vN The First Machine Dynasty(60)

"Bullshit." It was the softest, most comforting curse word Amy had ever heard. "Fucking bullshit. Getting you out of that mess was the best thing that crazy old bitch has ever done."



Why, thank you, young man.



Amy shuddered. "She's still in here. They didn't get her out. They didn't even try."



"I know." He plucked at something in her hair. Dried aerogel, most likely. "They showed me what they were d-doing to you. I guess they needed some advice on how to proceed."



Amy wiped her eyes. "What did they ask?"



"How I know it's you, when you're talking. How I know when Portia's talking to you. Stuff like that."



Amy nodded. "I'm sorry. I never should have let you get mixed up in all this. I guess you feel pretty stupid for trying to find me, huh?"



Javier rolled away, onto his back. "Did you hear what my oldest said to me, up there?"



"Yeah."



"Well, it's true. I had him in prison. I got caught stealing. I got arrested. The same thing happens to other vN all the time."



"How old were you?"



He shrugged and kept his eyes on the ceiling. "I don't remember. A few months. It started out as a training mission; my dad was teaching me standard shoplifting. Then it went bad, and he walked out of the store and I didn't."



Amy thought she understood. It made far more sense, now, that Javier would have so little trouble letting all of his children go: it was the only behaviour he'd ever learned, and in a roundabout way that strategy worked. His and his father's pattern improved with each of his own iterations – he taught them what he thought they needed to know, a little more each time, and in his eyes their skills now ranked above his own. But with lucky number thirteen, he had finally broken that cycle. Most organic parents never had so many chances to unlearn what their own families had taught them.



"I… I don't know what to say."



"You don't have to say anything. You don't have to give me that face, either. I was fine. I made friends. Human friends." He smiled more thinly, now. "The failsafe made sure of that. The failsafe made sure it all felt… fine. Nice, even. I mean, sometimes they would hurt each other. The humans. I'd have to intervene. That's sort of a vN's job in the prison environment."



"Javier–"



"Don't sit up, your body's still repairing itself." He resumed his examination of the ceiling. "Anyway. What I'm trying to say is that I left him there. And until recently, I had no trouble living with that."



"What changed?"



"Everything." He rolled over so that his back faced her. "Go to sleep. We've got a big day at the museum tomorrow."





Rory happily instructed them to meet Daniel Sarton near "the pig" at the Pike Place Market. Amy had no idea how they would get there, though. Both the market and any pigs who had once resided there now rested under a thick blanket of water, silt, and destroyed architecture. They all perched above the Pike Street entrance to the museum, in the shadow of a cracked and cloudy solar panel. Below, humans and vN allowed their passes to be checked by a combination of docents and drones before entering the playground that was the first six avenues of the old city. Amy watched them peering into decaying storefronts and adjusting their goggles, or sometimes snapping their fingers so a drone would zoom along to help. They were admitted in waves that fanned out across the empty streets, all of them drawn inevitably toward the wreckage that slumped into the water: the busted tracks, the drunken skyscrapers supported by ugly new pillars, the crumbling asphalt.



Amy understood a lot about the museum from its visitors. Most of them wore goggles or little blisters over their eyes that looked like bottle caps, and their collision detection seemed way off. They wandered along the street staring at the sky, or at the surrounding buildings, or even the cracked pavement below, but not at anybody around them. Consequently, they only evaded each other at the last minute. In this respect it wasn't very different from the city where she'd grown up, only the people here had a specific reason for not looking you in the eye.



She guessed that the eye covering had something to do with the museum, though, because occasionally the people around her would stop in the middle of the street, point their gaze at a certain spot, and begin counting years in clear voices: "1880. 1978. 2001. 2032. 2057." Even people with no visible augmentation did this – she guessed their add-ons were inside, or etched on contacts, or broadcast some other way. She wondered if they could even see her. Probably not – if the pop-ups were any indication, they were looking at layers of time. If Amy had the proper augments, she could have downloaded the layers, too, and watched the cycle of damage and repair play out year to year.