iD by Madeline Ashby Read Free Book Online

like a drunk dancing with a lamppost. “Did she make the animals, too?”
    “Some of them. The others were gifts. Test models, for us to report back on.”
    “For money?”
    “For money.” Javier lifted his grandson into his arms. “Why all the questions?”
    “I don’t think the animals like us anymore,” José said.
    Javier frowned. “What do you mean? Don’t they play with you like they used to?”
    “They play just fine,” the boy said. “But at night, they talk to each other.”
    “That’s normal. They’re de-fragging, just like you.”
    José shook his head. “No. They come together and they sit down and blink their eyes at each other. The ones Amy made, I mean. Not the other kind. The storebought kind.”
    “I’m sure that’s normal,” Javier lied. He hitched the boy higher on his hip. “Which ones, though? Abuelita has made a lot of animals for you to play with.”
    “The cats,” José said. “The big ones. At night they sit in a circle and blink.”
    “That’s not so different from organic cats,” Javier said. “ Abuelita did a good job copying the real thing.”
    The boy looked doubtful. “How would you know?”
    “Well…”
    Javier considered. Matteo and Ricci had asked him to avoid discussing his own past – too sordid, too dirty, parental discretion advised – but his father’s wasn’t off-limits.
    “Your great grandfather, my father, he saw big jungle cats all the time.”
    “Real ones?”
    “Real ones. One of them took his hand clean off once.”
    The boy brightened. All traces of fear vanished from his face. “Did it grow back?”
    “It grew back. It took a while, but it grew back.” Javier decided that now was not the time to tell his grandson that Amy had once bitten off his thumb. That grew back, too. “They were able to stop the smoking. He was working on a big crew, then. In the rainforest.”
    “With his brothers?”
    “Yes. Our clade.”
    José hugged him. “We used to be together, once,” he whispered.
    “Yes,” Javier whispered back. “Once upon a time.”
     
     
    The other vN busied themselves preparing for the shipment. They darted across the thoroughfare, trading clothes and gossip, mugging for their botflies. They wove around Javier as he proceeded toward his own little bud. It floated freely, separated from any arterial by exactly ten feet at all times. He focused on the green arbour marking the entry to his garden, and leapt. Glittering water vanished beneath his outstretched feet. Seconds later, he landed in the fragrant arms of a mango tree. Wrapping his legs around the trunk more completely, he stretched out and plucked one. It was perfectly red and soft. He decided to charge more, then dropped into the cool green shadows below.
    His was the only space on the island entirely devoted to organic life. Real trees. Real blossoms. Real dirt. Real mould and real insects and real food. It took him a long time to coax a good permaculture out of the island’s synthetic flesh, but between the deep sea minerals and the algae and the bio-waste he traded interviews for, he’d made fertile soil: dark and damp and loamy. It worked so well, Amy had once asked him if the failsafe would allow him to grow drugs there. He told her it wasn’t worth the headache. Literally.
    Instead, he grew food he could neither taste nor consume. There was a big call for exotic things out on the seasteads and pirate ships and barges. Mangos were big. And avocados. Little red bird’s eye chillis and saw-toothed shiso and tingly Sichuan peppercorns. Vanilla: a key ingredient in pirate hooch. Hen-of-the-woods: a luxury for vegans. The stuff Americans used to get shipped up from Mexico or Chile or Thailand or Japan. The things they used to traffic via container ships, before the thing that became the island started eating container ships. Now he grew those things on the skin of the island itself.
    He bounced from tree to tree, collecting produce. It was a strange thing, having a