vN Read online

  Praise for vN

  "vN is a strikingly fresh work of mind-expanding science fiction."

  – iO9

  "Ashby's debut is a fantastic adventure story that carries a sly philosophical payload about power and privilege, gender and race. It is often profound, and it is never boring."

  – Cory Doctorow

  "Picks up where Blade Runner left off and maps territories Ridley Scott barely even glimpsed. vN might just be the most piercing interrogation of humanoid AI since Asimov kicked it all off with the Three Laws."

  – Peter Watts

  "Will AIs be objects, or people? Caught between the category of human and everything else, we can't think about the very real entities that inhabit – and will inhabit – the excluded middle. Madeline Ashby's done more than just think about that territory; she's made it her home. Person; object; we need new words for things that are neither – and in vN, Ashby provides them."

  – Karl Schroeder

  MADELINE ASHBY

  vN

  Book I of the

  Machine Dynasty

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  When a robot girl loses her inhibitions, it can only end badly

  For Caitlin Sweet, who loved Amy first,

  and

  Peter Watts, the Giant Squid who lent me an

  island when I rebuilt myself

  PROLOGUE

  Give Granny a Hug

  Jack had lived through this same moment before, with human women.

  Before meeting his wife (he insisted on referring to her that way, despite their lack of legal standing) at a tech show in Las Vegas, he had spent most of his dating life in what he called the Relationship Academy of the Dramatic Arts. Through a combination of patience, politeness, punctuality, and other qualities curiously absent from most of his competitors, he managed to attract the most volatile women in his available pool. They were the kind who called you in tears at 3am, two years after the breakup, when their latest "performative biopolitical modification" art project got infected. He offered these women the opportunity to calm down and sort things out. Things their moms had said. Things their dads had never said.

  Charlotte was different. Charlotte was vN. She had no hormones to influence her decision-making, no feast-or-famine cycle driving dopamine or serotonin. She didn't get cramps or headaches or nightmares or hangovers. She didn't need retail therapy or any other kind. Her "childhood" was difficult – her mother abandoned her in a junkyard – but her spirit was as strong as the titanium sheathing her graphene coral bones, her personal integrity as impermeable as the silicone skin overlaying the polymerdoped memristors embedded there, her wit as quick as the carbon aerogel currents wafting through and shaping the musculature of her body.

  Charlotte was a self-replicating humanoid. Charlotte didn't do drama. Until now.

  That morning he'd found Charlotte in the same place he'd found her all week, curled up beside Amy, in the hammock their daughter used for defragging. Their faces echoed each other: heart-shaped, with narrow little elfin chins and high cheekbones, delicate ears, couture eyebrows just as fair as the hair on their scalps. Depending on how much and how often they fed her, Amy would eventually grow to her clade's default size and shape. At that point, she and Charlotte would be indistinguishable. Jack worried about that, sometimes. What if one day, years from now, he kissed the wrong one as she walked through the door?

  For the past month, Jack had gone to bed alone. He only felt Charlotte slip in beside him in the dimmest hours of the morning. He always rolled over to hold her for the last few seconds before her body went completely still, untroubled by snores or twitches. That perfect stillness took some getting used to. At first, it felt like holding a corpse. Now he suspected he'd find human women too warm, too loud, too mobile.

  When he'd asked last week, Amy said her mother spent most of her time looking up potential clademates online and mapping their locations. She had shared access to the map with Amy, but not Jack. The clusters glowed throughout the American southwest. The Border Patrol sometimes found them helping migrants across the desert. It was the failsafe, Amy said. They had to help, even when helping was illegal. With a flick of her wrist, Amy and the projector had put him down inside the canyons where the sightings took place, walking him down the blazing paths his wife had traversed only hours earlier. Amy had snagged the images from drones the Border Patrol shared with the public, but confessed to having already played them in an epic weekend game of Capture the Frag.

  "You're not supposed to play violent games," he'd said. "They could trigger you."

  Amy ignored him and changed the subject. "Mom's been away from her mom and her sisters so long, she doesn't know how big the clade is. They don't even know she's replicated."

  "Iterated," Jack corrected her.

  Amy shrugged her mother's shrug. Then she asked: "Dad, what's an r-selector?"

  Like most mixed families, Jack and Charlotte and Amy kept their kitchen carefully organized. Although the labelling had improved in recent years, it was still easy to mistake vN food for human food, especially since all the brands now seemed to manufacture the equivalent of their most popular products for vN. The majority of the pantry was dominated by whatever vN food they'd managed to find on special at the handful of retailers licensed to sell it. Jack had gone on a spree when he realized Charlotte was iterating. Now he realized that they really didn't need that closet full of vN products, not while they were keeping Amy little. Were it not very illegal, and were it not for the trackers embedded in each box, he might have considered reselling the merchandise.

  Five years ago, Jack had been tempted to speed Amy's progress and get to the fun parts: theme parks, concerts, bikes. He bought all the food to start that process. But now he knew what life with vN was really like, and he knew his daughter. She needed the time to grow at an organic pace. She needed to understand how she was different and why and what it meant, from her lack of physical pain to her abundance of opinion. She needed trips to museums and street markets; she needed to ask about glistening roasted ducks hanging in windows and why there weren't any for vN; she needed to build her endless succession of dream homes and secret lairs and impregnable fortresses, each more elaborate and clever than the last, in her multiple gaming environments. This time – this sweet time, pulsing with rhythms he was finally learning after years of moving too fast – was the gift most vN never received. He was determined that Amy have better – even if it meant adhering to a strict child-sized version of the Robento Rory diet, even if it meant telling his little girl to go without meals.

  "She stayed up last night."

  Jack turned. Charlotte knotted the belt of her pale blue bathrobe and pulled out a barstool from the kitchen island. He watched her take note of the box of vN pancake mix he'd pulled down from its shelf, and the spray can of special oil he needed to cook them with. Her eyes didn't lift from the products. "So you don't have go to all this trouble," she continued, "because she won't wake up for a while."

  Jack persisted with his preparations anyway. He opened the box of pancake mix, nose wrinkling at the dried-blood smell of the rusty orange powder that puffed up when he ripped open the liner bag. "How late was she up?" he asked.

  "Midnight."

  Jack nodded. "Did she finish the ship?"

  "Oh, she's never really finished with anything. You know that."

  Char
lotte continued staring at the box of pancake mix. Her gaze didn't move when Jack began measuring the powder into a bowl. She blinked at the proper intervals to simulate a human need for moisture, but her expression – default neutral – remained unchanged. Sighing, Jack retrieved a black tub of ionic gel from the refrigerator door, and set it beside the mixing bowl. He wouldn't open and emulsify the spoonful required by the recipe until Amy woke up, but he felt better just having it ready on the counter. He liked the integration of old and new in this kitchen – his humanoid daughter's advanced nano-particle meal formula sitting at home beside the chipped earthenware bowl and the scarred bamboo butcher block. He liked the life those things indicated. He wanted to keep that life.

  "You've slept with her every night this week, Charlie."

  He watched his wife's internal protocols negotiate for which expression to summon. Her face vacillated between embarrassed and indignant before settling again on neutral. "Amy can't play with human children. She needs a vN friend."

  "I agree, but I need my wife, too."

  Now Charlotte's eyes rose. "Is this some kind of test? Do you think that my feelings for you aren't genuine?"

  Shit, Jack thought. Now he'd done it. He'd committed the one sin that no human partner of a vN humanoid should ever contemplate: he had doubted the reality of Charlotte's emotions. How many times had he unwittingly made that same mistake? Shame prickled across his skin. No wonder Charlotte was acting strangely.

  "Charlie, that's not it–"

  "You think I really am just a robot–"

  A chirp from Amy's wrist-mounted design assistant interrupted her. Their daughter stood in the doorway, wrist held up in its habitual composition pose, perhaps articulating the bend of a banister or an arcade. Her hand dropped abruptly and she turned back down the hall. Her footed pyjamas made scuffing noises as she marched away. Jack dropped his measuring cup immediately and went after her. He caught her door on its track before it could click shut.

  Amy's room was made to look like the interior of a treehouse. The knotty pine had cost them, but it was worth it, and the sheer number of nails meant that she never really lost anything because she could always hang it in plain view. She stood at her pegboard now, carefully reorganizing her shirts by colour. Her projector remained locked in display mode. The light from the projector hid her from him a little, and when he moved she moved, too, obscuring herself in the brilliance of last night's creation: an eighteenth-century pirate cruiser called The Sun Queen. He watched its walls peel away to expose the decks hidden within, and all the mates inside swabbing floors and tying down barrels and playing dice.

  "How much did you hear?" Jack asked.

  Amy shrugged.

  "I was making pancakes." Jack tried to smile, just in case she turned around to see it. "I should know by now not to start a conversation with your mom before having any coffee. It's an organic thing, you know?"

  Amy nodded. She must have heard this excuse any number of times, from any number of humans. He certainly offered it enough.

  "This is a really cool ship, you know. You did a great job."

  For a synthetic child, appeals to Amy's ego still worked fairly well. This time she did turn around. She twisted her wrist, and the display vanished. "Mom thought she saw one of her sisters last weekend," she said. "That's why she's being weird."

  Jack nodded. He looked around for a cushion large enough to hold an adult, and sank into it. Amy joined him in his lap.

  "Mom says our shell used to be popular."

  "That's true," Jack said. "That's why she gets confused, sometimes. There are so many vN with your face running around, it's easy to make a mistake about seeing a clademate."

  Amy nodded into his chest. "That's what she said, too." She fiddled with her assistant, sliding two fingers under the haptic bangle and wiggling them. "She said I'm not supposed to talk to them."

  "You're not supposed to talk to any strangers, no matter who they look like."

  Jack kept his voice light. No need to teach Amy his phobias. He knew other parents feared the same things: strangers, vans, promises of puppies. In their darkest moments they imagined their children kicking and screaming, wrestling against duct tape or blankets. What terrified Jack was the willingness with which Amy would allow herself to be taken by whatever human pervert came along. Her failsafe guaranteed that.

  The angel investor supporting the development of von Neumann humanoids was not a military contractor, or a tech firm, or even a design giant. It was a church. A global megachurch named New Eden Ministries, Inc, that believed firmly that the Rapture was coming any minute now. It collected donations, bought real estate, and put the proceeds into programmable matter, natural language processing, and affect detection – all for the benefit of the few pitiful humans regrettably left behind to deal with God's wrath. They would need companions, after all. Helpmeets. And those helpmeets couldn't ever hurt humans. That was the Horsemen's job.

  It all went to hell, of course. The pastor of New Eden Ministries, Jonah LeMarque, and many of his council members became the defendants in a class action suit brought by youth group members regarding the use of their bodies as models in a pornographic game. The church sold the licenses to vNrelated patents and API rights to finance the settlement. They had risen in value over the years that Pastor LeMarque spent in the appeals process, but LeMarque insisted on keeping the failsafe proprietary. He claimed that this way, the vN could never be used to hurt human beings. The judge who sentenced him was the first to remark on the irony of this particular opinion.

  "How come Mom has sisters, but I don't?"

  Jack blinked himself out of his thoughts. He kissed the top of Amy's head. "Because your mom and I got it right our first try, sweet pea. We don't need anybody else but you." He pulled back a little to peer at her. "Would you like to have a sister?"

  Amy twisted her assistant around her wrist. "I don't know." She furrowed her pale brows at him. "She'd be just like me?"

  "She'd look just like you. That doesn't mean she'd be just like you."

  Amy nodded. "Would you keep her little, or would you feed her a lot so she caught up to me?"

  Jack considered how to reframe his daughter's question. "Well, I guess she would grow at a human pace, just like you." He smiled. "Would you like a little baby to help take care of?"

  Amy looked genuinely perplexed. Then her face resolved into mock accusation. "Aren't you late for work, Dad?"

  He laughed. "I'm taking the day off work."

  Amy perked up immediately. She twisted in his lap to face him fully. "Oh yeah? Can I take the day off school?"

  He lifted her in his arms and stood. "What? You can't take today off school; you'll miss your party!"

  Amy rolled her eyes. "The party's going to be stupid. I bet they forget that I can't eat the cookies, like last time."

  "Then you'll need your breakfast, won't you?"

  Jack turned. Charlotte stood in the door, armed with a wooden spoon still glittering with ionic gel. "Pancakes are ready," she said.

  Amy slid out of his arms, briefly threw her arms around her mother, and bounded off to the kitchen. Jack heard the clatter of cutlery a moment later. His eyes locked with Charlotte's and he opened his arms. Pursing her lips, she stepped inside them. Seven years later, her body still felt the same. Engineers and artists and experts of all sorts had worked to sculpt this form for human use, but Charlotte still felt uniquely fitted to him when she let him hold her like this.

  "Are we OK?" he asked now.

  She nodded. "Sure." She pulled away to look at him. "You're taking the day off work?"

  "I decided my girls needed me more, today."

  Charlotte smiled. "Thank you." Her head tilted. "Do you believe that I love you, Jack?"

  Jack's eyes shut. He tugged her back to him, so he felt the brush of her eyelashes on his neck. Marriages like his operated on a different kind of faith. It wasn't the synthetics themselves that organics like him had to trust, but the emergent
properties latent within them, the sum total of decades of research and design and prototyping. You had to know, deep down, that the expression of feeling was as valid as the chemicals that made all human feeling possible, that the story you read on your wife's mass production face was just as mysterious and meaningful as the ones gleaned from more wrinkled texts. Five years ago he had sworn by those words or something like them, not legally, but he had wept and so had she and that was all he needed to know.

  "Yes. I believe."

  His wife rarely spoke of her childhood, but Jack knew it involved a lot of hiding during the day and raiding junkyards at night. Her mother Portia had iterated her in a junkyard. It was one of the only places with enough raw materials available to trigger the self-repair mode into total self-replication. Charlotte was a glitch; because her clade did not stem from a networked model, neither she nor her mother had access to the clouds that might have regulated their iterative cycles. Now fully grown and far away from her mother, Charlotte craved both open space and solitude. Too many people made her nervous, but too tight an enclosure did the same. So on their dates, he often took her to Lake Temescal.