Crashland (20 page)

Trevin retreated with the corners of his lips pulled down. Devin was smiling, as though he liked seeing his older brother put in his place.

“You're right, Clair,” Devin said. “We have to stop the dupes, but what do they even want? Mayhem and murder is about as high as they're reaching at the moment. They're not storming castles or plastering manifestos. Sometimes it seems more like an infection than a coordinated attack.”

“A disease,” said Sargent. “That's a good analogy.”

“I'd describe the potential collapse of civilization as something slightly more serious than a head cold,” said Trevin.

“The collapse of
your
civilization, you mean,” said Jesse. “The idea that someone can copy you and move into your head . . . Who in their right mind would use d-mat after that gets out?”

“You don't seriously think the Abstainers are going to emerge on top of this, do you?” said Trevin, eyebrows almost comically high.

“They were fighting back long before you.”

“Nobody's going to be on top of anything if we keep snapping at each other,” said Clair, sticking her fingers into her curls and gripping her skull. She was sick of the endless
arguing
. “It's not helping Mom. . . . It's not helping anyone.”

JESSE PUT A
hand on her shoulder, to comfort her, Clair presumed, but it would take more than that.

“Sterling work, peacekeepers,” said Trevin. “If you can't save one woman, how do you expect to save the world?”

Clair stared out of the crow's nest's glassy sphere along the broad, hulking mass of the seastead. The words she had just said still rang in her ears.

Nobody's coming out on top of anything if we keep arguing
.

Nobody's coming out on top
. . . .

“Whatever the dupes are doing,” she said, “they're doing it while we stand around fighting each other.”

Sargent tilted her head to one side. “You think the kidnapping of your mother is a diversion?”

“Maybe,” she said, even though it felt like a betrayal to suggest that her mother wasn't important. Allison Hill was very important indeed, to Clair, but to the rest of the world she was just one more person in trouble. “Maybe not. Either way, we have to do something to stop them.”

“Like what?” asked Jesse.

Clair didn't have an immediate answer, although the need for one burned inside her. Was all-out war really the best option? In all likelihood it had started already. She might not want to accept it, but the dupes would keep chipping away at her life until they destroyed everything she loved. When that failed, they would destroy her, too. She couldn't just stand around and let that happen. She
wouldn't
.

Clair would kill them all, every last dupe, every single hollow man and hollow woman, if that was what it took to bring her mother home. Behind cold anxiety, fury had begun to blaze, flaming hot and building fast.

Jesse was still talking. “We can't fight them because they're everywhere. We can't track them because we can't predict when they'll appear. We can't cut them off at the head because we're not sure if they even have a head. We can't ask them what they want because they're not talking.”

“I for one am not surrendering to a dupe,” said Devin. “Better dead than someone else in your head.”

“What if it was your mother at stake?” Sargent asked.

“Leave our mother out of it,” said Devin, tight-lipped. “She has nothing to do with this.”

The debate raged among those tasked with coming to a strategic consensus. What on earth could bring peacekeepers, Abstainers, and RADICAL to any kind of agreement? Clair despaired of ever finding a solution . . . but there was something in her mind, some thought she needed to extract. She could feel it wriggling and gnawing at her, like a worm in an apple.

That metaphor made her think of Mallory gnawing her way into Libby's mind . . . and all the other Improved . . . and how uselessly she had marched into VIA HQ expecting to save them, handing herself and Turner to Wallace practically on a platter in the process. . . .

The worm swallowed itself and morphed into a lightbulb.

She had an idea.

“I know how we can fight them,” she said, not caring who she cut off.

“Do tell,” said Trevin.

“Well, we can't take on a whole world of dupes, not now that they've hacked into the VIA network. No one's crazy enough to think that, I hope. So what we do instead is lead them into a trap.”

“How?”

“I'll send them a message, telling them we want to talk. That'll imply I know something. They'll be suspicious, of course, but the only way for them to find out is to make contact. And if we cut ourselves off from the Air, the only way to do that is to come here.”

“Here?”
said Trevin.

“Why not? It's away from cities, full of soldiers with guns, easily defended. That's why you're out here, isn't it? So we use that to our advantage.” Clair folded her arms. “Unless you're afraid.”

Trevin bristled. “We're not afraid of a few dupes. But to what end? What do we gain from it?”

“We flush them out. Not just them, but their source, where they come from. Somewhere there has to be a server containing their original patterns, the ones they keep copying over and over again. If we can trick them into duping themselves here, we can track them—track their data right back to its source. And when we have that source, we erase it. Then we can get on with finding Mom, finding Q. Once the dupes are dead and their source is gone, they'll never come back, ever.”

The angry flame in her heart burned brighter at that thought, which shocked her at the same time as it energized her. These weren't people, she told herself, but dupes, greedy ghosts stealing bodies in exchange for immortality.
Hollow
indeed, empty of all conscience and morals.

And they had attacked her and the people she loved. If Clair could threaten them in return, maybe they would give Allison back.

“Hang on,” said Devin. “You've missed something. How are you going to lead them here? It's all hypothetical until you figure out a way to do that.”

Here some of her confidence crumbled slightly, not because she wasn't sure of her plan, but because of what it might mean to her. “I'll have to offer something personal, so they can be sure it's not you guys talking. I'll have to wrap the bait in something completely honest, like telling the world my side of what's been going on, as I did before. If I do it just the right way, all everyone here has to do is be ready for them. Will you be?”

Devin and Trevin looked at Forest and Sargent.

“How about it, peacekeepers?” asked Trevin. “Are you going to commit?”

“We need to confer,” said Forest. “This course of action will undoubtedly put lives at risk. It is not simply a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with something we personally feel is right.”

“But you won't stop us, will you?” said Clair, suddenly afraid of what might happen if the PKs decided that it was in the world's best interest to halt the war between the dupes and RADICAL before it had even begun. . . .

Sargent shifted awkwardly on her seat.

“We will confer,” was all Forest said again.

“Yes, you do that,” said Devin. “Sooner rather than later, so we'll know exactly who we can rely on.”

“Perhaps we should take a break,” said Clair. “I'll start on my thing while everyone else does theirs.”

“Do I have a thing?” asked Jesse.

That stumped her for a second.

“Talk to WHOLE,” she said. “Find out who's in charge now that Turner is gone. You never know when that will come in handy. Maybe they can work with the PKs, tracking down the dupes like they did in New York. Okay?”

No one looked excited by that idea, but it was all she had. Maybe if terrorists and peacekeepers could get over their differences, there was hope for her and Jesse in the long run.

“Okay,” Jesse said with a shrug. “Let's get this war on the road.”

The group disbanded, Clair and Jesse heading back to their cabin to commence work on their particular tasks, she already dreading the lie she was going to have to tell.

I AM THE
real Clair Hill
, she wrote,
and I am telling you the truth
.

From there it got harder. In the hours following the meeting, she went backward and forward through the text of her announcement, trying to find exactly the right words for what she needed to say. She felt like she was going in circles, making no progress at all in defining either of the things in the opening sentence—the truth or Clair Hill.

We saved the world from Improvement
, she wrote,
but that was only the beginning
.

And perhaps that was why she was having so much trouble. Her victory had come at a cost she was sure some people thought was too high. So what if a few listless kids were killed in order to give actual geniuses a second chance at life? Was it worth breaking d-mat to fix that relatively small problem? Was it worth switching off the powersats, if it came to that?

Dupes walk among us
. . . .

If you see someone behaving strangely
. . .

Not everyone is who they seem
. . . .

Clair opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling. The room she was sharing with Jesse was small, possibly the smallest bedroom Clair had ever seen—and it was meant for two! At least it had separate bunks, narrow though they were. Clair hoped she wouldn't be asked to sleep in them. They were about as comfortable as planks of wood.

Her lenses were confused. Sometimes her menus were the blue of ocean and arctic skies, sometimes they were the hard blue of steel and machines, courtesy of the seastead's internal networks. As she lay back on her narrow bunk and tried to concentrate, she could hear Jesse's fingers working hard on the bunk opposite, tapping out messages via his augs. His legs, crossed at the ankles, reached vertically up the wall because the mattress wasn't long enough for him to stretch out flat. Every now and again he reached out to touch her hand in wordless reassurance. She appreciated it, except for when it interrupted her train of thought. Overall, it was a good thing.

“Any luck with WHOLE?” she asked.

“Some,” he said. “People know I've used d-mat now, so I have to win their trust back. It's tricky. But I've found out who took over from Turner Goldsmith. She's in Russia. Her name is Agnessa Adaksin. She's a hardliner, not one of the public Abstainers. People are blaming WHOLE for the collapse of d-mat, so she's abandoning the old cell structure and calling WHOLE to muster to her—and they're coming, every way they can.”

Clair understood the instinctive need to find safety in numbers.

“Will she help?”

“I don't know. She won't take orders from me or the PKs, but I don't think she'll have any objection to fighting the dupes in a bigger way. Maybe we can just leak her the info she needs . . . make it look like she's in charge of any joint operations, not anyone else . . .”

“That's a good idea.” And it was. In his own way Jesse was making more progress than she was.

I have been imprisoned, impersonated, threatened, and attacked. My mother has been kidnapped, my friends have been killed—and I'm not the only one who has been targeted this way. Some of the people who committed these crimes have been brought to justice, but others remain at large. Using everything we have, we're tracking them down and stopping them
.

At least she hoped they were. But who were “we,” exactly? Clair still didn't know.

Locating Sargent through the seastead interface, she sent a bump to see if there was any movement on that front. She felt more comfortable talking to Sargent than to Forest. They agreed on at least one important thing: giving people the right to return if their deaths were premature.

“We're still conferring,” came the immediate reply. “It's complicated.”

“How is it complicated? The dupes are the bad guys. They have my mother and they have to be stopped.”

“Read this.”

With Sargent's brisk reply came the results of a preliminary survey handed down by the Consensus Court. Clair had never been particularly interested in the workings of OneEarth, beyond watching her parents participate in the Consensus Court on matters that moved them. But she knew in principle how it worked. Everyone over eighteen could contribute if they wanted to, guided and informed by lawmakers. Lawmakers took their lead from random samples of people, creating a feedback loop that provided governance without needing any one person or group of people to be in charge.

Since the crash, lawmakers had been busy, along with peacekeepers and everyone else. Testimonies offered up by Jesse, Clair, and others, such as the Improved, had been processed. The results were just starting to come in.

People were to be judged, the preliminary survey said, by their appearance. So if someone
looked like
Dylan Linwood, that was how he would legally be treated. In the case of disputed identities, where two people looked the same, everyone was to be kept in custody until some kind of consensus was reached as to who was who.

In other words, no one was ordering the peacekeepers to kill the dupes at this point, just to capture them and lock them away. And as for the Improved, they would be allowed to remain inside their new bodies indefinitely.

“What about parents who've lost their kids to Improvement?” Clair shot back, annoyed and frustrated by the ruling. “What about the families of the dupes? What about
me
?”

“I know, it's crazy,” said Sargent. “And look, here's another one.”

This survey concerned the legal status of people who had died in the process of being duped or Improved. It all came down to how they had last been
witnessed
. If the victims were last seen alive, then they were considered still alive and retrieval from a data cache was allowed. If they were last seen dead, then retrieval of an earlier pattern was not allowed. They had to stay dead.