vN The First Machine Dynasty
MADELINE ASHBY
1
The Ugly Parts
Amy woke on the floor of a cage that hummed. She tried moving her legs and kicked the fencing nearest her feet, igniting a spark that jolted up from her toes to her teeth and left her so rigid even her eyes couldn't move. She hated being more conductive than organic people.
"Careful," someone said from outside the cage. "It's rigged."
The man wore a blue uniform and held a scroll-style reader between the thumb and first finger of each hand. Its anonymous blue glow made his expression hard to read. He looked organic; she could see his pores and the patchiness of his hair. Other clades had advanced plugins for differentiating humans. They used thermoptics or gait recognition or pheromone detection. Amy just looked for the ugly parts.
"Where am I?"
He didn't even bother putting down the scroll. "You're being detained."
Amy tried moving again. She had to do so carefully; her limbs were grown-up limbs now, and they were much longer and clumsier than the ones she remembered. Finally she sat with her knees to her chest and looked around. She sat in a kennel like at an animal shelter, a rectangle of white linoleum bordered by black chain-link. Across the room was another set of kennels stacked two rows high. In the centre aisle sat an empty cage, shaped more like a cube. Its floor was black.
In games, Amy had escaped far more challenging environments than this. In fact, she could have easily designed a more intimidating space, given the time and the tools. She checked for laser turrets or acid sprinklers, but found none. Maybe the whole room had a mutable magnetic field. It would certainly explain how they'd kept her asleep, and why they bothered with an organic guard. Without a helmet, he'd be vulnerable to the field and start seeing things. Did that mean the field generator was being reset? Were there other vulnerabilities in the system?
She decided to take stock of other resources. She wore a bright green jumpsuit. It didn't seem particularly sturdy, much less fire- or acid-proof. Far at the end of the kennels was another person in the same jumpsuit. She couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl just by looking, but it had a very big shape over which the fabric stretched tightly. It wasn't moving.
"Where are my parents?" She tried to think of something more intelligent to say. "They should be here. I'm a minor."
This time the scroll did fall, and a hand strayed toward his taser. The guard's eyes had the dead, blank look of someone watching late-night shows. "I don't know how it is in Oakland, but where I come from, minors know how to behave themselves."
Amy had nothing to say to that. She looked at her new prison slippers. She had never thought of her mother's feet as big, but now that she was wearing them, Amy wondered how her mom got around without tripping. How had she never noticed details like this before? Where was her mother now? Was she still repairing the damage to her body?
"May I please call my parents? I think I get a phone call. People who get arrested get a phone call, right?"
Now the guard stood. He lumbered over to the kennel and leaned close without really touching it. This close his humanity was more obvious: burst capillaries in his nose, silver hairs sprouting from a mole below his left ear, sweat stains blackening the blue of his shirt. "I think you're failing to grasp the enormity of the shit you're in. Now if you know what's good for you, you'll sit tight and wait. It won't be long, now."
"It won't be long until what?" Amy asked.
He straightened up and pulled his shirt down where it had bunched up over his curling waistband. He wore a yellow gold wedding ring. The skin around it was puffy and red. He must have started wearing it years ago, when his fingers were slimmer.
"You didn't have to tell me about being young," he said. "It's already on your record."
"So you know I just graduated kindergarten?"
He nodded slowly. "Yup. So I figure maybe you don't know that all you vN were designed by a bunch of Biblethumpers."
Amy shook her head. "I know. They wanted us for after the Second Coming, or something. To take care of everybody God didn't like."
"That's right. That's why you've got all the right holes and such. So people can indulge themselves without sin."
Amy's attention scattered over several simulated outcomes to this conversation. It cohered on the one in which he opened the cage to touch her, and she wove around him and got away, somehow.
As though he had run the same simulations in his own mind, the guard shook his head. He held up one hand. "Don't worry, kiddo. I'm a grown man; I don't play with dolls." He leaned down a little. "What I'm saying is, I don't know if they left behind some piety programming or what, but if they did you had better make peace with your god."