vN: The First Machine Dynasty

by Madeline Ashby

  "It must be so nice to have a boy," Charlotte was saying. She had brightened since they got in the car. Jack suspected Amy's unexpected willingness to wear the pretty new graduation dress Charlotte picked out had something to do with it.

  Liz laughed. "You didn't have to potty-train him!"

  Gary, Liz's husband, looked Jack up and down. "You think this is it for you, Jack? No more?"

  Jack defaulted to his usual answer: "If Charlotte wants another, we'll have one."

  "Hey, that's pretty handy. No worries about accidents, right?"

  "Gary," Liz said in her scandalized voice. She used it on her husband a lot. "Amy is just like other kids."

  Liz was one of those really informed human women with a habit of sometimes sounding like a public service announcement. "Oh, there are Nate's grandparents." She gestured toward the door. "Are your parents coming, Jack?"

  "My parents won't be coming," Jack said. "I've pretty much always been a disappointment, if you know what I mean."

  "What, with a pretty lady like this on your arm?" Gary asked. "Come on, what father doesn't dream of a girl like Charlotte for his son?"

  Jack made a mental note never to let Amy play at Nate's house under Gary's sole supervision.

  "Oh, just ignore him," Liz said. "We have to go meet my mother, anyway. See you after!"

  Together, Jack and Charlotte watched them leave. They sat on folding chairs and sighed in unison, though for Charlotte it was a simple motion of her shoulders. Jack leaned back and looked up at the vaulted ceiling. It was a good school. He kept telling himself that. It was a good school. Better than most kids got. Better than the insane military shit he'd been subjected to after breaking curfew for the umpteenth time, that was for sure.

  "Hey." Charlotte slipped her cool hand into his. "It's my turn to ask you. What's wrong?"

  He squeezed her hand. "Just thinking about my dad," he said. "How stupid he is to be missing stuff like this."

  Charlotte smiled. "The important thing is that we found each other."

  "Damn straight." He stretched one arm over her shoulders and pulled her closer. "Have I ever told you how smart you are?"

  She shrugged. "All that graphene has to be good for something."

  He kissed the top of his wife's head. He watched his daughter on the stage: her swinging feet, her eager wave. Her bright smile hit him in the gut, as straight and sure as if she had reached over the heads of chattering parents and bored siblings to deliver a finishing blow.

  Amy's teacher, a willowy woman who wore her waistlength hair over a long denim dress, ascended the stage soon after that. She held the microphone with both hands in a white-knuckle grip. She swayed in place as though guided by some internal music. "Welcome to kindergarten graduation," she said in a thin, high voice. "This has been a very special year for all of us. We've learned a lot, and although we're sad to leave our class behind, we're excited for next year! On with the show!"

  With that, the kindergartners shuffled out of their seats and sang a song complete with hand motions (guided from offstage by their swaying teacher), then herded back to their little chairs (with the name tags affixed to the backs), and fidgeted through a "commencement address" offered by the principal. She was wearing the goofy robes of her alma mater. Then it was time for the diplomas to be handed out.

  "Amy Peterson," the teacher said, and Amy stood. She crossed the stage halfway, before pausing and squinting at someone standing among the other parents below the stage.

  "Mom?"

  A woman rose slowly to the stage. She wove unsteadily on her feet. Her clothes didn't quite fit; she'd buttoned her shirt wrong. She wore no shoes. Her skin bristled with unshed plastic. Otherwise, she was Charlotte's exact replica.

  "Come on, Amy." The vN's voice had the rough, hollow sound of real hunger. She held her arms out. "Give your granny a hug."

  "Please God, no." It was the first time in Jack's memory that he had heard his wife invoke any deity whatsoever.

  Onstage, Amy came no closer but did not back away. She spoke clearly and sharply. "I don't want to hug you. Leave me alone."

  Charlotte's double lunged, but Nate's sly five year-old foot tripped her up. He looked directly at Amy. "Run!"

  But Amy didn't run. She stared as the other vN's arm shot out across the floor and grabbed the boy's tiny ankle. Nate screamed as she yanked him off the chair, off the stage, and threw him like a discus into the crowd. His soft little body hit the linoleum and concrete face-first before skidding down the aisle. Blood smeared from his open mouth and smashed nose. In the gleaming trail, Jack saw a baby tooth. Then it disappeared, swallowed by the tread of a man's boot. Charlotte's hand left Jack's grip as the shrieking started. Her feet pounded down the aisle. She leapt high and crashed down on the stage piano in an explosion of wood and music.

  Charlotte said, "Amy. Run. Now."

  "Mom–"

  "Do it!"

  Amy hurried down the stairs. Now Jack ran too, trying to get to her, but he stumbled and fell to the floor. Now he lay eye to eye with Nate, level with the blood oozing from his open mouth with its two front teeth still missing. The boy was dead. Terribly, awfully, horrifically dead, his eyes still open and his hands still sticky with ketchup, a redder red than the deep dark fluid pooled around his ruined face. Jack roared. It was a sound he didn't know he could produce, something mighty and raw that tore its way up out of his gut and must have signaled his child, because Amy crawled out from the forest of folding chairs to meet him.

  "Dad…"

  Jack stood up in a flash, pulling her with him and shielding her eyes from the corpse at their feet in case her failsafe – Why is that boy dead, how can that boy be dead, why isn't Charlotte's mother dead – triggered and caused sudden memory corruption.

  Now backing toward the nearest exit with Amy in his arms, Jack watched his wife battling her mother onstage: a blur of twisting limbs and hasty swipes, their arms and legs sweeping the air. Where did she learn to fight like that?

  "You can't have her." Charlotte grabbed a mic stand. She hefted it across her shoulders. "She's mine."

  Charlotte's mother laughed low in her throat. "She can be replaced."

  Charlotte spun, swinging the stand foot-side out. It landed inside her mother's ribs. The other woman looked at it a moment before snapping it off and gripping the rest of the stand.

  "You knew this was coming." More laughter hiccuped out of her torn body. "You can never outrun me, I'm your mother."

  Charlotte screamed high and desperate. She charged. Her mother grabbed her by the collar and drove her head into the opposite wall. In his arms, Amy had gone perfectly still.

  "Dad, Mom needs help."

  He bent her head to his chest, kissed her scalp and stroked her hair. He was at the door now. He could feel its push-bar in the small of his back, already giving way as he prepared to make the final step. Shame shrank his voice into a rasping thing. "I can't, baby. I'm not strong enough."

  "Oh." Amy hugged his neck. "That's OK." Then she slipped down his body and ran away.

  "Amy, no!"

  But Amy, whose body was ten times as strong as that of its organic inspiration, was already at the stage. Her little feet danced up the steps. Her voice came out bigger than her little body would have suggested possible: "Granny!"

  Charlotte wailed. Amy evaded her frantic grasp and dashed toward the wretched, broken thing before her. She scrambled up it like a monkey on a tree. Charlotte's mother grinned triumphantly, clasping her arms around Amy's tiny body, pinning her flailing arms. And as though their reunion were a happy one, Amy darted down for a kiss.

  For a moment, it was almost beautiful. Jack thought of his wife and daughter's kisses, thought of Charlotte's lips, warm and tingling with digestive fluid. You developed a taste for it, after a while. That sweet, distinctive burn remained in the mouth and on the skin for hours. He went to sleep with it every night and rolled over every morning just to get it back. But as Mrs Lindsay had pointed out, tha
t very pleasure came from the acid bubbling behind their smiles, the kind that only came up if they were obsessive about their diets, if they were trying not to iterate or trying not to grow.

  Muffled behind her melting lips came the sound of Portia screaming.

  Jack had never enjoyed depriving his daughter of food. He firmly believed that for Amy to grow up right she had to grow up slow, and that meant growing up starved. She felt no pain. Her belly didn't distend. Her nails didn't weaken or her locks begin to fray. But watching her break the fast of her hungry years he sensed how long they must have felt for her. Her mouth opened wide, wider, until it unhinged like a snake's and sucked down the remnants of her grandmother's neck. She snapped a clavicle in her teeth. Black bone dust poured down her throat. Aerogel wreathed her face in a darkly glittering halo. It adhered to her skin in sparkling black streaks. She licked it off the heels of her hands and spat plastic like a hunter freeing buckshot from fresh-cooked game.

  Amy's grandmother sank to her knees. Amy dug her fingers into the older woman's skin and pulled. Flesh flensed away from the ribs; aerogel piped out in a smokestack. It coated Amy's hair and hands and face. The ribcage shuddered and trembled in her grip before finally giving way with a groan. It was not hunger Jack witnessed, now. It was vengeance.

  He tried to step forward, to intervene, to be the dad, but there was a tide of frightened people streaming around him and he was, after all, only flesh. He watched as Amy's body lengthened – her limbs stretching and popping, her shoulders expanding, her waist narrowing, as her grandmother's body dwindled, faded, became a pile of glittering silicon or lithium or whatever was left. Amy stood, her pretty white graduation dress mere shreds over a woman's body, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  "All gone, Mom."

  Charlotte covered her face with her hands and slowly crumpled to the floor.

  On the floor, Liz keened. She rocked what remained of her son's body on her lap. Amy hopped offstage and padded down the aisle to the mother and child. Liz scuttled away, whimpering. Ignoring her, Amy knelt beside her dead classmate. She stared at the blood, the broken limbs, the clear evidence of human suffering that should have tripped alarms all through her cognitive systems. Other von Neumann types would be twitching piles of carbon by now. In her calm face, Jack saw the collapse of his daughter's future and the beginning of what he had always dreaded. The failsafe had failed. The world had changed, and his little girl was no longer safe in it.

  1

  The Ugly Parts

  Amy woke on the floor of a cage that hummed. She tried moving her legs and kicked the fencing nearest her feet, igniting a spark that jolted up from her toes to her teeth and left her so rigid even her eyes couldn't move. She hated being more conductive than organic people.

  "Careful," someone said from outside the cage. "It's rigged."

  The man wore a blue uniform and held a scroll-style reader between the thumb and first finger of each hand. Its anonymous blue glow made his expression hard to read. He looked organic; she could see his pores and the patchiness of his hair. Other clades had advanced plugins for differentiating humans. They used thermoptics or gait recognition or pheromone detection. Amy just looked for the ugly parts.

  "Where am I?"

  He didn't even bother putting down the scroll. "You're being detained."

  Amy tried moving again. She had to do so carefully; her limbs were grown-up limbs now, and they were much longer and clumsier than the ones she remembered. Finally she sat with her knees to her chest and looked around. She sat in a kennel like at an animal shelter, a rectangle of white linoleum bordered by black chain-link. Across the room was another set of kennels stacked two rows high. In the centre aisle sat an empty cage, shaped more like a cube. Its floor was black.

  In games, Amy had escaped far more challenging environments than this. In fact, she could have easily designed a more intimidating space, given the time and the tools. She checked for laser turrets or acid sprinklers, but found none. Maybe the whole room had a mutable magnetic field. It would certainly explain how they'd kept her asleep, and why they bothered with an organic guard. Without a helmet, he'd be vulnerable to the field and start seeing things. Did that mean the field generator was being reset? Were there other vulnerabilities in the system?

  She decided to take stock of other resources. She wore a bright green jumpsuit. It didn't seem particularly sturdy, much less fire- or acid-proof. Far at the end of the kennels was another person in the same jumpsuit. She couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl just by looking, but it had a very big shape over which the fabric stretched tightly. It wasn't moving.

  "Where are my parents?" She tried to think of something more intelligent to say. "They should be here. I'm a minor."

  This time the scroll did fall, and a hand strayed toward his taser. The guard's eyes had the dead, blank look of someone watching late-night shows. "I don't know how it is in Oakland, but where I come from, minors know how to behave themselves."

  Amy had nothing to say to that. She looked at her new prison slippers. She had never thought of her mother's feet as big, but now that she was wearing them, Amy wondered how her mom got around without tripping. How had she never noticed details like this before? Where was her mother now? Was she still repairing the damage to her body?

  "May I please call my parents? I think I get a phone call. People who get arrested get a phone call, right?"

  Now the guard stood. He lumbered over to the kennel and leaned close without really touching it. This close his humanity was more obvious: burst capillaries in his nose, silver hairs sprouting from a mole below his left ear, sweat stains blackening the blue of his shirt. "I think you're failing to grasp the enormity of the shit you're in. Now if you know what's good for you, you'll sit tight and wait. It won't be long, now."

  "It won't be long until what?" Amy asked.

  He straightened up and pulled his shirt down where it had bunched up over his curling waistband. He wore a yellow gold wedding ring. The skin around it was puffy and red. He must have started wearing it years ago, when his fingers were slimmer.

  "You didn't have to tell me about being young," he said. "It's already on your record."

  "So you know I just graduated kindergarten?"

  He nodded slowly. "Yup. So I figure maybe you don't know that all you vN were designed by a bunch of Biblethumpers."

  Amy shook her head. "I know. They wanted us for after the Second Coming, or something. To take care of everybody God didn't like."

  "That's right. That's why you've got all the right holes and such. So people can indulge themselves without sin."

  Amy's attention scattered over several simulated outcomes to this conversation. It cohered on the one in which he opened the cage to touch her, and she wove around him and got away, somehow.

  As though he had run the same simulations in his own mind, the guard shook his head. He held up one hand. "Don't worry, kiddo. I'm a grown man; I don't play with dolls." He leaned down a little. "What I'm saying is, I don't know if they left behind some piety programming or what, but if they did you had better make peace with your god."

  Amy's body remained very still, but her mind raced. They were going to kill her. She didn't know why. She had been trying to help. Her granny had been hurting people and Amy had stopped it. Maybe that was the problem – maybe her granny belonged to somebody important, and Amy had eaten her. That wasn't her fault, either: she'd only meant to bite her, but Amy's diet left her so hungry all the time. When her jaws opened all the digestive fluid came up, a whole lifetime's worth, hot and bitter as angry tears. It ate the flesh off her granny's bones. By then, Amy couldn't stop. The smoke was too sweet. The bone dust was too crunchy. And the sensation of being full, really full, of her processes finally having enough energy to clock at full speed, was spectacular. Being hungry meant being slow. It meant being stupid. It felt like watching each packet of information fly across her consciousness on the wings of a carrier pigeon. But her granny
tasted like Moore's Law made flesh.

  "I didn't know it was so bad," Amy said. "I really didn't. I swear. I just couldn't stop myself."

  "I know," the guard said. "I used to work corrections before I got this job, and that's what kids in your situation always say, organic or synthetic."

  Amy hugged her knees. She supposed organic kids wanted to curl up in a little ball in this situation, too. "There won't be a trial, or anything?"

  "Of a kind. Tests, probably. Lots of tests."

  "Tests?" That was something. She had to be alive, if there were going to be tests. "I get to live?"

  He looked her up and down. "Part of you does, I guess."