He pulled back and smiled. He looked delighted. “It was you,” he said. “You broke Jack out.”
“Gold star.” Javier looked back the display. “Now are you going to tell me where Sarton’s cache is, or are you going to make me suck your dick again like that asshole did?”
Now Holberton did pull away. He retied his robe. “God. No. Jesus.” His mouth fell open. Tears rose in his eyes. “Oh, my God. He…” He covered his mouth with his hand. “I’m so sorry, Javier. I’m so, so sorry.”
He tried to hug Javier, but Javier stepped back and held a hand up. “Please don’t. You’ve done enough.”
Holberton went pale. “So, upstairs… ? Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God. I’m so–”
“Upstairs was fun. You didn’t force me to do anything.” Javier sat down on the stool Violet had previously occupied. “But I still need your help.”
“With what? The food? I can get you the clean stuff, that’s no problem–”
“I need you to explain all this.” He pointed at the display. “And then I need you to answer something for me. But this first.”
“Oh, boy.” Holberton paced for a minute. “I’m getting some gin. Hold on.”
Holberton came back with a bottle of Hendrick’s and a glass full of ice. He clutched a lime in one hand and a bottle of soda under one arm. He set all the items on the table and started pouring. When he was finished pouring, he rimmed the glass with a wedge of lime, but didn’t squirt any of its juice into the drink itself. When he had consumed a good third of his glass, he sat back down.
“I don’t know how much Violet told you, but Derek Smythe supervised a whole team. Coders, testers, the whole bit. But he was the one who answered directly to my father.” Holberton took another drink. “And your missionary man, Powell, he brought Smythe in. Convinced him to join. It was a hard sell. So I guess you could say that this whole turn of events, the way the world is right now, that’s all Powell’s fault.”
I could explain it all to you. I could tell you my whole history. I could tell you that I’m atoning for something. Because I am, Javier. I’m atoning. I’m making something right.
“Oh, God.”
“Literally.” Holberton took another long drink. “I honestly don’t know how vN live without alcohol,” he said. “I mean, what do you do when you want to get drunk?”
“We fuck.”
“Well, then.” Holberton raised his glass. Then he finished it. He seemed to be turning an idea over. But when he opened his mouth, he didn’t say what Javier expected. “You should know something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Derek Smythe turned in the finished failsafe. That’s part of the issue.”
“It wasn’t finished?”
“The beta version is the one that went to rollout.”
Javier’s mouth fell open. “That’s… That’s not legal, is it?”
Holberton waved a hand. “This kind of thing happens all the time. The oil rigs in the Gulf, for example, their inspections process was shit for decades. The 2008 housing crisis, the SEC had letters coming in for years warning them what would happen, and no one listened. Chernobyl. Walkerton. It happens.” Holberton leaned forward. “We’re flawed, Javier. And we made you flawed, too. And then we covered it up, the same way we cover up every other preventable industrial disaster.”
Javier sat back in his chair. He understood that this variety of artificial light granted humans a sense of warmth, but he felt none of it. If anything, the thought of all those filaments blinking away toward their inevitable decay made him feel decrepit. “But someone would have found out,” he said.
“No. No one did. Because Smythe was dead, and my father ordered everyone to take a week off to mourn, and then some of my father’s people came in and made it look like suicide from overwork. They made it look like the last prototype was the final one.”
“Made what look like suicide?”
“Don’t you get it?” Holberton poured more gin. He drank. “Smythe didn’t kill himself. He was murdered. By the vN he was working on at the time. The nursing model.”
“Amy’s model.”
Holberton put the glass down. “Yes. Amy’s model.”
“That’s why it was easier to hack the nurses. Because their failsafe was a little different already, and it wasn’t finished, yet.”
“That’s about the size of it.” Holberton polished off the last of his new drink. He winced. “What else were you going to ask me?”
Javier looked up at the image of Susie, the murderous gynoid. “I need to know where you put Dan Sarton’s file cache.”
Holberton remained silent for a long time. So silent, Javier had to turn around to make sure he was still there. He was. He was just saying nothing, and staring at the floor. “It couldn’t last,” Holberton said finally. “Humans and vN, coexisting. It was always going to go this way, eventually.”
“And you want to protect me from it.”
“Yes, I do. For as long as I can.” He looked up. “Stay with me. I like you. I really do.”
This was how it always started. With men, anyway. Being straight had nothing to do with being straightforward. Javier simulated a future stretching away from him, as flat and monochromatic as the desert that surrounded them: Holberton undressing him, fucking him, feeding him, keeping him like a pet, and then Holberton tiring of him, finding a way to turn him out. It would happen. It always did. And although Javier could see it happening, he always let it. He was a machine, running a program. He knew how to do a few things. One of them was staying with humans. Except lately, he wasn’t so good at it.
He could have stayed with Alice, too. This was just another version of the brass ring she’d offered him. The relationship every vN dreamed of. Some human who was actually humane, who wanted to make slow, sweet love all the time and didn’t ask for weird shit and had lots of money and wanted to spend it all on keeping you in a very pretty box to be looked at and touched occasionally. In his FEMA capacity, Holberton probably really could protect him. Javier had consulted for them, before, in his own way, in Redmond. He could just start that up again. He could tell them everything he’d learned about Amy since his last interrogation session. And he could watch from the sidelines as Portia tore the world apart and humanity eliminated the single species designed to love it without condition.
“No.” Javier watched Holberton’s face. “Tell me where the cache is.”
“Why would you need to know that?” he asked.
“You know why.”
Holberton shut his eyes. “She’s not in there. Not really. Not like you think. And even if she were, you’d need a quantum de-crypter to decode her.”
“Quantum?”
“She’s in a diamond. On a diamond, actually. A qubit-friendly, nitrogen-enhanced diamond. That’s what Dan did with all his important files.” He
“It couldn’t last,” Holberton said. “Humans and vN, coexisting. It was always going to go this way, eventually.”
“And you want to protect me from it.”
“Yes, I do. For as long as I can.”
It was another brass ring. The relationship every vN dreamed of. Some human who was actually humane, who wanted to make slow, sweet love all the time and didn’t ask for weird shit and had lots of money and wanted to spend it all on keeping you in a very pretty box to be looked at and touched occasionally. In his FEMA capacity, Holberton probably really could protect him. Javier had consulted for them, before, in his own way, in Redmond. He could just start that up again. He could tell them everything he’d learned about Amy since his last interrogation session. And he could watch from the sidelines as Portia tore the world apart and humanity eliminated the single species designed to love it without condition.
“Tell me where the diamond is.”
Holberton sighed deeply. He looked broken. Javier would have been sad, if he weren’t so close to what he wanted. “It’s in Walla Walla. My cousin’s cache is in the state penitentiary in Walla Walla, W
ashington. Where my father is.”
Javier straightened. “You sent it to your dad? To LeMarque?”
“I sent it to the safest place I could think to keep it,” Holberton said. “A solitary confinement cell, in a maximum security prison.”
THIRTEEN
Faith in Fakes
Holberton had set this diamond in a Josten’s class ring with his father’s high school mascot and graduating year on it. It was a genuine antique setting that Holberton spared no expense in locating and obtaining.
“I wanted it to look like something my father might really have owned,” he explained. “I couldn’t ask my mother about it, but I looked into it. He wore a ring just like it in his graduation photo.”
“Aren’t you worried somebody’s gonna steal it?”
Holberton shrugged. “I almost hope someone does. If they do, I doubt they’ll run it past a diamond test, much less a quantum exam. They’ll sell it to a collector.”
“Wouldn’t the collector do a test?”
“Maybe. If they did, the setting would pass as genuine. But they’d still need a key to decrypt the information on the diamond.”
“And you have that key.”
“Yes,” Holberton said.
They had this conversation in Holberton’s garage. The other man clutched the edge of a tarp draped over something that sat beside the Impala. He looked bad: red eyes, wrinkled clothes, dusty wingtips. Javier suspected he didn’t look much better.
“I can’t leave town,” Holberton told him. “But I can send you with a fob that’ll get you into the Walls.”
“The Walls” was what people called the prison in Walla Walla. Holberton had never visited. The package containing the ring was the sole act of communication that he had shared with his father in over twenty years.
“There’s no guarantee he even kept it,” Holberton said, as he began to pull the tarp free. “For all I know, he traded it for a blowjob.”
“He kept it,” Javier said.
Holberton pulled the rest of the tarp free. Doing so revealed a motorbike. A big, red motorbike. It had a chopper-style reclining seat with plush black leather cushions, and a long, narrow windscreen curved against the wind. The rear wheel was a lot bigger than the front. Neither wheel had any rims, just giant half-spheres the same red as the rest of the bike. The decals strewn across the front wheel and main body were for companies Javier didn’t recognize: Canon, Citizen, Shoei.
“Do you know what this is?” Holberton asked.
“It’s a great way to get a ticket.”
Holberton laughed his his big “Hah!” laugh. It was the first time Javier had heard it in a few hours. Strange, how he’d really only known Holberton for a little while. It seemed like much longer. Then again, he was only four years old. Each day was a significant portion of his lifespan.
“It’s a replica bike. It’s from a movie. It’ll still work, and everything, but don’t expect it to be too rugged.”
Javier blinked. “Everything you own is copied from something else, isn’t it?”
Holberton shrugged. “It’s the one thing my father and I have in common. He copied humans; I copy artifacts.” He cleared his throat. “It’ll take you a couple of days to get up there, at least. It’s not like California or something, where you can just hop on one highway and keep going. You’ll have to go through Utah, Idaho, and a little bit of Oregon. I’d lay in the course, but I’m guessing you don’t want a GPS knowing where you’re headed.”
Javier had to think about that. Rory and Portia seemed not to need any help finding him. Then again, they had way more processing power to devote to the problem than any one police officer or department. In the end, it probably didn’t matter. They’d tracked him this far, and he’d made out OK.
“Lay it in,” Javier said.
An hour later, he’d packed up everything he could. Clothes, electrolytes, and a week’s supply of vN food. He would need to get to Walla Walla before Tuesday, Holberton reminded him. The new food was rolling out then, and unless Javier felt like contacting him about which grocery stores were stocking the poisoned material, he’d have to eat only the safe stuff he’d packed himself.
“It’s OK,” Javier told him. “There’s always garbage.”
Holberton winced, but he said nothing. It was almost dawn. Javier planned to take his shirt off as soon as he got on the road; the sunlight would be his best help. He’d look a little silly wearing the helmet, but it would also help him avoid recognition. And with a bike that gaudy, he needed all the help he could get in that department.
“This is my favourite time of day,” Holberton said. “Come over here.”
They left the bedroom, and Holberton brought him into the living room. In the pre-dawn light, the house looked especially grey. Holberton offered him a chair facing east, and Javier sat. He heard Holberton start making coffee behind him in the kitchen. Then the sky began to go pink. And with it, so did the house.
Every surface and every object reflected the sky. Without any blinds to filter the view, the colours of the sunrise slanted across the concrete floor and infused the house. Tables, counters, glossy vases and the pressed-earth fireplace. All of them went pink. Then orange. Their greyness was a perfect reflector for the sky’s colours.
As the sun rose higher, Javier’s skin tingled pleasantly. It had been a while since he last savoured the dawn. The last time it happened, he’d been on the island with Amy.
He got up out of the chair. Holberton stood in the arch of the kitchen door, leaning against it and holding his steaming coffee.
“One more try,” Holberton said. “Come on.”
Javier shook his head. “Any other time, I would say yes. In a heartbeat.” He quirked his lips. “I mean, if I had a heartbeat.”
“It’s dangerous out there. You’re safer, here.”
Javier could have told Holberton that he’d never been truly safe. That he’d had isolated periods of relative safety with the gnawing awareness of iteration or poverty eating him up from the inside out, and that this period was really only another one of those.
“You’d get tired of me, eventually,” Javier said. And because he wanted to make it easier, he added: “Everyone always does.”
Holberton looked stricken. He examined his coffee in its cup. “I would not.”
“Would too.” Javier strode up to him. He tipped Holberton’s face up, held it, and kissed him. The man was still a good kisser. He did surprisingly well with such thin lips. He tasted of coffee and agave syrup and some sort of vegan creamer. It had a chemical tang that lingered in Javier’s mouth.
“Switch to cream,” Javier said. “My body thinks that substitute stuff is food, and I’m a fucking robot.”
Like the Impala, Holberton’s bike was a real boat to handle on the road. The recumbent position made it easier; Javier suspected that anybody with a genuine organic spine would have real trouble sitting upright on a bike for the roughly twenty-six hours it would take him to reach Walla Walla. Then again, an organic person would need sleep. Javier didn’t.
He preset the bike’s speed limits so he could toggle through cruise control at will, and synced up the helmet to traffic news. For the first hour, it wasn’t too bad. Just him, and the strengthening sun, and the bike rumbling away between his legs as they ate up the blacktop together. It was hard to believe that anything could be going wrong on such a clear summer day. This was a part of America he had never seen anywhere but in media: the empty part, stretching away for miles and miles in every direction, a field of jasper red under lapis blue dotted with stubborn, scrubby green. This was the place where the cowboy movies came from. This was the place where the cowboy stories came from. Every bad day at every black rock, every drifter on every high plain, every years-long search, they all came from here. He was in one of those stories, now. He was one of those guys on a horse trying to find his girl. Or so he told himself.
On the radio everybody had an opinion about a certain document leak that h
ad sprung up overnight. It described in detail FEMA’s plan to poison the vN food supply, and also contained memos from other world governments about their adoption of the program.
Jack worked fast.
“Well, I find it really troubling that the government isn’t telling us anything about what goes on in there,” said one caller. He was a retiree named Burt. Burt lived near Macondo, and he wanted the city either cleared out, or packed full of more vN, not just the Amys. “I mean, we have a right to know.”
Burt was buying a gun, later that day. He had never owned one, but he needed something that would shoot puke rounds. Just in case.
“I think the Stepford solution is the only solution,” another caller said. Her name was Crystal. Crystal was learning how to be a kindergarten teacher. “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. We can’t just kill them.”
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 caller. His name was Keenan. “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.”
Of course, that wasn’t the whole story. Javier thought of this as he wove his way through traffic. The vN were LeMarque’s idea. Retailing their technology was somebody else’s. If New Eden hadn’t had to pay out a massive settlement, the world might never have seen the vN. Maybe there would have been other humanoid robots, instead. Big clunky ones with rubber skin and actuator joints and hydraulic muscles. The kind other companies used to build, before New Eden started their crusade.
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