Like the Impala, Holberton’s bike was a real boat to handle on the road. The recumbent position made it easier; Javier suspected that anybody with a genuine organic spine would have real trouble sitting upright on a bike for the roughly twenty-six hours it would take him to reach Walla Walla. Then again, an organic person would need sleep. Javier didn’t.
He preset the bike’s speed limits so he could toggle through cruise control at will, and synced up the helmet to traffic news. For the first hour, it wasn’t too bad. Just him, and the strengthening sun, and the bike rumbling away between his legs as they ate up the blacktop together. It was hard to believe that anything could be going wrong on such a clear summer day. This was a part of America he had never seen anywhere but in media: the empty part, stretching away for miles and miles in every direction, a field of jasper red under lapis blue dotted with stubborn, scrubby green. This was the place where the cowboy movies came from. This was the place where the cowboy stories came from. Every bad day at every black rock, every drifter on every high plain, every years-long search, they all came from here. He was in one of those stories, now. He was one of those guys on a horse trying to find his girl. Or so he told himself.
On the radio everybody had an opinion about a certain document leak that had sprung up overnight. It described in detail FEMA’s plan to poison the vN food supply, and also contained memos from other world governments about their adoption of the program.
Jack worked fast.
“Well, I find it really troubling that the government isn’t telling us anything about what goes on in there,” said one caller. He was a retiree named Burt. Burt lived near Macondo, and he wanted the city either cleared out, or packed full of more vN, not just the Amys. “I mean, we have a right to know.”
Burt was buying a gun, later that day. He had never owned one, but he needed something that would shoot puke rounds. Just in case.
“I think the Stepford solution is the only solution,” another caller said. Her name was Crystal. Crystal was learning how to be a kindergarten teacher. “These… people, I guess, they’ve got families. They have kids that are dependent on them. We can’t just split them up from their families. We can’t just kill them.”
What they were really talking about was rounding up all the vN and putting them somewhere.
“I think we really, uh, messed this up,” said the third caller. His name was Keenan. “I think the people who are into vN, or whatever, they’re like kids with toys. At first they were all excited, and now they’re bored, or they’re pissed because their toys got broken. It’s stupid. Meanwhile, the rest of us normal guys, who don’t sleep with dolls, we’re just shaking our heads. We’re all facing the goddamn robot apocalypse because some nerds didn’t have the sack to ask a girl out.”
Of course, that wasn’t the whole story. Javier thought of this as he wove his way through traffic. The vN were LeMarque’s idea. Retailing their technology was somebody else’s. If New Eden hadn’t had to pay out a massive settlement, the world might never have seen the vN. Maybe there would have been other humanoid robots, instead. Big clunky ones with rubber skin and actuator joints and hydraulic muscles. The kind other companies used to build, before New Eden started their crusade.
“It’s been a whole year since that poor kid died in that kindergarten,” a caller named Kiana said. “And then those other people died, and now soldiers are being attacked, and America is probably next. So what is being done about this? Were we supposed to just let them have their little islands forever? They’re a threat. Even if most of them work right now, there’s nothing to say they won’t just break down later. They can’t function perfectly forever. Nothing can.”
Eventually, the radio started calling up vN to see how they felt about the whole thing.
“Well, obviously the humans are the first priority,” said the vN working the radio station’s reception desk. “But it’s really only the one clade that has caused problems. And for the most part, they’re contained.”
Javier listened to these calls all the way through New Mexico. The route took him alongside national parks and through single-intersection towns, past exits to Air Force bases and “secret history” museums about alien ancestors and government cabals. Javier rode past them all. As he did, the sun began to slip toward evening, and the vN who called in started sounding more selfless.
“Maybe it really would just be better if we went somewhere else for a while.”