She levelled him with a stern glare. “You’re not doing yourself any favours, Javier.”
Amy gestured at the furthest wall and a portion of it slid away. She stepped out into the sunlight. Dawn was just growing into day. He followed her under the heliotropics, into the jungle of black-on-black. The trees bent back subtly to allow her more light. Lately their island was small. It held only their house within a thicket of black trees, and the single diamond tree that had always stood beside it. That tree was the first thing Amy had raised from the body of the massive group of vN that once lived beneath the sea. It was only with their combined processing power that she’d been able to rid herself of Portia, a partition of whom she had internalized when the old bitch tried to kidnap her. Amy accessed that power each time she redesigned the island. Now Javier wanted it, to redesign himself.
Amy splashed into the water and started walking across it. Behind her, Javier rolled his eyes. She always did her Jesus walk when she was feeling particularly self-righteous. He waded in after her. Beneath their feet, a membrane of the island’s flesh stretched taut between their home and the superstructure directly behind it. Javier kept his eyes on the water. But he didn’t only look down, he looked back, back to their little house alone on the water and the tree that stood beside it. No matter the formation of the islands, it was always at the very front: a perfect target.
Amy had designed their archipelago like a leaf: a single broad spine with multiple arterials of increasing length branching away from it, and little buds of space on the edges of each. Each bud featured structures of varying degrees of sophistication. Some of them were flat-pack, shipped in piece by piece or printed off by the seasteaders in exchange for services that were none of Javier’s business. New arrivals got whatever Amy shaped for them, but eventually they always wanted something of their own fashioning: teetering stacks of rusting containers; spiky tents of solar silk whose logos changed colour as the sun passed overhead; hollow pendulums as delicate as dandelion seeds, swaying from eldritch carbon fibre trees. Walking past them meant striding through glassy chiming; the islanders got pretty competitive about homemade lawn ornaments. The current meme was a unicorn weathervane whose hooves raced when the wind blew. Last month, it was sundials. It reminded Javier of a giant floating trailer park. The whole thing was roughly the size of a Dubai hotel. Amy ran five of them.
Javier followed her out of the water, to the spine of the leaf. vN of almost all clades used it like a thoroughfare. Botflies followed most of them, perched on their shoulders or hovering over their heads. They paused, regarded Amy, and zoomed away. As though having heard a signal, Xavier dropped out of a tree and bounded up to Amy. He was looking about nine or ten years old, these days. He threw his arms around Amy’s waist. She threw her head back and laughed at something he said. The laugh opened her face, and Javier glimpsed the little girl Amy must have been only a year ago.
A single jump caught him up to them. Xavier peered up at him and squinted. “?Pelotearíais?”
“Callate tu boca.”
Amy glanced at both of them. “Be nice.”
She took hold of Xavier’s hand and led him down the causeway. Xavier swung her arm as they walked. He waved at the botflies with his free hand.
“Don’t encourage them,” Amy said.
“I’m just saying hello.” The boy continued waving. “It’s not like I have my own series.”
“Matteo and Ricci are making money for their baby,” Javier said. “You know that.”
“So? Someday I’m going to iterate a baby. Shouldn’t I start saving up?”
“You can start making money when you’re full-grown. You chose to stay a kid, so you have to play by kid rules.”
Xavier shook Amy’s hand in his. “She didn’t. She was still little when she ate Portia.”
Amy paused. Her face remained blank. A stranger would have assumed she was simply staring into the island’s middle distance, surveying the black trees and listening to the thick hum of botflies. She caught him looking at her, and gave him a brittle smile over Xavier’s head. Then she rearranged her features, softened her smile, and knelt.
“Attacking Portia was a mistake. I did it because I was angry at her for hurting my mother, and because I was scared that she was really going to do permanent damage.”
“But she was doing permanent damage. I’ve seen the clip.”
Amy shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her mouth was a thin, flat line. “I don’t want you watching that again.”
“I stopped when the failsafe warning came up–”
“Good. But I still don’t want you to watch it again. Ever.”
Xavier gesticulated. Javier sometimes wondered if his designers had worked from some stereotype about Latinos talking with their hands. He couldn’t seem to quit doing it, and neither could any of his iterations. “But you were so badass!”