“Sir? Is there someone you would like to speak with? Someone I can contact, for you?”
“No,” he said. “I’m on my own.”
He jumped.
Making his way up the building required a sort of monkey shimmy. This meant clinging with his fingers, his toes, and his inner thighs and inching up, slowly, with the wind at his back and music in his ears. It was funny, how noise from the Strip floated up so intact.
“Well, then he started grinding up on me. And I couldn’t get away.”
“You should have just punched him. Or elbowed him in the stomach, or something.”
Humans had it so easy.
He inched up a little higher. His suit was slippery. He’d only made it one floor. Trees were easier. Why hadn’t he just gone to the rainforest, in Costa Rica? He could have found a way out from there. Or maybe he never would have. Maybe he could have just gotten lost in there. It would have been better for everyone if he had never left the rainforest. Better for Amy. Better for his iterations. It was his father’s choice to take them out of the forest. He was a child, then, but he hadn’t wanted to go. Hadn’t wanted to leave. Why had he followed Arcadio? What had the old man ever done for him?
He had taught him to climb.
“Loosen up,” Arcadio had said, their first time climbing trees together. They had started at the bottom, with the roots. There were tapirs and jaguars and not too much sunlight, down on the forest floor. It was dark. He was scared.
“Stop hugging the damn tree,” Arcadio shouted up at him. “It’s not your girlfriend.”
But he liked the tree. He liked the softness of its moss. He liked how big it was. He liked all the insects crawling around through that moss. It would be fun to be one of them, just wriggling around in all that pillowy green lushness all day. He wasn’t going to tell Arcadio that, because it was stupid, but that was how he felt.
“The monkeys don’t hug the tree,” Arcadio said. “They just hold it. Like it’s a tool that they’re using.”
A tool. Something you used with your hands. Javier pulled away. He gripped with his hands. Then just with his fingers. He shut his eyes.
“There you go,” Arcadio said. “Now haul up with your fingers and push up with your toes. It’s like a crunch. You don’t know what those are, because we don’t need to use them, but I’ll show you. You bring your knees to your gut.”
“But then, I’d have to let go,” Javier had protested.
“It’s OK if you let go all at once,” Arcadio said. “You know that. Your body knows that. Your body was built for it. All you have to do is let go.”
Javier opened his eyes in Las Vegas. He pulled his body away from the wall. Wind whistled between him and it. This was the difference between crawling and running, between climbing and leaping, between man and machine. Up with the fingers. Up with the toes. Knees to stomach. He let go.
He sailed up ten feet. His fingers found the next grip without his computing it. Then he did it again. And again. And again. Then he stopped counting.
Holberton’s room was on the penthouse level, as expected. Javier recognized it by the bottle of wine left out on the terrace. It was a brand Holberton once talked about in an interview. The room was unlit, but it lit up as soon as Javier entered it from the terrace. Inside, it was very clean. Housekeeping had been by. He would need to find the safe.
“Where is the safe?” he asked.
“You don’t belong here,
” Rory said. He recognized her immediately. It was the hotel talking, but it was also her. She had a special kind of smug.
“Bullshit.” Javier started with the perimeter of the room. He nudged aside each piece of art, and every mirror. Nothing. He checked the cabinets in the kitchenette. Then the bar. Nothing. He even opened the wine cooler beneath the counter, and checked the powder room and laundry room nearest the door into the main hall. Nothing. But that was just being thorough – the safe was likely in the bedroom, where giant watches and gems went to sleep. He went there, next.
Amy was projected on every wall of Holberton’s bedroom.
No, not Amy. Not all of them were Amy. Most were her clademates. They looked exactly like her, but they weren’t
her
. He had no idea what particular pattern matching or facial recognition algorithms allowed him to recognize that, but he was usually able to identify his own flesh when he saw it on display. He’d been able to do it, the first time he watched news coverage of FEMA herding Amy’s clademates and all the clades who shared their bodyplan onto trucks. He’d watched for her. Obsessively. It got him chased out of an electronics store where he’d been scouting for e-waste to eat.
The vN who looked like Amy all seemed to be inhabiting the same space. The images were surveillance images captured from household environments: kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms. The women were dressed normally, not in prison jumpsuits or lab scrubs. They were interacting with humans. Mostly men, but a few women.
The vN were also iterating.
Javier found a picture of a human man smiling into a camera – a nice camera with favourable lighting, not a surveillance camera – and hugging his iterating vN. She was huge and full. Her face was round. Even her ankles had puffed, just a little. This was what Amy would have looked like, if she had ever iterated. If she had given Xavier the little sister he kept asking about. If she had given the two of them a daughter.
The next image was of the resulting iteration. There was a new picture for every day. In each image, she was naked. Javier waved his hand and the little girl grew, faster and faster, stretching up and out into the child Amy had once been, wispy fine blond hair and huge green eyes, up into a more teenage size, out into a woman grown, the perfect replication of her mother. The final image was of the two women standing together.
When he flipped the images forward, a blueprint filled the wall. The blueprint was not for a single building, but a whole town. There was a central square and a big sculpture where a fountain might once have gone, and a group of parks, and businesses, and houses. When you gestured at any of the groups, photos from them popped up. Amy’s clademates were in every one. Young and old, iterating and not. A field of green-eyed, fair-haired women and their husbands and wives.
At the bottom of every image was a single word: STEPFORD.
He was about to open a folder named “DIET PLAN” when in the hallway, a door closed. Shit. Javier hastily disarranged the photos with frantic gesturing, and got himself behind the bedroom door. He wiggled into its corner just as it opened. Holberton stepped in. He was alone. Javier made himself as still as possible. Holberton paused, looked at the pictures, gestured at them, and shrugged. Then he crossed the room and opened the bathroom door. The light came on, and he closed the door.
Javier was almost out the bedroom door when he heard the sound of bees, and fell. The charge ploughed through him like a freight train. He was instantly rigid and heavy. He fell without breaking his fall, his face pressed deep into white shag carpeting. From there, he watched Holberton’s shoes come close to his face.
“You know, when you said you’d find me, this isn’t quite what I had in mind.” Holberton used his foot to roll Javier over. He held out the taser. He shook it a little in his hand. “Move and I’ll use this again. Blink once for yes and twice for no. With a name like yours, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Pike method of communication.”
Javier wasn’t, but he blinked once anyway.
“Good. Now. Is your name really Ricardo Montalban?”
Javier blinked twice.
“Thought so. Are you a journalist, photographer, or in any way affiliated with the infotainment industrial complex?”
Two blinks.
“Excellent. Are you a spy sent from a foreign government?”
What the fuck? Two blinks.
Holberton straddled him and knelt. “OK. Here’s the really big question. This is the important one, so pay attention. Are you with New Eden? Did my father send you?”
Two blinks. Javier struggled to open his mouth. “No,” he said. It came out more like a moan.
Holberton stood. He sidestepped Javier and held out a hand. With difficulty – it felt like pushing a broken-down car – Javier lifted his arm and took it. Holberton helped him up. He pushed him over to the settee at the edge of the bed and stood in front of him.
“Who are you?”
The truth, again. “My name is Javier Peterson.”
Holberton whistled. “
The
Javier? From the island?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were
dead
. Everyone does.” Holberton turned, pulled some images aside with his fingers, and brought up a square of footage. In it, Javier jumped clear of the destroyed house on the little home island. Nearby, his youngest was in the diamond tree, furiously prying at one of the branches. But six months ago, Javier had not seen that. He just walked out into the water. And then he fell into it, and didn’t come back up.
“Please stop.”
“Sure. Sorry.” Holberton wiped the images away with one hand. Now the room was lightless, artless. Only the light from the hallway came through. A single shaft of amber light, illuminating just the very edges of both of them. “What are you
doing
here, Javier?”
“I need your help,” he said, after a moment. He looked up. Holberton was very close to him. His eyes were a seaglass green. Just like Amy’s. They were, in fact, Amy’s eyes. Someone had reproduced them in her bodyplan, right from this very pattern. “New Eden killed Amy. A missionary by the name of Mitch Powell. Now I’m on the run, and I need someone who hates those Bible-thumping bastards just as much as I do.”
Holberton smirked. “Then it looks like I’m your man.”
11:
The Suburbs
“Have you ever heard of CITE?”
Holberton drove a greened-up 1967 Impala sedan, black. Holberton told him something about going all the way to Detroit to get it printed from the original pattern, when an auction in Vancouver fell through.
“CITE was a prototype city, out in Lea County,” Holberton said, now. “Urban environment, suburban, everything. A place for companies to test new products, basically, without a lot of toxic internal corporate culture to fuck things up.”
Javier watched the desert blur past. “That’s the city I saw in your suite?”
“That’s the one.”
“And now a bunch of Amy’s clademates live there.”
“Yes.” Holberton moved to an on-ramp. “They’re mostly in one suburb, Macondo. That’s part of why the families agreed to go. More space.”
Amy had wanted a backyard. She had told him that, once. She kept designing the same treehouse, over and over, knowing she’d never see it. She and his youngest were working on one, together. They had been, anyway. When they were alive.
“At first, it was like any other product recall,” Holberton said. “Except the vN were all willing. FEMA sent out a message asking for them to come in and do an interview, after what happened with Amy and Portia, and they did. If they were already living with humans, that is. The homeless ones, that was different.”
“I know,” Javier said. “You rounded them up in trucks.”
Holberton adjusted his position in his seat. “They went willingly,” he repeated.
Vultures circled overhead. Of course they’d gone willingly. The failsafe made them incapable of doing anything else. “Yeah,” Javier said.
“But we couldn’t just split up the families. We didn’t want to do that. Nobody wanted to do that.”
“So you moved them here.”
“FEMA moved them here. I’m just a design consultant.”
Javier turned to him. He said nothing, just stretched his arm out the window to get the sun.
“What’s it like? When you’re in the sun?”
Javier searched for the right word. “Fizzy.”
“But you were intended for work in the woods, right?”
“That’s right.”
“And now you’re here, in the desert. Where there’s nothing.” Holberton clicked his tongue. “I guess that’s what Vegas is for. Reinvention.”
They changed lanes, and Holberton pointed. It was there, up ahead. In the dun-coloured desert it was a field of sudden green and silver, its edges as sharp and exact as pixels. It looked like a motherboard forgotten on a stretch of burlap. There were skyscrapers and strip malls, steeples and domes and golden arches. Javier thought of the city Amy kept hidden underwater. He liked that one better.
They drove along a ring road that circled the entire complex. Eventually they came to a simple checkpoint with a red and white bar that lowered as they drove close. The man inside was organic. He was very old, and Latino, with a pockmarked face and hair that reeked of gardenia-infused petroleum jelly. Until this moment, Javier was unaware that anyone still
made
Tres Flores, much less used it.
“Good afternoon, Mr Holberton.”
“Good afternoon. I’m bringing my friend with me, today. He’ll need a guest pass.”
“Does he have a radiation detector?”
Holberton winced. “Ooh… No. Yeah, he needs one of those.”
The guard handed them both lapel pins with red squares of film inside. “If that turns black, you run,” he said. “Now there’s more paperwork…”
“Oh, come on. I cut short my time in Vegas just to show all this to my friend.”
The words
my friend
seemed to trigger something in the guard’s mind. Instantly, his face went from anxious to sheepish. He handed Holberton a pass marked GUEST without so much as looking at him, and lifted the gate.
“Goodness,” Holberton said. “I don’t know why that had to be so awkward.”
“He thought you were trying to impress me,” Javier said.
Holberton turned to him with raised brows. “Am I not?”
Javier smiled.
Pastures formed the outermost edges of the city. Drones hovered above them, moving in time with the herds of alpaca that appeared to be making their homes there. The ring road picked up the interstate, and they followed it out of the farmland and over the rest of the complex. On the right, Javier watched a series of long, rectangular buildings disappear under the concrete. “MACONDO MALL” the sign read. Only a few cars were parked in the lot.
They turned off the interstate, taking an offramp marked only “MACONDO.” It curved down away from the highway and led into a suburb of one-story houses. Javier’s experience with suburbs was minimal. But he doubted most of them looked like this.
“I decided to go for a retrofuturist theme.”
Holberton gestured at the houses. They looked like snowflakes: all white, all edges, all angles. Faux stone and slab roofs that tilted strangely, doorways that opened to the diagonal corners of front yards rather than the street. White archways and colonnades and windows, endless windows.
“The thing about these people, the people who choose vN, is that they don’t want something real. If they wanted reality, they would have chosen reality.”
Even the storefronts looked a little wrong. Rather, they looked like they were from the past – but a past Javier didn’t understand. A place where everything was white and gleaming and the signage was huge and neon and the fonts were all that stylized drunken slant that was neither print nor cursive.
“Most emergency housing tries to replicate everything about your old housing, in miniature,” Holberton said. “But that’s a mistake. That’s a setup for an Uncanny Valley reaction at the architectural level. It’s like your house, but it’s not your house. It’s literally
unheimlich.
The familiar, defamiliarized. So you have to make something completely different. Something so far off the mark that people get into it as an alternative, rather than a straight replacement.”
Javier opened his window and looked out. Even the trees had been pruned to meet a certain standard size and shape. The lawn furniture, what he could see of it on porches and concrete patios, was comprised of chairs like eggs and tulips. The tables all looked like they’d been cast of a single piece.
“Where did you
find
all this stuff?” Javier asked.
“We had to replicate a few museum pieces. Mostly Buckminster Fuller stuff, and a lot of Eames and Jacobsen, but also some demo furniture and fabrics from the original Playboy mansion. And the Playboy townhouse. Did you know there was supposed to be a Playboy townhouse? In 1962?”
“Playboy?” Javier asked.
“They were actually extremely helpful. I really wish I could have worked for their interiors division, back then, when they tried their home design revival. It was so trashy, all leopard-print and mohair. They needed a better team.”
“Right,” Javier said, as though those words meant something to him.
“Anyway, my thinking was that we should really dig into that sense of wonder and optimism that pervaded the Mid-Century Modern period. Because it was all about this one approach to the future, before we knew how hard the future was going to be. Like space, for example.”
“Space?”
“Well, space travel. I mean, these people still believed in space travel.”
Javier watched the houses rolling by. Their floor-to-ceiling windows exposed all the goings-on inside, when the sun’s glare went the right way. Inside, there was always an Amy. Amy, watching a display. Amy, checking a cupboard. Amy, watering a succulent. Amy, but not Amy. Just a constant reminder of what he’d lost. He had his doubts about God, but Hell was looking like a distinct possibility. There was no other word for an entire community planned around housing multiple copies of the woman he’d loved and betrayed.
“Space travel? You mean like generation ships?” Javier asked.
“Yeah, like those,” Holberton said. “Although, these people, these
Jetsons
types, they were into domed cities on the moon. Can you imagine that? Domed cities? On the fucking moon? Jesus Christ.”
The lawns were fake. Children played on them nonetheless. Holberton stopped at an intersection, and as Javier watched, three small versions of Amy led a group of human children across the street. The Amys watched the intersection with narrow eyes and perfect posture: heads high, chins up, shoulders back, spines straight. Their alertness only diminished when the organic kids had all made it to the sidewalk. They looked exactly like the lionesses Amy had designed to guard the Veldt.
“They’re deeply focused,” Holberton said. “It’s a leftover from the original nursing programs. It has to do with problem-solving. They prioritize goals differently. They’re long-term thinkers.”
Well. That would explain some of Portia’s behaviour.
They drove past a park with a swingset and a bunch of toys. Amys of different sizes played there, swinging impossibly high, climbing cargo nets with grim determination, swinging from monkey-bars like zealous humans at a terrorist training camp. Javier used to take his sons to playgrounds. He considered it a key part of their social development. Apparently the parents here thought the same. The adult Amys watched from the sidelines. They clustered together, watching the human children and their own iterations with the same precision that their daughters exhibited while crossing the street.
“It’s not a bad life,” Holberton said. “There’s a school. And a library. And a grocery store full of vN food.”
“All home comforts,” Javier said.
“Don’t take that tone. I know what real poverty – real lack of privilege – looks like.” Holberton gunned the engine and started driving toward the centre of the city. “Under Las Vegas, there’s a whole network of flood tunnels. There were hundreds of people who lived down there. Humans. Before the vN came along. When I first came to Vegas, I ran a haunted house down there. It was cash only, and you got a text an hour before it started telling you which entrance to take. No one under eighteen allowed.”
“But you
were
eighteen,” Javier said.
Holberton turned to him. “Someone’s done his homework.”
Javier shrugged. Holberton continued staring at him, but he said nothing. Eventually, Holberton turned away and focused on the road.
“Anyway, I guess you could say that’s how I got started in all this.” He gestured at the houses with their prickly pear and rhododendron in the front yards. “And
this
is not
that.
Do you see an inch of flood water everywhere? No. Do you see parents on drugs? No. A few alcoholics, maybe, but we’ve even got some AA meetings over at the church.”
“Did these people quit their jobs to come here?”
Holberton shrugged. “I’m sure some of them did. A lot of them didn’t have work. They get paid a stipend to stay here. It’s not much, but they can spend it any way they like. And there’s no shortage of businesses who want to take their money. It’s not all government cheese, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Government cheese?”
“It’s a term. It means…” Holberton’s mouth opened, then closed. “Who the fuck knows what it means. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not all that bad. It could be a lot worse. It could be fucking Warsaw, and it’s not.”
Javier didn’t know what
Warsaw
meant, either, but the length of the vowels and the sharpness of the consonants made it sound unpleasant. He didn’t want to ask, either. He didn’t like how much he liked Holberton. He didn’t want to start liking him even more.
The car chimed.
“Chris?”
“Yes, Rosie?”
“You have a call from Washington.”
“… State?”
“… No.”
Holberton sighed. “Well, shit.” He made a quick turn. “I guess we’ll have to save the tour for another time. Are you OK coming to my office?”
They pulled up at a campus of buildings whose sign proclaimed it the “CITY LAB.” No one there wore lab coats, though. It was mostly cargo shorts and climbing shoes and T-shirts with beer slogans on them.
“In the summer, we have a lot of students,” Holberton said. “Things get pretty casual.”
Holberton led him into a main building. It was all steel and glass and polished concrete, with big walls in
hacienda
colours with huge displays of art that faded in and out as humans passed. Javier paused to examine one of the displays. It hung over a dead fireplace, and as he watched it switched from Diego Rivera to a mobile shot of a group of Amys at the playground.
“Come on. I’ll give you the full tour later. For now, you’re kind of stuck here.”
Holberton fobbed open a steel door set in glass at one end of the hallway, and ushered Javier through. Once inside, the air was much quieter and cooler, and the art completely nonexistent.
“I know I should do more to encourage team spirit,” Holberton said, pointing at the bare walls, “but I don’t do interiors for free.”
Holberton fobbed open yet another door. It opened onto his office. The sheer number of greys made the entire room look as though it had emerged fully formed from an ancient strip of film. The only spots of colour available were in the assistant’s clothes: a single turquoise scarf delicately arranged over a boat-neck T-shirt and a pair of capri pants. Javier had the feeling that Holberton had chosen her solely for her sense of style.
“Hi, Georgia.”
“Chris!”
Georgia stood up at her desk. She blinked. Her skin was very deep black. She reminded Javier of a woman he’d met in Panama. He’d just iterated Matteo and Ricci, and she’d been very helpful, and all she wanted in return was somebody nice who could be gentle. She’d been sewn up, down there. Javier almost failsafed just looking at it: the perforated labia, the vanished clitoris. She came from Sierra Leone. He’d named Léon after her, sort of.