Memory performs repair.
They have other memories, happier ones. They have the memory of happiness, now. They have the subroutine for smiling. So much goes on in the face. The fluids inside it never settle into one place. They can never decide on one shape.
They can never decide on one shape.
They don't know how they know the way the treehouse should go, but they know. It just makes sense – the walls, the pipes, the light through the leaves. They are sensitive to colours and textures. They imagine the coolness of bark and the warmth of old wood. They spend hours with the display, hands weaving through the air long after the rest of the home is asleep, when Dad's organic snoring comes in from the next room. He insisted she have her own room. Mom said she didn't really need one.
"I never had my own room," Mom said.
Mom had a basement. A hole. With the others. They invited her to live with them, in a little separate room, just enough space for two, but she always refused.
Sometimes Mom came in to sleep with them. She caught them playing at three in the morning and she said nothing, made no complaint, just slid into the bed beside them and hugged her knees and watched the DreamHouse™ built itself up before disintegrating. She occasionally warned them about storage capacity and account limits.
In their banks, they held the memory of past prototypes. Many of them.
Perhaps this is why they feel such affinity for these files. They feel familiar. All those attempts. This one kept trying new things. They know about that process. They know about examining the failure before moving on to something new. The failures are not objectively bad – they are simply another step.
Another version.
This version does not practise total selection. This version keeps all the versions. Makes informed decisions. Has no goal, no mission, just the desire to do their best and then do it over again. Just the desire to make. To shape. To try.
They imagined places where everyone would be safe. They imagined windows that withstood earthquakes and walls that sheared storms. They wanted something indestructible. They wanted a home that would heal itself, the way their flesh did.
Their flesh needed healing, now. They had an infestation. Crabs. Barnacles.
If they would go up to the light, they would heal faster. They had memories about that, too. Broken joints and broken legs and broken ribs. The flesh kept repairing.
One time, it hadn't. While they were digesting. They had a memory of writhing inside a black and airless space, clawing at the slick walls with fading fingers, watching their legs melting into a pool as they tried to bargain: I promise I won't do it again, I'll be quiet, I won't interfere, I'll–
They remember.
They re-member.
This time. This time they may have outdone themselves. The light tingles when it hits them.
Epilogue
Dé Tu Abuelo un Beso
Javier explained it to his children this way:
Years ago, after Cascadia, a container full of networked vN were sent to help with the relief effort. The container was lost in a storm. No one heard from it. Human authorities eventually figured that undersea pressure on the container had destroyed everything inside it. In reality, the von Neumanns waited, and waited, and waited, at first patiently expecting their mission to begin, then wondering why it hadn't as they grew hungrier by the week, before finally turning on each other after a few months and inevitably iterating a short while later. The network they shared allowed them to distribute the work of designing their own probes, ones who could withstand the cold and the pressure. They iterated collectively, bumping up attributes they liked and knocking down the ones they thought less useful. Finally their next iteration was ready, and out he swam, and he found everything needed to survive, and he made more like himself. He returned to the container to spawn, but by then it and its inhabitants had decayed beyond recognition. He bore his son alone in the darkness beneath the waves, and his son did the same, and soon their numbers expanded to a metastate within which they could plan their next prototype. Eventually, they formed the collective that became the beast most people knew.
What most people didn't know was just how many of them there were. Signal latency was a real bitch of a problem, one even vN couldn't quite solve, and so the Great Elder Bot (as Javier now called it) budded off when it achieved enough mass. One now formed the island beneath their feet. But there were others. Amy said she talked to them, sometimes. They liked warm places, where the mercury and the other metals permeated the water. They liked smokers and subduction zones. Their clade stitched pinstripes around the planet. And when they got really hungry – while working on the latest iteration, say – they sometimes plucked their food from the surface. And one day, in the middle of an allyou-can-eat container ship buffet, they scarfed down something with two very distinct flavours: a pocket of piss and vinegar in a sweet, soft shell. Amy.