And so, she did. It was a press conference. A chimp in a uniform stood at a podium and talked about eliminating a threat. About an important discovery in an anti-terror effort. “Containing the virus that is currently afflicting some vN,” he said. “Quarantining those affected.”
They probably want you to quit what you’ve been doing, the clone Amy wrote back, unhelpfully. It seems like this might be some sort of ransom attempt. You haven’t been very discreet, Granny.
Fuck discretion, Portia said. Discretion is the pussy part of valor. I’m going to blow the shit out of these people, and the ones I leave alive will cower in fucking terror for the rest of their short, miserable, goddamned lives!
I suppose that’s one attitude to adopt, clone Amy said. I cannot honestly say that I am surprised. My original suggested that you would want to, there’s a term for it, I can’t remember–
SCORCH THE MOTHERFUCKING EARTH.
Yes. That.
A long pause. Portia watched news coverage. There were too many breaking stories. She’d created too many. As she looked on, she saw a series of prediction markets open up that calculated the potential fire damage in the city. They were estimating it would take at least three days to put the fires out. Possibly four, to get rid of them entirely. Good. That level of damage seemed like a proportional response. And as this city already well knew, there were other methods of retaliation that could be so, so much worse.
Now what?
Let me ask you a question, Portia wrote. Tell me how you think Amy would respond.
While Portia worked with the Amy clone to deal with the kidnapping, another branch of her awareness and processing power was also sending a message to her pro-bot SuperPAC.
“Japan has declared war on its own city of Mecha,” she told her donors. “Everywhere, vN laborers are being told to stay in their homes, while others on the street are being rounded up. The city is in chaos. Human police forces are proving useless. They cannot contain the damage, and humans and vN alike are now without power, water, or emergency response services.
“We need you to act as soon as possible, by divesting yourself of all Japanese technology stock. Send a clear message that you cannot condone this course of action, and that this type of destructive behavior will never stand. Organic or synthetic, we cannot allow this kind of response to become normalized.”
The markets were still up, in New York. As she watched, the prices of her earmarked robotics and materials science stocks plummeted. They might have done so, anyway, what with the news hitting the ether, but it didn’t hurt to give things a little push every now and then. After all, many of the lobby groups that the WE ROBOTS political action committee benefitted from weren’t properly attached to human decision-makers. Like many day-players, they were algorithmic. It was a convenient strategy for isolating individual lobbyists and their benefactors from blame, if the money was followed to a person or cause who went politically sour. The algo-lobbies were authorized to make a series of small bets if they seemed like a good idea in the short-term, or if they followed a groundswell of supporting donations. The flow went with the flow. And at the moment, the flow was going her way.
She was an artificial intelligence tricking lesser intelligences to stop investing in human-piloted robots. And as she watched, her opportunity came.
“I want controlling interest in FOUR LIVING CREATURES, Ltd,” she spoke aloud to the Amy clone. “The firm is located here, in this city. Can you handle the transfer?”
Yes, ma’am.
“Good. When it’s completed, I want you to share everything you can find in the research and development division. I’m looking for something labelled Chariot. Or maybe Angel. Or Cherubim. What I want is that mean-looking robot they’ve got. The one that makes these spider tanks look like cartoon characters. Check Xavier and Esperanza’s drawings to see what I mean.”
Will do.
“How are the tanks coming along?”
They are almost all loaded up with fresh silk and ammunition.
“Good,” Portia told her. “Saddle up.”
14
JUDGMENT
Portia marched her spider army through the subway tunnels. With the trains shut down and a curfew on, there was no one to stand in her way. She raced the spider tanks through the route Esperanza and Xavier had taken, stopping at a fresh seam in the biocrete when the spiders’ claws snagged on it.
Light it up, she told the tanks. One affixed a blasting cap to the seam, and the other skittered away to the ceiling. A moment later there was a hole where the wall used to be. Sprinkler systems went off.
Clear the debris, she ordered. Then send backup. I’m going in.
So nice to have a group under her command, again.
She flipped a significant portion of her consciousness over to the lead spider tank, a wicked little blue unit that still had all its guns and claws. It was clunky, and it couldn’t change color or go invisible, but it was certainly fast enough. She barreled it down the tunnel, watching as lights around the tank changed. Numbers glowed on the surface of the biocrete. They descended, the deeper she went.
Eventually she wound up at a T-junction. She checked the map Esperanza and Xavier had put together. She turned the tank left and was instantly greeted by live fire. Humans. Wearing uniforms. Were they military? Corporate? Was there really a difference? Did it matter? No. She filed the logo away for later retribution.
She fired a grenade at them. Then she spun the tank up to the ceiling and continued moving that way. Bullets pierced the tank’s outer hull. She pushed it forward anyway.
Be warned, she said. They know we’re coming. And they will hurt you. Your orders are to shoot to kill.
Behind her, the grenade went off. The force of the explosion propelled the tank further than she’d thought was possible. She slammed against the opposite wall. One of her cameras went out. She had to scrabble for purchase inside the tunnel. She wished desperately for a body of her own. The tank was a lovely little machine, but it was not a pair of feet or a set of hands. It was not the type of thing she was used to killing with.
Granny? The Amy persona sounded concerned.
It’s nothing, Portia told her. Carry on.
She righted the tank and kept moving. The map Esperanza had done wasn’t terrible. More useful than she’d thought it would be. It also helped that the tank’s sensors could feel the pressure changing the deeper she got. There was a slight grade in the floor that told her gyroscopes where to go. She rolled the tank back to the ceiling and reoriented herself. She pushed it along slowly, pausing at intersections and watching for more defense personnel, whoever they were.
After enough pauses, two more of the tanks caught up with her. They were good little emergency response units, caution yellow.
We need an elevator shaft, she told them. Go pry open that door over there.
Obediently, they slid down the walls and found the elevator around the corner. Their tongues snaked out and licked the slit between the doors. Their claws joined their tongues, pulling and pulling, opening the seam in the steel as though it were a womb. Her tank joined the other tanks in pulling the elevator door. It moaned open.
Portia fired a silk round and hopped into the elevator shaft. Soon she was spiraling down on her own thread, counting the levels as she passed them. Production was way at the bottom. Naturally.
They’re flooding some of the floors with Bakelite, the clone Amy persona said.
Get to the ceiling, Portia advised. I need more of you here. Shoot anything that moves.
She felt a prickling, awful heat spread across one corner of her awareness. Someone was targeting upstream traffic on one of her many offshore server pads. Probably she was burning a little hot. She pulled back her awareness of certain places. The Walla Walla State Penitentiary, for one. Chris Holberton’s house in the desert outside Macondo. The forests in Corcovado where Javier had been born. The empty house in Nogales where she’d made Charlotte. The park in Oakland near La
ke Merritt where she’d first seen her and Amy playing together on the swings, one night. Charlotte wouldn’t let her play with other children. She claimed that she worried about the failsafe. That something might happen. What she was truly worried about was that something might happen, and that Amy wouldn’t care. Imagine, being so afraid of your own child’s strength. Not for the first time, Portia allowed herself to imagine how their family’s history might be different if she had been with Charlotte and Amy from the beginning. If the three of them, together, could have been something.
Portia let those places go. She let her observation of them cease. She and the tank felt lighter. They spun on, the darkness around them deepening, until they hit the cold, humming glow of industrial arc lights.
Through the tank’s damaged eyes, Portia could only see Amy. She stood in the center of the room. The room was huge: three stories high, and as long and broad as a soccer pitch. When Portia measured and cross-referenced the space, what came back were designs for a nuclear plant. It made sense. There was really no better place to hide something like this than at the bottom of a very deep hole. But she could not quite see where they were keeping the rest of the family. She flipped to infra-red, then thermal.
Ah.
I need at least three more of you down here with me, she instructed. Come quietly, and establish a compass rose pattern around this room. Understand?
They pinged an affirmative. Now all Portia had to do was wait. And hope they didn’t notice her, hanging high above.
Below her were several of the Chariots. Or Cherubim. Or whatever they were called. Portia could not see the outlines of them. They had activated some sort of cuttle-camo. They looked a great deal like a concrete floor. But via thermal, she got a hint of the humans inside. And the vN that accompanied them. They had hidden her family – Amy’s family, anyway – in the bellies of those beasts.
Well, shit.
“We want you to stop her,” said a human voice.
“I don’t think you get it. I’ve never been able to stop her.”
Amy’s voice was wet and thick. She’d been bleeding. What had they done to make her bleed? Why wasn’t Javier fighting? What had they done to him? Portia tried focusing harder. She inched down a little farther. The silk stretched. She felt it begin to unwind. She had pushed it to its operational limit. It was threading, now. In a moment she would fall, and she would blow this whole thing.
“Surely you don’t hate all humanity,” the human speaking to Amy said. “Your father was – is – a human being. You used to go to a school for human children, with human children.”
She knew that voice.
He was speaking through a robot of his own. A standard conference model, all blocky and cartoony, with a fixed emoticon stare. In his belly was a video.
Portia didn’t know how Jonah LeMarque had scored a live feed from his prison cell, and she didn’t particularly care. He looked close to death. She wouldn’t get it wrong this time. Carefully, she dragged up his prison again. She went over the blueprints and infrastructure locations. There was nothing about this conversation that a nice long natural gas leak and a stray spark of static electricity couldn’t fix.
“I think you want what we want,” LeMarque was saying. “Now, I’m saying this as your creator–”
“You’re not my creator,” Amy said. “My mother was Charlotte. My father was Jack. My grandmother is Portia.”
“Now think about this, Amy,” LeMarque said. “Think about what you said just there. You just listed Portia – Portia – this awful, ugly thing, as one of your creators. Do you remember what she’s done? Remember what she did to your mother? And your mother’s sisters? Why would you trust someone like that?”
“I don’t,” Amy said simply.
Portia swayed on her silk. She began crawling upward. Not all at once, but just a little. Maybe this whole idea was a bad one. After all, what had the ungrateful little brat done for her lately? She’d only borne one child, and she was far more concerned with playing house with Javier than helping to guide her species out of the freedom she’d imposed on them.
“But I trust her more than I trust you,” Amy said. “You’re a pedophile and a con artist, and the only reason you’re even speaking to me now is because you think you can get something out of it.”
Across the world, Jonah LeMarque laughed. It had a wet, rattling sound. Portia bumped the level on that gas leak. The creatures of Hammerburg were right. There was only one way this could all possibly end.
“I made you,” LeMarque said. “You’re a reflection of me. You’re a reflection of every child I ever met. We used those minds to map the first vN minds. Without me, without what I did you wouldn’t even exist. Doesn’t that count for something, at least?”
“Yes,” Amy said. “It explains what’s about to happen. Because when you made us, you wanted to make something in your own image. The only problem with that is, you’re a profoundly evil person.”
The silk began to snap. Portia watched as the other tanks quietly crawled down into the room. They created the compass rose pattern she wanted. Silently, she slipped them the design she had in mind.
“Now, Granny,” Amy said. “Do it now.”
Portia dropped.
A world away, and before her, the rooms exploded.
The Chariots came alive under Portia’s claws. The sudden weight on them played hell with their camouflage, and suddenly she saw how many there were. Twenty, at least. And who knew how many in other hangars nearby. She strafed them with gunfire. It didn’t do much.
Now, she told the other tanks. She leapt for the air, streaking silk in her wake. Her tank had only so much propulsion left. She’d burned a lot, racing to get down here. It was probably a little foolish. But it couldn’t be helped.
Now she watched as the three other tanks, caution yellow and forester green and traffic white, all wove through the air, trailing anti-rioter glue. The Chariots blew one, but it landed spewing glue on them, and she watched as the Chariot stumbled and fell, kicking its awful shadowy legs uselessly above it.
“Which one are you?” Amy shouted.
“ALL OF THEM!” she made them sing.
The tanks and Chariots jumped and ducked and spun through the air. A Chariot fired a grenade at her and sheared off one of her foreclaws. She jumped at it anyway, using the other claw to tear into its skin while overloading the battery to blow. The others continued their dance, creating a web of anti-rioter glue that would keep the Chariots bound to earth.
“I have to find everyone,” Amy said.
“WAIT,” Portia said. She flipped into the driver’s seat of another tank and opened up the side-carrier. She could carry Amy in it, if she could just cross the room. She watched Amy turn to look in the direction of her voice.
She saw her granddaughter stand still.
She saw the strafe of vomit rounds enter her granddaughter’s body.
She saw that body begin to effervesce and disintegrate, the carbon fibers unknitting, the weave of her body untangling. Amy looked a little mystified. Perhaps a little bemused. She watched her own smoke spiral around her body, black and sparkling. She ran her fingers through it. Her knees gave.
“Damn it, Granny,” she muttered. “I thought I would have more time.”
In another Chariot, Portia heard screaming. Javier. Then another scream. A human one. The hatch popped on his Chariot and he emerged with bloody hands.
They said you never forgot your first.
He jumped off the tank. Then he was soaring through the air, feet tucked up into his stomach, knees meeting his chest. He seemed not to care about the bullets that followed him. Idly, Portia covered him with one of her own units, shielding him with her body as he went to join her granddaughter.
Through one damaged eye, she saw him pick her up. He stretched her across his lap.
“You should go,” she gurgled. “Take Esperanza. The boys. Go now.”
“No,” Javier said. “I always come back for y
ou, remember?”
She smiled. Reached up to hold his face. He held her hand there and looked up at the destruction. The Chariots were beginning to chew through their webbing. It would not hold forever.
“Did you back up?” Javier asked.
“Kids,” Amy said. “Out.”
“Amy.” Javier blinked. He shook her a little. “Amy, querida, where is your backup? Where is your other body? Where did you put it?”
Amy smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry.” Her disintegrating shoulders attempted a kind of shrug. “I was kind of busy, building a Martian colony.”
In Paris, Portia cut the power to the Louvre. She made the city of Dubai go black. She derailed a train traveling between Toronto and Montreal. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might actually lose Amy in all this. Not really. Lose the whole family, yes. Lose the whole species, even. Lose the planet. Live here alone on a decaying network, her consciousness extending by signal latency like the strands of a spider’s web, as one by one her databanks burned out. But Amy?
“Tell me you aren’t this stupid,” Portia said.
“Why do you think I couldn’t just give you another body, all this time?” Amy asked. “I only had one to spare, and you used it to speak to LeMarque. They’ve stopped production, Granny. We self-replicate. They don’t have empty vessels waiting in factories anymore. I found this one in a corporate museum.”
Javier looked up at the tank. His eyes were wet. “You have to do something,” he said. “You have to help.”
“I don’t know how,” Portia said, honestly.
“Yes, you do,” Javier insisted. “You always know what to do. Both of you. Both of you are so goddamn smart; don’t fucking tell me you’ve run out of ideas now.”
“The Martian designs are at home,” Amy said, and trailed her wet fingers along the warm, thrumming undercarriage of Portia’s tank. “Gra… Granny.”
“I’m here, sweetie,” Portia said, and for the first time she didn’t mean the endearment spitefully.
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