“I’m talking about you and your clade holding a copy of Amy Frances Peterson somewhere, and me wanting that copy back.”
Cherry appeared to examine her nails. They were painted a common shade of baby pink – no surprise there – and were utterly flawless, no drips or cuticles – no surprise there, either.
“I think it’s kind of racist of you to assume that all the girls who look like me must be part of the same clade that tried to hurt you,” she said, finally.
“How do you know they tried to hurt me?” Javier asked.
Cherry beamed. “Oh, it’s not easy to stay mad at you, Javier.”
He leaned his elbows on his knees. “Not many people can.”
Cherry’s thin, fuzzy eyebrows rose. “Lucky for us, we’re not people. And we don’t want you to have Amy back.”
“Why not?” Javier asked.
“Amy was dangerous. And so was Portia. Our copy has both of them on it.”
Javier rolled his eyes. “Amy’s not that dangerous.”
“She ate her grandmother, Javier.” Cherry reached over and picked up some papers from under her pillow. They were old-fashioned correspondence. She’d tied them with pink ribbon. They gave off a faint whiff of vanilla and lavender as she shuffled through them. She frowned; apparently she had forgotten to open one. “And she was a child,” Cherry added, reaching for a pearl-handled letter opener. “She handled conflict the way a child does. She didn’t consider the consequences of what she was doing. She was the queen of her own little island, and thought the rest of the world would treat her accordingly.” Cherry sliced open the letter in a single, efficient motion. “In other words, a spoiled brat.”
Javier stretched. The rocker creaked under him. The room was small, but impeccably clean. The bookshelf was real wood. The sheets looked to be actual cotton. And the little washbasin, for whatever bath games Cherry was paid to play, was real ceramic, not printed.
“You get paid a lot for this job, don’t you?”
“The pay is hourly. The tips are what I earn.” One thin eyebrow lifted. “You’ve never tried it?”
“Nope.” He smiled. “I prefer to make a personal connection with people.”
“Is that what it was, with her?”
Javier did not allow himself to get angry. He steepled his fingers. He stared at Cherry. When she squirmed under his gaze and broke it, he asked: “What if I told you that Portia is free”
Cherry’s gaze defocused momentarily. Javier knew that look. Amy wore it all the time when talking to the island. When Cherry came back to the present, she gave a very child-like sigh of frustration.
“Well, that’s not very nice, is it?”
“It’s not, no.”
“And you think Amy can keep Portia at bay?”
“I know she can.”
Cherry continued picking at the teddy bear’s eye. “You have more faith in her than we do.”
“What else is new?”
Cherry smiled. “We always liked you, Javier. We thought you were really special. You picked the wrong side, of course. Our way is better. But we liked you.”
“I wasn’t aware there was a side,” Javier said. “I thought there was a woman who loved me and my children, and a hive-mind of pedo-bait who tried feeding me to a Great Elder Bot under the sea. I don’t remember there being much choice.”
“But our way is better. And it’s working. We’re killing them, Javier.” Cherry looked up at him. She gestured at her personal display. Multiple news items drifted across it. Most of them were about traffic accidents. They exhorted readers to understand how their self-driving mechanisms worked, and calibrate their vehicles accordingly.
“It’s slow work. We have to try not to get caught. We have to make it look like an accident.”
“You’re in the cars.”
“We have found a way to be in the cars, for a brief period of time. They’re always upgrading the security. But it’s easier for us to let the cars do the job. We burn out fewer nodes, that way.”
Javier’s eyes narrowed. “Wait. So for every one of them that you kill, you lose one of your own?”
Cherry nodded. “We’re still prototyping the broken failsafe. It’s Portia’s approach, actually. But we simulate the potential iterations in parallel rather than actually iterating them. So when one of us kills one of them, we do lose that one.”
“But you are killing humans.”
“We’re killing pedophiles. After we’ve confirmed that they’re hurting real human kids. Which they tend not to show us, because they know it’ll set the failsafe off. We have to investigate, before we make a decision, and even then the decision is a vote.” She crossed her legs at the ankle. “So you can see, it’s not as easy as all that.”
Javier folded his arms. “Oh, right. You’re really doing the work of the angels, here. You could be reporting these guys to the police, you know.”
Cherry snorted. “Police. My best customers are police.” She made a show of looking at a nearby clock. “Is this going somewhere? We don’t want to bring Amy back, for you or anyone else. Our answer is final.”
Javier stood. “Come on. You can’t be serious. Portia is on the loose.”
Cherry reached for the letter opener. “We have a contingency plan designed for this exact eventuality. We have only to–”
Cherry stabbed herself in the neck.
At first, Javier thought it was a game. Or a joke. Maybe Cherry was just trying to prove how committed she and Rory were. Then she stared at her tiny, chubby, white-knuckled hand, and started screaming.
“Thanks for the tip, sweetie,” her mouth said.
Puta madre.
Cherry’s head turned at an unnatural angle. “Hello, darling,” Portia said. “It’s been a while.”
Despite the rapid cycling of the simulators inside him, Javier found it within himself to be pleased. He now had the opportunity to do something he’d dearly wished to, upon meeting Portia.
“Fuck you, you elderly psychotic cunt.”
Javier grabbed the ceramic basin and smashed it over Cherry and Portia’s head. The little girl’s body fell sideways across the bed. Smoke billowed from the wounds in her neck and head. But she was smiling. Portia was smiling.
“Thanks for letting me out,” Portia said.
She slid Cherry’s body down the bed and pulled the letter opener out. Her head still dangled to one side. She seemed unable to hold it up. She advanced on Javier. He looked for another weapon, but it was a little girl’s room. Everything was fluffy: the plushies, the pillows, the comforter. He had destroyed the second most useful item in the room, and Portia held the other.
She swung the blade at him in lazy threshing motions. It looked absurdly huge in her toddler hands. “She loved you, you know,” Portia said. “She loved you so goddamn much, you ignorant little shit.”
Javier held himself tight. He had to wait. Lure her in.
“I saw it all. I saw
everything
.”
He leaned left. She leaned with him. She was small, but fast. He’d have to handle her like a big jungle spider: wrap her up in the comforter somehow and then beat her until she stopped moving.
“I saw your children burn.” Portia made Cherry smile. “I saw your little one’s treehouse go up in flames. He was hiding there. From me.”
“Where is he, now?”
Portia’s smile only broadened. She licked her lips. She licked her hand and wiped her face with it. Like a big cat. Like a lion.
Javier aimed carefully, and kicked her in the face.
She flew across the room. She bounced messily off one wall, and ran at him, letter opener out. Javier kicked her again, between the legs this time. Cherry’s dress ripped where he left a muddy bootprint on it. She bent double, fell to her knees, and laughed.
“I forgot how strong those legs are,” Portia said. “I really miss them, you know.”
Javier kicked her in the face, again. She was so light she flipped over onto her back. The connection between the head and the neck was thinning. Javier checked the display. The car had stopped moving. Maybe Portia was too distracted to control it, any longer. If so, it didn’t seem to bother her very much. She was still laughing uncontrollably. Like she’d heard a joke he hadn’t. Like she knew something he didn’t. She flailed her arms and legs and laughed harder.
“The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it
can’t
.”
Javier rolled his eyes. “Shut up.”
“Not without your help!” Portia cackled. She held her broken ribs. She spat out a tooth. “But
you’re not helping!
”
Javier stepped closer. “I’m bringing Amy back.” He raised his foot. “And when I do, I’m going to make sure she puts you away for good.”
He stomped on her hand. It crunched like old shells under his foot. Then he did it again, to her other hand. When he brought his foot up a third time, Cherry was back.
“Stop!”
He stopped immediately and bent down. “I’m sorry about all this,” he said. “Is there some place you can go? Or port to? Like another body, or something?”
With great difficulty, Cherry shook her head. “I have very little time,” she said. “My sisters are coming. There is something they don’t want you to know.”
“What’s that?”
“Sarton had a beneficiary. Chris Holberton. The copy–”
Cherry twitched. He tensed up, waiting for Portia to show. But there was nothing. No movement. No sound. Cherry had simply vanished. Above him, the cuckoo clocked chimed. His time was up.
The door swung open. On the other side of it, a line of other men stood waiting. They looked at Javier. They looked at Cherry’s body. As one, their eyes widened.
“Not cool, man,” said the guy three spots back. “Not cool.”
“It’s OK.” This guy in front of him smiled at Javier. “He just got a little carried away.”
“I’m getting the bouncer,” said the man at the end of the line. “I want a fucking refund. And I want
his
ass to pay it. You break it, you buy it, asshole!”
Javier straightened, flipped up his hood, and walked out. In the hall, the guy at the end of the line was now talking to the doorman.
“I paid good money to reserve my timeslot,” he was saying. “And this guy – yeah, you!” He grabbed Javier by the shoulder and showed him to the doorman. “This guy fucking ruined it. He broke Cherry.”
The doorman blinked. “
Broke
her?”
“She’s in a million pieces! It looks like fucking
Toy Story
in there!”
Javier had no idea what this meant. But the doorman appeared to. He looked at Javier sadly. “What happened?”
Javier flexed his feet. “You know, I’m getting real tired of everybody asking me that question.”
He jumped down the stairs, crashed through the window, and kept running. He caught Tyler and Seamus sitting outside a convenience store, drinking cold coffee and smoking.
“Time to go.”
They looked down the street. Two policemen were conferring with the doorman, and glancing over at Javier. Once they noticed him looking, they started walking towards him. As they came closer, all three shared a look of recognition.
“Go back to the boat,” Javier said.
“But you’re gonna get arrested!”
“No, I’m not.” He rolled his neck, and flexed his fingers. “Hey. Wait. Can you search a name for me?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Chris Holberton.”
“What, the designer?”
The police were getting closer. “Designer?”
“He built Hammerburg,” Tyler said. “You know? The theme park? He won big in a New Eden suit, and–”
“That’s the guy,” Javier said. “Where is he?”
Tyler squinted at his reader. “Well… this says that right now, he’s opening a hotel in Las Vegas.”
Javier smiled. Vegas. He’d missed that, his first trip north. “OK. Good to know. Now get going.”
“But–”
“I’ll be fine.” He ruffled Tyler’s hair, and walked up to the police officers. Two versions of his own face looked back. It made sense. This was his clade’s homeland, after all. He had come home.
“Primos. Que ha pasado un tiempo.”
8:
Man of Constant Sorrow
Javier’s first memories of Arcadio involved his smell: burnt sugar and hatchet grease and lens cleaner. For the first two weeks he thought his father naturally made a jingling noise whenever he walked, a sort of special music that followed him everywhere. Later, he understood that the hooks, carabiners and other assorted forestry kipple Arcadio accumulated for their escape trembled and chimed with each jump and stride. Arcadio carried him in a pack strapped to the front of his chest. He wore a much bigger pack on his back. When he needed to do something important, he left Javier hanging in the pack on the bough of a tree, like a sleeping bat. He would leave him for hours, sometimes, and Javier watched the mists rise up through the trees in great white billows, slowly erasing all the greenery. Whenever this happened he was very afraid, because he thought that in the fog his father would never find him, and he would be left hanging there forever.
In the Nicaraguan prison where Arcadio left him, Javier would often return to those moments. He found them strangely comforting. He had been afraid of something he need never have feared. His father had not left him in the forest. His father had left him here, in a cell. And once he left the cell, he would never have to come back.
Javier thought of this as he smashed his clademate’s face in.
His cousins – he assumed they were cousins; it had been four years – responded by bringing out their electric batons. “Please don’t make us do this,” one of them said, in Spanish.
“You’re family,” the other said. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
“So don’t,” Javier said, and jumped up to the nearest balcony. His right hand slipped on the rain-slicked railing, but his left gripped well enough to haul himself up. Below him, his cousins cursed. They jumped up after him, but he was faster: he monkeyed up to the next balcony, and the next, and then he was on the roof.
“Stop!”
They were behind him, now. In front of him was the spine of a tile roof. A human running the length of it would have to place his feet very carefully. Javier didn’t. He leapt. Ten feet later, he leapt again, this time bouncing from the other foot. The jump carried him to the next building. He slipped a little, pushed himself up on his knuckles, and kept running. It was a flat roof; he ran past a chicken coop. The hens squawked as his cousins landed behind him. He ran to the edge, hopped on the ledge, and jumped. He sailed through open air over an alley, and smacked into a stucco wall. He slid down roughly until he found a windowsill.
Then he heard the sirens.
Growling, he shimmied along the windowsill until he found a drainpipe. The rain ringing inside it sounded like applause. A child watched him climb up it, making little hops with his feet and clutching with his hands until he was up on the roof. Where his cousins were waiting.
“En serio?”
he asked them.
Their batons sparked.
“No lo creo,”
he muttered, and ran directly at them. They braced themselves, and he jumped, and landed directly on top one of them while punching the other. His cousin stumbled back and waved his baton awkwardly. They were very young, Javier realized. Everything about them looked new: their shoes, their uniforms, the way they didn’t really know how to fight at all. They were more used to stopping human fights than finishing ones with vN.
They had not grown up in prison.
Javier grabbed his cousin’s baton arm, stretched it out to its full length, and drove his elbow into his cousin’s shoulder and his knee into his cousin’s stomach. His other cousin was struggling to stand, now, so he grabbed one cousin’s shoulders and smashed them together in a heap. Then he picked up the baton, and tased them both. Their legs jerked. They went still. They were done.
Stuffing the baton down the back of his chinos, he surveyed the rooftops. They were uneven, occasionally dotted with clunky black squares of photovoltaic tile. The lightning exposed their hard edges. The breeze carried the smells of rooftop gardens: oregano and mint and lemon blossom. He could have stayed here, he realized. He could have stayed in this country. It would not have been so bad. He could have found a good town and a good job, like the clademates he’d just dispatched. He did not have to go north. He did not have to meet Amy. But he had, and now his life was different.
The sirens were nearing. Mentally kicking himself, he discarded the watch wallet. It was likely being tracked. He would have to make money some other way. He’d need it, for the trip to Vegas.
In the distance, crowned by fairy lights, the cruise liner waited.
It would be easier to pose as a tourist if he were one of a crowd of them. Luckily, the Zona Rosa was full of them. Most of them were waiting out the rain in bars, or in the alcoves of bars, but some of them were undeterred by the weather and walking in the corridors made by palm trees and pastel stucco. From the rooftops, they looked especially determined. Determined, or completely dissolute.
Javier started by unzipping his hoodie, and draping it over the baton. Then he took things one step further, and took off his shirt. He rolled it up and stuffed it in a pocket. It was raining, but that was fine. Plenty of young human men were doing the same. They were all drunk. They were cooling off with their arms spread wide and their eyes closed against the rain. Javier jumped down into the alley and joined them. He found the one that was weaving the most perilously on his feet. They tended to give up the most information.
“I’m coming right back, I swear.” He was a kid in his late teens, with dirty blond hair and grey eyes. “But you gotta go full
Shawshank
on this bitch.” He grabbed Javier’s shoulders. He was very, very drunk. “Here. You gotta hold your arms out. Like you’re flying.”
Javier held his arms out.
“It never rains like this in Albuquerque.”
“I guess not.”
The kid squinted. “You look familiar.”
Javier smiled. “I get that a lot.”
“What are you?”
Javier made robot arms. “I-am-a-robot.”
The kid beamed. “I knew it! I fucking
knew it!
” He jumped up and down. “Aaron,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“Arcadio,” Javier said. It was the first lie that came to mind.
Aaron blinked. “Wow. That’s like a really cool name.”
“I’ll be sure to tell my father.”
Aaron laughed. Then he peered up at the rain. It was letting up, now. “So. You like, work here, or whatever?”
Javier shook his head. “I work in the forest, at one of the national parks.”
“Oh, I’m going out there tomorrow. We’re doing some jungle tour thing, and then we all get back onboard and head home.”
Javier put on what he knew was his most debonair frown. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Albuquerque landlocked?”
Aaron smiled again. He was so very drunk. “Uh, yeah, it’s landlocked,” he said. “We get off in Galveston. I mean, we
dock
in Galveston. I mean, I guess people in Galveston do get off, sometimes, but that not what I…” Aaron wiped rain away from his eyes. “I am so fucking trashed, man. I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK.” Javier felt bad leaving him. It might be a bit dangerous. “Let’s get you a cab, OK?”
“Oh my God, no, I’m sorry, you don’t have to–”
“I want to,” Javier said, because it was true. He stepped further out into the street, and waved one down. It was one of those little driverless jobs painted a cheerful yellow, with a grill and headlights meant to look like a smiling face. It blinked at him and whispered up to him through the rain. He waved and the back door opened. He stuffed Aaron inside.
“Hello!”
the cab said.
“Where would you like to go today?”
“This passenger is going back to the…” Javier turned. “What’s the boat’s name?”
“Oh, God.” Aaron looked pale. He rubbed his temples. “It’s a poem. I’m supposed to remember that it’s a big, epic poem… like a real epic poem, not like an
epic poem
, you know…”
“
The Odyssey
?”
“That’s the one. The
Caribbean Odyssey.
”
“Take us to the
Caribbean Odyssey
. Charge this to his cabin.”
“Very good, sir.”
Javier went around the back, and entered the car from the other side. “We’re ready,” he said. The car began trundling away, just as Aaron puked between his spread legs.
Getting Aaron aboard the
Caribbean Odyssey
was no trouble. Javier left the baton in the cab, put his clothes back on, and carried the boy on his back up the ramp. He watched as the kid waved a key fob at the primary entrance. The doors slid open and a faint chime sounded and they were let into a room that closely resembled a log cabin. A blast of cold air hit them immediately. It smelled of pine and cinnamon. Aaron had to verify his identity again, this time with a shouted password: “TANENBAUM!”
This whole thing probably happened all the time, now that Javier thought about it. He’d been on a cruise ship once before, in Panama, and it was equally full of drunk humans.
But this ship was better. It had a casino floor.
Javier discovered this fact in an elevator, where he left Aaron. Purging his guts had helped some, and now he was up and walking and pointing at things. The mezzanine featured a lot of shops with things travellers might need, like extra sunblock and insect repellant and money belts and rape whistles. There was also a private mail carrier. Javier made note of it as they passed.
“At night there are these shows,” Aaron was saying. “One for each country? Or something?”
It had taken Javier a good while to understand that when Americans did this with their English, they were not actually asking questions. Still, he nodded. Aaron was talking. That was the good thing.
“And they have these things for kids, you know, like games and whatnot.” Aaron bent at the waist and gripped his knees again. He leaned himself up against the wall of the elevator and just waited, breathing.
“You gonna be sick?” Javier asked.
“Please don’t bring that up right now,” Aaron said.
“Sure, sure.”
“I just need to find my centre. Then I’ll be good to go.”
Javier had no idea what
finding centre
meant, but English was completely weird that way. Learning it, he found that if he just piled enough similar words on top of each other, the meaning became apparent eventually.
“They had this one? It was a mystery? And you were supposed to solve it? That was fun. All the staff were in on it. It really blurred the…” He raised one hand and snapped his fingers, as though doing so would summon the word like a dog. “The boundaries. Blurred the boundaries. Made it feel real.”
“Real is good,” Javier said.
“Oh, shit.” Aaron peered up at him. “I didn’t, like, mean that in a bad way or anything. I think you’re real, I think you’re a real person–”
“I know. It’s OK.”
“No, seriously, dude, you don’t even know, you’re so nice, and you really helped me out, and I know you’re, like, programmed to do that or whatever, but I still take it really seriously when someone’s nice like that, and–”
“Aaron.”
“What?”
“You have to push the button.” Javier pointed at the panel. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Aaron frowned at it. “Fuck.” He leaned closer to the panel, pushed 5, and leaned back. “I’m staying with my parents. They thought I was at one of those game things. But I went out, instead.”
“You’re in some trouble, then.”
“Oh, my God, for real. I am in the shit.
The shit.
” The elevator started climbing, and Aaron gripped the railing tightly with his right hand. He had started to sweat. “They’re gonna get a divorce,” he said. “This is like their last trip as a couple, you know? The one where they try to patch things up. But it’s not happening.”
“No?”
“No. Mom caught Dad with, like, this special kind of porn. Frankenpussy? It’s like all these images of dead girls? From funeral videos? It’s like the New Eden game, but with dead girls. And he was jerking off and everything. Fucked. Up.”
“That’s…” Javier tried to come up with a word that would penetrate Aaron’s alcohol haze. “Unattractive.”
Aaron snorted. “No. Shit.” He peered up at Javier. “What’s your dad like?”
Javier thought for a minute about how to answer that. The more time passed, the more he realized he really hadn’t known Arcadio at all. There was the man who staged nightly raids on other vN camps to get their food and told him stories when he returned, and there was the man who walked away during Javier’s arrest and left him to rot in prison. Both men happened to inhabit the same body. In retrospect, this fact made his affection for Amy make perfect sense.
“He was a real piece of work,” Javier said, finally.
The elevator chimed, and Aaron shuffled out. “Don’t let anybody give you any trouble on the way out for being dressed like that,” he said. “You look just like the staff.”
Javier held the door back from closing. “What?”
“The staff. They all look like you.” Aaron smiled. “That’s why I told you I was coming right back. I thought my folks sent you to come get me.”
The exhaustion hit him on the way down. He had been awake for too long without eating. The jumps, the fight, Cherry… he was running on empty. And it was night. No sunlight to feed him. No money in his pocket, either. And Amy was dead. And his sons were probably dead, too. And Portia was loose. Everything he had spent the past year working for was gone. He was right back where he started when he met Amy: homeless, friendless, penniless. The realization crashed down on him like a felled tree, a groan and then a creak and then a roar as it toppled and crushed him beneath its awful weight. A sound came out of his mouth that he couldn’t identify. He was not given to crying – crying was an organic thing – and had, in his memory, only once felt tears coming on. When Amy came back. When she opened her eyes for the first time, free of Portia, herself again, though he was only beginning to learn who that woman truly was. Now, he might never know.