Warren approached cautiously, using the rugged rocks as cover. He studied the ramshackle buildings, windows showing pale lighting. His background said this was no longer a functioning ranch, but instead a set for moving pictures. He wondered why anyone would bother making such dramas on location, when computer graphics were much simpler; or was this time so far back that that technology did not exist? The past was a mysterious, unknowingly wealthy land.
Near the wooden barns and stables ahead, a bonfire licked at the sky. Warren moved to his right, going uphill behind a rough rock scree to get a better view. Around the fire were a dozen people sitting, their rapt faces lit in dancing orange firelight, focused on the one figure who stood, the centre of attention.
Warren eased closer to catch the voices. Manson’s darting eyes caught the flickering firelight. The circle of faces seemed like moons orbiting the long-haired man.
Warren felt a tap on his shoulder. He whirled, the 0.22 coming naturally into his hand. A small woman held her palms up, shaking her head. Then a finger to her lips, shhhh.
He hesitated. They were close enough that a shot might be heard. Warren elected to follow the woman’s hand signals, settling down into a crouch beside her.
She whispered into his ear, “No fear. I am here for the same reason.”
Warren said, “What reason? Who the hell are you?”
“To prevent the Tate murders. I’m Serafina.” Her blonde hair caught the fire glow.
Warren whispered, “You’re from—”
“From a time well beyond yours.”
“You … side-slipped?”
“Following your lead. Your innovation.” Her angular features sharpened, eyes alive. “I am here to help you with your greatest mercy.”
“How did you—”
“You are famous, of course. Some of us sought to emulate you. To bring mercy to as many timelines as possible.”
“Famous?” Warren had kept all this secret, except for his—ah, of course, the team. Once he vanished from his native timeline, they would talk. Perhaps they could track him in his sideslips; they had incredible skills he would never understand. In all this, he had never thought of what would happen once he left his timeline, gone forever.
“You are a legend. The greatest giver of mercies.” She smiled, extending a slender hand. “It is an honour.”
He managed to take her hand, which seemed impossibly warm. Which meant that he was chilled, blood rushing to his centre, where the pain danced.
“I … thank you. Uh, help, you said? How—”
She raised the silencing finger again. “Listen.”
They rose a bit on their haunches, and now Warren heard the strong voice of the standing man. Shaggy, bearded, arms spread wide, the fierce eyes showed white.
“We are the soul of our time, my people. The family. We are in truth a part of the hole in the infinite. That is our destiny, our duty.” The rolling cadences, Manson’s voice rising on the high notes, had a strange hypnotic ring.
“The blacks will soon rise up.” Manson forked his arms skyward. “Make no mistake—for the Beatles themselves saw this coming. The White Album songs say it—in code, my friends. John, Paul, George, Ringo—they directed that album at our Family itself, for we are the elect. Disaster is coming.”
Warren felt the impact of Manson’s voice, seductive: he detested it. In that rolling, powerful chant lay the deaths to come at 10050 Cielo Drive. Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant. Her friend and former lover Jay Sebring. Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. Others, too, all innocents. Roman Polanski, one of the great drama makers of this era and Tate’s husband, was in London at work on a film project or else he would have shared their fate, with others still—
The thought struck him—what if, in this timeline, Roman Polanski was there at 10050 Cielo Drive? Would he die, too? If so, Warren’s mission was even more a mercy for this era.
Manson went on, voice resounding above the flickering flames, hands and eyes working the circle of rapt acolytes. “We’ll be movin’ soon. Movin’! I got a canary-yellow home in Canoga Park for us, not far from here. A great pad. Our family will be submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world”—a pause—“I call it the Yellow Submarine!” Gasps, applause from around the campfire.
Manson went on, telling the “family” they might have to show blacks how to start “Helter Skelter,” the convulsion that would destroy the power structure and bring Manson to the fore. The circle laughed and yelped and applauded, their voices a joyful babble.
He sat back, acid pain leaking into his mind. In his joggs Warren had seen the direct presence of evil, but nothing like this monster.
Serafina said, “This will be your greatest mercy.”
Warren’s head spun. “You came to make …”
“Make it happen.” She pulled from the darkness behind her a long, malicious device. An automatic weapon, Warren saw. Firepower.
“Your 0.22 is not enough. Without me, you will fail.”
Warren saw now what must occur. He was not enough against such massed insanity. Slowly he nodded.
She shouldered the long sleek weapon, clicked off the safety. He rose beside her, legs weak.
“You take the first,” she said. He nodded and aimed at Manson. The 0.22 was so small and light as he aimed, while crickets chirped and the bile rose up into his dry throat. He concentrated and squeezed off the shot.
The sharp splat didn’t have any effect. Warren had missed. Manson turned toward them—
The hammering of her automatic slammed in his ears as he aimed his paltry 0.22 and picked off the fleeing targets. Pop! Pop!
He was thrilled to hit three of them—shadows going down in the firelight. Serafina raged at them, changing clips and yelling. He shouted himself, a high long ahhhhhh. The “family” tried to escape the firelight, but the avenging rounds caught them and tossed the murderers-to-be like insects into their own bonfire.
Manson had darted away at Serafina’s first burst. The man ran quickly to Warren’s left and Warren followed, feet heavy, hands automatically adding rounds to the 0.22 clip. In the dim light beyond the screams and shots Warren tracked the lurching form, framed against the distant city glow. Some around the circle had pistols, too, and they scattered, trying to direct fire against Serafina’s quick, short bursts.
Warren trotted into the darkness, feet unsteady, keeping Manson’s silhouette in view. He stumbled over outcroppings, but kept going despite the sudden lances of agony creeping down into his legs.
Warren knew he had to save energy, that Manson could outrun him easily. So he stopped at the crest of a rise, settled in against a rock and held the puny 0.22 in his right hand, bracing it with his left. He could see Manson maybe twenty meters away, trotting along, angling toward the ranch’s barn. He squeezed off a shot. The pop was small against the furious gunfire behind him, but the figure fell. Warren got up and calculated each step as he trudged down the slope. A shadow rose. Manson was getting up. Warren aimed again and fired and knew he had missed. Manson turned and Warren heard a barking explosion—as a sharp slap knocked him backward, tumbling into sharp gravel.
Gasping, he got up against a massive weight. On his feet, rocky, he slogged forward. Pock pock gunfire from behind was a few sporadic shots, followed immediately by furious automatic bursts, hammering on and on into the chill night.
Manson was trying to get up. He lurched on one leg, tried to bring his own gun up again, turned—and Warren fired three times into him at a few meters range. The man groaned, crazed eyes looking at Warren and he wheezed out, “Why?”—then toppled.
Warren blinked at the stars straight overhead and realized he must have fallen. The stars were quite beautiful in their crystal majesty.
Serafina loomed above him. He tried to talk but had no breath.
Serafina said softly, “They’re all gone. Done. Your triumph.”
Acid came up in his throat as he wheezed out, “What … next …�
��
Serafina smiled, shook her head. “No next. You were the first, the innovator. We followed you. There have been many others, shadowing you closely on nearby space-time lines, arriving at the murder sites—to savour the reflected glory.”
He managed, “Others. Glory?”
Serafina grimaced. “We could tell where you went—we all detected entangled correlations, to track your ethical joggs. Some just followed, witnessed. Some imitated you. They went after lesser serial killers. Used your same simple, elegant methods—minimum tools and weapons, quick and seamless.”
Warren blinked. “I thought I was alone—”
“You were alone. The first. But the idea spread, later. I come from more than a century after you.”
He had never thought of imitators. Cultures changed, one era thinking the death penalty was obscene, another embracing it as a solution. “I tried to get as many—”
“As you could, of course.” She stroked his arm, soothing the disquiet that flickered across his face, pinching his mouth. “The number of timelines is only a few hundred—Gupta showed that in my century—so it’s not a pointless infinity.”
“Back there in Oklahoma—”
“That was Clyde, another jogger. He made a dumb mistake, got there before you. Clyde was going to study the aftermath of that. He backed out as soon as he could. He left Clifford for you.”
Warren felt the world lift from him and now he had no weight. Light, airy. “He nearly got me killed, too.”
Serafina shrugged. “I know; I’ve been tagging along behind you, with better transflux gear. I come from further up our shared timestream, see? Still, the continuing drop in the homicide rate comes at least partly from the work of jogg people, like me.”
He eyed her suspiciously. “Why did you come here?”
Serafina simply leaned over and hugged him. “You failed here. I wanted to change that. Now you’ve accomplished your goal here—quick mercy for the unknowing victims.”
This puzzled him but of course it didn’t matter anymore, none of it. Except—
“Manson …”
“He killed you here. But now, in a different timestream—caused by me appearing—you got him.” Her voice rose happily, eyes bright, teeth flashing in a broad smile.
He tried to take this all in. “Still …”
“It’s all quantum logic, see?” she said brightly. “So uncertainty applies to time travel. The side-jogg time traveller affects the time stream he goes to. So then later side-slipping people, they have to correct for that.”
He shook his head, not really following.
She said softly, “Thing is, we think the irony of all this is delicious. In my time, we’re more self-conscious, I guess.”
“What … ?”
“An ironic chain, we call it. To jogg is to act, and be acted upon.” She touched him sympathetically. “You did kill so many. Justice is still the same.”
She cocked his own gun, holding it up in the dull sky glow, making sure there was a round in the chamber. She snapped it closed. “Think of it as a mercy.” She lowered the muzzle at him and gave him a wonderful smile.
The Education of Junior Number 12
MADELINE ASHBY
Madeline Ashby (www.madelineashby.com) is a science fiction writer and foresight consultant living in Toronto. Her debut novel, vN, is out from Angry Robot Books in 2012. Her stories have been published in Nature, FLURB, Tesseracts, Escape Pod, and elsewhere. She has also blogged for BoingBoing, WorldChanging, Tor.com, and io9.com.
“The Education of Junior Number 12” appeared online at the website of angryrobotbooks.com at the end of December 2011, and this is perhaps its first appearance in print. About this story, Ashby says, “Javier is a character who appears in vN. He’s one of my favorite characters, and this is one of his more sombre stories.”
Charlie Jane Anders calls the story, “dark and intense and amazing.”
“You’re a self-replicating humanoid. vN.”
Javier always spoke Spanish the first few days. It was his clade’s default setting. “You have polymer-doped memristors in your skin, transmitting signal to the aerogel in your muscles from the graphene coral inside your skeleton. That part’s titanium. You with me, so far?”
Junior nodded. He plucked curiously at the clothes Javier had stolen from the balcony of a nearby condo. It took Javier three jumps, but eventually his fingers and toes learned how to grip the grey water piping. He’d take Junior there for practise, after the kid ate more and grew into the clothes. He was only toddler-sized, today. They’d holed up in a swank bamboo tree house positioned over an infinity pool outside La Jolla, and its floor was now littered with the remnants of an old GPS device that Javier had stripped off its plastic. His son sucked on the chipset.
“Your name is Junior,” Javier said. “When you grow up, you can call yourself whatever you want. You can name your own iterations however you want.”
“Iterations?”
“Babies. It happens if we eat too much. Buggy self-repair cycle—like cancer.”
Not for the first time, Javier felt grateful that his children were all born with an extensive vocabulary.
“You’re gonna spend the next couple of weeks with me, and I’ll show you how to get what you need. I’ve done this with all your brothers.”
“How many brothers?”
“Eleven.”
“Where are they now?”
Javier shrugged. “Around. I started in Nicaragua.”
“They look like you?”
“Exactly like me. Exactly like you.”
“If I see someone like you but he isn’t you, he’s my brother?”
“Maybe.” Javier opened up the last foil packet of vN electrolytes and held it out for Junior. Dutifully, his son began slurping. “There are lots of vN shells, and we all use the same operating system, but the API was distributed differently for each clade. So you’ll meet other vN who look like you, but that doesn’t mean they’re family. They won’t have our clade’s arboreal plugin.”
“You mean the jumping trick?”
“I mean the jumping trick. And this trick, too.”
Javier stretched one arm outside the treehouse. His skin fizzed pleasantly. He nodded at Junior to try. Soon his son was grinning and stretching his whole torso out the window and into the light, sticking out his tongue like Javier had seen human kids do with snow during cartoon Christmas specials.
“It’s called photosynthesis,” Javier told him a moment later. “Only our clade can do it.”
Junior nodded. He slowly withdrew the chipset from between his tiny lips. Gold smeared across them; his digestive fluids had made short work of the hardware. Javier would have to find more, soon.
“Why are we here?”
“In this treehouse?”
Junior shook his head. “Here.” He frowned. He was only two days old, and finding the right words for more nuanced concepts was still hard. “Alive.”
“Why do we exist?”
Junior nodded emphatically.
“Well, our clade was developed to—”
“No!” His son looked surprised at the vehemence of his own voice. He pushed on anyway. “vN. Why do vN exist at all?”
This latest iteration was definitely an improvement on the others. His other boys usually didn’t get to that question until at least a week went by. Javier almost wished this boy were the same. He’d have more time to come up with a better answer. After twelve children, he should have crafted the perfect response. He could have told his son that it was his own job to figure that out. He could have said it was different for everybody. He could have talked about the church, or the lawsuits, or even the failsafe. But the real answer was that they existed for the same reasons all technologies existed. To be used.
“Some very sick people thought the world was going to end,” Javier said. “We were supposed to help the humans left behind.”
The next day, Javier took him to a park. It was a key part of the
training: meeting humans of different shapes, sizes, and colours. Learning how to play with them. Practising English. The human kids liked watching his kid jump. He could make it to the top of the slide in one leap.
“Again!” they cried. “Again!”
When the shadows stretched long and, Junior jumped up into the tree where Javier waited, and said: “I think I’m in love.”
Javier nodded at the playground below. “Which one?”
Junior pointed to a redheaded organic girl whose face was an explosion of freckles. She was all by herself under a tree, rolling a scroll reader against her little knee. She kept adjusting her position to get better shade.
“You’ve got a good eye,” Javier said.
As they watched, three older girls wandered over her way. They stood over her and nodded down at the reader. She backed up against the tree and tucked her chin down toward her chest. Way back in Javier’s stem code, red flags rose. He shaded Junior’s eyes.
“Don’t look.”
“Hey, give it back!”
“Don’t look, don’t look—” Javier saw one hand lash out, shut his eyes, curled himself around his struggling son. He heard a gasp for air. He heard crying. He felt sick. Any minute now the failsafe might engage, and his memory would begin to spontaneously self-corrupt. He had to stop their fight, before it killed him and his son.
“D-Dad—”
Javier jumped. His body knew where to go; he landed on the grass to the sound of startled shrieks and fumbled curse words. Slowly, he opened his eyes. One of the older girls still held the scroll reader aloft. Her arm hung there, refusing to come down, even as she started to back away. She looked about ten.
“Do y-you know w-what I am?”
“You’re a robot …” She sounded like she was going to cry. That was fine; tears didn’t set off the failsafe.
“You’re damn right I’m a robot.” He pointed up into the tree. “And if I don’t intervene right now, my kid will die.”
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