The baby grabbed her hair insistently. "I've never seen anybody give birth, before, especially not a boy," Amy told him. "At least, not in real life."
She had seen it happen a lot in dramas. They always got humans to play the part of vN. The actors always glowed with real sweat and real tears and they always tried really hard to make it look like they had only a handful of facial expressions, until the baby came and the actor got to look human for a few minutes while he smiled tiredly into the camera. Her mother used to say that it was a little unfair how humans won awards for playing robots, but robots never won anything for playing humans. Amy hadn't really understood what she meant at the time. She had asked about it, but they were in the middle of Friday movie night at home and her mother had said something about getting the vN pizza out of the oven. Amy had gone to follow her, but then her dad decided to play tickle monster and soon they were rolling around on the floor. Amy wished she had told him the truth: that it wasn't his dancing fingers that made her laugh, but his smiling face. Maybe other vN were ticklish, but not her. It wasn't in her model's original programming. She wondered if her dad knew. She wondered where he was.
Again, Javier's baby tugged her hair. Javier had said that stress made the baby come early. Maybe she had triggered it somehow; maybe she had seriously injured him when she drove the car into the dumpster. "I didn't know," she told his son. "Honestly, I swear, I didn't know. I was just trying to
help."
Look what happened the last time you tried helping,
a voice inside said.
"I'm sorry." Amy no longer knew whom she was saying it to. She shut her eyes and held the baby tight. "I'm really, really sorry. I'll try to be more careful next time–"
"He can't understand you, you know." Amy flinched. She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, and turned around. Javier had shed his shirt, and his fat had melted back inside him, leaving only vague hints of itself in loose skin that hung over his suddenly-baggy shorts. His belt curled away from him, now, cinched tight enough to leave slack. When Amy squinted, she saw the shining scar across his stomach. Already, it had begun to fade. Javier threw himself to the grass at her feet. "All my kids default to Spanish." He tickled the air with his fingers. "Give him to me."
Amy handed the baby to Javier. He proceeded to unwind him from the sweater and check his hands, his feet, and between his legs. He nodded once, satisfied. "All mine." He laid the child stomach-down on his chest.
"But you speak English," Amy said.
"I learned it. My father taught me." Javier rested a hand across his son's back. "We – my boys and I – stem from a clade based in Costa Rica. They were re-forestry specialists. That's what my father was doing before he left and iterated me. He was bringing back the rainforest."
Amy tried picturing life in a rainforest, with all the animals. She imagined birds bright as jewels swooping past, and lazy, lethal cats sleeping in the boughs of giant trees. "Why did he want to leave?"
"He didn't," Javier said. He stood his son up on his chest, now, holding him with hands that shook only a little. "You got kids?"
Amy shook her head. "I'm…"
I'm too little
, she wanted to say, but that wasn't true, any longer. "I'm not ready," she said instead, because it was something her mom's human friends said when the subject came up.
Javier nodded. "Me, I got twelve."
"Twelve?"
"Yup. This one's lucky number thirteen."
Amy couldn't help but stare. She knew that technically, vN could iterate as many times as they wanted, as long as they ate enough and didn't get hurt and no one interfered. But who would want to have twelve babies? And where were they, now?
"Are they all grown up?" Amy asked.
He nodded, lifting his son and letting him go horizontal, as though he were flying. "Oh yeah. They're all big, now. I had six last year."
"Six?
In a
year
?"
"What can I say? I'm the last of my clade. I gotta spread my seed. Literally."
"But…" Amy did the math. "But that means you forced them to grow up early, right?"
"What's early?" Javier asked. "vN grow at the speed of consumption. I fed them. They grew. The end."
"But… where are they?"
"Here and there," Javier said. "Wherever I left them. Wherever they choose to go. They're independent guys.
I'm
an independent guy."
Amy didn't quite know what to say. Her own dad said that a man who didn't spend time with his family could never be a real man, but he also said that came from a movie, and it was a movie that came with a failsafe warning so she couldn't watch it. "But on the inside, aren't they still little? When you… abandon them?"
Javier put his baby down and pushed himself up on his elbows. "I don't abandon them. I teach them stuff. Like English, and how to get food, and stuff like that. They can take care of themselves by the time I'm gone."
She pointed at Javier's new baby. "So you're just going to leave this one behind, too, once he's bigger?"
"That's the plan. Then he'll have his own iterations, and do the same with them. And then they'll repeat the process. Exponential growth. Survival of the species."
Amy's mouth fell open. "But he didn't do anything! You've got no reason to leave him behind!"
"Sure I do. Once he's grown, he'll iterate more. We'll grow the clade from San Diego to Vancouver." Javier lifted the baby again. "This size, he's just a little parasite."
Amy snatched the baby up off the ground. "That's a terrible thing to say! I can't believe you actually think of your own baby that way!
My
parents never called
me
a parasite!"
"Doesn't mean you weren't." Javier stretched. "I mean, you sucked up a lot of their resources without giving anything back, right? Like electricity and water and clothes and all that prefab vN food. That shit costs money, and you were just using it up like nobody ever worked for it. Right?"
Amy regained her stump. "I… I guess so… I never really thought of it that way."
"No shit." He sat up. "How old are you?"
"Five."
It was Javier's turn to look surprised. "You're
five
? Do you even know how
old
that is? You should be, like, a
grandmother
by now!"
"But five is when you go to kindergarten," Amy said. "I was in kindergarten. And then I… grew up."
Javier's eyes narrowed. "You're one of those slow kids, huh?"
"I am
not
! I always do well on–"
"Not like that! Like, human speed!
Slow
." He made it a whole hand gesture, his flat palm stroking the air.
"Mom and Dad said it would be good for me," Amy said.
"When you say
Dad
, you mean the human your mom lives with, right? Humans always think up crazy self-justifying bullshit. They totally retarded you."
"I'm
not
–"
"I didn't mean
you
were retarded, I meant that they
retarded
you. They slowed you down. That's what the word means. It means delayed. You know,
tardy
?" He shook his head. "You're like a bonsai tree. You kept growing and they kept clipping you." He made a
snip
motion with one hand.
Amy squared her shoulders. "Well, at least they never left me behind."
Something changed in Javier's face. His eyes went dark and flat. He snatched his baby from her. "Iterating isn't something most of us do because we feel like it, or because we're ready, or even because we want to."
Amy straightened. "Then why do you do it?"
"Because I can't stop," Javier said. "It's what I'm programmed to do. I'm an eco-model. I was made for helping trees. But I'm also a big fat carbon sink, and so are all my boys."
He seemed to come back to himself. Suddenly his grin reappeared. "You know, the more babies I make, the cooler this planet gets."
Amy had only just graduated kindergarten, but had watched enough media to know a line when she heard one. "I'll bet you say that to all the girls."
He nodded, and winked. "All the boys, too."
They didn't speak much after that. A morning spent in the sun helped Javier feel better, though, and soon he was tying the old sweater around himself like a sling in which to carry his son. He pushed vaguely north, claiming that he'd been headed that way before being arrested for "serial iteration," which Amy hadn't known was illegal in California.
"I didn't know, either, till recently," he said. "It's to preserve resources or something. They know we have to eat a lot to keep iterating, and the trace metals cost money. That's why they jack the price up on the reprocessed crap."
Amy happened to enjoy the reprocessed crap. She didn't like having to stick to the diet plan Rory sent her parents each week, but she liked the cute shapes each piece of feedstock was moulded into, and the smart offers on the wrappers, and the prizes that came with them, and the way she and her mother would save up for days and days just to binge on bigger meals later in the week. Her mom was trying to avoid having another baby. To do so, she had to monitor her diet very carefully. Her portions were only a little bit bigger than Amy's. But Javier didn't seem to have that problem. Now that she'd eaten the first big meal of her life, Amy could understand the draw.
"Were you really going to eat all that garbage behind the old electronics store?" she said.
"What the hell else is it good for? Better in my belly than a landfill."
"Isn't it all that metal bad for your teeth?"
"What, you've never broken a tooth before? They grow back the next day."
Javier picked out trails much faster than Amy did; he seemed to know just how to cross fallen logs and climb the ridges of hairy, exposed roots without really thinking about it, whereas Amy had to stand back and plot a path for herself before taking a step. Her slowness annoyed him – she could tell by the set of his shoulders – and it only worsened as she paused to stare into the cathedral-like ceiling of trees overhead, or ask about what animals he thought they might see. She had heard that vN proved especially troublesome for wild animals: bears and mountain lions and the like got frustrated because the vN just kept fighting back and didn't taste right. Her dad had read her a story online about a vN surfer who reached down into a shark's mouth and grabbed back part of his missing thigh. If a cougar decided to pounce on them, Amy wasn't so sure she'd be as calm.
"Where do you think we should go?" she asked, as a way of changing the subject.
"A main access road, and then our separate ways."
"Are you heading home?"
"Not really."
"Where do you live?"
Javier made a circle in the air with one finger. "Wherever I want."
Amy paused. She watched him continue hiking away. "Are you really homeless?"
He turned. "Well, yeah," he said. "It's a bad idea for my iterations to be clustered in one place, you know."
"I thought maybe you had a home base! You know, like a travelling salesman, or something!"
"Travelling salesman?"
"Well, there are these people in my building sometimes, and they offer to fix things. My dad says they narrow down searches about broken things to one IP and then knock on your door."
Javier nodded. "Oh yeah. I knew an abortion doctor in Mexico who did that." His eyes narrowed. "You know what those are, right?"
Amy rolled her eyes. "I can read spam as well as anybody, Javier." She hauled herself up over a fallen tree. "If you're not going home, are you going anywhere in particular?"
"Not really. Just north. You?"
Amy dusted off her palms. "I have to go home to Oakland. My mom and dad are probably really worried." She surveyed the trees. "I must be really far away, though. How long was I asleep?"
"A few days." Javier jumped down a hillside. He turned to watch Amy creeping down more carefully. "You know, you could apply for citizenship in Mecha. That's what I'm doing once I've saved up for the application fee."
Amy snorted. "I thought you had plans for world domination."
"Not world domination, just strategic… seeding."
"Seeding."
"Planting. Sowing. Whatever. The point is it's awesome over there. They sell vN food from little carts on the street corners, not crappy little one-shelf sections at the back of some human store, and you can watch or play any channel without worrying about the failsafe. They even pay the vN to live there and hang out with the tourists. It's our ideal habitat."
"It's thousands of miles away! And I thought Dejima was really crowded."
"Well, that's better than…" Javier frowned. He held a hand up. Somewhere in the trees, a twig snapped.
Javier made a throat-slitting motion and jerked his thumb at a tree. He ushered her in its direction, and held a finger over his lips. "Cops."
"What? Where–"
"Shut. Up."
Slowly, carefully, he unslung his baby from his body and handed him to Amy. "You hold him. I might drop him."
"But–"
Javier took a running leap at the tree, and ran up its length for three steps before clinging on with his fingers. Amy watched him disappear into the green shadows above. A cloud of pine needles floated down toward her face. By the time she felt them drift across her skin, she had already heard the cough of police radios.
Behind her, Amy heard cautious footsteps brushing through undergrowth: the swipe of leaves across leather, half-smothered human grunts when a boot sucked free of clay. They reverberated not merely in her ears, but across her skin and over her scalp.
Stay perfectly still
, a familiar voice within said.
None of that giggling that gives the other kids away during hide-and–