“Your name is Junior,” Javier said. “When you grow up, you can call yourself whatever you want. You can name your own iterations however you want.”
“Iterations?”
“Babies. It happens if we eat too much. Buggy self-repair cycle—like cancer.”
Not for the first time, Javier felt grateful that his children were all born with an extensive vocabulary.
“You’re gonna spend the next couple of weeks with me, and I’ll show you how to get what you need. I’ve done this with all your brothers.”
“How many brothers?”
“Eleven.”
“Where are they now?”
Javier shrugged. “Around. I started in Nicaragua.”
“They look like you?”
“Exactly like me. Exactly like you.”
“If I see someone like you but he isn’t you, he’s my brother?”
“Maybe.” Javier opened up the last foil packet of vN electrolytes and held it out for Junior. Dutifully, his son began slurping. “There are lots of vN shells, and we all use the same operating system, but the API was distributed differently for each clade. So you’ll meet other vN who look like you, but that doesn’t mean they’re family. They won’t have our clade’s arboreal plugin.”
“You mean the jumping trick?”
“I mean the jumping trick. And this trick, too.”
Javier stretched one arm outside the treehouse. His skin fizzed pleasantly. He nodded at Junior to try. Soon his son was grinning and stretching his whole torso out the window and into the light, sticking out his tongue like Javier had seen human kids do with snow during cartoon Christmas specials.
“It’s called photosynthesis,” Javier told him a moment later. “Only our clade can do it.”
Junior nodded. He slowly withdrew the chipset from between his tiny lips. Gold smeared across them; his digestive fluids had made short work of the hardware. Javier would have to find more, soon.
“Why are we here?”
“In this treehouse?”
Junior shook his head. “Here.” He frowned. He was only two days old, and finding the right words for more nuanced concepts was still hard. “Alive.”
“Why do we exist?”
Junior nodded emphatically.
“Well, our clade was developed to—”
“No!” His son looked surprised at the vehemence of his own voice. He pushed on anyway. “vN. Why do vN exist at all?”
This latest iteration was definitely an improvement on the others. His other boys usually didn’t get to that question until at least a week went by. Javier almost wished this boy were the same. He’d have more time to come up with a better answer. After twelve children, he should have crafted the perfect response. He could have told his son that it was his own job to figure that out. He could have said it was different for everybody. He could have talked about the church, or the lawsuits, or even the failsafe. But the real answer was that they existed for the same reasons all technologies existed. To be used.
“Some very sick people thought the world was going to end,” Javier said. “We were supposed to help the humans left behind.”
The next day, Javier took him to a park. It was a key part of the training: meeting humans of different shapes, sizes, and colours. Learning how to play with them. Practising English. The human kids liked watching his kid jump. He could make it to the top of the slide in one leap.
“Again!” they cried. “Again!”
When the shadows stretched long and, Junior jumped up into the tree where Javier waited, and said: “I think I’m in love.”
Javier nodded at the playground below. “Which one?”
Junior pointed to a redheaded organic girl whose face was an explosion of freckles. She was all by herself under a tree, rolling a scroll reader against her little knee. She kept adjusting her position to get better shade.
“You’ve got a good eye,” Javier said.
As they watched, three older girls wandered over her way. They stood over her and nodded down at the reader. She backed up against the tree and tucked her chin down toward her chest. Way back in Javier’s stem code, red flags rose. He shaded Junior’s eyes.
“Don’t look.”
“Hey, give it back!”
“Don’t look, don’t look—” Javier saw one hand lash out, shut his eyes, curled himself around his struggling son. He heard a gasp for air. He heard crying. He felt sick. Any minute now the failsafe might engage, and his memory would begin to spontaneously self-corrupt. He had to stop their fight, before it killed him and his son.
“D-Dad—”
Javier jumped. His body knew where to go; he landed on the grass to the sound of startled shrieks and fumbled curse words. Slowly, he opened his eyes. One of the older girls still held the scroll reader aloft. Her arm hung there, refusing to come down, even as she started to back away. She looked about ten.
“Do y-you know w-what I am?”
“You’re a robot …” She sounded like she was going to cry. That was fine; tears didn’t set off the failsafe.
“You’re damn right I’m a robot.” He pointed up into the tree. “And if I don’t intervene right now, my kid will die.”
“I didn’t—”
“Is that what you want? You wanna kill my kid?”
She was really crying now. Her friends had tears in their eyes. She sniffled back a thick clot of snot. “No! We didn’t know! We didn’t see you!”
“That doesn’t matter. We’re everywhere, now. Our failsafes go off the moment we see one of you chimps start a fight. It’s called a social control mechanism. Look it up. And next time, keep your grubby little paws to yourself.”
One of her friends piped up: “You don’t have to be so mean—”
“Mean?” Javier watched her shrink under the weight of his gaze. “Mean is getting hit and not being able to fight back. And that’s something I’ve got in common with your little punching bag over here. So why don’t you drag your knuckles somewhere else and give that some thought?”
The oldest girl threw the reader toward her victim with a weak underhand. “I don’t know why you’re acting so hurt,” she said, folding her arms and jiggling away. “You don’t even have real feelings.”
“Yeah, I don’t have real fat, either, tubby! Or real acne! Enjoy your teen years, querida!”
Behind him, he heard applause. When he turned, he saw a redhaired woman leaning against the tree. She wore business clothes with an incongruous pair of climbing slippers. The fabric of her tights had gone loose and wrinkled down around her ankles, like the skin of an old woman. Her applause died abruptly as the little freckled girl ran up and hugged her fiercely around the waist.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” the mother said. She nodded at Javier. “Thanks for looking after her.”
“I wasn’t.”
Javier gestured and Junior slid down out of his tree. Unlike the organic girl, Junior didn’t hug him; he jammed his little hands in the pockets of his stolen clothes and looked the older woman over from top to bottom. Her eyebrows rose.
“Well!” She bent down to Junior’s height. The kid’s eyes darted for the open buttons of her blouse and widened considerably; Javier smothered a smile. “What do you think, little man? Do I pass inspection?”
Junior grinned. “Eres humana.”
She straightened. Her eyes met Javier’s. “I suppose coming from a vN, that’s quite the compliment.”
“We aim to please,” he said.
Moments later, they were in her car.
It started with a meal. It usually did. From silent prison guards in Nicaragua to singing cruise directors in Panama, from American girls dancing in Mexico and now this grown American woman in her own car in her own country, they started it with eating. Humans enjoyed feeding vN. They liked the special wrappers with the cartoon robots on the front. (They folded them into origami unicorns, because they thought that was clever.) They liked asking about whether he could taste. (He could, but his tongue read texture better than flavour.) They liked calculating how much he’d need to iterate again. (A lot.) This time, the food came as a thank-you. But the importance of food in the relationship was almost universal among humans. It was important that Junior learn this, and the other subtleties of organic interaction. Javier’s last companion had called their relationship “one big HCI problem.” Javier had no idea what that meant, but he suspected that embedding Junior in a human household for a while would help him avoid it.