“Where are my children?” Javier asked.
Tyler reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sorry, man. Really, really sorry.”
Javier blinked. “What day is it?”
“It’s almost Christmas.”
Javier shut his eyes. Six months. He’d been under for half a year. “The island?”
“Gone. All of them.”
His eyes opened. “What?”
“They’re all gone, man. As soon as the first one burned…” Tyler shrugged helplessly. “All of them just started… melting. Like an oil spill.”
“All of them? Gone?”
“All gone. Uncle Sam, uh, hastened that particular process.” Tyler snorted. “Drone strikes, skimmer bots, phage swarms, smart algae, the whole bit. What they couldn’t blow up, they skimmed off and took away. I think the UN has some of the dregs in some oil drums, somewhere, next to the Ark of the Covenant.”
There was nothing left. No Great Elder Bot. No islands. No physical memory. Nowhere for Amy to have ported herself when he…
“Oh, Jesus.” His voice was a whisper. He knew the taste in his mouth, now. The stains under his nails. The smell on his skin. He knew it only in passing; the failsafe kept him from experiencing it, most of the time. Only a handful of women had let him taste and see. Blood. So much blood.
“Yeah,” Tyler said.
“Oh, Jesus.” He gripped the edges of the hammock hard. “Oh, Christ. Amy. Oh God, Amy…”
Tyler reached over and stilled the hammock. “She’s… gone, Javier. We’ve been waiting for word… you know, thinking maybe she copied herself somewhere, but…” He sighed and licked his lips. “With what all’s been happening out there, she can’t have made it.”
Javier rolled his head and his gaze toward Tyler. “What do you mean?”
Tyler took a deep breath. He licked his lips again. He appeared to think of something, and took Javier’s hand. He squeezed it hard, like they were making a bargain together.
“I mean the motherfucking apocalypse, brother,” he said. “I mean Portia.”
He was suddenly and terribly aware of how small he was in this room, and how small he would like to remain. If he never opened that door, if he never left this room, he would not have to see what Tyler was talking about. It would not have to be real. Amy gone and his sons dead and Powell…
“She’s out?” Javier asked. “Free?”
Tyler unrolled a reader and showed Javier an image. It was a sixteen-lane highway. Afternoon sunlight slanted across mangled cars. They’d all crashed into an eighteen-wheeler that read ISAAC’S ELECTRONICS on the side. It was a prison transport for vN, just like the one where Javier had first met Amy. Now a cluster of vehicles pressed themselves flat against it like preserved petals. There’d been an accident underneath an electronic sign. The sign read: BEWARE; FOR I AM FEARLESS, AND THEREFORE POWERFUL.
“That’s why everybody was all hot and bothered to go scorched earth on the islands. They’re hoping to shatter any mirrors she might be hosting herself on. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’re talking about taking down satellites. She’s a one-woman army hell-bent on taking us back to the fucking Dark Ages.”
Javier laughed. He felt the seam in the skin of his back start to open, but he couldn’t stop. It was too funny. Portia, the epitome of technological achievement, forcing the humans who made her into burning their clouds one server at a time.
“Dude,” Tyler said, “what happened out there?”
Javier slowly pulled himself to sit up. “I think…” He reread the advice on the side of the cell. “I think I got owned. Hard.”
Tyler exhaled smoke. “Was it that preacher guy?”
Tears pricked Javier’s eyes. “Yeah. It was him.”
Tyler nodded. He stood up. Javier watched him walk over to a door in the cell, knock out “Shave and a Haircut,” and wait as the door squealed open. Light blazed into the room.
“I won the pool,” Tyler said.
The seastead sat on pontoons like an oil rig, but without the giant milkshake straw poking up out of the middle. They’d built the towers on the “stacked rock” model, with old containers piled high and poking out at odd angles to catch the most sun. Some had solar paint, others had fab-glass to take in light and grow crops. Everywhere, he heard the chug and clank and hiss of the water purifiers. Everyone smoked. He got invited to naked vinyasa his first morning out. He didn’t go. If he’d gone, he would have fucked someone. He knew that about himself, now. Or rather, he’d been reminded of it. Powell had reminded him.
Simone called the seastead a “temporary autonomous zone,” but really that meant that it was a big camp and you could come or go as you pleased. You didn’t get a vote unless you committed to more than six months of work, which she said meant that “the views of anybody spending their summer off school slumming it here don’t mean shit.”
“We could use you in the gardens,” Simone reminded him. “You can stay as long as you like.”