Year's Best SF 17

She said it like he had a choice. Like he could just shut it off, if he wanted. Which he couldn’t. Ever.

“Yeah, I like humans the best.”

Abigail’s feet stopped swinging. She sipped her orange juice delicately through a curlicued kiddie straw until only bubbles came. “Maybe my daddy should try being a robot.”

It wasn’t until Brigid and Abigail were gone that Javier decided to debrief his son on what had happened in the park. He had felt sick, he explained, because they were designed to respond quickly to violence against humans. The longer they avoided responding, the worse they felt. It was like an allergy, he said, to human suffering.

Javier made sure to explain this while they watched a channel meant for adult humans. A little clockwork eye kept popping up in the top right corner of the screen just before the violent parts, warning them not to look. “But it’s not real,” Junior said, in English. “Can’t our brains tell the difference?”

“Most of the time. But better safe than sorry.”

“So I can’t watch TV for grown-ups?”

“Sometimes. You can watch all the cartoon violence you want. It doesn’t fall in the Valley at all; there was no human response to simulate when they coded our stems.” He slugged electrolytes. While on her lunch break, Brigid had ordered a special delivery of vN groceries. She clearly intended him to stay awhile. “You can still watch porn, though. I mean, they’d never have built us in the first if we couldn’t pass that little test.”

“Porn?”

“Well. Vanilla porn. Not the rough stuff. No blood. Not unless it’s a vN getting roughed up. Then you can go to town.”

“How will I know the difference?”

“You’ll know.”

“How will I know?”

“If it’s a human getting hurt, your cognition will start to jag. You’ll stutter.”

“Like when somebody tried to hurt Abigail?”

“Like that, yeah.”

Junior blinked. “I need to see an example.”

Javier nodded. “Sure thing. Hand me that remote.”

They found some content. A nice sampler, Javier thought. Javier paused the feed frequently. There was some slang to learn and explain, and some anatomy. He was always careful to give his boys a little lesson on how to find the clitoris. The mega-church whose members had tithed to fund the development of their OS didn’t want them hurting any of the sinners left behind to endure God’s wrath after the Rapture. Fucking them was still okay.

He had just finished explaining this little feat of theology when Brigid came home early. She shrieked and covered her daughter’s eyes. Then she hit Javier. He lay on the couch, unfazed, as she slapped him and called him names. He wondered, briefly, what it would be like to be able to defend himself.

“He’s a child!”

“Yeah, he’s my child,” Javier said. “And that makes it my decision, not yours.”

Brigid folded her arms and paced across the bedroom to retrieve her drink. She’d had the scotch locked up way high in the kitchen and he’d watched her stand on tiptoes on a slender little dining room chair just to get it, her calves doing all sorts of interesting things as she stretched.

“I suppose you show all your children pornography?” She tipped back more of her drink.

“Every last one.”

“How many is that?”

“This Junior is the twelfth.”

“Twelve? Rapid iteration is like a felony in this state!”

This was news to him. Then again, it made a certain kind of sense—humans worked very hard to avoid having children, because theirs were so expensive and annoying and otherwise burdensome. Naturally they had assumed that vN kids were the same.

“I’ll be sure to let this Junior know about that.”

“This Junior? Don’t you even name them?”

He shrugged. “What’s the point? We don’t see each other. Let them choose their own name.”

“Oh, so in addition to being a pervert, you’re an uncaring felonious bastard. That’s just great.”

Javier had no idea where “caring” came into the equation, but decided to let that slide. “You’ve been with me. Did I ask you to do anything weird?”

“No—”

“Did I make you feel bad?” He stepped forward. She had very plush carpet, the kind that dug into his toes if he walked slowly enough.

“No …”

They were close; he could see where one of her earrings was a little tangled and he reached under her hair to fix it. “Did I make you feel good?”

She sighed through her nose to hide the quirk in her lip. “That’s not the point. The point is that it’s wrong to show that kind of stuff to kids!”

He rubbed her arms. “Human kids, yeah. They tend to run a little slow. They get confused. Junior knows that the vids were just a lesson on the failsafe.” He stepped back. “What, do you think I was trying to turn him on, or something? Jesus! And you think I’m sick?”

“Well, how should I know? I come home and you’re just sitting there like it’s no big deal …” She swallowed the last of the drink. “Do you have any idea what kinds of ads I’m going to get, now? What kind of commercials I’m going to have to flick past, before Abigail sees them? I don’t want that kind of thing attached to my profile, Javier!”

“Give me a break,” Javier said. “I’m only three years old.”

That stopped her in her tracks. Her mouth hung open. Human women got so uptight about his age. The men handled it much better—they laughed and ruffled his hair and asked if he’d had enough to eat.

He smiled. “What, you’ve never been with a younger man?”

“That’s not funny.”

He lay back on the bed, propped up on his elbows. “Of course it’s funny. It’s hysterical. You’re railing at me for teaching my kid how to recognize the smutvids that won’t fry his brain, and all the while you’ve been riding a three-year-old.”

“Oh, for—”

“And very eagerly, I might add.”

Now she looked genuinely angry. “You’re a total asshole, you know that? Are you training Junior to be a total asshole, too?”

“He can be whatever he wants to be.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s finding plenty of good role models in the adult entertainment industry, Javier.”

“Lots of vN get rich doing porn. They can do the seriously hardcore stuff.” He stretched. “They have to pay a licensing fee to the studio that coded the crying plugin, though. Designers won a lawsuit.”

Brigid sank slowly to the very edge of the bed. Her spine folded over her hips. She held her face in her hands. For a moment she became her daughter: shoulders hunched, cowering. She seemed at once very fragile and very heavy. Brigid did not think of herself as beautiful. He knew that from the menagerie of creams in her bathroom. She would never understand the reassurance a vN could find in the solidity of her flesh, or the charm of her unique smiles, or the hundred different sneezes her species seemed to have. She would only know that they melted for humans.

As though sensing his gaze, she peered at him through the spaces between her fingers. “Why did you bother bringing a child into this world, Javier?”

He’d felt this same confusion when Junior asked him about the existence of all vN. He had no real answer. Sometimes, he wondered if his desire to iterate was a holdover from the clade’s initial programming as ecological engineers, and he was nothing more than a Johnny Appleseed planting his boys hither and yon. After all, they did sink a lot of carbon.

But nobody ever seemed to ask the humans this question. Their breeding was messy and organic and therefore