“Loosen up,” Arcadio had said, their first time climbing trees together. They had started at the bottom, with the roots. There were tapirs and jaguars and not too much sunlight, down on the forest floor. It was dark. He was scared.
“Stop hugging the damn tree,” Arcadio shouted up at him. “It’s not your girlfriend.”
But he liked the tree. He liked the softness of its moss. He liked how big it was. He liked all the insects crawling around through that moss. It would be fun to be one of them, just wriggling around in all that pillowy green lushness all day. He wasn’t going to tell Arcadio that, because it was stupid, but that was how he felt.
“The monkeys don’t hug the tree,” Arcadio said. “They just hold it. Like it’s a tool that they’re using.”
A tool. Something you used with your hands. Javier pulled away. He gripped with his hands. Then just with his fingers. He shut his eyes.
“There you go,” Arcadio said. “Now haul up with your fingers and push up with your toes. It’s like a crunch. You don’t know what those are, because we don’t need to use them, but I’ll show you. You bring your knees to your gut.”
“But then, I’d have to let go,” Javier had protested.
“It’s OK if you let go all at once,” Arcadio said. “You know that. Your body knows that. Your body was built for it. All you have to do is let go.”
Javier opened his eyes in Las Vegas. He pulled his body away from the wall. Wind whistled between him and it. This was the difference between crawling and running, between climbing and leaping, between man and machine. Up with the fingers. Up with the toes. Knees to stomach. He let go.
He sailed up ten feet. His fingers found the next grip without his computing it. Then he did it again. And again. And again. Then he stopped counting.
Holberton’s room was on the penthouse level, as expected. Javier recognized it by the bottle of wine left out on the terrace. It was a brand Holberton once talked about in an interview. The room was unlit, but it lit up as soon as Javier entered it from the terrace. Inside, it was very clean. Housekeeping had been by. He would need to find the safe.
“Where is the safe?” he asked.
“You don’t belong here,” Rory said. He recognized her immediately. It was the hotel talking, but it was also her. She had a special kind of smug.
“Bullshit.” Javier started with the perimeter of the room. He nudged aside each piece of art, and every mirror. Nothing. He checked the cabinets in the kitchenette. Then the bar. Nothing. He even opened the wine cooler beneath the counter, and checked the powder room and laundry room nearest the door into the main hall. Nothing. But that was just being thorough – the safe was likely in the bedroom, where giant watches and gems went to sleep. He went there, next.
Amy was projected on every wall of Holberton’s bedroom.
No, not Amy. Not all of them were Amy. Most were her clademates. They looked exactly like her, but they weren’t her. He had no idea what particular pattern matching or facial recognition algorithms allowed him to recognize that, but he was usually able to identify his own flesh when he saw it on display. He’d been able to do it, the first time he watched news coverage of FEMA herding Amy’s clademates and all the clades who shared their bodyplan onto trucks. He’d watched for her. Obsessively. It got him chased out of an electronics store where he’d been scouting for e-waste to eat.
The vN who looked like Amy all seemed to be inhabiting the same space. The images were surveillance images captured from household environments: kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms. The women were dressed normally, not in prison jumpsuits or lab scrubs. They were interacting with humans. Mostly men, but a few women.
The vN were also iterating.
Javier found a picture of a human man smiling into a camera – a nice camera with favourable lighting, not a surveillance camera – and hugging his iterating vN. She was huge and full. Her face was round. Even her ankles had puffed, just a little. This was what Amy would have looked like, if she had ever iterated. If she had given Xavier the little sister he kept asking about. If she had given the two of them a daughter.
The next image was of the resulting iteration. There was a new picture for every day. In each image, she was naked. Javier waved his hand and the little girl grew, faster and faster, stretching up and out into the child Amy had once been, wispy fine blond hair and huge green eyes, up into a more teenage size, out into a woman grown, the perfect replication of her mother. The final image was of the two women standing together.
When he flipped the images forward, a blueprint filled the wall. The blueprint was not for a single building, but a whole town. There was a central square and a big sculpture where a fountain might once have gone, and a group of parks, and businesses, and houses. When you gestured at any of the groups, photos from them popped up. Amy’s clademates were in every one. Young and old, iterating and not. A field of green-eyed, fair-haired women and their husbands and wives.