iD

by Madeline Ashby

  “Oh, of course!” Javier held up both his hands, palms forward. “I don’t want you think that I can’t make humans happy. I just want to try doing so in a different way, from now on.”

  “It sounds like you’re ready for your citizenship test, then,” the spider said.

  “Citizenship test?” Javier frowned. “I thought I’d already passed. I thought only passing tests were entered in the lottery.”

  “Oh, that’s just the theoretical exam,” the spider said. “This is something new. This is the practical.”

  For a moment, he thought he was back at the Akiba.

  At least, that was what it looked like. The spider led Javier down a narrow, accordion-style hallway that opened onto what was probably a portable building. The spider pushed open the door, and ushered Javier inside.

  Inside was a festival on a summer night. It was warm, and terrifically humid. Fireflies blinked greenly through the air. They were real. They drifted toward hanging paper lanterns and fairy lights strung down a busy street full of humans in tourist clothes. There were some of Rory in there, too – mingling and looking pretty without really saying anything. Most of them were in traditional clothes, but a few of them weren’t. They were buying skewers and playing games. They fished for goldfish and held up charms and compared bolts of cloth.

  “Everyone,” the spider said, “this is Arcadio!”

  The crowd turned. “Hi, Arcadio!”

  “We’re going to start the clock, now.” The spider turned to Javier and took his right hand in its right claw. “Now, I’m sure you recall the terms of citizenship agreement you signed when you completed your application, but I must remind you of this one detail: you are not allowed to discuss what goes on in this exam with any other potential applicants. Sharing that information is grounds for revocation of your citizenship.”

  “Uh…”

  “Good luck, Mr Corcovado. We’re all rooting for you.”

  The spider sped out of the room. Above the door, a clock flashed: 14:59. Fifteen minutes. He had fifteen minutes to prove that he belonged here. But what did that involve? Ordinary citizenship exams required a bunch of forms, and maybe an interview, and then an oath. Was this the interview? Were they going to ask him how much he knew about his new home? About its history? If so, he was completely fucked.

  He went up to the nearest Rory. “What am I supposed to do, here?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, as a cart rolled up at the end of the street. On it were the words “FREAKS OF NATURE.” A Rory jumped out, wearing a circus ringmaster’s uniform. It was very cute: tophat, tails, fishnets, everything.

  “Step right up!” she said, cheerily. “Welcome, one and all, children of all ages, to the last human freak show on this island!” She gestured at the cart, and its display rippled. “See Kappa-Kodo, half-boy, half-fish!”

  Everyone applauded.

  “See the Onibaba, the Bearded Lady!”

  The applause increased.

  “See Shinji, The Man Without Feelings!”

  Out of the cart stepped a man. His age was hard to place. He had some teeth missing. He was Japanese. He smelled like alcohol rub. And his pupils said that he’d just taken a load of beta blockers.

  “Everyone, this is Shinji,” Ringmaster Rory said.

  “Hi, Shinji.”

  “Shinji has a special neurological disorder. It’s called congenital analgesia.” She said the word loud and slow. Everyone cooed. “Shinji, please explain.”

  Shinji apparently had a hard time working his jaw. Maybe it was just that he was having a hard time with the English. “I can’t feel any pain.”

  “None at all?” Ringmaster Rory asked.

  “None at all.”

  “Have you ever felt any pain?”

  Slowly, Shinji shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to see this in action, won’t we? I think we should put that to a test! Who will test Shinji’s nerves of steel?”

  A big man strode up to Shinji. He was white, and broad-shouldered, and badly sunburned. He took off his jacket. His shirt was barely holding his muscle in.

  “So you won’t feel this, then?”

  He punched Shinji square in the jaw. Shinji reeled. Javier waited for the pixels to arrive, for the image to de-rez. But it didn’t. Shinji stayed standing, and so did he. Shinji shook it off, and so did he.

  “No,” Shinji said. “I didn’t feel that at all.”

  “Oh, my God,” Javier murmured. This was what it was like, not to have a failsafe. This was how it felt. At least, he thought it must be. It was the closest he’d ever been.

  “Are you sure?” the white guy was asking. He punched Shinji right in the gut. “How about now?”

  Shinji bent double. He coughed. He spat. “It’s uncomfortable,” he said, “but it doesn’t hurt.”

  Javier looked at the surrounding humans. “Shouldn’t…” They looked at him, pointedly. Then they looked back at Shinji.

  Shinji was getting the fuck beat out of him.

  “Nothing,” he was saying. “Nothing. Ever.”

  “Stop!” Javier shouted. He wriggled in between the humans and marched up to the cart. “Stop it! This is sick!”

  “Why?” the one doing the beating asked. “He can’t feel it. He’s fine.”

  “I’m fine,” Shinji said, and spat out a tooth.

  The white dude kicked him in the groin. “You should try it,” he said, as Shinji worked to stand up. “Go on. Give it a go.”

  Around him, the crowd applauded. He waited for the applause to diminish, but it didn’t. “Do it!” one urged, and the urge became a chant: “Do! It! Do! It! Do! It!”

  He looked at Ringmaster Rory. She winked.

  This was the test. It had to be.

  They were giving him a chance to hurt a human being in a consequence-free environment. They wanted to know if he was tempted. The spider had said it was a new exam, and that made sense. Because if one clade could lose its failsafe, so might all the vN clades, one day. If and when that ever happened, the Mechanese authorities probably wanted only those vN who had never once felt any inkling of violence in their hearts for humanity. They wanted lovers, not fighters.

  “It’s OK,” Shinji said. “Just get it out of your system.”

  “No one would blame you,” Ringmaster Rory said. “Maybe if we told you more about him? He beat his grandmother to death with a tire iron. But then he got confused – he didn’t know what to do with her. The blood leaked down to the unit below, and here we are.”

  “I’m getting early release.” Shinji’s voice was thick with blood. “For doing this. For participating.”

  We think of the key, each in his prison.

  He reached down to help Shinji up.

  “It’s not that easy, pal.”

  The punch landed in the back of his head with the kind of force that would have instantly concussed an organic human being. For Javier, it meant a stumble to the floor that quickly became a high jump to the rafters. They were so high as to be invisible, and painted a midnight blue to blend in with the projection of a night sky, but they were there. He used his legs as leverage to swing himself up into an upright position.

  “Aw, no fair,” the white guy said. “Come on down here and take it like a real man.”

  But he wasn’t a real man, and, he realized, he had never been happier about that fact. “Let me out!”

  “Come on down here, buddy. The test isn’t over.”

  “Yes, it is! I passed!”

  Ringmaster Rory took off her tophat. She put it on Shinji’s bleeding head. “Come on, now, Javier. We all know that’s not true.”

  Oh. Shit.

  “Did you think we wouldn’t find you?” she asked. “Did you think we weren’t watching you? We couldn’t get to you on the plane, or at Holberton’s house, or even on that stupid low-tech bike, but we have you now.”

  “I haven’t done anything to you,” Javier said. “Let me go.”

  Ring
master Rory laughed. “You started all this, Javier. You’re the one who couldn’t keep it in your pants. You’re why Portia’s loose. You’re why FEMA is poisoning the food supply. They’re going ahead with it, you know. A prospective formula is already online. People are printing it themselves.”

  “I’m sorry,” Javier said. “I’ve lost a lot, too. Remember?”

  “Not enough to make you any smarter,” Rory said. She nodded at the humans. “Destroy him.”

  They brought out guns. When they primed them, Javier smelled horseradish. Puke rounds. The last time he had smelled any this close was when he’d taken Amy hostage on that prison transport truck. It felt like so long ago. At the time, he told himself he simply wanted to get the hell out of another jail term, and that was why he’d taken such an audacious risk. Now he knew the truth. He had never been rescued, and he had the chance to rescue someone else. Someone who was in the same position he’d been in, once. Someone who was obviously too young to know what she was doing. Someone who had done something bad in the pursuit of doing something good. No one had ever saved him. But he could save someone else.

  If he lived through this, he would save her again.

  The first round hissed past his head, and he jumped. He jumped randomly, bouncing against a rafter and falling down clumsily to the “street” below. The humans looked entirely different, now. They were no longer tourists, or even actors. They fired without blinking.

  “You called the fucking army?” He jumped higher. He had to find a sprinkler. Something that would trigger an alarm. Anything.

  “I guess she never changed you,” Rory called. “If she had, you’d be able to fight back.”

  Javier jumped down into the food stalls. He overturned the bowls of goldfish. They sloshed down to the ground. He flipped over carts of fruit. The smell of the bullets stung his eyes. A fine yellow mist was rising. He jumped higher, again. If he went down there again, he wouldn’t even be able to see. As he watched, some of the humans reloaded.

  He was going to die, here. Slowly. No one was going to save him. No one was coming. Amy was gone. Powell probably had his kids, already. Jack was on the run. Holberton and Alice and Manuel and Tyler and Simone were all far away. He should have stayed with them. They’d all offered him the one thing he’d never had: a home. And he’d gone on this stupid quest instead, and had nothing to show for it, not even the diamond where the love of his life had her soul encrypted. Now all that was left of her was her psychotic grandmother.

  Portia.

  “PORTIA!” He stared at Ringmaster Rory. “Help!”

  Rory jerked. A look of horror crossed her face. She tried to run into the crossfire. But as Javier watched, she ran straight for the barbecue pit, instead. She picked it up and threw it at the humans. Two were pinned screaming beneath its weight. Hot coals spilled free of it. He smelled burning flesh. His vision started to pixel.

  He covered his eyes. He covered his ears. He heard the cracking, anyway. The ripping. Belatedly, he realized there were three of Rory in the room. Three of Portia.

  They bellowed up in unison: “I wondered when you’d come around, sweetie.”

  Everything went black.

  When they pried him loose from the rafters, he told them that the vN in the room had all gone insane. The spiders – he spoke with three, all in one room – all nodded their huge bodies and spun their claws and downcast their many eyes.

  “It’s so unfortunate,” one said. “It’s been happening so randomly to that clade, we thought we’d still be OK using it as security.”

  “You might want to look into that,” Javier said. “You know. Revamp that particular policy.”

  And after he signed an affidavit promising never to talk about what he’d seen, they let him go.

  His new citizenship granted him the privilege of sleeping in a capsule room for a month while he made other living arrangements. It was a 7x3x4’ tube, complete with a futon, a tiny display, a fan, and a little set of shelves no deeper than an old paperback. You entered it by waving your little petty cash card at a door in a blank-looking building and taking the elevator that blinked a green light at you. On the seventh floor, another blinking green light led him to a hatch. He waved his card at it, and it popped open.

  “Hello, Javier,” Rory said, when he closed the hatch behind him.

  He looked at the hatch just in time to watch a bolt slide across it.

  “Hija de puta,” he muttered. “What do you want now, Rory?”

  “Just a chat.”

  Javier rolled his eyes and stretched out on the futon. There was a little package of vN candy on the pillow. They looked like little Buckyballs made of sugar, but they were probably just carbon. He rustled the package. “Yeah? You know what we could talk about? How about your latest fucking attempt on my life?”

  “That’s what we wanted to discuss. We’re very sorry, Javier.”

  It occurred to him that Rory might actually be lonely. She – they – had no friends. No real ones. Just pawns. Pawns, and multiple iterations of the same self. Javier was on a very short list of people who knew who Rory really was. The rest was just an echo chamber.

  “Where is this going, Rory?”

  “We’re curious about your plans in Mecha.”

  There was no way in hell he was going to tell her about his kids. “Oh, you know. The usual. Drink some tea, eat some rofu. Maybe work at a host club.” He eyed the hatch. “If you ever let me out, that is.”

  “Of course we’re going to let you out. We just thought we’d say hello. And apologize.”

  Javier frowned. He knew Rory. She never just said hello. “I haven’t told anybody what you’re doing to the pedophiles,” he said. “So you can’t be pissed at me for that.”

  “We’re not angry with you, Javier.”

  His frown deepened. “You do remember that you tried to have me killed in Las Vegas, right?”

  “We remember.”

  “And that you just had tried to have me killed again? Like, yesterday?”

  “We regret that very deeply. We are reevaluating our decision-making apparatus.”

  “And so, what, the slate is just wiped clean, now?”

  There was a long pause. “Yes.”

  He wished he could sit up. He settled for pushing himself up on his elbows. “So, let me get this straight. I kill one of yours in Costa Rica, I kill two of yours in Las Vegas, Portia kills three of yours in Mecha, and now you’ve got me locked up in a room that looks like a coffin, and you’re just going to let me go?”

  “We wanted to welcome you to Mecha. Despite our best efforts, you’ve made it here.”

  She had something, there. She had originally promised him and Amy passage to Mecha, only to try drowning them. A year later, he was finally here, but Amy wasn’t.

  “Well, thanks,” he said. “Is that all?”

  “We just want you to remember this conversation, later on. Remember that we let you go. We can be generous. We can be accommodating.”

  The bolt slid back, and the hatch opened.

  “You may want to visit the ninja forest, on the island’s western edge. The acrobats are quite captivating.”

  “Acrobats,” Javier said.

  “They’re really something, Javier. You should go. But the only entry is via the old city, so you’ll have to get admission there, first.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Rory, but I don’t exactly trust you,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re leading me into a trap.”

  “We are not trying to trap you, Javier. We are trying to help you.”

  “See, that’s the part I’m not ready to believe. Because you’ve never helped me, Rory. Ever.”

  “We are trying to make up for that, now.”

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

  “We are dying.”

  “… What?” Was that even possible? Rory had distributed herself across hundreds – if not thousands – of her clademates. She lived in their network. And she’d lived there lo
ng enough to iterate multiple generations. For her to be dying meant…

  “Portia is winning, Javier. She is destroying us from the inside.”

  “How?”

  The display flickered on. On it, he saw a Rory model in a kitchen. It was a mixed-species kitchen. Javier could tell, because there was a basket of fruit on the counter that only humans could eat. It was night. Very late, judging by the clock on the microwave. The view was from a camera embedded in one of the appliances; Javier guessed it was the refrigerator. She stood before the stove. She raised one trembling hand to it and held it aloft. Javier watched as she stood there, her hand shaking. She stood there, her whole body shuddering as her fingers spasmed. And then her hand pounced down on the dials of the stove, and very quickly lit each of the burners. It was only a small amount of heat; Javier couldn’t even see any flame. But it was enough. Her face blank but her eyes wet, she turned away from the stove and sat down.

  “It only takes a minute,” Rory said. “A blown fuse, a sudden swerve, a mixture of bleach and ammonia in a closed room. We kill ourselves, afterward. The coroners think it’s because we’ve failsafed, watching the deaths of our human families.”

  It wasn’t Portia’s usual way of doing things – that was to take control of someone’s body and kill all the humans within range with her bare hands. “Why doesn’t she just kill the humans?”

  “We don’t know.”

  The image on the display fizzled a little. It blipped. Then it went black.

  THESE BITCHES NEED TO LEARN HOW TO DO IT RIGHT.

  Javier swallowed.

  TELL THE LITTLE ONES GRANNY SAYS HI.

  The city of Mecha stood on what was once Dejima, the artificial island originally used to house foreign traders between the seventeeth and nineteenth centuries. Javier’s new ears told him this as he wandered through it. The old island had been only nine thousand square meters in total; it was now many times that size, having annexed the old Naval Training Centre as well as some of the city of Nagasaki. The original island stood at the centre of the total landmass, and it was the only place in town where the buildings remained low. Skyscrapers loomed over it, casting the reproduction Dutch warehouses and townhouses in a constant shadow that left their bleached white surfaces a pale blue.