“Sex sells,” he said.
Amy opened her mouth to say something more, but the high hum of the ‘steaders’ boat cut her off. It was a little solar foil that hopped and bounced on the waves. Its fan sounded like a whole forest of cicadas. It towed a Zodiac bearing a precarious load of boxes tied down with twine. Javier spotted three humans on the foil: two men and one woman. He recognized only two of them. The group of vN rode behind them. All were huge. All were iterating.
“What kept you?” he asked, when the foil pulled up at the island.
The humans’ gaze shifted from him to Amy. Their colour and awas hard to tell in the violet light she’d rigged up. She had copied the design of sunflowers that lit up a playground where she and Javier once played in a sandbox. He pretended not to notice this little detail, but he liked that she remembered all the same. Then as now, the light made it easier to see movement and affect rather than pigment.
“We caught your little show,” Tyler said.
Tyler was the one they usually dealt with. He was what other humans occasionally called a “trustafarian,” whatever that meant. His parents were American diplomats. He’d lost them in some revolution in some country where the native population thought of vN as some kind of unnatural evil and refused to let them past the border. No vN, no vN security forces, no peaceful transition. Tyler had some issues with mainland governments, after that. He’d gotten drunk and told Javier all this, a few months ago, when he discovered how good Javier’s peppers were for homemade gochujang – whatever that was. Amy made sure to hustle him off before it became a come-on.
“Oh, you mean the worm,” Amy said. “We’re still not sure where it came from.”
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Tyler said. “Apparently you riled up whoever’s watching those botflies.”
“The fucking Coast Guard showed up,” Simone said.
Simone was Tyler’s partner on these missions. Menopause was not treating her very kindly, and it manifested in a constant scowl that Javier nonetheless found endearingly steely.
“They wouldn’t let us complete the shipment without sending a representative,” she continued. “We had to take on ballast.” She jerked her head back behind her.
From the shadows emerged a black man in his forties. He was about six feet tall with ankles too slim for the broad span of his shoulders. He’d shaved his head. He wore a priest’s collar. When his hand touched Javier’s, every Turing process in him fired at once.
“I’m Pastor Mitch Powell,” he said. “New Eden Ministries.”
FOUR
Mr Self-Destruct
That night, Amy sealed off their room entirely before undressing. She did so completely, letting the skinsuit drip down her legs and settle into the floor before joining him on the bed. She stretched out beside him and pressed herself against his back.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Everything.”
“That’s a bit much.” He took her hand. “Be more specific.”
“I’m sorry…” She dug her forehead between his shoulderblades. “I’m sorry that we have to live with stuff like this. I’m sorry that things like the sub show up. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. You wouldn’t have to if you didn’t live here.”
“I doubt I’d be any better off anywhere else.”
“Sure you would be. You’re great at being by yourself.”
He rolled over and found her eyes in the dark. “I don’t want to be by myself.”
She smiled. “Thank you.”
“Hey, here’s a question.” He rested his head on his arm. He had no idea why he was asking this, after a day like the one they’d just had. It was obvious where her head was at. But the idea had germinated inside him and now he had to run it to its inevitable conclusion, whatever that turned out to be. “You think that preacherman could marry us? We’re definitely of his flock. He’s probably got a service in his missal.”
“His missal?”
“Whatever it’s called. The thing with all the ceremonies in it.”
“A reader?”
“You know what I mean.” His right hand found her left. “Interested?”
Her fingers enlaced with his. “If you are,” she said. “I don’t need a ceremony, though. And even if I did, I wouldn’t need a human to perform it.” She squeezed his hand. “Besides, we’d have to invite my dad, and he’d have to get time off, and then we’d have to move the island closer to shore, and–”
“OK, OK, I get it.” He let her hand slip away. “I just thought it might be nice.”
She cuddled into his chest. “It would be nice. But if that’s what you want, there’s no reason to wait for a human to approve of it.”
He inhaled the scent of her scalp. She smelled like ozone, like storms and rust and burnt sugar. “You don’t play fair,” he said, “turning down my proposal while you’re naked.”
Her head poked up. “I didn’t turn you down,” she said. “I just like doing things my own way. I never went to church, and I’m not going to start with some organization that built us to serve perverts.”
“So, we should wait for a Unitarian to show up?”
Amy rolled away. “No,” she said. “I’m saying we don’t need anything like that. We chose each other already. If you want to have a party for it, that’s fine. But you know it’ll just turn into some big media circus. They’ll stream it everywhere, on every feed. It won’t belong to us anymore.”
She had a point, and it was one he hadn’t considered. He’d been focused on his own private simulation of just how exactly he would slip the white silk up Amy’s legs, just what he’d say, just how it would all go down. So to speak.
“It’s OK,” he heard himself say. “I think I just wanted the wedding night, anyway.”
“… Oh.”
Instantly, he realized he’d made a mistake. She thought it was all about the sex. Usually he was better at planning these things out a few moves in advance. You didn’t sleep your way out of a Nicaraguan prison without being able to do that. But Amy was different. Just organic enough to make him yearn, just synthetic enough to make him slip. And that made moments like this one interminable. Amy folded her knees to her chest and hugged them. She focused on the shadows of the room. Her fingers danced across her shins.
“It’s not just that,” he said. “I want more than that.”
“It’s OK.”
It wasn’t. “No, it’s not.”
“No, really. It’s fine.” Her fingers fluttered like pale night moths. “Like you said. I’ve been holding out on you.”
Oh, Jesus. Shit. Puta madre. The conversation was slipping away from him. She was slipping away from him.
“It’s not like that,” he said. “That’s not why I brought it up.”
“I should take it as a compliment,” Amy said. “It is a compliment, right?”
“It’s a compliment I want to spend the rest of my life giving you.”
She smiled. “Thank you.” She stood. “I have to go look at the sub, now.”
Fuck. He’d lost. She was being graceful about it, but that much was obvious. Her clothes climbed up her body, vine-like and dark enough that she seemed to be slowly disappearing from the room. At the end, only her face remained. Her face was frowning, but not at him. She was talking with the island. In losing the plot, he’d lost her attention, too. She was already unsealing the room. She paused at the entry, hand on the jamb, peering over her shoulder at him.
“Do the words generation ship mean anything to you?” she asked.
He said no, and she drifted away. He was watching the darkness where she’d been when Pastor Powell showed up.
“I can’t sleep,” he said.
“This is some place you’ve got, here.”
They were proceeding along the thoroughfare. The night after a shipment was always animated; everybody trying on or trying out whatever came from the boat, showing off their new wares to neighbours and botflies. Small it
erations ran past them with pinwheels and fireworks and glowing projector bangles. Rickshaws were out with samples of all the latest pre-fab foods, sent from all the best brands. Lantern bots dipped and hovered, casting mood lighting based on aggregate emotional data gleaned from ambient conversational keywords. And when the other vN noticed the human walking at Javier’s side, they stopped everything to watch him pass.
“Yeah,” Javier said. “It’s something.”
“Forgive an old preacher for prying,” Powell said, “but you don’t seem as enthused as the others. Are you worried about something?”
Yes, he was. But he wasn’t about to tell Powell what it was. So he picked another niggling doubt at the back of his mind.
“The cats,” he said. “In the children’s section. Where the orphans live. I’m worried about the big cats there. My grandson told me they’d been acting up.”
“Your grandson?” Powell’s lips turned down. “I’m jealous. None of my kids has managed to get that far.”
“You’ve got kids?”
Powell nodded. “I don’t see them very much, anymore, though. My wife and I…” He shrugged. “I couldn’t be the man she deserved.”
“Because you enjoy fucking other men?” Javier asked.
Powell stopped short. He said nothing. He didn’t even look at Javier. “That obvious, huh?”
“It’s OK. We’re built to sense these things better than humans can.” He jammed his hands in his pockets. “And as for grandkids, don’t feel bad. Human kids are really tough. They’re intimidating. You’re stuck with them for a long time.”
“If you get to keep them,” Powell said.
Javier nodded. “I’m just saying, our kids are easier. They grow faster. It’s not so much of an investment.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Powell said. “They seem like their own challenge.”
Javier walked through a game of hopscotch where the tiles of the game yelped and squeaked and giggled as he stepped on them. The vN playing were no more than a few months old, but they were all adult sized. Each of them paused as he and Powell drifted through the game. Powell even took the time to pick up an old USB key and toss it across the squares, hopping on one foot to his target and triggering all sorts of shouts and screams. When he finished, the vN clapped.
Javier laughed. It felt good. He hadn’t laughed all day, he realized. Maybe not all week.
“I fucked up the last square.” Powell’s lips made a little “o” shape. “Yes, Javier. We preachers can cuss.”
“Oh, I know you can,” Javier said, before he could think. “I fucked a divinity student before coming here. I know the kind of swear words you all can use.”
His lips clamped shut immediately. The pastor didn’t look embarrassed, just bemused. But Javier was embarrassed. First Amy, now this. The words just kept bleeding out of him. Beside him, Powell slowed to a stop under a tree flush with blue solar leaves.
“Are you trying to confess to me?” he asked. “Because you can, if you want to. Our ministry has a lot of room for that kind of thing. It’s not a sacrament, per se, but we recognize the importance of sharing our truth.”
He leaned up against the tree. He saw Powell do the same. The other man seemed a lot closer than he had before. The heat came off him in damp waves. He was sweating. He smelled of bay rum. He envied that, in organic men. They could wear things that made them smell better, or at least different. He’d heard of vN-friendly colognes, but they all just smelled like new cars.
“Could you marry me to Amy?”
“If that was what you both wanted.”
“What about baptism?”
Powell smiled with only one corner of his mouth. “You want me to take you to the water, Javier? Give you a good dunking?”
“I was just asking.”
“I can baptize you, yes. You or your children, or your grandson.” Powell leaned forward. “You know, you don’t have to be suspicious of me. Unlike the majority of organics, I do believe that you have a soul worth saving.”
“I’m not suspicious of you,” Javier said. “What makes you think I’m suspicious of you?”
“The way you’re looking at me, right now.”
“That’s not suspicion,” Javier said. “That’s how a vN looks at a human being.”
“Quiet. We’re not supposed to be here.”
At night, the Veldt was even more like a fairyland. It was not totally dark, and not totally silent. Being something of a night owl herself, Amy had designed it with the goal of relaxation, not enforced rest. Hammocks hung from the gentle curves of counterfeit oaks, and the trees themselves rocked gently in a programmed breeze. Young iterations, most of them missing shirts or pants or even just one sock, slept in the soft grass or the swaying boughs or in the room-sized clusters of roots beneath the big trees. They piled up together like puppies, or splayed out all alone on the banks of gurgling creeks. They were like lambs, Javier realized. Tiny, human-shaped lambs asleep in the pasture.
“Have you ever read any J.M. Barrie?” Powell whispered.
“No,” Javier said.
“This is just like Never Never Land,” Powell said, like that meant something.
“We’re just looking for the cats,” Javier said. “We get in, take a look, and get out.”
He didn’t know why he hadn’t told Powell to wait at the edges of the Orphanage. If Amy found out, he’d be so over the line with her that it would be a dot to him. And really, this was her problem. He should have approached her with it. Should have said something. Only something terrible seemed to happen when he said something, these days. It always went so wrong.
So he was sharing this little night reconnaissance with Powell. Powell, the stranger. Powell, the human. Powell, the one reporting on all their activities, so he could “smooth things over.”
“Is that one of them?”
Javier followed the line of Powell’s finger. There, between two intertwined trees, an lioness-shaped ani-mech padded into a clearing. Then another lioness joined it. And another. Jesus. José was right. They were getting together. Though maybe it was nothing; Amy had copied her synthetic cats from organic ones, and lionesses were supposed to enjoy hanging out. They just tended to do it while protecting their young. Which was why Amy had built them in the first place – to protect the young.
“I just have to check this out,” Javier said, and sprang.
He landed in the middle parts of the nearest intertwined tree. He gripped it with all his limbs, and edged around it carefully. Then he walked out on one of the boughs. Like most of the trees on the island, it was helpfully designed to fit the width of his foot. Amy again. Never missed a trick.
Below his feet, the lionesses were seated in a circle. They made no noise. They flicked no ears or tails or paws. They remained simply and completely still. Except for the eyes. The eyes – huge and green, almost cartoon-like – blinked slowly. Sometimes they stayed closed for a second or two, and sometimes they blinked more normally. A single cat always did the blinking. They took turns. There were six of them. It was like a nature special, only there was no blood.
Then Powell entered the ring.
He moved quietly, but not quietly enough, and as his shadow crossed the clearing the lionesses turned as one to stare at him. Their ears pricked. Their tails swished. Their mouths opened. And then they pounced.
Javier’s vision pixelated almost immediately. One moment he was full retina display, the next he was full Famicom. It was as though his senses wanted to split up the suffering into small, manageable pieces. He saw the violence play out in low-res, kludgy machine vision. The lions were attacking Powell. Powell was struggling. He was cursing and kicking trying to roll onto his back. It was the best way to protect his stomach from the lions’ back paws. They were trying to disembowel him.
If Javier didn’t stop them, he would failsafe and die.
He jumped down out of the tree and into the pile of snarling flesh. The cats squeaked beneath him,
all fibreglass fur and gleaming teeth, their green eyes – Amy’s eyes, Portia’s eyes – made mostly black with pupil. Javier body-checked one of them off Powell and fell on top of him.
“I’m sorry,” Powell said. “I thought–”
“Sh-shut up and get on your b-belly.”
Beneath him, Powell twisted. Teeth clamped onto Javier’s neck. Then claws. He jabbed the lion with one elbow. It refused to let go. He jabbed harder. Claws raked his thighs. His vision darkened, blurred. He slipped his hands under Powell’s squeezing ribs and hugged him, hard.
“P-pull your legs up.”
He leapt.
The lioness on his back growled and shook her head, trying to maintain her grip. But Javier had leap-frogged over one more big cat, and he managed to dislodge her on the landing. He jumped again. Powell’s shirt rode up and he had to grip him again. His skin was unbelievably hot, and surprisingly smooth. He had an appendix scar and what felt like an old bullet wound, all thick and knotted. They landed roughly in the grass. The lions bounded after them. Javier leapt again. Powell kept suppressing little screams. They caught in his throat like a stifled sneeze. But he lifted his legs a little higher with each jump and held himself tight until the jumps fell into a rhythm, higher and further and longer, their toes just barely touching ground before kicking free again.
“We’re flying,” Powell said.
“We’re es-escaping,” Javier said.
The snarls behind them grew softer. They were out of the Veldt. They cleared the fogbank and sailed over water, landing in a twist of roots beneath a massive black mangrove from whose arms a series of mummy bags swung like giant chrysalises. The bags swayed for a moment, but none of the vN inside woke.
Powell was panting. “You OK?” Javier asked.
The preacher nodded. “Yeah. Actually. I thought I was fucked there, for a minute, and then bang, you swoop down like Superman.”
“I did not s-swoop. Real men don’t swoop.” Javier rolled his neck. The stammer was his least favourite part of the failsafe. It made him sound like such a pendejo. It was worse when he was speaking English. The adaptive behaviours got all entangled with the stemware programming. “Though I guess I’m n-not a real man, either.”
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