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.”
6:
Tribulations
“Well hi hi hi there,” Tyler said.
Javier opened his eyes, slowly. His vision was greyscale. Tyler was nursing some bullshit little goatee and was smoking from a pipe printed to look like corncob. He wore a Mump & Smoot T-shirt. At least, that’s what it said on it. It had pictures of clowns. Javier hated clowns. They really threw the Turing process into all kinds of hell.
“Long time no see.” Tyler smiled. His eyes were red. He didn’t smell like pot. He’d been crying. “Thought you were, uh, what’s the right word? Fragged? Decommissioned?”
“¿Qué?”
Javier’s mouth tasted like rust. “What?”
Tyler kept smiling. He tapped his pipe out into a matching ashtray. His mouth worked, then stopped, then worked again. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Javier’s eyes were wet. His whole body was wet. Or at the very least, damp. He was on a hammock. He was being hang-dried. He smelled like cancer.
“It’s cool if you don’t want to talk about it,” Tyler said. “But we’re gonna have to. At some point.” He scratched under his collar. “It’s kind of a thing, you see. Keeping you here.”
The room was an old container. It was likely a brig of some sort. There was nothing inside the room with which he could hurt himself. No sharps. No edges. Everything was soft. If he were a human being, he could have hanged himself on the hammock, but that was about it. Along one wall, in huge stencilled yellow letters, read the words:
WE MUST CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN.
“Where are my children?” Javier asked.
Tyler reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sorry, man. Really, really sorry.”
Javier blinked. “What day is it?”
“It’s almost Christmas.”
Javier shut his eyes. Six months. He’d been under for half a year. “The island?”
“Gone. All of them.”
His eyes opened. “What?”
“They’re all gone, man. As soon as the first one burned…” Tyler shrugged helplessly. “All of them just started… melting. Like an oil spill.”
“All of them? Gone?”
“All gone. Uncle Sam, uh,
hastened
that particular process.” Tyler snorted. “Drone strikes, skimmer bots, phage swarms, smart algae, the whole bit. What they couldn’t blow up, they skimmed off and took away. I think the UN has some of the dregs in some oil drums, somewhere, next to the Ark of the Covenant.”
There was nothing left. No Great Elder Bot. No islands. No physical memory. Nowhere for Amy to have ported herself when he…
“Oh, Jesus.” His voice was a whisper. He knew the taste in his mouth, now. The stains under his nails. The smell on his skin. He knew it only in passing; the failsafe kept him from experiencing it, most of the time. Only a handful of women had let him taste and see. Blood. So much blood.
“Yeah,” Tyler said.
“Oh,
Jesus.
” He gripped the edges of the hammock hard. “Oh, Christ. Amy. Oh God, Amy…”
Tyler reached over and stilled the hammock. “She’s… gone, Javier. We’ve been waiting for word… you know, thinking maybe she copied herself somewhere, but…” He sighed and licked his lips. “With what all’s been happening out there, she can’t have made it.”
Javier rolled his head and his gaze toward Tyler. “What do you mean?”
Tyler took a deep breath. He licked his lips again. He appeared to think of something, and took Javier’s hand. He squeezed it hard, like they were making a bargain together.
“I mean the motherfucking apocalypse, brother,” he said. “I mean Portia.”
He was suddenly and terribly aware of how small he was in this room, and how small he would like to remain. If he never opened that door, if he never left this room, he would not have to see what Tyler was talking about. It would not have to be real. Amy gone and his sons dead and Powell…
“She’s out?” Javier asked. “Free?”
Tyler unrolled a reader and showed Javier an image. It was a sixteen-lane highway. Afternoon sunlight slanted across mangled cars. They’d all crashed into an eighteen-wheeler that read
ISAAC’S ELECTRONICS
on the side. It was a prison transport for vN, just like the one where Javier had first met Amy. Now a cluster of vehicles pressed themselves flat against it like preserved petals. There’d been an accident underneath an electronic sign. The sign read: BEWARE; FOR I AM FEARLESS, AND THEREFORE POWERFUL.
“That’s why everybody was all hot and bothered to go scorched earth on the islands. They’re hoping to shatter any mirrors she might be hosting herself on. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’re talking about taking down
satellites.
She’s a one-woman army hell-bent on taking us back to the fucking Dark Ages.”
Javier laughed. He felt the seam in the skin of his back start to open, but he couldn’t stop. It was too funny. Portia, the epitome of technological achievement, forcing the humans who made her into burning their clouds one server at a time.
“Dude,” Tyler said, “what
happened
out there?”
Javier slowly pulled himself to sit up. “I think…” He reread the advice on the side of the cell. “I think I got owned. Hard.”
Tyler exhaled smoke. “Was it that preacher guy?”
Tears pricked Javier’s eyes. “Yeah. It was him.”
Tyler nodded. He stood up. Javier watched him walk over to a door in the cell, knock out “Shave and a Haircut,” and wait as the door squealed open. Light blazed into the room.
“I won the pool,” Tyler said.
The seastead sat on pontoons like an oil rig, but without the giant milkshake straw poking up out of the middle. They’d built the towers on the “stacked rock” model, with old containers piled high and poking out at odd angles to catch the most sun. Some had solar paint, others had fab-glass to take in light and grow crops. Everywhere, he heard the chug and clank and hiss of the water purifiers. Everyone smoked. He got invited to naked vinyasa his first morning out. He didn’t go. If he’d gone, he would have fucked someone. He knew that about himself, now. Or rather, he’d been reminded of it. Powell had reminded him.
Simone called the seastead a “temporary autonomous zone,” but really that meant that it was a big camp and you could come or go as you pleased. You didn’t get a vote unless you committed to more than six months of work, which she said meant that “the views of anybody spending their summer off school slumming it here don’t mean shit.”
“We could use you in the gardens,” Simone reminded him. “You can stay as long as you like.”
Only that wasn’t true.
The stead’s seed money came from a few big grants from a combination of American government think tanks, private industry, and wealthy parents who just wanted their kids to shut the fuck up at family dinners. All of those people had a vested interest in keeping Javier on the seastead, where he could answer questions about what had happened. But since the sovereignty of the stead was in question, it was tricky for any of them to show up on the stead itself. Tyler and the governing council had spent the past three days fending them off. Their drones hovered everywhere. When Javier went out to sun himself, he always waved.
Tyler had also set up some sort of legal defence fund. There was an attorney on the stead, a brassy British lady who left her firm after her boss’ attentions got to be a hassle. She collected a very big and very secret settlement. It now funded a tower farm. She was big into beekeeping, now. Her name was Phaedra.
“So you have to tell me what happened,” she said, during their first meeting. She was wearing the steader equivalent of business casual: a pair of scrubs whose colours actually matched, with black mesh swim shoes. “But first, I want to tell you that I’m here to protect you and what legal rights you do have. Which aren’t many. And also that I have no interest in having sex with you.”
“That’s big of you.”
“You lot just aren’t my thing, I’m afraid.”
Javier nodded. “Noted.”
“So. Understanding that I am bound by privilege, and you can tell me everything, please do. What happened, out there?”
Javier decided on the simplest possible explanation. “A pastor from New Eden Ministries by the name of Mitch Powell failsafed me into killing my…” His what? In Spanish, he’d say
mi mujer
, my woman. It sounded crude. Like she’d belonged to him. Like he’d bought her somewhere. His partner? What, did they fight crime together? English was so stupid. So finicky and so vague at the same time. “My wife,” he said, finally.
Phaedra blinked. “You mean Amy Peterson?”
“Yes.”
She examined some documents on her reader. “Does that mean you would like to be known legally as Javier Peterson?”
He had never considered it, before. “I guess.”
“Nomenclature is a real problem for vN,” she said. “Most countries still don’t have a filing system to deal with single names. Normally we just choose the human you’re living with, or the one you started out with.”
“Peterson’s fine.”
“So.” Phaedra rolled up her reader. She folded her hands. They were covered in old stings and new freckles. “Amy is dead.”
“Yes.”
“You know of nowhere that she might have ported herself?”
He considered that. In the final moments of her life, Amy was in pain. Confused. Probably horrified at his betrayal. Could she have gathered herself and gone elsewhere? Or was that process just automated, like a backup?
“Have you talked to her dad?” Javier asked.
“The FBI has,” Phaedra said. “His drivespace and cloudspace have all been seized and searched. She’s not there.”
He nodded. That made sense. It would be an obvious place to look, for one. And besides, he had no idea whether Powell was bullshitting him about the contents of that poison. Maybe it wasn’t a pain plug-in. Maybe it was just pure poison. Maybe it was designed to unmake Amy from the inside out.
“But Portia is alive,” he murmured. “Why is Portia alive, but Amy isn’t?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” Phaedra said, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms.
“She was the model for the island’s self-defence mechanism. Amy told me, right before…” He frowned. “Wait. How long did it take the uniforms to take out the islands? Once they’d started disintegrating, I mean.”
“It was surprisingly difficult.”
Phaedra opened up something on a reader for him. Footage of men in amphibious uniforms being hustled onto a bright orange emergency retrieval vessel. Onboard, they were hosed down.
“The islands were radioactive,” Phaedra said. “They started leaking radiation almost immediately after…” She sighed. “It’s what started the fires in the fogbank. The heat. The men who first tried planting mines on the island have sustained their life’s total allotment of radiation. One more X-ray, one more airline flight, and it’s cancer for them.”
Javier said nothing. Powell was right. Amy had hidden her plans from him. He’d had no idea. Hadn’t wanted to believe it. Hadn’t wanted to even consider the possibility that she would take things so far.
“It was like five different nuclear reactors melting down on the same day, Javier. That’s what you missed, while you were in the belly of the whale. And the consequence – the
fallout
, if you’ll forgive me – is that the world is a profoundly different place for vN than it once was.”
“Christ.”
“Exactly.”
Phaedra licked her teeth. She nodded deeply. The nodding encompassed her whole torso, and became more of a rocking motion. Her corkscrew curls swung to and fro as she rocked.
“I am asking you these questions because if we can tell someone – the US Attorney’s office, a representative of the UN Sub-committee on Artificial Intelligence – that you know where Amy might have ported, things will go much easier for you. You need something to play with, Javier.”
She leaned across the table. “So think of any friends you might have, any contacts who might know where Amy could have gone.”
He nodded. “OK. I will.”
Phaedra tried to smile. “So. When this missionary fellow from the Rapture-minded Christian sect told you to kill your wife, was he, really, maybe, just trying to bring about the end of the world?”
The end of the world was exactly how it was portrayed on the news. It even came complete with the right REM sample, when news about the islands ran on major streams. Javier had to look the song up, because he kept hearing it and it always annoyed him not to pick up on that kind of thing. It wasn’t his fault he was only about four years old. The vN channels were a lot better about not dropping arcane references all over Hell and half of Spain. They knew you probably wouldn’t catch half of them.
Javier watched the news as he turned over compost with his hands. He liked the slither of worms across his skin. He liked the life in his hands. The humans probably saw it as decay, what was happening in those dark, fetid bins. But it was life, on the micro scale. The roots of organic life. Out of a very similar pile of reeking garbage, Javier imagined, humanity had wriggled its way into existence.
The islands showed up as circles of red on maps, with black and yellow warning signs hovering over each. Travel plans were cancelled. Airports emptied. People burned their hard drives on massive pyres in supermarket parking lots. Every exploded battery, every bad GPS map, every cloned credit balance, became Portia’s handiwork.
It was a motherfucking witch hunt.
He searched images of the island wreckage for any sign that his boys had escaped. He saw the houses floating away, most still in flames. The fans were all boycotting the media, doing cosplay reenactments of Matteo and Ricci’s series in the foyers of major sponsors, blaming the corporations for broadcasting the carnage.
“It’s just sick,” Javier saw one say. The man was the fat, almost pregnant version of Matteo. He’d even printed a reasonable facsimile of Matteo’s favourite stupid Hawaiian shirt. “It’s bad enough that the government is treating the vN so badly, but for these guys to sell ad share on it? That’s terrible. That’s exploitation.”