special, and everybody treated it like some divine right no matter what the consequences were for the planet or the psyche or the body. They’d had the technology to prevent unwanted children for decades, but Javier still met them every day, still listened to them as they talked themselves to sleep about accidents and cycles and late-night family confessions during holiday visits. He thought about Abigail, lonely and defenceless under her tree. Brigid had no right to ask him why he’d bred.
He nodded at her empty glass. “Why did you have yours? Were you drunk?”
Javier spent that night on a futon in the storage room. He lay surrounded by the remnants of Brigid’s old life: t-shirts from dive bars that she insisted on keeping; smart lease agreements and test results that she’d carefully organized in Faraday boxes. It was no different from the mounds of clutter he’d found in other homes. Humans seemed to have a thing about holding on to stuff.
He had moved on to the books when Junior came in to see him. The boy shuffled toward him uncertainly. He had eaten half a box of vN groceries that day. The new inches messed with his posture and gait; he didn’t know where to put his newly-enlarged feet.
“Dad, I’ve got a problem.” Junior flopped onto the futon. He hugged his shins. “Are you having a problem, too?”
“A problem?”
Junior nodded at the bedroom.
“Oh, that. Don’t worry about that. Humans are like that. They freak out.”
“Is she gonna kick us out?” Junior stared directly at Javier. “I know it’s my fault and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mess things up—”
“Shut up.”
His son closed his mouth. Junior looked so small just then, all curled in on himself. It was hard to remember that he’d been even tinier only a short time ago. His black curls overshadowed his head, as though the programming for hair had momentarily taken greater priority than the chassis itself. Javier gently pulled the hair away so he could see his son’s eyes a little better.
“It’s not your fault.”
Junior didn’t look convinced. “… It’s not?”
“No. It’s not. You can’t control how they act. They have systems that we don’t—hormones and glands and nerves and who knows what—controlling what they do. You’re not responsible for that.”
“But, if I hadn’t asked to see—”
“Brigid reacted the way she did because she’s meat,” Javier said. “She couldn’t help it. I chose to show you those vids because I thought it was the right thing to do. When you’re bigger, you can make those kinds of choices for your own iterations. Until then, I’m running the show. Got it?”
Junior nodded. “Got it.”
“Good.” Javier stood, stretched, and found a book for them to read. It was thick and old, with a statue on the cover. He settled down on the futon beside Junior. “You said you had a problem?”
Junior nodded. “Abigail doesn’t like me. Not the way I want. She wouldn’t let me hold hands when we made a fort in her room.”
Javier smiled. “That’s normal. She won’t like you until you’re an older boy. That’s what they like best, if they like boys. Give it a day or two.” He tickled his son’s ribs. “We’ll make a bad boy of you yet, just you watch.”
Javier kept tickling. “Oh yeah. Show me your broody face. Show me angst. They love that.”
Junior twisted away and folded his arms. He threw himself against the futon in a very good approximation of huffy irritation. “You’re not helping—”
“No, seriously, try to look like a badass. A badass who gets all weepy about girls.”
Finally, his son laughed. Then Javier told him it was time to learn about how paper books worked, and he rested an arm across his son’s shoulders and read aloud until the boy grew bored and sleepy. And when the lights were all out and the house was quiet and they lay wrapped up in an old quilt, his son said: “Dad, I grew three inches today.”
Javier smiled in the dark. He smoothed the curls away from his son’s face. “I saw that.”
“Did my brothers grow as fast as me?”
And Javier answered as he always did: “No, you’re the fastest yet.”
It was not a lie. Each time, they seemed to grow just a little bit faster.
Brigid called him the next day from work. “I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye before I left this morning.”
“That’s okay.”
“I just … This is sort of new for me, you know? I’ve met other vN, but not ones Junior’s age. I’ve never seen them in this phase, and—”
He heard people chattering in the background. Vaguely, he wondered what Brigid did for a living. It was probably boring, and she probably didn’t want to think about work while she was with him. Doing so tended to mess with human responses.
“—you’re trying to train him for everything, and I get them, but have you ever considered slowing things down?”
“And delay the joys of adulthood?”
“Speaking of which,” she said, her voice now lowered to a conspiratorial whisper, “what are you doing tonight?”
“What would you like me to do?”
She giggled. He laughed, too. How Brigid could be so shy and so nervous was beyond him. For all their little failings humans were very strong; they felt pain and endured it, and had the types of feelings he would never have. Their faces flushed and their eyes burned and their hearts sometimes skipped a few beats. Or so he had heard. He wondered what having organs would feel like. Would he be constantly conscious of them? Would he notice the slow degradation and deterioration of his neurons, blinking brightly and frantically before dying, like old filament bulbs?
“Have a bath ready for me when I get home,” she said.
Brigid liked a lot of bubbles in her bath. She also liked not to be disturbed. “I let Abigail stay at a friend’s house tonight.” She stretched backward against Javier. “I wish Junior had friends he could stay with.”
Javier raised his eyebrows. “You plan on getting loud?”
She laughed a little. He felt the reverberation all through him. “I think that depends on you.”
“Then I hope you have plenty of lozenges,” he said. “Your throat’s gonna hurt, tomorrow.”
“I thought you couldn’t hurt me.” She grabbed his arms and folded them around herself like the sleeves of an oversized sweater.
“I can’t. Not in the moment. But I’m not responsible for any lingering side-effects.”
“Hmm. So no spanking, then?”
“Tragically, no. Why? You been bad?”
She stilled. Slowly, she turned around. She had lit candles, and they illuminated only her silhouette. Her face remained shadowed, unreadable. “In the past,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’m a really bad person, Javier.”
“Why?”
“Just … I’m selfish. And I know it. But I can’t stop.”
“Selfish how?”
“Well …” She walked two fingers down his chest. “I’m terrible at sharing.”
He looked down. “Seems there’s plenty to go around …”
The candles fizzed out when she splashed bubbles in his face.
Later that night, she burrowed up into his chest and said: “You’re staying for a while, right?”
“Why wouldn’t I? You spoil me.”
She flipped over and faced away from him. “You do this a lot, don’t you? Hooking up with humans, I mean.”
He hated having this conversation. No matter how hard he tried to avoid it, it always popped up sometime. It was like they were programmed to ask the question. “I’ve had my share of relationships with humans.”
“How many others have there been like me?”
