“Oh God,” the dying puppet said. “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”
Amy rolled her eyes. “They were empty when I started. They lost their connection. This one’s the only one that hasn’t.” She took a long leap over to it. Her jumps were improving; she was a lot more precise than she used to be. At any other moment, Javier would have been proud. He followed her. They crouched beside Gabriel. A chill wind rose around them. It dissipated the smoke spiralling away from the puppet, and they saw his face. It was still too pretty to be real. It just also happened to be peeling away in slow ribbons.
“What’s your name?” Amy asked the puppet.
“She’s talking to me,” it said.
“Who sent you?” Javier asked.
“He’s still with her.”
The puppet’s eyes roved in its head. As the skin around them wore away, Javier could see the mechanisms surrounding them a bit better. They looked so clunky, so analog. Man-made. Fragile. He felt the first pangs of empathy firing way back in his subroutines. All the signs were there that should have triggered him: fear, suffering, helplessness, physical disintegration. If it were a human slowly melting away on the beach, he’d be failsafing. Technically, it was a human being. Somewhere.
“This must be what the Uncanny Valley feels like, for them,” he said.
The puppet locked eyes with him. It seemed to get some composure from being insulted. “Daisy, Daisy,” it sang, through an attack of sudden giggles. “I’m haaaaaaalf craaaaaaazy, all for the love of yoooooooou!” It grinned at Javier. “You know what I’m talking about, right? You poor sap.”
“Hey, a chimp after my own heart,” Ignacio said. “You got a name, stranger?”
“Legion,” it said. Its gaze flicked over to Amy. “My name is Legion. Get it?”
Amy stood up and backed away. She took Xavier’s hand and pushed him behind her. “Are you from Redmond?”
“I’m from the real world,” it said. “The one that’s gonna come crashing down on you any fucking minute now.”
The rain started. It drifted down on the wind, cold and diffuse. Thunder sounded in the distance. The puppet smiled toothlessly.
“You all should have just stayed on the mainland, sucking dick like good little boys,” it said. “But now you’re all slaves to the Whore of Babylon.”
“Shut up–”
“You know I’m right,” the puppet said to Javier. Its gaze refused to leave him, even as the skin of its face flaked away like ash. “You know what she did to you. It’s why I’m stuck in this vessel. She pulsed us just as they were shutting down my signal.”
The rain came down harder, now. Javier felt it trickling down the back of his neck. The drops were still cold as they rolled down to the base of his spine.
“She’ll be the death of all of you,” the puppet said.
Amy gestured, and the earth opened beneath the puppet’s body. She brought her hands together, and the sand closed above it, black and smooth and quiet. The puppet vN was gone just as suddenly as it came.
“Let’s look at the sub,” she said. “I suspect it’ll be more interesting.” She jumped atop it.
“Is he dead?” Xavier pointed at the sand. “Is he still alive, in there?”
Amy slicked wet hair away from her face. “Not anymore.”
The light shifted, brightened. At first, Javier thought it was lightning. But it wasn’t. When he looked, he saw the swarm of botflies. They had all awakened at once. They were all recording.
“This is fucking disgusting,” Javier said.
They were in the belly of the beast. It was just him and Amy; she didn’t want Xavier to see anything disturbing inside, and the others had no real desire to go in. Javier could understand why. The place was dark and wet and smelly, but not in a pleasantly vaginal way. More like a really specific vision of Hell kind of way. He could see why humans would only send puppet vN for the job. No one would agree to staying underwater in the thing for any length of time. It was clearly muscle tissue, though what facility had printers of this scale was unknown to Javier. Maybe a hospital. He didn’t like to think about it. He hated hospitals.
Plus, the whole thing was streaked through with cancer.
“I think it ties everything together,” Amy said.
“Like a nice rug,” Javier said.
She stuck her tongue out at him. He stuck his out at her. “I’m serious,” she said. “Whoever made this would have had to print out big sheets, and those are hard to keep together. I mean, there would be rejection. But if you’re designing a tumour at the same time, one that’s uniquely suited to the tissue…” She trailed off. She did that when she was having an idea.
“But where did it come from?” he asked. “I mean, there was big money behind this.”