Amy balanced Junior on one hip. "Um… Did I miss something?"
Javier turned on the radio. After some tuning, he found static. He glanced up at Amy. "You hear that?"
"It's just white noise."
"No, it's white
space
. It's unused bandwidth. At least, according to most people." He popped a panel in the dash, exposing an ancient radio. He switched inputs, tabbed something on the radio, and sat back. "Listen again."
Amy listened. She closed her eyes. The static droned on and on, sometimes scratchy, sometimes smooth. It almost sounded like a rhythm. Soon a voice shaped itself from that rhythm. It was a cute and very young female voice:
"Amy Frances Patterson was last seen in Washington State, near the Olympic National Forest. She is travelling with an eco-model named Javier, wanted for serial iteration in California. If you see either of them, please tell them to contact me."
Javier turned the volume down. "I wasn't sure about that ranger at first, so I decided to check her story out. That's Rory.The one who writes the diet plans. She's a Japanese model. One of the networked ones."
Amy's lips made a little O of jealousy. "Lucky…"
"I know, right? I'd kill for that connectivity."
"What else do you know about Rory?"
"She's the one who helped me have all my kids," Javier said. "You need a really old, modded radio like this one to decode her broadcast, and she changes the codec every few days. The content changes locally – I really don't know how she does it, I think her whole clade's in on it, or something – and it's always about where the best food is for iterating vN. See? She's not all about keeping little kids little."
"There are lots of mixed families who use the diet plan, Javier. Hundreds. Thousands. There are even vN who use it
not
to iterate. Like my mom."
Oh really, now? That's quite the change. You know, you wouldn't miss Charlotte so much if you knew the truth.
Javier was still talking. "Well, Rory made out like I was the sidekick, which is bullshit.
I
am not travelling with
you
,
you
are travelling with–" His head tilted. "Is that thing you're doing with your mouth adaptive, or did it come with your model?"
"What thing?"
"The wibbling. You're wibbling your lower lip. And your eyes are huge. It's like your ocular cavity's expanded while I've been looking at it. I think your model must have originally come with some sort of… I don't know what it is, but it probably works really well on organic guys."
Amy turned around and walked away. She wiped her eyes. "Just drive."
This was how Amy wound up in a charging station at the edge of a sprawling parking lot, upon which sat a former bigbox store, now a combination farmers' market and capsule hotel. It was vN-friendly; the shelves – which had once held giant pallets of rice and tea and tube socks and monitors, and other things brought in from elsewhere – were available for hourly rental if vagrant vN wanted to take a safe nap. Amy had only seen them in news programs, and her mother had always changed the feed when they came on. You could subscribe to the recommissioned drones that had once worked the stores, though, and see what the vN were up to at night.
Outside the complex stood tables and booths, full of soap and baked goods – and fat blocks of plastic feedstock, priced per pound depending on the quality of their marbling. There were little inventions, too. Amy couldn't tell what they were for, but they looked like the same little bundles of chips and wires you could buy – from any flea market – that did the same things vN did without really thinking about it: moisture and temperature detection, or mapping a straight line, or measuring cubic centilitres. It seemed odd to have so many different little devices to do those things. Then again, most people couldn't just do them with a single touch. They needed a mobile, at least, or a good pair of glasses. There was even a vintage disaster bot crawling the parking lot, telling the humans they were alive and barking strangely at the vN.
Javier had pulled them into the charger farthest from the other stations, and he'd worn a hat and sunglasses when he hopped out of the RV to hook the battery to the enormous cable snaking its way free of the charger. Now they were sitting in the vehicle, watching the bar at the bottom of the dashboard display as it grew incrementally brighter and longer.
"How are we paying for this?" Amy asked.
Javier jingled the keys. One fob wore the same logo as the chargers outside. "They've got an account."
How convenient,
Portia said.
Now they'll know exactly where to find you, when they check the account.
"Granny says that'll help them find us," Amy said.
"I don't give a flying fuck what that she has to say." Javier stood and made his way into the cabin. He started fussing with the dinette table. "Help me unfold this bed. I need to defrag all this."
Javier set Junior on the floor, then unlocked something beneath the table that lowered it with a squeak. He then folded up one of the dinette's benches, removing the back cushion before pulling out the seat so it sat flush with the newly lowered table. Intuiting the symmetry of the arrangement, Amy did the same on her side. With the cushions included, there was now a little bed where the dinette used to be. It fit Javier just barely. He sat up and retrieved Junior from the floor. The baby was crawling now, or at least worming around on the cushions, struggling in vain to conquer the mountain that was his father.
Uncertain where to sit, Amy chose the floor. She wedged herself up against one faux-wood wall and watched Junior pushing himself around on his rubbery knees. Javier lifted him carefully, then laid him across his shins.
"What's it like, iterating?"
Javier continued raising and lowering his son on his shins, his body coiled up slightly, his fingertips connecting his son's hands to his and making their two shapes into a complete circle. "You're hungry all the time. And you're…
on
, I guess. Sensitive. Like you can feel every little atom copying itself."
"Can you talk to your baby while you're iterating? Like me and my psycho granny?"
"No." Javier let Junior slide forward off his shins and toward his chest. "I dream a lot when I'm iterating, though. The closer it gets to the end, the more I dream."
"What about?"
"Unicorns."
Amy blinked. "Seriously?"
"No, of course not
seriously.
Jesus." He turned over to his side. "It's just the stemware copying itself. First my search engine clones itself in him, then it just goes hunting for relevant data and imports it."
"Oh." Amy winced. "So, me dreaming Portia's memories is probably a bad sign?"
For you, yes. For me, no.
"She's talking right now, isn't she?" Javier propped himself on an elbow. "I can tell. Your face changes." His eyes narrowed. "Your face, it has all these expressions that mine doesn't. Even your crying looks real."
Amy was only too happy to pick a fight. It meant not hearing Portia. "Maybe because it
is
real?"
"But we don't even have endocrine systems," Javier said. "We
can't
get big rushes of emotion. Even our smiles are just plug-ins performing a subroutine for socially relevant nonverbal communication. So you can't be feeling all that bad. Your feelings were never that real to start with."
Amy had no idea what to say. Of course her feelings were real. It was old-fashioned to think otherwise. Nobody really cared about the vN capacity for feeling, any more. Even if Javier were correct, and the things she called feelings were really just algorithms, the way she showed them seemed real enough to the people around her. After all, people like her dad had relationships with vN all the time. Why would they do that, unless they thought their feelings were real? Didn't her mom say "I love you" all the time? Didn't she mean it?
"Are you trying to make me feel better, by telling me I have no feelings at all? Because it's really not working."
Javier folded his arms. "How would you know if you were feeling better? Do you have a heart that can skip a beat? Or a stomach that does flip-flops? Does your blood go cold? Does your face get hot?"
"Well, no…"
"Didn't think so. You're not made of meat. You don't have the right chemicals. Those things chimps call
feelings
are really just hormones having a key party. They're no more real than what we've got preloaded."
He flopped backward and rolled over, away from her. "My need for sleep, that's real. I'm fucking
wrecked
. My thumb still hasn't grown back all the way."
"I'm sorry…"
"See, there you go again." Javier rested one arm across his son's ribs. "You're saying sorry because you learned to say that when you've screwed up. You're not actually
sorrowful
, or anything. Your stomach isn't tying itself up in knots. You just know you did a bad thing and you don't want me to get mad, so you're apologizing."
Amy was suddenly glad he couldn't see her face. One look and he'd know exactly what she had in mind. "I thought you just said that you
couldn't
get mad, Javier."
"Well…"
She poked him between the ribs. "What about now?" She poked again, harder this time. "Are you mad, now?"
He batted her hand away blindly. "
No
."
She jabbed two fingers right under the lowest rib. "Are you sure?" She snapped her fingers near his ear. "Because I can keep it up–"
Javier flipped over and grabbed both her hands. He stood up and pushed her. She had to dig into the carpet with her bare feet just to get any traction. Amy had seen girls playing this game in the bathroom at school; they called it Mercy. They always stopped when she walked in. If they really hurt each other, then Amy would be hurt, too. At least, that's what the teachers had said – they said the other kids couldn't fight if a vN was watching. But privately Amy had always wondered why, if it was really so bad, the other girls started up again just as soon as the doors shut behind her. Javier certainly seemed to enjoy it. At least, she assumed that's what the smile meant.
"Hey, stop hitting yourself," he said, and made her fist tap her chin lightly. "Why are you hitting yourself? Come on, stop hitting yourself!" He punched again and again.
Frustrated, Amy tried stomping on his foot. He only laughed and made her hit herself once more. She aimed higher, with her knee. It was OK with other vN, she decided. There was nothing in the original programming about not hurting them. They couldn't even feel pain. But Javier doubled over anyway, then lunged forward and dug his fingers into her ribs.
I'm not ticklish,
she tried to say, but all that came out was squealing. She had seen other people get tickled before, had seen all the wriggling and screaming and laughing, and now she understood it: tickling was wonderful. She did a checkpoint pose, raising her arms high and letting herself go limp against the wall. He could get more spots more quickly, this way. Oddly, it didn't work – he stopped immediately, stepping back with his hands up like she'd suddenly turned electric and dangerous to touch.
"You're supposed to fight back. Humans always fight back, anyway." He frowned. "I always have to quit, or my brain will fry. Something about how high their voices go when they beg you to stop…" He gestured vaguely at his skull, as though his important processes were really held there and not all through his body.
"Why do they do that?" Amy asked. "It feels good." She bent down and started rolling up one leg of her jeans. "Can you try the back of my knee? My dad is ticklish there."
His eyes rose from her bare leg to her face. "Huh?"
"I've never been ticklish, before. I want to see if every spot is equally ticklish."
Javier tilted his head. "You, uh, need my help with that?"
"I promise not to fight back," Amy said. "And even if I did, it wouldn't matter, right? I'm vN. You won't melt."
He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm starting to wonder." His head jerked toward the bed. "Sit."
"I have to be sitting down?"
"I can't really get the bottom of your feet if you're standing on 'em, can I?"
"Oh! Good thinking." She sat, and stuck her feet out.
Javier picked up one foot gingerly and started tickling. It was very light, and reminded her of the odd scratches she'd received from holding the class mouse for the first time. "So, this is new for you?"
"Mmm hmm." Amy lay back on her elbows. "I've never been ticklish. I must have gotten it from you, like the photosynthesis."
"It's built into our tactile receptors," Javier said as his fingers skittered lazily up the back of her leg. "It was so our clade would feel snakes and spiders crawling across our skin. So we wouldn't bring them back to camp with us by mistake."
"So they wouldn't bite the humans?"
"Right." He lifted one hand and stretched it out. "The jungle spiders are huge. Bigger than my hand. My dad said so. He had to kill one, once."
"Did your dad see any other animals?"
"He lost his hand to a jaguar, one time." Javier wiggled the remains of his left thumb. "Now I know how he felt."
She sat up. "Can I see?"
Javier held out his hand. Amy took hold of it with both of hers and flipped it over. The thumb was there, but it looked too small and loose to be of much good. She had really done some serious damage to it. "I'm sorry. I didn't know it would take this long to come back. It's still so floppy!"
"Hey!" Javier retracted his hand. "Be nice."
Amy wasn't aware she'd been mean. "Sorry." She grinned and reached out for Javier's middle. Now that she knew what tickling felt like, it was much more fun to try it on someone else. Javier tried slapping her hands away, but she was much quicker and ran her hands up under his arms. He scuttled backward, but she stuck her foot out to trip him and he fell down. Amy pounced. Her dad did it this way: somehow she always wound up on the floor. Vaguely, she wondered if Junior would enjoy being tickled, too. Javier was now rolling around like a big cat with his belly up, laughing and swearing. It was a little odd – normally people only ever said, "Oh shit, oh fuck," when they dropped something or locked their keys in the car. But the deeper her fingers went, the fouler his language got.