She hid her mangled hand up her sleeve. She needed food. Desperately. And she needed money. Money could get her to her parents, once she found out where they were. Her mom would know what to do. Her dad would hug her and throw a vN pizza in the toaster oven and blow the dust off his old Fruits Basket discs and make it seem like no time had passed. Her mom would drill her, like she did every after day after school: whom had Amy seen? Where? Her dad always knew how to make her feel safe. Her mom knew how to keep her safe.
Your mother was always rather good at that sort of operation.
Portia had taken to doing that over the past couple of days. Teasing Amy about her mother. Things she knew that Amy didn't. Memories she had, and that she revealed only fleetingly and during defragmentation. Something scanned briefly and then quarantined to some deeply buried chunk of Amy's memory coral. Junkyards. Garbagemen. Fences and dogs and miles of desert adorned only by the scattered emeralds of well-kept lawns.
Amy focused on the trees surrounding her. She examined the scabs of bark in the pine she currently inhabited. They interlocked like tiles or armour plating. The tree felt solid and strong. She had grown used to its not-silences. The first night, alone in the rain with her maimed hand and the motionless infant, the woods had seemed bereft of all sound. After a few hours, Amy realized it was only human sounds they lacked. At night the woods had a different voice, huge and dry and ceaseless, not unlike a sample clip of "static" her dad once showed her. It was white noise. It put her to sleep.
Portia always woke her up.
This can't possibly go well, you realize.
"I didn't ask you," Amy said. She crossed the street.
In her greyscale vision, the Electric Sheep was a series of fineand coarse-grained shadows interrupted by the flickering glow of hot tables displaying menu items: steaming slices of cherry pie, mashed potatoes oozing butter, feedstock curled into perfect golden halos of calamari. The restaurant probably bought feed from the garbage dump, Amy realized. The guy who worked the nightshift might even have been a regular. Now he was dead.
She sensed the human eyes on her more keenly, then.
It was around 10 o'clock on what she guessed was a Tuesday. Wednesday was supposed to be "Ladies' Night", whatever that meant, but Amy didn't see any more girls than usual, either organic or synthetic. The synthetics seemed mostly to be waiting tables. Amy identified them by their flawless posture and the way they had all paused, staring at her, recognizing her, evaluating her as a potential threat to the humans in the room. Amy stood in the waiting area beside an empty podium. To her left was a small area of half-circle booths swollen with vinyl cushioning. To her right was a series of smaller, square booths with bench seats. A chest-height wall separated each area from the bar, where massive displays hung. All of them were tuned to vN-friendly channels. One of them showed the news from Mecha: a cheerful weathergirl in shiny galoshes bantering silently with her human counterpart in the studio. Then the story switched to something about vanished ships and subs. It showed a map. The map read: "Bermuda Pinstripe."
Amy would have said something, or at least cleared her throat, but the smell of the food was so strong that a hungry whimper made it past her lips first. Her bones felt hollow. The edges of objects pixelated and dithered in her greyscale vision. An organic woman (Amy could tell by the wrinkles at her eyes and throat) seemed to float toward her. She was smiling. She made a mechanical noise. When Amy looked down, she saw old-fashioned roller skates peeking out from beneath lumpy cable-knit legwarmers.
"Oh my God. You even dressed the part."
The human on the skates gripped Amy's shoulders like they were old friends. Tattoos had turned her collarbone into a jungle tree dripping with pythons. They ducked modestly under the lace of what Amy recognized as a Bavarian barmaid costume, like the ones worn by low-level AI on the tavern levels of old games.
"Um–"
"Have you ever been a hostess before?"
You're a host right now.
"No, I'm not. I mean, I haven't been. No." Was this the job interview?
"Well, that's good. No retraining. The whole performingthe-brand schtick is really important within the Electric Sheep franchise flock." If possible, her smile stretched even wider. She wore something frosty on her lips. Amy wished she could see in colour.
"Do you see what I did there? Sheep? Flock?"
Amy's giggle had never felt quite so literally mechanical.
"See? I thought it was funny, too. I'm Shari, by the way. I'm the boss. And I tell everybody they'll need a sense of humour if they want to work here."
Amy made her mouth work. "Just like that?"