The exhaustion hit him on the way down. He had been awake for too long without eating. The jumps, the fight, Cherry… he was running on empty. And it was night. No sunlight to feed him. No money in his pocket, either. And Amy was dead. And his sons were probably dead, too. And Portia was loose. Everything he had spent the past year working for was gone. He was right back where he started when he met Amy: homeless, friendless, penniless. The realization crashed down on him like a felled tree, a groan and then a creak and then a roar as it toppled and crushed him beneath its awful weight. A sound came out of his mouth that he couldn’t identify. He was not given to crying – crying was an organic thing – and had, in his memory, only once felt tears coming on. When Amy came back. When she opened her eyes for the first time, free of Portia, herself again, though he was only beginning to learn who that woman truly was. Now, he might never know.
“Sir?”
Javier brought his head up. “Yeah?”
“Sir, are you in distress?”
Javier wiped his eyes and stood up straight. “No. I’m fine.” When the elevator remained silent, he added: “Thank you for asking.”
“Do you require wayfinding assistance?”
“Wayfinding… Oh. Yeah. I need to eat something.”
“The Electric Sheep is located on Deck 8. Staff meal for Shift A is at 04:00.”
Javier checked the time. “So… in an hour?”
“Yes, sir. If you are interested, please report to the main dining room, in uniform.”
The casino’s Christmas theme did not extend to Christian charity. When Javier found the posted rules, they were explicit: Gameplayers with a synthetic advantage will not be allowed to participate in table games. In other words, no vN. They had enough computational power to count the cards, and enough affect detection to spot a tell from a mile away. It was a powerful combination, and one he’d used to make money in the past. None of that mattered now, though. He had no cash or chips to play with. And the posted rules also said something about a ten percent rake every half hour. Those were terrible odds, for a man or a machine.
And he had more pressing matters to attend to. Like eating. He took the elevator to the main dining room, and tucked himself into a private banking alcove near a bathroom. Soon, his fellow vN started trickling in. Many of them looked just like him; his model, if not his clade, was apparently the default male staff model.
“Where’s your uniform?” the shift leader asked, when Javier queued up at the entrance to the dining room.
“It’s being cleaned,” Javier said.
The shift leader rolled her eyes. She was human. Exhaustion hung from her eyes in violet folds. She wore giant enamel earrings in the shape of poinsettias.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“It was covered in semen,” Javier said.
The shift leader growled under her breath. “Ugh. You fucking fuckbots. I can’t even…” She ticked something off on her reader. “Whatever. Just get it dry before you go to work.”
“Thank you.”
Javier was accustomed to seeing human food served buffet-style, but he had never seen so much pre-fab vN food in one place. Under glass-haloed tables, tureens of feed steamed and bubbled. And when they were empty, someone rushed out and replaced them with full ones. The air reeked of rust. He was halfway down the line when he heard a voice behind him.
“?Está embarazada?”
Javier turned back. The other vN was staring at him. Then his gaze shifted to Javier’s plate, piled high.
“No es asunto suyo,” he replied, and found a table near a wall-mounted display.
Pregnant. Christ. He might be. The memories of Arcadio only ever arose when he was iterating. He kept them carefully disassociated otherwise. But he was burning so much raw material, it probably wouldn’t develop very quickly. He could let the sunlight take care of him, as he had on the island. He didn’t want to iterate. This was the worst possible time to get knocked up. Still. It was happening. One in, one out. One in, six out. Seven, counting his grandson. Eight, counting Amy. Nine, counting any iterations the two of them might have had.
Léon was a surprise, like this. He didn’t get surprised much, after that. He’d been in Mexico, happily enjoying the attentions of a woman who’d just survived cancer, when the dreams started coming and his memory started cloning itself for the next iteration.