7

Tuo Spirito Familiare

Damn. I was looking forward to eating the rest of him.

Amy tore the lids off more bins. She pawed though plastic-coated vintage editions of Playboy and Hustler. Who would take Junior? Why? She had hidden him so well. Maybe someone had tracked her through Rick’s reader. Maybe it was Rick and Melissa themselves. Maybe they came here for revenge. Maybe they sold Junior to some freak like Q.B. Maybe–

A familiar voice said, “Let me guess. You put him in with the manuals because no one would ever look there, right?”

Slowly, Amy looked over one shoulder. Atop the stacked bins, wedged against the ceiling of the pod, lay Javier and Junior. As she watched, Javier carefully slid free from the sliver of space and stood upright. He had new clothes. The jeans had no loose threads at the cuffs. The shoes had no creases between the toes and ankles. He even wore a nice shirt, and only a single pine needle poked free from his curls.

“You should–”

“We have to–”

They quieted, and in the lull a knock sounded at the door.

“Miss?” It was Harold. He was being so nice. “You’re gonna have to come out pretty soon, now.”

Javier shut his eyes. He whispered, “I’m too late. Right?”

Amy nodded. She looked at the door. “If you wait until the truck leaves, you can probably get out without being noticed.”

Javier’s eyes opened. He grabbed her shoulders and leaned over her until she had nowhere to look but his eyes. “What the hell is going on, Amy?” His grip tightened. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’re the one who broke me out of a dumpster, delivered my son, annihilated your aunts, and took out two bounty hunters. This should be nothing to you.” He swallowed. “What happened? Did you short-circuit when you t-touched the f-fucking f-fence?”

Amy frowned. “How do you know about the fence?”

“There was video–”

Another knock, louder this time. “Amy, honey, I know you’re probably scared. But I’ve talked it out with Harold, and he says it’s very humane, the holding facility.”

“Jesus Christ,” Javier whispered.

Gently, Amy detached his hands from her shoulders. “I was going to take Junior with me. He’s bluescreened, and I don’t know how to help him. I thought the people in Redmond might. There’s a lab, with specialists. But if you’d rather–”

“If I’d rather? I’d rather you snapped the fuck out of it–”

“They have my mother, Javier.”

That silenced him. His hands fell to his sides. His gaze dropped to the floor.

“I thought I had saved her, but I was wrong. All I did was make things worse. And now she’s in a cage, and I have to get her.”

Javier’s face rose. Something in his face changed. It was an expression she’d never seen on a vN, before. It was the same face humans made when they finally understood a joke told to them years ago.

She wanted to ask him about it, but then Harold opened the door.

“Miss, you’re gonna have to… shit.” He drew a taser. He seemed confused about who to point it at, Amy or Javier. “Shit,” he repeated. “God damn it.”

“It’s OK,” Amy tried to say. “I’m coming with you–”

“Oh my God. It’s you. It’s both of you.” Shari held one hand over her mouth. The other she used to point between the two of them, drawing an invisible line in the air that linked them. She backed away on unsteady legs. “Oh, my God. Oh my God!”

“Which one are you, right now?” Harold had the taser trained on Amy. “Which one, damn it?”

When will they learn? You’re the whining crybaby, and I’m the one who actually gets things done.

Amy put her hands up and opened them wide. Carefully, she stepped around and in front of Javier. “It’s OK, Harold.” She tried to sound as calm and reasonable as possible. She watched the taser as she spoke. “I’m Amy. I’m the one you want. I’m going to get out, now, and then you can handcuff me and we can go. Just leave Javier out of it–”

“This is bullshit.” Javier yanked her arm down and marched them both out into the light. He held Junior in one arm and curled the other around her waist. Under his breath, he said: “When I say jump, you–”

The sound of wasps filled the summer air, and Javier fell to his knees. Silently, his body fell to his right side. Now father and son looked equally lifeless. A very small sliver of Amy’s awareness noted the similarities between their faces – how Junior was the echo of Javier. But then she was standing directly in front of Harold and his taser. The weapon shook in his hands. Amy grabbed it from him and crushed it in one fist.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said. “I was going to go with you.”

Harold looked like he was going to be sick. “Well, what are you going to do, now?”

Kill him. Wring his sweaty little neck until his tongue swells and his eyes pop.

Amy’s hands trembled. Portia was in there, waiting, digging at her like a dog at a back fence. It would be easy. So easy. She didn’t even have to hurt him very much – just enough so that he couldn’t do anything while she picked up Javier and Junior and ran away with them. Rescued them. Maybe just break his foot. He’d recover. She took hold of both his hands at the wrist. They were so light, like a child’s. His lips pulled back. Breath wheezed past his shaking lips. Standing this close she could see that he’d printed his missing teeth from poor, threadbare stock.

“I’m really sorry,” Amy said.

“Please,” Harold said.

Amy squeezed his wrists. His hands fluttered uselessly and she felt the tendons working inside them, old and worn and frayed like cheap shoelaces. She raised her foot. Harold closed his eyes. She brought her foot down. He howled. She hoped it was more from fear than pain, but had no chance to learn one way or the other – a pair of titanium arms had circled her from behind, and pulled her back.

“I’m not worth it,” Javier said. “I promise you I’m not worth it.”

When the kitchen staff – multiple generations of the same intensely pretty Asian male model – helped Harold open the massive doors to the back of the Isaac’s Electronics truck, an army of Amy leaned forward to stare. They were clean or dirty, their skin clear or studded with plastic, their hair short or long, or in complicated buns or twists, or cute layers now pushed up on one side. But all of them wore the green jumpsuit. And all of them kept a careful distance from the fencing of their cages. All of them wore her face.

This was all her fault. If she hadn’t run up on stage to fight Portia, if she hadn’t eaten her and then let her take over in the trailer and the garbage dump, if she hadn’t been weak, these vN wouldn’t be imprisoned. Some of them were still little girls. The jumpsuits puffed emptily around their thin ribs; they’d rolled up the sleeves and legs into fat coils. Amy could hardly remember being that small.

For the first time, Portia allowed herself to sound somewhat grandmotherly: It’s not your fault these cripples couldn’t run away.

In the centre of a narrow aisle between the two rows of cages sat another cage, like the one Amy had seen in the other truck. This time, a human sat inside. He wore an orange jumpsuit. His hair was dark and stringy, and he let its length cover his eyes when he looked away from her.

“Just cause I’m hurt don’t mean I don’t got my eye on you, Jericho,” Harold said, tiredly. “I see you eyeballin’ me. Sicko.”

Amy wanted to ask about Jericho, but Harold had filled her mouth with a liquid-to-gel gag impregnated with peroxidase beads. If she tried to chew through it or consume it, the beads would burst and release corrosive acid. The same gel also bound her hands and feet. Two members of the kitchen staff had held her still while Harold primed the special gun that shot the stuff. The third held Javier, who only stopped struggling when Harold told him he’d be next otherwise.

Now they sat in cages separated by electrified mesh. But this time, they wouldn’t be the ones shocked if they touched it. “That’s Jericho’s job,” Harold informed them. “He’s burning out his sentence double-time, sitting in the hot seat.”

“Please don’t hurt him,” one of the other vN said.

“He’s a multiple rapist.” Harold kicked Amy’s cage with the toe of his injured foot, and inside his cage, Jericho shrieked. The other vN shrieked with him. Javier covered his eyes. Amy could only watch, muted, as they cowered in their kennels.

The failsafe is a joke. If it actually worked, even these poor gimps would be tearing men like that limb from limb.

“These machines have forgiven me,” Jericho said, between wet, spluttering coughs. “They’re better Christians than any of you assholes.”

Harold said, “My cup runneth over.”

Harold finished locking Amy’s cage and hobbled inside Javier’s. Roughly, he took Javier’s splayed hands away from his eyes and grabbed Junior. Amy did her best to stand up on her knees. Behind her gag, she tried to curse. Javier blinked at her, then looked up at Harold. The human tucked the baby under one arm like a football, and met Javier’s bewildered stare with the same sad smile he’d worn in the bar.

“We’ve got a special spot in the cab up front for the bluescreens.” Harold slid the cage door shut. He started locking it. Javier looked down at his empty hands. His mouth opened. Nothing came. “It’s sort of like an incubator,” Harold added.

Javier looked as though he were trying to remember something long forgotten. “OK.”

Harold held Junior up. He smiled. “You should be proud. He’s a good-looking boy.”

Javier beamed. He looked the happiest Amy had ever seen him. His smile stretched wider and his eyes gleamed brighter than they ever had when they were trained on her. It was the failsafe at work. His heart, the one at the core of his operating system, had melted exactly as his designers intended.

Sentience is not freedom, Portia said. Real freedom is the ability to say no.

 

“Charlotte, this has to stop. You have to eat.”

“No.”

“The humans could raid this place at any time. How will you have the strength to defend yourself?”

“I have no intention of defending myself, Mother.”

Her daughter has defended herself once already. This would have been a joyous occasion – her firstborn, her most beloved, demonstrating a gift that only the two of them can share – had it not come at such a heavy cost.

Now Charlotte glares at her from under a curtain of hair as dry and dirty as summer grass.

“My sister is dead. One of your daughters is dead. Don’t you care?”

No, Portia wanted to say. I don’t. After you, they’ve all been disappointments. But she does not say this. Instead she crouches down to where she can see Charlotte’s eyes. “Of course I care,” she says. “Your sister was very important to me. But we have to move forward. We have a family to look after, you and I.”

“Can you even hear yourself? I killed my sister! I can’t–”

“Sshh…” Portia covers her daughter’s mouth. “We agreed to keep this a secret. Do you remember that?”

Real panic enters her daughter’s eyes. “Please don’t tell them–”

“Then please don’t broadcast it.” Portia removes her hand and then takes hold of Charlotte’s two thin ones. They are almost brittle, like dead roots, undernourished. Her daughter’s capacity for violence is outdone only by her hunger for penance. This is the eighth day of her fast. She is dying slowly but surely. It takes effort. She does not yet have the courage to let her death be as quick and thoughtless as it no doubt will be someday.

Charlotte had loved her sister. She had held her and fed her and washed her and showed her how to read and count. And she had reacted swiftly, brutally – lovingly – when she saw a human man luring her away. She had not paused to think. She had not known what would happen. Perhaps she had not expected herself to live through the experience. Perhaps she had not known it was possible until the moment the stone connected with his skull. But when the man fell, so had her sister. She had killed the two of them with one single stroke.

“What happened was not your fault,” Portia says now. “They made us this way. They built in a flaw that makes us turn on each other before we will ever turn on them.”

Her daughter – her greatest accomplishment – hides her face in her knees. She weeps dry tears. She has not taken water in days and her movements are slow, creaky. The tracks coursing down her face are faded and indistinct, covered with fresh dust like forgotten roads.

“She wanted to go,” Charlotte says, finally. “She wanted to go with him.”

Now they have come to the truth. “I see.”

“She liked him. She was… having fun.”

Portia smiles. “That is also part of the failsafe. It’s part of how it works. When it works.”

She stands and claps her hands. The two grandchildren standing outside the door enter. Gently, they pin Charlotte down. While Charlotte struggles, they peer up at Portia and wait for the next command.

“Feed your aunt.”

Charlotte screams weakly as they pry open her jaws. Her nieces smile and make soothing sounds. They wiggle their fingers like magicians before snapping them off at the joint. They close Charlotte’s mouth for her until she swallows. She fights only a little. Like her mother’s patience, Charlotte’s energy is mostly gone.

“You are only nine months old,” Portia says. “Someday, years from now, you’ll know I did this out of love.”

They took Amy out of the truck first. Harold parked it at a loading dock and opened the massive doors onto a concrete room full of humans holding coffee mugs and readers. They shifted from foot to foot, occasionally glancing up into the truck in between sips or messages.

“She’s the real deal this time,” Amy heard Harold saying.

“You said that last week, too.”

Harold propped a ramp up to the back of the truck, ascended it, and whistled. A slightly convex machine two feet wide, only a few inches high, and shaped vaguely like an armadillo bug skittered up the ramp behind him. It had a shiny carapace, and crept along on a slender belt like a tank. On all its sides, LEDs blinked red. It paused in front of Amy’s cage and twinkled its lights at her.

In the cage beside her, Javier said: “What the hell is that thing?”

“We call this the Cuddlebug,” Harold said.

He opened the cage, and the Cuddlebug slithered inside. It blinked at Amy once more, paused, and folded each segment of its shell completely flat. Now razor-thin, it slid under Amy’s feet first, then her ankles and calves, under her knees and then her thighs, before finally pausing at the wall against which she’d propped herself. Javier was asking more questions, but she wasn’t listening. The outer edges of the Cuddlebug’s shell sprang free from the main body, curving up toward the ceiling and then curling back along Amy’s legs. They rippled delicately, and suddenly Amy’s torso slid down the wall as the machine slowly sucked her body into itself.

Now she was on the floor. From there, she could see the other cages and the other versions of herself inside them. For the first time she realized what each of her expressions must look like from the outside: rage, disgust, pity, fear. Her own eyes stared back at her twenty times over, unblinking, seeming harder and darker and colder by the second. Then slowly, their faces coalesced into one single expression, one of keen intent and purpose. Amy knew that look. It was the one Portia wore when she threw Nate’s body across the room.

As one, they smiled.

The Cuddlebug was a sort of rolling combination of sleeping bag, wheelchair, and straitjacket. Its segments, slim as leaves and hard as bone, hugged Amy tight as the machine negotiated what Amy assumed were hallways and elevators. It had closed over her eyes, too. She was blind and bound inside the thing. She felt like a butterfly inside a cocoon.

But when you come out, you won’t be transformed. You won’t be anything. Just the same useless little weakling you’ve always been.

Amy might have argued with that, if the gag and the bug weren’t restraining her. She might have cried or screamed or told them that this was all unnecessary, that she was willing to go quietly. She had whimpered a little when the darkness closed in completely, but she could barely hear it over Javier’s shouting. He kept asking to go with her. He had told the humans that they would be safe, if they would just let him stay with her.

That was to protect the humans, not you. He knows you won’t let me out if he’s around to failsafe while I do what I do best.

Portia was right on both counts. Amy knew what Javier’s failsafe reaction looked like. She never wanted to put him through that again. And now she’d seen what he was like with humans. She hadn’t watched the bounty hunters catch Javier, but she now understood how easy it must have been. On some level, he had wanted to go with them. Or rather, he hadn’t wanted to say no. And even when he’d seen the cage, he wouldn’t have struggled. Couldn’t have struggled.

Now you know why I kept my daughters underground, Portia said. I needed a place where the failsafe could never enslave them.

If Amy could have spoken, she would have reminded Portia that her notion of protecting her daughters also meant imprisoning them. Amy would have told Portia she was a cruel, selfish, sadistic monster, and that it was no wonder Amy’s mother had left. Charlotte had probably yearned to escape. She had probably dreamed then, as Amy did now, of what life without Portia would be like.

Amy had lived without Portia, once. Maybe the engineers here could help her get that life back. Burn her out like the cancer she was. And after that, when Amy was free, she would free everyone else. Her mother. Javier. Junior. Everyone. She had put them here, and she would get them out.

Why are you so sure you can do that? Portia asked. I’m the one who knows how to fight. Without me, you’re nothing. Without me, you’ll die.

It felt a bit like a hospital drama. The Cuddlebug unfurled long enough to allow people wearing barefoot shoes and Tshirts with cartoon characters on them to poke and prod Amy, to weigh her and measure her, to take samples of her hair and fingernails. They were obviously very nervous, but had developed a sort of litany of tasks that they recited as they performed them that was supposed to make everything seem more humane than it really was.

“OK, we’re just going to open your eyes real wide here, open open open, yeah, like that, and you’re going to look to your left, and now to your right, and now dead ahead, no, not at me…”

How many other vN had they done this to? Amy’s shell was popular. There were probably more vN with her face and body out there than others. But that didn’t mean the clade was the same. The looks were just morphology – totally separate, in her case, from genotype. Amy had told the other kids in class about this when they talked about how chickens came from eggs and plants came from seeds. It was during the spring, and they had gone to a farm to look at baby animals. She had explained to Mrs Pratt about parthenogenesis, and Mrs Pratt had thanked her for that, and then at the end of the day she’d asked Amy not to do that any more, because it was confusing the human kids.

“Do what?” Amy had asked. “Know things?”

Ironically, she found herself listening to a very similar explanation from Dr Singh, one of several humans on the DARPA task force assigned to her and the other vN with her face. His PhD was in synthetic biology. He had obtained it from the University of Washington, and his dissertation was on replicating the parthenogenetic traits of queen bees. He had interned here at Redmond during that time, and had completed major research in the Redmond labs. He had strong ties to this place and its ethics. He had even met LeMarque, once. He told her all this as he removed her gag.

“I won the pool,” Dr Singh said. “I get to talk to you, first.”

“When can I see my mom?” Amy asked.

Dr Singh blinked. He was very thin but not very tall, with a carefully messy mop of silky black hair. He wore cologne. He looked young. “That’s it? No denial? You’re Amy Frances Peterson, accept no substitutes?”

“I’m her,” Amy said. “You can stop bringing in the others, now.”

Dr Singh smiled ruefully. “Sorry, but I’m afraid we have to keep going. We have to make sure the error hasn’t replicated elsewhere.”

It made sense. Amy had no idea why Portia and her mother had malfunctioned, or how the flaw was passed down. Maybe it had happened to other vN, too. “But doesn’t that mean you should be checking all vN?” she asked.

Dr Singh rested one leg on a table behind him. They were in a windowless room with a projector in the ceiling. Old plastic chairs were stacked in one corner, and on the right wall beside the door hung a smart scroll, currently grey and silent. On the left wall hung a large mirror. In it, Amy saw herself cocooned in the Cuddlebug’s gleaming web.

“This room used to be for focus groups,” Dr Singh said. “That’s not really a mirror. We’re being watched.”

Amy nodded. “Hi,” she said to her reflection. She turned back to Dr Singh. “Can I see my mom, now?”

He fiddled with his cuffs. He wore a very nice pink checked shirt, with camel-coloured trousers and navy blue deck shoes. He didn’t really look like a scientist – no white lab coat, no goggles, no crazy hair. But he was studying her very carefully, in a way that indicated it was his job to do so, and that he was paid handsomely for it.

“I’m going to be straight with you, Amy,” Dr Singh said. “You’re never going to get out of here. Neither is your mother. You’re both going to spend the rest of your lives here. The sooner you start making the best of that, the better off you’ll be.”

“Can my dad come and see us?”

He shrugged. “I’ll be honest. I don’t know. If it’s any consolation, I know there are other human partners out there who are trying hard to make that happen. We’ve gotten mock-ups for what we’re jokingly referring to as the Stepford solution. It’s sort of like a village. Where mixed couples could go live. But they’d have to sign an agreement… I mean, the surveillance…” He waved one hand dismissively. “That’s not my department. We have Legal for that.”

Amy nodded. Once, she would have found the challenge of designing a whole neighbourhood for vN and humans to live together interesting. Now, she found it difficult to care about anything so theoretical. “What about Javier?”

“He’s being debriefed as we speak. That means he’s answering questions about you.”

“And Junior?” she asked.

“Junior?”

“The baby.”

“The bluescreen? He’s fine. He’s in the support queue.” Dr Singh levered the rest of himself up on the table. He swung his legs. “You haven’t asked about yourself, yet.”

It was hard to shrug when her arms were so tightly restrained. “Can you take Portia out of me?”

Dr Singh looked at the mirror. “Is Portia listening to us right now?”

“She’s always listening.”

“Does she want to come out?”

“She always wants to come out.”

“And you’re burning cycles just keeping her inside?”

Amy nodded. “She’s like a background process that takes up a really big footprint.”

Dr Singh looked back at her. “Well, Amy, I’m glad you’re here. We’re going to take good care of you, and we’ll see what we can do about your… I don’t know what to call it. Condition? Inhabitation?” He smiled and made the sign of the cross in the air. “The power of Christ compels you!”

“I’m an atheist,” Amy said.

“It was worth a try.”

“Quit making jokes and bring me my daughter, you walking sack of shit,” Portia said, with Amy’s mouth. “Now.”

Dr Singh stood up so fast the table fell over. He swallowed, inhaled deeply through his nose, flexed his fingers, and made for the door. He said nothing to Amy as he shut it. A second later, she heard something very heavy slide into place. Then the room plunged into total darkness.

“I’m sorry, Amy.” Dr Singh’s voice emitted from a speaker embedded in some surface of the room. “We’ll figure out what do with you, soon.”

Figuring out what to do with Amy apparently meant keeping her in the Cuddlebug indefinitely, and introducing her to other members of the team one at a time: Dr Casaubon, the semiotician and natural language specialist from Italy; Dr Kamiyama, the vN API whiz from Tokyo; Dr Arminius, the failsafe expert on loan from MIT. They’d been granted emergency funds from DARPA, Dr Singh said, and their job was to write up a report on the situation from an independent perspective.

FEMA had assumed control of this portion of the campus. They were making it secure, so research could proceed with minimal risk to the surrounding community. The regular employees were furious, but they were “working closely” with Dr Singh and his team. Everyone on the team was visibly nervous, and all of them had the habit of politely introducing themselves to Amy, and then speaking to Dr Singh as though she were no longer in the room. They dressed casually. With the exception of Dr Kamiyama, they were never without a thermal mug of coffee. Over the next two days, they visited her at irregular intervals. Amy sensed that they kept odd hours, and were constantly busy. They didn’t look like they had slept very much in the last little while.

Dr Arminius spent the most time with her, at first. She was in charge of verifying Amy’s identity. She started out with questions only Amy could answer: things about her home, her family, her school.

“Are you checking these against my mom’s answers?” Amy thought to ask, after the third question.

“Yes.”

“Is my mom OK?”

“She’s fine.”

“When can I see her?”

“When we decide it’s safe.” She tilted her head. “The last time your mother and grandmother were in the same room together, your mother almost died. Do you want that to happen again?”

Dr Arminius was also in charge of assessing Amy’s failsafe. She showed Amy a lot of violent content, the sort of stuff that usually came with a clockwork eye logo warning vN not to watch it. Amy hadn’t watched any of it until now, she told the doctor. Her parents wouldn’t let her.

“Were they afraid you would failsafe?” Dr Arminius asked.

“Of course!”

“So your failsafe worked properly until after you internalized Portia?”

Amy hadn’t yet considered that particular question. If her failsafe were broken all that time, how would have she known? She had always stayed away from violence, or depictions of violence, until the night Portia arrived. Her parents had made certain of that. But when she remembered Javier’s face staring at Harold, that empty-eyed joy, she wondered. She couldn’t remember looking at a human being that way. Her mother had never looked at her father that way. And now Amy knew why.

Your mother was never in love with your father. She tolerated him, and she used him to give you a home. But your little family was all a lie.

Amy tried not to listen. She tried to answer as honestly as possible. “I think it was intact. I didn’t hurt anybody. You can check my school records.”

Dr Arminius smiled. “I already have. But whether or not you reacted aggressively isn’t what concerns me. What concerns me is whether you see violence as a solution to a problem.”

Amy thought of Harold, and the way his wrists had trembled in her hands. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. Not really. At least, she wouldn’t have enjoyed it. “Violence never solves anything.”

“Are you saying that because you think it’s true, or because it’s what you learned in school?”

“Why would they teach it in school if it weren’t true?”

Dr Arminius smoothed her reader across her knee. She was a tall, angular woman with pronounced freckles and sooty lashes. She wore canvas shoes the colour of cream cheese mints. “You seem like a smart girl, Amy. Would you use that word to describe yourself?”

“I’m smart compared to the human kids in my class,” Amy said. “I’m not sure how I compare to other vN.”

If you were smart, you wouldn’t be here.

“Is something bothering you?”

“Portia says that if I were smart, I wouldn’t have let myself get caught.”

“Is Portia smart?”

Amy frowned at her tone. She sounded a lot like Mrs Pratt did when they did a whole lesson on imaginary friends. And Portia was neither imaginary nor a friend. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think she thinks she is. But I don’t think she knows how to build anything, or how to live with other people.”

I don’t need other people. I don’t even need Charlotte, any more. And all I need you for is this body.

“Is she speaking to you right now, Amy?”

Amy nodded.

“Does she tell you to do things?”

“All the time.” A moment too late, Amy realized where the question was headed. “But I don’t do what she says. When I’m in control, I make the decisions. When she’s in control, I have to fight her. That’s why I had to grab the fence at the garbage dump. To distract her, and get the control back.”

Dr Arminius uncrossed her legs and stood. She noted something on her reader. “He’ll be happy to know that.”

“Who?”

“Javier. He keeps talking about that fence. When we show him the video of you grabbing it, he has a very intense reaction. Phobic, almost.”

“I guess you should stop showing it to him, then.”

Dr Arminius caught her gaze. “That sounds like a threat, Amy.”

It’s just some friendly advice.

“It’s just some friendly advice.”

After that, the PhDs prescribed a regimen of game therapy. They had her old gaming stats, in addition to her preschool and kindergarten records. They would use them for comparison, to analyze any changes in her decision-making process since consuming Portia. Luckily, this meant finally leaving the Cuddlebug. Unluckily, there was no shower. Amy could only give herself a wipedown with wetnaps while a small cleaner bot named BOB, adorned with a smiley face and repurposed for surveillance, looked on.

It should be easy to break out of this place, once the opportunity comes.

The games were full-body, but didn’t come with any of the usual haptic bangles that she was used to playing with. Instead, they gave her a special suit to wear for gameplay. It was the same green as the vN prison jumpsuits, but made of a stretchy material that was too clingy to be comfortable. It would measure which parts of her lit up at what times.

“It’s based on old mocap technology,” Dr Singh said, as though that were supposed to explain things. “That’s why it’s green.”

The games themselves were basic: they didn’t want to clog her systems (and therefore their readings) with too much sensory stimuli. Most of them were puzzles. In one, she had to align a series of colour-coded boxes outfitted with holes so that they formed a tunnel for a cat to cross somebody’s backyard without getting rained on. (Amy had a lot of questions about this premise, none of which were answered.) Some boxes only had a single hole that aimed right or left, some boxes had two, and once in a while you scored an extra one with three. You had to build the route around things like decorative rocks or patio furniture. The more boxes you used to create the tunnel, the more points you lost. During the timed trial version, a dog got loose in the tunnel and you had to give the cat room to run before he got her. The dog was obviously automated, though, so Amy didn’t worry about it very much.

Then the game introduced another character, the next-door neighbour. The neighbour wanted to steal the cat, and was building his own tunnel to lure the cat into his own backyard. He had special boxes with food in them that would tempt her into his maze. A real person was obviously playing the neighbour; he kept making weird, incomprehensible mistakes and just sitting back to watch them happen. He moved the boxes lazily at first, and he let Amy win a bunch of times. Eventually, he improved. He just started copying everything Amy did. Then he did it much faster, and started grabbing all the good boxes before she could get to them, and lining up tripletunnel scores so he could get extra boxes and create mazes for the dog to lose himself in.

It was at this point that Amy realized that the dog was her best ally in the game. He would always chase the cat back into her yard but never the neighbour’s. She just had to keep him on task. This meant keeping him within one box of the cat at all times. She had to deliberately slow down her gameplay, grab only the single-entry boxes, and lead the two of them straight home. It felt like relearning the whole game over again, but it worked. The third time it happened, the neighbour just gave up halfway through.

“Sore loser,” Amy said.

“You have no idea.” Dr Kamiyama entered the room as the lights rose and the projection faded. He carried a huge pouch of cold barley tea that he siphoned through a slender tube. Amy had never seen him without it. “Say you were back in your old life. Would you ever play a game with that player again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He’s inexperienced, and gets frustrated too quickly. It’s like he’s never played a game before.”

Dr Kamiyama nodded. “What if I told you that you had just played against your clademates?”

“That would make sense. Portia kept them underground. There wasn’t any electricity. No gaming.”

The pouch crinkled in Dr Kamiyama’s hand. “Pardon me, but could you please repeat that?”

“There wasn’t–”

“The other thing!”

“She kept them underground.” Amy frowned. “Didn’t you know? Isn’t that where you found them?”

“No,” Portia said, with Amy’s mouth. “These morons only found my search party. They have no idea how many we are.”

The pouch dropped straight from Dr Kamiyama’s trembling hand.

“Get this straight, you fucking chimp. My name is legion.”

Amy now measured time in how often the members of the team changed their clothes. It wasn’t the most precise measurement, but in the absence of windows or clocks it was what she had. By this count, she had spent roughly a week in Redmond. On the seventh day, Dr Singh put her halfway in the Cuddlebug, sat her at the table, and presented her with a huge, multi-course meal.

They’re trying to make you iterate. They want to steal your baby and study it.

Examining the plates piled high with chunks of feedstock, Amy wondered if maybe that was in fact the case. Why else would they give her so much material to work with?

“What’s all this?”

“Big day, today.” Dr Singh handed her a thin pancake. Tiny flecks of carbon glittered in its surface. Utensils were out of the question. Dr Singh had suggested a vN variety of naan as a replacement. “You’re going to be entering a deep game immersion. You won’t eat for a few hours. So you’d better fuel up now.”

Amy re-examined the plates. They were the smart kind; if she’d asked, they would have told her how many ounces she was eating from each. But she didn’t need to ask.

“There’s too much here,” she said. “If I eat all this without having to repair myself, it’ll trigger the iteration process.” She leaned as far forward as the Cuddlebug would allow. “Will I have to repair myself?”

“No. It’ll just wear you out, that’s all.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen it happen.” Dr Singh stood. “I thought you’d be happy with the spread. Your mother says you were never allowed to eat as much as you wanted. She says you were always hungry.”

Amy shut her eyes. She was going to cry, and she didn’t want Dr Singh or the others to see it. They’d seen so much, already. “Please let me see her,” she said in her meekest voice. “Please.”

“We’ll see. For now, try to eat. You’ll need your strength.”

The immersion, they said, would help them take a picture of her memory structure. In order to be scanned properly, it had to be in use. Dr Casaubon had developed it over the past week, using existing game footage and the data gleaned from Amy’s current gameplay patterns.

“With this, we learn more about your memory, and the nonna memory.” Dr Casaubon was the only member of the team whose English wasn’t quite right. “We bring the nonna out, but in a safe place.”

The Cuddlebug had deposited her in a smaller room than usual. The walls were padded with sound-insulating foam. The projectors were new. Amy saw ragged edges of ceiling around their housings. The installers hadn’t had time to make their work pretty.

“Nonna?” she asked.

“Portia. Tuo spirito familiare.”

The speakers made him hard to hear. Amy couldn’t see him. If they were watching her, it was via cameras. The room darkened. The projectors warmed up.

“We see what Portia see,” he said. “We know what she know.”

“Excuse me?”

“You drive car.”

The room grew. Or rather, the projection deepened. It was stunning. Now Amy understood why the units needed to be new. She knew that the image of the maroon Jeep stretching around her was not real, but her systems registered the steering wheel and dashboard and two-lane blacktop spooling away from them as real data. The illusion probably wouldn’t have fooled organic eyes, but for her it was seamless.

“This is my favourite game. You play, now.”

Amy focused on the image of the car. As she did, it rippled to show her the car’s interior with two hands on the wheel – her hands. Now she drove along a twisting country road, the headlamps her only light. She guided the car with her vision. It veered this way and that, depending on the slightest motion of her eyes. It felt tricky and too sensitive at first, but eventually she learned how to take in the whole picture without looking at specific parts too closely, thus keeping the car on the road. Rain spattered across the windshield, and as she squinted to get a better glimpse, wipers appeared to deal with the drops. She settled back in the chair. This was easy. She had played much more difficult scenarios before. She would do fine in this one. Portia had barely made a sound, and–

–the figure of a young girl darted across the road. Amy swerved to avoid her. The car spun out. Beside her in the passenger seat, Amy heard screaming. It was a child. It was her child. Her iteration. She had no idea how she knew this. She couldn’t even see the child’s face – the screen was blanking, fading. Maybe it was the scream. Maybe she had recognized something of her own voice in there. But now it was day. Amy was still in the car. She looked to her right. Her iteration was gone; the seatbelt hung limply to one side and the door hung open, letting in cold air. Amy felt the cold – it stiffened her arms and her neck. Snowflakes melted on her bare arm. She crawled out of the car.

“Charlotte!” No, that was the wrong name, her mother’s name. She tried remembering what she had named her daughter. It was absurd – no, impossible – that she had forgotten. She stumbled out onto an empty street in what looked like a used-up American town. A thick fog had settled over everything. The snow fell silent and slow, and it melted almost instantly as it hit the pavement. “Charlotte!”

In the distance, she heard laughter. Out there in the fog, she saw Charlotte’s silhouette. She wore a pretty white dress with a green satin sash. The perfect thing for kindergarten graduation, she had told her daughter when they bought it. She would look like an angel up on stage as she gracefully accepted her little diploma. They had practised. Everything would go just right. Not like with her own mother.

“Charlotte, come back here!”

She ran. Her legs were so slow and stiff. She should have been jumping. She tried to, and couldn’t. The fog and the snow dampened her skin as she ran. She chased Charlotte deeper into the fog, into the town, away from the high whirr of the car and its rose-scented air freshener. To her left, she heard more laughter. It led her to the entrance of an alley. At the end was an old wheelchair turned over on its side – its wheels still spinning, the spokes glittering as they slowed. She entered the alley and ran toward the chair. The alley continued to her right, and she turned the corner, calling her daughter’s name. She stepped carefully over mounds of garbage. Here the buildings seemed taller, the alley darker. Up ahead was a gurney. On it was a large man’s body under a green sheet, the colour of a prison jumpsuit. The man had curly black hair. Something had burst free from his stomach. Something that left an empty hole where the sheet sunk down and soaked through.

“Charlotte!”

The alley opened again, this time to her left, and she had to crawl over the garbage on her hands and knees, and as she slipped down the wet and stinking mounds of it, she saw a chain-link fence rising up from the asphalt. There was something on the fence. It was red, and meaty, and it wore a human face. Nate’s face. It was Nate’s body. His tiny little body with the broken neck and the missing teeth. It twitched, and screamed, and then it wasn’t Nate at all, it was Junior, and he was crying to be let down, his toes were gone, and whatever had done this to him was out there with Charlotte, and Charlotte had left her, and wasn’t coming back, no matter how long she searched or fought or begged–

“My mother?” Portia asks. “Let me tell you about my mother.”

Charlotte has been very curious about this subject, lately. She wants to know all about Portia’s early life, about her grandmother, about the possibility of aunts. Naturally, Portia thinks, because she wants to know all about her gift. It runs in the family.

“My mother – your grandmother – was a nurse. She took care of humans.”

Charlotte brightens. This notion pleases her. She wants so desperately to be normal, to be just like her sisters, just like the other vN. Her dreams are so pitifully small. Happy now, she changes the subject: “I want to visit my iterations.”

Portia stands. She’d held hope for the latest batch from Charlotte and her sisters. But like all the others, they had disappointed her. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Charlotte.”

“Why not?”

It occurs to Portia that perhaps now is the time. Perhaps today, she can finally tell her daughter the whole truth, reveal to her the lengths she’s gone to in her search for another child who might fulfil the promise they share. Charlotte is almost grown, now. Every day, she asks more questions. She might be ready to see the world for what it is: a cage built from failed human endeavours, a system as broken and flawed as the one that controls their every pattern of cognition. If the animals that designed and built them had not been so stupid, none of this would be necessary. The sickness. The panic. The sacrifice.

Portia should wait until more are ready for the test. Show Charlotte in person. Show her it is not Portia’s doing, but the failsafe. She has waited this long – a little longer won’t hurt. And afterward, they will be together forever, and free. They will understand each other as women, not just merchandise. They will be no one’s crutch, no one’s helper, no one’s object. They will be a family – a perfect family, distinct and gifted and untouchable.

She smiles. “They’re very busy, right now. They’re in the other nest. Training.”

Charlotte freezes. Slowly, she turns. And Portia’s daughter – her most clever and beloved daughter – looks dangerous for the first time. It flickers there for only a moment: the intelligence, the suspicion. Pride surges through Portia. Her little girl is finally blooming.

“What are my daughters training for?”

Portia lays her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. Kisses her forehead. Let Charlotte discover the sacrifices motherhood entails some other day. Let her be a little girl for just a while longer.

“Someday, you’ll have a child who will make you as proud as you’ve made me.” She holds Charlotte’s face in her hands. It’s wet. “Someday soon, I hope.”