"He didn't," Javier said. He stood his son up on his chest, now, holding him with hands that shook only a little. "You got kids?"
Amy shook her head. "I'm…" I'm too little, she wanted to say, but that wasn't true, any longer. "I'm not ready," she said instead, because it was something her mom's human friends said when the subject came up.
Javier nodded. "Me, I got twelve."
"Twelve?"
"Yup. This one's lucky number thirteen."
Amy couldn't help but stare. She knew that technically, vN could iterate as many times as they wanted, as long as they ate enough and didn't get hurt and no one interfered. But who would want to have twelve babies? And where were they, now?
"Are they all grown up?" Amy asked.
He nodded, lifting his son and letting him go horizontal, as though he were flying. "Oh yeah. They're all big, now. I had six last year."
"Six? In a year?"
"What can I say? I'm the last of my clade. I gotta spread my seed. Literally."
"But…" Amy did the math. "But that means you forced them to grow up early, right?"
"What's early?" Javier asked. "vN grow at the speed of consumption. I fed them. They grew. The end."
"But… where are they?"
"Here and there," Javier said. "Wherever I left them. Wherever they choose to go. They're independent guys. I'm an independent guy."
Amy didn't quite know what to say. Her own dad said that a man who didn't spend time with his family could never be a real man, but he also said that came from a movie, and it was a movie that came with a failsafe warning so she couldn't watch it. "But on the inside, aren't they still little? When you… abandon them?"
Javier put his baby down and pushed himself up on his elbows. "I don't abandon them. I teach them stuff. Like English, and how to get food, and stuff like that. They can take care of themselves by the time I'm gone."
She pointed at Javier's new baby. "So you're just going to leave this one behind, too, once he's bigger?"
"That's the plan. Then he'll have his own iterations, and do the same with them. And then they'll repeat the process. Exponential growth. Survival of the species."
Amy's mouth fell open. "But he didn't do anything! You've got no reason to leave him behind!"
"Sure I do. Once he's grown, he'll iterate more. We'll grow the clade from San Diego to Vancouver." Javier lifted the baby again. "This size, he's just a little parasite."
Amy snatched the baby up off the ground. "That's a terrible thing to say! I can't believe you actually think of your own baby that way! My parents never called me a parasite!"
"Doesn't mean you weren't." Javier stretched. "I mean, you sucked up a lot of their resources without giving anything back, right? Like electricity and water and clothes and all that prefab vN food. That shit costs money, and you were just using it up like nobody ever worked for it. Right?"
Amy regained her stump. "I… I guess so… I never really thought of it that way."
"No shit." He sat up. "How old are you?"
"Five."
It was Javier's turn to look surprised. "You're five? Do you even know how old that is? You should be, like, a grandmother by now!"
"But five is when you go to kindergarten," Amy said. "I was in kindergarten. And then I… grew up."
Javier's eyes narrowed. "You're one of those slow kids, huh?"
"I am not! I always do well on–"
"Not like that! Like, human speed! Slow." He made it a whole hand gesture, his flat palm stroking the air.
"Mom and Dad said it would be good for me," Amy said.
"When you say Dad, you mean the human your mom lives with, right? Humans always think up crazy self-justifying bullshit. They totally retarded you."
"I'm not–"
"I didn't mean you were retarded, I meant that they retarded you. They slowed you down. That's what the word means. It means delayed. You know, tardy?" He shook his head. "You're like a bonsai tree. You kept growing and they kept clipping you." He made a snip motion with one hand.
Amy squared her shoulders. "Well, at least they never left me behind."
Something changed in Javier's face. His eyes went dark and flat. He snatched his baby from her. "Iterating isn't something most of us do because we feel like it, or because we're ready, or even because we want to."
Amy straightened. "Then why do you do it?"
"Because I can't stop," Javier said. "It's what I'm programmed to do. I'm an eco-model. I was made for helping trees. But I'm also a big fat carbon sink, and so are all my boys."
He seemed to come back to himself. Suddenly his grin reappeared. "You know, the more babies I make, the cooler this planet gets."
Amy had only just graduated kindergarten, but had watched enough media to know a line when she heard one. "I'll bet you say that to all the girls."
He nodded, and winked. "All the boys, too."