He sounded tired. He sounded old. Amy had never really thought about his age, before. His birthday was just the day he got his special organic cake and blew out a trick candle that insisted on blazing back to life the moment he lifted his knife and fork to eat. She had never asked about the number. There were a lot of things she'd never asked about. And now, she had no time. There was too much to say.
"Dad, I have to tell you something–"
"Is it about your mother?"
"Yes."
"They told me." He cleared his throat. "I'm so sorry, baby. I didn't know it would ever get this bad. I'm just happy you got out of there when you did. I'm so grateful for that."
There was a moment while they each struggled not to cry over the phone. Amy imagined her dad in a room with other men, trying to keep it together in front of them so they wouldn't take advantage of his weakness, later. She concentrated on the sounds of Javier puttering in the kitchen, singing something in Spanish, as though to prove that he weren't listening.
"Did you know about Mom? About the failsafe?"
"No," he said immediately. "I promise. I didn't know."
"Did you know she had other daughters before me?"
"What?"
Amy wiped her eyes. "It's true. She did. And Portia killed all of them." She laid her head down on her arms. She shut her eyes. "Dad, she's really crazy. And she's in my head and I can't get rid of her."
Her dad was silent for a long time. So long, in fact, that she started asking if he was still there, when he said: "My dad was with me for a long time like that, too."
"Dad, that doesn't make any sense."
"Parents are programmers, Amy. That's their job. And my dad tried to give me a whole series of goals and directives before he wound me up and let me go." She could almost hear him shrugging through the tooth. "I know it's sort of a clumsy metaphor, but you should remember that as the next generation, it's actually your job to piss your elders off. You're supposed to do things differently from them. Because in the end, your granny's way of doing things didn't work out too well, did it?"
"Mom ran away from her. They were living in a bunch of basements, like rabbits."
"I rest my case." Again, he cleared his throat. "Look, I don't know the particulars. I don't even know how what you're describing is possible. But I do know that everyone, human or not, deals with this. It's not what you're given that matters, baby. It's what you do with it."
Amy tried to think of something to say to that, but there was nothing. He didn't really get it. This was a material problem, not a mental one. She couldn't go to a counsellor and talk about Portia until she went away. Portia wasn't a bully. She was a cancer. But maybe asking Dad to understand that was too much. His brain was totally different from hers, after all.
She waited, and finally her dad said: "When my dad kicked me out of the family, he said that he was tired of watching me waste time with toys. I know he meant your mom, but I think he was also referring to the kind of life I'd led up until that point. He could never really understand why I liked the things I did, or why I chose the friends I made. He told me there was no upside to any of them. He said I had nothing to gain.
"By itself, that's nothing special. I knew he thought that my hobbies and my friends and my way of seeing things – everything that I considered of any importance or value – were a waste of time. I had known that for most of my life, by the time he finally came out and said it. But it still stung."
"Is this why I've never met him?" Amy asked.
"Yeah. Pretty much. I knew I wasn't welcome, and I didn't really feel like extending the olive branch, either. But that's not the point. The point is that I got over it. And I got over it because I had already met somebody who had so thoroughly exceeded the world's expectations of her that I knew that anything my dad had to say about me was really just a guess."
Amy smiled. "Mom."
"That's right. Mom. And I know she lied to us, and she's not around to explain why, but…" He faltered. "Maybe it's hard for you to understand, having grown up with so many vN, but even just a few years ago, before you were born, emergent phenomena was all anyone talked about. The definition of sentience was changing. Suddenly we were discussing consciousness all the time. And then along came your mother, and I thought, 'If this allegedly artificial woman can overcome everything her designers ever intended for her and think for herself and make her own way, then I can sure as shit quit whining about the lies my daddy told me'."
The next question was the hardest. She tried to think of a graceful way to ask it, but in the end the words just came out plain: "Do you still feel that way?" She plucked at the hem of her bathrobe. A single thread was pulling away from it, and she wound it around one finger until the flesh at the tip turned grey. "Or do you feel like it was all a big mistake?"