Amy pinched the skin of her arms. If you couldn't brag in the brig, where could you? "I've got fractal design memory in here. Even if I'm cut up, my body remembers how to repair itself perfectly. I'll come back in one piece, no matter what."
"Oh, believe me, dollface, I know. I've seen it happen. You put some vN shrapnel in the right culture, and it grows right back. Like cancer." He snorted. "But whether what grows back is actually you? With all the memories, and all the adaptations? That's like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."
Amy imagined her skin sliced thin as ham, suspended in the shadowy clouds of vN growth medium. Maybe she wouldn't even miss her mom and dad. Never once seeing their faces or hearing their voices or feeling their arms around her would probably hurt a lot less, if she were smashed into a million pieces.
Red lights washed the kennels in a sudden cough syrup haze. "Shit," the guard said. He thumbed off his scroll, rolled it shut, and stuffed it in one shirt pocket. Then he pressed open a panel over his shoulder and retrieved a shotgun. Frowning, he snapped it open and sniffed the rounds. Apparently pleased, he marched down to the kennel holding the other person.
"This your doing?" he asked. "Your boys know where you are?"
"…chingada, cabrón."
"Yeah, same to you, pal. I know exactly what they're doing with you, later. They're gonna smoke your ass." He stared up at the ceiling. "Serial–"
Behind him, another door slammed open, knocking him forward. He stumbled, and the gun clattered to the floor. An alarm filled Amy's ears. She covered them. Now she watched three women walk in through the door. One aimed a can of spray paint at the guard; she misted him with it and he began to collapse. The woman caught him, and laid him down tenderly, arranging his limbs as though for sleep. It must have been some kind of drug in that can; Amy heard no screams and saw no blood. What she did see frightened her more.
Granny. Three of them.
Now Amy did skitter backward in her little kennel. She watched the three women walk forward, single file. They each wore her mother's face, but every other detail shouted Wrong! in Amy's head: the tightness in their shoulders, the alertness of their gaze, their mismatched clothes and the hungry way they looked at her. Up close, she saw the plastic embedded in their flesh. It poked up at odd points, black and pink and green just visible at the thinnest stretches of their skin. They peeled her door away; sparks hissed harmlessly off their thick gloves.
"You're coming with us," one said.
Amy whimpered. There was no way she could escape from all three of them. They were here to punish her. They had to be. She had eaten their mother. "Go away!"
One of them moved forward. "You have something we need."
"Leave me alone!" Amy pressed herself up against the wall. Her fingers, for some reason, were still in her ears. She was crying. They were staring. "I'm sorry, OK? I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to. Just please let me go home. Please, I just want to go home."
One smiled faintly. "You are home." And she reached out–
–and then her hand vanished, gone in a hot puff of wind that smelled vaguely of bile. For a moment, the other von Neumann woman watched her flailing stump of a wrist. Then the wrist disappeared, blazing away into blackly glittering nothingness that smoked from her disintegrating arm. She didn't scream. She didn't howl with pain or fear as a human would have done – she just watched as a large figure in a green jumpsuit loped down the hall carrying the guard's shotgun.
"I think you know what this is!"
Amy's fellow prisoner primed the shotgun again. He was hugely fat, and wore badly scorched prison slippers on his hands. Amy smelled burning cloth. The other vN women backed away, abandoning their sister, who cradled her disintegrating arm close to her chest. Now he stood at the ruined door to Amy's cage. He said, "There are three more puke rounds in here. The peroxidase in just one can eat carbon tubes faster than your repair mods can handle it. You're gonna die."
He pointed the weapon straight at Amy's head. "And now you're gonna let me leave."
Amy tried moving, but he was bigger and faster and he grabbed her arm and wrenched her upward. He pressed the gun into her back and nudged her forward. "Move."
Fight back, a voice inside said to Amy. You can take him.
But then the gun was prodding her again, and she stepped forward. The sisters followed her with their eyes. She kept walking. At the end of the hall stood a set of doors secured by a single steel bar.
"Open it," her fellow prisoner said.
Amy's fingers fumbled on the lock. Grimacing, she forced the bar up and over. It squealed a little as it slid down. She pushed open the doors–
–and almost fell into oncoming traffic. Her arms windmilled for a minute before a hand bunched up in her jumpsuit and yanked her back. Columns of headlights had gathered just a foot below them. Drivers honked and gestured at dashboard comms. Far away, she saw the blink and spin of police cars. The kennel room wasn't a room at all: it was a vehicle.
"Hey, a mobile prison," said her new captor. "The chimps are getting creative." Then he pushed her.
Amy landed on her knees – atop a car. She winced and tried to apologize to the woman shouting in the driver's seat. Beside her, the other prisoner jumped down and grabbed her arm. He pulled her off the car and along the highway, out of the red glare of the mobile prison and into the rows of increasingly noisy cars. Amy looked back. The sisters stood high above in the mobile prison, watching. They could still help you, a voice inside said. Do you want to be a hostage?
"Out," said her kidnapper. He was tapping on the driver's side window of an old and dented blue sedan with the business end of the gun. The teenaged boy inside yelled something, and Amy's captor flipped the gun around and busted the window with it. "Out," he repeated. "Please."
The boy scrambled out of the car on the other side. He held his hands up. "You can take whatever you want," he said. "I mean, seriously, just take it, just let me go–"
"Start running," Amy's kidnapper said. The boy ran.
Her kidnapper reached inside the door via the broken window, and opened it. He pushed her inside. She crawled over to the passenger side and squeezed back against the seat as her hostage-taker reached across her and pulled the door shut. It slammed and she flinched. He gave her an odd look before shutting his own door and edging the car past the prison and into the flow of traffic. He could barely fit his bulk inside the driver's seat. He didn't bother with a seat belt.
"You see that?" he asked, pointing at the mobile prison as it blurred past. Outside, it looked like an ordinary eighteenwheeler with the words ISAAC'S ELECTRONICS inscribed across its panels. "That's somebody's idea of a joke. It's fucking sick."
Amy said nothing. The gun sat between them. She wondered if she could grab it and use it. But where would she go? They were screeching through traffic. She couldn't drive. At least, not in real life.
"You could thank me, you know." He began ripping out peripherals and throwing them out the window.
"For taking me hostage?"
"For saving your ass!" He tossed a fistful of wires onto someone else's windshield. "You didn't want to go with them, did you?"
Amy blinked. She hadn't quite thought of it that way. "Well, no…"
"Who were they, anyway?"
Amy hugged her knees. "My aunts, I guess," she said. How much had he heard back there? "I, um… I sort of killed my grandmother." He said nothing, but she sensed the suspicion anyway. "She and my mom were having a fight, and I got in the middle, and–"
"Whatever. Family drama. Got it."
Amy's kidnapper had sort of a doughy face, olive-skinned and fringed with huge black curls on top and a scrubby beard across the non-existent jaw. He had very nice eyelashes, though, long and perfectly curled like in a commercial. He seemed to notice her staring, because he turned to her suddenly and said: "I'm Javier."
"I'm Amy. Amy Frances P–" She paused. Maybe giving out her name wasn't such a good idea. "Amy Frances
."
"Was that your first time in jail, Amy Frances?"
"Uh huh."
He sped up. "Lucky you."
Amy watched the highway scrolling by. It looked like an old cartoon where the backgrounds were the same and just recycled on a loop: strip malls, streetlights, abandoned car dealerships full of desperate signs and black windows. The same everywhere, over and over, not like the unique shops her mother frequented – full of handmade things and loud music that Amy couldn't understand, but still danced to while waiting outside the fitting rooms. Even the trees were different: thin and bristly and spiky-looking, not like the broad, shady ones planted in sidewalks. She was very, very far from home. And she had no idea where they were headed.
"Are you hungry?"
Amy turned to Javier. "Not really." Your granny did make a pretty big meal, after all. "But thank you for asking."
"Seriously? I'm starving. Jail-breaking is hungry work."
"Do you do a lot of jail-breaking?"
"Define 'a lot'."
For some reason, Amy had assumed that this kind of bragging was confined to organics, and ended with boyhood. Men of this size, be they flesh or mech, weren't supposed to get dimples in their faces while hinting at their exploits. Then again, she hadn't met that many vN models. Maybe Javier's had add-ons for charm.
"I'm not used to eating very much."
Javier peered at her from the corner of his eye. "You're a dieter, huh?"
"I was. But a little while ago, I…"
"Fell off the wagon?"
She tucked her hands under her legs. "Something like that."
"Sweet." Javier licked his lips. He turned off into a tiny little strip mall full of For Lease signs. "Then I guess it's time to go shopping."
"What?"
He parked in front of a thrift store. LEAVE DONATIONS HERE read a sign in one wall-sized window. A giant arrow pointed downward at bulging black garbage sacks. Javier jumped out of the car and hurried over to one. He started ripping it open. He looked over his shoulder. "What's your shoe size?"
Amy looked at her new, grown-up feet. "I… I don't know…"
"Well, come on and find out!" He threw a pair of pink flipflop sandals at the car.
Slowly, Amy left the car. She scoped the parking lot. Arc lights cast a dull orange glow over the whole place. Earthquakes had left dark lightning patterns in the concrete façade of each dead shop. Black mould grew there, now. She heard wind in the pines. It was the loneliest place she'd ever been.
"Isn't this stealing?" Amy asked.
Javier was wriggling into a giant black T-shirt, faded grey now, with a picture of an old video game controller on it. BLOW ME, it read in peeling white letters. "No way," he said. "People donated this stuff already, right? They don't care."
Reluctantly, Amy started picking through the garbage bag. After a few tries, she found a Sesame Street T-shirt with the Count on it. The brand made her feel instantly at home, as though the little yellow and green street sign could act like a talisman and keep her safe with its promise of cheery songs and word games. "Found one," she said, holding it up.
Javier's brows lifted. "That's a kid's T-shirt."
"So?"
"Gonna be tight, is all I'm saying."
Amy looked down at herself. Maybe he was right. Still, it couldn't hurt to try. "Um, where do I try it on?"
Javier gestured at the parking lot. He was already pulling at the legs of his jumpsuit. Amy quickly covered her eyes, reached blindly, and ran around the side of the building, trailing old clothes behind her. She pressed herself up against one shadowed wall, near a door marked LOADING. She threw on the clothes as quickly as possible. She'd found track pants, the shiny kind with all the buttons up each leg, and without underwear they felt a little weird. But there was no way she was digging through somebody else's underwear and putting it on. None. Synthetic or not, some things were just disgusting.
Amy emerged from the shadows still wearing her prison slippers. They fit, and she had no desire to wear somebody else's socks or shoes. Her new pants made a slippery sound as she walked. Javier had retrieved an enormous pair of shorts – she couldn't tell if they were for swimming or just wearing – with a camouflage pattern and big pockets. She wondered suddenly if he did this a lot. He seemed used to it. He stared at her new clothes as he slipped on some old foam beach mocs.
"Uh, you might wanna roll those up."
"Excuse me?"
"Your pants. Roll them up."
Amy bent down. The ends were dragging, a little. She started folding.
"At the waist, I mean. Start rolling at the waist. So they don't fall off."
"Oh! OK." Amy started rolling. It took a couple of folds, but the pants did fit better. Javier threw a nubby old grandpa sweater at her, too, saying something about it being cold outside, as he shuffled off toward another store. Amy followed, rolling up her new woolly sleeves. Javier crowed, and ran across the parking lot to the store on the opposite side – a used electronics shop. Amy jogged behind him. He ran around the side of the building and started rubbing his hands together at the sight of a row of three dumpsters.
"Awesome." He tossed a chunk of asphalt at the nearest one. When it fell back to ground, he began opening its massive creaking lid.
"What are you doing?"
"Grocery shopping. Didn't I say I was hungry?" Javier leapt in. A moment later, out flew a positively ancient keyboard that clattered to the concrete and promptly lost a few dirty keys. "Plastics! In the trash! It's like they're just throwing money away!"
Amy tiptoed to the side of the dumpster. She stood on her toes to peer inside. It seemed mostly empty, aside from a few stray accessories. Rationally, she knew that other vN, the unlucky ones out there on their own, had to eat garbage sometimes or sell it to buy food. They didn't have to worry about diet plans like Rory's pinging their kitchens every time they opened the cupboards, because they were just scraping to get by. She'd just never seen or met one of them, before. Not until her granny.
"You take the other one," Javier said. "This one's mine."
Amy frowned. She hadn't asked to share his loot, but she moved on to the next dumpster anyway. Slipping her fingers under the lid, she pushed it up until it rested against a wall, and tried hopping in as Javier had done. He evidently had a lot more experience, though, because he had made it look easy, and she ended up slinging one leg over before teetering on the dumpster's lip and falling down inside. Like the other dumpster, this one was mostly empty aside from a few loose loops of frayed cable and discarded dongles, yellow and blocky like old organic teeth. She listened for rats, but doubted they would have much use for an electronics store dumpster; after all, there was nothing inside that they would want to eat.
Emptiness aside, Amy liked the dumpster just fine. It was surprisingly clean, and its faint rusty smell gave her only a little twinge of hunger. If she were still in a child-sized body, it would have made the perfect spot to play Scorched Earth. She had designed her own tanks in games, of course, and had bounced and careened over their perfectly rendered deserts blowing the middles out of everything from Nazis to djinns, but she had never really played that kind of game outside, with things she could actually touch. She wasn't allowed to visit playgrounds during the day when human children might be there, so when her parents took her to the nearest place with swings and slides and cargo netting and a crow's-nest, it was always after dark and the other kids were always gone. She would sit up there alone, or maybe next to her dad on the swings (her mom's arms were so much stronger that she always pushed them both), but inevitably they left before too long.
If they'd had a backyard, maybe she could have played those games there. But they weren't rich, so they didn't have one, so she didn't. She built her tanks and forts in-game instead, and her dollhouse's walls and chimneys had gone gluey and flexible with having been recycled and reprinted so many times. She wondered about the dollhouse, now. The week before graduation, she'd programmed some new designs –
based on having looked up the word "caliphate" a while back. Maybe the panels were still there waiting for her in their tray; pale and thin like the bone cups she had seen in a museum once. When she got home, she could put all the pieces together.
"What's taking you so long?" Javier asked.
Amy looked up. Javier stood over the dumpster, clutching the old keyboard to his chest.
Amy looked around the dumpster. "This place would make a great fort."
Javier frowned deeply. "Were you tased as an infant? Quit daydreaming and get out of there." He moved on to the third dumpster. Amy heaved herself out of hers, and watched him cautiously put down his bounty before propping open the lid. Looking inside, he laughed and patted his belly. "We're eating good tonight, that's for sure," he said, and jumped in.
The dumpster promptly closed around him. Amy watched the massive lid slam down on Javier's head. Locks sprang up, threading through bails that pinned the whole structure together. She heard nothing. Maybe he was too muffled in there. She took a hesitant step forward to listen, and startled as a sudden thud sounded against the walls of the dumpster. "Hey! Get me out of here!"
vN: The First Machine Dynasty Page 4
