vN (17 page)

  "I'm sorry." With her good hand, Amy reached over to close his eyes. Under her skin, his flesh remained warm.

  
Are you sure he's dead?

  Amy shut her eyes. "Stop it."

  
You don't know how deep his damage goes. Perhaps a specialist could repair him.

  Amy shook her head. Even that small movement was terribly difficult. "You're only playing for more time."

  
And if you kill us both, then you're abandoning that child in this junkyard just to spite me.

  Portia had lived in Amy's head for too long. She knew just what to say to get what she wanted. And although Amy knew this, she could not stop herself from reaching for Junior and standing up to leave, any more than she could silence Portia's wheedling. Portia had left Amy's mother in a place just like this one, and Amy was not going to do the same. They might have shared the same body, but they were very different, and if Amy had to let Portia live just a little while longer to prove that, then she would. Portia had already ruined enough lives; Amy could not allow her to destroy another. Junior was broken, and it was her job to make sure someone fixed him. Home would have to wait.

  She started walking.

 
 

 
 

The sign on the door read: PORTIA'S WANTED. Amy's teacher had let her skip ahead to the third grade unit on contractions and possessives, but she remained uncertain whether the sign was a joke or just a typo.

  Amy had not eaten in five days. She saw everything in greyscale, now, even the maps on Rick's reader. She had searched frantically for news about her parents before the battery died. Both were in jail. No one said where. It was difficult to query further, with only one good hand. The jumps were harder, too. Well, the landings were the truly hard part. The index fingernail of her good hand popped off during a particularly nasty slide down a tree.

  She did not see Rick and Melissa's RV when she sprinted back down the access road. Javier was gone. His son had not woken up. He had not so much as moved. The fabric of Melissa's old sweatshirt now pressed him against her body, silent and still as the bluescreens in the barrow.

  
Aren't you too big for dolls?

  "He's alive. He just needs repair."

  
How do you know?

  Amy didn't know. She admitted that. Junior's body was limp and cool and occasionally his eyes would fall open when she didn't carry him right. But somewhere there were bluescreen specialists. That meant they could be fixed. That had to count for something. She'd make it count for something.

  She hid her mangled hand up her sleeve. She needed food. Desperately. And she needed money. Money could get her to her parents, once she found out where they were. Her mom would know what to do. Her dad would hug her and throw a vN pizza in the toaster oven and blow the dust off his old
Fruits Basket
discs and make it seem like no time had passed. Her mom would drill her, like she did every after day after school: whom had Amy seen? Where? Her dad always knew how to make her
feel
safe. Her mom knew how to
keep
her safe.

  
Your mother was always rather good at that sort of operation.

  Portia had taken to doing that over the past couple of days. Teasing Amy about her mother. Things she knew that Amy didn't. Memories she had, and that she revealed only fleetingly and during defragmentation. Something scanned briefly and then quarantined to some deeply buried chunk of Amy's memory coral. Junkyards. Garbagemen. Fences and dogs and miles of desert adorned only by the scattered emeralds of well-kept lawns.

  Amy focused on the trees surrounding her. She examined the scabs of bark in the pine she currently inhabited. They interlocked like tiles or armour plating. The tree felt solid and strong. She had grown used to its not-silences. The first night, alone in the rain with her maimed hand and the motionless infant, the woods had seemed bereft of all sound. After a few hours, Amy realized it was only human sounds they lacked. At night the woods had a different voice, huge and dry and ceaseless, not unlike a sample clip of "static" her dad once showed her. It was white noise. It put her to sleep.

  Portia always woke her up.

  
This can't possibly go well, you realize.

  "I didn't ask you," Amy said. She crossed the street.

 

In her greyscale vision, the Electric Sheep was a series of fineand coarse-grained shadows interrupted by the flickering glow of hot tables displaying menu items: steaming slices of cherry pie, mashed potatoes oozing butter, feedstock curled into perfect golden halos of calamari. The restaurant probably bought feed from the garbage dump, Amy realized. The guy who worked the nightshift might even have been a regular. Now he was dead.

  She sensed the human eyes on her more keenly, then.

  It was around 10 o'clock on what she guessed was a Tuesday. Wednesday was supposed to be "Ladies' Night", whatever that meant, but Amy didn't see any more girls than usual, either organic or synthetic. The synthetics seemed mostly to be waiting tables. Amy identified them by their flawless posture and the way they had all paused, staring at her, recognizing her, evaluating her as a potential threat to the humans in the room. Amy stood in the waiting area beside an empty podium. To her left was a small area of half-circle booths swollen with vinyl cushioning. To her right was a series of smaller, square booths with bench seats. A chest-height wall separated each area from the bar, where massive displays hung. All of them were tuned to vN-friendly channels. One of them showed the news from Mecha: a cheerful weathergirl in shiny galoshes bantering silently with her human counterpart in the studio. Then the story switched to something about vanished ships and subs. It showed a map. The map read: "Bermuda Pinstripe."

  Amy would have said something, or at least cleared her throat, but the smell of the food was so strong that a hungry whimper made it past her lips first. Her bones felt hollow. The edges of objects pixelated and dithered in her greyscale vision. An organic woman (Amy could tell by the wrinkles at her eyes and throat) seemed to float toward her. She was smiling. She made a mechanical noise. When Amy looked down, she saw old-fashioned roller skates peeking out from beneath lumpy cable-knit legwarmers.

  "Oh my God. You even dressed the part."

  The human on the skates gripped Amy's shoulders like they were old friends. Tattoos had turned her collarbone into a jungle tree dripping with pythons. They ducked modestly under the lace of what Amy recognized as a Bavarian barmaid costume, like the ones worn by low-level AI on the tavern levels of old games.

  "Um–"

  "Have you ever been a hostess before?"

  
You're a host right now.

  "No, I'm not. I mean, I haven't been. No." Was this the job interview?

  "Well, that's good. No retraining. The whole performingthe-brand schtick is really important within the Electric Sheep franchise flock." If possible, her smile stretched even wider. She wore something frosty on her lips. Amy wished she could see in colour.

  "Do you see what I did there? Sheep? Flock?"

  Amy's giggle had never felt quite so literally mechanical.

  "See? I thought it was funny, too. I'm Shari, by the way. I'm the boss. And I tell everybody they'll need a sense of humour if they want to work here."

  Amy made her mouth work. "Just like that?"

  "Just like that." The woman rolled her eyes. "Do you know how hard it's been to find a Portia these days? They're all being rounded up and taken to Redmond."

  The haze of hunger that clouded Amy's perception froze. "Redmond?"

  Shari nodded. "Yeah, where the reboot camp is. It's where the church started. At least, I think their founder used to live up there. LeMarque had a tech job, before he started preaching. His old contacts did most of the work on the failsafe."

 

After digesting some food and getting her colour vision back, Amy had embroidered a story with enough details to make it sound somewhat believable. Her name was Jacqueline and she was a year old. Prior to getting this job she was in a relationship, but it went sour after news came out about what Portia had done. He had gotten very suspicious and mistrustful because they shared the same model, and it had poisoned their love. As a result, she had no place to stay, and now slept in a little mobile storage pod that Shari kept in the parking lot for just such occasions.

  The previous tenant had done nothing to improve the place. It was filthy. The ugly details that Amy always forgot to include in her designs had returned through some bizarre twist of fate to haunt her, here. Cobwebs hung from every corner and lint clung to them. Old wrinkled clothes and rolled-up posters and mugs from practically every state in the Union were everywhere. Amy had hidden Junior in an all-weather storage tub marked MANUALS. Nobody would ever look there.

  Shari came to visit her in the pod before her first shift. She came bearing the printout of Amy's new work uniform, and waved her hands dismissively when Amy thanked her for everything.

  "It's cool. I know how it is," Shari said. "Been there myself. I've dated some real jackasses in my time. Then, around the time of the Cascadia quake, I switched to vN, and I never looked back."

  Amy listened to the road outside. They were only a few hours away from Redmond, and her mother, and the "reboot camp" where bluescreens went to wake up. Immediately upon entering the pod, she had charged up Rick's device and found the campus on a map. It was one big pixel. She had to get there, and soon. She just needed to do this job for a little while to make that happen. It would take two weeks. Two weeks until the next payday.

  
A suicide mission funded entirely by tip jar. That's a new one.

  In an effort to block out Portia's chatter, Amy asked: "Do you really think vN guys are different from human ones?"

  "Totally!" Shari reached into the pocket of her tiny red leather jacket. She was dressed as some sort of bullfighter today, but with sequined leggings and shiny black boots that stretched over her knees.

  "You mind if I, uh…" Shari mimed smoking.

  "It's all right. I don't have lungs."

  "Cool." Shari brought out a little hand-rolled cigarette and lit up. "Anyway. Yeah. vN guys are totally different. Human men, they only think with one head, and it ain't the one sitting on their shoulders, you know what I mean?"

  Amy had heard this expression before, but had never really known what it meant.
It means cock, you little moron
, Portia said.
You know, penis
?

  Amy blushed and nodded. "I… I guess… I mean, their biology is different, they can't help it…"

  "Damn fucking straight," Shari said, gesturing with her lit cigarette. "They can't help it. I know that. I get it. Hell, I got tons of shit I can't help. Menopause. They can make you,
you,
you little miracles of modern science, but they can't cure my goddamn hot flashes."

  "You're right. That's… weird."

  "It's total bullshit, is what it is. This whole culture, it doesn't give a good goddamn about women." Shari pointed at Amy. "There are only two industries in this world that ever make any kind of progress: porn, and the military. And when they hop in bed together with crazy fundamentalists, we get things like you." She rested her elbows on her knees and grinned at Amy. "I'm telling you. Big men with their little heads. You know?"

  Amy didn't know. Her mother had explained about human reproduction, and it all sounded chancy and complicated and dangerous. She could understand why her dad wouldn't want to make a baby with an organic woman. It was much easier with vN. At least, she had thought so at the time.

  "This is depressing you, isn't it?" Shari asked. "It's depressing me. Let's quit being so depressed. vN are great. There, that's a happy thing."

  Amy smiled. "You really like vN better than other humans?"

  "Oh, hell yeah. They're consistent. No betrayal. No issues. No complications."

  
Oh, the stories your mother could tell,
Portia said.

  "I know you can't help but feel attracted to humans," Shari said. "That's just the failsafe doing its job, though. That's how you got into that situation with your old boyfriend, am I right?"

  "Uh… right. Yes. My old boyfriend."

  "You should know, whatever happened, it wasn't your fault. You can't help but love humans, even when they're total dickwads. That's just how you're built. It's
us
, you know, it's us who can't handle that kind of love. We're apes. Literally. We don't know shit about unconditional affection. So we fight it, because on some level we don't even believe it's possible."

  Amy stood up to find her work uniform. Humans tended to overestimate the failsafe's properties. Saying that she was helplessly attracted to organics was just silly: she'd felt absolutely nothing for her prison guard. And she didn't find Rick or Melissa very cute, either, or the boys who sometimes chased her and tried to flip up her skirt during the walk between the classroom and the music studio at school. They had always seemed so surprised when she ran away.

  "I think the failsafe is different from love," Amy said carefully. "I think it just makes us sick. It hurts us to see someone else getting hurt."

  "You have a humane response to inhuman behaviour." Shari blinked. She stared at her cigarette as though it were the one who had spoken. "Whoa. That was deep. Especially for me."

 

According to the customer service training game, the Electric Sheep was steadily growing into one of the most popular chains on the West Coast. While vN could find food in urban grocery and convenience stores, restaurants rarely had more than one or two items on the menu that they could eat. The Sheep had further broken down barriers by incorporating mandatory daycare for vN children. Doing so kept vN from running away to iterate, and it helped to train new vN in a job, so they wouldn't wander homeless and aimless without skills. This was a problem Amy had known about only vaguely, from media and from the occasional glimpse of silently staring vN on street corners and in parks. She hadn't really needed to consider it until now – now she was one of them.