It felt wrong not sleeping beside her. His body knew this, but it also knew that this Amy was different from the one who once shared the backs of trucks with him. He had tried to discuss the difference – her newfound calm, her focus, the speed with which she now made each decision – with Xavier, but his youngest son merely rolled his eyes. What Xavier and Amy had shared during the long days and nights of the boy's bluescreen delay, Javier would never truly know, but the time had cemented something pure and clear between the two of them, something Javier had never once enjoyed with his own iterations. He saw it when she gently separated his son's curls with her long and careful fingers, or when she delved below the island's obsidian surface and withdrew a quicksilver peach for him to eat. He saw it in the complete comfort and trust on his son's face.
The father of thirteen children, Javier had only ever seen that bliss on his sons' faces when they had found a human whom they loved to please. But Amy wasn't like the humans his other sons knew. She wouldn't tire of his novelty, or wonder if he were "really real", or pass him off to a friend when his affection proved unnaturally strong. She would die – had died – to protect him. And despite having loved his share of humans, Javier maintained no illusions about their loyalty. To love humans was to know them, and to forgive all their flaws, even the ones they didn't yet know of.
He'd been with humans of all shapes and colours through good times and bad. They had a habit of finding him in the troughs and valleys of their lives, when they just wanted something easy, something that just worked, but occasionally he served as a sort of dessert, a reward for their accomplishments. He met them in bars and parking lots and bleachers. They took him to their homes, their capsules, their cars, and even to their churches when they were feeling particularly ambivalent about the whole enterprise. He had been the vengeance fuck, the guilty fuck, the it's not cheating if you're not a person fuck. He had sat with them through Just a tiny little slice and I'll call her back tomorrow and If they didn't want me to dummy up the numbers, they'd have made these forms easier to fill out.
"You love us like God must love us," the last one told him, before the fucking started. The last one was really into God. A lot of gods, actually. He was pursuing a degree in divinity, whatever that meant. He started out all Good Samaritan and ended up leaving little pillars of salt on everything. It happened between the garbage dump and the Electric Sheep.
It was why Javier came to the Electric Sheep, why he found Amy and followed her over land and under water.
That time, for the first time, he felt like a machine.
He never really noticed the failsafe before that. It was just a part of him, a function that kept him and all the other vN running. Its processes faded from his awareness and he thought of it as a solitary mechanism, the way humans called the complex and dynamic relationship between the air in their lungs and the deep rich colour of their blood "breathing". Like all features, it worked best when it went unseen. But that time, with the divinity student, he felt it. He felt the helpless pull when the other man smiled. He knew he'd wind up on his knees sometime in the next few hours. He'd felt the reward nodes of his network ping him appreciatively when he made the other man come. But the reward didn't feel like a reward. It felt like a by-product.
Organic women had told him about orgasms like this, when they talked about the person they had just left. It's just what happens if you keep hitting the right buttons, they said. I felt like a fucking console.
He'd wondered if he were broken, or defective, or otherwise compromised, when the other man's head came up and he smiled and asked if Javier was enjoying himself. How could he not enjoy himself? Why wasn't he? Why was he thinking about another vN at a time like this? The human was a good one, from the dimples on his face to those in his back, just below his belt, and he could sing the Song of Solomon in the original Hebrew, and he said that everyone of Javier's model must be having such a hard time out there on the road.
"Yeah, it's pretty hard, all right," Javier had said, grinning, because he just couldn't help himself.
And that was the crux of it: he just couldn't help himself. He knew that. Until that moment, he had lived with it, even enjoyed it. But as he laid his head on the other man's chest and listened to the squeezing of his heart, Javier found himself wondering when that organ would slow, how it would stop, whether it would be a clot or a hole or just the inevitable conclusion of a long history of organic decay. He wanted Amy fiercely then, desiring not her heart but its absence, the comforting silence of a body that would not age into decrepitude or abandonment.
He began his search the very next morning.