vN The First Machine Dynasty(48)

In the cage beside her, Javier said: "What the hell is that thing?"



"We call this the Cuddlebug," Harold said.



He opened the cage, and the Cuddlebug slithered inside. It blinked at Amy once more, paused, and folded each segment of its shell completely flat. Now razor-thin, it slid under Amy's feet first, then her ankles and calves, under her knees and then her thighs, before finally pausing at the wall against which she'd propped herself. Javier was asking more questions, but she wasn't listening. The outer edges of the Cuddlebug's shell sprang free from the main body, curving up toward the ceiling and then curling back along Amy's legs. They rippled delicately, and suddenly Amy's torso slid down the wall as the machine slowly sucked her body into itself.



Now she was on the floor. From there, she could see the other cages and the other versions of herself inside them. For the first time she realized what each of her expressions must look like from the outside: rage, disgust, pity, fear. Her own eyes stared back at her twenty times over, unblinking, seeming harder and darker and colder by the second. Then slowly, their faces coalesced into one single expression, one of keen intent and purpose. Amy knew that look. It was the one Portia wore when she threw Nate's body across the room.



As one, they smiled.





The Cuddlebug was a sort of rolling combination of sleeping bag, wheelchair, and straitjacket. Its segments, slim as leaves and hard as bone, hugged Amy tight as the machine negotiated what Amy assumed were hallways and elevators. It had closed over her eyes, too. She was blind and bound inside the thing. She felt like a butterfly inside a cocoon.



But when you come out, you won't be transformed. You won't be anything. Just the same useless little weakling you've always been.



Amy might have argued with that, if the gag and the bug weren't restraining her. She might have cried or screamed or told them that this was all unnecessary, that she was willing to go quietly. She had whimpered a little when the darkness closed in completely, but she could barely hear it over Javier's shouting. He kept asking to go with her. He had told the humans that they would be safe, if they would just let him stay with her.



That was to protect the humans, not you. He knows you won't let me out if he's around to failsafe while I do what I do best.



Portia was right on both counts. Amy knew what Javier's failsafe reaction looked like. She never wanted to put him through that again. And now she'd seen what he was like with humans. She hadn't watched the bounty hunters catch Javier, but she now understood how easy it must have been. On some level, he had wanted to go with them. Or rather, he hadn't wanted to say no. And even when he'd seen the cage, he wouldn't have struggled. Couldn't have struggled.



Now you know why I kept my daughters underground, Portia said. I needed a place where the failsafe could never enslave them.



If Amy could have spoken, she would have reminded Portia that her notion of protecting her daughters also meant imprisoning them. Amy would have told Portia she was a cruel, selfish, sadistic monster, and that it was no wonder Amy's mother had left. Charlotte had probably yearned to escape. She had probably dreamed then, as Amy did now, of what life without Portia would be like.



Amy had lived without Portia, once. Maybe the engineers here could help her get that life back. Burn her out like the cancer she was. And after that, when Amy was free, she would free everyone else. Her mother. Javier. Junior. Everyone. She had put them here, and she would get them out.



Why are you so sure you can do that? Portia asked. I'm the one who knows how to fight. Without me, you're nothing. Without me, you'll die.



It felt a bit like a hospital drama. The Cuddlebug unfurled long enough to allow people wearing barefoot shoes and Tshirts with cartoon characters on them to poke and prod Amy, to weigh her and measure her, to take samples of her hair and fingernails. They were obviously very nervous, but had developed a sort of litany of tasks that they recited as they performed them that was supposed to make everything seem more humane than it really was.

"OK, we're just going to open your eyes real wide here, open open open, yeah, like that, and you're going to look to your left, and now to your right, and now dead ahead, no, not at me…"



How many other vN had they done this to? Amy's shell was popular. There were probably more vN with her face and body out there than others. But that didn't mean the clade was the same. The looks were just morphology – totally separate, in her case, from genotype. Amy had told the other kids in class about this when they talked about how chickens came from eggs and plants came from seeds. It was during the spring, and they had gone to a farm to look at baby animals. She had explained to Mrs Pratt about parthenogenesis, and Mrs Pratt had thanked her for that, and then at the end of the day she'd asked Amy not to do that any more, because it was confusing the human kids.