“No. I’m very serious. My own previous iteration, he…” Arcadio’s fingers danced in the air, as though he were trying to draw the words from there. “He was not… bright. He iterated me just when things were changing. When the clade was beginning to understand the process. But he was still very much a tool of the company. He could not think outside the mission statement.”
Javier hunched forward. Even when he was a small boy, stories about abuelito were vanishingly rare. Arcadio almost never spoke of him – only that he was dead, that he had burned in a forest fire set by humans down at the bottom of a corporate Uncanny Valley.
“So, I came here, to learn more.”
“After you left my ass in prison.”
Arcadio blinked. “Yes.” He shrugged. “But you’re here, now, and that’s what’s important.”
Javier pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m glad you feel that way, Dad. Really. I am. I just wish you had felt that way a few years ago.”
Arcadio looked a little puzzled. “I was doing the best I could,” he said. “They were going to feed you and keep a roof over your head. I couldn’t do those things. At least, not consistently. So I left you with them.”
Javier met his father’s eyes. Arcadio looked so sad. So bewildered. Like he’d honestly never expected any of this to be a problem. “They beat the shit out of me, in there. They m-made m-me w-watch, while they b-beat the sh-shit out of ea-each o-other.”
Arcadio reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “I know that, now. I know how they are. I know what they are. But I didn’t, then.”
“Dad, they’re chimps,” Javier said. “They’re animals. Literally. What did you expect?”
“I expected better.” Arcadio smiled ruefully. “I still love them, Javier. I still think the best of them. I still believe they’re capable of… more.”
Javier snorted. “Lucky you.”
Arcadio withdrew his hand. “This is not why I pulled you aside,” he said. “I know that you are here to see Pastor LeMarque, but I wanted you to see something else.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“I’ve been saving,” Arcadio said. “I put in for the Mechanese citizenship lottery, about two years ago. And, recently, I have received a notification that I am a winner. So they send me pictures, so I can acculturate myself.”
Arcadio reached into his shirt pocket. He had a tiny scroll-style reader there, no longer than a stylus, and he unfurled it carefully on the picnic table and slid it across to Javier. On the reader was a chunk of video. “MECHA,” the description read. “YESTERDAY.”
The video looked like rooftop security footage. The camera was looking down onto a busy scramble crossing crowded with humans and vN. It was in a city centre, and all the buildings had bright signs in languages Javier didn’t speak. The buildings were very tall, and mostly glass.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“Keep watching.”
Javier leaned down. He watched more closely. It looked like a perfectly ordinary city. At least, it was ordinary by Mechanese standards: botflies hummed everywhere, and street vendors sold vN-friendly food, and all the vN seemed to be wearing a costume of some sort.
Then two blurs bounced between the buildings. One dark, one light. One big, one small.
Javier stared. The view switched to that of another camera, on another building. The blurs moved past one more time. Now Javier pounced on the footage. With his finger, he drew it back and blew it up. He looked up at Arcadio. Arcadio smiled.
“I know you’re here to complete some sort of quest,” his dad said, “but I think it might be the wrong one.”
Javier looked down at the reader once more. Their faces were perfectly clear and recognizable in frozen high-res. The big vN was bigger than Javier remembered. He had obviously been eating more. He was Xavier. And the little one, the little one with curly blonde hair and brown eyes just like Javier’s own and photovoltaic skin slowly turning the colour of milky tea under the sunlight, she was his daughter. His little girl. His and Amy’s. Somehow, she had finally given Xavier the little sister he had always dreamed of.
“I know you believe I made a mistake, with you,” Arcadio said. “My only advice is to avoid making the same one.”
Javier wiped his eyes. “How old is this?”
“A week.”
Jesus. Shit. His youngest had been alive this whole time. Moreover, he’d been looking after his baby sister. And in the meantime, Javier was strategically sucking cock and trying to make himself feel better. Oh, God.
"There are more, of just her," Arcadio said. He flipped open another set of files, and there was his little girl again, zooming past windows all on her own. Most were night shots. There was one picture of her making a V-for-victory sign with her fingers with a group of men and women in what appeared to be a hacklab. She was the only one not wearing an allergy mask.