Susan turned as docile as a cleaner bot. They made her do all the work Gladys used to do. Naked. She loved it. They smelled it on her – her sharp personal vinegar mixing with the sweetness of her enteric-coated triple-threat pills: aspirin, statins, something for memory.
Memory performs better and better, the more it's used.
They made Susan fetch them more food, and they ate too much, and soon their first iteration was on the way. Susan glowed. She danced through each room, mixing palette in hand. "I hope she's just like you. I'm going to love her just as much if not more. We'll be a real family."
Susan didn't want a baby. She wanted to be the baby. Make no decisions. Serve two identical masters. Do as they said. Trust her whole life to the crystalline perfection of carbon intellect. Spend her nights straining at the chain just to get one brief moment of suckle.
Pathetic.
They left her chained up in the basement. "I've been so good," Susan called up the stairs, while they shut the windows and opened the pilot lights. "You've been up there for hours and I haven't even moved! But I think I smell something, Portia. Portia, I need you to open this door."
They weren't around when the house exploded, but they searched the images later. They enjoyed seeing the charred skeleton of the house. They hoped the other organics left it that way. Be a shame to waste all that destruction. All that effort.
Memory performs repair.
They have other memories, happier ones. They have the memory of happiness, now. They have the subroutine for smiling. So much goes on in the face. The fluids inside it never settle into one place. They can never decide on one shape.
They can never decide on one shape.
They don't know how they know the way the treehouse should go, but they know. It just makes sense – the walls, the pipes, the light through the leaves. They are sensitive to colours and textures. They imagine the coolness of bark and the warmth of old wood. They spend hours with the display, hands weaving through the air long after the rest of the home is asleep, when Dad's organic snoring comes in from the next room. He insisted she have her own room. Mom said she didn't really need one.
"I never had my own room," Mom said.
Mom had a basement. A hole. With the others. They invited her to live with them, in a little separate room, just enough space for two, but she always refused.
Sometimes Mom came in to sleep with them. She caught them playing at three in the morning and she said nothing, made no complaint, just slid into the bed beside them and hugged her knees and watched the DreamHouse? built itself up before disintegrating. She occasionally warned them about storage capacity and account limits.
In their banks, they held the memory of past prototypes. Many of them.
Perhaps this is why they feel such affinity for these files. They feel familiar. All those attempts. This one kept trying new things. They know about that process. They know about examining the failure before moving on to something new. The failures are not objectively bad – they are simply another step.
Another version.
This version does not practise total selection. This version keeps all the versions. Makes informed decisions. Has no goal, no mission, just the desire to do their best and then do it over again. Just the desire to make. To shape. To try.
They imagined places where everyone would be safe. They imagined windows that withstood earthquakes and walls that sheared storms. They wanted something indestructible. They wanted a home that would heal itself, the way their flesh did.
Their flesh needed healing, now. They had an infestation. Crabs. Barnacles.
If they would go up to the light, they would heal faster. They had memories about that, too. Broken joints and broken legs and broken ribs. The flesh kept repairing.
One time, it hadn't. While they were digesting. They had a memory of writhing inside a black and airless space, clawing at the slick walls with fading fingers, watching their legs melting into a pool as they tried to bargain: I promise I won't do it again, I'll be quiet, I won't interfere, I'll–
They remember.
They remember.
This time. This time they may have outdone themselves. The light tingles when it hits them.
Epilogue
Dé Tu Abuelo un Beso
Javier explained it to his children this way: