vN The First Machine Dynasty(92)

Xavier was the first to try saving her. Together, they watched the arm of the massive creature suck her down its gullet, her body – Portia's body, in that moment – twitching and kicking as it slid into oblivion. And then Javier's arms were suddenly empty, and his son was in the air, his arms and legs having attached to that much larger mecha limb as confidently as they might have secured themselves around the trunk of a tree. His youngest attacked the creature with his fingers and his teeth. He ripped into its dark flesh like a sculptor attacking clay. It whipped through the air and dashed him against containers. He refused to let go.



Javier's children had a funny habit of outshining him.



He'd stripped the vessel for weapons, after that. He broke the guns off their turrets, and raided the containers for anything of use. He'd fired up the lifeboat's outboard and aimed it straight at the Great Elder Bot's core body. And when he got there, he found his youngest son waiting for him, his arms burned up to the elbows, his knees raw and bloody, alone on the tip of a machine whose glossy bulk had already sheared the rudder off their lifeboat.



Javier had expected the water to be cold when his feet hit the waves. But the machine's internal combustions had warmed the surrounding depths, and the soles of Javier's feet hissed when he walked across its skin. At the time, he had no clue that the heat that seared his skin – and forced him and Xavier to take breaks from the digging – was the heat of Amy's reforging. Javier hadn't even been sure he could dig her out. That the thing beneath the surface was a machine, he knew. But what kind of machine, what it did, he had no idea. Maybe it was a massive algal bloom of oil-devouring mech-krill. Maybe it was a hideous cancerous mass of sentient trash. But it had Amy deep in its guts and they had to keep digging, keep shooting at it and pouring acid on it and chasing it when it drifted away. He did not discuss these actions with his sons so much as hear their distant pleas for him to come back to the boat, to leave the thing alone, to realize that she was dead and there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do, and that he was wasting her sacrifice with his stupidity. Its surface could open up at any moment and swallow him, they said. They were alone here, with no supplies or food or method of calling for help. They were burning through a battery. They had to escape while escape remained an option.



But Amy had already lost herself inside one monster. Javier wasn't about to let her be swallowed by another. He swung an axe down into the machine's shining carapace, and he kept swinging until he felt the grind of his bones inside their sockets. And finally Ignacio jumped off the boat, tapped him on the shoulder, and handed him a vomit cannon. "Dad," he said, "for this job, I think you want some power tools."



That night under the stars, with his boys sleeping in a tiny little raft that they all expected to be swallowed up at any moment, he had run the probabilities of her being pulped away into nothing. They had no reason to believe that she was anything more than extruded feedstock. Her memories and patterns and habits were probably lost, digested in the belly of a giant.



And watching his sticky skin slowly mending over each repeated burn, Javier could only simulate the things he would have said, should have said, should have done. If they had gone their separate ways after Xavier was born, if he had run further from the garbage dump, would they have been in this mess? If he had let her go in Redmond, would she be alive now? What if he had kissed her the way he'd wanted to so many times, and said Fuck it, fuck the quest, fuck finding the answer, it's good when we're together and that's enough? Maybe he could have lived with Portia hiding behind Amy's eyes. Maybe he could have adjusted to her voice in Amy's cries and her fingernails raking his chest, maybe if Amy were there too. Maybe he could have loved them both. He considered this possibility, and many others, until the morning light exposed a thin and trembling blister containing the outlier in all Javier's calculations.



It should not have surprised him that Amy had reprogrammed the thing from the inside. She did that with everyone. She worked like a virus, altering priorities and setting new defaults and raising the bar and looking at you like you'd always had the potential to change, you just hadn't always known it. He had been in her grip for Christ knew how long. Maybe it was the failsafe. Maybe she was just human enough. Or maybe he was just enchanted enough with her berserker mode, having identified an alpha whose pack he could insert himself into. But in that moment, when the light hit her, his awareness rested on exactly none of those things and focused instead on how whole she was, how faithfully reproduced in every detail, from her too-fine hair to the knobbiness of her knees. He had seen her in various states of damage, in prison and on the side of the road and deep in the bowels of Redmond and in the jaws of her family, body smashed and voice destroyed, and he had watched her repair herself each time. But she had never looked so beautiful as she did now, a tiny perfect thing in the midst of all the dirt and salt and carbon, a pearl gifted to him by the sea.