vN The First Machine Dynasty(26)

Javier turned the volume down. "I wasn't sure about that ranger at first, so I decided to check her story out. That's Rory.The one who writes the diet plans. She's a Japanese model. One of the networked ones."



Amy's lips made a little O of jealousy. "Lucky…"



"I know, right? I'd kill for that connectivity."



"What else do you know about Rory?"



"She's the one who helped me have all my kids," Javier said. "You need a really old, modded radio like this one to decode her broadcast, and she changes the codec every few days. The content changes locally – I really don't know how she does it, I think her whole clade's in on it, or something – and it's always about where the best food is for iterating vN. See? She's not all about keeping little kids little."



"There are lots of mixed families who use the diet plan, Javier. Hundreds. Thousands. There are even vN who use it not to iterate. Like my mom."



Oh really, now? That's quite the change. You know, you wouldn't miss Charlotte so much if you knew the truth.



Javier was still talking. "Well, Rory made out like I was the sidekick, which is bullshit. I am not travelling with you, you are travelling with–" His head tilted. "Is that thing you're doing with your mouth adaptive, or did it come with your model?"



"What thing?"



"The wibbling. You're wibbling your lower lip. And your eyes are huge. It's like your ocular cavity's expanded while I've been looking at it. I think your model must have originally come with some sort of… I don't know what it is, but it probably works really well on organic guys."



Amy turned around and walked away. She wiped her eyes. "Just drive."



This was how Amy wound up in a charging station at the edge of a sprawling parking lot, upon which sat a former bigbox store, now a combination farmers' market and capsule hotel. It was vN-friendly; the shelves – which had once held giant pallets of rice and tea and tube socks and monitors, and other things brought in from elsewhere – were available for hourly rental if vagrant vN wanted to take a safe nap. Amy had only seen them in news programs, and her mother had always changed the feed when they came on. You could subscribe to the recommissioned drones that had once worked the stores, though, and see what the vN were up to at night.

Outside the complex stood tables and booths, full of soap and baked goods – and fat blocks of plastic feedstock, priced per pound depending on the quality of their marbling. There were little inventions, too. Amy couldn't tell what they were for, but they looked like the same little bundles of chips and wires you could buy – from any flea market – that did the same things vN did without really thinking about it: moisture and temperature detection, or mapping a straight line, or measuring cubic centilitres. It seemed odd to have so many different little devices to do those things. Then again, most people couldn't just do them with a single touch. They needed a mobile, at least, or a good pair of glasses. There was even a vintage disaster bot crawling the parking lot, telling the humans they were alive and barking strangely at the vN.



Javier had pulled them into the charger farthest from the other stations, and he'd worn a hat and sunglasses when he hopped out of the RV to hook the battery to the enormous cable snaking its way free of the charger. Now they were sitting in the vehicle, watching the bar at the bottom of the dashboard display as it grew incrementally brighter and longer.



"How are we paying for this?" Amy asked.



Javier jingled the keys. One fob wore the same logo as the chargers outside. "They've got an account."



How convenient, Portia said. Now they'll know exactly where to find you, when they check the account.



"Granny says that'll help them find us," Amy said.



"I don't give a flying fuck what that she has to say." Javier stood and made his way into the cabin. He started fussing with the dinette table. "Help me unfold this bed. I need to defrag all this."



Javier set Junior on the floor, then unlocked something beneath the table that lowered it with a squeak. He then folded up one of the dinette's benches, removing the back cushion before pulling out the seat so it sat flush with the newly lowered table. Intuiting the symmetry of the arrangement, Amy did the same on her side. With the cushions included, there was now a little bed where the dinette used to be. It fit Javier just barely. He sat up and retrieved Junior from the floor. The baby was crawling now, or at least worming around on the cushions, struggling in vain to conquer the mountain that was his father.



Uncertain where to sit, Amy chose the floor. She wedged herself up against one faux-wood wall and watched Junior pushing himself around on his rubbery knees. Javier lifted him carefully, then laid him across his shins.