Mrs Lindsay's gaze slid over to Charlotte, who met it blankly, then back to Jack.
"I'm not certain why I need to explain this to you, but when vN children go hungry, their digestive fluids build up and permeate their saliva. That makes it corrosive, and very dangerous in an environment like this one."
Jack sat up a little taller in the too-soft chair across from the desk. "I'm well aware of my wife and daughter's physiology, Mrs Lindsay. What I don't get is what gives you the right to tell me how to live in my own home. Amy is a smart, happy kid–"
"No, she isn't, Mr Peterson."
He uncrossed his legs. "Excuse me?"
"Please don't feel badly about this. Children often hide these kinds of things from their parents. But Amy has no friends in her class. The friends she does have are teachers. She talks with them during the recess and gym periods."
"Only because you won't allow her to participate!"
"Accidents happen in those settings all the time, Mr Peterson. We can't risk her failsafe going off if a human child falls off the monkey bars and cracks his head open." Mrs Lindsay squeezed her eyes shut and took a moment before continuing. "We cannot fulfil your daughter's special needs
and
allow the other children to play normally."
"Then don't. Keep a closer eye on the organics, and let Amy play. It's not her fault if one of the monitors can't stop a fight fast enough."
"That's true. It's not her fault. But it is definitely her problem." Again, Mrs Lindsay glanced at Charlotte. When Charlotte said nothing, Mrs Lindsay raised her hands in a conciliatory manner. "I'm going to recommend that we allow Amy to skip a few grades. Frankly, I was never fully convinced that she should start school in kindergarten. She is not a kindergartener, and has not been one for years."
Jack looked at Charlotte, expecting backup without knowing why. His wife had voiced the exact same concerns, back when they made this choice. Now he wondered how much of
their
choice it had been. Maybe Charlotte was just going along with it, waiting for him to see her brand of reason. He suddenly felt very alone in the room.
"So, what if we don't skip her ahead, or grow her bigger, you won't let her come back next year?"
"Please don't treat this conversation as a hostage negotiation, Mr Peterson. This is an inclusive school, and we simply want it to be a safe place for all our students, organic and synthetic." She steepled her delicate fingers. "But it's because this school operates from that ethic that I would be forced to report you to certain authorities if I found you unusually defensive about keeping your daughter prepubescent in appearance."
Fear opened up a void inside him. He knew why other men kept their synthetic little girls so little. He wasn't one of them. But Mrs Lindsay had the power to make the pedo squad think he was, and that kind of thing didn't just leave your record, even if it was only a simple search for the wrong kind of pornography. It could lose him his next job, and the one after that. He thought of the vagrant vN, their skin bulbous with trash, like serfs of the Dark Ages afflicted with plague.
Beside him, Charlotte stood. "I think we'll be taking Amy home now," she said. Somehow, Jack stood with her. He wandered toward the door. Behind him, he heard Charlotte ask: "How old were you when you reached your full size?"
"A year," Mrs Lindsay said.
Back at home, they ordered delivery from the nearest Electric Sheep location. Amy wanted to go in and sit down to eat like a grown-up, but the Sheep was a meat market. At least, their local was. Maybe the other franchise locations were different. But the last thing Jack wanted in this moment was for his daughter to watch organic men watching synthetic women. So he put his foot down, and Amy ordered a Folded Hands sandwich with Flexo Fries and an orange LCL punch, and hid in her room playing games until she was done. The meal itself was too big, far beyond her dietary limit, but she said nothing, perhaps having already guessed the things Mrs Lindsay had told them. Jack wondered, as he munched on his own potato version of the Flexo Fries, whether the principal had counseled her at all before meeting with him and Charlotte. Did they already have some sort of scheme going? Had she asked Amy to report anything unusual?
Jack finished his fries, put his GO Box in the sink, and stretched out in his chair. He watched Charlotte watching the scroll-style display above the trick fireplace. He'd bought the place solely for that fireplace; it was one of the last units in the city to be built with one. In every dream house Amy designed there was now a fireplace, sometimes with a display over it, but most often with a real brushwork scroll or tapestry or painting. With Amy safe in her room, Charlotte had lifted the usual lim its from the feeds. Occasionally, the eye-shaped clockwork gear that indicated failsafe-triggering programming would pop up and the secondary limits kick in, delaying the signal and shuffling until something suitable was found. She flicked through the remaining content with one irritable, jerking finger.
"What's wrong?" Jack asked.
"Nothing."
"It's not nothing. Something's bothering you. What is it?" He hunched forward and tried to catch her eye. "Is it because you were right, all this time? That we should have grown Amy more quickly?"
Charlotte opened her mouth, then closed it. "No. That's not it."
"Then does it have to do with your clade? I know you've been tracking them. Do you miss your mother?"
Charlotte leveled him with a glare the likes of which he had never seen in a synthetic woman. It seemed to penetrate his every cell, as though she were watching him decay one picosecond at a time. She was silent for a full minute before whispering: "No."
Jack swallowed. His wife's eyes had never seemed so pale before. They were like jagged pieces of sea glass bleached by the abuse of sun and ocean. Despite the ageless skin surrounding them, they looked terribly old. "We've never talked about her, Charlie. Maybe we should."
His wife shook her head and returned to the feeds. "Nothing about Portia can be solved with conversation."
"Don't shut down on me now, I want–"
"Did you intend that pun, Jack? Or was it just a slip?"
Recognizing a no-win scenario when he saw one, Jack stood up and left.
• • • •
In her room, Jack found Amy captaining a pirate ship and losing. A zombie virus had overtaken her crew, and she, the sole survivor, fired her limited weaponry from the crow'snest. Her little body swayed with the rocking of the simulated cruiser projected at her feet. She had run out of bullets for her blunderbuss, and now mimed loading the thing with gold doubloons straight from her pocket.
"The gold melts too fast," she said, "but it leaves a nice big hole."
Jack poked a finger through one of the miscreants' sucking chest wounds. The creature cast him an affronted glare. "I thought zombies were weakened by salt."
"They are, but I lost my loyalty round, so my first mate rebelled and bought women instead of supplies."
"You should have hired a better first mate. Now you'll have to find another one."
Amy shook her head. "It's the ship I mind losing. I worked really hard on this one."
Jack watched the zombies shambling over his shins. He thought about what Amy's principal had said. "You don't mind losing a friend?"
"He isn't a friend, he's the game."
"How can you tell?" Jack let a peg-legged zombie crawl over his hand. An undead parrot alit on his wedding ring and started pecking at it. Bright green feathers the size of rice grains molted away as its head bobbed. They dissipated into smoke in the time it took to blink his eyes. "I'm sure his programming is just as complex as yours."
Amy rolled her eyes. "Dad, please. I know the difference between adapted and automatic."
Jack nodded slowly. "Oh."
Amy made a pincer gesture to freeze the game. "Are you trying to give me a talk about being in trouble? Or about being vN?"
He closed his eyes briefly. "No, I'm not. You're a person just like anybody else, Amy. You know that."
"And people get in trouble, sometimes."
"Yes. People get into trouble, sometimes."
Amy thawed the game. He watched her fight the zombies as nobly as she could, until they were crawling all over each other to climb the mast and attain her perch. She waited until she could see the pixels of their eyes, and then used an ancient ruby amulet won on her last quest. Jack recognized it from his many trips through her treasure chest. She had played for weeks to find it. The gleaming cabochon inside granted her power over flame. With its projection clutched delicately in her tiny fist, she held it to the in-game sun and watched the light refract red and hot on her enemies. Fire blazed within the stone's bloody depths. It ran down the red rays and caught and spread among the moaning hordes.
They gibbered and screamed and jumped ship. But the damage was already done, and the loss total: the fire had spread to Amy, too, and had run down her sleeve onto the mainsail and mast. The ship was burning. She was going down with it.
"Oh, Charlotte! Hello!"
It was Liz, one of the other mothers. Her son Nate had attended the same daycare as Amy. The boy had nursed a crush on Amy all year and given her a special synthetic chocolate heart last Valentine's. Now he sat beside Amy in the front row, with the gold star students waiting onstage for kindergarten graduation to start, staring at her openly. Amy pretended not to notice.
"It must be so nice to have a boy," Charlotte was saying. She had brightened since they got in the car. Jack suspected Amy's unexpected willingness to wear the pretty new graduation dress Charlotte picked out had something to do with it.
Liz laughed. "You didn't have to potty-train him!"
Gary, Liz's husband, looked Jack up and down. "You think this is it for you, Jack? No more?"
Jack defaulted to his usual answer: "If Charlotte wants another, we'll have one."
"Hey, that's pretty handy. No worries about accidents, right?"
"
Gary
," Liz said in her scandalized voice. She used it on her husband a lot. "Amy is
just like other kids
."
Liz was one of those really informed human women with a habit of sometimes sounding like a public service announcement. "Oh, there are Nate's grandparents." She gestured toward the door. "Are your parents coming, Jack?"
"My parents won't be coming," Jack said. "I've pretty much always been a disappointment, if you know what I mean."
"What, with a pretty lady like this on your arm?" Gary asked. "Come on, what father doesn't dream of a girl like Charlotte for his son?"
Jack made a mental note never to let Amy play at Nate's house under Gary's sole supervision.
"Oh, just ignore him," Liz said. "We have to go meet my mother, anyway. See you after!"
Together, Jack and Charlotte watched them leave. They sat on folding chairs and sighed in unison, though for Charlotte it was a simple motion of her shoulders. Jack leaned back and looked up at the vaulted ceiling. It was a good school. He kept telling himself that. It was a good school. Better than most kids got. Better than the insane military shit he'd been subjected to after breaking curfew for the umpteenth time, that was for sure.
"Hey." Charlotte slipped her cool hand into his. "It's my turn to ask you. What's wrong?"
He squeezed her hand. "Just thinking about my dad," he said. "How stupid he is to be missing stuff like this."
Charlotte smiled. "The important thing is that we found each other."
"Damn straight." He stretched one arm over her shoulders and pulled her closer. "Have I ever told you how smart you are?"
She shrugged. "All that graphene has to be good for something."
He kissed the top of his wife's head. He watched his daughter on the stage: her swinging feet, her eager wave. Her bright smile hit him in the gut, as straight and sure as if she had reached over the heads of chattering parents and bored siblings to deliver a finishing blow.
Amy's teacher, a willowy woman who wore her waistlength hair over a long denim dress, ascended the stage soon after that. She held the microphone with both hands in a white-knuckle grip. She swayed in place as though guided by some internal music. "Welcome to kindergarten graduation," she said in a thin, high voice. "This has been a very special year for all of us. We've learned a lot, and although we're sad to leave our class behind, we're excited for next year! On with the show!"
With that, the kindergartners shuffled out of their seats and sang a song complete with hand motions (guided from offstage by their swaying teacher), then herded back to their little chairs (with the name tags affixed to the backs), and fidgeted through a "commencement address" offered by the principal. She was wearing the goofy robes of her alma mater. Then it was time for the diplomas to be handed out.
"Amy Peterson," the teacher said, and Amy stood. She crossed the stage halfway, before pausing and squinting at someone standing among the other parents below the stage.
"Mom?"
A woman rose slowly to the stage. She wove unsteadily on her feet. Her clothes didn't quite fit; she'd buttoned her shirt wrong. She wore no shoes. Her skin bristled with unshed plastic. Otherwise, she was Charlotte's exact replica.
"Come on, Amy." The vN's voice had the rough, hollow sound of real hunger. She held her arms out. "Give your granny a
hug
."
"Please God, no." It was the first time in Jack's memory that he had heard his wife invoke any deity whatsoever.
Onstage, Amy came no closer but did not back away. She spoke clearly and sharply. "I don't want to hug you. Leave me alone."