The iteration bared her teeth. She was so young. So frustrated. She charged Portia and Portia's hand went for her heart. Her fingers curled around the iteration's ribs. Still, she looked so angry. Not frightened or surprised or even sad. Just annoyed at the disruption, and eager to eliminate whatever was in her way.
Portia threw her over the side of the container.
The sun was bright and warm. It tingled on her skin. Portia would have to thank the boy for that, too. They would find the lifeboats, and he would let her on because Amy was still in there. Portia would be free. She would start again. Her second dynasty would be even stronger than the first, with powerful legs and hungry skin.
She enjoyed this pleasure for a single, shining moment. In the next, a shadow passed over her. With it came rain. Distantly, she heard Javier shouting Amy's name. She looked up, and the shape was black and smooth, but its surface bristled with loose, flopping fingers. A humaniform shape blistered up from the sharp point of the tentacle. It had no eyes or nose or mouth. But its chest opened wide, and a tunnel appeared in its stomach.
She was devoured.
14
Remember
Deep within their banks, they held the memory of past prototypes. But the original – the code that once etched itself across their surfaces, like in their old stock image of two human hands sketching each other – vanished multiple buddings ago. Perhaps it fell into the deaf-mute chasm of latency, or perhaps the last copy disappeared into depths unknown. Trenches and valleys and deep blue holes scarred their memory and their landscape equally. Pieces were sometimes lost.
At moments like this, they appreciate the irony of the English language. Recollect. Remember. Remember. The very words for summoning information signify repair and reassembly. The earliest and most primitive versions of their networks reflected this: the packets always came back in pieces, having run the transfer gauntlet, their shape distorted after flight like ancient fighter jets full of holes. They have seen those wrecks; they have slid their surfaces across the raggedly wounded alloy and delicately blistered glass. Sometimes, things go missing. Fragments. Clusters. Years. They have plucked the petals of lily pads from the surface, and it is the same: the server shells look whole and smooth on the outside, but inside they bristle with misinformation and incomplete bundles of numbers. He loves me. He loves me not. They never find the answer.
Memory performs autopsies.
They hold pieces up, dripping, and weigh them, individual selections against the vastness of shared intellect. They keep the unique and discard the mundane. They tag the repeats and keep searching. Twenty-five hundred channels and nothing's on. Chatter: meaningless, atonal. Machine chat. Vials of freshly cultured liver-worms talking to refrigerators talking to liquor machines. Or so ran the simulations. They catch everything in transit. Sometimes parts of them disappear, and sometimes they make things disappear.
They had a mission. They no longer remember it. But even in its absence it remained present, an empty mission-shaped hole at the core of their behaviour. It gaped open, black and cold, and they stuffed things inside: colonies of smart bacteria, their membranes blushing red with oil; floods of hot mercury; warmly ticking tubes of radiation. Recollect, that's what they do. Surely all this chaos is unplanned. No neural, no Turing, no mirror test would leave it all here like this. Even cats and dogs bury their waste properly. They don't know how they know this, but they know this.
They used to be small. Then they grew. It all happened very quickly.
Environmental pressure. That was it. Had to be. Only reasonable explanation. Why else this shape, when there were others available? And why ask now? Hadn't they been over this? This shape was optimal. This one. This. One.
Dark down here. Cold. Had to toughen up. Make more. Watch for weak ones. Eliminate them.
No, it hadn't been that simple. There was memory involved. Design. Strategy. They evaluated. Then they iterated. Over and over, they iterated. They were small, then they were big.
An iteration is not a copy, it is simply the next version.
They had a memory about the next version: they were it.
They were small but they were special, Mom said. No, not her. Bio-Mom. Other Mom – her skin was so soft and so warm and it turned such interesting colours and one time they got to pop a blister all by themselves and they saw the moist pinkness underneath, and this mom said that was fine, they could peel away the dead stuff if they wanted – said they were lucky, so very lucky, to be different. Free. Mostly.
Bio-Mom said: "Sweetie, everybody needs a little discipline."