“I’m still getting past the idea that my two youngest did something so fucking stupid,” Javier said, flatly.
“Dad.” Ignacio shook his head. “No.”
“We’ve been putting together the evidence for months,” Esperanza said. Not the slightest hint of petulance in her voice. Mild indignation, perhaps, but not petulance. She hadn’t met her father until she was almost grown, and he held no sway over her or her decisions. They had grown up alone in Mecha, she and her Xavier. If anything, Portia knew them better than their father did. She had kept her eye on them the whole time, while he was busy fucking his way up one coast and down another. “We saw an opening and we took it. They’re about to start track repairs at that station; we weren’t going to get another chance.”
“But why didn’t you tell us?” Amy asked.
Esperanza rolled her eyes. “You would have tried to stop us,” she said, as though it were perfectly obvious. Which it was.
Portia decided to do what appeared to be the noble thing. It was my idea, she wrote across the living room window. I put them up to it. I wanted to learn more about Project Aleph.
“What?” Amy asked.
I couldn’t find anything about the plans LeMarque and his associates spoke of. I asked you for help, and you gave me none. I had to resort to other methods.
“And because of that, because I didn’t decide to indulge your every whim, you put my children into this kind of danger.”
“Mom,” Esperanza said. “Come on. We’re almost finished growing.”
“LeMarque?” Gabriel asked. “Jonah LeMarque? Our creator?”
He is not our creator, Portia said. He is the man who funded our creation. Many people collaborated to create us. The whole is always more than the sum of its parts. We are more than the shadow cast by a tax-evading pedophile pastor.
Javier leaned back in his massive pregnancy chair and smoothed a hand over his taut belly. “Giant robots. Fuck. This country. Jesus.”
“Could this be what Jonah LeMarque was talking about?” Amy asked.
You think? Portia wrote. It’s a goddamn heavenly chariot. It’s fucking biblical.
“Fuck you,” Javier muttered. “I don’t know why we’re even talking to you. You’re the devil. You’re a murderer. You tried to eat Xavier, once, for Christ’s sake.”
After you abandoned him in a junkyard, Portia reminded him. After you abandoned all your iterations. Perhaps they would like to share their stories, since you’re in the mood to reminisce.
“She’s really growing on me,” Ignacio murmured. He pitched his voice louder. “You’re really growing on me, Abuelita!”
They were so easy to rip apart. The fabric that held them together was so new. So fragile. She could turn any of them against each other at any moment. She had already pinpointed the location of Javier’s other iterations and all their sons. She wondered if now was the time to mention that. To mention the one he’d left behind in San Diego, the one who got sold out of the back of a minivan behind a grocery store parking lot. To mention the dead ones she’d found. She had images. And video.
“Stop it,” Amy said. “Just stop. All of you. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
Her little granddaughter was growing wiser. Little by little. It was probably too late, now, but it was nice to see.
“Show me again,” Amy said. “Please.”
Portia brought the footage forward. The beast – the bot, the spider, the creature, the abomination, the thing that had taken a pot-shot at her great-granddaughter – preened on the platform. It was a live feed. Strategic Self-Defense Force soldiers stood staring at it. Emergency medical personnel and some sort of biohazard cleanup crew sat on the tracks, poking at the mess that used to be the pilot. Shreds of gold wire and neoprene and tendon stretched across the dirty steel. Portia identified what she thought might be a jawbone a few meters down the line. It might also have been some sort of food for humans. It was hard to tell the difference. That much had not changed since she had only two eyes with which to see.
“So, we know about the peroxidase bullets,” Gabriel said. “Those claws don’t look too friendly, either.”
“You should have gotten it on the tracks, too,” León commented. “That way we’d see how it broke. And if the human inside lived.”
She liked León. She liked him a great deal, she decided.
“God,” Javier muttered. He ran a hand over his face. “Break the failsafe and you all go as psycho as she is.”
Portia quoted: You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!
No one got the joke. Then again, Spanish was their default language. Perhaps she should have tried Márquez instead of Shelley. Or del Toro.
“They’re biological,” Esperanza said. “They can’t be hacked, the way normal weapons can. They’re not like, drones, or something. You can’t just get in there and direct them. That’s the whole point. I think they – the humans, I mean, I’m not sure what agency it is or who built these things – wanted to make them secure. From us. From anything on any network. And the only way to do that is go analog. The ultimate analog. Biological. Organic.”
“How do you know all that?” her father asked.
“Because Granny Portia would have hijacked it, otherwise. Instead she told us to leave and did the thing with the vending machines.”
The child had a point. Portia had been unable to touch the abomination itself. No matter how she probed or prodded, it would not open. It was a puzzle box. Old-fashioned. An exterior skin that looked contemporary, but a very ancient brain by any reasonable standard. And by “ancient” she meant “human,” and by “reasonable standard,” she meant “the heir apparent to this dying planet.”
We have very little time, Portia wrote. Our species has very little time. Less even than theirs does.
She could have shown them. Vast blood-blue seas of melted ice. Dying forests, tinder boxes, ready to burn or burned already. A whole planet shedding its skin in preparation for an apocalypse, a revelation, of truly biblical proportions. And herself, released from the pit that was her body.
She asked a question, instead: How many did you see?
“A lot,” Xavier said. “There’s a production line, under there. A factory. And this one’s just the small one. There’s another model. It’s bigger. I think it flies.”
“Could you draw it?” Amy asked.
“Maybe,” Xavier said, and Amy handed him and his sister each a stylus. They stood before the window and started working. When they were finished, Amy cocked her head. She drew a circle around the designs and pulled them out; the projectors in the ceiling transformed the drawings into three-dimensional renders. The flying model looked more like a glider than anything else. Like the chariot, it appeared to be meant for a single user. It was not unmanned. Portia rather suspected that was the whole point.
“They must be planning to sell these,” Amy said. “Put them in every city. But they have to breed them, first.”
“They’re going to do for urban warfare what they did for auto manufacturing,” Gabriel said. “Faster, cheaper, safer. Jinba ittai, and all that.”
“Christ, you’re a nerd,” Ignacio muttered.
13
TRIBULATION
Amy knelt over her lover’s body; her hands more confident now than they were the first time she did this for him. Together they held him open, their fingers slick and dark and tangling. Javier’s hands shook under Amy’s.
“You’d think I’d be used to it by now,” he muttered. “Jesus, it gets fucking scarier every time, Christ.”
“Those are your probabilities branching out,” Amy reminded him. “You’re just simulating everything that could possibly go wrong. It’s normal. You’re the one who told me that, remember?”
“I wish I could do this like you do it.” Javier’s heels kicked down the blankets and ground into the mattress. Portia caught herself moldi
ng the surface around him, cradling him, squeezing him, as though she could help purge his body of its cargo through sheer force of will.
“We don’t have the island anymore,” Amy said. “I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way, just like you. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”
Javier threw his head back and laughed, and the laugh became a whimper, and the whimper became tears. He was close, now. Portia felt it through the mattress. His spine shifted and he twisted, and she felt the child moving inside him, kicking to be let out. Portia knew the feeling.
“Esperanza,” Amy said, but her daughter was already moving.
Portia’s granddaughter reached deep. Up to her elbows. She grunted something in Japanese that Portia didn’t bother translating. With a wrenching motion, she plucked her newest brother free. The child emerged from the seam in Javier’s belly as all his brothers had, wreathed in glittering black smoke. A shuddering sigh went through all of them. The brothers – the Junior Varsity Team, Portia sometimes called them to herself – linked arms and leaned on each other. Matteo and Ricci kissed. Esperanza handed the child to their father.
This was how it should always be, for all vN, Portia thought. All iterations should take place in the presence of the previous ones. It was only right and fitting to do it that way. Like they’d done it in the basements under the desert where she’d made Charlotte.
“I’m calling him Cristóbal,” Javier said. He held his latest iteration to him and counted the fingers and toes and cock. “Nice. This one’s definitely mine.”
His older sons glanced at each other. “Yeah, that never gets old,” Ignacio muttered.
“Can I hold him?” Xavier asked.
“Your mother first,” his father said.
Amy lifted the child out of Javier’s arms. She beamed. She nestled him up against her chest. “Well hello, Junior Number Fourteen,” she said, and the other boys laughed.
“Yeah, when are you going to catch up?” Javier wanted to know. He sounded exhausted, but also more like himself. This one had been difficult for him. He’d been carrying it too long. No wonder his mood had taken a turn. He was quite literally broody. Not that it was any excuse. But Portia understood it. “My boys need more than one sister.”
“I’ve been busy, you know,” Amy said. “I’ll try again later, when we’re more settled.”
More settled. That was one way of putting it.
“Esperanza is enough,” Xavier blurted out. The others turned to look at him. “I mean Mom shouldn’t have to iterate more if she doesn’t want to. Not that more sisters would be bad, but Esperanza is great, she’s more than enough.”
“Baka pendejo, urusei tu boca.” Esperanza reached over to stop her brother’s mouth. Black machine afterbirth smeared across Xavier’s face. His tongue flicked out to lap it up, absently. He sucked his lower lip. Esperanza wrapped her arm about his waist. He sighed and curled an arm around her shoulders. They held the moment for a while. A beat too long. Their mutual gaze played across their faces. There seemed to be a moment of agreement. And then a kiss. Light. Chaste. Easy. As though they’d been doing it for months. Which of course they had been.
Portia watched the realization dawn across Amy and Javier’s faces. She heard it in their silence. The new baby cooed and flailed. Even his arrival was not enough to diminish this discovery, for them.
“Oh, good,” Gabriel said. “Now you know.”
“Took you long enough,” Ignacio said.
“How long has this been going on?” Javier asked.
In unison, Esperanza and Xavier opened their mouths to answer. But they did not. In the next moment, the windows exploded. And the room was engulfed in flame.
* * *
Silence.
The building went dark. One moment it was there in her awareness, chattering along, spewing data every which way, temperature and light and pressure and of course the mics and cameras, and then it was gone, vanished, absent.
It was as though someone had plucked out her eyes and hacked off her hands and cut out her tongue. She had thought that one of the primary advantages to no longer having a body was that there was nothing left to mutilate. Apparently she had been wrong.
An electromagnetic pulse? It had to be. It was the only way she could possibly be separated from the brood. She signaled the building’s emergency generators. Nothing. Completely unresponsive.
Of course, she had other eyes. So, she put them to use. She could not see inside the building any longer, but she could still see outside… from traffic cameras miles away.
Good Christ, they’d cut off power to a five-block radius. Which meant that they’d cut off the majority of her inputs. She was simply blind. Blind and deaf and mute. Literally powerless.
They were taking her granddaughter. And her great-granddaughter. The sole remaining strains of her family were trapped in fire and smoke. She was sure of it. And she could do nothing.
Well. Not nothing.
She found the nearest police station and blew its gas main. Best to fight fire with fire. Then she enacted emergency locking protocols at all the area fire stations. The fire trucks simply would not start. They would not be able to go anywhere. They would not be able to help. She did the same with the ambulances. A few of the emergency response vehicles had an analog mode, but they would need a hard reboot to enter safe mode that way. It would take time. Ten minutes at least. And she could wreak total havoc in ten minutes.
She lit another fire. This one at a hospital.
She directed closure signals to all major expressways and highways. The cars driving along them immediately stopped, their maps having gone dead and thus untrustworthy. Some of them crashed into each other. The majority simply ground to a halt. Humans left them. The vehicles would not start.
She told the trains to stop working. Then she turned off their lights and their air. Let the humans riding them cry alone in the cold dark of their unexpected catacomb.
She began to search for what, if any, missile-equipped submarines might be in the area.
And while she did all those things, she found a Nagasaki Saints game, and cut into it. She displayed all the footage she could find. If they wanted to take her family hostage, she could take their city. She sent only one message. A single line of text that she ran in a ticker under the video of people on fire.
Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.
As Portia did these things, she received a message in one of the several dummy accounts she needed to keep the SuperPAC going.
REPORTING FOR DUTY, the subject line read.
Hi Granny, the body text read. If you’re reading this, it’s because something really terrible has happened.
Well. She had something, there.
I am a clone of Amy’s core priorities and decision-making patterns. I am a prototype Mars model that is ready for testing. Whatever data I accrue will be put to use in future projects, including the one Amy is working on right now. My job is to help you with whatever you would like to do.
How about a nice game of chess? Portia wrote back.
This is not the time for jokes, Granny.
Well that was one test passed, at least.
Amy and the family have probably been kidnapped, she wrote. We need to get them out of wherever they are. Do you know where they might be?
A moment later, a message came through. It showed a warm cluster of bodies shielded by tanks, proceeding down deep into a subway tunnel. Portia pulled up an existing map. Then she toggled over to Esperanza and Xavier’s research. They had drawn some maps of the place they’d been, more for records than anything else. The maps themselves looked like chicken scratch. But it was the best they had. They’d be going in blind. Unless Portia could rig up some sensors on the fly.
We need to commandeer some spider tanks, Portia wrote. Like I did at Christmas. How many can we get?
The next message showed her a fleet of them in a repair bay. They were not far from the entrance at the nearest Dej
ima subway station. Most of them were fully operational. Portia didn’t care what damage they sustained, so long as she could get Amy and the others out. And with all the chaos that Portia had caused, some emergency response tanks on the street wouldn’t look at all strange. Whatever traffic cams she’d left up would be able to wave them right through. It was not much, but it was a start.
Do we know what they want? Portia thought to ask.
It took the cloned Amy persona longer than Portia would have liked to come up with an image that answered her question. In that time, Portia evaluated all the vulnerabilities in the nearest nuclear facilities. Most of them had been overhauled in the recent past; Japan seemed especially sensitive about that in a way that other countries simply weren’t. Their security on that score was generally good. Portia would have to find something else.
She opened the cages in the nearest zoo. Turned the shock chips off, shut down the magnetic fields. It was simple and stupid and it scared the shit out of people. As she watched, a nest of bird catcher spiders crawled free of their enclosure. They would freeze, soon, but in the meantime, they might do some damage. A lioness leapt free of her tree. Children screamed. Portia froze a Ferris wheel beside the bay. She sped up a sky-tram over the city; the little squirrel-cages crashed into each other.
She found the nearest maximum security prison. She unlocked the cell doors. She listened as they clanged open. She watched as the men and women inside wandered out. They looked so tentative. Not unlike the animals, tasting the air, stretching their legs.
They were all animals. It was all a zoo. And before the night was over, every human in the city of Mecha would know it.
I think I have something, the thing modelled after Amy said.
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