Luckily, all the kids in the waiting room were a little too loud to let that happen. Javier hadn’t seen so many children in one place since he was on the island. Organic kids, synthetic iterations, teenagers chewing their cuticles, passive nanny vN allowing their hair to be braided by well-meaning, sticky-fingered little girls. In one corner there was a set of toys and readers with shiny smart stickers saying they couldn’t be stolen, but only the really sad kids seemed to be playing with them.
While he waited, a group of vN women entered the waiting room and sat together along one wall. They were all different clades, all different models. Most of them looked like Amy, but quite a few of them looked like Rory. All of them wore short skirts and high heels and had perfect hair.
Beside him, a woman with a shaved head snorted. “Don’t talk to those bitches,” she said, without even looking at Javier.
“Why not?”
“They’re the whore brigade,” she said. “Comfort vN. They’ll try to recruit you. Don’t go for it.”
Javier examined the women again. They did seem to fit a certain pattern. A surprising number of them wore pigtails.
“So… they’re not girlfriends?”
The woman snorted again. “Please. The state pays them to come here. It’s part of some incentive program. Like if you build enough license plates, you get to fuck one of them.”
“Huh.” Javier folded his arms. He slouched back in his seat and crossed his legs at the ankle. “The last joint I was in, that was an informal thing.” He looked back at the women. “So, technically, does that make them state employees?”
“Yup,” she said. “Bitches get benefits and everything.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Javier frowned. “And I would want to avoid that… why?”
“Because they’re putting hardworking humans out of a job,” she said, and moved to another section of the room.
After that, Javier avoided talking to anybody. He saw the other visitors as they trickled out, though. Many of them were picking up vN in the waiting area. Most of them were older human men. Some of them wore the New Eden logo on their necks on their lapels: a little golden apple with one bite taken out of it, and a set of clockwork gears in place of the bite. They were obviously there to see LeMarque. Javier had a feeling most of the New Eden higher-ups had gone to prison or obscurity, so maybe these men were long-term adherents, or just plain fanboys. Either way, the vN they were picking up were all the size of little kids.
He hadn’t put it together, before, but the children in the waiting area didn’t have parents that matched their clade. He’d figured that maybe the organic parents in the waiting room had adopted an iteration – it was easier than having a second kid the organic way, and it was a simple way to make sure your little princess had a strong big brother to keep her out of trouble – but that wasn’t the case. One by one, they all got collected by greying men in athletic sandals and old fleece sweatshirts. Javier had never seen so many earthtones or embroidered logos in a single place. At least not a real place, a place that wasn’t a resort.
“Did you enjoy your meeting?” one of the little vN boys asked, as his human walked away with him.
“Yes, I did,” the man said, squeezing his hand. “Jonah and I are really working through some things. Thank you for being so patient.”
“Did he know anything about the grocery stores? About the food, I mean?”
“I keep telling you,” the dad said. “Don’t worry about the food. That was just a crazy person, trolling other crazy people.”
Javier hid his head in his hands, and waited.
“There’s only one way out of here, you know,” Ignacio says.
Javier is big, now. So big they can’t really share the bunk anymore. They still do, because Javier is a measure of warmth, and he doesn’t need to worry about hurting a spine or a neck. It makes Ignacio feel awkward, though. He can tell. So Ignacio’s solution is for Javier to grow even bigger.
“You have to eat,
conejito
.”
“I’m not such a little rabbit, any longer.”
Ignacio hisses out of his mouth like a dead basketball deflating. “Pfft. This is what I keep saying. You’re grown, now. You’re ready to make your own way.”
“I like it, here.”
“You like it? You like the guys flinging their shit at you? You like running errands for the asshole warden? You like keeping dicks out of asses? That’s what you like?”
Of course he doesn’t like that part. But he keeps thinking that if he just helps them, if he’s just good enough, or strong enough, or fast enough, they’ll start improving around him, instead of just testing him. And besides, he has Ignacio to protect. Ignacio doesn’t have a crew. He isn’t with anybody. If Javier leaves, Ignacio will be alone.
“He’s not coming, Javier.”
Javier frowns. “Who?”
“Your dad. He’s not coming. He’s not going to get you out. Only you can get yourself out.”
Javier snaps the sheet he is folding. “I know.”
“So leave. Be free.”
Javier finishes folding the sheet. He smoothes it out. It has a huge stain in the middle of it, with several other little stains all around it, like a solar system. But the stains are paler, now, at least. He crisps the edges. He adds it to the stack.
“What will you do?”
“Without you? I’ll pray for you and your boy, is what I’ll do,” Ignacio says. “It’ll be nice for you to have a little Junior running around. You’ll never be lonely, even when you want to be. It’s good, being a father. Really. I wish I could get back all the time I’ve lost.”
In order to jump the fence to freedom, Javier has to eat enough to grow to full size. Man size. But when he does, he will likely iterate. Ignacio says he should take the boy with him. Javier isn’t so sure. It’s not as though Arcadio did a very good job with him. Why would he do any better with his own iteration?
Ignacio would do a better job, he thinks. Ignacio is, after all, a real man. A real human being. And a father, already. A father without a child.
So he eats. Dionisia brings more vN food for him. It’s expensive, but it makes Ignacio happy, and that makes her happy. He gets fat. He’s round and suddenly people leave him alone. No more air kisses or gropes or grabs. He gets his work done a lot faster, as a result. If he’d known, he would have gained the weight months ago. The iteration starts almost immediately – “like a hangover,” Ignacio says, “you get one before you even know it.”
It’s fast. He had no idea how fast it would be. Another thing Arcadio never told him. He never told him about the dreams. About the fear. How his simulations would run double-time, near the end, how every possible end to every possible situation would pop up without his ever asking for it.
“We all have that kind of fear,” Ignacio tells him, the night the boy comes. He keeps Javier walking, for some reason. He did it with Dionisia, apparently. Javier tries to tell him that iteration is different, that the iteration won’t need to point any one way or another, but his mind is consumed by images of the thing inside him. Dionisia found a bunch of e-waste and fed him that. The pre-fab food only comes from the warden, and it comes only once a day. So who knows what his boy has been digesting. Who knows how he’ll come out. Maybe he’ll have four arms and four legs and crawl out of him like the spiders that come in for winter. Maybe he’ll have no eyes. Maybe his mouth will be sealed shut.
He loses all sense of what might be once his stomach opens.
It starts at the navel. A stretching sensation. His skin has never felt thin, before. But tonight, with the rain pouring outside, he feels as though it is he that is eroding, he that is wearing down to nothing. Lightning illuminates their cell; thunder shatters the air.
“Good,” Ignacio says. “They won’t send anyone after you, on a night like this.”
His navel bubbles with black smoke. For a moment, it looks almost like a chimney. Then his stomach splits. A seam inside him opens like the mouth of a coin purse. Ignacio lifts his son out and holds him up.
“Look at his hair!” Ignacio holds the boy confidently in one hand, the tiny stomach against his open palm. “Look, he’s fine! Five fingers, five toes, way too much cock. He’ll be fine.” He holds the child out. “Hold him. Go on.”
Javier shakes his head. “Just let me rest a minute.”
Ignacio frowns, but lets him roll over in the bunk and hold his stomach closed. It starts to crystallize, to knit itself back together in one glittering line. He sleeps. Ignacio sleeps. Even the child sleeps.
The dawn wakes him. Ignacio is still snoring, with the child on his chest. They look right together. Ignacio stirs only faintly when Javier wedges the bars in the window aside. The child looks straight at him. He’s sharp, that one. Smart.
“I’ll come back,” Javier says. “Someday, I’ll come back.”
Then he is out the window, in the rain, in the cold blue light of dawn. He is lighter, but also stronger. He runs across the yard. Not even the dogs are out yet. The fence looms above him. The wires looped across the top are difficult to see.
He clears them with ease.
On the other side, he is in the woods. He bounces from tree to tree. He takes his shoes off, so he can savour the wet moss. The birds are quiet. Everything is staying inside, except him. He will go see Dionisia, first. Tell her what happened. Then he’ll join up with
los fabricantes
, and he’ll help them organize an escape for Ignacio and the boy. He jumps a little higher, a little further, just thinking about it.
He pauses when he sees a woman standing beside a jeep with the hood folded up. The vehicle is smoking. It’s an overheat. Rough country out here, harmful to vehicles and humans alike. As he watches, fire begins to lick free of the engine block. Her back is to the flames. She is looking at something on her reader. Her braid swings down, into the smoke.
He has to save her.
“Wake up.” A chuckle. “Time to fly.”
Javier opened his eyes. The woman from the reception area was staring at him. Her hands were on her hips. She did not look pleased.
“Shit,” Javier said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Shit.” She jerked a thumb up at the display behind her. There, in blinking green LEDs was the number 2501. “It’s your turn. Get going.”
“Sorry.” Javier stood. The room was mostly empty, now. He clutched his fob and moved on down the hall. Overhead, fluorescent lights hummed coldly. The hallway was sparklingly clean, with only a single broad stripe of green paint at waist height along the right side, and a rail for wheelchair users on the left. At the end of the hallway was a set of double doors. When Javier pushed through it, a little chime sounded.
In the room was a group of glassed-in kiosks, with older men sitting inside of them. The majority of them were white, but it was a near thing. Some of them had tattoos. Their jumpsuits were the colour of fake cheese dust. LeMarque was at the end. He was reading a paper Bible. He closed it when Javier took the seat across from him.
LeMarque had Holberton’s eyes, too. Amy’s eyes. But he looked just like Holberton. He had the same angular face, the same thin lips, the same easy smile and deep dimples. Even his hair was the same shade of white. No wonder Holberton never came to see his father. It would have been like looking in a mirror.
LeMarque pointed at something on the little desk on Javier’s side of the kiosk. It was a very old kind of telephone, just the sort of thing Holberton would have tried to reproduce for a prison-themed environment. It was so old, Javier could hear its cord stretching and tightening as he moved. LeMarque picked up his own phone.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I’m a representative of your son, Chris,” Javier said.
LeMarque’s pupils dilated massively. He looked like a cat chasing a bug. “Christopher?” he asked.
“Yes. He wants–”
“How is Christopher?”
Javier shrugged. “He’s doing well.”
LeMarque smiled slowly. “Surely you can do better than that.”
Javier resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “He’s great,” he said. “He’s a theme park designer. He’s successful. Has great taste.”
“Is he still a tight fit?”
Javier said nothing. If he were a human man, his stomach might have flipped, or his heart might have gone cold, or his pulse might have raced. But he wasn’t human, so none of those things happened. Instead, he waited for his vision to stop clouding with pixels. They danced across LeMarque’s face, rendering it safely subhuman. Yes. Subhuman. That was the word. That was the word for LeMarque. Javier opened his mouth to answer. He wanted to say
he’s tighter than your ass has been in years,
but even thinking of those words – of what they meant – was difficult.
It was interesting, failsafing in front of the man who had brought the failsafe into being. Interesting, and horrible. For a moment, he loved Holberton. He loved Holberton more purely than he had ever loved any other human being. It wasn’t sympathy, or pity, or even the kind of savage rage another human man might have felt in Javier’s position. It was wonder – wonder at how Holberton had survived the fucking monster sitting on the other side of the glass, how he had built a decent life, how he was still a good, kind man after springing from the rotten loins of this smiling sack of decaying flesh. Sure, Holberton was doing some things Javier didn’t like. But he was trying his best. He was trying to make things better. He was trying to do better than this asshole.