vN (32 page)

  An image of Javier's son rippled across the scroll. Javier pointed at it. "Recognize him?" As one, the boys nodded. "That's your second-youngest brother. Had him in San Diego." He turned away from the scroll. His eyes met Amy's. "The human I was with at the time, she gave him to a pedophile in a grocery store parking lot. And I let it happen. Because the failsafe told me she was the more important one."

  
And you wonder why I grew my girls in basements. You think I kept them caged, but at least they were safe – from the world, and from themselves.

  Javier faced Ignacio. "I don't know what happened to you in that prison after I left you there. I simulated it a bunch of times. Tried to do the math. But in the end I left so that I could make your other brothers, and give them a better shot than you had. And I did the same thing with the iteration you see on that scroll. I let him go so I could make that one right there." He pointed to Junior. "I left him, too. But Amy didn't. So if you're angry with me, be angry with
me
. And if you have a problem with the decisions I made, then make better ones for yourselves. Or try to. If your programming allows it."

  Javier's boys examined Amy, then looked away. In her arms, Junior squirmed and tightened his grip. Ricci was the first to look his father in the eye. "We just wanted to be brothers, Dad." He stepped around Ignacio, took Javier by the shoulders, and turned him around to face his twin. "Do you know how many times I would have died without Matteo, Dad? I need him. And if I need him this bad, then maybe the rest of us need each other, too."

  Javier hung his head. His shoulders slumped. "I was only doing what my dad taught me, and all his iterations–"

  "An iteration isn't a perfect copy, Dad," Matteo said. "It's just the next version."

  "Yeah, and
this
version thinks this whole gilded cage thing is crap." Ignacio tried to wiggle his nose back into place by stretching his upper lip. It didn't work. "I wouldn't want to be on a feed. I hate feeds."

  Léon snorted. "Leave it to you to whine about Dad grabbing the brass ring–"

  "It's a valid concern, and it merits further thought–"

  "Gabriel, I swear to Christ if you intellectualize this whole thing one more time–"

  
"I don't want to go!"

  The others fell silent. In her arms, Junior pulled away to look at Amy. Javier frowned at her. "You don't?"

  "No. I don't. Of course I don't. I don't want to be a tourist attraction. I don't want to live inside a zoo. I wore a costume and played nice for the humans at my last job, but at least I got to be myself at the end of my shift. If we go to Mecha, I won't be myself, I'll be a… a
product
. And so will you."

  Javier tilted his head. "
Querida
. You're acting like I have a choice."

  
If Sarton is right, then he doesn't.

  Amy tried to ignore the truth shivering through her systems. Slowly, she bent and put Junior down. The child looked up at her with huge eyes. Portia was right, and Amy knew it. If Sarton's theories about Amy held any significance, then she was no better than the humans who had victimized Javier his whole life. And even if he enjoyed it at the time, the failsafe limited his choices and his pleasures in a way that Amy had never experienced. It was why he'd abandoned his children so many times, and why he would abandon his youngest yet again to go to Mecha with her. She had a chance to adjust that imbalance, now, in some small way. She could grant him a kind of freedom, imperfect and incomplete – but improved. Perhaps a life exposed on camera was no more liberating than a life hidden in a basement. But a metaphorical cage had to be better than a real one. And Amy was the only one with the ability to choose freely – and in so doing, protect all of them.

  "Rory," she heard herself say, "I want you to arrange passage for all of us."

  The twins spoke in unison: "What?"

  "Everyone goes, or nobody does," Amy said.

  The room went quiet. Even the images on the scroll paused briefly. "That won't be easy, Amy. Arranging six more so quickly–"

  "Make it happen, Rory. Please." Her eyes found Javier's gaze and held it. "We're not leaving anyone behind, this time."

  Another pause. "I'll see what we can do."

  "I'll make it easier on you. Dummy up five extra visas, not six." Ignacio crossed the room to stand inches from Amy. He leaned in so close she almost lost her balance. "You may have poached our code, but you don't get to transplant us across the goddamn Pacific without asking, first."

  His face, the carbon copy of Javier's in his moments of deepest rage, registered annoyance and surprise when Junior scrambled to his feet and shoved him backward. The boy remained standing, arms folded, his tiny toes gripping the mat beneath. For a moment, Javier's first and latest iterations stared at each other silently. Then Ignacio turned his back to them, shaking his head. "Whatever."

  Matteo looked at his twin brother. "What do you think?"

  "I think we should defrag it," Ricci said.

  Matteo's brows lifted. "That's my cue." He wagged a finger at his father. "
Ser hombre bueno, viejo
."

  Ignacio nodded. "
Qué él dijo
."

  Gabriel stretched. "Well, now that we have a rotifer in the clade, I should be rereading some biology." When he noticed the rest of them staring, he rolled his eyes in a way that Amy was now certain had to be patented somewhere in an animator's portfolio – and permanently attached to Javier's clade. "Amy is a rotifer. She produces only daughters, but she incorporates code from a wide variety of other species into every new batch."

  "See, Dad?" Ignacio turned a little to nod at his brother. "Sometimes you even iterate nerds."

  "There's a species that does what I do?" Amy asked. "An organic one?"

  "It's one of the oldest on the planet. It lives at the bottom of the sea."

 
 

 
 

"Shouldn't you be inside, young lady?"

  "I'm sorry, officer, I was just feeling a little cooped up at home. I'm really missing the sun."

  "I can see you're quite the troublemaker. Think I might have to cuff you."

  "I'd love to see you try."

  "I'm beginning to think I've rubbed off on you in a bad way." Javier hopped onto the railing and began walking it, arms outstretched, his body one slip away from the churning water below. His toes gripped the steel carefully at each step. He hadn't worn shoes from the moment they boarded the container ship. That was a week ago.

  Amy looked up at him. Javier stood framed by a cloudless sky, perfectly balanced, not smiling, but not scowling, either. His calm face. It took some getting used to.

  "Please come down from there."

  Javier clasped his hands behind his back. "You know you're supposed to stay in your container. There could be botflies. Or satellites. All it takes is one facial pattern match, and we get blown out of the water."

  "I'll go back inside if you quit standing on that rail."

  One dimple appeared in the corner of his mouth. "You're on."

  He made it his usual game of chase, bounding across the riveted steel, one foot on a blue container and the other on a yellow one, or maybe green or red or just rust. They flitted over the names of companies and company towns they didn't know, places where things were built. Once upon a time, the container ships that crossed the Pacific were stacked solid with cargo; not even a finger could slide between the units. Not so, these days. Trenches gaped open between the unevenly stacked containers. Javier enjoyed hiding in those hollow spaces, the little nooks and crannies. His laughter echoed between the walls of steel, down where the ocean and engine noise couldn't dull its edges. When the ship's security systems said the air was clear, they played tag, or Marco Polo, or Sharks and Minnows, or any of the other games he'd watched his children play without ever having tried himself. He'd give her just enough time to catch up before jumping away again. Her jumps were improving. She even caught him, sometimes.

  This time he pulled up short, though. He held up one hand, and Amy landed as silently as possible behind him. She peeked over his shoulder. On the bright yellow terrace formed by an uneven stack below, Ignacio was teaching Junior the finer points of blackjack. At least, Amy assumed so. They both wore green gambling visors filched from the bridge. Blackjack required very little talking on the player's part, which made it ideal for Junior.

  Ignacio pointed. "You should double-down."

  Junior seemed to have a hard time deciding. He had a very expressive face that made understanding his wants and pref erences easy. He just never used words. No one knew why. After researching it, Gabriel suspected that a crucial component of his little brother's natural language functions had burned out somewhere along the line. They held out hope for Mecha, though. If anywhere had the right experts to deal with the problem, it was Mecha. For all Amy knew, she and the boy would be seeing the same specialists. Amy watched him point at something she couldn't see, which in the shared illusion of the visors told Ignacio to deal again.

  It came as a surprise when Ignacio told them he was coming along. Javier had blinked at him and his slender roll of clothes tucked under one arm, and then moved aside to let him hop up the ramp leading to the main deck. Ignacio still shoulder-checked Amy on his way up, though. And over the last few days he hadn't acted any differently: frequently calling his father's presence away from hers on one lame pretext or another; rolling his eyes every time she told a story; asking her pointedly if she needed a snack. It was sort of cute, the way he thought those little digs actually impacted her in some way. Amy lived with Portia locked inside her head. No one could mock her as accurately or steadfastly as her grandmother.

  They had lost Matteo and Ricci. The twins wanted to continue their search for their brothers, and they couldn't do that from Mecha. "If they're out there, they need our help now more than ever," Matteo had said. "We have to try," Ricci agreed. And so they had hugged their father and all their brothers, and then they had left. But not, however, before giving Amy a request:

  "Look after our dad," Matteo instructed. "He's getting sloppy in his old age."

  "Your father is younger than I am."

  "Oh." Matteo patted his twin's shoulder. "Your turn."

  "Just don't expect much," Ricci said. "He knows a lot about moving around, but not a lot about sticking around."

 

Inside the hot, still darkness of her container, Javier seemed to have no trouble staying put. He had his own bedroll, and his own files on the reader, and his own settings on the gaming unit. He frequently tagged her designs with comments: "More green." "More skylights." "Bigger shower. Include grab bars."

  Not that Amy honestly expected to design or build her dream condo, once they hit Mecha. She just liked playing with the layouts. The materials there were different, and the specs, and the regulations. Her much smaller self once relished in exteriors, in the knots of wood or the stippled surfaces of old bricks or the cactus-like networks of grey water pipes grafted onto old buildings. Now she considered what would go inside the space. She approached the small spaces as a challenge and then looked for the most beautiful version of every absolute necessity: the thickest towels, the finest plates.

  It felt good to have some dimensions between her hands again. She had stuck a small but good projector in the seam between her container's northern wall and ceiling, and it allowed her to stretch out the shapes of beds and sofas and tables. Under its light she sculpted chairs like roses or tubs like mouths. Her predilection for saving each of these designs, once the bane of her parents' storage allotment, became an opportunity for her to give Javier the grand tour of a different home each day.

  
You're nesting
, Portia told her, more than once.
How very organic of you.

  Amy studiously ignored her.

  "I like the
idea
of this bed," Javier said now, his finger poking at the dimensional projection of a mattress suspended on tension wire, "but I think in practise it could really get somebody hurt."

  "We can't get hurt," Amy said, before she could simulate the outcome of her words.

  Ostensibly, Javier had his own container to sleep in. He just seemed to wind up in hers, because Junior insisted on crawling inside it after the sun went down. At least, that was how it happened the first time. She woke up, their first night aboard, to see Junior's little body silhouetted against the deep blue of the night sky, framed within the container hatch, and he silently wormed his way under the covers and into her arms. He acted a like a dog who, upon circling a rug three times, sleeps in a fortuitous slant of sunshine for the rest of the afternoon. He slept with his back to her chest, no squirming or poking or kicking. Minutes later Javier arrived, shook his head, and sat down on her other side.

  "Is this OK?" he had asked.

  Implicit in all their conversations about Mecha was the assumption – at least on her part – that they would be sharing the same space. Javier still slept in his own bed, even when it was shoved up against hers. Amy had no idea if Javier slept there because he wanted to, or because the failsafe made him want to. She had no idea how to ask, either, or if he would even know the difference. Just in case, she kept her hands to herself. Shortly after sunrise, they usually found Junior in the hollow between their bedrolls. Their motion triggered the lantern, and Amy made certain to watch the slow rise of greenish light exposing the new details of Junior's face. Every morning, it looked a little more like Javier's.

  They had yet to talk about the future. They showed each other pictures, instead.