by D B Hartwell
The oldest girl threw the reader toward her victim with a weak underhand. “I don’t know why you’re acting so hurt,” she said, folding her arms and jiggling away. “You don’t even have real feelings.”
“Yeah, I don’t have real fat, either, tubby! Or real acne! Enjoy your teen years, querida!”
Behind him, he heard applause. When he turned, he saw a redhaired woman leaning against the tree. She wore business clothes with an incongruous pair of climbing slippers. The fabric of her tights had gone loose and wrinkled down around her ankles, like the skin of an old woman. Her applause died abruptly as the little freckled girl ran up and hugged her fiercely around the waist.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” the mother said. She nodded at Javier. “Thanks for looking after her.”
“I wasn’t.”
Javier gestured and Junior slid down out of his tree. Unlike the organic girl, Junior didn’t hug him; he jammed his little hands in the pockets of his stolen clothes and looked the older woman over from top to bottom. Her eyebrows rose.
“Well!” She bent down to Junior’s height. The kid’s eyes darted for the open buttons of her blouse and widened considerably; Javier smothered a smile. “What do you think, little man? Do I pass inspection?”
Junior grinned. “Eres humana.”
She straightened. Her eyes met Javier’s. “I suppose coming from a vN, that’s quite the compliment.”
“We aim to please,” he said.
Moments later, they were in her car.
• • • •
It started with a meal. It usually did. From silent prison guards in Nicaragua to singing cruise directors in Panama, from American girls dancing in Mexico and now this grown American woman in her own car in her own country, they started it with eating. Humans enjoyed feeding vN. They liked the special wrappers with the cartoon robots on the front. (They folded them into origami unicorns, because they thought that was clever.) They liked asking about whether he could taste. (He could, but his tongue read texture better than flavour.) They liked calculating how much he’d need to iterate again. (A lot.) This time, the food came as a thank-you. But the importance of food in the relationship was almost universal among humans. It was important that Junior learn this, and the other subtleties of organic interaction. Javier’s last companion had called their relationship “one big HCI problem.” Javier had no idea what that meant, but he suspected that embedding Junior in a human household for a while would help him avoid it.
“We could get delivery,” Brigid said. That was her name. She pronounced it with a silent G. Breed. Her daughter was Abigail. “I’m not much for going out.”
He nodded. “That’s fine with us.”
He checked the rearview. The kid was doing all right; Abigail was showing him a game. Its glow diffused across their faces and made them, for the moment, the same colour. But Junior’s eyes weren’t on the game. They were on the little girl’s face.
“He’s adorable,” Brigid said. “How old is he?”
Javier checked the dashboard. “Three days.”
• • • •
The house was a big, fake hacienda with the floors and walls and ceilings all the same vanilla ice cream color. Javier felt as though he’d stepped into a giant, echoing egg. Light followed Brigid as she entered each room, and now Javier saw bare patches on the plaster and the scratch marks of heavy furniture dragged across pearly tile. Someone had moved out. Probably Abigail’s father. Javier’s life had just gotten enormously easier.
“I hope you don’t mind the Electric Sheep . . .”
Brigid handed him her compact. In it was a menu for a chain specializing in vN food. (“It’s the food you’ve been dreaming of!”) Actually, vN items were only half the Sheep’s menu; the place was a meat market for organics and synthetics. Javier had eaten there but only a handful of times, mostly at resorts, and mostly with people who wanted to know what he thought of it “from his perspective.” He chose a Toaster Party and a Hasta La Vista for himself and Junior. When the orders went through, a little lamb with an extension cord for a collar baa’d at him and bounded away across the compact.
“It’s good we ran into you,” Brigid said. “Abby hasn’t exactly been very social, lately. I think this is the longest conversation she’s had with, well, anybody in . . .” Brigid’s hand fluttered in the air briefly before falling.
Javier nodded like he understood. It was best to interrupt her now, while she still had some story to tell. Otherwise she’d get it out of her system too soon. “I’m sorry, but if you don’t mind . . .” He put a hand to his belly. “There’s a reason they call it labour, you know?”
Brigid blushed. “Oh my God, of course! Let’s get you laid, uh, down somewhere.” Her eyes squeezed shut. “I mean, um, that didn’t quite come out right—”
Oh, she was so cute.
“It’s been a long day—”
She was practically glowing.
“And I normally don’t bring strays home, but you were so nice—”
He knew songs that went this way.
“Anyway, we normally use the guest room for storage, I mean I was sleeping in it for a while before everything . . . But if it’s just a nap . . .”
He followed her upstairs to the master bedroom. It was silent and cool, and the sheets smelled like new plastic and discount shopping. He woke there hours later, when the food was cold and her body was warm, and both were within easy reach.
• • • •
The next morning Brigid kept looking at him and giggling. It was like she’d gotten away with something, like she’d spent the night in a club and not in her own bed, like she wasn’t the one making the rules she’d apparently just broken. The laughter took ten years off her face. She had creams for the rest, and applied them.
Downstairs, Abigail sat at the kitchen bar with her orange juice and cereal. Her legs swung under her barstool, back and forth, back and forth. She seemed to be rehearsing for a later role as a bored girl in a coffee shop: reading something on her scroll, her chin cradled in the pit of her left hand as she paged through with her right index finger, utterly oblivious to the noise of the display mounted behind her or Junior’s enthusiastic responses to the educational show playing there. It was funny—he’d just seen the mother lose ten years, but now he saw the daughter gaining them back. She looked so old this morning, so tired.
“My daddy is going out with a vN, too,” Abigail said, not looking up from her reader.
Javier yanked open the fridge. “That so?”
“Yup. He was going out with her and my mom for a while, but not any more.”
Well, that explained some things. Javier pushed aside the milk and orange juice cartons and found the remainder of the vN food. Best to be as nonchalant with the girl as she’d been with him. “What kind of model? This other vN, I mean.”
“I don’t know about the clade, but the model was used for nursing in Japan.”
He nodded. “They had a problem with old people, there.”
“Did you know that Japan has a whole city just for robots? It’s called Mecha. Like that place that Muslim people go to sometimes, but with an H instead of a C.”
Javier set about preparing a plate for Junior. He made sure the kid got the biggest chunks of rofu. “I know about Mecha,” he said. “It’s in Nagasaki Harbour. It’s the same spot they put the white folks a long time ago. Bigger now, though.”
Abigail nodded. “My daddy sent me pictures. He’s on a trip there right now. That’s why I’m here all week.” She quickly sketched a command into her reader with her finger, then shoved the scroll his way. Floating on its soft surface, Javier saw a Japanese-style vN standing beside a curvy white reception-bot with a happy LCD smile and braids sculpted from plastic and enamel. They were both in old-fashioned clothes, the smart robot and the stupid one: the vN wore a lavender kimono with a pink sash, and the receptionist wore “wooden” clogs.
“Don’t you think she’s pretty?” Abigail asked. “Ev
erybody always says how pretty she is, when I show them the pictures.”
“She’s all right. She’s a vN.”
Abigail smiled. “You think my mom is prettier?”
“Your mom is human. Of course I do.”
“So you like humans the best?”
She said it like he had a choice. Like he could just shut it off, if he wanted. Which he couldn’t. Ever.
“Yeah, I like humans the best.”
Abigail’s feet stopped swinging. She sipped her orange juice delicately through a curlicued kiddie straw until only bubbles came. “Maybe my daddy should try being a robot.”
• • • •
It wasn’t until Brigid and Abigail were gone that Javier decided to debrief his son on what had happened in the park. He had felt sick, he explained, because they were designed to respond quickly to violence against humans. The longer they avoided responding, the worse they felt. It was like an allergy, he said, to human suffering.
Javier made sure to explain this while they watched a channel meant for adult humans. A little clockwork eye kept popping up in the top right corner of the screen just before the violent parts, warning them not to look. “But it’s not real,” Junior said, in English. “Can’t our brains tell the difference?”
“Most of the time. But better safe than sorry.”
“So I can’t watch TV for grown-ups?”
“Sometimes. You can watch all the cartoon violence you want. It doesn’t fall in the Valley at all; there was no human response to simulate when they coded our stems.” He slugged electrolytes. While on her lunch break, Brigid had ordered a special delivery of vN groceries. She clearly intended him to stay awhile. “You can still watch porn, though. I mean, they’d never have built us in the first place if we couldn’t pass that little test.”
“Porn?”
“Well. Vanilla porn. Not the rough stuff. No blood. Not unless it’s a vN getting roughed up. Then you can go to town.”
“How will I know the difference?”
“You’ll know.”
“How will I know?”
“If it’s a human getting hurt, your cognition will start to jag. You’ll stutter.”
“Like when somebody tried to hurt Abigail?”
“Like that, yeah.”
Junior blinked. “I need to see an example.”
Javier nodded. “Sure thing. Hand me that remote.”
They found some content. A nice sampler, Javier thought. Javier paused the feed frequently. There was some slang to learn and explain, and some anatomy. He was always careful to give his boys a little lesson on how to find the clitoris. The mega-church whose members had tithed to fund the development of their OS didn’t want them hurting any of the sinners left behind to endure God’s wrath after the Rapture. Fucking them was still okay.
He had just finished explaining this little feat of theology when Brigid came home early. She shrieked and covered her daughter’s eyes. Then she hit Javier. He lay on the couch, unfazed, as she slapped him and called him names. He wondered, briefly, what it would be like to be able to defend himself.
• • • •
“He’s a child!”
“Yeah, he’s my child,” Javier said. “And that makes it my decision, not yours.”
Brigid folded her arms and paced across the bedroom to retrieve her drink. She’d had the scotch locked up way high in the kitchen and he’d watched her stand on tiptoes on a slender little dining room chair just to get it, her calves doing all sorts of interesting things as she stretched.
“I suppose you show all your children pornography?” She tipped back more of her drink.
“Every last one.”
“How many is that?”
“This Junior is the twelfth.”
“Twelve? Rapid iteration is like a felony in this state!”
This was news to him. Then again, it made a certain kind of sense—humans worked very hard to avoid having children, because theirs were so expensive and annoying and otherwise burdensome. Naturally they had assumed that vN kids were the same.
“I’ll be sure to let this Junior know about that.”
“This Junior? Don’t you even name them?”
He shrugged. “What’s the point? We don’t see each other. Let them choose their own name.”
“Oh, so in addition to being a pervert, you’re an uncaring felonious bastard. That’s just great.”
Javier had no idea where “caring” came into the equation, but decided to let that slide. “You’ve been with me. Did I ask you to do anything weird?”
“No—”
“Did I make you feel bad?” He stepped forward. She had very plush carpet, the kind that dug into his toes if he walked slowly enough.
“No . . .”
They were close; he could see where one of her earrings was a little tangled and he reached under her hair to fix it. “Did I make you feel good?”
She sighed through her nose to hide the quirk in her lip. “That’s not the point. The point is that it’s wrong to show that kind of stuff to kids!”
He rubbed her arms. “Human kids, yeah. They tend to run a little slow. They get confused. Junior knows that the vids were just a lesson on the failsafe.” He stepped back. “What, do you think I was trying to turn him on, or something? Jesus! And you think I’m sick?”
“Well, how should I know? I come home and you’re just sitting there like it’s no big deal . . .” She swallowed the last of the drink. “Do you have any idea what kinds of ads I’m going to get, now? What kind of commercials I’m going to have to flick past, before Abigail sees them? I don’t want that kind of thing attached to my profile, Javier!”
“Give me a break,” Javier said. “I’m only three years old.”
That stopped her in her tracks. Her mouth hung open. Human women got so uptight about his age. The men handled it much better—they laughed and ruffled his hair and asked if he’d had enough to eat.
He smiled. “What, you’ve never been with a younger man?”
“That’s not funny.”
He lay back on the bed, propped up on his elbows. “Of course it’s funny. It’s hysterical. You’re railing at me for teaching my kid how to recognize the smutvids that won’t fry his brain, and all the while you’ve been riding a three-year-old.”
“Oh, for—”
“And very eagerly, I might add.”
Now she looked genuinely angry. “You’re a total asshole, you know that? Are you training Junior to be a total asshole, too?”
“He can be whatever he wants to be.”
“Well, I’m sure he’s finding plenty of good role models in the adult entertainment industry, Javier.”
“Lots of vN get rich doing porn. They can do the seriously hardcore stuff.” He stretched. “They have to pay a licensing fee to the studio that coded the crying plugin, though. Designers won a lawsuit.”
Brigid sank slowly to the very edge of the bed. Her spine folded over her hips. She held her face in her hands. For a moment she became her daughter: shoulders hunched, cowering. She seemed at once very fragile and very heavy. Brigid did not think of herself as beautiful. He knew that from the menagerie of creams in her bathroom. She would never understand the reassurance a vN could find in the solidity of her flesh, or the charm of her unique smiles, or the hundred different sneezes her species seemed to have. She would only know that they melted for humans.
As though sensing his gaze, she peered at him through the spaces between her fingers. “Why did you bother bringing a child into this world, Javier?”
He’d felt this same confusion when Junior asked him about the existence of all vN. He had no real answer. Sometimes, he wondered if his desire to iterate was a holdover from the clade’s initial programming as ecological engineers, and he was nothing more than a Johnny Appleseed planting his boys hither and yon. After all, they did sink a lot of carbon.
But nobody ever seemed to ask the humans this question. Their breeding was messy and organic
and therefore special, and everybody treated it like some divine right no matter what the consequences were for the planet or the psyche or the body. They’d had the technology to prevent unwanted children for decades, but Javier still met them every day, still listened to them as they talked themselves to sleep about accidents and cycles and late-night family confessions during holiday visits. He thought about Abigail, lonely and defenceless under her tree. Brigid had no right to ask him why he’d bred.
He nodded at her empty glass. “Why did you have yours? Were you drunk?”
• • • •
Javier spent that night on a futon in the storage room. He lay surrounded by the remnants of Brigid’s old life: T-shirts from dive bars that she insisted on keeping; smart lease agreements and test results that she’d carefully organized in Faraday boxes. It was no different from the mounds of clutter he’d found in other homes. Humans seemed to have a thing about holding on to stuff. Things held a special meaning for them. That was lucky for him. Javier was a thing, too.
He had moved on to the books when Junior came in to see him. The boy shuffled toward him uncertainly. He had eaten half a box of vN groceries that day. The new inches messed with his posture and gait; he didn’t know where to put his newly-enlarged feet.
“Dad, I’ve got a problem.” Junior flopped onto the futon. He hugged his shins. “Are you having a problem, too?”
“A problem?”
Junior nodded at the bedroom.
“Oh, that. Don’t worry about that. Humans are like that. They freak out.”
“Is she gonna kick us out?” Junior stared directly at Javier. “I know it’s my fault and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mess things up—”
“Shut up.”
His son closed his mouth. Junior looked so small just then, all curled in on himself. It was hard to remember that he’d been even tinier only a short time ago. His black curls overshadowed his head, as though the programming for hair had momentarily taken greater priority than the chassis itself. Javier gently pulled the hair away so he could see his son’s eyes a little better.
