iD (20 page)

“No. No one did. Because Smythe was dead, and my father ordered everyone to take a week off to mourn, and then some of my father’s people came in and made it look like suicide from overwork. They made it look like the last prototype was the final one.”

“Made
what
look like suicide?”

“Don’t you get it?” Holberton poured more gin. He drank. “Smythe didn’t kill himself. He was murdered. By the vN he was working on at the time. The nursing model.”

“Amy’s model.”

Holberton put the glass down. “Yes. Amy’s model.”

“That’s why it was easier to hack the nurses. Because their failsafe was a little different already, and it wasn’t finished, yet.”

“That’s about the size of it.” Holberton polished off the last of his new drink. He winced. “What else were you going to ask me?”

Javier looked up at the image of Susie, the murderous gynoid. “I need to know where you put Dan Sarton’s file cache.”

Holberton remained silent for a long time. So silent, Javier had to turn around to make sure he was still there. He was. He was just saying nothing, and staring at the floor. “It couldn’t last,” Holberton said finally. “Humans and vN, coexisting. It was always going to go this way, eventually.”

“And you want to protect me from it.”

“Yes, I do. For as long as I can.” He looked up. “Stay with me. I like you. I really do.”

This was how it always started. With men, anyway. Being straight had nothing to do with being straightforward. Javier simulated a future stretching away from him, as flat and monochromatic as the desert that surrounded them: Holberton undressing him, fucking him, feeding him, keeping him like a pet, and then Holberton tiring of him, finding a way to turn him out. It would happen. It always did. And although Javier could see it happening, he always let it. He was a machine, running a program. He knew how to do a few things. One of them was staying with humans. Except lately, he wasn’t so good at it.

He could have stayed with Alice, too. This was just another version of the brass ring she’d offered him. The relationship every vN dreamed of. Some human who was actually
humane
, who wanted to make slow, sweet love all the time and didn’t ask for weird shit and had lots of money and wanted to spend it all on keeping you in a very pretty box to be looked at and touched occasionally. In his FEMA capacity, Holberton probably really could protect him. Javier had consulted for them, before, in his own way, in Redmond. He could just start that up again. He could tell them everything he’d learned about Amy since his last interrogation session. And he could watch from the sidelines as Portia tore the world apart and humanity eliminated the single species designed to love it without condition.

“No.” Javier watched Holberton’s face. “Tell me where the cache is.”

“Why would you need to know that?” he asked.

“You know why.”

Holberton shut his eyes. “She’s not in there. Not really. Not like you think. And even if she were, you’d need a quantum de-crypter to decode her.”

“Quantum?”
 

“She’s in a diamond.
On
a diamond, actually. A qubit-friendly, nitrogen-enhanced diamond. That’s what Dan did with all his important files.”

 

“Tell me where the diamond is.”

Holberton sighed deeply. He looked broken. Javier would have been sad, if he weren’t so close to what he wanted. “It’s in Walla Walla. My cousin’s cache is in the state penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington. Where my father is.”

Javier straightened. “You sent it to your
dad?
To
LeMarque?
”

“I sent it to the safest place I could think to keep it,” Holberton said. “A solitary confinement cell, in a maximum security prison.”

 

13:
Faith in Fakes
 

 

Holberton had set this diamond in a Josten’s class ring with his father’s high school mascot and graduating year on it. It was a genuine antique setting that Holberton spared no expense in locating and obtaining.

“I wanted it to look like something my father might really have owned,” he explained. “I couldn’t ask my mother about it, but I looked into it. He wore a ring just like it in his graduation photo.”

“Aren’t you worried somebody’s gonna steal it?”

Holberton shrugged. “I almost hope someone does. If they do, I doubt they’ll run it past a diamond test, much less a quantum exam. They’ll sell it to a collector.”

“Wouldn’t the collector do a test?”

“Maybe. If they did, the setting would pass as genuine. But they’d still need a key to decrypt the information on the diamond.”

“And you have that key.”

“Yes,” Holberton said.

They had this conversation in Holberton’s garage. The other man clutched the edge of a tarp draped over something that sat beside the Impala. He looked bad: red eyes, wrinkled clothes, dusty wingtips. Javier suspected he didn’t look much better, himself.

“I can’t leave town,” Holberton told him. “But I can send you with a fob that’ll get you into the Walls.”

“The Walls” was what people called the prison in Walla Walla. Holberton professed to have never visited. The package containing the ring was the sole act of communication that he had shared with his father in over twenty years.

“There’s no guarantee he even kept it,” Holberton said, as he began to pull the tarp free. “For all I know, he traded it for a blowjob.”

“He kept it.” Javier smiled tightly. "We're both dads, right? We both know he kept it."

Holberton said nothing to that. Instead, he pulled the rest of the tarp free. Doing so revealed a motorbike. A big, red motorbike. It had a chopper-style reclining seat with plush black leather cushions, and a long, narrow windscreen curved against the wind. The rear wheel was a lot bigger than the front. Neither wheel had any rims, just giant half-spheres the same red as the rest of the bike. The decals strewn across the front wheel and main body were for companies Javier didn’t recognize: Canon, Citizen, Shoei.

“Do you know what this is?” Holberton asked.

“It’s a great way to get a ticket.”

Holberton laughed his big
“Hah!”
laugh. It was the first time Javier had heard it in a few hours. Strange, how he’d really only known Holberton for a little while. It seemed like much longer. Then again, he was only four years old. Each day was a significant portion of his lifespan.

“It’s a replica bike. It’s from a movie. It’ll still work, and everything, but don’t expect it to be too rugged.”

Javier blinked. “Everything you own is copied from something else, isn’t it?”

Holberton shrugged. “It’s the one thing my father and I have in common. He copied humans; I copy artifacts.” He cleared his throat. “It’ll take you a couple of days to get up there, at least. It’s not like California or something, where you can just hop on one highway and keep going. You’ll have to go through Utah, Idaho, and a little bit of Oregon. I’d lay in the course, but I’m guessing you don’t want a GPS knowing where you’re headed.”

Javier had to think about that. Rory and Portia seemed not to need any help finding him. Then again, they had way more processing power to devote to the problem than any one police officer or department. In the end, it probably didn’t matter. They’d tracked him this far, and he’d made out OK.

“Lay it in,” Javier said.

An hour later, he’d packed up everything he could. Clothes, electrolytes, and a week’s supply of vN food. He would need to get to Walla Walla before Tuesday, Holberton reminded him. The new food was rolling out then, and unless Javier felt like contacting him about which grocery stores were stocking the poisoned material, he’d have to eat only the safe stuff he’d packed himself.

“It’s OK,” Javier told him. “There’s always garbage.”

Holberton winced, but he said nothing. It was almost dawn. Javier planned to take his shirt off as soon as he got on the road; the sunlight would be his best help. He’d look a little silly wearing the helmet, but it would also help him avoid recognition. And with a bike that gaudy, he needed all the help he could get in that department.

“This is my favourite time of day,” Holberton said. “Come over here.”

They left the bedroom, and Holberton brought him into the living room. In the pre-dawn light, the house looked especially grey. Holberton offered him a chair facing east, and Javier sat. He heard Holberton start making coffee behind him in the kitchen. Then the sky began to go pink. And with it, so did the house.

Every surface and every object reflected the sky. Without any blinds to filter the view, the colours of the sunrise slanted across the concrete floor and infused the house. Tables, counters, glossy vases and the pressed-earth fireplace. All of them went pink. Then orange. Their greyness was a perfect reflector for the sky’s colours.

As the sun rose higher, Javier’s skin tingled pleasantly. It had been a while since he last savoured the dawn. The last time it happened, he’d been on the island with Amy.

He got up out of the chair. Holberton stood in the arch of the kitchen door, leaning against it and holding his steaming coffee.

“One more try,” Holberton said. “Come on.”

Javier shook his head. “Any other time, I would say yes. In a heartbeat.” He quirked his lips. “I mean, if I had a heartbeat.”

“It’s dangerous out there. You’re safer, here.”

Javier could have told Holberton that he’d never been truly safe. That he’d had isolated periods of relative safety with the gnawing awareness of iteration or poverty eating him up from the inside out, and that this period was really only another one of those.

“You’d get tired of me, eventually,” Javier said. And because he wanted to make it easier, he added: “Everyone always does.”

Holberton looked stricken. He examined his coffee in its cup. “I would not.”

“Would too.” Javier strode up to him. He tipped Holberton’s face up, held it, and kissed him. The man was still a good kisser. He did surprisingly well with such thin lips. He tasted of coffee and agave syrup and some sort of vegan creamer. It had a chemical tang that lingered in Javier’s mouth.

“Switch to cream,” Javier said. “My body thinks that substitute stuff is food, and I’m a fucking robot.”

 

Like the Impala, Holberton’s bike was a real boat to handle on the road. The recumbent position made it easier; Javier suspected that anybody with a genuine organic spine would have real trouble sitting upright on a bike for the roughly twenty-six hours it would take him to reach Walla Walla. Then again, an organic person would need sleep. Javier didn’t.

He preset the bike’s speed limits so he could toggle through cruise control at will, and synced up the helmet to traffic news. For the first hour, it wasn’t too bad. Just him, and the strengthening sun, and the bike rumbling away between his legs as they ate up the blacktop together. It was hard to believe that anything could be going wrong on such a clear summer day. This was a part of America he had never seen anywhere but in media: the empty part, stretching away for miles and miles in every direction, a field of jasper red under lapis blue dotted with stubborn, scrubby green. This was the place where the cowboy movies came from. This was the place where the cowboy
stories
came from. Every bad day at every black rock, every drifter on every high plain, every years-long search, they all came from here. He was in one of those stories, now. He was one of those guys on a horse trying to find his girl. Or so he told himself.

On the radio everybody had an opinion about a certain document leak that had sprung up overnight. It described in detail FEMA’s plan to poison the vN food supply, and also contained memos from other world governments about their adoption of the program.

Jack worked fast.

“Well, I find it really troubling that the government isn’t telling us anything about what goes on in there,” said one caller. He was a retiree named Burt. Burt lived near Macondo, and he wanted the city either cleared out, or packed full of more vN, not just the Amys. “I mean, we have a right to know.”

Burt was buying a gun, later that day. He had never owned one, but he needed something that would shoot puke rounds. Just in case.

“I think the Stepford solution is the only solution,” another caller said. Her name was Crystal. Crystal was learning how to be a kindergarten teacher. “These… people, I guess, they’ve got families. They have kids that are dependent on them. We can’t just split them up from their families. We can’t just kill them.”

What they were really talking about was rounding up all the vN and putting them somewhere.

“I think we really, uh, messed this up,” said the third caller. His name was Keenan. “I think the people who are into vN, or whatever, they’re like kids with toys. At first they were all excited, and now they’re bored, or they’re pissed because their toys got broken. It’s stupid. Meanwhile, the rest of us normal guys, who don’t sleep with dolls, we’re just shaking our heads. We’re all facing the goddamn robot apocalypse because some nerds didn’t have the sack to ask a girl out.”

Of course, that wasn’t the whole story. Javier thought of this as he wove his way through traffic. The vN were LeMarque’s idea. Retailing their technology was somebody else’s. If New Eden hadn’t had to pay out a massive settlement, the world might never have seen the vN. Maybe there would have been other humanoid robots, instead. Big clunky ones with rubber skin and actuator joints and hydraulic muscles. The kind other companies used to build, before New Eden started their crusade.

“It’s been a whole year since that poor kid died in that kindergarten,” a caller named Kiana said. “And then those other people died, and now soldiers are being attacked, and America is probably next. So what is being done about this? Were we supposed to just let them have their little islands forever? They’re a threat. Even if most of them work right now, there’s nothing to say they won’t just break down later. They can’t function perfectly forever. Nothing can.”

Eventually, the radio started calling up vN to see how they felt about the whole thing.

“Well, obviously the humans are the first priority,” said the vN working the radio station’s reception desk. “But it’s really only the one clade that has caused problems. And for the most part, they’re contained.”

Javier listened to these calls all the way through New Mexico. The route took him alongside national parks and through single-intersection towns, past exits to Air Force bases and “secret history” museums about alien ancestors and government cabals. Javier rode past them all. As he did, the sun began to slip toward evening, and the vN who called in started sounding more selfless.

“Maybe it really would just be better if we went somewhere else for a while.”

“Of course people are scared of us, right now. We’re everywhere. A lot of us are teachers. They trust us with their children, and they’re wondering if they should.”

“Really, we should be recalled, or segregated, until there’s a better understanding of how the failsafe works and how it failed in the Peterson case. Until then, nobody is safe.”

“I’m calling because I want to tell other vN that we should just leave. I know it’s difficult, especially if you’re living with a human right now, but we should just take ourselves out of the equation.”

 

When he arrived at The Walls, he was unprepared for how nice and normal everything seemed. There were big open fields, and a lot of signs about onion farms and hayrides and corn mazes and craft breweries and apple jellies, and then you followed a winding driveway through a path of Douglas fir and long-needled pine, and you waved your fob at the nice human in the reception shack, and you were there.

The Walls lived up to its nickname. The whole complex was ringed by a fifteen-foot brick wall, broken only by regular guard towers and crowned with razor wire. Javier could have scaled it easily, but it was nice not having to. This did nothing to lessen his nervousness as he made his way up into the lobby. The main entry to the prison had a bunch of boring furniture and desiccated plants, with smart posters linking to information about leaving your deadbeat husband or how to get your kid to quit drinking, but all the staff wore the same dead-eyed expression as all prison staff. They didn’t look cruel, or conniving, or nasty. They just looked bored. And tired. And completely disgusted with the people they saw every day.

“Name?”

“Arcadio Holberton,” Javier said, and waved the fob at the woman in the steel cage.

“You don’t have an appointment.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You should have made an appointment.”

“I’m sorry.”

They watched each other for a good minute. She was a big, black woman with magnificent natural hair and false eyelashes. She also had a killer manicure. He could understand it: if he had to wear a uniform like that, he’d figure out ways to pretty himself up, too.

“Will you think I’m sucking up if I tell you I like your nails?” Javier asked.

Not even a crack of a smile. “Yes.”

“Oh. Well, never mind, then.”

She sighed a sigh that was more like a growl. “Holberton, huh? And you’re here to see…”

“You know who I’m here to see.”

She made the noise again. Abruptly, she nodded. “Take a number and get in line, then. He’s got a full slate, today, and you’ll just have to wait like everybody else.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The line wasn’t really a line, but a waiting room with a bunch of seats all bolted to the floor and welded together. The armrests were all permanently lowered, so none of the visitors could lie down. Javier supposed that was a good idea; now that he’d made it here, all he wanted to do was shut his eyes and rest.