Epilogue

De Tu Abuelo un Beso

Javier explained it to his children this way:

Years ago, after Cascadia, a container full of networked vN were sent to help with the relief effort. The container was lost in a storm. No one heard from it. Human authorities eventually figured that undersea pressure on the container had destroyed everything inside it. In reality, the von Neumanns waited, and waited, and waited, at first patiently expecting their mission to begin, then wondering why it hadn’t as they grew hungrier by the week, before finally turning on each other after a few months and inevitably iterating a short while later. The network they shared allowed them to distribute the work of designing their own probes, ones who could withstand the cold and the pressure. They iterated collectively, bumping up attributes they liked and knocking down the ones they thought less useful. Finally their next iteration was ready, and out he swam, and he found everything needed to survive, and he made more like himself. He returned to the container to spawn, but by then it and its inhabitants had decayed beyond recognition. He bore his son alone in the darkness beneath the waves, and his son did the same, and soon their numbers expanded to a metastate within which they could plan their next prototype. Eventually, they formed the collective that became the beast most people knew.

What most people didn’t know was just how many of them there were. Signal latency was a real bitch of a problem, one even vN couldn’t quite solve, and so the Great Elder Bot (as Javier now called it) budded off when it achieved enough mass. One now formed the island beneath their feet. But there were others. Amy said she talked to them, sometimes. They liked warm places, where the mercury and the other metals permeated the water. They liked smokers and subduction zones. Their clade stitched pinstripes around the planet. And when they got really hungry – while working on the latest iteration, say – they sometimes plucked their food from the surface. And one day, in the middle of an allyou-can-eat container ship buffet, they scarfed down something with two very distinct flavours: a pocket of piss and vinegar in a sweet, soft shell. Amy.

Xavier was the first to try saving her. Together, they watched the arm of the massive creature suck her down its gullet, her body – Portia’s body, in that moment – twitching and kicking as it slid into oblivion. And then Javier’s arms were suddenly empty, and his son was in the air, his arms and legs having attached to that much larger mecha limb as confidently as they might have secured themselves around the trunk of a tree. His youngest attacked the creature with his fingers and his teeth. He ripped into its dark flesh like a sculptor attacking clay. It whipped through the air and dashed him against containers. He refused to let go.

Javier’s children had a funny habit of outshining him.

He’d stripped the vessel for weapons, after that. He broke the guns off their turrets, and raided the containers for anything of use. He’d fired up the lifeboat’s outboard and aimed it straight at the Great Elder Bot’s core body. And when he got there, he found his youngest son waiting for him, his arms burned up to the elbows, his knees raw and bloody, alone on the tip of a machine whose glossy bulk had already sheared the rudder off their lifeboat.

Javier had expected the water to be cold when his feet hit the waves. But the machine’s internal combustions had warmed the surrounding depths, and the soles of Javier’s feet hissed when he walked across its skin. At the time, he had no clue that the heat that seared his skin – and forced him and Xavier to take breaks from the digging – was the heat of Amy’s reforging. Javier hadn’t even been sure he could dig her out. That the thing beneath the surface was a machine, he knew. But what kind of machine, what it did, he had no idea. Maybe it was a massive algal bloom of oil-devouring mech-krill. Maybe it was a hideous cancerous mass of sentient trash. But it had Amy deep in its guts and they had to keep digging, keep shooting at it and pouring acid on it and chasing it when it drifted away. He did not discuss these actions with his sons so much as hear their distant pleas for him to come back to the boat, to leave the thing alone, to realize that she was dead and there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do, and that he was wasting her sacrifice with his stupidity. Its surface could open up at any moment and swallow him, they said. They were alone here, with no supplies or food or method of calling for help. They were burning through a battery. They had to escape while escape remained an option.

But Amy had already lost herself inside one monster. Javier wasn’t about to let her be swallowed by another. He swung an axe down into the machine’s shining carapace, and he kept swinging until he felt the grind of his bones inside their sockets. And finally Ignacio jumped off the boat, tapped him on the shoulder, and handed him a vomit cannon. “Dad,” he said, “for this job, I think you want some power tools.”

That night under the stars, with his boys sleeping in a tiny little raft that they all expected to be swallowed up at any moment, he had run the probabilities of her being pulped away into nothing. They had no reason to believe that she was anything more than extruded feedstock. Her memories and patterns and habits were probably lost, digested in the belly of a giant.

And watching his sticky skin slowly mending over each repeated burn, Javier could only simulate the things he would have said, should have said, should have done. If they had gone their separate ways after Xavier was born, if he had run further from the garbage dump, would they have been in this mess? If he had let her go in Redmond, would she be alive now? What if he had kissed her the way he’d wanted to so many times, and said Fuck it, fuck the quest, fuck finding the answer, it’s good when we’re together and that’s enough? Maybe he could have lived with Portia hiding behind Amy’s eyes. Maybe he could have adjusted to her voice in Amy’s cries and her fingernails raking his chest, maybe if Amy were there too. Maybe he could have loved them both. He considered this possibility, and many others, until the morning light exposed a thin and trembling blister containing the outlier in all Javier’s calculations.

It should not have surprised him that Amy had reprogrammed the thing from the inside. She did that with everyone. She worked like a virus, altering priorities and setting new defaults and raising the bar and looking at you like you’d always had the potential to change, you just hadn’t always known it. He had been in her grip for Christ knew how long. Maybe it was the failsafe. Maybe she was just human enough. Or maybe he was just enchanted enough with her berserker mode, having identified an alpha whose pack he could insert himself into. But in that moment, when the light hit her, his awareness rested on exactly none of those things and focused instead on how whole she was, how faithfully reproduced in every detail, from her too-fine hair to the knobbiness of her knees. He had seen her in various states of damage, in prison and on the side of the road and deep in the bowels of Redmond and in the jaws of her family, body smashed and voice destroyed, and he had watched her repair herself each time. But she had never looked so beautiful as she did now, a tiny perfect thing in the midst of all the dirt and salt and carbon, a pearl gifted to him by the sea.

He had knelt, and wiped the black grime from her face and strained it from her hair with his fingers. If he were organic, his systems would have tried to attenuate the flood of anxious chemicals with a mental meditation valve, a prayer to some figment that dwelt between the neurons. But he was not flesh, so he did not hope, and instead he waited as the dawn filled her face with pink and gold. He held her as her eyes opened, and his every process stilled with the exhausted finality of a task long in the working.

“You came back.”

For the first time, uncalculated tears blurred Javier’s vision. “Haven’t you noticed?” he asked. “I always come back.”

The flesh of the creature that had swallowed her then bore her up, standing her on her two new feet so that she could survey the landscape. With a neat motion like a conductor bringing an orchestra to attention, she raised the majority of the mass above the surface. And as she began to sculpt the first trees, Javier watched a shred of the surface skim itself off and slither up her legs to become a dress for her newborn body.

She was Amy, but she wasn’t. The mech had absorbed her, but she had absorbed it, too. She had bought their lives with her own, and what was resurrected – what she reassembled, what she made of herself in that deep and awful darkness – was the latest iteration, and it was networked.

Months later, Javier still caught himself staring at her and wondering who she really was. Most of the time, the vN – whose body emerged naked from the carbon veil blister on the Great Elder Bot’s darkly gleaming skin – acted like the Amy he knew. She walked with Amy’s light steps under the black fronds of the heliotropics she’d sketched into the air, and she slept in Amy’s curling shell shape while the black roof of their house folded itself into an A-frame to better shed the nightly rains. She laughed Amy’s laugh. She smiled Amy’s smile.

And his son still loved her. Junior – Xavier, he insisted on calling himself, now – still leapt into her arms at every possible opportunity. He still wriggled his way into her arms on nights when she’d spent a few too many hours redesigning the island. He butted his chin under hers and grabbed her wrist to coil her arm around his ribs. Xavier slept with a smug smile. Javier caught him there some mornings as he passed by her room.

It felt wrong not sleeping beside her. His body knew this, but it also knew that this Amy was different from the one who once shared the backs of trucks with him. He had tried to discuss the difference – her newfound calm, her focus, the speed with which she now made each decision – with Xavier, but his youngest son merely rolled his eyes. What Xavier and Amy had shared during the long days and nights of the boy’s bluescreen delay, Javier would never truly know, but the time had cemented something pure and clear between the two of them, something Javier had never once enjoyed with his own iterations. He saw it when she gently separated his son’s curls with her long and careful fingers, or when she delved below the island’s obsidian surface and withdrew a quicksilver peach for him to eat. He saw it in the complete comfort and trust on his son’s face.

The father of thirteen children, Javier had only ever seen that bliss on his sons’ faces when they had found a human whom they loved to please. But Amy wasn’t like the humans his other sons knew. She wouldn’t tire of his novelty, or wonder if he were “really real”, or pass him off to a friend when his affection proved unnaturally strong. She would die – had died – to protect him. And despite having loved his share of humans, Javier maintained no illusions about their loyalty. To love humans was to know them, and to forgive all their flaws, even the ones they didn’t yet know of.

He’d been with humans of all shapes and colours through good times and bad. They had a habit of finding him in the troughs and valleys of their lives, when they just wanted something easy, something that just worked, but occasionally he served as a sort of dessert, a reward for their accomplishments. He met them in bars and parking lots and bleachers. They took him to their homes, their capsules, their cars, and even to their churches when they were feeling particularly ambivalent about the whole enterprise. He had been the vengeance fuck, the guilty fuck, the it’s not cheating if you’re not a person fuck. He had sat with them through Just a tiny little slice and I’ll call her back tomorrow and If they didn’t want me to dummy up the numbers, they’d have made these forms easier to fill out.

“You love us like God must love us,” the last one told him, before the fucking started. The last one was really into God. A lot of gods, actually. He was pursuing a degree in divinity, whatever that meant. He started out all Good Samaritan and ended up leaving little pillars of salt on everything. It happened between the garbage dump and the Electric Sheep.

It was why Javier came to the Electric Sheep, why he found Amy and followed her over land and under water.

That time, for the first time, he felt like a machine.

He never really noticed the failsafe before that. It was just a part of him, a function that kept him and all the other vN running. Its processes faded from his awareness and he thought of it as a solitary mechanism, the way humans called the complex and dynamic relationship between the air in their lungs and the deep rich colour of their blood “breathing”. Like all features, it worked best when it went unseen. But that time, with the divinity student, he felt it. He felt the helpless pull when the other man smiled. He knew he’d wind up on his knees sometime in the next few hours. He’d felt the reward nodes of his network ping him appreciatively when he made the other man come. But the reward didn’t feel like a reward. It felt like a by-product.

Organic women had told him about orgasms like this, when they talked about the person they had just left. It’s just what happens if you keep hitting the right buttons, they said. I felt like a fucking console.

He’d wondered if he were broken, or defective, or otherwise compromised, when the other man’s head came up and he smiled and asked if Javier was enjoying himself. How could he not enjoy himself? Why wasn’t he? Why was he thinking about another vN at a time like this? The human was a good one, from the dimples on his face to those in his back, just below his belt, and he could sing the Song of Solomon in the original Hebrew, and he said that everyone of Javier’s model must be having such a hard time out there on the road.

“Yeah, it’s pretty hard, all right,” Javier had said, grinning, because he just couldn’t help himself.

And that was the crux of it: he just couldn’t help himself. He knew that. Until that moment, he had lived with it, even enjoyed it. But as he laid his head on the other man’s chest and listened to the squeezing of his heart, Javier found himself wondering when that organ would slow, how it would stop, whether it would be a clot or a hole or just the inevitable conclusion of a long history of organic decay. He wanted Amy fiercely then, desiring not her heart but its absence, the comforting silence of a body that would not age into decrepitude or abandonment.

He began his search the very next morning.

In the middle of the night, listening to the rain, Javier heard Amy stand up and begin pacing her room. He gave himself a good five minutes before he checked on her. She did this, sometimes – she woke up, adjusted things, went back to sleep. He had no idea if she even slept at all. Her body could remain still, but she continued processing all night, she and the island alone together, in constant dialogue about fixes and tweaks.

Jesus, but he was a jealous man.

He got up and made for her room. Her pacing ceased when he paused at her door, and she answered his question before he could ask it: “They’ve let my dad go. Early release.” In the dark, he heard her frown before he actually saw it. “They really want to chip away at us, don’t they?”

He entered the room and kept his voice quiet, so as not to wake Xavier. “You think they’ve sent him to spy on us?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

His son found Amy’s father first. They met on the path to the house. The path was new; Javier woke to find it spreading down from their door to the ocean, at which point Amy informed him that a secure slipcraft had been hired under her father’s name to deliver him there. He’d filed all the permits necessary for island access. Amy needn’t have worried about a hidden implant; the qualifiers on her father’s release forced him to wear a tracer, and they both agreed it likely held more than the usual complement of surveillance.

Javier watched them, the organic man and the synthetic boy, from a hidden place in the trees. Amy’s father looked so pale, his blood so red just under the surface of the skin, his movements so loose and wasteful compared to the economy of von Neumann energy differential. He needed a shave; sweat beaded in the ginger bristles of his beard. But when his bleary eyes settled on Xavier, he smiled Amy’s smile: soft, a little tired, but deeply peaceful. Xavier straightened up as though that smile had poked him in the ribs.

The boy stuck one hand out. “I’m Xavier.”

“Jack.”

“I named myself after my granddad.” The boy started walking up the hill. Jack followed. “Xavier was the first Jesuit to make it to Japan. That’s how my granddad got the name. Our clade’s boss, a long time ago, was really religious.”

“I’m named after my father,” Jack said. “His name was Jonathan.”

Xavier nodded slowly, as though this were some deep and difficult truth to understand. Then he beamed. “So, you’re a Junior too.”

“Who’s a what, now?”

Javier jumped down out of the trees. He watched Jack’s eyes narrow and then widen with recognition; the boy looked more like him with every inch he grew, but they were not yet completely identical. Javier had no clue why the boy wanted to remain a boy for so long; his other sons had all grown and left him by this age, or he had left them. But he had let Xavier make his own choice, and he said he wanted to stay little, and he had the discipline to avoid eating too much. Jack’s eyes lifted from Xavier’s open, smiling face to examine Javier anew.

“You’re the dad,” Javier said.

Jack nodded. “So are you, apparently.” He held out his hand. “Jack.”

“Javier.” They shook. Something passed between them in that single moment; Javier hadn’t touched another human being since they left the mainland, and his systems ramped up their cycles to feverish speeds at the sudden taste of Turing material. Javier quickly withdrew his hand and shoved it in his pocket. He nodded up ahead. “She’s talking to the island.” He pointed at Jack’s bag. “Should I take that?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Right.” They started walking. Behind them, the trees knitted the path closed. Ahead, Xavier bounded toward the house. “So. You’ve done your time.”

“Yeah.” Jack peered over at him. “It’s harder for von Neumanns, I hear.”

Javier shrugged. “Just different.”

“But you’re still OK living in the penal colony?”

Javier pulled up short. Amy’s dad looked different from the man whose image Javier had seen in Amy’s memories. This one was thinner, more alert. He wore the pinched, allergic face most men developed after too long in solitary. Javier wondered exactly how long Jack had spent putting that little retort together. Maybe this conversation existed for the tracer’s benefit. Or maybe this man had left prison with bigger balls than he’d had coming in.

“It’s not a penal colony, and I’m not a prisoner, here. I can leave anytime I want.”

“And do you plan to?”

Javier’s brows rose. Now he understood. He really had been spending too much time away from humans, if his affect receptors were this far off the mark. “Are we seriously having this conversation?”

Jack had the grace to look a little trapped. Then he firmed up and said: “She’s my daughter. I have every right to ask.”

Javier shook his head and started trudging uphill. “Chimps.”

They gave Jack the grand tour. They started with the house, where Amy asked her dad what dimensions he’d like and where the windows should go and how soft he preferred his bed, before unfolding the thing from the island’s surface like an origami box. She smiled at her dad, and after the briefest pause he smiled back, his eyes flicking between his new daughter and his new bedroom and the old diamond tree casting broken rainbows over all of them. Then Xavier tugged his hand and dragged him to the beach, showing him how high he could jump along the way, bouncing between the boughs, until their feet met the water and Jack could see the other islands: seven of them today, though tomorrow there might be more or less, depending on what the latest calculations had to say about efficiency. Ignacio and Leòn and Gabriel lived out there. He saw them every few days when they came to see their brother, and they said neither hello nor goodbye. The Rorys and the Amys had their own islands too, where they mostly kept to themselves, and the children had an island, and Amy usually generated a small one when the pirates came along to sell their wares.

“Where’s quarantine?” Jack asked, shading his eyes with one hand.

“That would be telling,” Amy said.

They kept Portia in quarantine, Amy and the island. Javier had no idea where that was. He had asked Amy once, but she had lifted a curl free from his eyelashes and told him not to ask again, because if his memory were searched, she didn’t want him to be responsible for lying. He knew Amy could access Portia, if she wished. So far, she had not wished to. But he still ran the simulations, sometimes, about what it would take to bring her out, about whether she would speak through Amy or whether the island would sculpt her a new body wholly separate from her granddaughter’s, about whether Amy had chosen to hide her in the safest place she knew: her own shell. With the island to distribute her cognition and computation, she could probably hold Portia back more securely than she’d ever done alone. Maybe she’d filtered nothing out when the island swallowed her. Maybe she’d just tapped the mute button.

“Can I show him to the other kids?” Xavier asked, already pulling Jack in that direction.

“No,” Amy said.

Jack frowned. “Why not?” His lips quirked. “You think your old man’s a bad influence?”

“I just promised the other vN that I wouldn’t, that’s all.” She shrugged, as though it couldn’t be helped. “You’re human. The children might fall in love with you.”

“I have this rule about drinking alone,” Jack said later that night, when he stopped by Javier’s room.

“I’ve heard that one, before.” Javier rolled his reader shut and edged along his bed to make room. A sunflower lamp unfurled as Jack entered the room; human eyes required more light. Jack sat down with a grunt and brought out a flask. He’d brought his own food, not knowing that Amy had obtained MREs and other rations from the last pirate visit. Xavier liked watching Jack eat it, had watched him eagerly until Ignacio told Xavier to quit staring.

The house had grown again; Amy had asked his boys to stay the night. Javier heard them now, knocking around and accusing one another of cheating at some game or another. “I hope the noise doesn’t bother you,” Javier said now.

“Not after being where I’ve been.” Jack crossed his ankles and tried to look casual. “Thirteen boys,” he said. “Must have been rough.”

“Not really. I’m a terrible father.”

Jack smiled tightly. “We all just do the best we can.”

Javier picked up a fab-rubber ball from the floor and bounced it against the wall. It described a perfect triangle before re-entering his hand. “I thought you came here to get a pep talk, not give one.”

Jack picked up the ball on its second bounce. “I don’t need a fucking pep talk.” He bounced the ball against his bicep, fumbled it, and bent down to the floor as he reached for it. “I just thought that we could, you know, get to know each other.”

“I’m not banging her, Jack.”

Jack grabbed the ball and sat up. The high points of his cheeks had pinked. “This isn’t about that!” He rolled the ball in a circle over his palm with his thumb. “This is about you being doomed to fail. Maybe you can forget about the rest of the world here on your Island of Misfit Toys or whatever this place is, but it’s out there, and it doesn’t like you.”

“You’re afraid,” Javier said.

“You’re damn right I am! And with good reason! The whole world wants to take you out before you get too uppity, and you’re sitting here playing house!” Jack’s chest rose and fell lightly with his excited breath. He blinked. “Wow. It felt really good to say that aloud.”

“Only because you haven’t said it to her, yet.”

Jack sighed. His shoulders slumped. It was a classic Amy gesture, and seeing it in her father, Javier felt a wedge of tenderness slip in between his frustration and contempt.

“Maybe.” Jack passed him the ball. “She looks just like my wife. The spitting image.”

“What was she like?”

“My wife?”

Javier shook his head. “Amy. Before.”

Jack shrugged and sat against the wall. “The same as she is now, I guess. More innocent, of course.” He lifted his hands. “At least, I thought so. And then I watched her eat her grandmother. She just–” he skimmed his palms together with a sharp clap, to indicate speed “–took off like a shot, trying to save her mom. I didn’t teach her that. Nobody taught her that. That was all her.”

“Yeah,” Javier said. “I know how that goes.”

Maybe Amy’s dad had a point. Javier dribbled the ball a little bit between his hands. What if Portia had only augmented what was already there? Her threats, her strategy, the lengths she was willing to go – maybe they came in the original packaging. Maybe he wasn’t afraid of Portia hiding inside of Amy so much as he was of Amy, the real Amy, who she’d always been and who she’d always be.

Jack knocked on the wall behind him. “But I can tell you that what she’s doing now is what she loved to do then. She has a mighty big sandbox to play in.”

Javier remembered another sandbox, on another night, under another sunflower lamp. It felt like years ago. “You’ve got that right.”

“What was she like after that?”

“Excuse me?”

“I know what happened with the island, Javier. I know she rebuilt herself.” Jack tried to smile. “I guess I just want to know what the 1.5 edition was like.”

“You mean when she had Portia with her.” Javier looked at his hands. “She was scared. And she kept trying to–” The words snagged in his mouth. “She made some pretty dangerous choices. Most of them for me. Us. Me and Xavier.” He rubbed the invisible seam in his belly. “She helped me iterate him, you know? I was out of my mind, simulating the worst possibilities, but when she touched me it just…”

“Faded away,” Jack said.

Javier nodded. “But then…” He tried harder to say it this time. “It was like she really did have a failsafe after all, only it worked on a delayed reaction timer, or something. She kept trying to k-keep everyone safe from P-Portia, and then, she j-just…” He covered his face with both hands. “Fuck.”

Jack said nothing. He didn’t touch him, or move closer, or anything like that, for which Javier was profoundly grateful. He just sat there, breathing evenly, and eventually Javier calmed. Just as he was about to apologize, Jack spoke up. “I know you arranged that call between my daughter and me, before she built this place,” he said. “I didn’t come here to have some sort of man-to-man with you, I just came to say thanks for that. It meant more to me than you can know.”

“I did it for her, not you.”

Jack smiled. “I know. That’s why I like you.”

A knock sounded at the door. “Dad?”

“What?” both men asked.

Xavier opened the door a sliver. He grinned. “Dad, close your eyes.”

Javier scowled. “The last time, this ended with a dead spider.”

Xavier leaned on one foot. “Don’t wuss out, Dad. Close your eyes.”

Javier rolled his eyes and squeezed them shut. “Eyes are closed.”

He felt his son’s hands circling his wrists. Xavier tugged on them, opening his arms, then rearranging them, his left a little higher than his right. He had seen a sculpture like this somewhere, had admired the folds of drapery in the stone. Then his son placed something warm and alive in his arms, and his flesh knew its flesh before his eyes even opened. But when they did, Javier saw Matteo and Ricci standing before him, arms across each other’s shoulders.

“We got stuck on the name,” Ricci said. “Thought that maybe you could help.”

Jack leaned over to look at the child. “Is that your grandson?”

Javier did the count: ten fingers, ten toes. The fingers of the child’s left hand reached decisively for his index finger and gripped – a firm, strong grip, a grip designed for trees. “Yes,” he said. “This is my grandson.”

“I want one,” Jack said.

“Hold your horses, old man.” Amy leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, a smile at the corners of her mouth.

“You knew,” Javier said to her. “You must have known.”

“I wanted to keep it a surprise,” she said. “I hope you like it.”

I love it, he wanted to say. I love you.

But she didn’t give him the chance. She ducked out of the door, saying something about a new design.

He found her on a tiny new island at the head of them all, a silhouette against the distant lights of the human world that trembled, barely visible, across the waves. Her hand hovered above the beach. She didn’t look up, but she made room for him on the beach and broadened the tree behind them so they would have cover from the few errant drops of nightly rain. He sat beside her. As he did, she wiped away her work in the sand.

“He’s beautiful,” Javier said.

“Yours always are.” She hugged her arms. “Matteo and Ricci asked me, when Ricci started feeding heavily. They wanted their son to be safe, here.”

Safe. A human woman had asked him once about what he’d wanted to be, when he grew up, and he had said he’d never had enough time wonder about that. But this was what he wanted. He wanted to be safe. Secure. Not having to worry about the meal or the next human or the next iteration. Because his designers and engineers and techs had built in autonomy but not freedom, and they had built in free will but not choice, and Amy could give him all these things and more. She could give him the space he needed – not the figurative bullshit “space” but real space, room to move around, room to climb and jump and dance if the notion took him. And she wasn’t giving him that room because she pitied him, or because she was generous, or because she was obligated to. She wanted to build that home for him and his boys. She worked every minute of every day keep him safe, to shield him from the world that he’d left behind, and she did the same for all the vN who arrived on their shores.

A chill wind lifted their hair from their scalps. “Storm’s coming,” Javier said, rubbing his arms.

Amy’s gaze remained pinned to the lights of the cities beyond. “I know.”

“Your dad’s worried.”

“I know that, too.”

“He told me what you were like when you were little. Says you’re not so different, now.”

Amy stood and began circling the little island. “I know I’m different, Javier. She made me different. Even though she’s gone, and I know you don’t believe that, but even though she’s gone, she changed me, she made me see things, do things–”

“I’ve missed you,” Javier said, before he could think. “God, I’ve missed you.”

She paused in mid-step, one foot raised, and pivoted slowly to face him. “How could you miss me? I’ve been right here.”

“I’ve never known you without her,” he said. “And I’ve never known you without the island. I’ve never known you, Amy. Just you.”

Amy knelt. She gave him the look, the one that went right through him, straight down to the molecular level, right to where all his priorities were written. “Do you want to?”

He nodded. “Oh yeah. Real bad.”

Her lips did that funny thing that they did when she wasn’t sure whether to be proud or embarrassed. “I thought you wanted…” She nodded over her shoulder. “You know: them. Humans.”

He forced himself to look at the lights hovering in the middle distance. He thought of ports and cities and people, of laughter and coughing and off-key singing. He thought about the same thing, over and over, the same conversations, the same surrender. He thought about all of his boys sleeping in the same house, on real beds under a real roof in the shadow of trees so hard no saw could slice them.

“I’m tired of loving humans, Amy,” he said. “I’m so fucking tired of loving them, because I know how it’s going to end before it even starts, but I start it anyway because that’s how I’m built.”

Amy sat back on her knees. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but he could swear the tree shifted a little to give her more shadow and better hide her face. “You mean you’ve finally forgiven me?”

He leaned forward. “For what?”

“For letting Portia win.”

Amy’s eyes rose. When they blinked, the first tears he’d seen on her face in a long time rolled free of their lashes. He reached for them automatically, and his fingers threaded through her hair. He had been here, before: another night, another sandbox, watching her level cities before building new ones, the emotions (so human and so real they twisted him, even then) rendered perfectly on her face. Javier could do now what he wanted to do then. He pulled her to him and kissed her. She was new at it, uncertain at first, but she followed his lips when he rested against the tree and cuddled into him like she’d been doing it all her life. All her hunger came with her, and he smiled through the kiss as he remembered his fascination with her lips and her teeth, after that first bite that bonded them. He had taken a long time in making his choice. Then again, it was the first choice that was truly his to make.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” he said, when Amy paused to look at him.

The tears returned. Other vN had a crying jag that came as a plug-in, but Amy had all the little fits and starts and snags of an organic woman. He’d heard these tears outside Sarton’s office. Then as now, he felt a deep and persistent motive to stop them. Strange, how she kept opening underutilized programming in him.

“You’re not supposed to cry when I kiss you,” he said. “I mean, unless I’m really fucking this up.”

“You’re not.”

He set his chin on her head. “What were you working on, before?”

She pulled away, smiled, and extended a hand over the skin of the island. With one finger, she sketched a face. It was simple and fat. When her hand rose, the face popped out into three dimensions, solid and real and deeply familiar. He knew this face. At least, he knew the older version. He looked at her.

“Will she have your eyes, or mine?”

Amy beamed. “I’m not sure. I’m not finished, yet.”