“Sure it is.” He looked down at himself. “Just make sure you bring all the important stuff back in working order.”
Amy stood. “No. I’m not going to do this. I won’t. I can’t.”
Javier stood up, too. He folded his arms. “Amy, are you a repli
can
, or a repli
can’t?”
She levelled him with a stern glare. “You’re not doing yourself any favours, Javier.”
Amy gestured at the furthest wall and a portion of it slid away. She stepped out into the sunlight. Dawn was just growing into day. He followed her under the heliotropics, into the jungle of black-on-black. The trees bent back subtly to allow her more light. Lately their island was small. It held only their house within a thicket of black trees, and the single diamond tree that had always stood beside it. That tree was the first thing Amy had raised from the body of the massive group of vN that once lived beneath the sea. It was only with their combined processing power that she’d been able to rid herself of Portia, a partition of whom she had internalized when the old bitch tried to kidnap her. Amy accessed that power each time she redesigned the island. Now Javier wanted it, to redesign himself.
Amy splashed into the water and started walking across it. Behind her, Javier rolled his eyes. She always did her Jesus walk when she was feeling particularly self-righteous. He waded in after her. Beneath their feet, a membrane of the island’s flesh stretched taut between their home and the superstructure directly behind it. Javier kept his eyes on the water. But he didn’t only look down, he looked back, back to their little house alone on the water and the tree that stood beside it. No matter the formation of the islands, it was always at the very front: a perfect target.
Amy had designed their archipelago like a leaf: a single broad spine with multiple arterials of increasing length branching away from it, and little buds of space on the edges of each. Each bud featured structures of varying degrees of sophistication. Some of them were flat-pack, shipped in piece by piece or printed off by the seasteaders in exchange for services that were none of Javier’s business. New arrivals got whatever Amy shaped for them, but eventually they always wanted something of their own fashioning: teetering stacks of rusting containers; spiky tents of solar silk whose logos changed colour as the sun passed overhead; hollow pendulums as delicate as dandelion seeds, swaying from eldritch carbon fibre trees. Walking past them meant striding through glassy chiming; the islanders got pretty competitive about homemade lawn ornaments. The current meme was a unicorn weathervane whose hooves raced when the wind blew. Last month, it was sundials. It reminded Javier of a giant floating trailer park. The whole thing was roughly the size of a Dubai hotel. Amy ran five of them.
Javier followed her out of the water, to the spine of the leaf. vN of almost all clades used it like a thoroughfare. Botflies followed most of them, perched on their shoulders or hovering over their heads. They paused, regarded Amy, and zoomed away. As though having heard a signal, Xavier dropped out of a tree and bounded up to Amy. He was looking about nine or ten years old, these days. He threw his arms around Amy’s waist. She threw her head back and laughed at something he said. The laugh opened her face, and Javier glimpsed the little girl Amy must have been only a year ago.
A single jump caught him up to them. Xavier peered up at him and squinted.
“¿Pelotearíais?”
“Callate tu boca.”
Amy glanced at both of them. “Be nice.”
She took hold of Xavier’s hand and led him down the causeway. Xavier swung her arm as they walked. He waved at the botflies with his free hand.
“Don’t encourage them,” Amy said.
“I’m just saying hello.” The boy continued waving. “It’s not like I have my own
series
.”
“Matteo and Ricci are making money for their baby,” Javier said. “You know that.”
“So? Someday
I’m
going to iterate a baby. Shouldn’t I start saving up?”
“You can start making money when you’re full-grown. You chose to stay a kid, so you have to play by kid rules.”
Xavier shook Amy’s hand in his. “
She
didn’t. She was still little when she ate Portia.”
Amy paused. Her face remained blank. A stranger would have assumed she was simply staring into the island’s middle distance, surveying the black trees and listening to the thick hum of botflies. She caught him looking at her, and gave him a brittle smile over Xavier’s head. Then she rearranged her features, softened her smile, and knelt.
“Attacking Portia was a mistake. I did it because I was angry at her for hurting my mother, and because I was scared that she was really going to do permanent damage.”
“But she
was
doing permanent damage. I’ve seen the clip.”
Amy shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her mouth was a thin, flat line. “I don’t want you watching that again.”
“I stopped when the failsafe warning came up–”
“Good. But I still don’t want you to watch it again. Ever.”
Xavier gesticulated. Javier sometimes wondered if his designers had worked from some stereotype about Latinos talking with their hands. He couldn’t seem to quit doing it, and neither could any of his iterations. “But you were so badass!”
“I was not–”
“Yeah, you were,” Javier said, quietly.
Their eyes met. Xavier glanced between them. He tracked the line of their gaze. Amy broke it first. She turned to Xavier and held his hands.
“Well, I certainly wasn’t very smart. I bit off way more than I could chew.”
His youngest son had the decency to hold in his giggles for approximately three seconds before snerking through his nose. Amy shut her eyes and pursed her lips.
“I just said that aloud, didn’t I?”
“Yup!” Xavier punctuated his sentence with a five-foot standing jump. The kid was good, probably better than his older brothers. He landed like a superhero, a classic three-point pose, one knee and one fist plunging down into the black earth below. It was his favourite pose. He looked up at them, grinning. “You’re wrong,” he said.
Amy stood up and crossed her arms. “Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really. It was a good thing you ate Portia. If you hadn’t, you’d never have met Dad.”
Oh, his son was very good. Amy looked a little stunned. Her mouth kept opening and closing. She obviously had no idea what to say. What a brilliant little tactician Javier had iterated. Thirteen was apparently his lucky number.
“And if you never met Dad, I’d have been born in prison.” Xavier blinked at him, all wide-eyed innocence. “Right, Dad?”
“Es verdad, mijo.”
“So it’s really good that you ate her. Otherwise I wouldn’t even be here.”
Q-E-motherfucking-D, Javier wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead he caught his son’s eye and winked. His son winked back.
“Thank you for reminding me,” Amy said. “And now, let me remind you of something: you’re not going near the boat, today.”
Xavier’s mouth fell open. “Oh, come
on
…”
“No humans. Period.”
“But–”
“
This isn’t a discussion. The island will tell me if you even come close, so don’t bother.
”
The boy looked at Javier. Javier shook his head softly. The boy rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna go work on my treehouse, now.” He peeled away from them and jogged his way into a jump.
“Be careful…” Amy trailed off. The boy was already gone, leap-frogging over other vN and sailing through swarms of botflies. They watched him grow smaller as he jumped further and further away.
“Do you think he remembers?” Amy asked. “When I tried to eat him?”
“When
Portia
tried to eat him.” Javier slid an arm around her waist. “And no, I don’t. He was already bluescreened by then. He took a few thousand volts on that fence before Portia even touched him. And it was a couple of chimps who put him there, not you. Not her, I mean.” He squeezed her to him and kissed her scalp. “Stop doing this. I mean it.”
“But what if he’s watched it?” Amy turned to him. “The clip is out there. Just like the one of me attacking her. If he was curious enough to look for one, he’s probably seen the other.”
“Then he’s seen you rescue him, too.”
Amy’s affect hardened. Her lips firmed. “They never show that part.”
“Hey.
Querida.
” Javier tilted her chin up so she had to look him in the eye. In the daylight her eyes were the colour of wreckage, of seaglass, hard and bright and old. “We’ve been over this. Even if he does remember it, he’s let it go. We’ve all let it go.”
Amy smiled ruefully. “The chimps haven’t.”
The chimps were the real reason the island was so popular. Many of the youngest islanders had never met a human being. Their parents came here to iterate and either stayed on or left to rejoin the outside world. Another shipment was coming today.
“Do you think we’ll see any of yours?”
They were surveying the portion of the island Amy called “The Veldt.” Javier had no idea what a “veldt” was. He assumed it was a fancy word for “orphanage.” It comprised two of the island’s arteries. It looked like a forest out of fairy tales: the trees were thick and tall, with broad leaves and boughs like curled fingers. The waters were shallow; you could actually touch bottom. As Javier watched, a shimmering exoskeletal crab scuttled its way out of the water, blinked once at him with a series of red LEDs, and went along its way. It was not alone. A series of non-networked camel-bots and prototype service ani-mechs ranged the area, ready to play fetch or give the kids a ride or just lie down with them at night. It was safe enough for the little ones to wander freely. At least, Javier assumed so. He rarely saw them, underneath the fogbank.
“You know, it doesn’t have to be this thick. You could thin it out, a little bit.”
Amy shook her head. “It’s the easiest way to keep the flies blind. Plus it’s flammable. Extra secure. All I have to do is raise the temperature.”
“It’s
flammable?
”
Amy nodded. “The acetonitrile component is.” She waved a hand through the fog. “This stuff used to be a stabilizing agent in nuclear warheads. A version of it, anyway. It took a while for me to train the trees to pump it out, but less time than it took the humans at Los Alamos.”
He frowned. “So if you raise the temperature, you’ll lose this part of the island?”
She nodded, then appeared to reconsider. “We’d lose anything
organic
,” she said. “The mist only burns for a few seconds. And the kids wouldn’t feel anything. Plus, their skin would grow back.”
He didn’t like the way she wouldn’t meet his eye. “But it would totally fuck up a human being, right?”
She straightened and met his gaze head-on. “Humans aren’t allowed here. They have no business, here. All that lives on this part of the island is a bunch of little kids.” She folded her arms. “If any humans do show up, they’re trespassing. The fogbank is no different from an electric fence. And it’s a whole lot prettier.”
Javier looked at the trees wreathed in weapons-grade mist. He had helped her with those trees. Sketched them out with his finger on her back, describing the best surfaces for gripping. His clade was originally intended for work in rainforests. He knew trees. He just had no idea how Amy was really planning to use them. She hadn’t really mentioned that part.
“Javier?”
He rewound. “Oh. Yeah. The shipment. I think Matteo and Ricci stopped looking, once the munchkin came along.” He cupped both hands around his mouth.
“José!”
Giggles drifted through the fog. Javier could just make out shapes moving in the trees.
“José! ¡Viene acquí!”
His grandson dropped out of a tree and onto his back. His grip was true and flawless, but Javier grabbed him under the knees anyway just to be sure.
“Who’s there?” He twisted and turned, trying to see the child on his back. “Who’s got me? Is it a monkey?”
His grandson giggled and hugged him around the neck.
“It’s a big spider, isn’t it? Help!
Help!
”
The laughs grew bigger. His iterations all had the same laugh; as it turned out, they’d succeeded in passing it down.
“I guess I’d better crush it! If I flop down on the ground and roll around, it’ll go
squish
!” He knelt on the ground. “Okay, I’m rolling around! I’m killing this bug!”
“¡Abuelito, no!”
“Who’s that? Who’s talking?”
“It’s me!” José hugged him hard.
“Oh, good, it’s you. You scared me.” Javier let his grandson back down to the ground. “You’ve gotten bigger.”
José nodded emphatically. “I eat four times a day, now. Not just three.”
“Good for you. And your father?”
“Which one?”
Javier shrugged. “Both. How are they?”
His grandson returned the shrug. “They told me to play in here today. All day.”
“Because of the shipment?”
“Yeah.” José turned to Amy. “You get to go on the boat, right?”
Amy crouched on the ground. “Yes, I do.”
“Can I come?”
Amy shook her head. “Nope.”
“How come?”
Amy brushed imaginary dust from the child’s hair. He looked about three years old, but was really about four or five months. Unlike most of the other children, he wore a complete set of clothes: shorts, t-shirt, even a little belt with a logo Javier didn’t recognize. Matteo and Ricci scored a lot of free toys and playwear, these days. They’d sold their lives to a content development agency that made the story of twin robots raising an exact replica of themselves available in the US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Korea. Women loved it. At least, organic women did. Javier had always encouraged his boys to get by on their looks whenever possible, but his twins had perfected the practise. They didn’t even have to fuck the humans, anymore, and they still made money.