vN The First Machine Dynasty(93)

He had knelt, and wiped the black grime from her face and strained it from her hair with his fingers. If he were organic, his systems would have tried to attenuate the flood of anxious chemicals with a mental meditation valve, a prayer to some figment that dwelt between the neurons. But he was not flesh, so he did not hope, and instead he waited as the dawn filled her face with pink and gold. He held her as her eyes opened, and his every process stilled with the exhausted finality of a task long in the working.



"You came back."



For the first time, uncalculated tears blurred Javier's vision. "Haven't you noticed?" he asked. "I always come back."



The flesh of the creature that had swallowed her then bore her up, standing her on her two new feet so that she could survey the landscape. With a neat motion like a conductor bringing an orchestra to attention, she raised the majority of the mass above the surface. And as she began to sculpt the first trees, Javier watched a shred of the surface skim itself off and slither up her legs to become a dress for her newborn body.



She was Amy, but she wasn't. The mech had absorbed her, but she had absorbed it, too. She had bought their lives with her own, and what was resurrected – what she reassembled, what she made of herself in that deep and awful darkness – was the latest iteration, and it was networked.



Months later, Javier still caught himself staring at her and wondering who she really was. Most of the time, the vN – whose body emerged naked from the carbon veil blister on the Great Elder Bot's darkly gleaming skin – acted like the Amy he knew. She walked with Amy's light steps under the black fronds of the heliotropics she'd sketched into the air, and she slept in Amy's curling shell shape while the black roof of their house folded itself into an A-frame to better shed the nightly rains. She laughed Amy's laugh. She smiled Amy's smile.

And his son still loved her. Junior – Xavier, he insisted on calling himself, now – still leapt into her arms at every possible opportunity. He still wriggled his way into her arms on nights when she'd spent a few too many hours redesigning the island. He butted his chin under hers and grabbed her wrist to coil her arm around his ribs. Xavier slept with a smug smile. Javier caught him there some mornings as he passed by her room.



It felt wrong not sleeping beside her. His body knew this, but it also knew that this Amy was different from the one who once shared the backs of trucks with him. He had tried to discuss the difference – her newfound calm, her focus, the speed with which she now made each decision – with Xavier, but his youngest son merely rolled his eyes. What Xavier and Amy had shared during the long days and nights of the boy's bluescreen delay, Javier would never truly know, but the time had cemented something pure and clear between the two of them, something Javier had never once enjoyed with his own iterations. He saw it when she gently separated his son's curls with her long and careful fingers, or when she delved below the island's obsidian surface and withdrew a quicksilver peach for him to eat. He saw it in the complete comfort and trust on his son's face.



The father of thirteen children, Javier had only ever seen that bliss on his sons' faces when they had found a human whom they loved to please. But Amy wasn't like the humans his other sons knew. She wouldn't tire of his novelty, or wonder if he were "really real", or pass him off to a friend when his affection proved unnaturally strong. She would die – had died – to protect him. And despite having loved his share of humans, Javier maintained no illusions about their loyalty. To love humans was to know them, and to forgive all their flaws, even the ones they didn't yet know of.



He'd been with humans of all shapes and colours through good times and bad. They had a habit of finding him in the troughs and valleys of their lives, when they just wanted something easy, something that just worked, but occasionally he served as a sort of dessert, a reward for their accomplishments. He met them in bars and parking lots and bleachers. They took him to their homes, their capsules, their cars, and even to their churches when they were feeling particularly ambivalent about the whole enterprise. He had been the vengeance fuck, the guilty fuck, the it's not cheating if you're not a person fuck. He had sat with them through Just a tiny little slice and I'll call her back tomorrow and If they didn't want me to dummy up the numbers, they'd have made these forms easier to fill out.



"You love us like God must love us," the last one told him, before the fucking started. The last one was really into God. A lot of gods, actually. He was pursuing a degree in divinity, whatever that meant. He started out all Good Samaritan and ended up leaving little pillars of salt on everything. It happened between the garbage dump and the Electric Sheep.