Evolution's Darling

Flex lead them inside, through the inescapable hall of amateur desert scenes and overliteral plastiform dunescapes. But the unpleasant passage was enlivened by watching Beatrix walk her strange walk, negotiating the pull of gravity with her spindly legs like some aquatic bird stepping gingerly onto land.

And then they came to the Vaddum.

It was real.

Darling leaned forward to bring his full sensory spectra to bear on it, to capture the minute scent of metal atoms escaping its leaves, to breathe of it. He mumbled an apology as his sensory strands moved to touch it, flexing themselves across the warp and weave of its surface, caressing the searingly perfect craft of it.

It was real. He could no longer doubt his decision.

He placed an arm on Beatrix to steady himself, felt her shift to compensate for his weight.

While Mira played her game with Flex, Darling and Beatrix exchanged words both whispered and interfaced, pointed together at the work, traced its vital shapes in the air… enlightened each other.

He found that he was kneeling, the better to share an angle of vision with Beatrix, supplicant before the sculpture. He widened his vision to compare child and artwork. And found himself certain…

She was a Vaddum.

Beatrix.

Her body didn't fit the sculptor's rigid protocols of discarded parts and obsolete materials; that would have been inhumane. Some lower SPCAI limit of bodily usability had been met, but also subverted, extrapolated, made beautiful. And the aesthetic wasn't merely sculptural: Vaddum had made Beatrix's frame a machine for living in, its subtle balances informing her wit, her cleverness. The body shaping the soul.

He knelt there for a long time, talking with the child, admiring the resonances between her elegant body and the sculpture. Mira and Hirata Flex disappeared together into a back office; Mira's seduction of the woman seemed to be working.

But it was essential that Darling succeed first. As he had thought it would, his eye had led him to the right place.

"I want to meet him," he whispered to Beatrix.

"Whom?" she responded i

"The sculptor."

A few of Beatrix's eyes spun, as if sca

"But that's a secret]"

"I'm here to keep the secret, silly. We both are."

"Really?" the child answered. "Jessie too?"

"Jessie too. But we don't have to tell her."

"Good. I don't like her. Her dress makes my head hurt."

"Mine, too."

Beatrix swayed with indecision. "But you're supposed to think he's dead."

"Well, maybe the sculptor who made this is dead," Darling said, gesturing lazily to the Vaddum. "But what about the man who made you."

Beatrix nodded sagely at the false distinction, a few packets of giggles brushing the air around them.

"Oh, yes. I suppose you could meet him."

The dress was working. From the moment they had arrived, Hirata's eyes were locked onto the garment. The woman blinked and swallowed, her eyes dizzily tracing the curves of Mira's body, following the subliminal flickers on Mira's forehead and lips. Hirata had fallen into a near-hypnotic state immediately; her brain awash in the delicate, delicious overloads of love at first sight.

Mira stepped closer to Hirata, let the dazzling dress work its magic. The woman herself was pretty. Not large, but plump with a lack of exercise, her face open and pleasingly defenseless. Her pupils gaped, black holes, pocket universes of fascination. The guileless paralysis reflected in them amused Mira, made her lips feel dry.

Mira spoke to Hirata softly, enjoying the rampant and tiny shudders that spread through the woman's body when her breath disturbed the soft, black hairs on the back of Hirata's neck. Mira placed her hand on Hirata confidentially, feeling the wonderful give of the shoulder's thin cushion of fat. Hirata was just old and out-of-shape enough to work hard in bed, but to be genuinely, defenselessly exhausted by it. She was a woman into whose flesh fingers would sink without any need to break the skin. Mira let her thoughts shimmer with these images, guiding the vast but unimaginative intelligence of the dress to encode her fantasies in secret signs upon its surface. Mira could see the fantasies reflected in Hirata's eyes, as some deep part of Hirata's mind grasped the dress's subtle promise.

When her thumb rubbed lightly against Hirata's neck, a minute portion of the machine's substance sloughed off to spread its mischief across her epidermus, into her nervous system, wherever it found purchase.

The black of Hirata's pupils was now shiny, lacquered with a glaze of suggestibility.

"Notes? Sketches? Personal effects?" Mira whispered. "Perhaps even another piece?"

The woman wanted to answer, but fought against promises and plans, against a surety she would have held inviolable an hour ago. Mira pitched her voice still softer, suggesting a secret pact, a priviledged bond between them that would absorb any betrayal of confidence. The dress played out these dramas in its swirls.

Mira let herself feel a moment of irritation, an itch at the base of her spine. Somewhere on Hirata's body, an errant sliver of the dress followed suit, producing a measure of discomfort, a corresponding disquiet, a need for resolution.

Mira saw the itch reflected in the woman's face, felt a tension grow in the muscles of Hirata's neck. Mira tensed her own fingers there, and let her weight push Hirata slightly to one side; not hard enough for her to shift her feet, just enough to leave her subtly off-balance.

"Something more, isn't there?" Mira said, letting a sliver of a

"Yes. Another piece," was Hirata's hoarse admission.

All at once, Mira let herself relax, her body language returning to its seductive state of a few seconds before. Her thumb resumed its soft massage of Hirata's neck, smoothing out the moment's tension. The dress softened its dance, released whatever tiny cluster of nerves its remote portion had held hostage.

"Yes, I thought so," Mira agreed. "I thought you would have two."

Hirata turned toward her, a little confused, as if the spell were breaking.

Mira nodded slowly. "I wanted two," she said.

Hirata returned the nod, a relieved smile replacing her confusion.

This was going swimmingly.

Chapter 21

MAKER (4)

Original:

Only moments away now. The end?

The Maker has designed the explosion with extreme precision, the gigantic silicon brain calculating a radius of a

Only touches of artistry to attend to:

Taunting clues have been left in old message drops, in an abandoned house at the extreme periphery of the predicted blast, in the memories of comm exchanges. Nothing conclusive, just suggestive flotsam and jetsam, the cryptic spoor of hacker sabotage.

U

Sad about that. Those thousands of souls extinguished. But the Maker's capacious silicon intelligence has given it greater perspective, a wholly new sense of scale. Both vast and detailed in the extreme. From shipping manifests and production records it can enumerate precisely what will be obliterated when it triggers the explosion: all the garden gnomes and humidifiers and prosthetic hands catalogued, every gram of matter that will be returned to Malvir in the dusty rains of the next few decades, every bit of crap, all that stuff… destroyed.