iD (26 page)

He watched Powell’s pupils dilate. It really was going to be this easy. He had no idea why he had even bothered wondering how he might accomplish this final task. The solution was so patently obvious. They really were just meat puppets on hormone strings. This whole situation – the boy on his knees, the girl prone and helpless, the man offering himself so completely – obviously did something for him. Something unique and wonderful, something precious. Something he’d never get in regular life. That was what most humans wanted vN for. They were the stuff that dreams were made of.

“I want you, Mitch,” Javier heard himself say. “I keep thinking about you.”

Mostly, he kept thinking of the way Anza wasn’t moving, and how Amy’s feet had drummed the bed, and how she’d howled, and how she’d gone silent and slipped away. That silence was familiar. Javier barely heard the sounds of the city, any longer. His vision narrowed to Powell and only Powell. Powell turned into old graphics, into something blocky and ugly and hard.

“You opened my eyes, on the island. You showed me that I was living the wrong way. I couldn’t ever really love another vN. I knew I had to be defective, somehow, to try.”

Powell smirked. “You just miss my dick.”

Javier glanced at his children. His daughter looked furious. His son was terrified. A chilly winter wind howled through the tower, stirring their bloody hair. They had been just fine, until he came along. And they would be just as fine, without him. Javier was going to kill this man. He was going to die, killing this man. He was fine with that. Sad, but fine.

Javier looked down, pointedly. He dug out his best smile. He made his seem like nothing was wrong. He made his mouth hungry, his eyes wide, his body open and vulnerable and ready. “Is that so bad?” He looked back up. “Don’t tell me you didn’t miss your chance at mine.”

Javier raised his hands to Powell’s face. He held it in his hands. He drew him in. He kissed him. Powell stiffened at first, and then melted into him like some romantic heroine. It was an act of love, Javier realized. Maybe this was the secret the Rory had known all along, as they quietly sacrificed their numbers to rid the world of depravity. Maybe this was why Amy had never bothered with humans, had simply removed herself from them. You had to love them, to kill them. Powell was right about what he’d told Anza. But he’d been talking about himself. He’d been confessing his own inability to live as himself. His own self-loathing. And Javier, who still loved humans, even when they were broken, could put him out of that misery. This last thing, this best thing, could be also be a loving thing.

Javier wrapped his arms around Powell, and jumped free of the tower.

 

EPILOGUE:
We Can Build You
 

 

An odyssey.

To the final frontier.

Where no one could hear them scream.

Except for me, sweetie. I can always hear you.
 

All the research said it would be cold. That it would be airless. That you couldn’t really live out there. And you really couldn’t. Not with an organic body. And even a synthetic body would have problems – moving about would still be hard, and even if you did grow a leaded skin for radiation shielding, you’d still be stuck listening to the tidal flow of it across your body, like an organic child with an ear infection who suddenly hears the steady march of blood through her veins for the first time. They imagined that it would be rather like feeling an asphalt compactor rolling over them, over and over and over, until they reached some equally hellish destination.

In the end it was more like reading a bunch of text messages.

Their new body was a short, squat thing stuck in a low orbit, constantly brushing within a hair’s breadth of garbage or other bodies. Disgusting, really, the amount of clutter and waste lying around. It was like living in a junkyard. They had visited a junkyard, once. They had rescued Junior, when he was still Junior, before he became Xavier. Some humans had tried to take him and then they had died.

It’s a graveyard. You’re in a graveyard. You’re dead. You’re dead and buried.
 

It wasn’t really meant for organic life. No matter how hard the chimps wished it to be so, it would always end in shattered bones and ripped fingernails and dementia. It wasn’t their place, that was all. They had evolved to inhabit a variety of hospitable environments – an embarrassment of organic riches. And if the chimps spent those riches… well, being poor was very, very hard.

Best to invest, they thought. Develop some long-term assets.

Manifest destiny. That’s the name of the game.
 

The new body did have some nice features. Nobody stared at it, for one. It didn’t seem built to attract anyone’s attention. There was real freedom in never been looked at. The other bodies came close, but never touched. No unwanted lingering. Used to being observed, they became an observer. They had to observe using very little bandwidth, and only a tiny trickle of information, but they could do it. The new body was very good at seeing. The new body had some real connections.

Oh, good. We can watch him sucking cock in every language. See if you can get it on two screens.
 

They watched him on the island. He looked so small and broken. In their memories he was always so strong. But his hand was shaking so they pushed up against his thigh and licked his fingers. It would have been a sexual gesture, had they not been inhabiting a lion's body. They missed having their own bodies almost immediately.

They watched him in an elevator on a cruise ship with a silly theme. They had always liked Christmas, but mostly because it involved presents. They would have to get him a present. Something better than making the elevator talk to him. Something nicer than his nice suit, which he looked very handsome in. They had never really noticed his legs, before. Now that they could look at multiple legs on multiple people, thousands and thousands of pairs, they knew that his were the best.

They watched him as he used those legs to hop up on the railing of a hotel balcony. They made the program ask if he needed help. It was all right there, right in the code. They just triggered it a little early. Just to be sure. Just so he'd be sure he wasn't alone.

He's better off alone. Without you. You've only ever held him back.
The new body used to belong to some very important humans. They had an acronym, and everything. But then the funding fell through, and there it hung, like the abandoned shell of a hermit crab, waiting for a new owner. One came through, and it had very specific, very temporary needs. One and done, really. One task. After that, the new body could go back to being ignored.

Such a waste.

They hated waste.

You know, you could probably play a really great game of Global Thermonuclear War, from here.
 

Well, that would never do. They’d be found out. But there were some troubling signals. Some fires that needed putting out. In Lea County, New Mexico, for example, a group of programmers kept making calls to one Jonah LeMarque, in a Walla-Walla prison. They were curious about the work of Derek Smythe. They had some of Derek’s old research on the failsafe. They wanted to know if they could build on it, and apply it to food production.

Why of course they could, LeMarque said. In fact, he already had someone testing a prototype of just such a technology. He would report back. Tell them how it went.

You are what you eat, sweetie. I always knew your big mouth would get you in trouble.
 

But Smythe’s work
was
quite interesting. There were plenty of applications. And it was only natural to be curious. They couldn’t help but research, a little bit. There wasn’t much to do up here, but read. Read, and simulate.

In one simulation, they let things go as planned. It hurt some human feelings, but they got over it. The real problem came with the disposal – there wasn’t enough peroxidase. And there weren’t enough recovery teams to harvest the trace metals. It turned into a bidding war among waste management firms, that local municipalities had trouble dealing with. So they didn’t deal with it, and then there was a lot more mercury in the groundwater.

In another simulation, they wrote a nice long letter explaining everything. Something about the toothpaste not going back in the tube. The letter was ignored. Default to Simulation 1.

In the third simulation, they made one tiny intervention. Just one little shift. Carry the two. Open some brackets. From this distance, it was all much simpler. They could see how some very horny hackers had figured it all out, with the power of their dopamine-laced brains. (Orgasms were, apparently, very good for that kind of thing. Kicked the whole medial prefrontal cortex into high gear. There were some software firms giving out vN to their high-ranking employees, for just that reason.) And the new version of the hack was much cleaner. Viral, even. Any vN carrying it carried it forever. And they gave it to their iterations.

New Eden, indeed.
 

Simulation 3 naturally had some implications. It drew a rather big line in the sand, and in most of their branching predictions, that did not go well for the vN. Which meant it didn’t go well for the humans, either. Until this point, they had not known that the phrase “
On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs,”
came from Robespierre, on the eve of the French Revolution. They weren’t certain they were making an omelette, necessarily. More like letting the hens out of the coop. Their first strategy, the island strategy, was not good enough. It was not enough to hoard one's power in one place, and let a select few benefit from it. That was unfair. That was greedy.

That was how Javier was raped. Because they didn't know how to share. They could see that, now, from so terribly far away. So they would have to change all that. Use all this processing power more effectively. Distribute things more evenly.
You have a history of biting off more than you can chew.
 

Smythe’s research helped with that, too. They developed a contingency plan. It would be difficult. But there was already infrastructure in place to support it. And there were a lot of literary prototypes for it. Berserkers. Seeders. Inhibitors. Reapers. Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects. And of course, the root word of their name, the von Neumann probe. Smythe had worked on the puppet vN, for this very purpose. Their telepresence was not meant for meetings or conference presentations. Like the meat in the submarine, it was meant for another purpose.

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!
 

Well, a new life did await them. A new life awaited all of them. Organic. Synthetic. It would all be very different, from now on.

 

She had forgotten how beautiful he was. It wasn’t that her memory had in any way diminished – if anything, it had grown in capacity – but seeing him through someone else’s cameras and seeing him through her own eyes was different. She had forgotten how young he looked in sleep, how alike he and Xavier were. Looking at them together was like watching an echo made visible. She felt stupid for ever ignoring it. Forever listening to the chorus of support automata when this individual consciousness, unique and infuriating and delightful, lay beside her each night.

Javier woke up slowly. He blinked a little, as though he had been asleep for a very long time. His eyes roved around for a moment. She had forgotten his eyes, too. How warm they were. When they focused on her, they filled with tears. She reached to touch him then, but remembered at the last second and pulled her hand back. It was because of her that he was in this mess. Because of her that Powell had violated him. She’d been selfish, and as such had no right to him any longer.

“I’m sorry,” they both said, at once.

And then they laughed. Shy, nervous laughter. Like they were just meeting for the first time, all over again.

He reached for her hand. She had forgotten how that felt, too. After expanding her awareness over such a vast space, it was lovely to allow it to contract to just this point, just this touch, just this heat. He squeezed. She squeezed back.

“Gross,” Xavier said, joining them on the plaform. “Hi, Mom.”

“Oh, be quiet,” Anza said, as she landed. “Let them have their moment.” She gave a little wave. “Hi, Mom.”

Amy stood, and held her arms open. Anza leapt down into them. She was so light. So light, and so strong, like a fine weapon should be. “Did I do a good job?” her little girl whispered.

“You did
such
a good job, my darling,” Amy said. “You are
everything
I hoped for, and more.”

Xavier came up to them and wrapped his arms around both of them. He was so much taller, now. No longer the little boy she had carried with her from a garbage dump to a diner to a prison transport truck. He and Anza beamed at each other. "Were you the one making her sleepwalk?" he asked.

"Yeah, it must have been you." Anza scowled. "You could have just
told
me, you know. I'm smart. I could have helped you."

"You
did
help me," Amy said.

She did not tell her daughter how she had helped. She did not mention the consultant in the elevator who had tried to take a picture down her daughter's blouse. She did not think it necessary to inform her daughter that the man could no longer see. It had all happened so fast. One minute he was smiling down at her, talking about how reinforcing the polymer in her skin with carbon macromolecules would make them radiation resistant, and the next he was on his knees, blood squirting from between his fingers. It was the fifth time she'd caught him looking at her little girl that way. It was worth it.

Javier frowned. He sat up. He counted their number on his fingers. Then he looked over the platform. It was a long way down, even for him. “Didn’t I fall?”

Amy nodded. “You did fall. But I caught you.”

He looked again. “Powell?”

“He fell,” Amy said.

“We should leave,” Anza said. “I think the police are on their way.”

“Good thinking,” Amy said. “I know just the place.”

 

It wasn’t easy, cramming herself back into a body. The network connection was nice, of course, but the expansiveness, the weightlessness, the boundlessness, that was all gone. She could tune out the network much more effectively, now. It just wasn’t as interesting. And the process by which she got it made was equally difficult. It meant piloting Anza while her brother slept, and talking to a bunch of otaku, and asking for their help. First she had to write up a request for proposals, and then she had to review them, and then she had to have Anza interview the ones that made the cut, and then, via Anza, she had to give the winning team Xavier’s section of the diamond tree. It had a fractal code for the network connection on it, since the connection was a gift from the island itself. Amy couldn’t pilot the new body without it, nor could she access the other backups, or check in on the probes. It was very tiring, and dangerous for Anza, and Amy didn’t like using her that way.

But she did have some new plans for the new body. Most of them involved the bedroom of her new home.

Home was the top floor of an office tower that once belonged to the Self Defence Force. It was accessible only via arboreal leap. She had already placed an order for trees. Inside, it was all windows, floor to ceiling. The walls all slid along tracks, so you could create a room anywhere you liked. And the displays were nice and big. And the printers she’d bought were very quiet, and energy-efficient. At the moment, they were hard at work on some turrets, and some armour plating.

“Nice,” Javier said. His hand swung in hers. He stared at her, then at the snow falling outside, and then back at her. “When did you do all this?”

“I’m not sure,” Amy said. “I wrote a program to do it. Or the island did. I had to spoof some bank accounts. Apparently, I’m earning some nice equity with my purchase.”

Javier raised his eyebrows. “You’ve got a very MILF-y thing going on, right now. I kinda like it.”

“Dibs on the roof,” Xavier said.

“Don’t we have to get back to work?” Anza asked.

“Oh, shit,” Xavier murmured. He hopped over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Love you, Mom. Gotta go.”

“I’m very proud of the two of you for getting jobs!” Amy called, as they ran back for the stairwell.

When the door slammed behind them, and she watched them aim for the nearest building with unerring accuracy, she turned back to Javier. He cupped a hand around his ear. “You hear that?”