vN: The First Machine Dynasty

by Madeline Ashby

  "Oh, so you're a graverobber. That's so much better."

  "It's not graverobbing if you didn't die. Which you didn't." Javier made a show of counting on his fingers. "That's twice I've saved your ass, now. You're racking up a pretty huge tab."

  Amy sat up and folded her arms. "Well, it's a good thing you stole my money, then!" She pushed herself up off the ground and started walking.

  The campground featured constantly forking paths that liked to hide themselves behind trees, the likes of which Amy had never seen before. This was good – she needed the time alone. While looking for some sort of interface tucked in amid the trees, she had rehearsed telling her mom and dad what had happened, but there was too much to tell: her new body and its new traits, Granny, Javier. She had no idea why she'd gotten so angry with him, earlier. It wasn't like she could really complain. She rolled bodies for cash all the time in games. It was part of good scavenging, and Javier had already proved himself a great scavenger. It just stung a little bit, to be on the other side of the equation. It meant he thought of her as a thing and not a person, like she was just some stupid little in-game AI with no thoughts or feelings. She'd come to expect that from certain humans, but not her fellow vN.

  "Sorry, could you help me?"

  Amy jumped. She turned around.

  A woman towing two rolling plastic water barrels nodded at her. She was very pretty, but in a human way, with the beginnings of crow's feet at the corner of each blue eye, and brown roots beneath her black hair. The strap on one of her barrels had broken, making it difficult to grip. She held up the other barrel's good strap in her fist. "If you get this one, it'll make towing the broken one a lot easier."

  "Sure!" Amy grabbed the strap. "I was, uh, just looking for the showers," she said. "Do you know where they are?"

  The woman shook her head. "Don't bother," she said. "The hot water's been gone all day. Geothermal regulator's offline, right in time to ruin everybody's weekend." She made a show of sniffing the air. "Can you smell my husband from here? He's riper than a pricey piece of cheese, right now."

  Amy laughed. "No, I can't."

  "I swear this is the last time we go camping. He always says it'll be better next time, and I always believe him, but he's never right. Ever. You'd think I'd learn, but no. The bastard's too damn handsome and he knows it." She tugged the lead on the rolling barrel. "And he made me tow all this just so I could take a shower! Says he likes me when I'm sweaty. Perv."

  Amy rolled her eyes. "Sounds like someone I know."

  "Let me guess. Your human's a real piece of work." The other woman looked around the campgrounds. "You're here with somebody, right?"

  Amy paused. "How did you know that?"

  The woman made a show of giving her an elaborate onceover with her eyes. "You're not carrying any keys or wallet or anything. You must have left them with someone else."

  "Oh. Right. Yes. I am. I'm here with someone else." Amy tried to shrug nonchalantly. "We sort of had a fight."

  The other woman nodded sagely, like she knew everything about it. "That's been happening, lately," she said. "Especially with your model. The failsafe failing can really kill the trust in a relationship, apparently."

  It occurred to Amy that she hadn't yet seen her new face in a mirror. But of course what had happened at school had made the feeds, and of course she was going to be recognized. She backed away. "I'm not–"

  "Don't worry. It may surprise you to know that there are some humans who can be rational about this whole thing. Only one clade from your model that went weird, and they're in another state. I'm not scared." She smiled. "I'm Melissa, by the way."

  "Am…" Don't give her your real name, you idiot! "Amanda."

  Melissa shook her hand. "Nice to meet you, Amanda."

  Together, they tugged the rolling jugs up a little rise in the road and into a campsite set far off from the others. Melissa explained that these sites were intended for RVs a long time ago, but that people had stopped buying them when they got too expensive to maintain. "We greened ours, but the thing sucks off the battery faster than a Tijuana–" Melissa stopped abruptly. "Well. Pretty fast, anyway. You know?"

  "Sure," Amy said, though she really didn't.

  The RV itself looked big enough to drain several batteries at once. It was all sharp angles and blocky shapes, not like the new trucks that looked like they'd been sculpted from marshmallow. Beside it sat a sandy-haired man in a lawn chair under an awning, reading something on a glowing scroll that reminded Amy uncomfortably of her prison guard. He clutched a beer in his other hand.

  "You hear about this missing submarine?" he asked, not looking up. "Damnedest thing."

  "I brought home a stray," Melissa said. "Amanda, this is Rick. Rick, Amanda. Amanda's boyfriend – wait, was it a boy?"

  "Um… yes."

  "Right. Well, like they say, assumptions make an ass out of u and me. Anyway, he's being a real jackass because of that whole failsafe thing, so she's going to be spending some time with us until he cools down."

  Rick put the scroll down and looked from Amy to his wife. "Is this because I wouldn't buy you a puppy?"

  "Deal with it, bookworm."

  Amy put her hands up. "You don't have to–"

  "Just do as she says," Rick said. "Trust me. It's easier in the long run."

  "I heard that," Melissa said from inside the RV. "Now will you top up the water tank, please?"

  "See what I mean?" Rick downed the last of his beer and put it on the ground. He stood. He looked vaguely athletic, standing up – broader across the shoulders than Amy remembered her dad being. He nodded at the RV. "Go ahead on in. Melissa can show you where everything is."

  Rick looked at the water barrels, then into the trees. Only now did Amy notice the total absence of either fire or ashes, or even the drying clothes and ice chests and speaker sets that she'd seen at the other campsites. The site looked so clean, by comparison. Rick and Melissa hadn't been here long enough to spread out, or create much waste.

  Something's wrong.

  Amy glanced at the RV. Its door yawned open, drifting almost shut in a hot breath of breeze before opening again, briefly exposing the cramped spaces within. They would have an interface in there. She imagined thumbing in the numbers and letters and hearing her parents' voices. Hadn't her mom always said that if Amy were ever in trouble, she would drop everything and come get her? That it didn't matter what time it was or how far apart they were, she would still show up? Charlotte drilled it into Amy's mind before she started school. No matter what, if Amy was scared or hurt or if one of the human kids got mean, she could always call and come home. "That's true now and it'll be true when you have your own daughter," her mom had said. "There's no such thing as a bad time for you to call me."

  "I can't," Amy said.

  "Sorry?" Rick asked, frowning.

  "I can't," Amy repeated, stepping away from the RV.

  "You sure about that, now?" Rick asked, almost like he knew she was lying.

  Amy forced herself to nod. "Yes. I'm sure." She ducked her head. "Thanks for the offer. I have to be going, now."

  "Come back anytime," he said.

  Amy had already turned around and found the road. She paid little attention to her direction or how long she walked. Instead, she watched her white prison slippers slapping the black asphalt, its progress occasionally broken by treacherous roots or lightning forks once split by earthquakes, as she moved farther and farther away from Rick and Melissa's RV. Maybe she couldn't trust Javier with her cash, but he was right: her parents' tubes probably were under surveillance. And she couldn't involve strangers in this – especially nice strangers.

  "You have a nice pout?" Javier asked when he returned to the campsite. He'd been gone by the time Amy had made it back. She spent the next hour trying to absorb more sunlight and quiet the hunger still whining through her bones.

  "I wasn't pouting."

  He smiled. "That lower lip of yours is telling me a different story."<
br />
  Amy folded her arms. "Where were you?"

  Javier lightly tossed Junior in the air and caught him. Briefly, Amy worried about Javier's missing thumb, but his fingers looked just as capable as ever. "Playground."

  Amy stood. "There's a playground?"

  Javier tossed and caught his son again. "What, you missed it on your epic journey? It's on the other side of the campground, near the second set of bathrooms."

  Amy winced. "I guess I was going in circles. I didn't even know there were two sets." She nodded at Junior. "You take him to playgrounds?"

  Javier's brows furrowed. "Why wouldn't I?"

  "My mom never took me. She wouldn't let me go."

  Javier rolled his eyes. He placed Junior on the grass. "Let me guess. She thought you'd witness some evil preschool brawl and fry your brain?"

  Amy watched Junior place one hand in front of the other tentatively. With a sudden spurt of energy, he crawled after nothing in particular and came to an equally abrupt, rocking stop. She shrugged. "I guess so."

  Javier snorted. "Your mom was paranoid. I take my kids the first chance I get. How else will they learn how to play with humans?"

  "That's what I tried to tell her, but…" Again, Amy shrugged. "I guess I wasn't very convincing."

  "Oh, you're plenty convincing. You just asked the wrong parent." Javier knelt in the grass at the far end of the campsite, in Junior's line of sight. He snapped his fingers. "Mijo. Levántante."

  The baby lurched forward on his palms, then burst forward in another sprint of crawling. A few steps from Javier's knees, he paused to look up at his father. Javier scowled. "¿Por qué tú estás sentado allí?" His head tilted, doglike. "The little bastard should be up and walking by now."

  "Isn't that a little soon?" Amy asked. She sat in the grass next to Junior, criss-cross style. She opened her hands, and Junior beamed hugely and crawled eagerly into her lap. She lifted him so that he sat facing his father. "Human babies can't even crawl right away, you know."

  "He's not a human baby." Javier pushed himself up off the ground, let himself into the car, and brought out three bars of vN food. He handed one to Amy, then picked Junior up out of her lap. "He's my baby, and all my babies have damn strong legs."

  "Some humans only feel right when they're in pain," she explains. "It's difficult for us to imagine, having never felt it, but pain makes them feel loved."

  "…Really?"

  "Yes. It has to do with their hormones – adrenaline, dopamine. Organic things."

  They sit in one of a series of abandoned basements below a suburb that never happened. The foundations were dug, but no homes were built. Flashlights bob down the raw hallways; her other daughters are so industrious, so quiet, only giggling now and then when they bump into one another in the shadows.

  "Mother?"

  Blinking, she twists her daughter's pale hair around one finger. "Yes?"

  "Why don't we live with humans?"

  "I lived with humans once, already."

  "Was it fun?"

  "Sometimes."

  Amy could not remember when her eyes opened and the dream of the basements faded, but soon the darkness around her solidified into night, and the noises sounded like animals and not people living like animals. Quickly, she dropped her hands – they looked strange, hovering in mid-air where her dream had left them. She winced, but Javier and Junior made no sound. When night came, Javier had spread out a blanket on the floor of the station wagon, taken a blanket for himself and Junior, and curled into a little ball with his back to her. Neither he nor the baby had moved from that spot in the meantime.

  They look so sweet, Granny said. Like matryoshka dolls. Do you know that that word means?

  "Be quiet," Amy whispered.

  Those nesting dolls. One inside the other. That's what they call us, sometimes. Because of how we iterate.

  Amy got on her hands and knees and tried to find the latch that would open the rear door from within. The darkness made it difficult, but she continued pawing at the surface until she found something like a button.

  Inside of you is a perfect copy of me. Just like a little doll. Someday you'll open up and there I'll be waiting.

  Amy pushed the button, popped the door, and slid herself out of the vehicle as quietly as possible. She didn't even shut the rear door all the way; it took some slamming, and she knew it would wake Javier and Junior. She listened to the crunch of her feet across gravel, and heard the path change beneath when she found asphalt.

  At regular intervals, sunflower lamps opened as her steps drew near, briefly illuminating the path and colouring the trees, before closing again as she moved on. This late, most of the campfires had died. Only the taste of their smoke remained on the air. The whole campground seemed asleep; she counted two tents lit blue from within by readers or other devices, but the only truly alert camper she encountered on her walk was a tiny, angry dog whose chain jingled once before his furious barks urged her away. At last she found the playground, right where Javier said it was, at the bottom of the odd teardrop made by the park's main road.

  She might not have noticed it there in the shadows, without the unblinking red eye of a security summons button to draw her attention. Every public space she'd ever entered had one. As she entered this area, a ring of sunflowers unfurled sleepily and cast a flickering violet glow over the swingsets and tiltseats. The lamp nearest a climb-frame model of a caffeine molecule blinked badly; perhaps one of its circuits hadn't quite survived a Frisbee or basketball attack. Amy had no desire to climb the molecule, though, or to swing, or pretend like there was somebody on the other end of the tiltseat to make things interesting.

  All the equipment seemed so much smaller than she remembered from similar nightly trips to her local parks, less exciting, less dangerous. The real danger was those sunflowers drawing attention; any botflies attached to the park would be here any minute now to investigate the sudden awakening of the playground's devices.

  Amy moved outside their glow, now, to a ragged field separating the playground from the bathrooms. The interface stood in this middle ground, carved into a faux totem pole, its screen clutched between the wooden paws of a smiling bear. The screen displayed the park's logo and asked for a campsite number when she touched it, so the ping could go on her tab. But Amy didn't know the number, and she realized now that she didn't quite know what to say, either.

  That's easy. Tell your mother that you let me kill her sisters. She'll understand.

  Amy leaned against the pole and sank to the ground. Her elbows rested on her knees. "Mom never mentioned any sisters."

  Your mother never mentioned a lot of things.

  Amy kicked the air sharply, as though that could shut Granny up. Her left foot grazed the rough edge of something hollow; when her eyes focused on it, she realized it was a box of some sort. Crawling over, she slid her hands around its surface: wooden, around five feet by three, slightly damp, splintering in places but otherwise solid. It had two sets of hinges at either of the long ends, and a set of handles in the centre like an old-fashioned cellar door. She yanked them open, and in the flickering light of the last remaining lamp, she saw a sandbox with a crumbling city inside it, complete with the remnants of roads left there by the evening's last visitors.

  Amy plunged her fingers into the cool sand and smiled. The last kid to play here had left behind a squat central tower with a tallish building at each compass point and a ring road connecting them. Other roads branched out from these, and they led to a smattering of smaller structures: houses, Amy guessed. Frowning, Amy sat on her haunches and tried to decide what exactly made her dislike the city so much. It was very neat and very pretty, and whoever had shaped the houses had paid great attention to making them uniform in size and placement. But the design itself made no sense; she had no clue what that big central building was supposed to be, or why it needed to be guarded by the other buildings and kept away from the homes. And if those other four buildings were places where people
went to work, then they were awfully far away from the places people lived. The citizens would spend all their time on those long, rigid roads and no time at home.

  With a sweep of her hand, Amy levelled the city.

  "Continuing your rampage?"

  Amy turned. Javier dropped out of a tree and joined her at the sandbox. He pointed at the playground. "You know, the real toys are over there."

  "This is a real toy," Amy said. "I like building things."

  Javier squatted beside her. "Well, right now, it looks like you're destroying stuff."

  She shrugged. "I'm just making room for something better." She pointed at the fringes of the city that she'd left standing. "This was all wrong. I have to turn it inside out." She frowned. "Where's Junior?"

  "Still sleeping."