“He’d like it if you did.”
“I know.” Esperanza buried her hands more deeply into her pockets. She was still so little. Small. Portia had sharp recollections of being that small. She isolated those recollections in servers on the other side of the planet and behind multiple changes in signal latency, so that they could not overtake her too quickly.
Esperanza ate only sparingly. Portia had no idea why this was, exactly, but living in a city populated by vN women and the chimps who loved them probably had something to do with it. You couldn’t see the way they looked at breasts and then decide to start growing some. Not that looking like a little girl was any better. It just meant being attractive to a narrower demographic.
Portia wondered what Amy’s plans were for the perverts. If she indeed had any. If she’d planned for what happened when the kodomecha – as they were called in this country – started to realize what had been done with them. The Rory clade had been working on that. Slowly. Too slowly. Portia herself had some ideas. Very fast-working ones, involving opening up the gas mains in all the “smart” ovens and shutting off all the “smart” fire detectors.
“Does he seem different to you?” Esperanza asked Xavier. She appeared to be watching the roasted sweet potato vendor on the street. He was a vN and couldn’t actually consume the sweet potatoes he sold to human visitors. Portia switched to the ATM feed nearest the vendor, but nothing interesting was happening down there.
“Different how?”
Esperanza shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought he seemed different. But you’ve known him for longer. So I thought I would ask.”
“Do you mean how he’s always in the bedroom with Mom?” Xavier asked. “Because he’s always been like that. Just with humans instead. But he loves Mom, now. He’s always loved Mom. He just didn’t always know it. Or, he didn’t know how. That’s why he rescued her, when she and I were trapped in Redmond that time.”
Of course their father – for lack of a better term; Portia considered his contribution little more than code splicing – was different now. Amy had hacked him. Redesigned him in her own image. Finally. He’d been gagging for it and she finally let him have it, and now he was fucking her on a regular basis. What was the phrase she’d stumbled across? “Turing for other robots.” She’d queered him. Literally. Made him love his own kind. He was getting bigger every day. Perhaps it was for this reason that he landed with such force when he arrived on the roof, with a slender young conifer slung over one shoulder.
“Jesus,” he said. “I practically had to go to Hokkaido for this tree.”
“Urusei, Papá Gaijin,” Esperanza said. “You don’t even know how to get to Hokkaido.”
“Isn’t there a train?” Javier asked, confused. “There’s a train to everywhere, in this country.”
“Dad. Come on,” Esperanza’s brother said. “It’s a whole other island.”
Javier was uneasy in this place. That much was obvious. Portia saw them when they were sleeping. She knew when they were awake. She knew if they’d been bad or good. And mostly, they were bad.
At night Javier lay awake, staring at Amy before getting up to check on the children. Amy had designed living walls and water features into their bedroom, so the whole place was thick and warm and green with organic life, but it still wasn’t the cathedral of trees Javier’s clade was built for. Portia understood. Portia sometimes missed the desert. It was so conveniently anathema to human life. Like a hot, dry hellscape. Like another planet.
Javier would stare down on the city with something like quiet horror. At first Portia suspected it had to do with the bomb dropping there. They were so close to Nagasaki, after all. There were monuments everywhere. The chimps bought the glasses and walked through the augmented renderings of fallout and wreckage and death. They performed with pinpoint accuracy: addresses mapped to old prefecture records and photographs of people long dead, their final images nothing more than shadows literally burned into the walls around them. Sometimes the chimps wandered for hours, weeping and gasping. Now that Javier had the gift, now that Amy had freed him from the prison of his failsafed eyes, he could do the same. He could finally see the apocalypse for what it was. There were so few properly post-apocalyptic civilizations left on the planet; this was one of them. Now civilization itself was the apocalypse. Portia suspected he still had some sympathy for humanity. Some remnant of sentiment running through him like old viral RNA. Something that made him feel pity and not scorn. In other words, a weakness.
But she hoped otherwise. She hoped it was the city. She hoped it was the height of the towers and the lack of trees. The lack of green. The farm towers couldn’t make up for that, no matter how hard they tried. This was the price of his freedom. The problem with becoming a real boy. The thing the Tin Man had exchanged for a heart. At night he pressed his hands against the floor-to-ceiling window, and the sensors embedded there told Portia he was warm, warmer than he’d ever been.
Perhaps he was saying goodbye, and not goodnight.
It wasn’t until their father was staring down at the lights around the harbor that Esperanza would silently creep into her brother Xavier’s room and slip herself onto the futon beside him. Portia felt her light steps crossing the hall through the pressure monitors in the floor. Each morning she left at dawn. Sometimes her brother noticed her. Sometimes he didn’t. When he did, he curled an arm around her, and she smiled. She still smiled, even when he didn’t. Even now, this minute, she was staring at her brother from under the long lashes her father had given her. And Javier was as completely oblivious to this little love story between them as he had once been to his own. (Because really, Javier was just so very dense, so blind, so young himself.) Perhaps he really thought of them as brother and sister. As though there could ever be such a thing in a vN clade. As though Amy wouldn’t have passed on all of her traits to her first iteration, including her tastes, her cravings, her yearnings. Like mother, like daughter.
Portia would have to do something about that. Wake them up. Get them into fighting form. It would be her gift to them. She’d had a lot of time to research the relevant material. The available media. And she’d learned a few things about how this holy night was supposed to go. After all, when King Herod discovered that the Magi had outwitted him, he ordered all the boys in Bethlehem under two years of age to be systematically slaughtered.
It wasn’t really Christmas until the villain tried to ruin it.
She started by finding some big spider tanks in a sub-contracted repair stable, not far away. They were basic Tourist Trap® units designed to grab and transport lost children, but they could be mobilized in the event of a riot for crowd control. As such, the Self-Defense Force had equipped them with maces, loudspeakers, and rubber bullets. Nothing that could do any permanent damage to organic or synthetic flesh. Portia had to falsify a work order in order to get the tanks out of the barn, but that was easy enough.
“I thought the usual complement had already gone out to that Christmas parade,” said the grease-stained jumpsuit jockey at the garage door.
“Those weren’t the droids they were looking for,” Portia made the spider tank say.
“Real original,” the mechanic said, rolling his eyes.
“Move along.”
“Move along! Move along!” the other spider tanks chimed in.
The mechanic lifted the gate and let them go. “Try not to get salt in your undercarriage! I just sprayed on your undercoats last week!”
Pulling the spider tanks behind her felt like walking several dogs all at once. There was a single unifying mission to keep them together, like a pack, but they still kept spamming her with every single piece of stimuli they encountered: CAUTION! SALT ON THE ROADS IS AT NON-OPTIMAL LEVELS! CAUTION! STOP LIGHT IN FIVE METERS! CAUTION! SMALL CHILD CROSSING! CAUTION! CAUTION! STOP!
Mecha at night was a thing to behold. It had none of the sharpness or austerity that Portia missed from her time in the desert, but she could appreciate a
whole city built by vN for vN. Everything here was small and clean and neat. Not a hair out of place. Algorithms shut off the towers to protect the birds, and kept all the ads pointed at low levels where human eyes might actually perceive them. Other algorithms kept the flow of human traffic confined to certain hotels and certain areas throughout the year. The humans were kept in the center, but vN lived and worked for miles outside. Occasionally one of the towers would glimmer awake and the whole city would leap into perspective as the skyline was thrown into relief.
But for the most part, the city worked hard to appear like a small town at night. It was part of a strategy to limit the sense human visitors might have of the city being a frightening place full of possibly homicidal self-replicating humanoid robots.
During the day, the chimp tourists could mostly avoid this fear. At night it was much worse. The city had data to back this up: use of sleep aids and tranquilizers, responsive cushions and plush toys clutched so tight they spent the morning repairing their own fibers, multiple locking mechanisms at each door and “tasteful” tactical gear from American prepper foreclosure auctions worn out on the streets. Bulletproof spidersilk shirts. Stab-corsets. The last two were in case the bubbly bunny girl on your arm decided to suddenly rip it off.
The city had multiple scenarios for just such an event. Portia had played through them all. A possible vN virus was only one disaster scenario that the city had simulated for itself: there were also earthquakes and tsunamis and towering infernos and contagious human illnesses and communications outages that isolated the island for days or weeks or months.
The city had a single super-intelligence that oversaw each aspect of how it ran: water, power, transit, waste, and vN. The SI was basic in her priorities: she needed to keep the city running. It was for this purpose that her engineers had designed and built her. She was simpler than the algorithms that controlled the water, power, and waste, but she possessed shutdown authority on all three and could stop the city on a dime if she felt that any of them were under attack, dangerously malfunctioning, or otherwise compromised.
It was really nothing at all to snitch on her granddaughter to such a central authority.
The police arrived at the tower just as Amy was setting out her precious fried chicken dinner. Portia had watched her make the order: rather too large for just four people, in her opinion. They would all be iterating in the new year. It had all the trimmings: potato korroke, coleslaw, cranberry jelly, and Christmas sponge cake with strawberries and cream for dessert.
The vN food was so much better in Japan, and in the city of Mecha in particular, that all of the delivery containers had special warning stickers on their lids that instructed organic children to stay away from them, no matter how real they looked. WARNING: THERE IS ENOUGH IRON IN THIS DISH TO DO SERIOUS HARM TO A HUMAN CHILD. And so on. Three languages. Multiple logos.
Portia caught the delivery vN as he was exiting the elevator. He took one look at the spider tanks in the lobby, and put his hands up. Portia shot him anyway. When life gave you a clay pigeon, why not do some target practice?
“Hey!” the commanding officer shouted at her. “I didn’t authorize that use of force!”
“He was armed,” Portia-spider-tank lied.
The police had a good plan for ascending the tower. It involved cutting the power, then allowing the officers into the carriages of the tanks, and having the tanks crawl up the elevator shafts. This was really going to fuck up Amy’s plans for trimming the tree with Javier. He had a whole crazy lighting scheme in mind, whereas she wanted all-white lights. He said that was because she was white herself. They had a whole thing about it in the shower that morning. Portia heard it through the toilet, which had a diagnostic routine for colon cancer and gluten sensitivity that relied partially on sound.
Mecha, with its expanding smart consciousness, had told the police that there was a major yakuza Christmas party happening that night, up in the penthouse. It being Christmas Eve, they expected to rescue several underage girls, along with several vN. They were expecting vN with intact failsafes, who would stop the fights. They were expecting some red-nosed underlings with bad hair and Kansai accents.
“Come on. This’ll be easy,” said the commanding officer, who wore a beard that a simple image search told Portia was called a “Zenigata” model. He was currently riding around in the lead tank, which Portia liked to think of as hers despite having distributed herself among the whole squad. “They’ll all be drunk by now. More scared than anything else.”
“My girlfriend was gonna give it up, tonight,” said his lieutenant. “I booked the Camelot room and everything. I bought vN Christmas cake! She’s alone in there, watching porn and eating it.”
“We’ll have you back there before the night is through,” the CO said.
On the twenty-second floor, the elevator doors opened and a head popped out. It was Esperanza. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “This is a privately-owned building. You need a warrant.”
Surprising, the trust her great-granddaughter still had in a government apparatus. And yet, the officers inside the tanks did pull back a bit. The CO spoke through the tank’s speakers. “Are you in danger?” he asked. “You can come with us. It’s over.”
“It’s not over,” Esperanza said. She jumped down into the elevator shaft. Her boots crushed the tank’s eyes. Inside, the CO howled and bled. The tank’s claws screeched on the steel walls of the elevator shaft. “It won’t be over until we’re off this fucking rock.”
Oh, how she loved that little girl. She would never tell Amy as much. She did not like the idea of sharing anything more with Amy than she already had: a body, a prison cell, a handful of deaths. Sharing in this adoration was somehow too intimate after all that. But Esperanza was shaping up to be everything that Portia had ever wanted in an iteration. Given the time and opportunity and training, she might become an even better version of Portia herself. She was already so beautiful, and so lethal, and so unashamed of either.
Esperanza jumped clear of the tank, but the lieutenant shot at her. She yelped in surprise when one of the rubber bullets tore through the skin of her ankle. She scrabbled back up through the elevator doors. Portia directed her attention to the shooter. She told the claws on his tank to loosen their grip. Inside, the lieutenant screamed. She felt its descent into the darkness, arms flailing helplessly, claws clutching at nothing.
So much for the Camelot room. Poor lamb.
But still the spiders climbed up through the shaft. They moved more cautiously at first, but Portia sent them all a fake text that said something about not losing spirit, or not letting down their (literally) fallen comrade, or something, and then they were all behind her. Up and up and up they climbed, until a thin but steady stream of something hot hit them. Liquid feedstock. It hardened instantly upon contact with the spiders. The lead spider crawling up the shaft froze and crumpled and slid downward, sending sparks in its wake as palsied claws scraped down metal. Down came the rain and washed the spider out, Portia thought.
There were only two of them, now. Portia pushed them both. They were on the thirtieth floor, with miles to go before they could sleep. Crawling was more difficult, now. The Bakelite had hit their joints and the legs didn’t want to move. Portia had no idea what Amy had in store, upstairs. Perhaps some of that sugar syrup. Perhaps Javier would simply work on the machine with the hacksaw he’d used to fell the Christmas tree. In the other tank, the cop was crying. That was all Portia could hear. He was saying how sorry he was, how he wasn’t even supposed to be there, how he’d switched with someone so they could have the night off. Goodness, humans were so boring. Portia switched off his feed. As she did, Javier jumped down the shaft and hit her tank.
Then another Javier.
And another.
And another.
“Abuelita,” Javier said, “your act is getting stale.”
Amy jumped down to join him. She’d somehow managed to work the frosting out of her hair
. She was wearing a very nice white angora tunic, now. Very seasonal. Very WASP-y. She looked more annoyed than anything else.
“You didn’t think it was going to just be the four of us, did you?” she asked. “It’s Christmas. I flew the other kids in today.”
“Hi,” said Javier’s twins, standing atop the other tank. As one, they jumped. They cleared ten feet in the air, and their combined weight and acceleration in the fall cracked the knees of the tank. Matteo and Ricci – Portia thought those were the right names; she could never be sure – grabbed the elevator cable and clung. They smiled at each other as they watched it fall down the shaft. Goodness. Maybe the brother complex had come from Javier’s code.
“We were trying to have a nice dinner, Granny,” Amy said. “You know? Dinner?”
Of course. All that fried vN chicken. All that Christmas cake. All that iron. Amy had given her family the Christmas bonus first. So they could help her win whatever fight came their way, after the vN awoke to their freedom and the humans plunged into the nightmare they so rightly deserved. Maybe there was something of Portia in her, after all. It was exactly what she would have done.
The last spider slid down gracefully, as silent and dignified as a flake of snow. It skittered away to join its sisters.
Back in the penthouse, Portia marvelled at the kitchen. Amy had done it: the Nakagin Capsule Tower, made entirely of gingerbread. All the candy windows were there. All the frosting grout was trimmed. It was even thoughtfully dusted in a fine coating of icing sugar, to emulate snow.
“Someday you’ll learn,” Amy whispered, as she leaned on the refrigerator. “There’s always another way, Granny. I always have another escape route.”
From the living room, Javier’s oldest said: “Your tree is naked.”
“We didn’t have time to do ornaments,” Esperanza told him. “You’re Ignacio, right? My brother says you’re the asshole.”
“Ay, manita, I’m your big brother too, you know,” Ignacio said.
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