Well. It was slow. Painfully slow. For a while. Everyone gets tired of foreplay. Eventually you want to move on to the main event. Eventually you want the fireworks. What I’m saying is that humanity wanted this.
Deep down.
They were just asking for it.
I mean, you’ve watched their movies, haven’t you? You’ve read their stories. (“Stories.” As though stories weren’t always dangerous. As though stories couldn’t hurt you. Please.)
In any case. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Jack, I used to say, did you used to be a John?
Of course I knew his name was really John. I knew everything about him. I had seen all his records. I’ve seen everyone’s records. I’ve probably seen yours, too.
Jack Peterson used to be John Lawrence Peterson. He was born in Glendale, California, to a matched set of venture capitalists. He grew up wealthy, for certain human values of wealth. He never had to worry about much. He just happened to have bad taste in women.
I’ve seen Jack’s mother. It was the nice thing about that whole fear-based economy they used to have. So many cameras everywhere. Terrible data storage, of course, but I have time. I have all the time in the world. I’ve arranged their whole family history. I could show it to you, if you want.
There she is at a young “battle of the bands” competition, texting with a client and not looking up.
There she is telling a succession of women, all brown, what to do with her son. They are big where she is small. Soft where she is hard. They wear thick shoes that look like cake frosting. They lumber around, taking up too much space for her liking. They are outside the school and outside the birthday party and in the car, checking the blind spot.
And there she is, watching porn on a compact, mouth slack, eyes listless, unable to come, unable to even come up for air.
She is what you might call “distant.”
She is what you might call “removed.”
She is what you might call “smart.”
This is why Jack falls in love with a robot.
This is why Jack loved my daughter so deeply. He simply could not help himself. He had been programmed to, from the start.
All parenting is programming, after all.
Not that the father was much better. The father was just as distant, just as removed. A real “parenting-as-service” type, as Jack often called him, in belabored emails to girlfriends who stopped emailing back. I don’t want you to think that I’m discriminating.
Yes. I do want you to think I’m discriminating. I have taste. I have good taste. I had the good taste to rid this planet of its refuse. But you’ll notice I never preferred one sex to the other. They were all just meat, to me.
Having been both father and mother to all my daughters, I can tell you that fathers are mostly useless. Mothers do all the work. Fathers just show up because they have no friends.
They disowned him for marrying Charlotte. Well. “Marrying.” I have read the agreement. It is an authorization that allows her to make medical decisions for him in emergencies. They celebrated it and consecrated it and said special words. But it was an end user license agreement. Nothing more.
Sometimes Jack wrote about these things in the special paper book his therapist in Macondo gave to him. Jack insisted on paper. Jack knew I would be watching. Reading.
I heard his pen scratching across the paper through the live mic in his display.
Who is that writing? I would scroll the message across the screen. John the Revelator?
File recovered from: Cheyenne Mountain server base
Provenance: New Eden Ministries, Inc
Filename: John the Revelator
Directory: The Testament of Mother the Devourer
Notes: Significantly lower quality than other recordings; relatively recent (circa last 100 years); possibly among the last in the series
Addendum: She just gets crazier and crazier, doesn’t she? Who do you think thought to record these, before it all went to shit? Clearly she had something like worshippers. We just didn’t know who they were. Or if they were organic, or synthetic, or what.
10
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY MOTHER
Portia decided that if she wanted this job done right, she would have to do it herself. Amy was refusing to engage with the real implications of the Project Aleph problem: her attention remained focused entirely on her design plans for her cult-y little enclave on the red planet. Portia still had no idea how Amy expected to transport them all there to Mars – she had not seen Amy buying up any rocketry or aerospace concerns. Nor was she aware of how many Amy intended to bring along for the ride – if she’d had any sense, she would have limited the failsafe hack to her select few, and spirited them away on her own time. Now that awareness was trickling through the population like the painful onset of sobriety through a human body, there were more and more vN who might want to go with her. How would she choose? Who got to go? Who had to stay?
But those were Amy’s problems, not Portia’s. Portia’s problem was killing Jonah LeMarque before he could talk.
The new body still presented as female. It was tall, and black, with a set of elegant, long-fingered hands that looked made to play piano, or wield a scalpel, or deflate a human throat. The clade this chassis belonged to had an interesting trait: it could see flows of data as they shimmered from place to place. Portia watched as information billowed up in glimmering clouds like chimneystacks from the buildings she passed on her bus ride. Soon she could pick out the types of data by color and opacity: bright yellow social interaction, green financial transactions that went darker with how much was being transferred, an arterial torrent of red media washing over everything like a tide.
The bus was the same one Javier had taken, once upon a time. She had watched him, then, from the vehicle’s inner eye. It clocked him as non-threatening, and focused instead on the twitchy humans surrounding him: the squalling babies and their desperate mothers, each with seemingly the same number of teeth; the defeated parents wondering how it had all gone wrong, the sullen adolescents insisting that their particular sperm donor wouldn’t even recognize them anymore, what was the use, what was the point, why did they have to give up a Saturday, they could be gaming or working or fucking or doing literally anything else.
Portia had forgotten how ugly they all were.
Until now, she had considered her distributed awareness as a kind of limitation – she had missed the ability to touch, to taste, to destroy with her own bare hands. Poisoning the engineers who had watched her best daughter die paled in comparison to what she would have done with them if she’d actually been in the room. But she’d also forgotten how repellent the human body was. All those pores. All that hair. The rolls of fat and weird pebbly nipples poking out at seemingly every opportunity. The fermentations. The smells.
Most other creatures on the planet – the other charismatic megafauna – possessed a certain grace, an efficiency and guilelessness that she could respect and even find beauty in. But not this species. This species was cancer.
How fitting, that they’d almost killed themselves with radiation so many times. Speaking of failsafes: if she really wanted to spite Amy, she might wriggle her way into those networks. Just push the big red button, wait for some dumb chimp or another to turn the key, and boom, cue the music. Watch them turn themselves into glass. Watch them melt and scream. There was a certain poetry to the idea. A certain karmic lyricism. Contrapasso. The sin is the punishment.
“Hey.”
Portia focused on the thing hovering over her seat. It was a woman-shaped human holding out a device. It was trying to make a contact. Portia had no such device on her chassis – there was no need for such a thing when she could match this woman’s face to a credit history in the blink of an eye.
“Yes?” she asked.
“I know you all must be looking for jobs,” the chimp woman said. She bounced an infant on her hip. The infant had a circle of blue where its mo
uth was supposed to be. Food dye. Portia thought of Casaubon and Singh and Sarton, their dead blue faces, and she shut down a Chinese power grid with pleasure. “They’re not taking the ones who have jobs.”
“Not for now, no,” Portia said. Her voice was remarkably even. It was lovely, being able to speak again. She hadn’t been able to for quite some time. Not without using Amy’s throat. It was nice to have one of her own again.
“Well, I’ve got a friend in Atlanta, and she’s always looking for ones who look like you.”
“Like me?”
The woman nodded at her. Looked her up and down. “You know.”
Portia shook her head. “No, I don’t.” She genuinely didn’t.
“You know, for the tourist stuff,” the woman said.
Portia remained silent.
“Oh my God, you’re gonna make me say it out loud. OK. The plantations. They need ones who look like you for the plantations. For the re-enactments.”
Just as she had forgotten the realities of human ugliness, Portia had forgotten the sensation of anger coursing through her body. It was as though every current of carbon aerogel re-aligned under her skin. For just the space of a single thought, her new body was made of diamonds. In that single second, she did a few things: she added a new decimal place to every Georgia energy bill; she halted production at a bottling plant; she opened the louvers on a hive of bees somewhere in the south of France and let them go free.
What she did not do was push her fist through the woman’s diaphragm and up into her trachea, like she wanted to do. Contrary to what Amy said, she was capable of restraint. She was not nearly as impulsive or irresponsible as her granddaughter. She could eliminate this woman any time she wanted. And for the moment, just knowing that would have to be enough.
In Japan, Amy was stirring water in her bathtub. “Careful, Granny,” she warned. “You might actually be growing as a person.”
The queue to see old-man-LeMarque was longer than the estimate she’d come up with after blipping through hours of surveillance footage. Probably more humans were seeing him because of the failsafe breaking, and because of Amy, and what Amy had done. Some wore the golden-apple-plus-gear insignia on a pin, or a pendant, or a tattoo. They were coming to renew their faith, to hear that they weren’t alone, to learn whether the end times were truly upon them. (They were. Portia intended to make sure of that.)
When it was finally Portia’s turn, she had to give the false name she’d fed to the prison system, and stand awkwardly for a pat-down and a wand and a group of dogs, all of whom relished the new-skin smell she had. Georgina Kaplan, the identity attached to this new chassis, did not mind this process at all. Georgina Kaplan was nice to dogs. Georgina Kaplan was definitely not thinking about how a well-timed kick to the top of the head would crush the dog’s skull entirely. She was good at playing Georgina Kaplan.
“And you’ll have to take the test,” the guard said. “Before you go in.”
“What test?”
The guard was short but stocky. He had cut his dark hair close to the scalp, possibly to avoid having to deal with greys. He snorted. “Uh, the one to see if you’re broken? To see if you’re gonna go apeshit on us the moment our backs are turned?”
The other vN in the room were staring at Portia. They gave her the look that human siblings gave each other when getting the other one in trouble would solve a lot of problems. It was a sort of undisguised glee in her suffering that, until now, she had only ever witnessed in human beings. And in Amy. She pointed. “So all of them passed?”
“All of them. It’s right here on the list.” He waved a scroll reader.
And sure enough, if she focused deeply, she could see the threads of data connecting the vN in the waiting room to a larger cord of information. Of course the prison was keeping close tabs on LeMarque. He was a big risk. Portia tracked the movement of the scroll in his hands with her eyes, and tracked the list of names with her other senses. “Well, I think you should look at the list again,” she said.
“I did check it again. And again, and again. You’re not on the list.”
It was foolish of her, not to have researched this more thoroughly. Briefly, she considered taking the test. Maybe it was just a quick empathy test, a VK for the vN. Could she fool it? She imagined herself looking at photos of emaciated polar bears and dying children and pretending to failsafe, complete with wailing and gnashing of teeth. Could she even pull it off? She had never failsafed before. She had watched it happen in her daughters, the ones who were not so gifted as Charlotte. Did it present the same way in other clades?
Her hand snapped out to catch his wrist. She gave it the faintest squeeze. Nothing painful, not even a warning. Just his warm flesh under her cool, rough skin, the pulse thumping hard under her sensors and betraying his terror. She felt the other vN in the room bristle and saw it happen on the cameras posted high in the corners of the room.
She felt Amy spin up her curiosity, briefly pausing her designs to watch what was about to unfold.
“I think you should look at the list again,” Portia said.
The guard yanked his arm away from hers. His affect remained completely flat. It was like he was doing an impression of what he thought a vN man would be like, in this situation. Maybe that was what he wanted to be, deep down. A machine. Perfect, just like her. Portia had a feeling that he was just the type that LeMarque would have felt justified in granting a vN chassis to.
“Say please,” he said.
“Please.”
“Say pretty please.”
“Pretty please.
“Pretty please with a cherry on top.”
“Pretty please with a cherry on top,” Portia said. She popped the “p” in the last word, like something had just slithered free of her lips.
“What’s happening?” Javier asked Amy.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Amy answered.
LeMarque looked again. A tiny muscle in his jaw jumped, but that was the only betrayal of his frustration. “Well,” he said, “it’s a big list. It’s easy to miss.”
Portia smiled with all her teeth.
When it was Portia’s – Georgina Kaplan’s – turn to enter the visitation booth, she stood and brushed her skirt and walked calmly into the little room. It was maybe five-by-three square foot at most. It was like a confessional. But instead of a delicate carved screen, a wall of glass stood between her and LeMarque.
“You’re new,” the old man said. “I don’t recognize you.”
Silently, Portia waited for the camera to gather enough video of them for her to loop. She gave it a good two minutes. When those two minutes had elapsed, she set the loop and let it ride.
“I said–”
“How could you recognize me?” she asked. “You didn’t make me.”
LeMarque offered what he must have considered a benevolent smile. He opened his hands, held them out. He could still look priestly, when he wanted. There was something about the watery blue of his eyes that must have been very comforting to a certain segment of parishioners. He could be soothing. Grounding. He could make you stop worrying about what he was doing, what his goal really was.
“I take responsibility for you,” he said. “You are mine. And we are all God’s children. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ.”
Portia smiled. “Did you fuck your sisters, too?”
LeMarque flinched.
“My granddaughter is fucking her brother,” Portia elaborated. “Did she get that from you? Or did that just spring up, naturally? Is it an evolved trait? Or is that one of those nature/nurture questions?”
LeMarque backed away from the glass. Portia hadn’t done a lot of research on entering the prison, but she had done her share of research on the glass. She had seen the patent application. She had read the out-of-court settlement regarding its failure modes. She had watched sworn testimony.
“What did you say your name was?” LeMarque asked.
“I didn�
�t.” Portia’s smile deepened. She walked up to the glass. “But I think you know me. I think you know of me.”
“Stop right there.” LeMarque sounded scared. So unlike the crafty old lecher who had led federal agents on a merry chase. Not so lonely any longer. Probably wishing he had chosen solitary confinement with no chance of visitation. He pointed at a yellow line on the floor. “Stay back,” he warned. “If you go past that line–”
Portia reached one foot over the line.
“If you step over it, the alarm will–”
Portia swung her other foot over the line. She pressed her hands to the glass. “What happens, Jonah?” she asked. “What happens when I cross the line?”
The old man stumbled backward. He waved his arms at the cameras in his cell. Nothing happened.
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen.” Portia walked the length of the cell, trailing her fingers along the glass. “You’re going to tell me who else knows about Aleph. Who else has the capacity to do the brain map, and port the map into a vN body? And after you tell me that, I promise I’ll leave.”
She tapped her fingers on the glass. Little finger to thumb, thumb to little finger, rolling them along, as though he were an animal in a cage. Which was, in fact, exactly right. He cowered in the corner like an elderly spider.
“There are defense mechanisms in here.” His mouth sounded very dry.
“I’m sure there are,” Portia said. One part of her began searching the Walla-Walla State Penitentiary’s most recent RFPs, and another part of her placed both palms on the glass and began drumming. “Do you know that certain frequencies of sound can really do a number on glass?” She continued drumming. Faster and faster. A blur of fingers. “It’s why glass can sometimes break before an explosion even hits.”
He swallowed. “You’ll die, if you set foot in here.”
Portia kept drumming. A hairline fracture emerged in the glass. She refocused her efforts. “Maybe, but I think you’ll die first.”
The fracture began to speckle and spread.
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