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.”
“
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
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
“Well, how should
“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
“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 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?”
