Javier swallowed.
TELL THE LITTLE ONES GRANNY SAYS HI.
The city of Mecha stood on what was once Dejima, the artificial island originally used to house foreign traders between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Javier’s new ears told him this as he wandered through it. The old island had been only nine thousand square meters in total; it was now many times that size, having annexed the old Naval Training Centre as well as some of the city of Nagasaki. The original island stood at the centre of the total landmass, and it was the only place in town where the buildings remained low. Skyscrapers loomed over it, casting the reproduction Dutch warehouses and townhouses in a constant shadow that left the snow accumulated on every rooftop a pale blue. He didn't understand why the humans on the cruise liner had needed an artificial winter; real winter seemed just fine out here.
Javier had visited a few great, old cities in his time. Mexico City was probably the oldest, standing as it did on the shoulders of Tenochtitlan. But where the ancient roots of that city were almost invisible, the gilt-edged heels of each cathedral grinding the stone faces of each temple into the hungry mud of Lake Texcoco, here the remnants were a tourist attraction. It was like watching a body laid out in state: the little houses with their white and blue china and their long tables and their stiff-backed horsehair chairs arranged as neatly as the bones of an elder statesman. Javier considered this as he wandered through the oldest part of the city. They were still nice houses, in their own way. A little dark, perhaps, but cozy. Perfect for vN, or any other species that didn’t truly require indoor plumbing. He liked the raked gravel in the alleys, and the way the vN staff left out food and water for cats in dishes printed to look like wooden shoes.
It was all real. Tangible. Not like the Museum of the City of Seattle, that painted harlot of a city-wide earthquake memorial that appeared like a PTSD flashback if only you wore the right glasses. Not like the dry fountains outside the Akiba, in Las Vegas. Not augmented reality, but an entirely separate and equally valid consensual reality, as dishonest in its performance of what might once have been as Javier’s iterations were inexact copies of himself.
It helped that only cosplayers were allowed in.
Javier bounced a little in his sandalled feet. The wood bottoms of his geta were surprisingly comfortable. They’d been printed from a cedar-cellulose composite, which improved the smell a great deal. He’d obtained them at the Tori-Tori, one of the four gates to the old city. The Tori-Tori had a big old quadcopter drone skinned to look like a majestic red bird. The other gates had a white tiger, a blue serpent, or a black turtle. Who knew what they were made of. But the quadcopter was the most famous, because every hour on the hour it squirted some butane down the bones of its exoskeleton, burst into flames, and flew away to some distant rooftop. On that rooftop, someone skinned it again, and then it flew back just in time to repeat the process. It was a low-tech solution, but as Javier watched the bird dip and arc and perch and preen, he thought it worked. It looked old. It looked as old as the surrounding buildings, despite the fact that it was built centuries later. It matched.
At the Tori-Tori, the vN inside the little wooden kiosk asked him whether he wanted to be foreign or not.
“You could be a Portuguese, circa 1543,” one of them said. She looked like Rory, but if the network had warned her about him, she made no sign of it.
“That’s the brownest option you’ve got, is it?”
Some algorithm in her activated, and she blushed. Colour diffused from one high cheekbone to the other, spreading across the bridge of her nose without ever touching the tip. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a tiny, breathy voice that sounded like what would happen if fluffy white kittens ever gained the ability to speak.
“It’s fine.” Javier started removing his dad’s clothes. “I’ll take it.”
The “Portuguese” costume wasn’t the most ridiculous thing he’d ever worn, but it was pretty damn close. Under his sandals – standard issue for everyone, no matter what costume they wore – he wore pale tights that rose up into a pair of puffy culottes that ballooned around his thighs and swished as he walked. He had a weird pirate shirt with a bunch of ruffles at the collar and cuffs, and a deep green “velvet” jacket complete with a little peplum at the hip and a matching hat.
“Do you have a walking stick?” he’d asked.
“Are you injured?”
“No.” He stood back from the mirror in the little changing stall. “I just think that an outfit like this needs a walking stick.”
“If you’d like to leave some feedback for the costume manager, the watch on that chain will allow you to do so.”
Strictly speaking, the pocket watch that came with his costume wasn’t temporally appropriate. He wasn’t terribly familiar with the world of 1543, but he doubted pocket watches were the norm. But every visitor to the old city carried one.
“They’re the only accessory that goes with every costume,” the attendant had told him. “They just seem to communicate the past.”
And that was the thing about the old city. It didn’t represent or replicate any particular past, just “the past.” All the centuries just blended together into some imaginary year when everyone wore too many layers and smoked a lot of opium. Javier suddenly wished he could talk about it with Holberton. Holberton knew all about this kind of thing. Hell, he probably knew the people who had designed it. Maybe he’d even lost a bid to work on it. It certainly seemed to work a lot like Hammerburg. Only instead of vampires chasing people, there were samurai and geisha and spies for the Dutch government and Catholic priests in hiding.
One of those priests sidled up to him, now. Javier could tell by the plain black robe he wore. He also wore a massive rattan hat that looked like a lampshade. Breath fogged out from under it in short, strained bursts. The hat mostly covered his eyes, and when he tilted his head way back to peer at Javier, Javier could see that he was an older white guy with milky little blisters over his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped, “but do you know how to get to the Megane bridge from Dejima?” He held up a little jar. Inside was a pair of very old blue eyes. They no longer held any blood, but it was easy to imagine that once upon a time, not so long ago, they’d been bleary and red. “It’s good luck if you feed your old eyes to the turtles that live under the bridge. Your new eyes will never download anything bad.”
Javier gently pushed the old man’s hand away, so he didn’t have to look at the eyes any longer. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you know the way to the ninja forest?”