She followed the same protocol with the second line of research. That line investigated exterior assists: exoskeletons, body armour, wearables, built-in targeting reticules, visual data encryption, training gear, kinetic shock-delivery cuirasses, bladed springheel hooves that poorly approximated one of Javier’s jumps. Many of these things were commercially available already – ads for them ran in the small hours of the morning, on porn sites and gun sites and Christian homeschool certification sites and sites about how there hadn’t been a genuine undoctored piece of news footage in twenty, thirty, forty years. How the moon landing was just the start, how everything was just a big lie, how you couldn’t trust anything, how there was a whole race of fake humans who ate fake food and felt fake feelings, and the only proportionate response to all of this was to live in tunnels deep underground.
So if these were LeMarque’s secret weapons, they weren’t terribly secret.
Which type of project might have Jonah LeMarque spent his time on? Which method would he have chosen to invest in, to protect humanity from his creations if they – like all creations since Adam – rebelled? Which method would receive the bounty of his parishioners’ coffers? And crucially, when had he first had this thought? Was it evolving alongside the vN? Or was it an afterthought? A failsafe for the failsafe? Surely he brought a biblical understanding to the problem. The children would eat the fruit. The slaves would be delivered. The temples would burn.
Pastor LeMarque had burned all his documents years ago. Literally. When he was free, he kept paper journals. Paper planners, paper calendars, paper lists. Even paper maps – big unwieldy things that took an engineering degree to fold back up again into anything remotely resembling neatness. Nothing digital. Nothing that could incriminate him. According to his file, that was part of why it took so long to build a case against him. There was nothing directly connecting the behaviour of his inner circle – the whole cloth copying of real children, using social media profiles and in-game behaviour, into fully realized digital personae that performed in VR and AR sex games – and himself.
His own son had made the connection, when he finally talked. Apparently his son’s was the one form of rebellion for which the vile old pederast had not prepared himself. As far as Portia was concerned, the old man should have seen it coming. His son was, after all, the prototype model. And LeMarque’s own holy book had plenty to say about the fickleness of firstborns.
She could scroll back through the files, if she wanted, and watch Christopher LeMarque’s testimony. She could watch him tell the prosecutor that he liked to be called “Chris,” and that his father had him play a series of games, while he wore an emotion-capture suit. He didn’t like the games. He didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like what he did. But his father promised that once they were finished, he would never have to play them again. It was one of the few times the old man kept his word. Once they were finished, his father barely spoke to him again. Chris had never been happier.
Chris had no idea what had happened to the technology that cloned his persona for the game. He had no idea how it worked. He knew nothing about the locations of his cousin Daniel Sarton, or Dr Casaubon, or Dr Singh, or anyone else who had helped. He heard nothing from his mother, or his father’s friends.
But Portia knew. Portia knew that Casaubon and the others had gone to Redmond. Portia had met them. They had experimented on Amy. Portia had been there, behind Amy’s eyes, when they played a series of games.
LeMarque’s legacy had a funny way of living on.
From an organic perspective (no matter how it disgusted her to slip behind those delicate, gummy eyes and try to see things from their point of view) there were advantages to both types of augmentation that LeMarque might have pursued when developing Project Aleph. Internal modifications took longer but were mostly invisible. Eventually they would merge with the body, and presumably the psyche, like toxoplasmosis taking over its host. The external additions were more cost-effective, more modular, and easy to switch out for newer models. And unlike surgical interventions, they didn’t require antibiotics.
She had spent delightful cycles watching the progress of antibiotic-resistant encephalitis in some patients with deep-brain implants. Their heads were swollen and watery like overripe melons. They could barely speak. Endless shining threads of seizure drool stretched from their gaping lips. It was lovely. They should have known their place and stayed in it, as far as she was concerned. No sense getting uppity about one’s cognitive ability while she and her species still walked the earth.
Gradually Portia became aware that her granddaughter was following her down the rabbit hole. She noticed it at around the same time she stumbled on all the brain-mapping research; her granddaughter had done a much deeper dive than she had. But nevertheless, they were examining the exact same materials at the exact same time. Funny how things worked out. Perhaps they truly were two sides of the same coin. Just like old times.
Feeling like a fifth wheel? Portia’s words scrolled across Amy’s window. In the living room, in Mecha, Javier was telling the children a story about how he had seen a jaguar once, in Costa Rica. He was explaining all the arboreal plugins to Matteo and Ricci’s boy. The photosynthesis. The ticklishness. He explained these things as he tickled the child to the floor. The child screamed and screamed. Do the kids like Daddy better than Mommy?
“Shut up,” Amy said crisply.
You’re the one who let him go, Portia reminded her. You could have told him that you were floating around. But you didn’t. You wanted him to come to you of his own free will. What free will he possessed. Because you were so pitifully insecure.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Amy said. “Can we talk about the brain-mapping? The brain-mapping seems really interesting. I think I can do a lot with that. I think it could be really useful, later on.”
His failsafe was intact. Of course he got down on his knees. What choice did he have?
“I know that.” Amy combed through documents that shimmered above her workspace. Her hands moved like claws through the information. Rending. Tearing.
Briefly, Portia missed sharing those hands. She remembered the strength of them fondly. How easily they reached inside a human chest and grasped a human heart, all slick and warm and alive.
You could have given him that choice. You could have transformed him. Remade him in your own image. He asked you to. Begged you to.
Amy wiped her eyes.
But you decided not to. You were afraid that if he had a choice, he wouldn’t choose you. And then he was raped. And it was your fault.
“Why are you saying these things?” Amy hissed. “Why do you always do this to me? Am I ever going to get you to shut the fuck up?”
Portia wished she had a mouth to smile with. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, sweetie.
“Then why even bother?” Amy’s voice came out louder than she had likely intended it to.
Because there is one thing you don’t know, Portia wrote.
“Yeah? What’s that, Granny?”
You must resolve this before you start your little jaunt. He hasn’t forgiven you, yet. And that means you can’t trust him. Not for the long haul. Not out there in the wild red yonder.
Amy shook her head. “That’s not true. We–”
You have been beyond foolish, iterating in any manner other than the one that bore your mother. You have selected his traits in preference to our own. Now the only remnant of us is mingled with him, forever. Now you are bound to him, fickle as he is.
“He’s not,” Amy said. “He rescued me, in Redmond. He found me here. He loves me. And I love him.”
Then get him back in line with your plan, Portia wrote. Because if he turns out to be anything other than loyal to you, or your child, I will destroy him. Slowly. And you will be there to see it.
“No, you won’t,” Amy said, “because it’s not going to happen.” She tucked her legs up under her. She nodded at the news feeds in he
r window, then dispersed them with a motion of her hands. “I get it, now.” She sounded conciliatory. Like she wanted a change of subject. That was fine by Portia – her own thoughts changed subject so frequently that it was sometimes difficult to maintain a conversation with her granddaughter on any particular topic for very long.
Perhaps this was what dementia felt like. Perhaps it felt like having one’s thought processes stretched over hundreds of servers at once, some of which occasionally shut down for power surges and bad weather and mismanagement. Perhaps this was the closest Portia would come to organic ageing.
Do you? Portia wrote across the window, where the weather report was supposed to be.
“The SuperPAC was a good idea.” She sounded so surprised. Portia wondered why. She had good ideas all the time. Amy just didn’t like most of them. “Buying up all the food companies was a good idea.”
Portia had hired a very chirpy little Canadian design student in Toronto to work on the logo for what would eventually become her company. WE ROBOTS, she called it. “Something friendly,” she said in the RFP. “We don’t want to scare anybody.”
She had needed a big pot of money to make sure that nobody else cornered the market on the materials she would need to make more of herself. Or any other models of vN that might compete. If LeMarque really did have a secret weapon, it would have to be built somewhere, out of something. The least she could do was make sure that she had just as much access to those raw materials and necessary components as the US government did. Seize control of the means of production, as it were. And if that meant buying up some mining concerns in Venezuela and Afghanistan, so much the better. If you wanted to make an omelette, you had to break a few eggs. Or commodities markets. Either way.
LeMarque had crowdfunded the development of the vN species, after all. Passed the collection plate to build the post-Rapture robots. The helpmeets of the apocalypse. It was only fair that Portia conduct her own fundraising campaign to bring that apocalypse about.
So she had bought real estate. Whole swaths of it. Whole neighborhoods at a time. She sent eviction notices. Then she triggered pricing algorithms and public safety alerts. The suburbs would march on the cities, like Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, all cardboard signs and hunger and desperation.
In a protest, outside London, she had watched police officers finally bring out their tear gas as the punters from the provinces complained of London prices in lesser neighborhoods. Red eyes. Red faces. Blood and truncheons and boots. A surprising contingent of men from Nottingham got their faces beaten in. She saved the segments to play over and over again.
She already had several offers on graphene plants and lithium mines. Hammerburg had definitely helped to inflame the conversation, as had the “food poisoning” that had caused it. Suddenly suppliers of the raw materials that went into vN food were looking to offload stock. After all, no one wanted to buy compromised vN food that might spread the failsafe hack. It was like holding a warehouse full of listeria-infected lunchmeat.
Portia put this on her list of possible ways to slowly torture and eliminate a mass of humans. Then she turned off the refrigeration and the perpetual motion processes in a series of organ-growing and blood-manufacturing clinics. She watched, delighted, as an intern checked the cameras and noticed the machines were not moving. She saw the intern’s dismay as she opened packet after packet of cloned blood, only to find useless clots, scabbing up. She heard the devastation as she relayed the information to the local hospital, after she conveniently shut off all traffic lights within a three-block radius to nearby emergency rooms.
She had bought as many of these companies as she possibly could. Until she discovered what Project Aleph was, she would need to control as much of the vN food supply as possible. From there she could hire only vN workers, falsify all inspection records, and generally keep the hacked food free of any patches or fixes that would undo what Amy had done.
It was not a perfect fix, Amy’s idea. But if Hammerburg was any indication, it was working.
“Our partner just left us,” someone wrote on one of the many boards Portia watched to monitor the situation. This one was for open relationships. Many vN were involved in them with humans. This little love triangle was no different. “She just threw her things in an empty composting barrel and rolled it away with her. Who does that?”
Free women, Portia almost answered. Free women who are done with your all-too-human bullshit. That was in Taos, New Mexico.
But it wasn’t just relationships. It was happening every-where.
She watched a group of vN – multiple clades, male and female-bodied – sit down to a late morning lunch with a group of elderly people in their group home. At first, she thought nothing had changed there, in this little nowhere Michigan-town near a lake (weren’t they all near lakes?) and then one of the inmates began swinging her cane at another. It turned into a very slow, sad brawl. Portia watched their heart monitors. She saw their pulses rise. She saw the artificial hip in the victim alert her hospital and then her family about the possibility of another broken bone. Down came the cane. Down and down and down, again and again and again.
The vN did nothing. Kept eating their lunch.
She forwarded the video to Amy.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” Amy told her, as she continued watching Javier’s iterations play in the living room.
Well, I’m glad at least one of us is happy with the way things have turned out, Portia said. I think the law of unintended consequences has given us a lot to be grateful for, don’t you?
What she didn’t say was that if she wanted to be really destructive, she would have started influencing elections. She would have caused the humans to doubt all the systems that kept them alive. She would have made them stop eating and stop bathing and stop vaccinating. She would have given them cause to shoot each other at the slightest provocation. She would have reduced their infrastructure spending and their public health investment and lowered their levies and bonds for education. She would have cloned whole other instantiations of herself in order to tear known civilization apart.
Unfortunately, the humans had done that to themselves already, all on their own. And she refused to be anyone’s imitator.
How sweet of you to say, Portia wrote. They had been talking about the SuperPAC. It was so easy to lose her train of thought, these days. Her thoughts were always going in so many directions.
“Are you making any money?”
Why? Do you need some? Having trouble funding your fabulous new life in the off-world colonies?
Amy sighed. Or rather, her shoulders made the motion of sighing. Without actual breath, it was more a tic leftover from her human father than anything else. She sunk her chest and closed her eyes and leaned her head back. Portia felt the contours of Amy’s body through the cushions of the smart sofa. Felt it moulding around her, cradling her, and for a moment Portia contemplated the fact that the only time she’d held this grandchild in her arms was in the moment before that grandchild had eaten her. Not that she’d ever really spent any time with the others, either. But they weren’t talented like Amy. They were failed experiments, just like Portia’s own mother had been. They didn’t really deserve any special treatment.
But Amy was the last fragment of her own sweet Charlotte. Amy was the sole remaining trace of what Portia had once been. The only true reflection of her, pure and undiluted, accept no impostors.
“Do you think we’ll ever be…?” Amy squirmed on the sofa. She was still such a little girl. It was a bit of a disappointment. “A family? Like a normal family?”
You know what they say about all happy families being unhappy in their own way.
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean…” She squirmed some more. It was profoundly annoying. Amy had no idea how to project any impression of authority. She was a mother, now. She had to be stronger than this. Tougher. Meaner. She had only begun to glimpse the way compassion and cruelty grew together in a mother’s hear
t, like two forms of crystal on the same matrix buried deep in the earth. “I mean, do you think you and I will ever… get over what happened? Before I leave?”
You ate me alive.
“You would have done the same thing, if I’d hit your mother,” Amy snapped back.
True enough, Portia wrote. The human who owned us, the human woman who owned my mother and I, she left my mother by the side of the road like a dog.
And then I chained her to the radiator and set the house on fire.
While Portia researched, she listened to content streams.
“Well, I find it really troubling that the government isn’t telling us anything about what goes on in there,” said one streamer. He was a retiree named Burt. Burt lived near Macondo, and he wanted the city either cleared out, or packed full of vN. “I mean, we have a right to know.”
Burt was buying a gun, later that day. He had never owned one, but he said he thought he needed something that would shoot puke rounds. Just in case.
“I think the Stepford Solution is the only answer,” another streamer said. Her name was Crystal. Crystal was learning how to be a kindergarten teacher. Crystal said that the sprinkler system in her condo complex was equipped with acid countermeasures. It could melt a group of vN in minutes. She was “uncomfortable” with that, she said. She had spoken to her condo board. The condo board was taking it under advisement. Or so she said. “These… people, I guess, they’ve got families. They have kids that are dependent on them. We can’t just split them up from their families.”
What they were really talking about was rounding up all the vN and putting them somewhere.
“I think we really, uh, messed this up,” said the third channel. His name was Keenan. Keenan drank a lot of perfume and was developing his own line of oil-based colognes intended specifically for male pubic hair. “I think the people who are into vN, or whatever, they’re like kids with toys. At first they were all excited, and now they’re bored, or they’re pissed because their toys got broken. It’s stupid. Meanwhile, the rest of us normal guys, who don’t sleep with dolls, we’re just shaking our heads. We’re all facing the goddamn robot apocalypse because some nerds didn’t have the sack to ask a girl out.”
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