"I was trying to dig my way underneath the fence, so I could get some of the sponge," she said. "I thought I could use it to climb the fence. You know, like oven mitts?" She made a lobster-claw motion with both hands.
Javier snorted. "Climb the fence? We don't climb fences. We hop fences."
And with that, he broke into a run for the fence. At the last minute, he jumped toward a tree instead. He ran straight up it for a few steps, bounced off it like a swimmer kicking into a backstroke, and sailed over the fence easily. He landed in squelching foam. Junior didn't even wake up.
"Your turn," he said.
Amy pointed from the tree to him and back. "How…?"
"Your body knows how." He waggled his limp little thumb at her. "You can do everything I can do, now. You can feel tickles. You can photosynthesize. You can make this jump."
Amy stepped forward. "Is it hard?"
Javier smiled and shook his head. "It's easy. Just think with your body and not your eyes."
Amy had no clue what that meant, but it was worth a try. Jumping that high looked like fun, and she remembered how it had come in useful for Javier in the past, when they were running away from the police. (Technically, she realized, they were still running away from the police.) She backed away from the fence and shut her eyes tight. She listened to the sound of her boots pounding the dirt beneath as she bounded forward and leapt with all her might. The ground faded away and her hands reached out. They knew exactly where they wanted to go. Her fingers had already curled into claws before they hit the tree. Bark crumbled under her weight and when she opened her eyes, Javier was staring up at her and smiling.
"Good. Now come down here."
Amy hauled herself up a little and tried judging the distance between the two points. "What if I land in one of the garbage piles?"
"Then you'll get an acid burn. I recommend you try not to land there."
Amy hugged her tree. "Is this how you teach your iterations how to do this? Because I think they could use some more positive reinforcement."
Javier made the gesture for a single tear falling down his face, his fingertip describing a sad line from his eye to his jaw. Amy aimed herself straight at him and launched. She had a surreal moment of watching the fence falling away under her before landing on him. Instantly she sat up to avoid crushing Junior.
"I guess my code doesn't take as strongly as I thought," Javier said. "You're still pretty clumsy."
She stood. "Give me a break! It's my first time!"
"I'm honoured." Javier wriggled away and stood up. He brushed himself off. "That's my clade's arboreal plugin. The trees my dad's group was working on were three hundred feet high, and nobody wanted to worry about ropes or harnesses. So we were shipped with upgrades." He kicked the back of her leg with his toes. "Come on. I'll show you more after we shop."
But now Amy couldn't keep herself on the ground. Every third step, she bounced up just because she could – first one foot high, then three, then five – until Javier grabbed her ankle and yanked her back down to earth. "Later, I said! We've got to find the feedstock, now."
"Wouldn't getting a better view help with that?"
Javier folded his arms. "Fine. Go right ahead."
Amy jumped straight up. Just before she fell, she let out a little squeal of delight. She landed roughly in a mound of old controllers and cables all coiled up like limp noodles. She kicked free before the acid could do any real damage, jumped again, and landed on the skeletons of old cleaning bots, all white and mantis-shaped, their jointed arms snapping under her boots as she launched herself again. She flew over deadeyed projectors and the mouldering rags of wearable glucose monitors. Wires sprouted from the decaying threads of bras and undershirts and wristbands and gloves, and glittered at her as she soared past.
She landed in a pile of dolls. Their bodies sank below hers, swallowing her. At first she worried about the acid, but there was none – the dolls were covered in nothing more than dew. It clung to their bare skin, their tiny fingers and toes and the lashes of their still-open eyes. They were all different colours, their eyes blue and black and green and brown, and their faces were uniformly perfect – no lumpy baby bodies here, no rolls of plastic fat or curiously ambiguous genders like at a toy store. These babies were fully formed.
They were iterations.
Suppressing a scream, Amy struggled free of the baby barrow. She rolled backward across little outstretched hands and tumbled to the spongy ground below. She pushed herself to her feet, turned around, and smacked straight into Javier. He stiffened up when she put her hands on his shoulders and tried pushing him away. "Easy, easy, what's the– Oh."
Amy pointed behind herself. "Why are they in the trash like that? What's wrong with them?"
Javier's brows lifted. "They're probably bluescreens."