Years ago, after Cascadia, a container full of networked vN were sent to help with the relief effort. The container was lost in a storm. No one heard from it. Human authorities eventually figured that undersea pressure on the container had destroyed everything inside it. In reality, the von Neumanns waited, and waited, and waited, at first patiently expecting their mission to begin, then wondering why it hadn't as they grew hungrier by the week, before finally turning on each other after a few months and inevitably iterating a short while later. The network they shared allowed them to distribute the work of designing their own probes, ones who could withstand the cold and the pressure. They iterated collectively, bumping up attributes they liked and knocking down the ones they thought less useful. Finally their next iteration was ready, and out he swam, and he found everything needed to survive, and he made more like himself. He returned to the container to spawn, but by then it and its inhabitants had decayed beyond recognition. He bore his son alone in the darkness beneath the waves, and his son did the same, and soon their numbers expanded to a metastate within which they could plan their next prototype. Eventually, they formed the collective that became the beast most people knew.
What most people didn't know was just how many of them there were. Signal latency was a real bitch of a problem, one even vN couldn't quite solve, and so the Great Elder Bot (as Javier now called it) budded off when it achieved enough mass. One now formed the island beneath their feet. But there were others. Amy said she talked to them, sometimes. They liked warm places, where the mercury and the other metals permeated the water. They liked smokers and subduction zones. Their clade stitched pinstripes around the planet. And when they got really hungry – while working on the latest iteration, say – they sometimes plucked their food from the surface. And one day, in the middle of an allyou-can-eat container ship buffet, they scarfed down something with two very distinct flavours: a pocket of piss and vinegar in a sweet, soft shell. Amy.
Xavier was the first to try saving her. Together, they watched the arm of the massive creature suck her down its gullet, her body – Portia's body, in that moment – twitching and kicking as it slid into oblivion. And then Javier's arms were suddenly empty, and his son was in the air, his arms and legs having attached to that much larger mecha limb as confidently as they might have secured themselves around the trunk of a tree. His youngest attacked the creature with his fingers and his teeth. He ripped into its dark flesh like a sculptor attacking clay. It whipped through the air and dashed him against containers. He refused to let go.
Javier's children had a funny habit of outshining him.
He'd stripped the vessel for weapons, after that. He broke the guns off their turrets, and raided the containers for anything of use. He'd fired up the lifeboat's outboard and aimed it straight at the Great Elder Bot's core body. And when he got there, he found his youngest son waiting for him, his arms burned up to the elbows, his knees raw and bloody, alone on the tip of a machine whose glossy bulk had already sheared the rudder off their lifeboat.
Javier had expected the water to be cold when his feet hit the waves. But the machine's internal combustions had warmed the surrounding depths, and the soles of Javier's feet hissed when he walked across its skin. At the time, he had no clue that the heat that seared his skin – and forced him and Xavier to take breaks from the digging – was the heat of Amy's reforging. Javier hadn't even been sure he could dig her out. That the thing beneath the surface was a machine, he knew. But what kind of machine, what it did, he had no idea. Maybe it was a massive algal bloom of oil-devouring mech-krill. Maybe it was a hideous cancerous mass of sentient trash. But it had Amy deep in its guts and they had to keep digging, keep shooting at it and pouring acid on it and chasing it when it drifted away. He did not discuss these actions with his sons so much as hear their distant pleas for him to come back to the boat, to leave the thing alone, to realize that she was dead and there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do, and that he was wasting her sacrifice with his stupidity. Its surface could open up at any moment and swallow him, they said. They were alone here, with no supplies or food or method of calling for help. They were burning through a battery. They had to escape while escape remained an option.
But Amy had already lost herself inside one monster. Javier wasn't about to let her be swallowed by another. He swung an axe down into the machine's shining carapace, and he kept swinging until he felt the grind of his bones inside their sockets. And finally Ignacio jumped off the boat, tapped him on the shoulder, and handed him a vomit cannon. "Dad," he said, "for this job, I think you want some power tools."