"Good. Now come down here."
Amy hauled herself up a little and tried judging the distance between the two points. "What if I land in one of the garbage piles?"
"Then you'll get an acid burn. I recommend you try not to land there."
Amy hugged her tree. "Is this how you teach your iterations how to do this? Because I think they could use some more positive reinforcement."
Javier made the gesture for a single tear falling down his face, his fingertip describing a sad line from his eye to his jaw. Amy aimed herself straight at him and launched. She had a surreal moment of watching the fence falling away under her before landing on him. Instantly she sat up to avoid crushing Junior.
"I guess my code doesn't take as strongly as I thought," Javier said. "You're still pretty clumsy."
She stood. "Give me a break! It's my first time!"
"I'm honoured." Javier wriggled away and stood up. He brushed himself off. "That's my clade's arboreal plugin. The trees my dad's group was working on were three hundred feet high, and nobody wanted to worry about ropes or harnesses. So we were shipped with upgrades." He kicked the back of her leg with his toes. "Come on. I'll show you more after we shop."
But now Amy couldn't keep herself on the ground. Every third step, she bounced up just because she could – first one foot high, then three, then five – until Javier grabbed her ankle and yanked her back down to earth. "Later, I said! We've got to find the feedstock, now."
"Wouldn't getting a better view help with that?"
Javier folded his arms. "Fine. Go right ahead."
Amy jumped straight up. Just before she fell, she let out a little squeal of delight. She landed roughly in a mound of old controllers and cables all coiled up like limp noodles. She kicked free before the acid could do any real damage, jumped again, and landed on the skeletons of old cleaning bots, all white and mantis-shaped, their jointed arms snapping under her boots as she launched herself again. She flew over deadeyed projectors and the mouldering rags of wearable glucose monitors. Wires sprouted from the decaying threads of bras and undershirts and wristbands and gloves, and glittered at her as she soared past.
She landed in a pile of dolls. Their bodies sank below hers, swallowing her. At first she worried about the acid, but there was none – the dolls were covered in nothing more than dew. It clung to their bare skin, their tiny fingers and toes and the lashes of their still-open eyes. They were all different colours, their eyes blue and black and green and brown, and their faces were uniformly perfect – no lumpy baby bodies here, no rolls of plastic fat or curiously ambiguous genders like at a toy store. These babies were fully formed.
They were iterations.
Suppressing a scream, Amy struggled free of the baby barrow. She rolled backward across little outstretched hands and tumbled to the spongy ground below. She pushed herself to her feet, turned around, and smacked straight into Javier. He stiffened up when she put her hands on his shoulders and tried pushing him away. "Easy, easy, what's the– Oh."
Amy pointed behind herself. "Why are they in the trash like that? What's wrong with them?"
Javier's brows lifted. "They're probably bluescreens."
Amy thought back to Rick's reader. "I thought you had bluescreened, before."
"Me?" Javier snorted. "Please. That only happens to babies, and it's never happened to one of mine. We're very wellwritten, our clade, no gaps." He nodded at her with his chin. "So don't go biting anybody else, OK? You might lose those nice new legs of yours if you do."
But Amy's focus was not on her legs. "People just throw out bluescreens?"
"Well, yeah." Javier shrugged. "What's the big deal? They're frozen, and they're tough to fix, and we can always make more."
"They're babies!"
"Ay, you sound like such a breeder." Javier turned her around so she faced the pile of lifeless vN. "Look. They're non-functional. They can't eat, they can't grow, they're totally four-oh-fucked."
"Nobody throws out human babies when something like this happens to them!"
"Of course not! That's sick. Did your grandma come up with that?" Javier shuddered.
No. You thought up that brilliant little idea all on your own.
Reaching behind his head, he untied the sling and set Junior on the ground with the other iterations. He pulled the shirt back on. "Don't move," he said to his son. He nodded at Amy. "Let's go get that feedstock."
Amy pointed. "You're just leaving him there?"