vN: The First Machine Dynasty

by Madeline Ashby

  The first time he brought her here, she asked: "You're taking an artificial woman to an artificial lake?"

  "It wasn't always artificial," he had said. "We pitiful humans just improved it a little, with our primitive damming technologies."

  On that day, just like this one, Charlotte luxuriated in the sun. (Sunscreen had fast become the default accessory to their relationship.) She loved the night sky just as much, even during the peak power seasons when it glowed orange with light pollution. She loved hiding in fog and reaching out for the rain from the roof of their building. Charlotte couldn't fathom Amy's constant desire to stay inside – working on environments that would never exist – when there was so much outside, waiting to be explored. They fought about it, sometimes, in a completely logical and amicable vN way that nonetheless resulted in stalemates.

  Despite the impulsive nature of his decision, Jack had chosen exactly the right day to take off. Clear sky, no bugs save the botflies keeping an eye on the tourists, the clammy fog of winter a distant memory. Others had gotten the same idea: milling around under the shade trees behind Jack and Charlotte was a group of high school seniors attempting to grill a brunch of maple sausage and English muffins on a barbecue with a mostly empty solar cell. It involved a lot of snide laughter and cursing.

  The beach was also populated by other vN, both vagrants and min-wage workers standing patiently inside snack stalls. He could pick out the vagrants by the lumps under their skin; unlike the vN with enough money to buy the pre-fabbed food, they often resorted to consuming e-waste to survive. He watched one – with a rather bland square-jawed, broadshouldered shell – seated at a picnic table, picking errant pieces of plastic from his skin and saving them carefully in a colourful pile between his legs. Jack watched him scoop the pieces into his palm and transfer them to a zippered pouch inside his shirt. He would probably feed them to depository later and earn some cash.

  "It's good they have those machines, now." Jack glanced over to find that Charlotte was looking at the vagrant vN as well. She closed her eyes for a moment, then turned away to hug her knees. "We used to have to actually ask for the money, sometimes."

  "We?"

  Charlotte shrugged. "Just vN in general."

  Jack nodded. "If it's still this nice tonight, I was thinking we'd take Amy to Lake Merritt after the graduation."

  Charlotte winced. "With all the quake tourists?"

  "It's either that or the zoo."

  "I can't stand the–"

  "Fuck!"

  Jack twisted to look at the group of teens. A boy wearing a Raiders jersey staggered away from a picnic table beside the grill, clutching his hand. A cheap-looking knife and a halfskinned pineapple stood abandoned on the table, and when the kid turned Jack saw blood. He checked: Charlotte kept her eyes pinned to the grains of sand welling up between her toes, where she wouldn't see the injury or the pain it had inflicted; the vagrant vN hunched at his own picnic table, head hidden in his arms; the vN at the snack counter had shut their eyes.

  "I'll see how bad it is," Jack said, and pushed himself up off the beach.

  "I could help," Charlotte said. "My clade has a healthcare plug-in."

  "Yeah, a deactivated healthcare plug-in," Jack said. "No wife of mine is shorting out because some kid can't use a knife."

  He jogged over to the kids at the grill. They had it mostly covered; the kid with the cut hand had immersed it in a cooler full of ice while his friends rifled their bags for skin glue. Botflies hovered over the kid; one settled on his shoulder and blinked greenly at him before alighting on the cooler itself. The kid held up his hand, pink now with diluted blood, and the fly blinked again.

  "You OK?" Jack asked.

  The kid turned. "I think so." He held out his hand. "Does it look bad?"

  Jack looked. The kid had sliced into his fingers pretty deep; probably deep enough to chatter a doctor about it, but the glue would do the job in the meantime. "You're fine," he said. "Next time, slice the bottom off the pineapple before you trim the sides. That way you'll have a stable base."

  The kid nodded. He returned his hand to the cooler. He looked over at Charlotte's hourglass shape, still sitting patiently on the beach. "Does she belong to you?"

  Jack had corrected others on the matter of his relationship so many times that he could now summarize it in a single line: "She belongs with me, not to me."

  "Sorry." The kid tried smiling. "I just wish they could, you know, help with this kind of thing."

  "They help us with all kinds of things."

  The kid gestured at his face with his good hand. Jack couldn't tell if the pink of his skin was sunshine or embarrassment. The kid said, "What's it like when you cut yourself shaving? Does she freak out?"

  "I don't cut myself shaving, any more," Jack lied. "I'm not a fucking amateur."

  They were washing off the beach in the shower together when a call came from Amy's school. It was her principal. Amy was in trouble, and her principal wanted a meeting.

  "I'm sorry, but what did she do?" Jack watched the water meter under the showerhead slowly dialled into the red zone as their allotment swirled down the drain.

  "She was in a spitting contest," Mrs Lindsay said, as though that explained everything. "She left a hole in the flooring, and I expect you to pay for the damage."

  "Mrs Lindsay, if this is your idea of an end-of-term joke, it's not funny. My daughter is a humanoid, not a xenomorph."

  "Pardon me? A what, now?"

  "Whatever. We'll be there soon."

  Jack and Charlotte had researched schools all over the city before finally selecting one where Amy might safely make human friends. They chose the one with the smallest classes and the youngest teachers and the best after-school programs. They conducted interviews and obtained references. They wanted her to grow up alongside organic children, to think of herself as a person first and a synthetic second. They showed Amy stories about vN actors, vN chefs, vN teachers and dancers and designers; they avoided news about expanding anti-vagrancy laws and the millions of angry, jobless humans replaced by synthetics. They hoped the world might be a different place for vN by the time she grew up. Things would harmonize, Jack thought, as they entered the schoolyard and made their way to the principal's office. His daughter would find her place, and she would be happy, and so would her own daughters. They just needed time.

  Jack heard himself explaining all of this to Mrs Lindsay after the door to the principal's office clicked resolutely shut behind him and Charlotte.

  "I understand that, Mr Peterson," Mrs Lindsay said. She was a small Indian woman who wore her black hair in a tight chignon and offset her rather plain suit with ornate enamel earrings in the shape of hummingbirds. "But the reality is that the lifestyle you have chosen for your daughter is having harmful side effects, and not just for school property."

  Jack turned to Charlotte. "How many pancakes did she eat this morning?"

  Charlotte shrugged. He was seeing a lot of that shrug today, and he didn't like it. "However many her diet said."

  "This is the diet that retards her growth, yes?"

  "It doesn't retard her growth, it gives her time–"

  "Mr Peterson, your daughter is going hungry."

  Mrs Lindsay laid her hands flat on her desk. Between her fingers, Jack saw a hot map of the school. It randomly leapt between classrooms, offering attendance stats and tiny windows of surveillance footage.

  Mrs Lindsay's gaze slid over to Charlotte, who met it blankly, then back to Jack.

  "I'm not certain why I need to explain this to you, but when vN children go hungry, their digestive fluids build up and permeate their saliva. That makes it corrosive, and very dangerous in an environment like this one."

  Jack sat up a little taller in the too-soft chair across from the desk. "I'm well aware of my wife and daughter's physiology, Mrs Lindsay. What I don't get is what gives you the right to tell me how to live in my own home. Amy is a smart, happy kid–"

  "No, she i
sn't, Mr Peterson."

  He uncrossed his legs. "Excuse me?"

  "Please don't feel badly about this. Children often hide these kinds of things from their parents. But Amy has no friends in her class. The friends she does have are teachers. She talks with them during the recess and gym periods."

  "Only because you won't allow her to participate!"

  "Accidents happen in those settings all the time, Mr Peterson. We can't risk her failsafe going off if a human child falls off the monkey bars and cracks his head open." Mrs Lindsay squeezed her eyes shut and took a moment before continuing. "We cannot fulfil your daughter's special needs and allow the other children to play normally."

  "Then don't. Keep a closer eye on the organics, and let Amy play. It's not her fault if one of the monitors can't stop a fight fast enough."

  "That's true. It's not her fault. But it is definitely her problem." Again, Mrs Lindsay glanced at Charlotte. When Charlotte said nothing, Mrs Lindsay raised her hands in a conciliatory manner. "I'm going to recommend that we allow Amy to skip a few grades. Frankly, I was never fully convinced that she should start school in kindergarten. She is not a kindergartener, and has not been one for years."

  Jack looked at Charlotte, expecting backup without knowing why. His wife had voiced the exact same concerns, back when they made this choice. Now he wondered how much of their choice it had been. Maybe Charlotte was just going along with it, waiting for him to see her brand of reason. He suddenly felt very alone in the room.

  "So, what if we don't skip her ahead, or grow her bigger, you won't let her come back next year?"

  "Please don't treat this conversation as a hostage negotiation, Mr Peterson. This is an inclusive school, and we simply want it to be a safe place for all our students, organic and synthetic." She steepled her delicate fingers. "But it's because this school operates from that ethic that I would be forced to report you to certain authorities if I found you unusually defensive about keeping your daughter prepubescent in appearance."

  Fear opened up a void inside him. He knew why other men kept their synthetic little girls so little. He wasn't one of them. But Mrs Lindsay had the power to make the pedo squad think he was, and that kind of thing didn't just leave your record, even if it was only a simple search for the wrong kind of pornography. It could lose him his next job, and the one after that. He thought of the vagrant vN, their skin bulbous with trash, like serfs of the Dark Ages afflicted with plague.

  Beside him, Charlotte stood. "I think we'll be taking Amy home now," she said. Somehow, Jack stood with her. He wandered toward the door. Behind him, he heard Charlotte ask: "How old were you when you reached your full size?"

  "A year," Mrs Lindsay said.

  Back at home, they ordered delivery from the nearest Electric Sheep location. Amy wanted to go in and sit down to eat like a grown-up, but the Sheep was a meat market. At least, their local was. Maybe the other franchise locations were different. But the last thing Jack wanted in this moment was for his daughter to watch organic men watching synthetic women. So he put his foot down, and Amy ordered a Folded Hands sandwich with Flexo Fries and an orange LCL punch, and hid in her room playing games until she was done. The meal itself was too big, far beyond her dietary limit, but she said nothing, perhaps having already guessed the things Mrs Lindsay had told them. Jack wondered, as he munched on his own potato version of the Flexo Fries, whether the principal had counseled her at all before meeting with him and Charlotte. Did they already have some sort of scheme going? Had she asked Amy to report anything unusual?

  Jack finished his fries, put his GO Box in the sink, and stretched out in his chair. He watched Charlotte watching the scroll-style display above the trick fireplace. He'd bought the place solely for that fireplace; it was one of the last units in the city to be built with one. In every dream house Amy designed there was now a fireplace, sometimes with a display over it, but most often with a real brushwork scroll or tapestry or painting. With Amy safe in her room, Charlotte had lifted the usual lim its from the feeds. Occasionally, the eye-shaped clockwork gear that indicated failsafe-triggering programming would pop up and the secondary limits kick in, delaying the signal and shuffling until something suitable was found. She flicked through the remaining content with one irritable, jerking finger.

  "What's wrong?" Jack asked.

  "Nothing."

  "It's not nothing. Something's bothering you. What is it?" He hunched forward and tried to catch her eye. "Is it because you were right, all this time? That we should have grown Amy more quickly?"

  Charlotte opened her mouth, then closed it. "No. That's not it."

  "Then does it have to do with your clade? I know you've been tracking them. Do you miss your mother?"

  Charlotte leveled him with a glare the likes of which he had never seen in a synthetic woman. It seemed to penetrate his every cell, as though she were watching him decay one picosecond at a time. She was silent for a full minute before whispering: "No."

  Jack swallowed. His wife's eyes had never seemed so pale before. They were like jagged pieces of sea glass bleached by the abuse of sun and ocean. Despite the ageless skin surrounding them, they looked terribly old. "We've never talked about her, Charlie. Maybe we should."

  His wife shook her head and returned to the feeds. "Nothing about Portia can be solved with conversation."

  "Don't shut down on me now, I want–"

  "Did you intend that pun, Jack? Or was it just a slip?"

  Recognizing a no-win scenario when he saw one, Jack stood up and left.

  • • • •

  In her room, Jack found Amy captaining a pirate ship and losing. A zombie virus had overtaken her crew, and she, the sole survivor, fired her limited weaponry from the crow'snest. Her little body swayed with the rocking of the simulated cruiser projected at her feet. She had run out of bullets for her blunderbuss, and now mimed loading the thing with gold doubloons straight from her pocket.

  "The gold melts too fast," she said, "but it leaves a nice big hole."

  Jack poked a finger through one of the miscreants' sucking chest wounds. The creature cast him an affronted glare. "I thought zombies were weakened by salt."

  "They are, but I lost my loyalty round, so my first mate rebelled and bought women instead of supplies."

  "You should have hired a better first mate. Now you'll have to find another one."

  Amy shook her head. "It's the ship I mind losing. I worked really hard on this one."

  Jack watched the zombies shambling over his shins. He thought about what Amy's principal had said. "You don't mind losing a friend?"

  "He isn't a friend, he's the game."

  "How can you tell?" Jack let a peg-legged zombie crawl over his hand. An undead parrot alit on his wedding ring and started pecking at it. Bright green feathers the size of rice grains molted away as its head bobbed. They dissipated into smoke in the time it took to blink his eyes. "I'm sure his programming is just as complex as yours."

  Amy rolled her eyes. "Dad, please. I know the difference between adapted and automatic."

  Jack nodded slowly. "Oh."

  Amy made a pincer gesture to freeze the game. "Are you trying to give me a talk about being in trouble? Or about being vN?"

  He closed his eyes briefly. "No, I'm not. You're a person just like anybody else, Amy. You know that."

  "And people get in trouble, sometimes."

  "Yes. People get into trouble, sometimes."

  Amy thawed the game. He watched her fight the zombies as nobly as she could, until they were crawling all over each other to climb the mast and attain her perch. She waited until she could see the pixels of their eyes, and then used an ancient ruby amulet won on her last quest. Jack recognized it from his many trips through her treasure chest. She had played for weeks to find it. The gleaming cabochon inside granted her power over flame. With its projection clutched delicately in her tiny fist, she held it to the in-game sun and watched the light refract red and hot on her enemies. Fire bl
azed within the stone's bloody depths. It ran down the red rays and caught and spread among the moaning hordes.

  They gibbered and screamed and jumped ship. But the damage was already done, and the loss total: the fire had spread to Amy, too, and had run down her sleeve onto the mainsail and mast. The ship was burning. She was going down with it.

  "Oh, Charlotte! Hello!"

  It was Liz, one of the other mothers. Her son Nate had attended the same daycare as Amy. The boy had nursed a crush on Amy all year and given her a special synthetic chocolate heart last Valentine's. Now he sat beside Amy in the front row, with the gold star students waiting onstage for kindergarten graduation to start, staring at her openly. Amy pretended not to notice.