iD (23 page)

The first round hissed past his head, and he jumped. He jumped randomly, bouncing against a rafter and falling down clumsily to the “street” below. The humans looked entirely different, now. They were no longer tourists, or even actors. They fired without blinking.

“You called the fucking
army?
” He jumped higher. He had to find a sprinkler. Something that would trigger an alarm. Anything.

“I guess she never changed you,” Rory called. “If she had, you’d be able to fight back.”

Javier jumped down into the food stalls. He overturned the bowls of goldfish. They sloshed down to the ground. He flipped over carts of fruit. The smell of the bullets stung his eyes. A fine yellow mist was rising. He jumped higher, again. If he went down there again, he wouldn’t even be able to see. As he watched, some of the humans reloaded.

He was going to die, here. Slowly. No one was going to save him. No one was coming. Amy was gone. Powell probably had his kids, already. Jack was on the run. Holberton and Alice and Manuel and Tyler and Simone were all far away. He should have stayed with them. They’d all offered him the one thing he’d never had: a home. And he’d gone on this stupid quest instead, and had nothing to show for it, not even the diamond where the love of his life had her soul encrypted. Now all that was left of her was her psychotic grandmother.

Portia.

“PORTIA!”
He stared at Ringmaster Rory.
“Help!”
 

For a moment, nothing happened. Below, they all stared at him as though he'd lost his mind. Maybe it wouldn't work. Maybe she wasn't listening. Or maybe he just hadn't said the magic word.

"Please! Portia! I need your help!"

Ringmaster Rory jerked. A look of horror crossed her face. She tried to run into the crossfire. But as Javier watched, she ran straight for the barbecue pit, instead. She paused to beam up at him. "Looks like I'm the answer to your prayers, sweetie. Now cover your eyes."

Then she picked up the charcoal grill, lifted it over her head, and threw it at the humans. Sparks flew. Hot coals spilled free. Two humans were pinned screaming beneath its weight. He smelled burning flesh. His vision started to pixel. The humans were shooting at Portia, now, but she ran straight into the bullets, hands out, mouth open. Belatedly, he realized there were three of Rory in the room. Now all three were Portia. Their skin began to ash away, flaking up in spirals just like the sparks, but they each chose a human and beelined for their new targets.

He covered his eyes. He covered his ears. He heard the cracking, anyway. The ripping. The screaming. And then Portia's terrible laughter. It sounded thick and wet, like her mouth was full of meat.

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change, darling. You just keep that in mind."

Everything went black.

 

When they pried him loose from the rafters, he told them that the vN in the room had all gone insane. The spiders – he spoke with three, all in one room – all nodded their huge bodies and spun their claws and downcast their many eyes.

“It’s so unfortunate,” one said. “It’s been happening so randomly to that clade, we thought we’d still be OK using it as security.”

“You might want to look into that,” Javier said. “You know. Revamp that particular policy.”

And after he signed an affidavit promising never to talk about what he’d seen, they let him go.

His new citizenship granted him the privilege of sleeping in a capsule room for a month while he made other living arrangements. It was a seven-by-three-by-four foot space, complete with a futon, a tiny display, a fan, and a little set of shelves no deeper than an old paperback. You entered it by waving your little petty cash card at a door in a blank-looking building and taking the elevator that blinked a green light at you. On the seventh floor, another blinking green light led him to a hatch. He waved his card at it, and it popped open.

“Hello, Javier,”
Rory said, when he closed the hatch behind him.

He looked at the hatch just in time to watch a bolt slide across it.

“Hija de puta,”
he muttered. “What do you want now, Rory?”

“Just a chat.”
 

Javier rolled his eyes and stretched out on the futon. There was a little package of vN candy on the pillow. They looked like little Buckyballs made of sugar, but they were probably just carbon. He rustled the package. “Yeah? You know what we could talk about? How about your latest fucking attempt on my life?”

“That’s what we wanted to discuss. We’re very sorry, Javier.”
 

It occurred to him that Rory might actually be lonely. She – they – had no friends. No real ones. Just pawns. Pawns, and multiple iterations of the same self. Javier was on a very short list of people who knew who Rory really was. The rest was just an echo chamber.

“Where is this going, Rory?”

“We’re curious about your plans in Mecha.”
 

There was no way in hell he was going to tell her about his kids. “Oh, you know. The usual. Drink some tea, eat some rofu. Maybe work at a host club.” He eyed the hatch. “If you ever let me out, that is.”

“Of course we’re going to let you out. We just thought we’d say hello. And apologize.”
 

Javier frowned. He knew Rory. She never just said hello. “I haven’t told anybody what you’re doing to the pedophiles,” he said. “So you can’t be pissed at me for that.”

“We’re not angry with you, Javier.”
 

His frown deepened. “You do remember that you tried to have me killed in Las Vegas, right?”

“We remember.”
 

“And that you have just tried to have me killed again? Like, yesterday?”

“We regret that very deeply. We are reevaluating our decision-making apparatus.”
 

“And so, what, the slate is just wiped clean, now?”

There was a long pause.
“Yes.”
 

He wished he could sit up. He settled for pushing himself up on his elbows. “So, let me get this straight. I kill one of yours in Costa Rica, I kill two of yours in Las Vegas, Portia kills three of yours in Mecha, and now you’ve got me locked up in a room that looks like a coffin, and you’re just going to let me go?”

“We wanted to welcome you to Mecha. Despite our best efforts, you’ve made it here.”
 

She had something, there. She had originally promised him and Amy passage to Mecha, only to try drowning them. A year later, he was finally here, but Amy wasn’t.

“Well, thanks,” he said. “Is that all?”

“We just want you to remember this conversation, later on. Remember that we let you go. We can be generous. We can be accommodating.”
 

The bolt slid back, and the hatch opened.

“You may want to visit the ninja forest, on the island’s western edge. The acrobats are quite captivating.”
 

“Acrobats,” Javier said.

“They’re really something, Javier. You should go. But the only entry is via the old city, so you’ll have to get admission there, first.”
 

“Thanks for the tip, Rory, but I don’t exactly trust you,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re leading me into a trap.”

“We are not trying to trap you, Javier. We are trying to help you.”
 

“See, that’s the part I’m not ready to believe. Because you’ve
never
helped me, Rory. Ever.”

“We are trying to make up for that, now.”
 

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“We are dying.”
 

“… What?” Was that even possible? Rory had distributed herself across hundreds – if not thousands – of her clademates. She lived in their network. And she’d lived there long enough to iterate multiple generations. For her to be dying meant…

“Portia is winning, Javier. She is destroying us from the inside.”
 

“How?”

The display flickered on. On it, he saw a Rory model in a kitchen. It was a mixed-species kitchen. Javier could tell, because there was a basket of fruit on the counter that only humans could eat. It was night. Very late, judging by the clock on the microwave. The view was from a camera embedded in one of the appliances; Javier guessed it was the refrigerator. She stood before the stove. She raised one trembling hand to it and held it aloft. Javier watched as she stood there, her hand shaking. She stood there, her whole body shuddering as her fingers spasmed. And then her hand pounced down on the dials of the stove, and very quickly lit each of the burners. It was only a small amount of heat; Javier couldn’t even see any flame. But it was enough. Her face blank but her eyes wet, she turned away from the stove and sat down.

“It only takes a minute,”
Rory said.
“A blown fuse, a sudden swerve, a mixture of bleach and ammonia in a closed room. We kill ourselves, afterward. The coroners think it’s because we’ve failsafed, watching the deaths of our human families.”
 

It wasn’t Portia’s usual way of doing things – that was to take control of someone’s body and kill all the humans within range with her bare hands. “Why doesn’t she just kill the humans?”

“We don’t know.”
 

The image on the display fizzled a little. It blipped. Then it went black.

THESE BITCHES NEED TO LEARN HOW TO DO IT RIGHT.
 

Javier swallowed.

TELL THE LITTLE ONES GRANNY SAYS HI.
 

 

The city of Mecha stood on what was once Dejima, the artificial island originally used to house foreign traders between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Javier’s new ears told him this as he wandered through it. The old island had been only nine thousand square meters in total; it was now many times that size, having annexed the old Naval Training Centre as well as some of the city of Nagasaki. The original island stood at the centre of the total landmass, and it was the only place in town where the buildings remained low. Skyscrapers loomed over it, casting the reproduction Dutch warehouses and townhouses in a constant shadow that left the snow accumulated on every rooftop a pale blue. He didn't understand why the humans on the cruise liner had needed an artificial winter; real winter seemed just fine out here.

Javier had visited a few great, old cities in his time. Mexico City was probably the oldest, standing as it did on the shoulders of Tenochtitlan. But where the ancient roots of that city were almost invisible, the gilt-edged heels of each cathedral grinding the stone faces of each temple into the hungry mud of Lake Texcoco, here the remnants were a tourist attraction. It was like watching a body laid out in state: the little houses with their white and blue china and their long tables and their stiff-backed horsehair chairs arranged as neatly as the bones of an elder statesman. Javier considered this as he wandered through the oldest part of the city. They were still nice houses, in their own way. A little dark, perhaps, but cozy. Perfect for vN, or any other species that didn’t truly require indoor plumbing. He liked the raked gravel in the alleys, and the way the vN staff left out food and water for cats in dishes printed to look like wooden shoes.

It was all real. Tangible. Not like the Museum of the City of Seattle, that painted harlot of a city-wide earthquake memorial that appeared like a PTSD flashback if only you wore the right glasses. Not like the dry fountains outside the Akiba, in Las Vegas. Not augmented reality, but an entirely separate and equally valid
consensual
reality, as dishonest in its performance of what might once have been as Javier’s iterations were inexact copies of himself.

It helped that only cosplayers were allowed in.

Javier bounced a little in his sandalled feet. The wood bottoms of his
geta
were surprisingly comfortable. They’d been printed from a cedar-cellulose composite, which improved the smell a great deal. He’d obtained them at the Tori-Tori, one of the four gates to the old city. The Tori-Tori had a big old quadcopter drone skinned to look like a majestic red bird. The other gates had a white tiger, a blue serpent, or a black turtle. Who knew what they were made of. But the quadcopter was the most famous, because every hour on the hour it squirted some butane down the bones of its exoskeleton, burst into flames, and flew away to some distant rooftop. On that rooftop, someone skinned it again, and then it flew back just in time to repeat the process. It was a low-tech solution, but as Javier watched the bird dip and arc and perch and preen, he thought it worked. It looked old. It looked as old as the surrounding buildings, despite the fact that it was built centuries later. It matched.

At the Tori-Tori, the vN inside the little wooden kiosk asked him whether he wanted to be foreign or not.

“You could be a Portuguese, circa 1543,” one of them said. She looked like Rory, but if the network had warned her about him, she made no sign of it.

“That’s the brownest option you’ve got, is it?”

Some algorithm in her activated, and she blushed. Colour diffused from one high cheekbone to the other, spreading across the bridge of her nose without ever touching the tip. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a tiny, breathy voice that sounded like what would happen if fluffy white kittens ever gained the ability to speak.

“It’s fine.” Javier started removing his dad’s clothes. “I’ll take it.”

The “Portuguese” costume wasn’t the
most
ridiculous thing he’d ever worn, but it was pretty damn close. Under his sandals – standard issue for everyone, no matter what costume they wore – he wore pale tights that rose up into a pair of puffy culottes that ballooned around his thighs and swished as he walked. He had a weird pirate shirt with a bunch of ruffles at the collar and cuffs, and a deep green “velvet” jacket complete with a little peplum at the hip and a matching hat.