For a synthetic child, appeals to Amy's ego still worked fairly well. This time she did turn around. She twisted her wrist, and the display vanished. "Mom thought she saw one of her sisters last weekend," she said. "That's why she's being weird."
Jack nodded. He looked around for a cushion large enough to hold an adult, and sank into it. Amy joined him in his lap.
"Mom says our shell used to be popular."
"That's true," Jack said. "That's why she gets confused, sometimes. There are so many vN with your face running around, it's easy to make a mistake about seeing a clademate."
Amy nodded into his chest. "That's what she said, too." She fiddled with her assistant, sliding two fingers under the haptic bangle and wiggling them. "She said I'm not supposed to talk to them."
"You're not supposed to talk to
any
strangers, no matter who they look like."
Jack kept his voice light. No need to teach Amy his phobias. He knew other parents feared the same things: strangers, vans, promises of puppies. In their darkest moments they imagined their children kicking and screaming, wrestling against duct tape or blankets. What terrified Jack was the willingness with which Amy would allow herself to be taken by whatever human pervert came along. Her failsafe guaranteed that.
The angel investor supporting the development of von Neumann humanoids was not a military contractor, or a tech firm, or even a design giant. It was a church. A global megachurch named New Eden Ministries, Inc, that believed firmly that the Rapture was coming any minute now. It collected donations, bought real estate, and put the proceeds into programmable matter, natural language processing, and affect detection – all for the benefit of the few pitiful humans regrettably left behind to deal with God's wrath. They would need companions, after all. Helpmeets. And those helpmeets couldn't ever hurt humans. That was the Horsemen's job.
It all went to hell, of course. The pastor of New Eden Ministries, Jonah LeMarque, and many of his council members became the defendants in a class action suit brought by youth group members regarding the use of their bodies as models in a pornographic game. The church sold the licenses to vNrelated patents and API rights to finance the settlement. They had risen in value over the years that Pastor LeMarque spent in the appeals process, but LeMarque insisted on keeping the failsafe proprietary. He claimed that this way, the vN could never be used to hurt human beings. The judge who sentenced him was the first to remark on the irony of this particular opinion.
"How come Mom has sisters, but I don't?"
Jack blinked himself out of his thoughts. He kissed the top of Amy's head. "Because your mom and I got it right our first try, sweet pea. We don't need anybody else but you." He pulled back a little to peer at her. "Would you like to have a sister?"
Amy twisted her assistant around her wrist. "I don't know." She furrowed her pale brows at him. "She'd be just like me?"
"She'd
look
just like you. That doesn't mean she'd
be
just like you."
Amy nodded. "Would you keep her little, or would you feed her a lot so she caught up to me?"
Jack considered how to reframe his daughter's question. "Well, I guess she would grow at a human pace, just like you." He smiled. "Would you like a little baby to help take care of?"
Amy looked genuinely perplexed. Then her face resolved into mock accusation. "Aren't you late for work, Dad?"
He laughed. "I'm taking the day off work."
Amy perked up immediately. She twisted in his lap to face him fully. "Oh yeah? Can I take the day off school?"
He lifted her in his arms and stood. "What? You can't take today off school; you'll miss your party!"
Amy rolled her eyes. "The party's going to be stupid. I bet they forget that I can't eat the cookies, like last time."
"Then you'll need your breakfast, won't you?"
Jack turned. Charlotte stood in the door, armed with a wooden spoon still glittering with ionic gel. "Pancakes are ready," she said.
Amy slid out of his arms, briefly threw her arms around her mother, and bounded off to the kitchen. Jack heard the clatter of cutlery a moment later. His eyes locked with Charlotte's and he opened his arms. Pursing her lips, she stepped inside them. Seven years later, her body still felt the same. Engineers and artists and experts of all sorts had worked to sculpt this form for human use, but Charlotte still felt uniquely fitted to him when she let him hold her like this.
"Are we OK?" he asked now.
She nodded. "Sure." She pulled away to look at him. "You're taking the day off work?"
"I decided my girls needed me more, today."
Charlotte smiled. "Thank you." Her head tilted. "Do you believe that I love you, Jack?"
Jack's eyes shut. He tugged her back to him, so he felt the brush of her eyelashes on his neck. Marriages like his operated on a different kind of faith. It wasn't the synthetics themselves that organics like him had to trust, but the emergent properties latent within them, the sum total of decades of research and design and prototyping. You had to know, deep down, that the expression of feeling was as valid as the chemicals that made all human feeling possible, that the story you read on your wife's mass production face was just as mysterious and meaningful as the ones gleaned from more wrinkled texts. Five years ago he had sworn by those words or something like them, not legally, but he had wept and so had she and that was all he needed to know.
"Yes. I believe."
His wife rarely spoke of her childhood, but Jack knew it involved a lot of hiding during the day and raiding junkyards at night. Her mother Portia had iterated her in a junkyard. It was one of the only places with enough raw materials available to trigger the self-repair mode into total self-replication. Charlotte was a glitch; because her clade did not stem from a networked model, neither she nor her mother had access to the clouds that might have regulated their iterative cycles. Now fully grown and far away from her mother, Charlotte craved both open space and solitude. Too many people made her nervous, but too tight an enclosure did the same. So on their dates, he often took her to Lake Temescal.
The first time he brought her here, she asked: "You're taking an artificial woman to an artificial lake?"
"It wasn't always artificial," he had said. "We pitiful humans just improved it a little, with our primitive damming technologies."
On that day, just like this one, Charlotte luxuriated in the sun. (Sunscreen had fast become the default accessory to their relationship.) She loved the night sky just as much, even during the peak power seasons when it glowed orange with light pollution. She loved hiding in fog and reaching out for the rain from the roof of their building. Charlotte couldn't fathom Amy's constant desire to stay inside – working on environments that would never exist – when there was so much outside, waiting to be explored. They fought about it, sometimes, in a completely logical and amicable vN way that nonetheless resulted in stalemates.
Despite the impulsive nature of his decision, Jack had chosen exactly the right day to take off. Clear sky, no bugs save the botflies keeping an eye on the tourists, the clammy fog of winter a distant memory. Others had gotten the same idea: milling around under the shade trees behind Jack and Charlotte was a group of high school seniors attempting to grill a brunch of maple sausage and English muffins on a barbecue with a mostly empty solar cell. It involved a lot of snide laughter and cursing.
The beach was also populated by other vN, both vagrants and min-wage workers standing patiently inside snack stalls. He could pick out the vagrants by the lumps under their skin; unlike the vN with enough money to buy the pre-fabbed food, they often resorted to consuming e-waste to survive. He watched one – with a rather bland square-jawed, broadshouldered shell – seated at a picnic table, picking errant pieces of plastic from his skin and saving them carefully in a colourful pile between his legs. Jack watched him scoop the pieces into his palm and transfer them to a zippered pouch inside his shirt. He would probably feed them to depository later and earn some cash.
"It's good they have those machines, now." Jack glanced over to find that Charlotte was looking at the vagrant vN as well. She closed her eyes for a moment, then turned away to hug her knees. "We used to have to actually ask for the money, sometimes."
"We?"
Charlotte shrugged. "Just vN in general."
Jack nodded. "If it's still this nice tonight, I was thinking we'd take Amy to Lake Merritt after the graduation."
Charlotte winced. "With all the quake tourists?"
"It's either that or the zoo."
"I can't stand the–"
"Fuck!"
Jack twisted to look at the group of teens. A boy wearing a Raiders jersey staggered away from a picnic table beside the grill, clutching his hand. A cheap-looking knife and a halfskinned pineapple stood abandoned on the table, and when the kid turned Jack saw blood. He checked: Charlotte kept her eyes pinned to the grains of sand welling up between her toes, where she wouldn't see the injury or the pain it had inflicted; the vagrant vN hunched at his own picnic table, head hidden in his arms; the vN at the snack counter had shut their eyes.
"I'll see how bad it is," Jack said, and pushed himself up off the beach.
"I could help," Charlotte said. "My clade has a healthcare plug-in."
"Yeah, a
deactivated
healthcare plug-in," Jack said. "No wife of mine is shorting out because some kid can't use a knife."
He jogged over to the kids at the grill. They had it mostly covered; the kid with the cut hand had immersed it in a cooler full of ice while his friends rifled their bags for skin glue. Botflies hovered over the kid; one settled on his shoulder and blinked greenly at him before alighting on the cooler itself. The kid held up his hand, pink now with diluted blood, and the fly blinked again.
"You OK?" Jack asked.
The kid turned. "I think so." He held out his hand. "Does it look bad?"
Jack looked. The kid had sliced into his fingers pretty deep; probably deep enough to chatter a doctor about it, but the glue would do the job in the meantime. "You're fine," he said. "Next time, slice the bottom off the pineapple before you trim the sides. That way you'll have a stable base."
The kid nodded. He returned his hand to the cooler. He looked over at Charlotte's hourglass shape, still sitting patiently on the beach. "Does she belong to you?"
Jack had corrected others on the matter of his relationship so many times that he could now summarize it in a single line: "She belongs
with
me, not
to
me."
"Sorry." The kid tried smiling. "I just wish they could, you know, help with this kind of thing."
"They help us with all kinds of things."
The kid gestured at his face with his good hand. Jack couldn't tell if the pink of his skin was sunshine or embarrassment. The kid said, "What's it like when you cut yourself shaving? Does she freak out?"
"I don't cut myself shaving, any more," Jack lied. "I'm not a fucking amateur."
They were washing off the beach in the shower together when a call came from Amy's school. It was her principal. Amy was in trouble, and her principal wanted a meeting.
"I'm sorry, but what did she do?" Jack watched the water meter under the showerhead slowly dialled into the red zone as their allotment swirled down the drain.
"She was in a spitting contest," Mrs Lindsay said, as though that explained everything. "She left a hole in the flooring, and I expect you to pay for the damage."
"Mrs Lindsay, if this is your idea of an end-of-term joke, it's not funny. My daughter is a humanoid, not a xenomorph."
"Pardon me? A what, now?"
"Whatever. We'll be there soon."
Jack and Charlotte had researched schools all over the city before finally selecting one where Amy might safely make human friends. They chose the one with the smallest classes and the youngest teachers and the best after-school programs. They conducted interviews and obtained references. They wanted her to grow up alongside organic children, to think of herself as a person first and a synthetic second. They showed Amy stories about vN actors, vN chefs, vN teachers and dancers and designers; they avoided news about expanding anti-vagrancy laws and the millions of angry, jobless humans replaced by synthetics. They hoped the world might be a different place for vN by the time she grew up. Things would harmonize, Jack thought, as they entered the schoolyard and made their way to the principal's office. His daughter would find her place, and she would be happy, and so would her own daughters. They just needed time.
Jack heard himself explaining all of this to Mrs Lindsay after the door to the principal's office clicked resolutely shut behind him and Charlotte.
"I understand that, Mr Peterson," Mrs Lindsay said. She was a small Indian woman who wore her black hair in a tight chignon and offset her rather plain suit with ornate enamel earrings in the shape of hummingbirds. "But the reality is that the lifestyle you have chosen for your daughter is having harmful side effects, and not just for school property."
Jack turned to Charlotte. "How many pancakes did she eat this morning?"
Charlotte shrugged. He was seeing a lot of that shrug today, and he didn't like it. "However many her diet said."
"This is the diet that retards her growth, yes?"
"It doesn't
retard
her growth, it gives her
time
–"
"Mr Peterson, your daughter is going hungry."
Mrs Lindsay laid her hands flat on her desk. Between her fingers, Jack saw a hot map of the school. It randomly leapt between classrooms, offering attendance stats and tiny windows of surveillance footage.