That night under the stars, with his boys sleeping in a tiny little raft that they all expected to be swallowed up at any moment, he had run the probabilities of her being pulped away into nothing. They had no reason to believe that she was anything more than extruded feedstock. Her memories and patterns and habits were probably lost, digested in the belly of a giant.
And watching his sticky skin slowly mending over each repeated burn, Javier could only simulate the things he would have said, should have said, should have done. If they had gone their separate ways after Xavier was born, if he had run further from the garbage dump, would they have been in this mess? If he had let her go in Redmond, would she be alive now? What if he had kissed her the way he'd wanted to so many times, and said Fuck it, fuck the quest, fuck finding the answer, it's good when we're together and that's enough? Maybe he could have lived with Portia hiding behind Amy's eyes. Maybe he could have adjusted to her voice in Amy's cries and her fingernails raking his chest, maybe if Amy were there too. Maybe he could have loved them both. He considered this possibility, and many others, until the morning light exposed a thin and trembling blister containing the outlier in all Javier's calculations.
It should not have surprised him that Amy had reprogrammed the thing from the inside. She did that with everyone. She worked like a virus, altering priorities and setting new defaults and raising the bar and looking at you like you'd always had the potential to change, you just hadn't always known it. He had been in her grip for Christ knew how long. Maybe it was the failsafe. Maybe she was just human enough. Or maybe he was just enchanted enough with her berserker mode, having identified an alpha whose pack he could insert himself into. But in that moment, when the light hit her, his awareness rested on exactly none of those things and focused instead on how whole she was, how faithfully reproduced in every detail, from her too-fine hair to the knobbiness of her knees. He had seen her in various states of damage, in prison and on the side of the road and deep in the bowels of Redmond and in the jaws of her family, body smashed and voice destroyed, and he had watched her repair herself each time. But she had never looked so beautiful as she did now, a tiny perfect thing in the midst of all the dirt and salt and carbon, a pearl gifted to him by the sea.
He had knelt, and wiped the black grime from her face and strained it from her hair with his fingers. If he were organic, his systems would have tried to attenuate the flood of anxious chemicals with a mental meditation valve, a prayer to some figment that dwelt between the neurons. But he was not flesh, so he did not hope, and instead he waited as the dawn filled her face with pink and gold. He held her as her eyes opened, and his every process stilled with the exhausted finality of a task long in the working.
"You came back."
For the first time, uncalculated tears blurred Javier's vision. "Haven't you noticed?" he asked. "I always come back."
The flesh of the creature that had swallowed her then bore her up, standing her on her two new feet so that she could survey the landscape. With a neat motion like a conductor bringing an orchestra to attention, she raised the majority of the mass above the surface. And as she began to sculpt the first trees, Javier watched a shred of the surface skim itself off and slither up her legs to become a dress for her newborn body.
She was Amy, but she wasn't. The mech had absorbed her, but she had absorbed it, too. She had bought their lives with her own, and what was resurrected – what she reassembled, what she made of herself in that deep and awful darkness – was the latest iteration, and it was networked.
Months later, Javier still caught himself staring at her and wondering who she really was. Most of the time, the vN – whose body emerged naked from the carbon veil blister on the Great Elder Bot's darkly gleaming skin – acted like the Amy he knew. She walked with Amy's light steps under the black fronds of the heliotropics she'd sketched into the air, and she slept in Amy's curling shell shape while the black roof of their house folded itself into an A-frame to better shed the nightly rains. She laughed Amy's laugh. She smiled Amy's smile.
And his son still loved her. Junior – Xavier, he insisted on calling himself, now – still leapt into her arms at every possible opportunity. He still wriggled his way into her arms on nights when she'd spent a few too many hours redesigning the island. He butted his chin under hers and grabbed her wrist to coil her arm around his ribs. Xavier slept with a smug smile. Javier caught him there some mornings as he passed by her room.