Jack's eyes shut. He tugged her back to him, so he felt the brush of her eyelashes on his neck. Marriages like his operated on a different kind of faith. It wasn't the synthetics themselves that organics like him had to trust, but the emergent properties latent within them, the sum total of decades of research and design and prototyping. You had to know, deep down, that the expression of feeling was as valid as the chemicals that made all human feeling possible, that the story you read on your wife's mass production face was just as mysterious and meaningful as the ones gleaned from more wrinkled texts. Five years ago he had sworn by those words or something like them, not legally, but he had wept and so had she and that was all he needed to know.
"Yes. I believe."
His wife rarely spoke of her childhood, but Jack knew it involved a lot of hiding during the day and raiding junkyards at night. Her mother Portia had iterated her in a junkyard. It was one of the only places with enough raw materials available to trigger the self-repair mode into total self-replication. Charlotte was a glitch; because her clade did not stem from a networked model, neither she nor her mother had access to the clouds that might have regulated their iterative cycles. Now fully grown and far away from her mother, Charlotte craved both open space and solitude. Too many people made her nervous, but too tight an enclosure did the same. So on their dates, he often took her to Lake Temescal.
The first time he brought her here, she asked: "You're taking an artificial woman to an artificial lake?"
"It wasn't always artificial," he had said. "We pitiful humans just improved it a little, with our primitive damming technologies."
On that day, just like this one, Charlotte luxuriated in the sun. (Sunscreen had fast become the default accessory to their relationship.) She loved the night sky just as much, even during the peak power seasons when it glowed orange with light pollution. She loved hiding in fog and reaching out for the rain from the roof of their building. Charlotte couldn't fathom Amy's constant desire to stay inside – working on environments that would never exist – when there was so much outside, waiting to be explored. They fought about it, sometimes, in a completely logical and amicable vN way that nonetheless resulted in stalemates.
Despite the impulsive nature of his decision, Jack had chosen exactly the right day to take off. Clear sky, no bugs save the botflies keeping an eye on the tourists, the clammy fog of winter a distant memory. Others had gotten the same idea: milling around under the shade trees behind Jack and Charlotte was a group of high school seniors attempting to grill a brunch of maple sausage and English muffins on a barbecue with a mostly empty solar cell. It involved a lot of snide laughter and cursing.
The beach was also populated by other vN, both vagrants and min-wage workers standing patiently inside snack stalls. He could pick out the vagrants by the lumps under their skin; unlike the vN with enough money to buy the pre-fabbed food, they often resorted to consuming e-waste to survive. He watched one – with a rather bland square-jawed, broadshouldered shell – seated at a picnic table, picking errant pieces of plastic from his skin and saving them carefully in a colourful pile between his legs. Jack watched him scoop the pieces into his palm and transfer them to a zippered pouch inside his shirt. He would probably feed them to depository later and earn some cash.
"It's good they have those machines, now." Jack glanced over to find that Charlotte was looking at the vagrant vN as well. She closed her eyes for a moment, then turned away to hug her knees. "We used to have to actually ask for the money, sometimes."
"We?"
Charlotte shrugged. "Just vN in general."
Jack nodded. "If it's still this nice tonight, I was thinking we'd take Amy to Lake Merritt after the graduation."
Charlotte winced. "With all the quake tourists?"
"It's either that or the zoo."
"I can't stand the–"
"Fuck!"
Jack twisted to look at the group of teens. A boy wearing a Raiders jersey staggered away from a picnic table beside the grill, clutching his hand. A cheap-looking knife and a halfskinned pineapple stood abandoned on the table, and when the kid turned Jack saw blood. He checked: Charlotte kept her eyes pinned to the grains of sand welling up between her toes, where she wouldn't see the injury or the pain it had inflicted; the vagrant vN hunched at his own picnic table, head hidden in his arms; the vN at the snack counter had shut their eyes.
"I'll see how bad it is," Jack said, and pushed himself up off the beach.
"I could help," Charlotte said. "My clade has a healthcare plug-in."
"Yeah, a deactivated healthcare plug-in," Jack said. "No wife of mine is shorting out because some kid can't use a knife."