PRAISE FOR MADELINE ASHBY
“vN fuses cyberpunk with urban fantasy to produce something wholly new. There’s a heavy kicker in every chapter. Zombie robots, vampire robots, robots as strange and gnarly as human beings. A page-turning treat.”
Rudy Rucker, author of the Ware Tetralogy
“Picks up where Blade Runner left off and maps territories Ridley Scott barely even glimpsed. vN might just be the most piercing interrogation of humanoid AI since Asimov kicked it all off with the Three Laws.”
Peter Watts, author of the Rifters trilogy
“Will AIs be objects, or people? Caught between the category of human and everything else, we can’t think about the very real entities that inhabit – and will inhabit – the excluded middle. Madeline Ashby’s done more than just think about that territory; she’s made it her home. Person; object; we need new words for things that are neither – and in vN, Ashby provides them.”
Karl Schroeder, author of the Virga series
“vN is a clever book with a wonderful ending by a writer who is well versed in AI technology, who can evoke sympathy with a few well-turned phrases and tells a satisfyingly complex story.”
The Guardian
“What’s really fascinating about vN is the way it portrays a fairly complex future almost exclusively from the limited perspective of an immature and confused non-human character. There’s a future history hidden in these pages, but you have to glimpse it through eyes that just can’t process all of it yet. You experience Amy’s growth while she learns the true nature of the world she somehow ended up in.”
Tor.com
“vN is a strikingly fresh work of mind-expanding science fiction.”
i09.com
“It is a rare author who can write a fast-paced adventure without losing sight of the dilemmas, debates, morality and emotion that mark good storytelling. vN is nothing less. If you pick it up (and I recommend you do), expect to find a world thick with meaning and humour, elegantly packaged in an eminently readable adventure.”
Canadian Science Fiction Review
“With an excellent grasp of her subject matter and much to say within the genre, Ashby looks set to become one of the most important new voices in this particular branch of SF, and I for one shall be awaiting her next book with great interest. Download to your system at the earliest opportunity.”
The British Fantasy Society
“vN is a strong debut novel; its central premise is interesting, and Ashby draws us into a highly detailed and technologically literate world. Fans of Bladerunner, the Portal games and Raising Cain will find this an interesting read with more than a little bit of food for thought.”
Starburst Magazine
“iD explores the uncomfortable possibilities and limitations of love within slavery and free will under constraint. Ashby intelligently and brutally explores the way people are willing to abuse, devalue and destroy any form of consciousness they’re able to define as ‘other’, while the robots challenge the limits of love, devotion and life after death.”
Toronto Globe & Mail
“I love a book that kicks me in the head. iD cuts deep into questions of choice and free will and imperfection, and it hurts.”
Adam Rakunas, author of Windswept
“In Ashby’s expert hands vN cuts a painful incision into the emotional complexity of oppression in our society, and the way love can feed the worst kinds of hate. vN is a powerful novel and a fine exemplar of exactly the perspectives chauvinist SF so often stifles.”
The Guardian
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE MACHINE DYNASTY
vN
iD
Company Town
Licence Expired
ANGRY ROBOT
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
Unit 11, Shepperton House
89 Shepperton Road
London N1 3DF
UK
Revenge Served Warm
angryrobotbooks.com
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An Angry Robot paperback original, 2020
Copyright © Madeline Ashby 2020
Cover by Kieryn Tyler
Edited by Paul Simpson and Gemma Creffield
All rights reserved. Madeline Ashby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.
ISBN 978 0 85766 538 6
Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 858 5
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To My Grandmothers
CONTENTS
1 Satisfaction Guaranteed
[Redacted] Rapture
2 Truth or Death
3 What Child is This?
4 One Year Earlier
5 Conquest
[Redacted] Mortal Sins
6 Famine
7 War
8 Three Months Earlier
9 Pestilence
[Redacted] One Year Later
10 Let me Tell you About my Mother
[Redacted] Ten Years Later The Story of the Grandmother
11 Gramma
12 Doll Parts
13 Tribulation
14 Judgment
15 Death
Epilogue New Eden
Acknowledgments
1
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED
“I feel like one of those creepy guys who go to Thailand to fuck little girls.”
“They’re robots, Ashleigh. Boy robots. Grown-ass boy robots.”
Tiffany stretched her two palms a good eight inches apart, just in case her point was too subtle. One wheel of their carriage hopped over a stone in the road, and the wine in Tiffany’s glass sloshed dangerously. She eliminated its threat by glugging the rest down in a single go. Ashleigh sighed. Their reason for visiting Hammerburg was obvious, but Tiffany didn’t have to be so obvious about it.
Besides, you weren’t supposed to call them “robots” anymore. “Robot” came from the Old Slavonic word for “serf.” It was a cognate for the German word for work, arbeit. As in, arbeit macht frei. It was more politically aware – more honest – to actually refer to the vN as what they were: slaves.
Ashleigh wasn’t even sure she was going to fuck anybody. Anything. Or whatever you were supposed to say now. She had no idea. It was an ongoing debate. The vN had never really done much for her either way. She wasn’t afraid of them, but she wasn’t hot for them either. Sure, she had written the inevitable paper on the semiotics of simulacra in the robot sex trade, but so had every horny undergrad trying to be edgy for their Ethics in Tech class. The vN were pretty the way models were pretty. They were decoration. They were fantasy. They weren’t anybody. They weren’t people. They couldn’t love you like people could. Which meant they couldn’t really betray you, either. Maybe that was the charm. It was probably the charm.
Not that she was at all bitter. Not in the slightest.
“It’s exactly what you need,” Tiffany said. “After all this bullshit.”
Ashleigh didn’t have much to say about that. “I don’t even really like robots, though. I mean, with everything.”
Tiffany rolled h
er eyes. “Well, yeah, but you fucking love vampires.”
Slowly, the carriage drew to a halt. With the lace curtains drawn, Ashleigh wasn’t even aware they’d stopped until she noticed the clop of the horses’ hooves had ceased. They had entered the coach an hour ago. At least, it felt like an hour. The first thing they took from you was any mechanism for telling time – like a casino, or a CIA rendition site. If you signed the right waiver, they would send you your notifications and updates via telegram. “Is everything OK?” she asked.
“Better than OK.” Tiffany peered past the curtain in the carriage window. “We have fucking arrived.”
And just like that, the carriage doors flew open. A tiny set of stairs unfolded, and Tiffany swung out, wine glass still clutched in her gloved hand. The last dregs leapt free, tannic scabs of red spattering across the glittering white snow. She squealed, and jumped down to the freshly-swept cobblestones below.
Ashleigh peered out. The village looked exactly like it had online – thatched gables glittering with evening frost, snow thickly coating their A-frames, guttering lanterns hanging at every door, steep cliffsides shrouded in icy mist. In the central square, a massive Christmas tree. Beside it, a great wicker goat to be burned in effigy. A rime of moon hung in the violet sky over both symbols.
It was always twilight, in Hammerburg.
Ashleigh wasn’t really sure how Tiffany had won the Hammerburg contest. Winning was Tiffany’s job. Tiffany was brand-chaff: if she distracted a given customer service interface, or actively fucked with it, then its competitor could swoop in and snag other customers. She was always working – writing scripts that automatically entered her various accounts into competitions, constantly tagging an entire network of dummy accounts, skewing algorithms, bumping her rank, making her various selves into preferred customers, earning points, spending points, reviewing products and experiences, role-playing transactions in prototyping engines, providing data to auditors of game theory. She did this – or more accurately, she created the bots that did it – at the behest of various and sundry marketing firms. (One of them was actually called Various & Sundry, or so Tiffany had told her once.)
All of that was just as stupid, finicky and meaningless, Tiffany said, as any real job. “Every job posting always says how much they want competitive candidates. Well, I’m a professional contestant. There’s nothing more competitive than that.”
In truth, Ashleigh didn’t want to know what Tiffany had done to win their spots on the trip, given the park’s reputation. Not that she had any room to judge. Not these days. God, she was such an asshole. And a cliché. A trope. Her life was a misbegotten stream of content designed to make women weep into their wine when they had PMS. She thought she was past this. You could take the girl out of the Prairies, but you couldn’t take the Prairies out of the girl.
Ashleigh had decided that it was talking with her mother which brought back her judgmental streak. It was hearing the wet thock thock thock of a wooden mallet hitting a pork chop over the tinny audio channel, as though her mother were beating the information out of her. She hadn’t told her about Simon until that conversation. Her disapproval was thinly disguised as exasperation: Didn’t you see this coming? Surely you had to know this might happen. He was married. What more did you expect? Did you really think he was going to turn his whole life around for you? Just because you’re a human being and she wasn’t?
In the end Ashleigh had said she would not be spending Christmas with her and Dad and the aunts and uncles and cousins, after all. There was simply too much to do, she said. Too much work to catch up on.
Her feeds would show her in Hammerburg, of course. Her mother would know she’d lied. Her father, too, if he bothered to drag his eyeballs from hockey. They would be hurt. Maybe. Ashleigh wasn’t sure. Maybe it was best for everyone that she not attend anyway. Being there grated on her nerves, and they knew it. And she knew they knew it. Last Christmas, she’d left the house in time to give herself a good five hours at the airport. They had smiled, liberated and relieved, when the bus trundled up to their driveway and opened its doors to take her away.
Tiffany was snapping her fingers.
“Hey. Ashleigh. Get your chicken ass out of the fucking buggy. Igor over here is taking us upstairs.”
Tiffany jerked her head at the broad-shouldered vN at the door to the inn. He was a lot of things, but he was no “Igor.” Square-jawed and ginger-haired, he looked more like an extra in an historical fantasy drama than anything else. Which Ashleigh supposed this was. A fantasy about a history that had never really happened. The sort of thing Eco or Baudrillard or Sterling wrote about. Atemporal. That was the word. Christ, she was such a nerd.
For a moment she wished she could talk to Simon about it, and the air left her lungs. They would never have those talks again. Ever. Never share an inside joke, an utterly insufferable self-reference, never roll along that wide but recursive loop that was their conversational pattern. Could his wife do that? Did her neural net allow for it? Sure, she could make him come, but could she make him laugh?
Ashleigh watched as concern flickered over the robot’s face. Then he crossed over to her, his heavy peasant boots crunching on frosty gravel. He offered her one very strong, very warm, human-seeming arm.
“My lady,” he said. His accent was thick. She couldn’t place it. It sounded like it was from everywhere. And it probably was. Programmers in Seattle, manufacturers in Tokyo, localizers in Budapest. He was as placeless as a Happy Meal. Supply-side robotics. Satisfaction guaranteed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m just a little more tired than I thought I was.”
“Of course,” he said. “You’ve had a long journey.”
And something about the way he said it, the tone or the inflection, or maybe the way the corner of his mouth tugged up a little, made her wonder how much he really knew. Had the village scraped her feeds? Of course it had. It wasn’t even a question. That was part of the whole experience. Depending on the tier of service, you could provide all sorts of information that the park would use to create exactly the right storyline. They had to know about heart conditions, after all. It would follow that they had to know about heartbreak. And although she had been circumspect online, it was entirely possible that Tiffany told them something extra, on the sly.
“Come on, slick, I’ve got airplane crotch!” Tiffany said, a little too loudly. A polyfam of chalk-white corset-and-cravat enthusiasts swung their gaze at her. Tiffany gave them an eyebrow that was as good as a middle finger.
Ashleigh shook her head a little to clear it. She was just being paranoid. How many people came to Hammerburg for the same reasons as she? All too many. So what if she was a cliché? This really was the end of the road, for people like her. This was what closure looked like: a theme park village full of robots pretending to be vampires.
Their inn was called The Running Boar, and it was modelled on a set from The Brides of Dracula. Wherever possible, the literature warned them, props and set pieces traced back to “Bray Studios in the Berkshires” had been purchased. Printers and crafters had done the rest. In practice, what this meant were flickering chandeliers wrought from iron, and massive fireplaces with river rock chimneys that climbed up all the way up to open rafters hung with garlic, vervain and wolfsbane. And an animal’s head mounted in every room above the fireplace.
“You don’t think they’re real, are they?” Ashleigh asked, as they ascended the stairs toward their room. “The animals?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tiffany said. “Nothing’s real, here. That’s the whole point. Just don’t bring it up; it’s in the guidebook.” She gave Ashleigh a tickle under her ribs. “Stop worrying. I’m sure they put the surveillance units somewhere else.”
Ashleigh hadn’t even thought of that.
Their room had two beds, and no windows. At least, not proper ones. They were thick stained glass and solder, and they did not open. More dried garlic and wolfsbane hung in little bundle
s on either side of the window. No vampires would be sneaking in the old-fashioned way, apparently. You had to pay extra for that.
“You might see how the magic happens, otherwise,” Tiffany said, gesturing at the windows. “It’s the same everywhere. You get a view of the park, or you get nothing. I mean, you’re not supposed to call it a park, though. It’s an experience. It’s an immersive participatory fiction. Heaven forbid you should actually refer to it as a theme park, like it’s for kids or basics or people who do singalongs.”
“I wish we could see the castle,” Ashleigh said.
“Well, what can you expect, with a free room?”
Up the hill was a castle that reproduced Oakley Court, the castle that had appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Belles of St Trinian’s, and The Brides of Dracula. (Oakley Court, the literature was quick to point out, was itself a Gothic reproduction built during the Victorian period. So the Hammerburg version was a reproduction of that reproduction, a copy of a copy. You were supposed to recognize the irony of this on your own.) Staying there cost more, and you could purchase a role-play package wherein the Baron or Baroness or Count or whoever was inhabiting the castle at that moment plucked you out of obscurity and invited you to spend the night. What happened after that depended on how much you’d spent, and what waivers you’d signed, and whether the ambient sensors thought your heart was in good condition.
Downstairs was a lively gastropub called Badstein’s, and during the day a tearoom called Madame Marianne’s opened up for a continental breakfast, followed by little paté sandwiches and strudels and cold fruit soups with sour cream and brown sugar. A small leather-bound booklet informed Ashleigh of these things. It was real leather. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d actually seen real leather. There wasn’t a lot of room for it in the life of a grad student. She inhaled the smell of it and tried to fathom the expense. For a moment she seriously considered spending the entire trip in bed, ordering endless room service, watching as the mismatched “homestyle” patterned china stacked up and up and up in perilous towers of pink flowers and blue pagodas.
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