vN: The First Machine Dynasty

by Madeline Ashby

  You're right. You should run away now, while you still have legs to carry you. Leave the boy and his iteration behind. The only thing they're still good for is food.

  "I'm really starting to hate you, Granny."

  Amy bolted from the cover of the trees. She shot forward faster than she'd intended, and had to turn herself sideways to avoid the fence. Without looking up, she began digging her fingers under the fence. Under the sponge the dirt was wet, dark and heavy, and seemingly full of rocks. Soon Amy was digging those out, too, clawing at them and throwing them to one side as fast as she could. She had exposed some of the sponge's underside, though, and if she could just reach it without touching the fence–

  –a drone hove into her vision. She froze. It was a botfly model, tiny and black, and it zoomed around her head, blinking.

  Destroy it! Now, before it broadcasts! A sudden rigidity overtook her left arm. Portia. Her hand slid free of the dirt and reached for the bot, palm stiff and open and ready to choke. Another hand closed around it, though, and yanked it behind her back. Just as Amy yelped, Javier said: "Don't. Move."

  The botfly examined them for a moment, then buzzed away. Amy watched it fly between the fence wires and disappear behind a pile of old toilet seats. Behind her, Javier briefly rested his head between her shoulder blades. "Well. Thank Christ that's over."

  Amy turned. Javier looked worn and thin. He'd fashioned a sling from an old black long-sleeved T-shirt, and Junior lay curled up inside, his head against the side of Javier's chest where his heart would be if he'd had one. She beamed. "You're OK!"

  "Yes, I'm OK. But you are out of your fucking mind. Did you not see the guns up there?" He scuttled back toward the trees. Amy followed. Javier pointed toward the dump. "What are you doing here?"

  "I was trying to get in so I could get some food."

  He glanced at the fence. "I thought you wanted to stay away from this place."

  "That was before you fell asleep at the wheel." Amy leaned in and squinted at him to see if his eyes still had the sleepy, unfocused look from before. In the dark, it was hard to tell. "Are you sure you should be out here? You passed out. And you couldn't even talk, before."

  Javier wove away. "I'm fine. And why are your hands covered in dirt?"

  "I was trying to dig my way underneath the fence, so I could get some of the sponge," she said. "I thought I could use it to climb the fence. You know, like oven mitts?" She made a lobster-claw motion with both hands.

  Javier snorted. "Climb the fence? We don't climb fences. We hop fences."

  And with that, he broke into a run for the fence. At the last minute, he jumped toward a tree instead. He ran straight up it for a few steps, bounced off it like a swimmer kicking into a backstroke, and sailed over the fence easily. He landed in squelching foam. Junior didn't even wake up.

  "Your turn," he said.

  Amy pointed from the tree to him and back. "How…?"

  "Your body knows how." He waggled his limp little thumb at her. "You can do everything I can do, now. You can feel tickles. You can photosynthesize. You can make this jump."

  Amy stepped forward. "Is it hard?"

  Javier smiled and shook his head. "It's easy. Just think with your body and not your eyes."

  Amy had no clue what that meant, but it was worth a try. Jumping that high looked like fun, and she remembered how it had come in useful for Javier in the past, when they were running away from the police. (Technically, she realized, they were still running away from the police.) She backed away from the fence and shut her eyes tight. She listened to the sound of her boots pounding the dirt beneath as she bounded forward and leapt with all her might. The ground faded away and her hands reached out. They knew exactly where they wanted to go. Her fingers had already curled into claws before they hit the tree. Bark crumbled under her weight and when she opened her eyes, Javier was staring up at her and smiling.

  "Good. Now come down here."

  Amy hauled herself up a little and tried judging the distance between the two points. "What if I land in one of the garbage piles?"

  "Then you'll get an acid burn. I recommend you try not to land there."

  Amy hugged her tree. "Is this how you teach your iterations how to do this? Because I think they could use some more positive reinforcement."

  Javier made the gesture for a single tear falling down his face, his fingertip describing a sad line from his eye to his jaw. Amy aimed herself straight at him and launched. She had a surreal moment of watching the fence falling away under her before landing on him. Instantly she sat up to avoid crushing Junior.

  "I guess my code doesn't take as strongly as I thought," Javier said. "You're still pretty clumsy."

  She stood. "Give me a break! It's my first time!"

  "I'm honoured." Javier wriggled away and stood up. He brushed himself off. "That's my clade's arboreal plugin. The trees my dad's group was working on were three hundred feet high, and nobody wanted to worry about ropes or harnesses. So we were shipped with upgrades." He kicked the back of her leg with his toes. "Come on. I'll show you more after we shop."

  But now Amy couldn't keep herself on the ground. Every third step, she bounced up just because she could – first one foot high, then three, then five – until Javier grabbed her ankle and yanked her back down to earth. "Later, I said! We've got to find the feedstock, now."

  "Wouldn't getting a better view help with that?"

  Javier folded his arms. "Fine. Go right ahead."

  Amy jumped straight up. Just before she fell, she let out a little squeal of delight. She landed roughly in a mound of old controllers and cables all coiled up like limp noodles. She kicked free before the acid could do any real damage, jumped again, and landed on the skeletons of old cleaning bots, all white and mantis-shaped, their jointed arms snapping under her boots as she launched herself again. She flew over deadeyed projectors and the mouldering rags of wearable glucose monitors. Wires sprouted from the decaying threads of bras and undershirts and wristbands and gloves, and glittered at her as she soared past.

  She landed in a pile of dolls. Their bodies sank below hers, swallowing her. At first she worried about the acid, but there was none – the dolls were covered in nothing more than dew. It clung to their bare skin, their tiny fingers and toes and the lashes of their still-open eyes. They were all different colours, their eyes blue and black and green and brown, and their faces were uniformly perfect – no lumpy baby bodies here, no rolls of plastic fat or curiously ambiguous genders like at a toy store. These babies were fully formed.

  They were iterations.

  Suppressing a scream, Amy struggled free of the baby barrow. She rolled backward across little outstretched hands and tumbled to the spongy ground below. She pushed herself to her feet, turned around, and smacked straight into Javier. He stiffened up when she put her hands on his shoulders and tried pushing him away. "Easy, easy, what's the– Oh."

  Amy pointed behind herself. "Why are they in the trash like that? What's wrong with them?"

  Javier's brows lifted. "They're probably bluescreens."

  Amy thought back to Rick's reader. "I thought you had bluescreened, before."

  "Me?" Javier snorted. "Please. That only happens to babies, and it's never happened to one of mine. We're very wellwritten, our clade, no gaps." He nodded at her with his chin. "So don't go biting anybody else, OK? You might lose those nice new legs of yours if you do."

  But Amy's focus was not on her legs. "People just throw out bluescreens?"

  "Well, yeah." Javier shrugged. "What's the big deal? They're frozen, and they're tough to fix, and we can always make more."

  "They're babies!"

  "Ay, you sound like such a breeder." Javier turned her around so she faced the pile of lifeless vN. "Look. They're non-functional. They can't eat, they can't grow, they're totally four-oh-fucked."

  "Nobody throws out human babies when something like this happens to them!"

  "Of course not! That's sick. Did your g
randma come up with that?" Javier shuddered.

  No. You thought up that brilliant little idea all on your own.

  Reaching behind his head, he untied the sling and set Junior on the ground with the other iterations. He pulled the shirt back on. "Don't move," he said to his son. He nodded at Amy. "Let's go get that feedstock."

  Amy pointed. "You're just leaving him there?"

  "Relax. I'm camouflaging him. I don't want him getting in the way while we do the hard part." He gestured. "Come on. I'm starving."

  Amy gave Junior a long look as they walked away. Finally Javier just grabbed her wrist and tugged her along behind him. They skirted the sleeping camelbots carefully, occasionally leaping over them and waiting for them to wake. Javier counted off the seconds on his fingers, to show her. He jumped a little ahead of her each time, and he waited for her to land before springing forward. But there wasn't so much garbage close to the guardhouse – maybe the humans wanted to avoid the smell – and soon only an empty stretch of foam and fence lay between them and their goal.

  "Shit." Javier nodded at the guardhouse, where the one light glimmered and danced in a bottom-floor window. Beyond, the compiler sent steam wafting into the night air. "That building and the fence around it are too big for one jump."

  "Do you think the roof is charged?"

  Javier reached inside his pocket, and plucked out Rick and Melissa's keys. He undid a keychain from the ring, leapt high and hurled it at the roof. It sparked there like a mosquito caught in a lantern. He landed and sucked his teeth. "There goes that idea." He turned to her. "The moment your toes touch the ground, you jump. OK? And no squealing. You make this little noise when you're in the air, and you sound like a kid on a rollercoaster."

  "You've taken your kids on rollercoasters?"

  Javier took off into the air. Amy followed. She landed inside the narrow strip of sponge between the guardhouse and the fence. Inside, a guard was watching a display.

  Amy's dad was on it.

  "Jack Patterson, human father of vN fugitive Amy Patterson and domestic partner of murder suspect Charlotte Patterson, was arrested Wednesday for assaulting a police officer during a pro-vN protest."

  The display cycled through various shots of her father: flipping grey slabs of vN meat on the barbecue; holding Amy on his shoulders with the Malibu Pier stretching behind them and into the Pacific on a sunny day; kissing her mom under the red paper lantern of a vN kaiseki house in Oakland – the place he'd proposed to her after hearing about the Cascadia quake, that Amy recognized from his almost nightly retelling of the story. Then the display cycled to footage of her father in an orange jumpsuit. The guard watching began idly squeezing something on his chin.

  "Amy!" Hissing, Javier yanked down on her hand, hard. Her knees gave.

  "Patterson's father, insurance magnate Jonathan Patterson, issued a public statement today saying that he had no plans to offer legal assistance to his son, whom he disowned seven years ago."

  Amy stared out into the field of garbage. Somewhere, someone had her father in chains. Somewhere, someone could be interrogating him about her and her mother. He was alone somewhere dark and frightening, and she had no idea where or how to get there.

  Don't even think about helping him. Look what happened the last time you tried helping. If you had just left me alone, none of this would have happened.

  "My dad isn't a mean guy," she said. "He doesn't even yell."

  "In a press conference today, FBI vN specialists said that experiments on Charlotte Patterson have yet to conclusively determine whether her failsafe…"

  "They're experimenting on my mother?"

  Javier rolled his eyes. "What did you think was going to happen?" he asked. "Did you think they wouldn't start investigating your mom once they figured out what Portia could do? Did you think your old man would sit by and let that happen? He's meat, Amy. They're possessive."

  "–search has expanded for an unmanned vessel that went missing four days ago. This marks the latest incident in an unusually dangerous year for ocean-going vessels. Container crews are now in talks to form an international union–"

  Javier's fingers closed around her elbow. "Come on," he urged. "We have to go."

  Amy pulled her arm away. "I have to find them," she said. "I have to explain–"

  An alarm sounded inside the office. They froze. The pattern of light from the window shifted as the man inside stood up. His shadow stretched long over their bodies. They heard the gate swinging open, and the rumble of a heavy truck coming through. "Chingalo," Javier muttered, and looped an arm around her waist. He hauled her around the corner of the building as the truck rolled past.

  The engine died, and a door creaked open.

  "You from Redmond? From the reboot camp?" Amy guessed this was the guard.

  "Yeah. Here for the bluescreens," Amy heard another man say. "Sorry I'm late. All these new checkpoints…"

  "It's cool, no worries," the guard said. One of them whistled, and Amy peeked around a corner to watch a camelbot wake from its slumber. They stood to attention, forklift teeth raised, and seemed to await further instruction. "I'll show you the pile. We've got a ton lately."

  "Sweet."

  The men and the robots walked down one corridor of garbage, headed straight for the pile of bluescreens – and Junior. Amy was up on her feet instantly. Her feet had already left the ground when Javier grabbed the belt loop of her jeans and hauled her back down.

  "What do you think you're doing?"

  "They're going to find Junior!"

  Javier nodded. "Maybe, but we have a perfect shot at the feedstock right now. We should take it."

  "If they find him, they might do something terrible to him! Like the experiments on my mom!"

  Again, he nodded. "Yeah, they might. But we have to eat."

  Amy took a step away from him. "You don't care, do you?"

  "Should I?" He shrugged. "If it were a human kid, then it would be different. I'd be programmed to rescue him. But he's not. And the sooner I can get some fucking food, the sooner I'll be able to iterate another one of him." His expression softened. "If you were normal, you'd understand."

  Amy backed away. "Normal?"

  Inside her, Portia laughed. Don't tell me you were expecting more from him.

  Javier had put her back together. Granted, he had done so while on a mission to roll her corpse for money, but he healed her and she had only made life difficult for him in return. Amy had wanted to repay that debt. Everything in her – everything that was still hers, everything that Portia had yet to corrupt – had said that doing this was right, even though it was dangerous. She had felt the same way about fighting Portia to save her mother. Given the choice between doing something and doing nothing, she had chosen to do something, even if it was a stupid something. But if it were Javier, he'd have let his own father be devoured.

  "You're really OK with leaving your son behind?" Amy asked.

  Javier's answer was to look away, toward the compiler.

  Amy shook her head. "Then I guess you'll be just fine leaving me behind, too."

  She turned around and leapt away.

  Amy still wasn't as graceful as Javier, and couldn't do anything really fancy, but she didn't need to. She hopped over the heaps of garbage and tried not to make too much noise. She heard the faint cicada buzz of oncoming botflies. They rose, flanking her, blinking green light. They hovered over her almost as though they were concerned. Still, no alarm sounded. She had no idea why not, but didn't care.

  She made the final jump toward the baby barrow. The guard there held Junior by one arm. He turned as she landed. His face whitened and he dropped Junior. His right hand found his holster; the weapon came out.

  "These are puke rounds," he said. Up close he looked young, at least in human years. His face was all spotty. "You'll blaze up in no time."

  Amy put up her hands. Doing so felt silly; putting your hands up for a person brandishing a weapon was something that was only suppose
d to happen in dramas or games, not real life. But her hands came up anyway. "Please just give me the baby."

  "You think I don't recognize you?" he asked. "Look, I don't know how you fooled the flies, but–"

  Something heavy struck Amy in the back of the head. She pitched forward, catching herself at the last second. The heavy something – it felt like a piece of rebar – caught her across the shoulders. "Dude, thanks!" the guard was saying.